A Prisoner’s Cinema: “Justin Lee’s A Prisoner’s Cinema is a collection of literary horror that declines to soothe. Instead, it uses the genre’s conventions not as a blunt instrument for shock but as a scalpel to dissect the most tormented regions of the human psyche. Here, consciousness itself is the haunted house, a subjective prison from…
Tag: cinema
LINKS: Shatter-Zones; the Color of Oil; Recursion Psychosis
Michael Mann — the Only Male Filmmaker: “What is the constant in Mann’s characters? They don’t act like animals about women. I don’t mean that they’re chivalrous, I mean that they treat them like something more than chattels. Who would even want a chattel that’s always yapping? No, you want a woman because….well, you can’t…
David Lynch: 1946-2025
There’s a treasure trove of David Lynch film reviews at Unz.com, most of which are written by Trevor Lynch (no relation to David that I’m aware of). Some excerpts below. Death My Bride: “Lynch ends [Lost Highway] as he begins it: rocketing down a nighttime highway to Bowie’s ‘I’m Deranged.’ But by ending and beginning…
WEEKEND LINKS: Breaking Points, Nightmares, Lying
Aging is No Blessing: “Twentieth-century science doubled the life expectancy of Homo sapiens, but our health still declines at nearly the same age today as it did in 300 BC. We’ve learned to keep chronically ill adults alive, and made some welcome progress in maintaining health. But in 2024, we’re about as likely to develop the diseases of aging—like cancers—if…
weekend links: death cults, wilderness, eternal tension
Beyond Thaumatophobia 3: The End of the Age of Reason: “[My father, a] lifelong materialist…was startled one day to hear his mother’s voice from the ground floor of his house, calling his boyhood nickname. That was a bit of a surprise, since she was 300 miles away at the time. Startled, he went to look,…
weekend links: warzone conditions, spiritual cannon fodder, 2 hours in the dark
A National Divorce From Reality: “Douglas MacArthur famously stated ‘It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.’ Conservatives still have not grappled with the fact that their political will has been consistently shown to be much smaller than that of liberals. The Floyd Riots showed just how primed for derangement…
Mid-Week Links: Shatter Zones, Cultures of Refusal, Glory
A Far Away Planet to Which I Would Never Return — The vanishing horizon line of Terrence Malick‘s BADLANDS: “Kit is a trash collector by trade, Batailling against the solar surpluses reclaimable in the culturubble, throwing away items of no-to-low utility, revealing how even The Outsider can only seek emancipation from materialism in refuse materials,…
#WEEKENDLINKS
Culinary Mysticism — review of “Pig,” starring Nicolas Cage (IM1776) Rob does not hate Portland; like Socrates, who dismisses outright the idea of fleeing Athens for Thessaly, he sees it from the standpoint of eternity, and so both loves it and knows it to be deeply broken: Amir: “If the city floods we can always…
wEeKeNd LiNkS
Suddenly, On Halloween (Wrath of Gnon) Why don’t I know any of my neighbors? Why are the young couple down the street not around anymore? When did they move out? They seemed so nice. The Reality War (The Upheaval) Maybe now you are willing to believe that a good portion of our world’s political strife…
w҉̢̡̹̮͌̄ͦ͜͟͟͞͠͞e̵̡̫̫͍͕̎ͭ̐͟͟͝͞e̵̡̫̫͍͕̎ͭ̐͟͟͝͞k҉̴̶̬͈̫̹͖̾̎ͭ́̍̐͜͜͝͠e̵̡̫̫͍͕̎ͭ̐͟͟͝͞n̸͐̈́͟͟͝d҉̴̷̧̢̛̖͔̤ͯ̔̑̄͢͟͡͠ l̶҉̰͚͖͕̍̈́̅͗̏̇͢͜͜͝i҉̧̯̤̙͔̑ͧ̅̔ͦ́͜͟͢͝͠n̸͐̈́͟͟͝k҉̴̶̬͈̫̹͖̾̎ͭ́̍̐͜͜͝͠s҉̝̭̦͚̑ͯ̌͡
End the Cosmopolitan Monopoly: “Our current indulgence of cosmopolitanism can’t endure. It’s ultimately a facile and feel-good doctrine employed by the elites in direct contradistinction to the wishes of the majority. It’s a point of view and state of mind that contains too many inconsistencies, and that causes too much damage. Ultimately, it’s anti-natural. It…
WEEKEND LINKS
A GUIDE to IANNIS XENAKIS’S MUSIC: “When you hear Xenakis’s music – any piece of what we recognise as his mature work, starting with 1954’s Metastasis, onwards – you’re confronted with an aesthetic that seems unprecedented according to any of the frames of reference that musical works usually relate to. You won’t hear vestiges of things…