Hypervigilance: “The ability to quickly metabolize experiences and then let them go is a key marker of a healthy mind and body. By embracing the sensation an experience triggers, you let the body have a natural, healthy reaction. A good example is getting into cold water: The shock, the shaking, the tremors can feel too…
Tag: movies
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: Eschatological Narratives; the Direction God Gave Us; Hyperstition
Ferociously, naively, obsessively, maniacally, explosively, fetishistically devoted pic.twitter.com/hoEryPQAHM — tundranaut (@tundranaut) June 21, 2024 Allow Artists to be Artists: “…art must be tethered to something more concrete than simple ‘honesty.’ A sea of free-floating atomized individuals speaking their truth does not a culture make. T.S. Eliot, in his treatise Notes Towards the Definition of Culture,…
The Passion of the Christ
I watched The Passion of the Christ for the first time ever on Good Friday this year. I think it’s worth watching and many parts are very well done but I do think Mel Gibson went too far with the blood, the gore and the violence, which apparently has been a recurring criticism of the…
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…
ẅ̴͍é̷̞̲͐e̵̺̊͜ķ̷̥́̃e̸͎̣̼͂n̴̬̄d̸̡̈́ ̴̯̲̠̈́̾ĺ̸̯͎̯̈́i̷̻̼̚n̸̰̲̽̈̍k̴̖͆̊s̴̤̓̄: How to Stop Worrying; Rebellions Against God; Machines to Replace God
Atheists in Space: “[Oswald] Spengler believed that even as the 20th century began, all of the theoretical edifices constructed by the West to replace its old sacred order — which mainly manifested as political ideologies — had failed. Beginning in the 21st century, he predicted, the grandchildren of the revolutionaries and the rationalists, adrift in…
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…
weekend links: twilight, starlings, gods
Christianity is Not Monotheistic: “…angels were made to sing. Specifically, to sing the cosmos into existence. That’s why the medievals organized them into ‘choirs.’” Cormac McCarthy’s New Books of Revelation: “Everyone easily notices the Old Testament style, but rather than saints and gods, we encounter simple men who are driven by an instinctive solidarity for…
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,…
Q&A with @L0m3z: Wages of Fear, the Rejection of Falseness, and Navigating Hell
I first came across the @L0m3z Twitter account circa 2016 or 2017 and I was struck by how the things this person wrote in 140 characters were not simply tweets — they were great pieces of standalone writing. Fast forward to the current year and @L0m3z is one of the kings of anonymous Twitter. He…