Avatar

You may have won the last 500 years, but you’ll never colonize Space!!!

by Lauren Pabst

Just as District 9 indicated that there are enough realistic big-budget blockbuster movies about the horrors of apartheid in South Africa, there are apparently enough realistic big-budget blockbuster movies about the American genocide, according to Avatar.  Just kidding.  I know the value of a sci-fi satire as well as anybody.  But these are actual historical events, the repercussions of which persist today and are largely unrecognized by the cultural mainstream that Cameron is playing with, so heavy on the “real 3D” and CGI and lite on the story and context.

I would love to see a realistic epic historical blockbuster movie about people of color battling invaders and oppressors.  Hollywood does epic European versus European very well (see Braveheart) but notably Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto faded to black just before Jaguar Paw and his folks’ impending struggle against the arriving Europeans; the villians in that flick were Mayans.  Danny Glover’s plans to create an epic film about the Haitian Revolution and Toussaint L’Overture have been stalled more than a decade, as financing has been a real problem.

Cameron’s recycling a trusty myth that’s been kicking around the U.S. from James Fenimore Cooper to Dances With Wolves (as many others have pointed out, including David Brooks in the New York Times) of white man goes Native and finds his soul in the indigenous culture, which he then goes on to not only be accepted into, but to master, exemplify and then lead to (SPOILER ALERT) victory.  In Avatar, anyway.  Stay tuned for the real updated score for the Black people of South Africa and the original people of the Americas on your nightly news.  Oh, wait…

Akin to the fishiness pointed out by comedian Paul Mooney of a couple blockbusters of the early 2000’s ["First you had The Last Samurai starring Tom Cruise.  Then you had The Mexican starring Brad Pitt"], like authorities terming Zapotec Mexicans aliens for setting foot in Arizona, the indigenous people of Avatar also happen to be aliens.  Writer, director and producer Cameron tells a story of plundering land and attempting to destroy a people who were living in harmony with nature in the name of a outrageously coveted mineral (actually called “unobtanium”) – IN SPACE.

But wait a minute.  Leaving aside the Dances With Wolves plotline, isn’t there value to the themes of Avatar?  What about the kids – they’re hearing the lessons of live in harmony with nature, don’t take what you don’t need, honor your ancestors and (ahem) paint with all the glow-in-the-dark colors of the wind.  The story that emerges has many touching moments, as the Na’vi culture (aesthetically like a glow-in-the-dark combination of Lakota and Masai – only the people are massive, catlike and blue) believes that all energy is enduring and that they can communicate with their ancestors through nature – cool, right?  It’s not often that you hear those sentiments expressed on the screen – big or small.

And the $500 million spectacle that unfolds on the screen is not to believed.  Thanks to the “real 3D” that I saw it in, even things like the foreground edges of desks seemed real enough to touch.

But the creation of an indigenous culture from whole cloth by Cameron is a little weird.  Though the Na’vi are grounded in nature, there is also something subtly high tech about them – their natural world glows neon like a Tokyo nightclub and they can “upload and download” ancestral memories from fiber-optic trees and communicate with animals by literally plugging in their long braids (as emphatically pointed out by Sigourney Weaver’s scientist, still game to tromp around a space ship in cargo shorts and an undershirt).  Also, when hero Jake Sully’s Na’vi avatar appears, they don’t seem to question how a “sky person” could inhabit the body of one of their own, but then are horrified when he turns out to be an avatar.  This is just one part of the eerie blue pall of condescension that Cameron casts over the people of his imagination.

And there is even precendent for Cameron allegedly co-opting the artistic expression of people of color before.  A lawsuit filed by African American author Sophia Stewart claims that Terminator 2 is lifted from her sci-fi epic novel The Third Eye.  Stewart’s lawsuit also names The Matrix creators the Wachowski brothers.  According to Stewart, in her book, the young boy character of Terminator 2 grows up to become the Neo character of the events of The Matrix (which in The Third Eye is a deeper allegory of slavery and colonization than appears in that film, also produced by Terminator and Avatar studio Fox).  After a judge ruled that the muti-million dollar lawsuit could go forward, it was thrown out when Stewart failed to appear at a hearing.  (Check out this interview with Stewart for more details.)

Leaving aside all of that, Avatar provides an intriguing parallel universe story of victory of people and nature over colonization and exploitation.  The film has been endorsed by President Evo Morales of Bolivia (after he saw it in his third ever trip to the movies) and condemned by the Vatican, which is offended at the suggestion that nature can replace religion (sort of like they were during the 15th Century).  But $500 million could probably finance five epic historical blockbusters of actual battles between indigenous people and colonizers (lite on the CGI, heavy on the story and context).  Which ones would you like to see?

Let me know:

The Two Thousand Ands

Subway Ad, New York City, Two Thousand And Nine

We’re starting to hear about the “aughts” – that is, this decade we are about to bring to a close tonight.  It makes me think of like Charles Dickens, things I “ought” to do.  Or “ought” not to do or have done.  Wow.

I remember a vague debate back when we entered this decade about what we would call it.  You know, what it will say in those Time Life coffee table books summing up the decade or – hey, a new phenomenon since ‘99 – what the VH-1 “I Love the…” shows would term it.  Those shows are a little strange, by the way. We’re reminiscing too young!  Sure, the ’70s had Grease about the ’50s, the ’80s had Dirty Dancing about the ’60s, but we have stuff now about the ’80s and ’90’s?  And lots of it?  I heard somewhere that someone somewhere – maybe social scientists or a think tank – have documented that popular culture is reminiscing at a higher rate, getting nostalgic quicker about more recent times.  That is just weird!  It would be like listening to Gonna Be Starting Something  IRONICALLY when Michael Jackson had just put out Dangerous.  Or something.

Maybe I’m just getting older. Full moon this New Year’s Eve – the first one in 19 years.  Where were you 19 years ago?  I was seven.  Don’t remember what I did for New Year’s, probably didn’t get to stay up.  What could the full moon mean for people this evening?  Anyway, a tangent is oozing out of my blob – it’s about to go out immediately like slime through the vents of a slime infested building in a horror movie, out into cyberspace.  So exciting! – I mean my blog, if I had an editor, this would be neater.  (Shout out to the editors out there.)

I nominate the new decade moniker The Thousand Ands.  We never said “Class of Ought One!  Yes!”  We said “Class of Two Thousand And One!  Yaaaaa!”  I will miss saying it – the addition of “Twenty (Ten)” to the language is already weirding me out.  Just kidding.  Gotta move forward.

So what do you think??  The Aughts or the Thousand Ands.  It didn’t take us much time to say it during the decade itself.  (Peace, decade)

Vote here:

Please Pack Your Machete and Go

Hector Santiago, chef and owner Pura Vida restaurant, Atlanta

Judgment of Food Show Continues to Provide Sociology Lessons

by Lauren Pabst

“It looks like he cut this with an ax!”

- An astonished Gail Simmons of Food & Wine Magazine on Hector Santiago’s steak on Top Chef Las Vegas last week. He and partner Ash Fulk ran out of time on the cooking of a chateau briand and had to cut 24 pieces of meat in 2 minutes.

Episode Four of Top Chef Las Vegas was very French. It even ended up being perpetually red neckerchiefed San Francisco-based restaurant owner and contestant Mattin’s birthday. The Quickfire asked the chefs to make an accessible, innovative dish of escargots (snails) and Jesse Sandlin, who created a ELT (escargots, fresh greens and fried tomato) ultimately lost and was sent home. (kicked off the island of asphalt, palm trees and neon in the middle of the desert)

You could tell Jesse was nervous about it. Head Judge Tom Colliccio asked her “What was the inspiration for this?”

“I don’t know” she said. (What about a BLT? Why not.)

“I haven’t felt like myself since I got here” said Jesse in the obligatory exit interview. “I just want people to know that I don’t suck this bad.”

The contestants moved on to the big challenge. They each drew knives listing a “classic French” sauce and cut of meat. The meat-drawers had to pair with the sauce makers to whip up an innovative take on Classic French Cooking, to be judged by super big name chefs in the world of French Cooking – superstars like a guy named Joel Robouchon.

[So, if Top Chef comes from a default setting of low-expectations from Mexican food, they LOVE Classic French Cooking. Chef, sautee, entrée, cuisine, restaurant, sauce, café, bistro, latte, mise-en-place, chiffonade, brunoir – there already exists lots of French validation to cooking. What separates a cook from a chef? I haven’t eaten much French food (do French fries count? That’s a serious question) but it does seem good and complicated (they can fold thin dough every which way and butter it up… oh, the crossaint, crossandwich). But so is –  say, Thai food delicious and complicated to the untrained. And Greek food, Chinese food (definitely!), Indian food, Mexican food, Nigerian food, and more. Is it because the wife of a State Department worker, Julia Child, got around to Mastering the Art of French Cooking as a hobby that marvelously revolutionized American taste buds and eating habits, as the recent movie Julie and Julia suggests, when she “went native” in postwar Paris? Haven’t seen it, but heard that the Julie of the book, the blogger who cooked every recipe in Julia Child’s giant French cookbook in a year was working at the same time as a counselor for people affected by the attacks of 9/11 in New York. French cooking as escaping/coping with (fill in the blank)? The ultimate compliment, maybe.]

Jennifer C. was paired with Mike V., brother to Bryan V. (who won the episode with a “deconstructed bernaise”). Jennifer C. and Mike V. displayed a palpable cooking chemistry in the kitchen.

“How was it cooking together?” asked a judge, after praising their dish. Jennifer professed seriously a highly compatible kinetic energy while preparing rabbit and sauce together. Mike affirmed.

Besides Jennifer and Mike’s bunnies, other teams cooked lobster, frogs legs, trout and young chicken – all fairly dainty cuts of meat with similar cooking times (it seems to this non-chef, merely sometime cook).

For the same amount of time, a big hunk of meat (chateau briand) was assigned by knife-pulling – an Arthurian-like practice (Camelot = $250,000 cash and products furnished by the makers of Kitchen-Aid) to Hector and Ash.

“So a gay guy and a Puerto Rican have to cook dinner for Joel Robouchon, right?” joked Ash as they got started.

Hector shimmied his knife along the fat on long cuts of chateau briand. “I used to work in a banquet hall. This is all people want, filet mignon.”

The oven didn’t get as hot as Hector was expecting it to for the way he wanted to cook the beef. [One French chef judge would later frustratedly list how little time it took to roast a proper chateu briand]. They ran out of time cooking the meat.

“Eight seconds? That’s going to happen quickly” said Ash, saucing the plates in a rush.

Hurried cutting of the undercooked, bloody meat led it to absorb Ash’s sauce and to upset the delicate but boisterous Gail Simmons of Food and Wine Magazine.

“It looks like he cut it with an ax!” she exclaimed of the steak, riled up, mascaraed eyes wide.

Receiving an unevenly cooked end piece, Gail did her best neo-Mae West, almost neck-popping, in asserting that in giving her the end, they had “picked the wrong lady.”

“I am Haitian and Haitians and the French, we don’t like them and they don’t like us” said Classically trained French chef Ron Duprat. His dish went by in the middle – neither the best nor the worst, thus avoiding more than the just the most cursory critique. [It seems possible that the French don't feel any particular way towards Haitians now... but the nation's time spent with their feet on the island leaves a rough footprint, to say the least.]

Hector was told to pack his knives (and axes, if any, we can assume) and go on account of the undercooked meat. A chef and restaurant owner in Atlanta, he had said in an earlier interview that he started as a dishwasher and worked his way up.

“I wish I could have represented my people longer” Hector said before exiting the studio as he had been asked to do, politely.

In his “morning after” interview, available on BravoTV.com, Hector states his frustration with the experience.  That the judges were so judgmental of his traditional Latin American cooking style – when he fried a steak chicharron style – was particularly surprising to Santiago.

“In Latinoamerica, we fry everything… That they couldn’t understand that was really shocking to me.  They think that their way is the only way” Santiago said.  In the interview, he went on to state that getting kicked off on the fourth challenge would not allow him to accomplish his goal of raising the profile of his restaurant but would “actually diminish” his career.

Food for thought. Although I do not know what percentage of restaurant staff in the U.S. is Latino, it is certainly a high one. Latinos cook all kinds of food – from classical French cuisine to Japanese fare and pizza. It is interesting that Top Chef does not recognize as a valid style techniques common to Latino kitchens – the ones at home, or in Latin American restaurants. What is better-received on the show is cooking things sous vide (a style I had never heard of before tuning in to TC) – in a plastic vacuum-sealed sack, seemingly, in boiling water.  Many “cheftestants” get praised for this preparation.

Just another little interesting snapshot of real people, trapped in the pressure cooker of reality TV – and the steamy insight that drifts out.

Next Episode: The chefs visit a Wild West-like “settlement” set in the desert and circle the wagons, appearing to cook with big pots and pans.

Outburst, Jr.: Kanye West

Kanye West steals Taylor Swift's spotlight, 2009 MTV Video Music Awards

by Lauren Pabst

On Sunday, at the MTV Video Music Awards, Kanye West interrupted Taylor Swift’s sweet, fluttery, flattered acceptance speech for “Best Female Video of the Year,” boldly proclaiminig that he was happy for Taylor but that Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time! It seemed like a desperate play for the affections of either Beyoncé, her fans, his own egotistically loved personal opinion or (less likely) aficionados of the work of choreographer Bob Fosse (Beyoncé’s “Put a Ring On It” video dance routine was almost entirely cribbed from Fosse’s 1969 “Mexican Breakfast” combination. The proof is in the YouTube).

He definitely had an unnecessary outburst. But really, who the heck knows what it was all about?

It was RUDE, everyone agrees. An offended Jay Leno even seemed reluctant let Kanye apologize (probably a huge ratings draw) on the premiere episode of his 10pm talk show Monday night. After hearing his seemingly sincere apology, Jay pulled some kind of kindly old principal rank on a stunned Kanye, chastising him, and even asking him what his mother – who passed away a few years ago and Jay had met once – would have thought of the embarrassing, probably drunken, incident.

She probably wouldn’t have liked it, Kanye West agreed, appearing flabbergasted as much as ashamed.

[I had a crazy flash that maybe Jay Leno was trying to demonstrate to Bill Cosby and Barack Obama how he thought black boys should be disciplined by their absent male role models that we hear so much about. But Kanye West is a grown man over 30!]

Kanye West was being a pop star boy behaving badly. Wait, that sounds familiar.

When Justin Timberlake snatched off the clothes of Janet Jackson at Superbowl XXXVIII in 2004, it was Janet who apologized in the immediate aftermath. It was a “wardrobe malfunction” Janet claimed, a move that went wrong. Timberlake – who had played the very active role of “ripper of bustiers” within the incident – kept mum, that is, until CBS threatened to ban him and Janet from performing at the Grammys unless they made public apologies to the network and copped to the fact that the whole thing was not a mistake. Timberlake acquiesced but Janet refused and was barred from the ceremony.

In context, Kanye’s outburst – though rude to Taylor Swift – was a pretty Chicagoland, John Hughes-style tortured insider/outsider making a move for the pretty girl by interrupting the prom queen, utterly corny maneuver. Kanye West seems to think that the MTV Network is the school administration and he is the Judd Nelson character pumping a fist. (But Kanye, take it from this fellow cheesy Midwesterner and onetime 80’s aficionado, the 80’s are way over.)

In the past few years, Kanye has made a habit of making a spectacle of himself at awards shows, showing bad sportsmanship and egotism. His lyrics have turned towards the sexualized and shallow (“She love my big, (hahaha), Ego” – on his latest collabo with, hm, Beyoncé). When he does dig deep (like on his brooding, autotune-heavy latest LP “808s and Heartbreak”), it’s about his own emotions and relationships. It seems superstardom has been weird and hard on the goofy kid from Chicago who broke onto the scene by providing infectious beats for Jay-Z then sing-songily rapping on his 2004 debut “The College Dropout” about self-consciousness, materialism, discrimination at the Gap, family reunions, car accidents and Luther Vandross.

Things seemed to take an obnoxious turn after the fascinating events of 2005. In 2005, Kanye had just put out a song about diamonds from Sierra Leone (Where? The kids found out, hopefully, when the song caught on) and spoke out boldly on another live television event.

On an evening at the beginning of hurricane season, they stood side by side in the telethon television studio: Mike Myers, Austin Powers, Wayne’s World himself was somber, talking of needing money for relief efforts in New Orleans. Kanye West seemed stoic and frantic at the same time as he poured out a series of thoughts about the stranded, hungry, hunted poor Black people in New Orleans that he saw on TV that culminated with “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people,” before the live feed was cut.

(He could have gone even farther; George Bush doesn’t seem to really care about many people except maybe other people named George Bush.)

That was probably the last outburst of quality from Mr. West to date. With all that’s around to burst out about, last weekend’s display from Kanye was boring at best, cringe worthy at worst.

But it got the news cycle churning with fresh gristle; the info-tainment and enter-mation shows chewed on this eagerly like cud for 24 hours until the sad death of “wrong-side-of-the-tracks” love affair movie icon Patrick Swayze.

The liberating, juvenile, giddy admissions of confusion that have made about ½ of his songs so loveable and interesting now seems muddled by the muck of fame. In a business that rewards egoism, it’s not hard to see why Kanye has embraced this aspect of himself that he has seemed to wrestle with on earlier tracks.

It’s not too late for Kanye (still young, though not young enough to be scolded so by Jay Leno).

Please Pack Your Knives and Go

Jennifer Zavala, Philadelphia chef

by Lauren Pabst

“In America, deep frying steak is not a good idea”

– European emigrant Wolfgang Puck to (U.S. Commonwealth of) Puerto Rico native and Top Chef contestant Hector Santiago. Though placed in the bottom four, Hector escaped the first Top Chef elimination on the August 20th season premiere.

An argument can be made that Top Chef is the most decadent TV show ever. It pretty much has it all: elitism, sexy women eating food, competition, money, gluttony, excess, shopping, criticism, rejection. And food; oh, food: plates and plates of food for each challenge, course after course for the taste buds of the judges. Quickfire challenges with arrays of burgers and fries purely as a visual (maybe someone ate them, but who? The crew? The shoppers of the Top Chef Kitchen’s garbage cans?). Tens of thousands of dollars shelled out at various posh Whole Foods branches over five seasons (“I can’t find half my stuff!” Haitian chef Ron Duprat moaned good-naturedly, after asking a Whole Foods employee if they had an “island station”). Lots and lots of food, all of it usually looking good, some definitely going uneaten (“It was so good I finished it all!” has been an occasional judge comment in the past).

But at least every episode, a chicken wing or a salad or a tart displeases the panel of professional food eaters. Someone is dissed and dismissed. Somebody is rejected; sacrificed to the gods of reality television. Voted off the island. Fired. Cut. Sent home. Told to pack their knives and go.

Ultra dramatically, the pronouncement is accompanied by -”jing!” – the sound of a sharp blade slicing (the air?). Often the chucked chef will hang their head at the precise moment of this sound effect, giving us the quick impression of a parody of a beheading. This is what happens when you let them eat (apparently) sub-par cake.

A friend recently asked me the difference between documentary and reality TV. The question was interesting to ponder. Reality TV is utterly constructed, proudly fake. But “documentary film” can have elements of the constructed or forced; the mere presence of cameras has an impact on the action, often times.

But if a documentary is the filmmakers bearing witness to the subjects in a situation, “Reality TV” is the producers leading the subjects by the hand through a series of hoops – through competitions creative or personal. The personal competitions (The Bachelor / Bachlorette, Flavor of Love, The Biggest Loser) are squeamish to watch. The creative ones (Project Runway, Top Chef) also contain an element of discomfort, but are much more interesting. Because the contestants are there for a skill or craft, their personalities come out – perhaps – a bit realer.

Judgment of something so universal and cultural as food is curious. After all, isn’t food a matter of (hm) taste, which is determined by so many things – history, personality, habits, culture? Such harsh judgment of such carefully prepared, abundant food would probably be anachronistic and baffling to much of the planet. This show is no place for the philosophy that, to paraphrase Chris Rock from his book Rock This! (1998), anybody in this world lucky enough to have a steak in front of them (deep-fried chicharrón style or no) should probably just bite the s*** out of it.

But then without judgment, we wouldn’t have a contest or a show, would we.

On the premiere episode, which aired on Thursday, August 2oth, someone was cut (told to get out of there and take those sharp blades she brought with her, with her). She was Jennifer Zavala, executive chef at Philadelphia’s El Camino Real, mother of a three year-old boy. She had earlobes gauged out to the size of nameplate hoops and tattoos that read: “Sacred” on her throat and “Scarred” on her chest – (a weird but fascinating slide show on bravotv.com chronicles the illustrated arms and torsos of the chefs) who boldly stated that she felt she had to win to finance an education for her son.

“I want to win everything, no matter what” said fellow Philly-based chef Jennifer Carroll, another contestant, former sous-chef to celebrity chef Eric Ripert of New York City’s Le Bernadin and now chef de cuisine at his restaurant 10 Arts. Jen C. did win the Quickfire challenge with a clam ceviche (which she rhymed with beach). Carroll’s win in this Las Vegas themed show also came with a $15,000 chip courtesy of the hosting casino.

She won the two-tiered Quickfire, where only four people got to compete after winning in a butchering relay race of “some of the most popular foods in Las Vegas,” according to Tom Colliccio, which were – interestingly – shrimp, lobster, clams and meat, many of which, say, the Paiute probably didn’t have as part of their diet.

Some chefs were shy and nervous, some were boisterious and selfish and thought they were hilarious, some were frantically cocky, some were overeager to please. All this personality was tweaked by the producers who had them (inspired again by the reputably debauched desert city locale) create a dish based on a sin they were personally guilty of [sic]. Quite a few chefs dished up plates of food based on their drinking habits, some on their unhealthy food penchants, smoking,  procrastination, and one on not being able to let go of twenty-seven days spent at sea on a boat from Haiti to Florida.

“I’m not sure how that’s a sin” said Tom Colliccio about the inspiration of that last one, Miami-based Haitian chef Ron Duprat’s Chilean sea bass sitting on top of a squat, colorful stack of chunky sauces and cooked veggies at Judge’s Table, though he didn’t question anybody elses’ interpretations of the nebulous and probably mis-translatable concept of “sin.”

Hector Santiago, from Puerto Rico and a chef/owner of a restaurant in Atlanta smoked, then deep-fried a steak: “Steak and potatoes, Latino way!” he shouted in the kitchen, presenting it on a plate sliced on the bias next to a fresh jaunty pile of light sprouty looking greens.

“It’s a little bizzare… I don’t get it!” New York restauranteur Tom Colliccio sputtered to the rest of the unanimously distainful panel about Hector’s steak, like one who had never lunched above 96^th Street.

“What would you do if a chef in your restaurant put a steak in the deep fryer?” Colliccio fed to guest judge Wolfgang Puck.

“I’d throw HIM in the fire!” fired back Puck triumphantly as host Padma Lakshmi and judge Gail Simmons of Food and Wine magazine giggled in low cut dresses with mock exasperation.

Along with Hector, three chefs landed in the bottom four in a weird electoral college-like system that plucked a loser from every relay race group.

Some dishes were called overcooked by the judges. The chefs guiltily copped: Jesse Sandlin sweated over a dry chicken breast and Michigan chef Eve Aronoff was as flustered as her shrimp were flushed. (or something… hard to write about food you only see)

Jennifer Zavala served up a seitan-stuffed poblano chile with grilled tomatillo salsa based on a hot temper. “Anger can also be really good for you” she said. The big shiny dark green chile was crispy and fried, with creamy sauce-coated chunks of the wheat gluten meat-substitute protien nestled inside.

Tom Colliccio raked his fork through the insides of the chile and looked offended. At that moment, had this week’s loser already been selected?

“I love a good chile relleno… This is not a good chile relleno.” Colliccio said.

[The weird way Top Chef has treated Mexican food in the past doesn't begin and probably won't end with Colliccio's defensive love for chiles relleno. When Rick Bayless was a contestant on Top Chef Masters, the judges and narration kept going on and on about how much Bayless had "done for" Mexican cuisine, as if the centuries of tradition and flavors hadn't obviously done more for him. On that series' final episode (a sociology lesson in itself), Bayless was asked to recreate the dish that made him want to be a chef: in his case, it was the Mexican chile/chocolate/nut/maybe a dozen more ingredients sauce known as mole (literally: sauce, in a Mayan language). The judges were so overwhelmed with the well-prepared traditional Mexican dish that the British food critic (who rather unnecessarily later raved that Bayless "took his mole virginity") suggested that instead of talking about the dish, they just make "weird, guttural noises" to show their approval. Huh?]

“This dish was so clunky to me” complained Gail Simmons [of Food and Wine magazine, also a judge on the upcoming Top Wino] of Jen’s poblano.

“If you cooked that at home, those people would never come and visit you again” chortled Puck. “There’s really no flavor to it” – back to Tom.

Padma called it a midnight special from a vegan bar – not so clearly an insult if you’ve never even considered the idea of a vegan bar. And also maybe not if you have been to a vegan bar.

Jen Z. tasted defeat in Episode One. Or did she?

Next Episode:

“I love that you had the cojones to make that dish!”

- Tom Colliccio to Hector Santiago on tofu ceviche

AP: “Leonard Peltier Denied Parole”

From Associated Press:

BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) U.S. Attorney Drew Wrigley says imprisoned American Indian activist Leonard Peltier has once again been denied parole. Wrigley says the next scheduled hearing for Peltier is 2024, when Peltier would be 79 years old. Peltier is serving two life sentences for the execution-style deaths of FBI agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams during a June 26, 1975, standoff on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. He was convicted in Fargo, N.D., in 1977. He has claimed the FBI framed him, which the agency denies, and unsuccessfully appealed his conviction numerous times. Peltier had a full parole hearing for the first time in 15 years last month at the Lewisburg, Pa., federal prison where he is being held. Defense attorney Eric Seitz declined comment on the U.S. Parole Commission decision Friday, saying the Justice Department had not informed him. (Copyright 2009 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

Context?

Contextual Healing recommends:

Film: Incident at Oglala: The Leonard Peltier Story

From the archives (2003!) Film Review: Phone Booth: Please hang up and try again later

Colin Farrell on phone, in booth, under seige

(Did anybody see Phone Booth? I did!)

by Lauren Pabst

originally printed in the BU Daily Free Press Muse Arts + Entertainment section

In the tradition of one-location suspense films that are inordinately proud of their one location (such as Speed), comes Phone Booth — a movie that manages to create a moderate climate of suspense while operating entirely within the confines of a gimmick.

Colin Farrell plays Stu Shepard, a slimey publicist who is targeted by a mad sniper (voiced by the smooth, threatening baritone of Kiefer Sutherland) from within Manhattan’s last free-standing phone booth, located in Times Square. The events escalate and Stu soon finds himself trapped by both the sniper and the police, as a murder suspect.

A premise like this one does not create a large amount of mystery about what’s likely to happen, and the surprise is that somehow the film does not feel quite as predictable as it should. If the concept is gimmicky, director Joel Schumacher milks it for all it’s worth, transforming the titular glass enclosure into a creepy aquarium-like setting for the main character’s emotional, sweat-drenched trial by long-range fire.

Phone Booth’s fast pace editing and variety of shots — methodical circling, zigzagging zooms and slow-mo’ swooping around the booth and its limited immediate area — keep things frenetic but snappy and holds the audience on a MTV/ Matrix/ Fight Club-style visual adrenaline rush.

The film’s pace reflects its 10-day shoot, Schumacher said in a recent interview with the Muse. “Everything about the film was chaotic,” he said, laughing. “The first day of shooting I was panicky. I thought people would walk out.” Despite his initial fears, Schumacher soon found relevance in the film’s attempted true-life voyeuristic aspect, he said.

“I wanted it to feel for you the way it does — when you turn on the news, what’s happening right then,” he said. “If you turned on the news and they were saying that there was a guy in a phone booth and they think he had killed somebody and he wouldn’t get off the phone, you would watch. We all would.”

For someone trapped in a phone booth, Stu certainly draws a crowd — including a trio of disgruntled prostitutes, led by an amusing Paula Jai Parker, and the more reserved women in his life, Kelly (Rhada Mitchell) and Pam (Katie Holmes), who take turns looking puzzled and distressed. Forrest Whitaker is rather levelheaded as the top cop assigned to defuse the booth debacle. Sutherland’s sniper sounds sinister and somewhat reminiscent of that other mystery caller from Scream, but with more creepy calm and unsolicited psychoanalysis to offer his captive.

Like his character, though, Farrell fittingly garners all the attention. He does right by the mediocre script, accepting the perplexing attempts at witticisms as vestiges of his loser character instead of leaving them as clichè moments for the hero/bad-guy banter highlight reel. Farrell’s emphatic performance out-paces the rest of the film, and, at times, it almost feels like a one-man acting exercise with creative editing.

“Colin Farrell was my first choice, but no one would let me do it with him because he was unknown.” (The filming took place in 2000). This casting problem was the reason for one of the film’s three postponements, Schumacher explained. “First the film was postponed because of Sept. 11th because it’s set in New York, then until after Minority Report came out because then Colin would have a bigger profile.”

The sniper attacks in the Washington, D.C. area pushed back the October 2002 release date another six months, he said. For Schumacher, there was no way the film could have disregarded the events of last fall. “You can’t put movies above humanity.”

Though Phone Booth impressively renders the basic scenario of its gimmick, it remains un-ambitious in developing the story’s other angles. The film begins cleverly, with a bass-boosted montage of the state of the phone usage of modern man. However, by the end, there exists a bit too much sketchy emotional candor from the characters and blatant disregard of most all of the intricacies of the situation that rob the film of its possible depth. For all its tension building, via cool split screen tricks, the film only succeeds in hammering home pulse-pounding, crash-zooming irrelevance.

Michael Jackson: The Man in Our Mirror

by Lauren Pabst, Contextual Healing

The only reason I can talk about Michael Jackson is because he’s a freak. His face is all cut up. But just remember, when you look at that thing he calls his face, that he did that for you somehow. Somehow he thought you might – maybe it would help, maybe people might like me more if I turn myself into a white, ghoulish-like creature.

- Dave Chappelle, For What It’s Worth (2004)

Like many others, I was surprised and saddened by the death of Michael Jackson.

I just took for granted that Michael Jackson would always be around – an uncomfortable work in progress, a strange and wonderful phenomenon.

I feel sad that now when I think of Michael Jackson, it will be in the past tense. I felt a similar sadness with other music greats, but in this case there’s also an upsetting sense of:

This is how the story ends.

Thanks to the harsh, immediate spotlight of our celebrity worshiping culture, though I never even laid eyes on the actual MJ at so much as a CD signing event, I – like most of us – was intimately aware of the details of his extraordinary, turbulent life.  Not just aware of the infectious grooves that have become part of our cultural sense memory and cause the blood to pump along with the bass line of “Billie Jean.” Not just aware of his unprecedented success in album sales and music videos, and his wild talent for singing, songwriting and dancing, but aware of the abusive childhood, the reported self-loathing, the clandestine surgeries, the skin bleaching, the claims of vitiligo, the pet chimp and the hyperbaric chamber, the sad attempts to create a fantasy childhood he never had, the allegations of child molestation, the surgical masks, the collapsed nose, the scarf-draped children and dangled baby of mysterious origins.

I realize that part of me was hoping for a comeback – not like the current one that was projected to make gobs of money performing for rich Europeans – but a grand triumph of self-awareness (a decision to “make that change” as he croons in the song “Man in the Mirror”). I half-hoped in the back of my mind that maybe the years ahead would see a calm, rotund, septuagenarian Michael perched on a stool, wearing a sport jacket, his face – if not transformed into the round cocoa original, at least long-since un-meddled with -  singing “We are the World” with Alicia Keys at the 2020 Grammys; releasing a book of interviews conducted by Cornell West in which he examines the troubled cauldron of influences – societal and personal – in which his once-troubled lifestyle was forged. Unlikely, I know. Maybe this would have been possible in a parallel universe. But not here. Not anymore.

And I realize that with this fantasy trajectory, I’m basically wishing that Michael Jackson grew up to be someone other than who he was. It is to wish that he had a less traumatic life, that the little kid with the devastating soulful voice singing and dancing alongside his older brothers wouldn’t have grown into an adult so clearly warped by an entire life under a media microscope.

In a thoughtful article in the New York Daily News on June 26th, 2009 about Jackson’s musical legacy, Jim Farber writes:

“Jackson’s work with his brothers did more than score bullseye’s on the charts. Their relationship gave the mass media a model of a cohesive African-American family operating in joy and harmony at a time when race raged as a dividing point in the country. From that point on, Michael Jackson’s story would be as much about symbolism as talent.”

Symbolism indeed. If in those early years, young Michael – with his youthful charisma, energetic voice and wide, easy smiles – represented a new possibility for the generation coming of age during the Civil Rights movement, then we must also examine where he ended up in terms of symbolism. The problem is that according to some, Michael never came of age. He devoted millions to indulging childlike whims that he had been denied as a famous kid and befriended other current and former child stars. In his 2003 sexual abuse trial, Dr. Stan Katz testified that Jackson did not fit the profile of a pedophile – he had emotionally regressed to being a 10 year-old boy.

In the white-hot height of his career following the 1982 release of the album Thriller, produced with Quincy Jones, the 20-something Michael Jackson seemed to have it all. His epic music videos smashed the color line of MTV and according to Farber, jump-started the pop music frenzy that characterized the 80’s.

If we follow the MJ-as-symbol theory, then when it comes to race relations, the 80’s were the decade of everything being – or seeming, at least pop-culturally – okay. Michael Jackson was the most successful recording artist since Elvis. Equality! On TV, Dr. Huxtable and his family presented a portrait of upper-middle class black contentment. Equality! But as the 80’s wore on, crack swept the streets of black neighborhoods across the U.S. and rates of black and Latino incarceration began skyrocketing. With the closing of factories and deportation of high-paying unskilled jobs, generations were born into what would become decades-long unemployment. And it seemed that that amazingly contradictory happiness of fame took its toll on the emotionally fragile, painfully shy superstar Michael as he became more reclusive and altered his famed appearance more and more.

Was the troubled, surgically altered adult Michael Jackson a sad product of post-Civil Rights era decades of pretending that everything was fine?

Symbolism alert: he made millions to star in Pepsi commercials and was severely burned.

Last night saw the expected wall-to-wall news coverage of the death of Michael Jackson. Even now, TV anchors and “entertainment reporters” are probably readying a days-long audio/video dirge for the benefit of their own ratings. In other words, the pendulum has swung the other way: as with the obscene media treatment of the death of Anna Nicole Smith, it seems that the more mocked and reviled the celebrity was in life, the more embarrassingly obsessed the mainstream media becomes with their untimely passing.

Almost like we had guilty consciences or something.

There are still those who have rejected Michael Jackson completely because of the allegations of child molestation that we brought forward in 1993 and again in 2003. Though Jackson was found not guilty of the most recent charges, many take the fact that he settled out of court with the family from the ‘93 suit (in which the plaintiff was the child of a former friend) as proof of guilt. But as in most celebrity trials, it is often the case that myth outstrips fact in the public imagination. In other words: many who pass judgment don’t know for sure what happened in either case or even the details of what happened in the trial. The mere accusation of child molestation is often enough to destroy a reputation.

But when it comes to celebrities, everyone feels entitled to an opinion. That’s the way it goes in our culture: celebrity bashing is the corrosive flip side to the gilded coin of celebrity worship. No matter how much your life sucks, you can vent your frustrations at someone richer, more beautiful and crazier than you.

But even in the world of celebrity, double standards abound. In his 1999 song “Mr. Nigga,” recording artist and social critic Mos Def weighs in:

You can laugh and criticize Michael Jackson if you wanna
Woody Allen, molested and married his step-daughter
Same press kickin dirt on Michael’s name
Show Woody and Soon-Yi at the playoff game, holdin hands
Sit back and just bug, think about that
Would he get that type of dap if his name was Woody Black?

An interesting and valid point. Woody Allen (whose most recent film “Whatever Works” opened just a few weeks ago) and his public image have been basically unscathed by his admitted behavior towards his current wife, who was a minor at the time of their initial “involvement.” And what’s more, it seems that the license to bash a famous person increases exponentially when the person’s appearance does not conform to the ideals or even norms of society.

Which brings up an uncomfortable question. Namely, where does the whole of American culture fall on the responsibility spectrum for the  life of Michael Jackson – a life with as many ups and downs as a rollercoaster at the Neverland Ranch? Of course, though we are all products of our environment, personal choice and the autonomy of the individual is a large factor in the equation of who we all become. But thanks to the work of father Joe Jackson, an ambitious session musician from Gary, Indiana, Michael Jackson – from the tender age of 5 – was specifically and mercilessly groomed to entertain the American public. And he did so – in an unprecedented way.

And now we know exactly how this man’s life has played out.

Along these lines, today I think of the scene from the 1999 film Three Kings. The film, written and directed by David O. Russel (I Heart Huckabees) is set shortly after the end of Operation: Desert Storm and places that conflict in a murky and fascinating context of greed and cluelessness.

In this scene, the Army Reserve Sergent played by Mark Walhberg is kidnapped and tortured by an Iraqi intelligence officer (played by Said Taghmaoui). The topic of conversation turns unexpectedly to the King of Pop:

More than Meets the Eye

by Lauren Pabst, Contextual Healing

Many of this Summer’s blockbuster fantasy movies pit humans against machines, even as Americans find our government on the robotic side of the real thing in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Part I

i, Autobot

“I got you a webcam so we can chat 24/7” says a college-bound Shia LaBeouf, ever so cooly, to love interest Megan Fox via cell phone early on in the trailer for Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen, which opens today in theaters nationwide.

“Sounds cute, I can’t wait,” Fox replies cutely, flatly.

This little digital commercial is slipped prominently into the promo, just before clips of car chases and robot behemoths firebombing aircraft carriers, walking all over famous landmarks (Brooklyn Bridge! Pyramids of Giza!), busting up freeways and placing our visually pleasing heroes into jeopardy.

The flirty little exchange fits perfectly with the overall tone of Transformers, a fantasy action adventure based on the animated series from the 1980s, in which two squads of alien robots – one good, one evil – duke it out on battlefield Earth.

Though LeBoeuf and company will spend most of the movie along with the good Autobots fighting the evil Deceptecons, this little suggestive exchange aimed at the teenaged, digital device-consuming, YouTubing generation puts all of that robot-blasting in context. Technology (of the type that rumbles out of a tractor-trailer disguise to snatch your car off the highway) can be the enemy… but (in real life, now) before anything else, it is our trusted sidekick – our little digital friend. It’s what allows us to keep in touch with our sexy girl/boyfriends.

Since many of the summer blockbusters deal with the fantasy theme of man versus machine, it seems an appropriate time to take a look at our everyday relationship to robots. While Terminator: Salvation imagines malevolent killer robots programmed by an evil, autonomous, human-hunting computer program the Transformers series offers two sides of the coin – there are evil Deceptecons, but there are also helpful, righteous Autobots. And through our shared righteousness, humanity is on the side of the Autobots.

The friendship of Shia LaBeouf’s Sam Witwicky and Optimus Prime in Transformers is one more entry in the lovable-robot canon of American cinema. As evidenced by last summer’s WALL-E, as well as R2D2 and C3PO from Star Wars, Haley Joel Osment in A.I., Johnny 5 and the little guy from Batteries Not Included, the friendly robot is well established in our pop-culture consciousness. And let’s face it, friendly robots populate our life – from our trusty cell phone to our colorful, cute iPod, our indispensable laptop computer, our efficient microwave oven, and yes the webcam that allows us to chat with our significant other “24/7.”  Robots today provide unparalleled amounts of stimulation – mentally and in some cases even physically.

But in the Summer of 2009, the theme of man vs. machine is too significant and evocative for us to ignore. Certain other real-life battles are playing out right now, around the world. And like the heroic Autobots, we owe it to ourselves to transform a bit – our point of view, that is. There is definitely more than meets the eye.

Part II

“I’ll Be Back”

The Terminator was the 1984 action movie hit, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a humanoid killer robot from the year 2029, sent back in time to the Reagan era to kill the mother of the as-yet unborn John Connor. Connor would grow up to lead a rebellion against the evil machines that would take over Earth – an Air Force computer program called Skynet had become self-aware somewhere around the turn of the 21^st Century, and was now bent on destroying the human race.

In Terminator 2 (1991), Schwarzenegger was back, this time as a benevolent bodyguard-bot, reprogrammed by the future John Connor and sent back to 1995 to protect his mom and his young self.

Now, twenty-five years after the original, there is a new Terminator movie, the actor who embodied the original killing machine has been “reprogrammed” yet again as the Governor of California, and Terminator-like killer robots zoom around blowing up people. But just like Arnold, these robots work for us.

I felt a bit of cognitive dissonance watching the new Terminator: Salvation in a half-full darkened, cold theater on a hot June afternoon. The scenes of the nightmarish Terminator robots hunting the brave humans of the Resistance were for us images to eat popcorn to, while the real thing is taking place half a world away.

The machines formerly known as Predator Drones are unmanned flying vehicles capable of bombing targets in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq with Hellfire missiles as they are operated remotely by pilots in an air-conditioned room on an Army base in places like Nevada. The U.S. Defense Department first admitted to arming these unmanned drones on October 25, 2002; they previously had been known to be used only for surveillance purposes.

The first intended targets of these Predator Drones were suspected al-Qaeda members. The drones have since been used in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan. From just a handful seven years ago, the U.S. now has over 5,300 drones in operation – some as small as insects. Aerial drones also patrol the U.S.-Mexico border in the name of surveillance – these are currently unarmed.

In the words of one senior Bush administration official, as quoted by P.W. Singer, author of Wired for War, “The unmanning of war plays to our strength. The thing that scares people is our technology.”

Leaving aside the question of fear, the use of killer drone technology in the nebulous, seemingly unending “War on Terror” has many furious.

There has been an outcry by civilians in Pakistan, where over 250 people have been killed by the drones over the past year. A popular hit song in Pakistan last summer, as Singer explained on the TV and radio program Democracy Now! had lyrics charging that Americans look at them as insects. There are outspoken critics of the drones within the U.S. Defense establishment like David Kilcullen, an architect of General Petreus’ Iraq war surge, who claims that the unmanned robot killers are serving to further infuriate and radicalize the population of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq creating new enemies of the U.S. with each strike.

Some decry the attacks as a violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty, and point to their illegitimacy, due to the fact that the U.S. has not declared war on Pakistan. But the U.S.’ position is that the authorization of the use of force grated after the attacks of September 11, 2001 applies to all nations, if there are any suspected anti-American militants within their borders. But the use of the unmanned drones has provided the U.S. with a way to launch attacks, while avoiding an overt on-the-ground invasion of Pakistan. Recently, according to Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations, the motive waters have been muddied, as the drone attacks in Pakistan have not focused on al Qaeda operatives, but members of the network led by Baitullah Mehsud – opponents of the Zardari government with an alleged role in the assassination of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

All those who wondered if the drone attacks would end with the changing of the administrations didn’t have to wait long for their answer. In the early hours of January 23^th 2009, three days after President Obama took office, a drone struck two targets in Pakistan’s tribal Waziristan region. Fifteen people suspected of being supporters of the Taliban and their families were killed, including three children.

In the tribal regions of Pakistan can be found people living a rural, non-urbanized or globalized, traditional lifestyle. Three days earlier, in his inaugural speech, President Obama had referred to tribes:

“…because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.”

Do the “lines of tribe” have to dissolve for people to live in peace? That is a loaded statement to make when we consider the context of American treatment of the indigenous tribes of our own country. In fact, the U.S. government carried out one of the first instances of “ethnic cleansing” of an area with the Cherokee Removal Act of 1838, which culminated with a forced march of civilians known now as the Trail of Tears. In fact, Adolf Hitler studied the U.S. treatment of Native Americans (which reads more like a dark library than a “dark chapter”- see the recent PBS series “We Shall Remain”) and admired it as a model of genocide.

Whatever Obama meant by that, the drone attacks have had a major affect on the tribal areas: The Sunday Times of the UK reported in April that up to 1 million civilians have fled the tribal regions of Pakistan to try to avoid these drone attacks, as well bombings by the Pakistani army.

What are the advantages of deploying advanced technology against people? Steven Cohen of the Foreign Policy study program at the Brookings Institute defends the drones on the basis of their being a surgical-like warfare application. “What they do is allow any country that possesses them to pinpoint without much collateral damage,” Cohen says. “The drone, in essence, while it conjures up images of a mechanical monster is in fact far more effective and more humane than dropping tons of bombs on an area.”

How accurate the drones are, however, has been called into serious question. According to the Times of Pakistan, there have been 60 drone attacks by the United States on the tribal regions of Pakistan between January 14^th, 2006 and April 8^th, 2009. Horrifyingly, the Times reports, of these 60 attacks, only ten hit their intended targets, killing 14 alleged al-Qaeda leaders. An estimated 687 Pakistani civilians were killed in the drone attacks; unintended casualties, the aforementioned “collateral damage” (incidentally, also the title of an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie from 2002).

However, most of the people who will sit in multiplexes this summer watching Christian Bale’s John Connor fight the evil Skynet computer system and its robotic minions, or Shia LaBeouf and the gallant Autobots battle the evil alien robotic Decepticons, blissfully unaware or only muddily informed of the real-world drone attacks, will find themselves cheering on American humans as they face malevolent robots. In the blockbuster movies, like Terminator and Transformers, our (American) heroes are tasked with the burden of being the representatives of humanity that fight against the cold, brutality of an unfeeling robot programmed to murder cooly, indiscriminately.

The irony is so blatant that it would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.

Some are very aware of what the drones are doing, namely, their operators – many of them 18 and 19 year-olds literally assigned to this post because of their Playstation skills. As with their colleagues deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, the drone pilots –working on Army bases in the U.S. – though they may never physically experience the battlefield, have been known to develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) due to the jarring nature of their work. According to an August, 2008 story by the Associated Press, “Remote control warriors suffer war stress,” the pilots must guide the drones back to the attack site after the damage has been done, using the drones’ built-in surveillance equipment to gather high-resolution imagery of the casualties. Unlike Air Force pilots who can drop tons of bombs and never face the consequences of their work, the drone pilots cannot avoid seeing the dead bodies their mission has resulted in. A mission that resembles nothing so much as a live video game – with deadly real results.

Like a lot of action movies these days, Terminator: Salvation plays just a bit like a recruiting film for the Army. Set in a nightmare scape of 2018 (whoa! not much time, gang), it’s a watery by-the-numbers adventure where the carbon-based good guys scamper around the Western deserts (hmm) of a post-Apocalyptic United States wearing the official Resistance long olive trench coats oddly reminiscent of another time.

From a character’s pointed obsession with earning the right to wear the natty coats of the Resistance and an uncomfortable parable of redemption and self-sacrifice, Terminator Salvation is a embarrassingly earnest, bleak blow-up affair. Christian Bale’s John Connor (the fully grown charismatic alterna-leader within the corrupt bureaucracy of the Resistance) is brooding and glum. There’s little of the fantasy-rebel glee that characterized the earlier entries in the series, or the first Star Wars movies.

Then there’s the journey of Marcus Wright (Australian actor Sam Worthington), which makes up most of the film, a death row inmate from 2003 (he has committed some vague murders, never really explained) who, after having donated his body to science, emerges fully alive in the sand shitstorm of ’18 as a robot-human hybrid. Connor and company must decide whether the G.I. Joe-looking Wright can be trusted. For his part, Wright proves his loyalty to the human side via heroic self-sacrifice (a theme of the Terminator movies, to be sure, but one made more queasy given Worthington’s striking resemblance to an uber-soldier from one of those Army of One commercials).

In the midst of it all, the movie also offers a small vignette of resistance that could have been written by Sophocles; a bit of American Empire Greek Tragedy-style catharsis:

Connor refuses to follow the orders of the Rebellion’s leaders when they tell him to blow up Skynet’s command central, where thousands of human prisoners are kept. In the movie, it is the fact that he is unwilling to destroy innocent people (AKA collateral damage) that makes Connor a great leader. But what happens next is remarkable. The soldiers of the Resistance, inspired by Connor, actually refuses to follow the orders to bomb Skynet. Not so far-fetched, according to the conclusions of the 2005 documentary Sir No Sir, which retraces a large-scale resistance and its spread throughout the entire armed forces, during the Vietnam war. Connor is then able to save the human hostages, by engaging in the heroic hand-to-hand (or in this case, hand to bot) personal combat most highly prized by action movies.

In Terminator: Salvation, it almost seems like the plot has been designed as a rebellion lightning rod for an impressionable audience. Rebellion is painted in fantastical terms, awesome and escapist within the Hollywood-devised movie scenario. For much of the audience, the movie may be more relevant than the goings-on in the War on Terror. the real robot war being waged in our name, instead of merely identifying with fake cinematic versions.

Do our Summer blockbusters decontextualize current events, further desensitizing us to the effects of the real robot wars being being waged in our name? That all depends if these images of shadow cinematic rebellion remain entirely divorced from substance.

“If you are listening to this – you are the Resistance” John Connor intones breathily over pirate radio waves.

Ditto that.

Tactile Media Lament Part One(a)