version

Well-known member
Susan Sontag is someone I want to like more than I do

she's clearly super-smart but she like embodies hypocritical posturing leftism and she seems like a pretty awful person

Aside from the odd YouTube clip -- I watched an alright thing between her and Berger the other week -- and general reading, this is my first real encounter with her. She does seem like a pretty awful person, yeah. Apparently she treated Annie Leibovitz like shit, plus I can't really get behind referring to an entire race of people as a "cancer".

 
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catalog

Well-known member
Can I just say I fucking hate that Larry Clarke film? It relishes and delights in degradation of teenagers, valourises their worst impulses. As someone who works with that age group, Teens are funny, weird, stupid, selfish, idiotic but overall much more interesting than an ageing pedos miseryporn vision. It's a deeply, deeply reactionary vision. It's just a fucking Daily Mail front page in hipster clothing.

i still think it's an excellent film, for the way it's shot, the acting, the overall feel and what its saying.

although it's not really something i would watch now, and i'm far more ambivalent now about larry clark as an artist, than i was as a teenager.. it's definitely not daily mail tho, cos on the level of aesthetics, there's something else going on, or at least something else is being reached for. there's so many odd moments in it, where you get some strange insight into the characters, the weird awkward bits that are left in.

yes, you could definitely say it's exploitative, but there's definitely something else there (for me)..

have you seen his tulsa photo book? that's very good.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I thought Kids was cool when I was much younger, but I could never watch it now.

I also thought Kids was cool when I was younger (a teenager). I wanted to live in a sweltering New York and smoke blunts and skateboard in the park, and be surrounded by girls. But (girls thing aside) this was a fantasy I had picked up from skateboarding videos, and Kids happened to tap into it. I had a similar love of La Haine — the political message of it wasn't lost on me but I was really attracted to the hip-hop culture as depicted in the scenes of breakdancers and the bedroom DJ, etc.

These were strangely glamorous visions to a provincial nerd living a profoundly unexciting life.

If I'd seen Kids at a less impressionable age I probably would have disliked it.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Oh yeah, didn't mean to suggest that I was a fool for loving La Haine. Quite fancy watching it again, actually. Very relevant to the current moment, of course.
 

glasshand

dj panic attack
plz excuse me jumping in here without reading the full context but funny that people are mentioning Kids because I rewatched it a couple weeks ago after I watched this - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid90s (absolutely fuckin shit, do not watch). I liked it when I first watched it maybe ten years ago and I actually really enjoyed watching it again. I know what people are saying about its cynicism, but for me it was always just so obviously like a big kid's fantasy of what being a kid could be that I'd never really thought about it as having some real-life commentary on teenagers and what they're "really" like. I think it's stuff like the club scenes where it's all teens/even younger, the skating scene which is like a kid's fantasy of what you'd do to an adult if you were all hard enough, the house party where it's like 11/12 yr olds passing round blunts. Both when I first watched it and now it's all so unreal I don't think I judged it on the level of what's it's trying to say/portray about reality...
 

glasshand

dj panic attack
I'm reading this right now -
Bruno Latour - Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime

Am into books scaring me about the climate at the moment. This one's interesting for the way it argues that Trump, Brexit, are expressions of fear of climate change at a fundamental level - not having any land to live on. It's like a work of political pseudo-fiction - the billionaire class decided in the 80s that all the climate science showed there wasn't going to be an earth to live on much longer, so they threw their weight behind systematic climate change denial and withdrew from any notion of a common planet (deregulation, offshoring) to buy themselves some time for them and their children to live like feudal monarchs. Ordinary Brexit/Trump fans recognise they've been lied to about the whole globalisation project and want to shut off the borders to the land/dwindling fantasy of the Local that remains.
 

luka

Well-known member
I going to get really into Dickens too. I like the idea of getting into him and constantly telling craner he's better than Balzac.
 

luka

Well-known member
Barty told me that being into Europe and France specifically is a sure sign of pseudo-intellectualism. And I will frame the Dickens vs Balzac thing in that way. It'll be a running thing. I won't let it lie.
 

entertainment

Well-known member
Latour copied that idea off me. It's been talked about here loads of times.

It's a common one. Seen it framed as a 'frontier theory' a few times. Basically when we've exhausted the new world frontiers, we start to turn on each other. Land = done, technological advancement = at best diminishing returns, at worst dystopian surveillance capitalism, economic growth = an ecological impossibility.

The only viable frontier is the one towards your neighbor, enter protectionism. Basically the only hope is space colonization.
 

luka

Well-known member
Ok, I can go along with that. That's why I hate people like Latour claiming ownership over public memes and branding them.
 

luka

Well-known member
we need to stop self proclaimed intellectuals stamping their brand on public property. Fiction and philosophy have been collectivised
 

luka

Well-known member
That's one of the things I like about the diagram version posted on the conspiracy thread. All those ideas are public domain. That's the material we are all working with.
 
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