Monday, January 6, 2020

Sam Kriss' Something. The 2010's in Review

over the last year or so I followed with terror the outrageous clarity of this writer who seems to be able to breath in the acidified oceans of modern cinema inside the society of the spectacles and lives to tell the tale straight up and tarnished.

don't call him Ishmael though he may call the Ahabs and the whales white or blue as they appear while the whales themselves are running far to escape commercial sonar (but that's anything but another fish story to save for laters -- on the edge of #collaspsology -- in the #anthropo-obscene --

 read Sam Kriss @ Idiot Joy Showland (but not via facebook, even if Sam tells you to do so, he's totally off about that)

https://samkriss.com/2020/01/05/teenage-bloodbath-the-2010s-in-review/

an example -- emphasis added is mine

 "In the modernist 20th century, culture produced novelty: new galaxies, new empires, new images and affects. Now, in the era of neoliberalism, it’s all repetition and pastiche; the best we can do is repeat ourselves. Disney is churning out soulless live-action remakes of its old cartoons at a frightening, industrial rate. These aren’t for children: they’re for people who used to be children, and aren’t any more, but never actually grew up. People who want to remember their childhoods, but this time with lots of CGI. Sappy idiots. Meanwhile, every other major blockbuster is either a sequel or a franchise. Pop music copies the forms of the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Literature recoils into tedious 19th century realism. All we can do is rearrange the rubble of the past."

another example --

 "The Irishman is also a deeply worrying film. This is Martin Scorsese directing Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci in a film about Italian-American gangsters. It’s a McNugget of a Scorsese film; it’s as if his earlier canon had been juiced and then reconstituted. The most arresting thing about the film is its use of digital de-aging, allowing the 76-year-old De Niro to (not entirely convincingly, but still) play a man in his mid-thirties. As a proof of concept, Scorsese had De Niro recreate the Christmas party scene from Goodfellas, and then used the technology to make him look exactly as he did in 1990. This is more than nostalgia, it’s the extermination of time. Scorsese can dip into the past and insert a new item into his 90s crime canon. He can obliterate the last thirty years. In the ‘now’ of the film, the present from which De Niro remembers his life, US jets are bombing Yugoslavia. The most advanced digital technologies are used to keep culture in a permanent stasis."

enough examples --

everyone who has a good therapist or their own daily meditative practice of some kind should read all Sam Kriss' writing. if you are drinking or on drugs you probably won't anyway but I don't recommend reading him unless you are tough as nails & rather flinty

there's everything in here to suggest that in a few days there will be an AI that will re-write all of Don Quixote and sell it as if new -- as in that film I didn't see about the guy who was resurrected to be the Beatles that God erased from historical memory

 this image only accidentally refers to rubble of the past. that's my stuff, not his



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