Guy Zimmerman, in reviewing the new Wall Street film The Big Short, muses on the desperate conformity required in today’s entertainment in this new Gilded Age of oligarchy and disempowerment that has overtaken culture in the U.S.
Tag: capitalism
Is Classical Music, and the Desire for Rebellion, Dead?
Do today’s elite lack the patience and culture for classical music? Or is it a matter of cultural dominance of the popular, the fame producing, and capital revenue streams which have sacrificed painstaking complex creation? John Halle opines.
Free Trade Cities in Honduras: A Dangerous Experiment
The tiny forgotten Pacific port town of Amapala, among volcanic island sands and stifling heat, is proposed as the site of a radical libertarian experiment: an autonomous free trade city, a haven for multi-national corporations. And the locals are not celebrating.
Will Self: Talentless Hipsters and Commodification Culture
This awful cult of talentless hipsters has its Mecca in Los Angeles, according to Will Self. He asserts his generation took the avant-garde and turned it into a successful rearguard action by the flying columns of capitalism’s blitzkrieg. What to make of the commodification and democratization of culture, and where to go from here?
The Ongoing Reconsideration of Pier Paolo Pasolini
Champion of the disinherited of postwar Italy, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s masterworks prefigured his country’s fall to a consumerist Heart of Darkness, an uncompromising vision that may have led to his own wretched death. A biopic by Abel Ferrara that premiered at the Venice biennale reconstructed the last hours of the Italian film director, who was murdered in 1975.
The Climate Movement: Direct Action Against Extreme Fossil Fuels
David Osborn from Rising Tide asserts all new fossil fuel extraction must immediately stop if we want any chance of a habitable climate and a livable future. The climate movement needs more actions like Swamp Line 9 in Ontario, which shut down a pumping station to protest the Enbridge Line 9 Tar Sands Pipeline Reversal.
This Country’s Going to Socialist Hell – By Jerry Collamer
Jerry Collamer on the state of the nation’s political dialogue ongoing in BlondCounty and at a diner near you.