The Invisible Counterpoint

Concerning "Girls"' Hannah's new job, Daniel D'Addario wrote this:  Hannah has taken a gig at GQ, where she’s explicitly told not to answer the phone giving the name of the outlet; she’s writing sponsored content for Neiman Marcus, those glossy pages in the magazine that look sort of like — well, Ray explains it best in the episode’s first moments. “It looks like a real article,” he says, “so they trick you into reading it, but then you find out it’s a paid advertisement, which is both morally and creatively bankrupt.”   It seems much the same as  Adam’s anti-Gawker rant earlier in the season  — a man hectoring a naif for not sharing his point of view about the idiocy of the media world. And Ray is sort of right: Hannah would never have been hired to be a staff writer at GQ. All the perks of her job — from paycheck to snack room — stand in for respect in precisely the manner she craves.   But Ray’s sort of wrong, too, about just how bankrupt the enterprise...

Concerning Claude Lanzmann's "The Last of the Unjust," Andrew O'Hehir wrote this: I can understand why French documentary filmmaker Claude Lanzmann kept his interviews with Benjamin Murmelstein out of  “Shoah,”  Lanzmann’s 1985 magnum opus about the Holocaust. Murmelstein was a one-time Viennese rabbi who spent several years working closely with the notorious Adolf Eichmann and who was the final “Jewish Elder,” or community leader, in the ghetto of Theresienstadt (or Terezin, its Czech name), a faux-benevolent Potemkin village erected by the Nazis for propaganda purposes.    […]   To many people in the Jewish world, his name became identified with the way some leaders of Europe’s Jewish community had capitulated to Nazi domination and collaborated with a campaign of mass extermination. Gershom Scholem, the German-born Jewish philosopher and historian, suggested at one point that Murmelstein should be hanged as a traitor.   […]   Murmelstein ...

Concerning Bob Costas's pull-out from the Olympics, Daniel D'Addario wrote this:  Costas had spent the early days of the Olympics sick in a manner that was particularly visible. Were he ill with bronchitis, say, he might have soldiered through, waiting for a commercial break to stick his head in a humidifier but with no visible signs of distress the audience could notice. With his eye infection, his malady was written across his face. Surely I’m not the only audience member who grabbed at my own eye in painful recognition.  And yet, until now, Costas has gone through with a job he’s both contractually bound to and, more notably, one he seems to enjoy. […] But he’s also a testament to the very sort of fortitude we celebrate in Olympic athletes. […]  Those who are sick in their workaday lives shouldn’t feel bad about taking days off, of course. But the biennal spotlight of the Olympic games is different than an office job; just like the athletes, Costas has only so m...

This is how Lupita Nhyong'o describes the shooting of the whipping scene in "12 Years a Slave":  And being there was more then enough to handle. "The reality of the day was that I was stripped naked in front of lots of people," Nyong'o said. "It was impossible to make that a closed set. In fact, I didn't even as for it to be a closed set, because at the end of the day, that was a privilege not granted to Patsey, you know? It really took me there. It was devastating to experiencing that, and to be tied to a post and whipped. Of course, I couldn't possible be really whipped. But just hearing the crack of that thing behind me, and having to react with my body, and with each whip, get weaker and weaker …" She grew quiet, and sighed. "I mean, it was -- I didn't practice it. It was just -- it was an exercise of imagination and surrender."  Lupita was trying to become as close as she could to the actual Patsey, out of fidel...

I think we're mostly familiar with ceremonies where we do anointing. Certainly, if we can imagine a context where humiliation would prove most devastating it'd probably be at a ceremony where someone thought themselves due an honor -- "Carrie," "Good Fellas." "We labored long to adore you, only so to prime your hope, your exposure … and then rather than a ladder up we descended the slops, and hoped, being smitten, you'd judged yourself worthless protoplasm -- a nothing, for letting yourselves hope you might actually be something -- due to be chuted into Hades or Hell." Ostensibly, nothing of the sort occurred during Oscars 2013, where the host, Seth Macfarlane, did a number featuring all the gorgeous Oscar-winning actresses in attendance who sometime in their careers went topless, and pointed this out to them. And it didn't -- not quite. Macarlane would claim that all obscenity would be directed back at him, for being the geek so pathe...

Viewing the earth from space is supposed to be one of those opportunities to chuck off familiar ways of apprehending your lived life into a baptism where cognitive categories need to be reapplied … hold on, it's not just blue sea vs. brown terra which this view tells me it is, but of course the Pacific Ocean, and that chunk of terra is California,  and so on.  It's supposed to be one of those chances where in feeling an actual effort to reapply our entire normal way of perceiving, we feel in ourselves the capacity to change … the "us" in us can flow into a better mold. But though in certain kinds of cultural contexts this realization/rapture can be magnified -- like during the space launch, the utopian 1960s -- in some it can be virtually nullified as the fact that it's simply a view from a height lends it strictly not to perspective but to orientation. Arrogant, aristocratic -- entirely-not-our-own -- orientation. I've heard of differing agents in rega...

This is the End Iron Man 3 Only God Forgives Nebraska Superman: Man of Steel Inside Llewyn Davis The Wolverine Star Trek: Into Darkness The Counselor Filth Lee Daniel's The Butler Pacific Rim 12 Years a Slave Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit ***** Draw, or loss to the woman, owing to "the boy" IDing himself as loyal to mom, or as saving a nation / world, or some other epic  excuse. The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug Thor: The Dark World Star Trek: Into Darkness Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit

"Her"  The power of this fusion fantasy can be seen in a simple  experiment that has been repeated over and over again by Silverman and his group.  They showed subliminal messages to hundreds of people, and found that only one —" MOMMY AND I ARE ONE”— had an enormous emotional effect, reducing their  anxieties and pathologies and their smoking and drinking addictions measurably.  “Daddy and I are one” had no effect.  "Iron Man 3" Warriors become fused with the powerful mother that masturbated them during menstruation; they then decorate themselves with menstrual blood-red paint so they can appropriate the fearful power of their Killer Mothers. Wars in early civilizations are fought on behalf of and against Killer  Goddesses, bloodthirsty mothers like Tiamat, Ishtar, Inanna, Isis or Kali. Typical is  the Aztec mother- goddess Hiutzilopochtli, who had “mouths all over her body” that  cried out to be fed the blood of soldiers. ...