John Steppling

I would argue Greenwald is essential reading now. http://www.salon.com/2012/05/30/how_extremism_is_normalized/ So, speaking of narratives, this one is certainly part of that arc of police state mediation. The welcoming arms of the US populace is very strange. Of course, there are huge numbers not welcoming. https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions/#!/petition/create-do-not-kill-list/HwqFwRtG and here..... Chris Floyd's tasty critique http://www.chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/1-latest-news/2247-hymns-to-the-violence-the-nyts-love-letter-to-obamas-murder-racket.html#comment-543013573 and this, related, summary of the new Kill-Prez and his change that can drone-bomb … [Read more...]

One of the things I noticed while teaching at the film school in Lodz, was that students watched shows on their computers. They watched them, series anyway, in seasonal form. In other words if The Wire was making the rounds at the dorm, it was on a disc with the first two seasons. This allowed the sense of expanded narrative. Obviously, the old network formula, a stand alone one hour show, no longer seemed very compelling. Now of course most network TV is so awful as to be unwatchable anyway, but there was a new wave of cable material that defied the old formula; Boardwalk Empire and Breaking Bad, and The Sopranos, et al. Putting aside for a second the relative value of any of these shows, … [Read more...]

I wrote this a while back. “ Narrative cannot narrate anything significant, or rather it narrates what is of importance by not narrating it. Again, photography began with long exposure time; and this created the ‘space’ of the 19th century photograph. Snap-shot culture grew with the assembly line and with the quick turn around of product consumption. The snap shot, and now the digital photo are there ONLY to wear out the face. Today’s fixation with the Vampire trope is because of the sense people have that technology is sucking the blood from us. The over-photographed face of a super model is always bloodless. That space in the 19th century portrait photograph is the space of Kafka’s … [Read more...]