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Workload has hit maximum beatdown levels, so posting here has been minimal.
My thought of the day: Batman Begins could be read as a treatise on the failure of 1960s-era idealism and social activism…check it out. HBO on Demand=my new best friend. Anyway:
Bruce Wayne’s dad is seen as a failed hero because his economic policies and altruism meant nothing when a loaded gun was pointed his way–the peaceful solution is seen as impotent and unrealistic. Second, Scarecrow can be interpreted as an emblem of the sinister underpinnings of psychotherapy and social engineering through neuropharmacology. Raz Al-Ghul, the wise teacher who speaks in koans and helps Wayne get to the bottom of his Freudian issues, turns out to be weak, evil and a fraud–the Maharishi has no clothes. Finally, the ultimate symbol: Gotham’s water supply is being turned into Electric Kool-Aid by baddies with an agenda of unleashing murderous mayhem–exactly what the Establishment types accused the hippies of doing. They even call the drug a “weaponized hallucinogen.” How perfect is that?
Anyway, that’s enough B.S. for one day. I have a media law midterm in T-minus 40 minutes, wish me luck.
Go out and purchase Cormac McCarthy’s new novel The Road. It’s devastating.
Truth be told, I bought it because its premise is one I’ve tried to write a novel about: a father and son scraping to survive in a blasted world, post-nuclear war. Cormac beat me to it and I’m glad he did. The Road is vivid and bone-spare, one of those ultimate morality tales where the doomed and doomed to be good stand in defiance of total meaninglessness. I’m not even exaggerating.
He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.
Wow.
As far as I’m concerned, this is the final word in post-apocalyptic parables. Eat your heart out Mad Max and The Stand.
Picture Lord of the Flies as a near-future Western, tutored by Waiting for Godot, with a heaping helping of The Road to Perdition thrown in. With prose so miserly Hemingway sounds verbose in comparison. Blinding love at the end of days. Big, big theme.
And yes, there are cannibals. Read this damn book.
By Noah Barron
“You go out, you take a look at the area and you see if everything in the way it was the day before. If something’s different, there’s your problem,” says Officer Steve Wilson, 44. He’s a 21-year veteran of the Department of Public Safety (DPS) at USC.
Wilson describes the kinds of calls he’s been answering for nearly half his life; from the regular intoxicated fights on Fraternity Row, to more serious crimes, like GHB drug poisoning and sexual assault. College students, he says, are of an age “to push the limits as adults, to find out what’s wrong. They’ve been protected by their parents and by the law their whole lives, and now they’re on their own.”
I just spotted Quincy Jones in the Annenberg East Lobby. And I recognized him. Awesome.
How the Internet Is Backfiring on Arab Governments
October 10, 2006 in Commentary, News/Current Events | Leave a comment
By Noah Barron
LOS ANGELES — A visiting Egyptian media scholar said Monday at the USC Center for Public Diplomacy that “the Internet is creating a new media agenda in the Arab world, creating new audiences and putting new pressure on Arab governments.”
Doctoral candidate Ahmed El Gody of the Modern Sciences and Arts University in Cairo discussed how Web usage in the Middle East has contributed to grassroots political activism.
>>Read full text at PD Newswire.