1909 – The Crime of the Century (documentary mini series 2021)

spacetime coordinates: late 20th c and early 21st c USA

Investigation cum documentary mini series produces by HBO and directed by Alex Gibney who also directed The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief (winner of three Emmys in 2015), We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks, Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God (the winner of three 2013 primetime Emmy awards), Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (nominated in 2005 for Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature); Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer (short-listed in 2011 for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature), Casino Jack and the United States of Money and Taxi to the Dark Side (winner of the 2007 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature) etc

DN interview with Alex Gibney

Gibney’s style is quite gonzo, yet also influenced by the Bunuel The Exterminating Angel approach that refuses a reductionist, simple analytical perspective and offers a more experiential one. I am tempted to say that pain -and tremendous suffering cannot be just measured – especially when it’s about the left behind & especially since it exists as such a vast scale. Pain has been coupled with blackouts with all those images of unknown worn-out people that rescuers just try to revive or try to inject in order activate their bodies again and again. It is impossibly sad but also important to face this reality. Probably this will be the definitive documentary on Big Pharma and specifically the so-called pain epidemic in the US. It is really a close look at how things got out of hand and how the slow creep of ever more powerful and addictive pills got legally distributed, prescribed and paid by health insurance companies producing some of the most successful IPOs at the stock market and undoubtedly the profitable businesses on this planet. One cannot ever ever imagine the level of craziness and impetus of pushing (better said dealing as in drug dealing) that 21st century Pharma has revved up. There is infinite growth and there is infinite painkiller growth.

First importantly to understand that initially what seemed a good solution – a transition from traditional very brutal mental health therapy in the 1950s – shock treatment and lobotomy regulars in asylums at the time to a more humane, chemical (also say alchemical in tune with the Alchemical Cookbook movie) had much to offer. What started as finding a viable & more effective pain relief for terminal cancer patients that suffered from chronic (or constant) pain – that lead to some groundbreaking discoveries such as long release/extended release medicine ended up being readily available pipeline for anyone ache or no ache, with terrible consequences for the everbody. The 4h long investigation details the way regulatory institutions and a few health professionals strove without much success to warn everybody, shut down producers and try and bring health justice to the people that have been overwhelmingly blamed (the fault lies with you the patient, the addict, the lab rat). Many died because of this readily available and very profitable pill production. Since the developement of anestethics, there has been huge resistance, generally unjustified since doctors really believed patients should suffer or that bodies get purged by suffering – yet the current sitution is at the opposite pole. Pain has been transformed into No 1 enemy, entire clinics, methodologies, pain scale assesssments and pain lecture circuits (including lobbies & pain clinics) have been mushrooming. The result was exponential, the more available the more potent these pills became. Also big ignorance, or willful ignorance to what was happening not only in the private industry labs but also on the streets, the way ppl started circumventing, trafficking and how addicts in turn organizing their own DIY rings and local networks. The reality is much worse than the largely dystopian and conservative vision of Brave New World – in that pharmocracy is still largely highly patented full of patent trolls with no R&D investment.Oxy and the rest did encourage a maintenance of status quo, yet with no equilibrium steady state in view but a continuous disequilibrium, of heaped vulnerabilities latched on and gamed by systems that rarely recompose or manage to protect a majority smashed by decades of neoliberal depredation and legislative loopholes.

What is important is that is also makes clear that this is just one sequence of the story – of opiates and traditional opiate derivatives from poppy that was grown since antiquity. Once industrialized and processed opium became a weapon to open up new markets and balance out imperial trade deficits, most famously and disastrously (for China) during the Opium Wars it became an essential part of modern medicine. Those wars that European imperial powers forced on others in order to make them accept the very lucrative opium traffic in exchange for silver bullion had huge consequences. Generally when the Opioid crisis is mentioned, there is a sort of amnesia regarding the laissez faire economics and open door policies that basically got millions of Chinese addicted to opium traded by the British from the Indian Raj. China tried to fight and destroy these shippments of drugs, but the result was war and gunboat politics as well as territorial concessions by the Chinese, a shameful situation that lasted till 1990s in the case of HK.

One memorable aspect is the whole sales aspect of Pharma (Perdue or otherwise), in my experience one of the most surreal and most brash examples of marketing anywhere, in any industry, including tobacco or arms deals. There is this sequence of training videos for internal use – tactics destined for sales reps ob hip hop rap lyrics, aimed at those that are supposed to convince doctors trough any means (including honey traps or regular bribes etc) that they should continue over-prescribing or increase the dosage. It almost reminded me of Bulgakov based movie Morphine by  Aleksei Balabanov with the slowly depedent provincial doctor in Siberia increasing his dosage in order to keep others supplied and face the horrible situation. This in turn has been feeding other more potent drugs in a feedback loop that also ramped up heroin use addiction. The whole is just the alchemy of hell that somehow manages to inundate all sectors, all ages and all problems, especially the Mid West section, former mining towns, rust belt, Appalachia etc

Nothing is a conspiracy because, as always legislation seems to be written in collusion with the makers, where Pharma representatives meet in restaurants with FDA to draft laws around the distribution and safety of these medication. Emails and papers made public speak volumes, yet they always arrive too late. There is also the important art collecting and philantropic aspect of the Sackler family (sponsors of Tate, Smithsonia, Museum of Natural History etc Guggenheim), that denied all responsibility. What I like about Gibney that he does not focus or zoom in just on the founders, of the particular details of the Sackler clan, but takes a broad look into lots of other corners and examples that are not so easy to tie down. Interestingly (for me) is the emphasis on “passion”- in the sense that it truly seems to be a some sort of addiction going on with the founders or CEOs as well. It is easy to demonize Pfizer and just latch onto colorful vaxxer imagination, but it is harder to represent or imagine the vast legal production and pill mill explosion that does not need a virus or an epidemic, or CDC approval, only just incentives by vast amounts of in-flowing money and expansion from cancer patients into new territories and unfettered free access to new bodies.

Everything what they make is with “passion”, and the quote from Sackler Sr about Art and Medicine I find magical in its imbecile purity and mantra like appearance. It has lots of insiders talking, sales reps that where scapegoated and somehow spilled over all that information about whole logic (dare I call it corporate philosophy), of how things actually worked in practice not just on paper. How did this long term persuasion exercise continue and how distributed it got till the end or how hard it is to actually separate state institutions from private interests. Gibney does not exculpate the Sacklers, yet he zooms in order to widen the net and this I appreciate. Revolving doors, people joining the enemy camp happen all the time, at the same time, there is also some sort of permanent watchdogs of the industry, there is also enduring scrutiny by people who are not anti-science or anti-medicine or anti- pills per se, but regular almost barfoot (like the Chinese countryside dr) health soldiers, local family doctors or ex DEA employees on a crusade against Big Pharma. Like always corporation prefer to settle out of court, pay fines (that are merely symbolic in most cases) and never admit wrongdoing.

imdb

1908 – How ultra-processed food took over your shopping basket (podcast 2020)

UPFs (Ultra-processed foods) are food and drink products that have undergone specified types of food processing, usually by transnational and other very large ‘Big food’ corporations. These foods are designed to be “convenient, eaten on the go, hyperpalatable and appealing to consumers, and, most importantly, the most profitable segment of Big Food companies’ portfolios because of these foods’ low-cost ingredients”. Its rationale is that with nutrition and health now, ‘the issue is not food, nor nutrients, so much as processing’, and ‘from the point of view of human health, at present, the most salient division of food and drinks is in terms of their type, degree, and purpose of processing’. (wiki)

listen here

read article by Bee Wilson here

1907 – The Alchemist Cookbook (2016)

spacetime coordinates: woods of Michigan sometimes after 2000

The Alchemist Cookbook is a horror film directed by Joel Potrykus. The film was released on the 7th of October 2016 in New York City.  Sean” is an outcast who isolates himself from society to practice alchemy, accompanied by only his cat. As his mental condition deteriorates the line of what is real and what is not becomes blurred, and as his home kitchen chemistry turns to black magic, he instead summons a demon.The cast only contains two human characters starring Ty Hickson as Sean and Amari Cheatom as Cortez. Other notable characters include the Cat Kaspar and a possum. The cast is notable as it consists of only African American actors, a conscious choice to “take the white people out of the movie” by the director Joel Potrykus. (wiki)

There is no other movie about contemporary alchemy I would recommend more than this one. In a sense this genre breaking of horror, black commedy, supernatural thriller, demonic possession – sez something about the alchemical dabbling of its director that manages to establish these lonely figures not just as figures of pity, of just misguided or heavily medicalized labour force of today.

They all that as well as 21st c eremites, forever loners and over-qualified loosers that try to achieve the impossible which nowadays is fairly everything that was deemed possible only a few generations ago such as a decent job, some sort of stability and free health care.

What they get, is what Michael Taussig identified long ago in South America Columbia coca plantations as the new demonology of capital that maltreats, transform labour into dead labour, and possess everything. This demonology is at large in the woods of Michigan as well. Oxy and other Perdue Pharma products that have been choreographing the pain epidemic in the US Midwest are the sort of additives, the transformative blackout addictive and legal (FDA approved) substances, readily available alchemy that leaves nobody untouched. Potrykus seems to never aim for re-enchantment but somehow, in the midst of disaster and wilderness keeps us close to the low residues of broken quests.

And this is not the quest of Silicon Valley, of quantum computing or of immortalist future-addicted entrepreneurs, but of somebody who is trying to make ends meet and uses the most banal, lowly substances (fast food trash) – peanut butter, Doritos, all the toxic Cola sugary drinks dirge to enact the last invocation, to achieve some sort of disturbed and horrifying immortality in front of continuous demonic attacks, paranoia and hidden commands.

Being prone to nevrosis and increasing bouts of bipolar trouble (what was previously officially labeled as obsessive compulsive) gets a different urgency by being at the center of transformative and metamorphic processes. Some antrhopologists made an important observation – that there is lots of historians, people researching history and aware of changing historical timelines, but there is few who try to understand the processual nature of things, how one things becomes another and under what circumstances. How the change keeps on changing in its turn as Whitehead would say. There are certain alchemical processes at work here that keep on deteriorating, mutating and benumbing bodies and minds. In a sense there is nothing raw, everything is already alchemically modified the instant it is in contact with the elements, with weathering, oxidative or enzymatic non-human reactions. Yet we have arrived from the processed (pickled by bacteria and yeasts, dried by the sun, salted etc) to the age of ultra-processed products.

At the same time, it is an endless delight to compare and find parallels btw early imagery of alchemy and alchemists and this contemporary disciple.

imdb

1906 – Relaxer (movie 2018)

spacetime coordinates: Michigan 1999 just before the 2YK end of the world

Relaxer is a 2018 American comedy film written and directed by Joel Potrykus. Set in 1999, it tells the story of a man playing Pac-Man in a living room.

Have to thank Felix from Mabento for suggesting this one yr ago, which I ignored, and only now managed to watch. Potrykus also directed one of the all-time favorites – The Alchemist Cookbook (2015) based on David Henry Thoreau stint of living near Walden building around themes as slackness and loneliness. The cinematography of Potrykyus I find one of the most interesting developments of indie low-budget US cinema in recent years, that combines brash oddity, a certain perpetual quest element maybe even picaresque one (akin to 1975 Barry Lyndon) with a heavy dose of grossness, a new sincerity about meltdown and a freshly non-neurotypical candor dressed in black comedy garments. It endorses an unprepossessing (unstudied?) unpretentious braindead attitude about the world we leave in – maybe a jackass type of “critical stupidity” (Scott Richmond) that unites the avant-garde techniques of disturbance with online stunts & pranksterisms. I would also include Kajillionaire directed by Miranda July there. Altough completly stuck the main protagonist oozes forth some continuous fount of animal magnetism & obnoxious liquids.

Relaxer could well be the ode to the gamer martyr, a supernatural 1990s Midwestern take on Bunuel’s The Exterminating Angel, it also pitilessly transforms and ridicules all stereotypes of survivalist preppers, or what it takes to pull trough various challenges, endless gamification challenges and severe isolation without directly decrying the situation or pointing fingers. Relaxer is a new Millennial species, he is not just a couch potato, or the staycation victim of the year of quarantine, he is almost a life long slacker that always strives to reclaim his time back (like C Mudede sugested in a recent article) instead of joining the labour force or finally starting to be able to pay his rent or move out of his mom’s flat. It is also a generation that did not join the startup Californian culture, and that also became its complete antithesis, a sort of ungainly anti- entrepreneurs of slackerdom. This typology is usually vilified in movies – starting with the serial killer stereotype till the white trash family in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993). Survival here is not preparing against the government trying to take my gun, it might mean (here) finishing playing the n (impossible) level of Pac- Man, riding the glitch or managing the infinitesimal reflexes thats sacred cheat sheet scrolls of others promise. Maybe this is also the living catacomb of hardcore music and postpunk mashup with gaming culture (see the numerous Black Flag and Butthole Surfers, grunge posters on the walls). Survivalist logic is decomposing into a bizarre Robinson Crusoe stuck in his home, the archetype self entrepreneur in his (or his bothers) primordial flat, setting up a weirdo freelance business of impossible prize money offered by Nintendo magazine challenges.

This is a mostly fixed camera movie, just with one character entering a progressive state of taped decrepitude and self-neglect, almost sliding into voluntary homelessness, while at the same time retaining some modicum of re-enchantment, of derisory acquired special jedi ‘powers’. These powers are unclear, if they are conveyed by pulp trash or commercial pop, or useless skills allowing you to actual survive the new austerity of a mechanical Turk, that we will never know. What I appreciate is the brake from the redemptive narrative of Matrix, of messianic Neo pulling himself up or making ‘poor’ sheeple understand that we are just an appendix to machines. There is nothing redemptive to this alternate history of the 2YK and why the dotcom world actually ended or why we are its children, always ready to pick up on the next senseless challenge. Stylistically very diverse, Relaxer also features one of these incredible moments – that could be picked out of the best noir memories, with marvelous actress (+singer) Adina Howard starring as nurse Arin, a rare friend and ex colleague that is able to transmit secret knowledge (the cheat sheet scrolls), offering the only rare moments of genuine care. There’s this sequence where Cortez (from the Alchemist Cookbook), her companion standing in the door tries to rush her adding a few homophobic slurs, while she calmly takes the guy apart, completly switching the whole movie into something else related to what’s more and more unacceptable & harder to ignore. Even the Darth Vader 3D glasses – Scanners like Cronenbergian mind tricks find a way to feel all right & appropriate to the dark comic & cloying situation.

Don’t want to give the false impression, this is both an incredibly funny and painful to watchmovie – nothing happens, yet at the same time, here we have a reality desert eremite, ignoring the outside apocalypse as he in more ways than one brings it about. We are never sure if this is just mental games, finding ways to deal with one’s own insignificance or inability to adapt, or just a paen to that have shown us that relaxation never comes easy, that being at home doing basically nothing is still an uphill battle toward relaxation.

imdb

1905

Kingdom (TV Series 2019– )

spacetime coordinates: Set during Korea’s Joseon Dynasty, three years after the Imjin War. (the Japanese invasions of Korea 1592–1598 – three years after the famous “Battle of Unpo Wetland”)

Kingdom (Korean: 킹덤; RR: Kingdeom) is a 2019 South Korean political period horror thriller streaming television series, created and written by Kim Eun-hee and directed by Kim Seong-hun and Park In-je. The series is adapted from the webcomic series The Kingdom of the Gods, which was authored by Kim Eun-hee and drawn by Yang Kyung-il.

Set on a fictional, medieval-inspired Joseon, Kingdom explores the story of a Crown Prince, as he sets to investigate the source of a mysterious plague that begins to ravage his country. It stars Ju Ji-hoon, Ryu Seung-ryong, Bae Doo-na, Kim Sang-ho, Kim Sung-kyu and Kim Hye-jun. // wiki // imdb)

A special feature-length episode of the series, titled

Kingdom: Ashin of the North (TV Episode 2021)

was released on July 23, 2021 and focused on the supporting character Ashin played by Jun Ji-hyun.

The episode acts as a sidequel to the second season of Kingdom and explores the backstory of Ashin, the mysterious heir of the Northern Seongjeoyain tribe village, and the origin of the resurrection plant that triggered an unprecedented cascade of tragic events that swept through the Kingdom of Joseon. // wiki // imdb

1904 – Ar Condicionado (2020 movie)

Air Conditioner (Portuguese: Ar Condicionado) is a 2020 Angolan film directed by Fradique (Mário Bastos). The film was shot in 2020 in Luanda by Generation 80. (wiki)

Music: Aline Frazao http://www.alinefrazao.com/

One would expect everyone to at least try to bunk into the new wave of Afrofuturist or Africanfuturist (also in the sense developed by the black diasporic SF or experimental music – Detroit techno aquatic Drexciya world diving) that allowed such a plethora of both and new black Speculative Fiction literature to be written and published (for example Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon). I do not particulary care if this Angolan director was educated in NY or if Mubi – the place of art house small movies (for a small fee) was involved in its making and promotion.

I find that is it decidedly rare that new Afro- or African futurist narratives, histories, speculative worlds make it onto screen, possibly because they exist separately as music videoclips or stand alone movies without literary support. While I do not think in any way that rarity or scarcity makes things automatically more precious, I find it always an incredible surprise to see such a movie being made and circulated. You could call it an extended videoclip, but this is just the more reason to watch it. It is clearly an ode to Luanda city, but also, for me at least, it gestures towards the perfect mix in the sense of teaching us true cosmpolitanism while never giving up on the cosmospolitics of that particular place. Good riddance to the Euroamerican certitudes & obnoxious art house pretense.

It is a universal or dispersed planetary decrepitude, without pushing for the universality or for the so-called atemporal qualities. It speaks of weather, or climate change as it is experienced by a majority in an unmistakable way nowadays. It is climatic without spelling out climate crisis commonplaces. It is ultimately a drift or drop into high weirdness climax that never comes (to pick on a term from Erik Davies picked again from the High Weirdness by Mail catalogue), a jumble of vacous feelings of things liveliness or expenditure, changing natures that leave nothing unturned, including our dreams that seem to escape us & leave us stranded.

A prothean unforced becoming of outer and inner states, of moods like weather reports, or what recently in his last book Michael Taussig has termed Mastery of No-Mastery(MNM) or the ‘metamorphic sublime’. The people all around are changed without showing any significant changes on the surface, yet there is inexplicable things falling, while the representational bankrupcy is even more evident. Evidently Weather charts say nil about this. Climacteric scales have long tipped over and the rigorous and dire reports of the hottest year on record is falling on deaf ears each year, even if suffering and innumerable species (including human lives) are lost as each heat wave strikes. There is ample evidence yet there is also an inability and we seem ill equipped to gauge its full blown swipe.

Harshness does not exclude trembling atmospheric effects.

Air Conditioner starts almost in a pedantic way with a series of dictionary definition of Air, as flow as manner even as style and condition/conditioning – all of which seem to need redefinition according to new events, conditions and dysfunctionalities. Ie what the Global North bombastically deemed merely functional, highly competitive, adaptive and relentlessly improvable – turns out not to be. There is also a lack of ill intent, and the characters responses seem to always have some puzzled, semi-speculative understanding of this unusual situation. I said that this small movie does not claim planetary relevance, yet is speaks globally without shouting, directly murmuring.

It this the hum of the intelligent or sentient thermostats? Is it the dreams and longings of desperate attempts to repair what is un-repairable? You could blame anyone and find culprits, scapegoating is always on others, yet this does not lead anywhere. Or where it leads is one incredible meta-repair shop (not ‘charnel house of history’) – something that is both media museum, hacker lab etc Or a true semi derelict cyberpunk venue (not its Silicon Valley or maker space incarnation) where the mysteries of black-boxed technology don’t get just fixed but somehow scavenged and re-assembled in new and unsuspecting ensembles. Time travel might mean something completely different, it might mean to feel a gush of air, a fresh breath from a broken car AC or wash in the water condensed by all these ACs. The movie is local without being nativist, still it speaks in mysterious names, without explanation, yet it speaks to all – although the security guard is just a security guard, he is a sort of West African griot, a silent bard, a survivor scarred by wars of liberation of events that never get mentioned in the news and only obliquely adumbrated.

Somehow the ordering of events are all about violent interactions of people and objects or rather objects suicidal falling down to earth ground. A rain of suicidal ACs and dazed, always wary humans trying to disentangle and solve enigmas. Even if blaming the AC of ill intent, of exhaustion seems appropriate, one risks acting like a executor of the eternal boss command that just wants his AC back in good order and get on with the job. I cannot praise enough the wandering, meandering soundtrack which makes it even more of a contemporary desert of reality oasis.

1903 – 1983 (2018 TV Mini Series)

spacetime coordinates: set in an alternate timeline in which the fall of the communist Polish People’s Republic never happened, and the Iron Curtain is still in place. / set in 2003; a coordinated terrorist attack on multiple sites took place in Poland in 1983 which altered the course of history and the Cold War did not end.

1983 was particularly appreciated by critics for its photography and atmosphere. The directors create a gloomy and cold Warsaw, where old Soviet-style apartment blocks stand side by side with futuristic and imposing government and police buildings, equipped with the most modern instruments of control. The secret services of the SB now use computer surveillance mechanisms, tracking cell phones and digitizing citizens’ data (classified according to their “level of danger”).

Society is run by the “Party”, a privileged elite who enjoy a good education and excellent economic status. The rest of the population is disinterested in politics and devote themselves to consumerism, at least as regards those goods that are not censored or prohibited. Opposing this system is the “Brigade of Light”, a group of young people who carry out resistance to the dictatorship in clandestinity.

Poland is then imagined to have seen massive immigration from Indochina, and in particular from the socialist republic of Vietnam. Some night scenes – set in overcrowded Asian neighborhoods – seem like a reference to the Blade Runner movie.

It is curious that there are very few explicit references to communism in the series (no statue of Lenin in the streets, no red star or revolutionary chant). The regime appears to have created an Orwellian state, whose sole ideological goal is the suppression of dissent and the control of individuals.

In this sense, it seems that directors are making a more general criticism of any form of totalitarianism, police regime and society-induced conformism. Agnieszka Holland herself underlines how the contents of 1983 are also current in Western countries, in contingency with the current crisis of democracy and the emergence of what the director describes as “a conservative counter-revolution”. She says in the same interview with The Guardian: “But the real questions are: maybe these people are happy? Maybe freedom is overrated?” (wiki)

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1983 is a Polish crime drama streaming television series created and written by Joshua Long and based on an original idea by Long and Maciej Musiał, produced for and released by Netflix on 30 November 2018. A second season is being considered.

imdb   /   rottentomatoes