“During the Great Patriotic War (World War II), two Soviet partisans, Sotnikov (Boris Plotnikov) and Rybak (Vladimir Gostyukhin) go to a Belarusian village in search of food. After taking a farm animal from the collaborationist headman (Sergei Yakovlev), they head back to their unit, but are spotted by a German patrol. After a protracted gunfight in the snow in which one of the Germans is killed, the two men get away, but Sotnikov is shot in the leg. Rybak has to take him to the nearest shelter, the home of Demchikha (Lyudmila Polyakova), the mother of three young children. However, they are discovered and captured.” (wiki)
“Larisa Shepitko’s emotionally overwhelming final film [completed two years before her untimely death at 41 in a car crash] won the Golden Bear at the 1977 Berlin Film Festival and has been hailed around the world as the finest Soviet film of its decade. Set during World War II’s darkest days, The Ascent follows the path of two peasant soldiers, cut off from their troop, who trudge through the snowy backwoods of Belarus seeking refuge among villagers. Their harrowing trek leads them on a journey of betrayal, heroism, and ultimate transcendence.” —Janus Films
“An impoverished preacher who brings hope to the Miami projects is offered cash to save his family from eviction. He has no idea his sponsor works for the FBI who plan to turn him into a criminal by fueling his madcap revolutionary dreams.”(IMDB)
Altough it may appear completely preposterous this shows another facet of the FBI. Conspirative thought is the bread and butter of the Alphabet agencies (CIA, FBI, NSA to just name the most famous). Obsessing over anarchist conspiracy or internationalist anti-colonial revolutionary networks characterized the work of the British or French secret service very early on. Digital theoretician Alexander Galloway classified “conspiracy is a kind of network thinking, appropriate for a networked world.” – in this sense, the FBI is either a purveyor of conspiracies or – if need be a fabricator. We should also not consider the agencies as all-powerful, the bigger they are the bigger their footprint (not only carbon) the larger their propensity to fail miserably. One of the effects of the War on Terror has meant that a lot of vulnerable and poor racially discriminated communities practically got entrapped into playing the role of the terrorist and the baddie – and this movie pokes fun at this situation. The demography of the US is changing in universities (as the current protests demonstrated) and this is one of the lynchpins of the right manifested as ‘replacement’ bogus fears. What is being replaced is their sense of entitlement and laissez-faire that made sure inequality followed racial and heteronormative lines. In a sense, it speaks both of the ways these agencies work against the very citizens they aim to protect and of the way capitalism always finds a fall guy in those who are already in a sense marginal and powerless while protecting the brazen and unaccountable.
In the case of the Liberty City Seven – seven black construction workers and members of a small Miami, Florida-based religious group who called themselves the Universal Divine Saviors got baited by the FBI. I guess here is the agency of the almost all-powerful hegemonic US – representing the NSS as something more akin to a horrible farce (on those who had to pay with their lives or with prison). Russiagate, Epstein, Pizzagate, now TikTok CEO hearings or the president signing a bill that could ban Tiktok, seems to be all about the Paranoid Style in American Politics, an essay penned by US historian Hofstadter but also about the shadow of McCarthyism coming to haunt today’s geopolitical strains.
As Jameson put it in The Geopolitical Aesthetic, quoted by Galloway, the conspiracy means “a potentially infinite network, along with a plausible explanation of its invisibility.” The cabal must be massive and interconnected, yet despite everything the plots remain somehow veiled, just beyond one’s grasp.” In the end, this movie is about systemic racism and economic relations in today’s world and the richest and most powerful nation on earth, and how easy it is to fabricate subversive groups while the biggest subversion (the subversion of Democracy with the help of techno-capitalism) remains in plain sight for all to see. The TW below has everything wrong in the title (Balaji never mentioned that he wanted to ethnically cleanse SF – but the more important takeaway is the way techno-libertarians right wants to appear endangered and under threat by ‘woke’ assimilation).
🧵To understand what's happening in San Francisco today, you must examine the extremist politics of the "Network State" cult. For the @NewRepublic, I wrote about Balaji Srinivasan, an influential tech baron seeking to “ethnically cleanse” SF. Read➡️ https://t.co/SMTd4Mo441 ⬅️ pic.twitter.com/1uoZOjjcO3
timespace coodinates: in 2018, Reality Winner was given the longest prison sentence ever imposed for an unauthorized release of government information to the media after she leaked an intelligence report about Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections.
The whole dialogue is based on an official transcript of the interrogation by the FBI agents.
It is probably one of the best movies I have seen this year. Why?
Simply because it offers such a stark look at the US National Security State and the Alphabet agencies (CIA, FBI, NSA, DEA, etc), one that does not embellish or romanticize it. Usually, we think in terms of mysterious, funny, and charismatic agents in US cinema we think of Agent Cooper from Twin Peaks or of Scully and Mulder in X Files, and there is countless others.
Mishandling of classified documents is nothing new, and considering how the documents got stored at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, only one conclusion is possible: if you are rich and backed up by a powerful lobby, all lawyered upy, you can be super sloppy ( not saying this bc Reality Winner was sloppy or Joe Intercept handled her. For me it’s more about secrecy, making a case about nothing and how things can get easily turned around the leaker. If you are just a humble employee, a translator, and a woman, and even if you have an especially good track record, there isn’t much in your favor.
Another aspect is the fact that -in the whole world we are basically exposed to the domestic issues of the US. I am not talking about butterfly effects or fossil fuel methane and fracking here (altough that is an issue too), but about how various tensions and battles within American internal politics, bipartisan hearings, investigations, election campaigns, gerrymandering internal struggles – impact the rest of the planet. It is very funny that this already started in a fictional form with the Dallas soap opera series being streamed on Romanian National TV during the 1980s. It was an important moment and everyone in Socialist Romania, in the city or countryside, was familiar with the Texas-oil-rich Ewing family, with the machination of JR, with the troubles of Pamela Ewing, and practically fossil capitalism. So, in a sense, everyone has a stake in US politics, in who is going to be the next president. At the same time, the case of Reality Winner brings realism to this whole picture and re-situates this turmoil in the backyards of America for all of us to see. This is the NSS reality TV of our time!
A local musician and aspiring terrorist in Cuba is unaware of his actual nature as a day-walking vampire. He is apparently Count Dracula’s grandson and has served as an unwilling test subject for the experiments of one of Dracula’s sons. The musician finds himself targeted by both an American crime syndicate from Chicago and a multinational group of European vampires. He desperately tries to escape their manhunt.” (wiki)
It is an absolutely absurd madcap adventure with political and historical tones, more like an animated soap opera, but at the same time told with incredible zany humor. Blood since Bram Stoker’s Dracula was forever involved in telling the story of hidden desires, or intimate physiological communism, of the ‘other’ (usually an Oriental or someone from Eastern Europe, usually with a bad accent or Hungarian-sounding name). Less known is that Marx himself used the vampire as a metaphor for the operations of big capital sucking out living labor and transforming it into dead labor, while workers become more or less a blood bank. This animation is thus also about privatization, the grey line btw multinationals and mafia, access, equality and privilege, IP rights and patent trolls, and monopolies. As a socialist country, they have an excess of doctors, and it comes perhaps as no surprise that Cuban medical workers and doctors and “Doctor diplomacy” were deployed in 40 countries to help combat the COVID virus pandemic around the world.
Velvet worms Onychophora are some of my favorite organisms, and they are also one of the oldest, barely changed. They have a distinctive body plan, somewhat wormlike in appearance with a velvety surface. They also use their slime glands to eject quite accurately jets of adhesive slime to unsuspecting invertebrates that they actively hunt on the forest floor and among the leaf litter.
“With their chubby bodies, soft, padded feet, and slow-motion gait, South American velvet worms appear pretty harmless. Unless they’re hungry, and you’re an insect. Over millennia, these ancient creatures have evolved a pair of hunting weapons unlike any other in nature: dual high-speed canons capable of jetting viscous slime onto their prey from up to two feet away. Delivered with such power and speed, the velvet worm’s slime canon takes the element of surprise to new levels. And because the goo is delivered through narrow, flexible tubes and expelled with such tremendous force, it can cover a vast area in a matter of milliseconds. Until recently, biologists still didn’t know exactly how these slime canons work. But then Andres Concha, a Chilean physicist who studies the physical mechanisms in biological systems, turned his attention to velvet worms. Concha and his team used high-speed cameras to film slime canons in action.”
Capital B – Who Owns Berlin is probably the best documentary about a city any city out there, in a league all of its own with Los Angeles Plays Itself.
What happened to one of the biggest cities in continental Europe? A city that had incredible opportunities, cheap basically free spaces for grabs, and immense swaths that were opened up after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Berlin was probably the biggest story in subcultural history. This documentary by Arte Channel in 5 parts explains it all step by step. Yet saying this we cannot forget that after the Wall, there were winners and losers of the reunification, and sadly the losers (in economic terms, in job and academic positions, and cultural management positions) – were the people of former East Germany or DDR who today are being swiped off their feet by populist rhetoric and vote for the extreme right-wing AfD demagogues (altough there have been huge protests against AfD recently against right-wing extremism and for democracy).
Important to mention here that the institution (Treuhand), the pop-up trust company seated in Berlin that regulated and controlled the restructuring from a planned to a market economy did this almost overnight, without much accountability or democratic supervision. Its task was certainly immense to privatize 8,000 formerly nationally-owned enterprises. Modernizing thousands of enterprises and closing down thousands of others, from gigantic combines comprising a staff of umpteen thousand up to small family enterprises – and it ended with complete humiliation for East Germans, even if some say there were some benefits.
I think the story in Berlin is even starker, for most Berliners, and for most that have been living to see the explosion in subcultural spaces, clubs, and underground venues – it all came with a huge cost, they all were just acting like a magnet for the real estate mafia. Real estate – and space (to use Jameson’s suggestive quote from below) one might say is at the center of today’s capitalism. It was involved in the sub-prime crisis in the US that spread throughout the whole world, and certainly in land grabs around the world as well as ‘zoning’ of special economic zones, duty-free areas, and offshore tax-free heavens.
To narrow it down to a city – Berlin, the German capital allows us to see this process of capital accumulation, rent extraction, and speculative markets. It is a very sad documentary, particularly harrowing for all those who went through 30 years of gentrification and speculative luxury housing investments. Sadly the 5 part documentary is only available in French and German, there are no English subs, but I sincerely think someone who cares about the history of this city should do it, especially considering how many EN-speaking inhabitants live in this city.
There is interviews with key figures of the underground but also mayors, investors, politicians etc. The documentary offers a unique range of voices and key figures who were deeply and personally involved in shaping this city and transforming it into what it has become today. This is also the story of techno music and its entry into German electronic music. It is about the translation of a metronomic abstract heavy beat arriving in Berlin from Detroit Motor City via the UK and Belgium and one of the first musical styles to unite both East and West. Techno pioneers from East and West Berlin started setting the night on fire. It is really important to see how the members of the initially small rave culture tribe started scouting for a location, and how they ended up finding TRESOR by chance, that incredible space initially situated on Leipziger Straße and cleaning it and there is incredible VHS footage of that moment in 1991. Subculture had its summer of anarchy, an incredible mix of utopia and frenetic living, but the power elites of the city started asserting their pressure – and it all ended with fierce police raids, street battles, and forced evacuations.
The Fall
One should understand that this is a battle to the teeth, in the middle of the 1990s the West Berlin old-money elites got their interests served by mayor Eberhard Diepge – and started exercising their stranglehold over the city. Klaus-Rüdiger Landowsky one of the most powerful figures in Germany and together with Diepge want to transform Berlin from an industrial hub into a financial capital of the world on par with London and Frankfurt. It all ends with the biggest banking scandal in Germany and the arrival of a new younger mayor ready to use the power vacuum: Klaus Wowereit. Districts such as Kreuzberg and Wedding with a big migrant population are being transformed into virtual ghetto’s without opportunities, high unemployment rates and lack of funding. Savas Yurderi aka Kool Sava becames one of the most well-known rappers in Germany and he’s speaking with the voice of that place.
Poor but Sexy (was the mayor Klaus Wowereit motto for the city)
The City as Prey
This is the final decade where clubs get closed, everyone is kicked out and most of the underground places get shut down. It is the march of uberization, digitial nomadism and finacial speculation.
TimeSpace Warps 