Stephen read and liked brian's review of Under the Dome: A Novel:

"in the 2008 film max payne, there's a point in which the gloomy hero is, of course, offered casual sex by this ridiculously beautiful woman:



aware that payne is mourning the murder of his wife she says something to the effect t...more in the 2008 film max payne, there's a point in which the gloomy hero is, of course, offered casual sex by this ridiculously beautiful woman:



aware that payne is mourning the murder of his wife she says something to the effect that if he'd like he can call out his wife's name as he fucks her. ok. this is kinda interesting. if i was the director i'd hard cut to payne banging away and, yes, squealing his dead wife's name. play it straight. sad and tragic but also kinda funny and very human. and it offers up a complexity and darkness mainstream movies tend to shy away from.


of course, payne tosses this preposterously impossibly wildly beautiful woman out, offended at the very idea: in movies like this you can't have your hero banging strange woman and being sexually deviant in any way. too much complexity.


well, there's a whole lot of that shit going on in under the dome, in which the good guys are good and the bad guys are bad (i mean reeeeaaaaal bad. like gang-rape bad, kill-your-own-son bad, mass-murderer bad). and it's a shame b/c there's much to love about this 1072 pg. novel.


but it's not just the 'max payne' moments, it's the whole picture. check it: the novel is populated with tons of characters and just about all of 'em are all-american common-folksy types. kinda folks sarah palin'd be happy to have over for a moose and buffalo dinner. they all have backstories and personal tics and behavioral distinctions, but essentially king's view of human beings and human behavior is kinda conservative and uninteresting. strange from a guy with such a fertile imagination for the fantastic.


but here's what's most frustrating: if you're dealing with common folk, it's fun to throw 'em in extreme situations and watch 'em crack. we've seen it all over Apocalit*: lord of the flies, blindness, the road, etc… but this is the part i don't get: king chooses the less interesting of both worlds. 1) most of his characters are simplified and bland and 2) those that crack when the dome comes down ARE ALREADY ASSHOLES! it's bizarre. what's fun about this shit is watching the slow burn of a decent or sane character as they descend into evil or lunacy. it's kinda obvious what's gonna happen when henry kissinger or dick cheney is tossed into No Exit, ain't it? king's bad guys were bad before the dome and once the shit comes down they kill and gang-rape with no fore or afterthought. how the shit is this interesting? has king been too long in the horror genre that he's come to see murder and rape as something akin to jogging around the block or swatting a fly? what's great about murder in serious works of art (and make no mistake: this novel means to be a serious work of art) is not the murder itself but all which surrounds it.


i happen to believe that human existence is kaleidoscopically demented and deranged and far weirder than it appears on the surface. the most 'normal' of us are revealed to be sucking cock in airport bathrooms, believe in talking snakes or burning bushes or interplanetary beneficiaries, and like to be spanked flogged or abused, etc… in short, i appreciate people like david lynch or david cronenberg not in that they offer an alternative to the humdrum of daily existence but in that they throw to the forefront what is actually happening behind closed doors. i reject king's view of the world in that it lacks moral complexity, it lacks the true stink of human existence. blue velvet is heightened for sure, but it reveals what small town americana feels like. it is edward hopper to stephen king's norman rockwell.


and really. what's with all the banter? king has nearly every single character speak as if they were a precocious 13 year old. people actually say shit like "i'd tell you but then i'd have to kill you' or 'that's why they pay me the big bucks' as if this was the height of cleverness. and when a man and woman dialogue? ugh! king's lucky he's a megarich megafamous megastoryteller b/c my man has NO GAME. i mean… you wanna read the narrator's description of when our hero finally gets laid? keep in mind that we're dealing with a 1072 pg. book in which everyfuckingthing is described. this scene is both obscenely underwritten and obscenely icky:


"Want to?" he asked.
"Yes. Do you?"
He took her hand and put it on his jeans, where how much he wanted to was immediately evident.
A minute later he was poised above her, resting on his elbows. She took him in hand to guide him in. "Take it easy on me, Colonel Barbara. I've kind of forgotten how this thing goes."
"It's like riding a bicycle," Barbie said.
Turned out he was right.


anyway...

the good? lots of it. what king might lack in his basic presentation of human behavior he almost makes up for in his evocation of a kind of horrible and ineffable beauty. amidst this mash-up of sci-fi & political allegory there are scenes of true beauty and a kind of gritty poetry... so the book is about an impenetrable dome that descends over a town and the descent into some kinda Hobbesian nightmare -- as pollutants and dust and pollen collect on the roof of the dome, the townspeoples' view of the sky is skewed. they can't see the dome, so the sky itself appears... different. sunsets seem as when a volcano explodes: a deep rich burning red. and the night sky? a meteor shower is transformed into a natural fireworks show with streams of pink and red slashing the sky to bits. the latter is punctuated by the town's total silence save the quiet sobbing of its inhabitants as they view what they believe to be god's masterwork. and minus the 'leatherhead' parts, the final 'fireball and survivor' sequence haunted the shit outta me. some seriously horrifying stuff. as great as any bleak and despairing scene from any other example of apocalit.

so, yeah. my first foray into stephen king. badass bestseller horror iconic motherfucker and inspiration behind this terrific terrific terrific song:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6GzVCYqo...


i read 1072 pages in just under a week and that's no small feat. i'd like to share a beer, mr. king, get to know you. do i wanna tear through your oeuvre? we'll see...


*that's 'apocalyptic literature', thank you very much(less) "

Stephen read and liked Eric_W's review of Desert Mirage: The True Story of the Gulf War:

" Martin Yant reports in Desert Mirage that knowledge about the Middle East, and Kuwait in particular, was inversely proportional to the amount of television coverage watched about the war. "Among viewers who watched less than an hour and a h...more Martin Yant reports in Desert Mirage that knowledge about the Middle East, and Kuwait in particular, was inversely proportional to the amount of television coverage watched about the war. "Among viewers who watched less than an hour and a half a day, 16 percent thought Kuwait was a democracy, 22 percent knew of the Palestinian intifada against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and 40 percent were aware that Iraq wasn't the only country to occupy another in the Mideast. Among heavy viewers (more than three hours a night), on the other hand, 32 percent thought Kuwait was a democracy, just 10 percent had heard of the intifada, and only 23 percent were aware of occupations other than Iraq's.... Those who supported the war were twice as likely to falsely believe Kuwait was a democracy, and less than half as likely to know that before August 2, the official U.S. position on an Iraqi invasion was unclear. The only thing about which supporters were more knowledgeable was the name of the allegedly successful Patriot missile -- which goes to show that ignorance is more than mere bliss in America. It's also what passes for patriotism."
This data was collected by a survey done by the University of Massachusetts after 6 months of war coverage. The purpose of the survey was to discover whether TV journalism was actually informing its viewers. Ironically, the president and his advisors considered the war coverage to be subversive and tried every which way to subvert it. I guess the level of ignorance wasn't quite high enough. (less) "

Stephen read and liked Eric_W's review of Deschooling Society (Open Forum):

"Ivan Illich is one of our more interesting social critics. Schooled as a priest he became anathema to both the left and the right of the Catholic Church. He was Vice Rector pf the Catholic University of Ponce in Puerto Rico when he was ordered to lea...more Ivan Illich is one of our more interesting social critics. Schooled as a priest he became anathema to both the left and the right of the Catholic Church. He was Vice Rector pf the Catholic University of Ponce in Puerto Rico when he was ordered to leave by the Bishop. He went to Mexico where he founded the Center for Intercultural Documentation. In 1967 he was summoned before the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to undergo a modern form of the medieval inquisition. One of the reasons for their distaste of his ideas was his reluctance to promote the Pope's strong move to help the underdeveloped countries. Illich was against the so-called development of underdeveloped countries arguing it was a "war on subsistence". At the time when he railed against it (the mid-sixties), it deeply offended the conventional wisdom. "Rich nations," he wrote, " now benevolently impose a straitjacket of traffic jams, hospital confinements and classrooms on the poor nations and by international agreement call this 'development.'" Development disabled their ability to seek alternatives and created "under-development as a form of consciousness" which occurs with " the translation of thirst into the need for a Coke."

In Deschooling Society [Illich:] identified schooling as the fundamental ritual of a consumer society. Schole, the Greek word from which ours derives, means leisure, and true learning, according to Illich, can only be the leisured pursuit of free people. The claim that a liberal society can be built on a compulsory and coercive ritual is therefore paradoxical. By designing and packaging knowledge, schools generate the belief that knowledge must be acquired in graded and certified sequences. And this monopoly of schools over the very definition of education, Illich argued, not only inhibits alternatives but also leads to lifelong dependence on other service monopolies. By the early seventeenth century a new consensus began to arise: the idea that man was born incompetent for society and remained so unless he was provided with 'education'. Education came to mean the inverse of vital competence. It came to mean a process rather than the plain knowledge of the facts and the ability to use tools which shape a man's concrete life. Education became an intangible commodity that had to be produced for the benefit of all, and imparted to them in the manner in which the visible Church formerly imparted invisible grace. Justification in the sight of society became the first necessity for a man born in original stupidity, analogous to original sin.

In the early 70's he wrote book:Tools for Conviviality|253076] in which he argued that being anti-growth would merely stabilize "at the highest levels of endurable output." He disliked the term 'technology' because of the confusion it caused, preferring to use the word 'tools'. The hammer, highways, the health-care system are all examples of tools. All tools go through a metamorphosis. First they are productive, then they become counter-productive and they become ends rather than means. For example, automobiles expanded our mobility but we have now become their prisoner. Some tools do not dictate how they must be used. Libraries, the telephone, bicycles can be used freely whereas a high-speed transportation system "compels our allegiance by adjusting time and space to its own dimensions." He liked austerity, as defined by Aquinas, "a virtue which does not exclude all enjoyments, but only those which are distracting from or destructive of personal relatedness." Austerity, according to Illich, is the only "alternative to intensified surveillance and management by technocratic elites."

The Rio de Janeiro "Earth Summit" of 1992 represents the logical outcome of the failure to master tools. It was not about finding a better life that is simple in means and rich in ends; "it is about the equitable division of pollution optimums under the aegis of global monitoring." The idea of conservation must become intrinsic to the dignity of human nature and not just a requirement for survival. Illich was also critical of the power of dominant professions. In contrast to the old liberal professions like law and medicine, new professions have sprung up that have become protection rackets, licensed monopolies licensed to serve clients with services they insist must be recognized. "Grave-diggers did not become members of a profession by calling themselves morticians, by obtaining college credentials, by raising their incomes, or by getting rid of the odor attached to their trade by electing themselves president of the Lions Club. Morticians formed a profession, a dominant and disabling one, when they acquired the muscle to have the police stop your burial if you are not embalmed and boxed by them."

It was also in Puerto Rico that Illich came into contact with the first of the great secular bureaucracies whose pretensions he would make a career of puncturing, the school system. He sat on the board that governed the island's entire educational establishment and was soon engaged in a full-scale effort to understand what schools do. He came to the conclusion that compulsory education in Puerto Rico constituted "structured injustice." By "putting into parentheses their claim to educate," lie was able to see that schools focused aspiration on a mirage. In Puerto Rico, at the time Illich began studying the question in the late 1950s, children we' already required by law to have more schooling than the the state could afford to give them. The worst aspect of this Illich was that people also learned to blame themselves for failing to achieve the impossible. "Schooling," he concluded, "served ... to compound the native poverty of half the children with a new interiorized sense of guilt for not having made it" " you look around the globe at the most lethal conflicts convulsing the world, not one of them turns on race. Think about it. English vs. Irish, Croatians, Moslems, Bosnians and Serbs , Irakis vs. Kurds; the combatants are racially indistinguishable. The conflicts turn on difference of religion or ideology and the one thing we' learned very clearly, is that people of one race are fully capable of murderously exploiting people of the same race. Why do we get this so wrong in the United States, Why do we equate skin color with culture in the multicultural rubric, given what I just said. Given that it so ill-equips us to understand and of these conflicts I just mentioned. The answer is obvious. This is the only western country, to have abducted and plunger into its mists millions of enslaved people from Africa. . . . And blacks out of that dispossession had to create out of nothing an identity, plunged into this society yet kept viciously apart from it and the very rigidity of segregation actually gave some firm moral footholds because at least you knew what you were up against and black survival tools from black religion to jazz. . . cultural survival tools are among the richest treasures that this country has ever produced. The black quest to belong is the greatest example of unrequited love anywhere in the world."(less) "