Stacey E. Bryan's Blog, page 7

Banned Books Week and The U.L.S.

My go-to for everything that’s happening these days: Handmaid’s Tale. Cue the scene where the Commander’s wife, Serena, has a finger cut off for suggesting that women should be allowed to read. Not trying to make this about the woman stuff. Just the fanatical, tunnel-visioned, fear-driven, despotic, small-minded, unaccepting, tyrannical, dim-witted, exclusionary, anti-creative, anti-thought, anti-love, anti-possibility ethos many have had to live with and that we will have to live with too, m...

SILENCE

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In the early 17th century, two Jesuit priests enter Japan when Christianity was strictly forbidden in an attempt to locate their missing mentor and to spread the message of Catholic Christianity.

Martin Scorsese’s “Silence,” based on Shusaku Endo’s 1966 novel, was the director’s 25-year-long passion project finally brought to fruition in 2016. Across the board, the movie’s length was criticized (161 minutes) and complaints about the often plodding pace abounded amid declarations of “ambitiou...

THREE MICHAELS

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A while back, my mouth was agape as I read an article from Paste Magazine talking about what was then the new TV time travel show “Timeless”:

 “In one of the episode’s best lines, he tells the guard that he hopes he lives a long life so he can see Michael Jordan, Michael Jackson, Mike Tyson (“or just anybody named Michael”) and other notable African American figures (none of which he mentions except for Obama) because, ‘Time is not on your side.’”

Yeah, it’s a light article talking about a s...

AN OPEN TUBULARSOCK STATEMENT TO THE U.S. HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM.

Since I’m not doing anything else constructive concerning this issue, the least I can do is share:

Tubularsock

An open Tubularsock statement to The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Edna Frieberg’s press release on Holocaust Analogies.

Tubularsock would say that EVERY holocaust survivor in the U.S should be ON THE FRONT LINES in reminding everyone that when a government starts putting people in “camps” like in Nazi Germany it is a step TOWARD a possible tragic and horrendous outcome.

And to d...

The Color of Lightning

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One of the best days of my life when I was a kid was the day I discovered Ray Bradbury’s “Something Wicked This Way Comes.” Reading that novel was like gorging yourself at a buffet, except you could keep eating and eating and never get full and probably never get enough.

How did someone decide that women were like clocks, for instance?

Oh, what strange wonderful clocks women are. They nest in Time. They make the flesh that holds fast and binds eternity. They live inside the gift, know power,...

Time to make the donuts

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So in case many of you see I’m subscribing to your blogs again, it’s because WP woke up one morning, poured itself a cup of coffee, sat down on the sofa with its iPad and said, “Hey, this would be a good day to unsuscribe Stacey from all the bloggers she follows! Yeah! Boo-yah!”

So I’ve been in the process of re-upping my associations.

I thought it was something I did until I found out it’s happened to at least one other person too. 

HOLES

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Holes. Something you can twist your ankle in, bury nuts or gold in, ruin your car’s alignment driving over, get sucked into in space.

They’re also a regular ingredient and good friend of movies. Movies and holes have been acquainted a long time, engaged in a relationship approaching matrimony but settling in the long run for common law.

But since movies embody the strange and terrifying, the penetrating and passionate, our Pavlovian response to most of them is to check our brains at the door...

Review and Interview: CANNABIS: The Illegalization of Weed in America by Box Brown

This is fascinating stuff. And let me echo similar sentiments from the interview: cannabis is illegal but there’s a liquor store on every corner of every city and town in America. Yet how many accidents happen, specifically vehicular, from pot smoking compared to inebriation? Thanks, Henry, for a great interview, and thanks to the artist, Box Brown, for bringing the issue to light so creatively.

Comics Grinder

CANNABIS: The Illegalization of Weed in America is the new graphic novel by Box Bro...

Let’s Get Dirty

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A disenfranchised population. An exhausted, disgruntled workforce. Great, yawning chasms that separate the populace’s beliefs and expectations and, in turn, exacerbate division, frustration, anger–accelerating the death of hope.

America today? Yeah. But also the reboot of “Battlestar Galactica” almost a decade ago.

Running from 2004 to 2009, “Battlestar” presented myriad similar concepts which rang true, but the episode of Dirty Hands proved to be even more alarmingly prescient than usual, j...

The Business of Life and Death

It started several years ago, quietly, just annoying little changes.

He’d say, “God, I hate getting older.”

I’d say, “Why?”

He’d say, “Because I can’t see anymore.”

He could still see. But something mysterious was happening, an obstinate and diligent takeover. An internal invasion occurring in slow motion. As his peripheral vision started to fade, an opaque fog crowding the larger part of the world away, he finally relented to having to see a doctor.

At the ophthalmologist’s the diagnosis le...