Benjamin Britton > Recent Status Updates

"Even if a sea of fire comes towards us, sweet children do not need to be afraid. Our father is here. We have nothing to envy."

"by the end of 1998, the worst of the famine was over, not necessarily because anything had improved but, as Mrs. Song lager surmised, because there were fewer mouths to feed."

"What she didn't realize is that her indifference was an acquired survival skill. In order to get through the 1990s alive, one had to suppress any impulse to share food…one had to learn to stop caring."

"The outstanding supernatural thriller, Rosemary's Baby (1968), becomes his (Roman Polanski) first American production…composer Krzysztof Komeda provides a haunting score."

"There were no plastic bags or candy wrappers wafting in the breeze, no soda cans floating in the harbor. If somebody stamped out a cigarette on the pavement, somebody else would pick it up to extract a few flecks of tobacco to roll again with newspaper."

"Locked into their misery by the force of one man's personality, the Chinese people as a whole are denied all agency. And Mao himself ceases to be absorbing." Jonathan D. Spence

"Before the X becomes a euphemism for pornography, several excellent films are awarded this rating because of their 'uncomfortable' portrayal of the American reality of the day."

"This is the essence of Zapatismo, and explains much of its appeal: a global call to revolution that tells you not to wait for the revolution, only to stand where you stand, to fight with your own weapon." -Naomi Klein

"What Christianity did, in a religiously mystified version, is to give us the idea of rebirth. Against the pagan notion of destiny, Christianity offered the possibility of a radical opening, that we can find a zero point and clear the table." Slavoj Žižek

"The immediate result of Easy Rider's success is, however, a change of Hollywood's perception of viable commodity- suddenly (and briefly), anti-establishment pictures became good business."

"And so with Marx, we should continue to hope for and organize toward the moment when the demos can once again gain power over the phrase and content of social progress."

"Jean-Paul Sartre commented that so many attempts to move beyond Marx end up occupying a position not ahead of but behind Marx. This admonition has not yet lost it pertinence or it's poignancy." Paul Thomas

"As with sound, experimentation with color film dates back to early days of cinema. The first hand-tinted movies appear as early as 1896; each frame is elaborately painted under a magnifying glass."

"For all but a handful, capitalism has failed. For the rest of is, anti-capitalism remains our only hope." J.C. Myers