Reading List: Juli.

Fiction:

Jonathan Lethem: Chronic City.
Anne Brontë: Agnes Grey.
Neil Gaiman: The Graveyard Book.
George R. R. Martin: A Song of Ice and Fire Book Five: A Dance With Dragons.
Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice. 

Film: 

Heavenly Creatures (1994, Peter Jackson) ***.
All Over Me (1997, Alex Sichel) ****.
Je Te Mangerais (2009, Sophie Laloy) **/***.
Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970, Don Siegel) **/***.
Jane Eyre (2006, Susanna White) ****.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1996, Mike Barker) ****.
Wuthering Heights (2002, Coky Giedroyc) ***.
Pride and Prejudice (2005, Joe Wright) ***.
Lola rennt (1998, Tom Tykwer) ***.
The Night Watch (2011, Richard Laxton) ***.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 (2011, David Yates) ****.
Womb (2010, Benedek Fliegauf) ***.

One of the many reasons why I love this show so much, and why YOU SHOULD BE WATCHING THIS SHOW

I don’t know if we’ve shied away from political satire. I think we still do political and social commentary and satire. It’s not the point of our show at all, but when the opportunity arises to do it, I think we do do it. And I think we enjoy doing it. I mean, I’m very proud of the episode “Sweetums” from season two, which was an entire network comedy show episode based on the absurdity of the corn lobbyists and the corn syrup lobbyists. Corn syrup is a terrible thing that makes kids get fat, and we managed to tell an entire story about companies that pretend to be creating healthy products that aren’t. So, for me, that’s political commentary disguised as a comedy story about an evil corporation. But it’s still commentary. 

I think that all of the media commentary that we do on the show is the same thing. It’s not the point of our show, and the point of our show is not to grind axes and try to educate people or anything like that. It’s to be funny. But because we’re telling a show about a town and about a government, when the opportunity arises to maybe make a point or two, or at least raise an issue for discussion, we always like to do it. A large point of “Harvest Festival” was to say, “If the media would just cool it and stick to reporting facts and informing people, instead of trying to be sensationalistic and grab ratings, then I think the world would be a better place.” 

The A.V. Club: Michael Schur walks us through Parks And Recreation’s third season (Part 2 of 4)

Linkliste unbehandelter Themen

Musikuntermalung: 

Politics: 

The Nation writes about the CIA's counterterorrism programme in Somalia. 

continent on the afterlives of queer theory. 

Does anybody wanna bet at a last-second solution to that little debt-ceiling issue? If I'm wrong, we're in for some interesting developments. #electionsmakegrownupsactlikechildren

Pop Culture: 

Racialicious with some really insightful quotes on some aspects of 1990s pop culture.

PopMatters about Amy Winehouse's place in pop cultural history - personally I've never been an avid fan but Austrian radio channel Ö1 repeated a programme comparing her Back to Black record to Duke Ellington's Back to Back (which was part of the new Le Weekend-series) - and it's just incredibly sad that she left like this.

indieWire interviews Christine Vachon, producer of Todd Haynes' Mildred Pierce, I Shot Andy Warhol and Hedwig and the Angry Inch.  

Michael Schur walks the A.V. Club through the third season of Parks and Recreation (which, if there were such a thing as a perfect season of television, would be pretty darn close). Part 1, 2, 3, 4.

The things that we can't even give away

The Mountain Goats - Estate Sale Sign



Set up like unloved icons gathering dust up on the wall
From films no one remembers

Linksammlung, to be continued

I only found out yesterday that everybody I know in Oslo is okay, and I'm still trying to gather my thoughts.

The Daily Beast: Norway Killer’s Hatred of Women, July 24, 2011
TIME: Norway Attacks: How a Once Moderate Region Became a Haven for the Far Right, July 25, 2011
The Atlantic: Anti-Muslim Radicalism in Norway and Beyond, July 26, 2011
NY Times: Norway Gunman Used Drugs, Thought He Was ‘Warrior,’ His Lawyer Says, July 26, 2011
Guardian: Anders Behring Breivik had links to far-right EDL, says anti-racism group, July 26, 2011
Die Zeit: Norwegen prüft Anklage wegen Verbrechen gegen Menschlichkeit, 26. Juli 2022
Die Zeit: Deutschlands Rechtspopulisten fürchten um ihr Image, 26. Juli 2011
Die Zeit: Breiviks profane Apokalypsen, 26. Juli 2011
Foreign Affairs: The Muslims of Norway, July 26, 2011
NY Times: NY Times: Norway Killings Shift Debate on Islam in Europe, July 27, 2011
openDemocracy: Norway's atrocity: the mental tunnel, July 29, 2011
openDemocracy: The roots of Breivik's ideology: where does the romantic male warrior ideal come from today?, August 1, 2011

Somalia famine

According to the UN, more than six out of every 10,000 people are dying of hunger every day in some parts of the Bakool and Lower Shabelle regions of Somalia, with more than half the children there suffering from acute malnutrition. This is far above the normal famine threshold of two deaths per 10,000 people a day, and 30% malnutrition levels, UN agencies say.

While there have been numerous disasters in the Horn of Africa over the past decade, it is the first time a famine has been declared in the region since 1992, when hundreds of thousands of Somalis starved to death, prompting an international peacekeeping intervention."Somalia is facing its worst food security crisis in the last 20 years," says Mark Bowden, the UN official in charge of humanitarian aid in Somalia. "This desperate situation requires urgent action to save lives." 

Guardian: Somalia famine: 'There is no longer any excuse for inaction', July 20, 2011

NY Times: Food Crisis in Somalia Is a Famine, U.N. Says, July 20, 2011

openDemocracy: A world in hunger: east Africa and beyond, July 21, 2011

Das Lied zum Sonntag

 Dawn Landes - Private Little Hell (Daytrotter Session 1 + 2)




You're driving down the road
When something had to blow
The car is filled with smoke
It calls on you to grow
But it makes you want to throw up
To have to feel this bad
Now you know what you want
You want what you had
Make it break in
Make it break in...
But you can't have that
You can't go back...

[on Fireproof, 2006]

...

Listening to A Dance With Dragons instead of writing reviews or... talking to people, or leaving the house. Only about 40 hours to go, yay!

Linkliste unbehandelter Themen

Politics: 

Greece isn't doing well, Italy isn't doing well, Portugal isn't doing well, Spain isn't doing well, a couple of months ago it was pointed out that Belgium also might not be doing well, but they're not the only ones. 

Pop Culture: 

The Atlantic has impressive pictures of socialist monuments in the former Yugoslav states that look like something aliens might have built. 

Also in The Atlantic, an interview with George R. R. Martin. The fifth book in the A Song of Ice and Fire series (A Dance With Dragons) appeared today. In casting news for the second season of Game of Thrones (which, I suppose, will stick with the name?), Gwendoline Christie (The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus) will be Brienne. 

Maybe I did make it too big two books ago. But I've thrown the balls in the air and I feel obligated to keep on juggling them as best I can. You can't just forget about some of the balls, you have to deal with the plot threads that you've introduced. If I can pull it all off the way I want hopefully it will be great. And if I don't, I'm sure the world will let me know.

The A.V. Club talks to Neil Gaiman about the now almost confirmed HBO-adaptation of American Gods, which came out ten years ago (Good Omens might also soon be made into a show, WHOO excitement). Some rumours/sort of facts: apparently, Tom Hanks' production company is willing to guarantee six seasons. The first season will be the book, the others... new material. io9 did a fake-casting for the show that rendered some pretty awesome results (Idris Elba! Amy Acker!)

Lev Grossman, author of The Magicians, wrote a beautiful piece on fanfiction (it's so rare that authors understand the intention and motives behind it rather than just ridiculing the effort) and how it allows Harry Potter and other stories to live on forever. 

Fan fiction is what literature might look like if it were reinvented from scratch after a nuclear apocalypse by a band of brilliant pop-culture junkies trapped in a sealed bunker. They don't do it for money. That's not what it's about. The writers write it and put it up online just for the satisfaction. They're fans, but they're not silent, couchbound consumers of media. The culture talks to them, and they talk back to the culture in its own language.
Right now fan fiction is still the cultural equivalent of dark matter: it's largely invisible to the mainstream, but at the same time, it's unbelievably massive. [...] In most cases, the quantity of fan fiction generated by a given work is volumetrically larger than the work itself; in some cases, the quality is higher than that of the original too. 

A couple of weeks ago, some TV comedy showrunners talked about fanfiction (for the Emmy roundtable) and some (appropriately, those from shows that I don't watch/openly despise) expressed the opinion that engaged viewers are creepy and should just mindlessly consume their stories like the rest of the world. Dan Harmon (of Community, with a history of not always saying smart things) made this statement, which expresses perfectly how I feel about television.   

Sort-of TV recommendations for the hiatus: Leverage is back and it's as good as ever, Warehouse 13 just aired the season premiere (the A.V. Club makes some good points about the show not really using its awesome premise as well as it could), and Torchwood began its To America! run last Friday (I wasn't completely in love with the first episode but next week, Dichen Lachman and Lauren Ambrose will appear). And I've missed Captain Jack and Gwen (with her deeply buried desire to hold a rocket launcher in one hand and her adorable baby in the other). The Williamses of the Who-verse should meet up some time and save the world or something (and here's Heather Hogan's great "recap" of the episode). 

Mother Jones interviews Patrick Stickles, singer and lyricist of Titus Andronicus (about religion and commercials). 

Yeah, but those people have been hoodwinked and bamboozled by the advertisers into thinking that one kind of shoe will make you cool. My dad recently was scolding me because he heard that we refused a good bit of money from a soda company. He was like, "Isn't that kind of a hip, happenin' soda?" Get real Dad! There's no such thing as a hip soda.

Hogwarts will always be there to welcome you home...

Many, many years ago I bought a book for one of my friends, as a birthday present, and it was only later that I realized that it was the second part of Harry Potter. At that point, I had no idea what Harry Potter was, but then, because my best friend and I have never had the same taste in movies, we decided to try Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban one Summer day and in the weeks that followed I read all the books and I watched all the movies with her, because apart from the story itself giving meaning to its readers, the other things that makes it important is to share it with other people, to discuss the characters and their fate, to speculate about what is going to happen (and, for the past years that the books have been finished but the movies haven't, how well directors and actors would be able to translate the books into moving pictures). This story that is most important to me because I can share it with someone who I dearly love is now coming to an end, but it will live on, in hours spent re-reading the novels, in evenings filled with re-watching the movies (stopping, occasionally, to discuss a specific issue that just can't wait). I'll spend the next week patiently awaiting the return of my best friend so we can watch the last part together, desperately avoiding reviews and such so as not to spoil it. 

More on Sudan

Within this context, South Sudan’s secession is a mixed blessing. While it gives Southerners their long overdue right to self-determination, in the north it leaves the centre-periphery dichotomy intact. This is indicated in the wars that have erupted or are threatening to erupt in that region. The unresolved conflict in Darfur gives the lie to the notion that the north constitutes a homogeneous, unified entity, one that will be at harmony after secession. Millions of Darfurians remain displaced in camps in Sudan and in Chad, fearful of returning to their homes amidst the genocidal violence that began in 2003. In eastern Sudan, rebel groups continue to mount opposition to the Khartoum government, demanding equal access to development and economic redistribution for their region.  

openDemocracy: Sudan secession: resolving divisions?, July 8, 2011

Guardian: The Republic of South Sudan – the roadmap to independence, July 8, 2011

DerStandard: Vorfreude trotz Versorgungsengpässen, 8. Juli 2011

NY Times: South Sudan, the Newest Nation, Is Full of Hope and Problems, July 7, 2011

Guernica: Contested Territory. Jina Moore interviews Rebecca Hamilton, July 2011

Interviews with 3 awesome people

One... Neil Gaiman (also, just as a sidenote: I never realized before why he's called Mr Nancy, because in my head, Anansi was pronounced radically differently from how it is actually pronounced. Oh, the hardships of having the wrong mother tongue...)

I feel much safer with my fans than Steve does...

He actually plays this thing like being nine hundred years old and eleven at the same time.

...not if you hide behind the sofa.  

Two... Terry Moore (if you're not reading Echo, which admittedly is probably hard to get anywhere outside US cities, WHY NOT?)

But I also wanted an element of real danger in the story. I wanted you to have the same sort of fear that you might have in a war, that just because we’re in the lead group doesn’t mean we’re safe; the guy beside you could drop at any minute. When I’m drawing my stories, I think of them as a film. I think what would this look like, how would they shoot this, how do I frame the camera shot on this? I don’t wonder what other comic artists would do, I wonder what a great director would do.

Three... Ruth Wilson. What I love most about this interview is that it is almost entirely about the process of bringing a character to live, which really shouldn't feel quite so novel but actually does since all we usually seem to care about is private lives and the surface of things. 

What I'm trying to say is that the backstory doesn't particularly aid. I mean, I don't know anything about physics. I looked up everything that was in the script, like what dark matter was, and tried to work out what her frame of reference was. She comes from a physicist's point of view, so she sees everything as a physicist. She sees people as matter, as balls of energy and conflicting energy. So emotions, they're only energy, you don't have to put anything else onto them. You don't have to have a conscious about them, because they're simply energy flowing through your body. So therefore, guilt or anger or whatever is something that you don't have to worry too much about it, because it's just energy. If you kill someone, you don't have to feel anything about it, because it's just energy. That's all we are. We're matter. We're nothing else. We're just balls of matter. 

...

Campaigners warned that doubts about the credibility of the New York hotel worker who accused Strauss-Kahn of sexual assault on 14 May may make victims fear that only "perfect victims" could report rape and receive justice, and may lead to fewer women reporting sexual attacks.

"The message that this case gives is that, as a society, we still carry notions of a what a perfect rape victim should look like, and what 'real rape' is," said Holly Dustin, manager of End Violence Against Women.

"Rape victims can be less than perfect, they can have insecure immigration status, they can be prostitutes – and they can still be raped. This sends the message to women around the world that unless you are a perfect victim the system will eat you up and spew you out." 

Guardian: Strauss-Kahn case could deter reporting of rape, campaigners warn, July 3, 2011

NY Times: Strauss-Kahn Prosecution Said to Be Near Collapse, June 30, 2011