Ghost in the Machine

“Ronald Reagan’s Benghazi.”

“Around dawn on October 23, 1983, I was in Beirut, Lebanon, when a suicide bomber drove a truck laden with the equivalent of twenty-one thousand pounds of TNT into the heart of a U.S. Marine compound, killing two hundred and forty-one servicemen…Six months earlier, militants had bombed the U.S. embassy in Beirut, too, killing sixty-three more people, including seventeen Americans…In September of 1984, for the third time in eighteen months, jihadists bombed a U.S. government outpost in Beirut yet again. President Reagan acknowledged that the new security precautions that had been advocated by Congress hadn’t yet been implemented at the U.S. embassy annex that had been hit.”

As Republicans continue to lose their minds over Benghazi, to the detriment of all, The New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer puts things in perspective by going back to Beirut ’83. “If you compare the costs of the Reagan Administration’s serial security lapses in Beirut to the costs of Benghazi, it’s clear what has really deteriorated in the intervening three decades. It’s not the security of American government personnel working abroad. It’s the behavior of American congressmen at home.”

See also: the Dubya record on diplomatic attacks — there were over a dozen of ’em. I know complaining about GOP hypocrisy these days is like complaining about the weather. But honestly, what an egregious waste of time this is.

I Can See Your House From Here.

“The High Definition Earth Viewing experiment consists of four cameras strapped to the ISS’s hull and are all pointed toward the Earth. Occasional blackouts when switching between cameras can occur and the dark side of the Earth is, well, dark, but you still get some pretty stunning views.”

Who knows what will happen in 2020 — for now, the scientists (if not the politicians) are saying that “the relationship between NASA and Roscosmos is good, it is healthy.” In any event, NASA has set up a 24-hour live-feed from the ISS. Hopefully, it will help keep things in perspective down here.

Conjurer of Nightmares.

“A thread running through Mr. Giger’s work was the uneasy meshing of machines and biology, in a highly idiosyncratic blend of science fiction and surrealism…He kept a notepad next to his bed so he could sketch the terrors that rocked his uneasy sleep — nightmarish forms that could as easily have lumbered from prehistory as arrived from Mars.”

R.I.P. Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger, best known as the creator of the Lovecraftian Xenomorph from Alien (which, along with The Shining twins, Freddy Krueger, and the final shot from Carrie, is responsible for a goodly percentage of my nightmares over the years), 1940-2014. “My paintings seem to make the strongest impression on people who are, well, who are crazy. A good many people think as I do. If they like my work they are creative…or they are crazy.”

When the Last Light Warms the Rocks.

“Wilderness is a constant threat to order in True Detective. Neglected weeds grow between the cracks, along deserted freeways and in the broken pavement of abandoned parking lots. Orphaned bikes rust away in indeterminate piles of litter as the whole rottenpost-hurricane mess melts into a lush overgrowth that swallows up traces of a civilization that once was. As if to flaunt the victory of chaos over order, the weeds show America as a forgotten afterimage of itself and reveals it for the ‘jungle’ it has become and was before.”

By way of Matt Zoller Seitz’s Twitter feed, “America as Afterimage in True Detective”. Alas, this article is totally overwritten, in the usual style of po-mo-infused semioticians. Still, some intriguing ideas and connections amid the thicket of verbiage.

Batfleck Begins.

With production gearing up, Zack Snyder tweets out our first look at Ben Affleck as Batman, and it’s heavy on the Frank Miller. (Close-up below.) I wasn’t sold at all on Man of Steel, and I expect this second installment will be completely overstuffed. Still, that’s an impressive rendering of the Dark Knight, and no mistake.

Paths of Terry.

“Not quite an epiphany, but there was ‘Paths of Glory.’…It was two things: first here was technology that I’d never been aware of, the tracking shots through the trenches which of course I copied in ‘Brazil,’ but I’d never been aware of the camera before that film and the second thing was that you talk about injustice in the film, you could talk about big themes, ideas.”

As part of series over at IndieWire, Terry Gilliam discusses his life in eight movies. “That was my problem at a certain age…I still believed in movies in those days. I don’t anymore. Give me a drive-in now any day.”

You Win or You Restart/Discard.

Now here’s a Super Mario land that Bob Hoskins would’ve been more at home in — Game of Thrones, Mario-style.

Update: Now, Hyrule gets the same treatment.

Maximum Bob.

“You don’t end up with a face like this if you’re hard, do ya? This comes from having too much mouth and nothing to back it up with. The nose has been broken so many times.” R.I.P. Bob Hoskins, the tough guy with a heart of gold, 1942–2014.

Best known for Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, The Long Good Friday, and Mona Lisa (also featuring a young Clarke Peters) stateside, Hoskins had a number of memorable supporting turns over the years — Pink’s manager in The Wall, J. Edgar Hoover in Nixon; Jet Li’s handler in Unleashed, and one of the two Central Services guys in Brazil — and was always a touch of class in a production, even in drek like Super Mario and Snow White and the Huntsman. He will be missed.

Return of the Force?

“‘We are so excited to finally share the cast of Star Wars: Episode VII. It is both thrilling and surreal to watch the beloved original cast and these brilliant new performers come together to bring this world to life, once again. We start shooting in a couple of weeks, and everyone is doing their best to make the fans proud.'”

The Star Wars Episode 7 cast is announced, and, give credit where due, this is pretty auspicious (although heavily male) bunch. Along with all of the original gang — minus Lando — and the previously-rumored Adam Driver, Episode VII also includes John Boyega (the break-out star of Attack the Block), Daisy Ridley (don’t know her), Oscar Isaac(!, a.k.a. King John/Llewyn Davis), Andy Serkis(!, mutant master of CGI), Domhnall Gleeson (increasingly ubiquitous son of Brendan, late of About Time and Anna Karenina), and the venerable Max Von Sydow(!!! Needs no introduction, and it is a rush in itself to see him get his place next to Cushing, Guinness, Jones, and Lee.)

With all the usual caveats — Into Darkness, lens flares, etc. etc. — that’s a damned exciting cast. (Ok, so was MacGregor, Neeson, Portman, Jackson, and Stamp fifteen years ago, but let’s not talk about that.) Now how ’bout getting Frances McDormand, Saiorse Ronan, Viola Davis or somesuch in for additional support?

Update: Could well be damage control, but late word is there’s more to come. “Several sources tell The Hollywood Reporter that director J.J. Abrams has another substantial role to fill — and it’s a female part. No further details are known.”

Beats, Rhymes, Life to Bling-Bling-Bling.

“Whereas ‘My Adidas’ highlighted consumer items, ‘Picasso Baby’ is all about unattainable luxury, fantasy acquisitions. Within the first ten words of the song, Jay Z ensures that no one in his audience can identify with the experience that he’s rapping about…hip-hop has become complicit in the process by which winners are increasingly isolated from the populations they are supposed to inspire and engage…[I]t’s a significant turnaround and comedown for a music that was, only a little while back, devoted to reflecting the experience of real people and, through that reflection, challenging the power structure that produces inequality and disenfranchisement.”

In a six-part-series for Vulture, The Roots‘ Questlove explains, in his view, how hip-hop has failed black America. [Part 1.] Only two parts in, but so far he’s dead on. I know I’m turning forty this year, so there’s probably no small amount of Get-Off-My-Lawn involved. But, imho of course, something went wrong when commercial hip-hop took the hyper-consumerist turn awhile ago.

Back in the day, you had East vs. West coast (if I got to choose a coast, I got to choose the East — I live out there, so don’t go there), the Pan-racial, regular guy optimism of the Native Tongues; the history- and political-minded hip-hop of Public Enemy, Gangstarr, X-Clan, KRS-One; the skewed pop-culture funhouse of the Wu-Empire, rappers like Slick Rick, Nas, & Rakim working their own unique thing.

Now, some of Kanye’s experimenting aside, the hip-hop mainstream — from my admittedly limited perspective — seems to be mainly concerned with needle boats. “Who’s to blame? It’s hard to say. Certainly, Puff Daddy’s work with the Notorious B.I.G. in the early ’90s did plenty to cement the idea of hip-hop as a genre of conspicuous consumption.”

Then again, as a few people pointed out in the comments, the evolution of hip-hop from diversity to commodity isn’t happening in a vacuum. The music world, in most any genre, seems to be in a really bad way these days. But again, this is always the aging person’s lament. Now Get Off My Lawn.