Monthly Archives: January 2019

Okie (310/485)

Okie From Muskogee

We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee
We don’t take our trips on LSD
We don’t burn our draft cards down on Main Street
We like livin’ right, and bein’ free
We don’t make a party out of lovin’
We like holdin’ hands and pitchin’ woo
We don’t let our hair grow long and shaggy
Like the hippies out in San Francisco do
I’m proud to be an Okie from Muskogee,
A place where even squares can have a ball
We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse,
And white lightnin’s still the biggest thrill of all
Leather boots are still in style for manly footwear
Beads and Roman sandals won’t be seen
Football’s still the roughest thing on campus
And the kids here still respect the college dean
WAnd I’m proud to be an Okie from Muskogee
A place where even squares can have a ball.
We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse
And white lightnin’s still the biggest thrill of all
And white lightnin’s still the biggest thrill of all
In Muskogee, Oklahoma, USA.

No Escape

CSU libraries appear to be using boiler-plate copy from Amazon to describe at least some of their books. This is a great example of the ubiquity of commercial culture and the neoliberalization of higher education.

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Empire

This is what a modern coup looks like. After decades of relentless demonization, subversion, and economic warfare, the US is trying to force the issue via hostile diplomacy. Look for almost every single Democrat and Republican congressperson to fully support this attack on Venezuela’s sovereignty and the principle of national self-determination. Among US political elites Empire is a bipartisan reflex.

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Two Westerns

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Western (Germany 2017) d. Valeska Grisebach

A team of German workers travel to Bulgaria to build a dam. One of them, Meinhard, becomes interested in the people who live in the nearby village. The tensions between these two groups sharpen even as Meinhard’s relationships extend and deepen. This film has been billed as a thriller, though its pace is so deliberate that any “thrills” play out virtually in slow motion. Grisebach, the director, has said that she was raised on a steady cinematic diet of US American westerns as a child in West Germany and that she saw this film as an opportunity to explore homosocial forms of masculinity. The denouement defies expectation.

Sweet Country (Australia 2017) d. Warwick Thornton

The Australian and US American frontiers share both sublime terrain and a history of racist violence. Sweet Country dramatizes the paradoxes of settler colonialism and white supremacy, in particular the unavoidable dialectic of contempt and intimacy both of those power structures depend upon and produce. If the Crown’s law can distinguish between murder and self-defense, the passions ruling white colonists will never permit such a distinction. The darkest aspects of frontier life— particularly the antagonisms between sacred and profane, savage and civilized— are vividly rendered here with artful camera work.