“Natural order? You sound like one of those insane Neo-Catholics.”
February 7, 2018 by at 10:08 am
…is an actual line of dialogue from Altered Carbon, Netflix’s dense and gorgeous sci-fi series about life after death has been digitally defeated. Consciousness has been codified, so you can get “spun up” into a new bodily “sleeve” for all eternity — provided you have the means. But wouldn’t you know it, there’s this weird bunch of religious zealots who object — who make noises about soul and body having more to do with each other than ghost and machine, who think it devilish to deny death and what comes after. Who make noises about human dignity. Remarkable.
It’s chock full of sex and violence, and the dialogue isn’t always the strongest, and the acting isn’t always spot-on. But there’s a lot there, and I’m kinda fascinated. It’d be fun to see some smart Catholic critic dig into it. Heh.
I’d Be Happy to Know I Was the Only One Who Missed This…
March 13, 2017 by at 3:53 pm
From FOK Nick Ripatrizone…
In related other belated news, the man behind the swiveling heads and green projectile liquids finds out if he was right all along…
ADDED: Well, now, this is something (else!).
I’m glad Mika cleared that up for us
February 22, 2017 by at 12:08 pm
The Ordeal of Hannah Horvath?
December 22, 2016 by at 8:26 am
Lena Dunham on line one, Mr. Pinfold…
IRL she’s a generation’s gutsy, ambitious voice, author, showrunner, and star of the HBO hit Girls. But on TV and the web she becomes “a girl who careens between wisdom and ignorance,” a girl whose delusions have brought her here, to the shadowy realm of Decreased Stigma…
One Short Poem about Halloween
November 1, 2015 by at 1:51 am
The Not Great Heist of All Hallow’s Eve
The two had a plan, even a sense of irony,
as they wore masks of Shaggy and Freddie
for the cameras. Bumped the bolt. Their heist
was some silverware and costume jewelry
thrown into a pillow case—fairly petty—
and pizza and beer from the fridge. Tomfoolery
to fall asleep, drunk in front of the TV,
to be unmasked like any cartoon poltergeist.
Two Short Poems about Handheld Devices
August 11, 2015 by at 11:26 pm
Communicator Coverage in the 23rd Century
After flipping it open, Captain Kirk
heard nothing but static after the chirk.
Meditating on his New Google Phone
Funny, how much some fellow’s Nexus
phone posture resembles omphaloskepsis.
Sideshow Bob Raises a Fundamental Question…
August 27, 2014 by at 7:30 pm
6. Sideshow Bob raises a fundamental question: what is the role of the cultural elitist in a mass democracy?
— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) August 26, 2014
More discussion here.
Roger Sterling, Lost in the Cosmos
June 5, 2014 by at 12:00 pm
Detail of a frame from Mad Men Season 4, Episode 2, ‘Christmas Comes but Once a Year’
[W]hat is not generally recognized is that the successful launch of self into the orbit of transcendence is necessarily attended by problems of reentry. What goes up must come down. The best film of the year ends at nine o’clock. What to do at ten? […]
Options of reentry into [the everyday] world [include]: […]
(4) Reentry by travel (sexual). One has a succession of lovers […]. It is difficult to imagine the self of the autonomous artist in his singular and godlike abstraction from the ordinary world of men settling down with a wife and family any more than Jove settling down with Juno. Juno — yuck! […] Better to grow old alone in the desert, sit on a rock like a Navajo. But how lovely are the daughters of men! Indeed, heterosexual intercourse is the very paradigm of the reentry of the ghost-self back into the incarnate world whence it came.
–Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (New York: Open Road Integrated Media, 2011), Nook edition, chap. 14.
***
Frame from Mad Men Season 7, Episode 7, ‘Waterloo’
ROGER STERLING (July 21, 1969)
Did you see we landed on the moon? Neil Armstrong, what are you going to do with the rest of your life? Screw every girl in Florida, I guess.
–Carly Wray and Matthew Weiner, Mad Men, Season 7, Episode 7 (‘Waterloo’)
of Reruns of Reruns of Reruns of Reruns of Reruns of Reruns of Reruns of Reruns of Reruns of Reruns of
April 12, 2014 by at 12:00 am
‘What else is there?’
April 11, 2014 by at 12:00 pm
Frames from Mad Men Season 5, Episode 8, ‘Lady Lazarus’
Last season […] I was showing that the culture [of the United States in 1968] was like Don. It was carnal, it was anxious, it was having a huge self-confidence problem… And now [in Season Seven] I want to look at the material and immaterial world. Things that are of this world — ambition, success, money, and time to some degree — and the contrast of what we can’t see, the spiritual, the internal life… When your needs are met, when you have a roof over your head[…] and at a certain point those needs are met, what else is there?
—Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner on the show’s seventh (and final) season, which premieres this Sunday night; interview with amc.com dated April 7, 2014; emphasis added.
***
DON DRAPER (1960)
You’re born alone and you die alone and this world just drops a bunch of rules on top of you to make you forget those facts. But I never forget. I’m living like there’s no tomorrow, because there isn’t one.
–Matthew Weiner, Mad Men, Season 1, Episode 1 (‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’)
***
DON DRAPER (1960)
Advertising is based on one thing: happiness. And do you know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car. It’s freedom from fear. It’s a billboard on the side of a road that screams with reassurance that whatever you’re doing is OK. You are OK.
–Matthew Weiner, Mad Men, Season 1, Episode 1 (‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’)
***
DON DRAPER (1967)
You’re happy because you’re successful… for now. But what is happiness? It’s a moment before you need more happiness.
–Andre Jacquemetton & Maria Jacquemetton, Mad Men, Season 5, Episode 12 (‘Commissions and Fees’)
***
ROGER STERLING (1967)
What are the events in life? It’s like, you see a door. The first time you come to it, you say, ‘Oh, what’s on the other side of the door?’ Then you open a few doors and then you say, ‘I think I want to go over a bridge this time. I’m tired of doors.’ Finally you go through one of these things, and you come out the other side, and you realize that’s all there are: doors! And windows and bridges and gates. And they all open the same way. And they all close behind you. Look, life is supposed to be a path, and you go along, and these things happen to you, and they’re supposed to change your direction, but it turns out that’s not true. Turns out the experiences are nothing. They’re just some pennies you pick up off the floor, stick in your pocket, and you’re just going in a straight line to you-know-where.
–Matthew Weiner, Mad Men, Season 6, Episode 1 (‘The Doorway, Part 1’)
***
DON DRAPER (1960)
I remember the first time I was a pallbearer. […] I remember thinking, ‘They’re letting me carry the box, they’re letting me be this close to it, they re not hiding anything from me now.’ And then I looked over and I saw all the old people waiting together by the grave and I remember thinking I… I just moved up a notch.
[…]
Jesus, Rachel, this is it. This is all there is, and I feel like it’s slipping through my fingers like a handful of sand. This is it. This is all there is.
–Bridget Bedard and Andre Jacquemetton & Maria Jacquemetton and Matthew Weiner, Mad Men, Season 1, Episode 10 (‘Long Weekend’)
***
What, after all, is the use of not having cancer, cirrhosis, and such, if a man comes home from work every day at five-thirty to the exurbs of Montclair or Memphis and there is the grass growing and the little family looking not quite at him but just past the side of his head, and there’s Cronkite on the tube and the smell of pot roast in the living room, and inside the house and outside in the pretty exurb has settled the noxious particles and the sadness of the old dying Western World, and him thinking: Jesus, is this it? Listening to Cronkite and the grass growing?
–Walker Percy, ‘Bourbon’, Esquire 84 (December 1975): pp. 148-149; collected in Signposts in a Strange Land
Triangulation at Its Best Part II
January 27, 2014 by at 8:03 am
The first (!) two-time Super Bowl winning coach of JOB’s team talking about the two-time Superbowl team from Webb/Potter/Jobe’s corner of the world in reference to one of if not The Most Painful Super Bowl Loss sustained by Lickona’s team:
UPDATE: But of course, in this game, the gods of football will find a way to even keep greatness humble.
Everybody Loves Pizza
October 17, 2013 by at 4:10 pm
It never stops for Ray Barone, laid-off sportswriter turned pizza delivery guy, whose oddball family life consists of a fed up wife, overbearing parents, and an older brother with lifelong jealousy.
The complete first season now available on Korrektiv TV.
The End of an Era
Jonathan Potter hosted his last Naked Lunch Break at the Riverpoint Campus of Eastern Washington University.