Posts by Craig Ranapia
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Muse: A Friday Kind of Linky Love, in reply to David Ritchie,
An arguably NSFW video for a version which gets stuck in my head more than the original.
If Mary Harron’s lawyer calls, I’m not here. M’kay? :)
Meanwhile, safe for work but still utterly terrifying is the trailer for Paolo Sorrentino's English language debut. Sean Penn in Robert Smith drag! Some adorable (but culturally illiterate) child asking if he can play ‘This Must Be The Place’ by Arcade Fire. (Sidebar: Are hipster douchebags like Jesuits - start early and you've got 'em for life?)
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Muse: A Friday Kind of Linky Love, in reply to Kumara Republic,
Martin Scorsese’s Shine A Light ranks up there too.
Quite possibly, though I'd personally rank it as highly competent and little more as a piece of film-making. Though, to be fair, that's probably influenced by my complete disinterest in The Rolling Stones. Would recommend No Direction Home, his contribution to The Blues and The Last Waltz more highly, but (of course) that my not at all humble opinion and YMWV. :)
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Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to Stephen Judd,
Do tell me where the intermediate point is between here and Iraq where I can worry with your blessing.
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Excellent show last night, but I'm afraid I've got a long-standing bone to pick with the assertion that our censorship laws are "objective" rather than "philisophical". Really, guys? I'd say censorship is one area where value judgements around concepts like injury to "the public good" are unavoidable, but it really doesn't help public dialogue if we pretend they're not going on.
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Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to giovanni tiso,
Sure, if you look around at the financial markets or at the state of social services in this or most other developed nations, we are muddling through just splendidly, aren’t we?
You know, Gio, please go lecture my next door neighbours on what a shithole New Zealand is. They’ll patiently explain why they’re in no great rush to go back to Iraq. They have family who are more concerned about securing clean drinking water than the state of the Dow-Jones.
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Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to Russell Brown,
But, as I said, I tend to agree with your analysis. Throw in climate change – a challenge to which democratic governments in market economies are struggling to rise – and there’s any amount of evidence that things can’t continue as they have been.
Sure, but things never do. The world is constantly changing around you, and windy op-ed columns about the latest existential crisis de jour end up wrapping the same fish and chips as yesterday's page three boobs. Don't know: Perhaps I'm just intellectually pessimistic, but pragmatically optimistic about the human capacity for muddling through. A little epistemological modesty on the part of the commentariat doesn't hurt either. Or something. :)
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Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to BenWilson,
But I’m serious. It seems to me that Western capitalism is in crisis, because the logical outcome of it is finally coming to fruition, that the means of production have mostly moved out, and it’s now mostly uncompetitive and stagnant.
You know something, I’m have a real problem getting invested in an existential crisis at the moment. Sorry if that sounds glib and dismissive, because it’s sincerely not mean to be – but while we’re talking about the madness of crowds, perhaps there’s also some thinking to do about the evasive comforts of reducing ash and rubble and human pain and fear to lofty abstractions – and I don’t care whether they’re coming from the left, right or free-range fuckwits. Lionel Trilling put it rather nicely in an essay on Tacitus:
"[T]o minds of a certain sensitivity ‘the long view’ is the falsest historical view of all, and indeed the insistence on the length of perspective is intended precisely to overcome sensitivity – seen from sufficient distance, it says, the corpse and the hacked limbs are not so very terrible.”
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Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to BenWilson,
I’m with Tom in thinking that we’re in a time of crisis the like of which has not been seen in my own lifetime, nor that of my parents.
Considering one of my parents spent most of the Dub-Dub 2.0 in active military service (and large parts of Britain were subject to saturation bombing, FWIW), I'll say "m'kay" and move on.
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Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to Keir Leslie,
Keir:
That's an argument, but could we agree that 1) it's ultimately not the Metropolitan Police paying the bill but tax-payers and 2) a blaring headline in the Torygraph about poor hard-up multinational corporations claiming their corporate welfare entitlement isn't a good look?
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Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to Islander,
Tautoko.
I dont know what the current training regime is for Maori WardensAnd to be fair, I don't think they were the ones who came up with the idea of being race-based bouncers, but whoever decided to dust off that act for the World Cup needs some time on the naughty step. The Police already have pretty extensive powers under licensing laws that apply to everyone, and if they're not properly staffed, trained and resourced to do their damn jobs during the RWC outsourcing isn't going to be much use.
Still, nice to see that there seems to be a pretty solid cross-party consensus to bring that Act into the 21st century.
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