maybe some fun

a new Borat film

Collider has the report and we can also confirm a test screening took place last week. In a meta story, the film follows Borat as he’s now a famous figure and so to hide from the public, he pretends to be someone else. We’ve learned from sources that Trump and Epstein’s relationship, as well as the coronavirus, all figure into the main narrative with cameos from Mike Pence, Rudy Giuliani, and more best left unspoiled. We’ve also learned that one of the yet-to-be-revealed cameos could potentially derail a political career, and we imagine some backlash and lawsuits will follow.

While the test screening didn’t reveal who directed the sequel nor which studio was involved, the original was helmed by Larry Charles and went on to gross over a quarter of a billion dollars at the worldwide box office. We imagine those backing the project would want it out near the election considering the plot, so expect to hear official news very soon. In the meantime, check out some footage captured on set earlier this year below.

Sacha Baron Cohen Secretly Shot a Sequel to Borat

a revolutionary hiding in plane sight

The Eroica is arguably the most revolutionary of Beethoven’s symphonies, which may be why it remained his favorite, at least until the Ninth. John Clubbe, author of Beethoven: The Relentless Revolutionary (2019), believes the Eroica’s famous first two chords, which crash like cannon shots, represent the cannons fired by Napoleon’s armies as they marched across Europe. “The chords recall the world of the [French] Revolution: exuberant, over-the-top, colossal. They are wake-up calls to jolt [the] somnolent audiences” in Vienna and elsewhere. Beethoven loathed the complacent, apolitical, frivolous Viennese of his day, intimidated by repression and censorship into sybaritic silence. The symphony is full of his quintessential techniques of disruption, including sudden dynamic contrasts, extreme dissonance, colossal noise, massive dimensions, density of ideas, bursting of forms and conventions, and even an extra French horn to conjure the atmosphere of revolution. It all serves to communicate the abiding essence of Beethoven’s music: struggle, ending in triumph. It is not mere personal struggle, such as his struggle against deafness; it is collective, universal, timeless struggle, a war against limits, so to speak—artistic, creative, moral, political, even spatial and temporal. John Eliot Gardiner’s characterization is apt: Beethoven represents the struggle to bring the divine down to Earth. (Gardiner contrasts this with Bach and Mozart, the first representing the divine on Earth, the second giving us the music you would hear in heaven.)

“If we listen to Beethoven and do not hear anything of the revolutionary bourgeoisie—not the echo of its slogans, the need to realize them, the cry for that totality in which reason and freedom are to have their warrant—we understand Beethoven no better than does one who cannot follow the purely musical content of his pieces,” wrote Theodor Adorno. Beethoven was so political that, by the end of his life, some of his friends refused to dine with him: either they were bored of his constant politicizing or they feared police spies would overhear him. “You are a revolutionary, a Carbonaro,” a friend of his wrote in his conversation book in 1823, referring to an Italian secret society that had played a role in various national uprisings. Well past the point that it had become (to his contemporaries) anachronistic, Beethoven kept the Enlightenment faith.

The Revolutionary Beethoven
In the year of the great composer’s 250th birthday, we can retune our ears to pick up the subversive and passionately democratic nature of his music.

T and R, Ms. Benny!! 😊☮️👍 Excellent read. 👌I will use my POTUS NOTA as a protest vote. Hubster and krewe down here think I’m voting for ByeDone. If I had kids, several clothespins would be on my nose, and I would vote for semi-Braindead. I don’t. This really is a horrendous choice. 🤬🤮

ethnomethodology and the body politic

this comment is a reading

in the last year or so I have seen more connections to biology and ecosystems

this is from an article in a book which is an event set up by Bruno Latour and the event happened in 2017. The entire book is on line, over 300 pages with articles and the dialogue that followed. The particular selection concerns cells which have become important actors with Covid

appologize for strange line feeds since this is copied from a pdf. From the text page 89-90

Sem(b)iosis and the Political Economy of
Nature
Mike Lynch
On my flight over from the United States a few days ago, in order to get
some relief from thinking about this session, this talk and this Dialoghi, I relaxed
and read the latest issue of The New Yorker Magazine and, lo and behold, there
was an article by Siddhartha Mukherjee (8), on cancer, and it is related, I think—
somewhat different, but related—to what Scott has just told us about. The article is
called The Invasion equation. Mukherjee is a doctor, an oncologist, who deals with
cancer patients and he’s talking about a woman who is diagnosed with a tumor in
her breast. He says:

“… we have no clue how these tumors, the ones found incidentally, behave in
real life. Would the alliances formed between the woman’s tumor cells and her tis-
sue cells enable widespread metastatic dissemination? Or would these encounters
naturally dampen the growth of the tumor and prevent its spread? Nobody could
say. … It was a classic denominator problem but my response seemed supremely
unsatisfactory.”

The “denominator problem” is that he is faced with the patient, the woman who
has a positive diagnosis for this tumor, but he doesn’t know how many others who
were not in his presence, not having been diagnosed, would have very similar cells
in their bodies. He quotes a specialist on cancer research Rusian Medzhitov, who
wrote of the “new rules of tissue engagement.” Mukherjee says:

“Medzhitov believes that all our tissues have ‘established rules by which cells
form engagements and alliances with other cells.’ Physiology is the product of these
relationships. … Medzhitov’s point is that cancer cells produce cancer—they get established and grow—only when they manage to form alliances with normal cells.
And there are two sides (at least) to any such relationship.”

Mukherjee uses two common analogies to open up this question about the en-
vironment in which cancer cells, which are found ubiquitously in bodies and in the
blood, grow. One analogy is with seed and soil, and he is concretely looking into
soil. The other is with invasive organisms and he speaks about something that is
very familiar to those of us who live in upstate New york: zebra mussels (Dreisse-
na polymorpha), a species native to the Caspian and Black Seas that colonized the
Great Lakes and also the Finger Lakes near where I live, with thousands of them in
a square meter. And, again, the issue is why is it that these creatures, with predators
in their own habitats, are in some sort of balance and are not considered a hor-
rendous pest, but when they move to a new environment they just proliferate and
become, sometimes for quite a long time, predominant. So, what I find interesting
about this article, which I just happened to come across, is it alludes to just the
kinds of things that Scott has shown to us with his very wonderful slides. you start
seeing this everywhere, and I don’t think there’s any need to search for the politics
of science, particularly of genetic science and biology; the politics is in the language
used to describe them, incidentally: the cancer cells disseminate and encounter
normal cells, they engage with the tissues and form alliances. It is as if Mukherjee
and Medzhitov had been students of Latour (and maybe they were). Politics, in
this case, is not an addition to cellular physiology and pathology from some other
domain that affects or somehow changes the science; it’s part of it, it’s part of its
language, it’s intrinsic. Though in this case the politics is part of the way pathology
is described, we saw many cases from Scott’s talk in which it is not a pathological
way of informing and elaborating biology. Scott has treated us to a holobiontic
political economy of nature, and I suggest that it’s also ‘sembiontic’ in the sense of
being a kind of portmanteau between symbiosis and semiotics where we can pay
attention to the language in which biology is expressed, not just as incidental lan-
guage, but as the very opening up of discovered domains for further research and
clinical practice.

https://www.cini.it/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/BODY-POLITICS-complete-Online.pdf

The Democrats aren't in a cynical, exploitative, moment-of-convenience alliance with the Lincoln Project and Bush/Cheney neocons whom they're going to jettison due to ideological incompatibility soon as they get their votes & win.

That's the relationship between Dems & the left: https://t.co/4PbRifJtbw

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) September 28, 2020