Dangerous & Lazy

It took me a while to remember what it was that the visual style of The Hunger Games reminded me of. It was a second-hand paperback of H. G. Wells’s The Shape of Things to Come published some time in the 70s which, as these books usually do, featured a cover illustration which drew a little on the book itself and a lot on the trends in SF illustration of the time. That’s an appropriate style for the film, I think, a re-creation of 70s interpretations of WWII-era futurism, or, a taking-up of the science-fictional imaginations from two previous eras of austerity. And the film does look marvelous, with lots of little touches (some of which, such as the train we see near the beginning of the film, might be lost on an audience that doesn’t remember the existence of British Rail) that position it critically within the aesthetics of austerity nostalgia. Read more↴

The new issue of Street Spirit, a paper put together by a group of Quakers and sold by homeless people throughout the Bay Area, is mostly made up of articles on non-violence. In an astonishing (in a bad way) interview, George Lakey, “longtime nonviolent activist and trainer” manages to outdo Berkeley Chancellor Birgeneau’s infamous claim that protesters linking arms is “not non-violent”:

Lakey: Running does not heighten the contrast between the activists and the purveyors of violence. The running, to a T.V. or a news photographer or a bystander just looks like a riot and it gets reported in the news, that black people rioted on the streets of Birmingham or whatever. So sometimes you need to heighten the contrasts in order to make your point, and if that means getting people on their knees so they won’t run, great. Read more↴