Take A Break From Kardashian Conciousness - I'm So Sick Of Lies

Today I finally learned what Kim Kardashian is famous for. I've been trying so hard not to know as sleb conciousness irritates me more than most. Apparently it's sucking off big black guys so the Max Headroom gif seems appropriate. All over the world, people like me and this articulate, switched on and awake woman in the video above are sick of your lies, sick of your spectator sports mentality, sick of your celebrity worship and sick of your silence over things that matter.

There's a regional war on the verge of breaking out in Syria and the falsehoods that are being perpetrated to instigate it by the Western powers are sickening. It's a sickness to ignore it.

Despite being virulently anti Vatican I've sided with the Pope today and fasted for peace. I've found the frequent reminders of being a little peckish (less than I imagined) have focused my mind on what I care about. I care about life.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder | Ali: Fear Eats The Soul

Fear eats the soul is a film about loneliness. An elderly German widow comes together with a younger Moroccan man [Ali] and the outpouring of prejudice from the people in her life who ordinarily have little time for her as a woman and a human is painful to observe.

It's set in 1974 Germany and so for me was powerfully evocative as I lived there during that time and the 70's polyester prints neatly sum up the mass production post war colour that crept into peoples lives as the 'wirtschaftwunder' economic miracle began heating up after the total destruction of Germany during the war.

It's a spell binding movie with Fassbinder's idiosyncratic style of taking only one shot of each scene and so if you're paying attention a few mistakes creep in but it just gives it the feel of great theatre and writing.

In real life Ali was Fassbinder's boyfriend. Brigitte Mira's performance as Emmi is moving and Fassbinder himself makes a cameo performance as a work shy racist son in law.

This is the second film I've seen from the director after the 15 hour marathon of Berlin Alexanderplatz  that I wrote about over here. Ali's German is so broken that I understood every word as my own command of German has become so rusty it's barely useful if I try to use it.

In some ways Fassbinder comes across like a German Ozu with his sparse directing and key doorway framing shots. I doubt this film will be up on Youtube for too long so watch it while you can as it doesn't need the high definition that modern productions demand.

Sally Fields - Norma Rae

Norma Rae is the kind of pro-activist film Hollywood is no longer allowed to make. It won Sally Field an Oscar in 1979 for her performance as an underpaid cotton manufacturing worker emboldened by a visiting Union activist to set up a union for the employees with the usual obstacles put in place by the management who are hopelessly fixated on the scientific method of timing all the workers for the maximum productivity.

We now know from the unscientific method that people are more productive if they are happy and taken care of by employees. It's a warm movie with a slice of American life that I think still exists but is rarely brought to life as the mediated American way has drifted towards displays of crass consumerism, celebrity worship, sports distractions and military priapism....or Alien shit.

Movies about people coming together and taking on relentless greed are no longer made by the US. The big money investors don't wish to give the proletariat any ideas so fantasy is what they are served up with. Protesters or movements in movies are portrayed as Communists and radicals by Hollywood because that keeps the very people who are being exploited by greedy business in their place.

The only irony worth exploring is this movie won the Oscar in the same year that Deng Xiaoping instigated the special economic zones in China. The very places that took the manufacturing of the cotton and denim that Norma Rae is fighting for a better wage to produce.

There's an answer to this race to the bottom of lower production costs but it doesn't involve unconscious consumerism, botox materialism and relentless greed by business.

It might however involve 3D printing and design coding where ostensibly most products will become close to free. That will have an impact on Brands who have nothing different from their competitors and even more so on those who have anything substantive to say.