xsml

Deadwood is the best telenovela* I have ever seen. Everyone has just arrived, there is no law, life is cheap, labor is back-breaking. It should have been on Telemundo.

Matt Taibbi:
The room twitters in amazement. It’s hard not to applaud the balls of a man who walks into Congress short $72 million in taxpayer money and offers to guess where it all might have gone…
A year later, Iraq is still in flames, and your president’s administration is safely focused on reclaiming $485 million [...]

Yesterday
“Some 100,000 Islamists have met in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, to press for the re-establishment of a caliphate across the Muslim world… The BBC’s Lucy Williamson in Jakarta says that of the estimated 100,000 people packing the stadium hired for the event, the overwhelming majority were women, who have travelled from across Indonesia to attend.” [...]

mid-1970s
Office Signs – The Electric Company

mid-1990s
La Tour de Pise – Michel Goundry

it’s been so long since i slept long enough to dream.

1. an American soldier in Iraq runs away from his unit, takes off his uniform and hides from the ubiquitous enemy by taking shelter in a school. teachers refuse to share a room with him. he’ll try to pass himself off as not-an-American. a [...]

notes on a scandal
the philip glass score is deliciously suggestive. the pan across the notebooks in the opening sequence. the sober conversation that follows the freak-out – in front of the press. the high drama of the scene in the driveway: a dead cat vs. a special needs child. an inside-out Hitchcock movie.
the novel [...]