Just a few weeks after my last (belated) monthly podcast, there wasn't much to update in terms of viewing, listening, or behind-the-scenes work, but I did have one film/series I wanted to zoom in on. Adam Curtis' eccentric 2004 BBC program The Power of Nightmares offers a cutting, hypnotic audiovisual analysis of the dance between American neoconservatives and Middle Eastern Islamists which eventually led to the War on Terror. I'd seen, and never forgotten, the first chapter not long after it was first released. This time I watched the whole thing and reflected on it from a different standpoint than I had at the time, further to the left and more deeply skeptical of the government line on Al Qaeda (even so, some of the wild discrepancies and overreaches that the film highlights remain astounding). Hopefully I can watch more Curtis films in the near future; I've been fascinated by his style for a long time but never really explored his work. A year ago, my all too ambitious plans included a chapter-by-chapter reaction to the director's recent analysis of the left's ambitions and failures, Can't Get You Out of My Head. Perhaps that will be next in my exploration - when I finally find some time in my schedule.
Elsewhere, I offer some capsules on a handful of films I watched in June, riff on similar Bush era themes based on some podcasts I listened to (touching on my own political evolution - or evolutions), and end the podcast on a lighter note with a reading from my past work on a Gene Kelly musical, albeit one that also toys with issues of war, loss, and wistful regrets.
As I struggled to keep up with various projects, particularly Lost in Twin Peaks, I fell behind on the latest patron reward: the presentation of three character studies each month. Only several weeks after the month ended could I finally share the first one (the other two followed the next week, and I'm already moving ahead on July's advances so they won't suffer the same fate). Despite the delay, this represents a major breakthrough. Remarkably, I never wrote a single character study in all the years since The Return - despite my oft-stated goals. That half-decade was spent, when I focused on this work at all, slowly putting together the posts on minor characters and the like. Hopefully from now on I can move forward at a much quicker pace (on a positive note, when I finally got down to writing it, the first piece didn't take very long at all). (This cross-post accidentally went up last week with most of what you see here, and the reason I removed it and re-publushed today was because two these character studies were not yet ready.)
I won't discuss who these entries cover - the public gets to find that out if/when the series begins official publication in early 2023. But here's where you can find out, and read them ahead of time...
(become a patron to discover their identities)
following the announcement of
I've already cross-posted both parts of my conversation with Cameron Cloutier in a separate entry, but just to be thorough, here's the $5/month exclusive that went up in June...
Podcast Line-Ups for...
