Viewing posts tagged shelley
Posted by:
Jack Graham
6 years ago
"What if there's no one out there?" asks the Doctor. He's inside the Brannigans' floating car, stuck in gridlock.
What if the world ended when you weren't looking?"Someone's got to ask, because you might not talk about it, but it's there in your eyes. What if the traffic jam never stops?"
"There's a whole city above us," says Brannigan, "The mighty city state of New New York. They wouldn't just leave us."
"In that case, where are they?" counters the Doctor. "What if there's no help coming, not ever? What if there's nothing? Just the motorway, with the cars going round and round and round and round, never stopping. Forever."
What if the whole system is an utterly insane roundalay, going nowhere, getting noplace, just leaving everyone stranded, doing nothing but belching out endless clouds of toxic smoke? What if the crisis is permanent. What if normality
is the crisis? What if everyday life
is the end of the world?
Walter Benjamin said that history was a train crash, and revolution was when the passengers pulled the communication cord. The people of New New ...
Posted by:
Jack Graham
7 years, 8 months ago
The mechanical sciences attained to a degree of perfection which, though obscurely foreseen by Lord Bacon, it had been accounted madness to have prophesied in a preceding age. Commerce was pursued with a perpetually increasing vigour, and the same area of the Earth was perpetually compelled to furnish more and more subsistence. The means and sources of knowledge were thus increased together with knowledge itself, and the instruments of knowledge. The benefit of this increase of the powers of man became, in consequence of the inartificial forms into which mankind was distributed, an instrument of his additional evil. The capabilities of happiness were increased, and applied to the augmentation of misery. Modern society is thus an engine assumed to be for useful purposes, whose force is by a system of subtle mechanism augmented to the highest pitch, but which, instead of grinding corn or raising water acts against itself and is perpetually wearing away or breaking to pieces the wheels of which it is composed.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Philosophical View of Reform, 1819-1820
Silence. It flashed from the woodwork and the walls; it smote him with an awful, total power, as if generated by a vast mill. It rose from ...
Posted by:
Jack Graham
9 years, 1 month ago
Happy Hallowe'en.
I was watching
The Bride of Frankenstein yesterday; appreciating the fact that James Whale invented the self-analysing comic horror film decades before Wes Craven thought it would be tremendously cute to have characters in a slasher film talk about the narrative rules of slasher films.
At one point, the insane, camp, gin-swigging Dr Pretorius (played by the ridiculously watchable Ernest Thesiger) shows Frankenstein (Colin Clive) his collection of creations: tiny people that Pretorius grew from cultures and... well, it's pretty much indescribable. Watch it for yourself. If you've never seen it, you need to.
It isn't explicitly said, but clearly both Pretorius and Frankenstein anticipate (the former with relish and the latter with fear) the breeding of a new race. Pretorius, for all his campness and his disdain for every human female he meets, seems interested in the breeding potential of these creations of science.
Meanwhile, Frankenstein's monster turns out to have survived the first film and, having learned to talk, expresses his demand for a "friend"... by which he is taken to mean a woman with whom he can ...
