What if the Great American Novelist Doesn’t Write Novels?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Frederick Wiseman’s documentary films offer an unparalleled, panoramic vision of society. His 45th feature, “City Hall,” is on PBS this month — and he’s eager to get back to work. 

 

"The fact that Wiseman’s half-century-long project is a series of cinéma-vérité documentaries about American institutions, their titles often reading like generic brand labels — “High School,” “Hospital,” “The Store,” “Public Housing,” “State Legislature” — makes its achievement all the more remarkable but also easier to overlook. Beginning with “Titicut Follies” (1967), a portrait of a Massachusetts asylum for the criminally insane that remains shocking to this day, Wiseman has directed nearly a picture a year, spending weeks, sometimes months, embedded in a strictly demarcated space — a welfare office in Lower Manhattan, a sleepy fishing village in Maine, the Yerkes Primate Research Center at Emory University, the flagship Neiman Marcus department store in Dallas, the New York Public Library, a shelter for victims of domestic violence in Tampa, Fla., a Miami zoo — then editing the upward of a hundred hours of footage he brings home into an idiosyncratic record of what he witnessed. Taken as a whole, the films present an unrivaled survey of how systems operate in our country, with care paid to every line of the organizational chart.

They also represent the work of an artist of extraordinary vision. The films are long, strange and uncompromising. They can be darkly comic, uncomfortably voyeuristic, as surreal as any David Lynch dream sequence. There are no voice-overs, explanatory intertitles or interviews with talking heads, and depending on the sequence and our own sensibility, we may picture the ever-silent Wiseman as a deeply empathetic listener or an icy Martian anthropologist."

read essay by MARK BINELLI 

 

Image

“Titicut Follies,” 1967.Credit...Zipporah Films

 

Rebeldys

CAIO GOMEZ

 

Empresários se preparam para frear fim da jornada 6x1

 

 

"Associações, empresários e frentes parlamentares definiram um plano para tentar frear o fim da jornada de trabalho 6x1 —seis dias de trabalho e um de descanso— com três tipos de abordagem. Eles planejam atuar para que a votação fique para depois da eleição, preparar estudos e campanhas para mostrar os pontos negativos da mudança e apresentar propostas alternativas, como a desoneração da folha de salários ou autorizar o pagamento por hora trabalhada."

leia reportagem de
Raphael Di Cunto
Fernanda Brigatti
 

Empresários se preparam para frear fim da jornada 6x1

When Cruelty Seems Like a Joke

 

 "The Trump administration and its Department of Homeland Security have made frame perversion a signature feature of their social media presence. On Valentine’s Day 2025, the White House posted images of Trump and his border czar, Tom Homan, set against a pink backdrop and paired with a sing-song rhyme: “Roses are red / Violets are blue / Come here illegally / And we’ll deport you.” As Christmas approached later that year, the official ICEgov Instagram account shared an AI-generated image of an “ICE AIR” flight full of deportees pulled through the sky by Santa’s reindeer, captioned: “Avoid ICE AIR and go Ho Ho Home…” In each case, cheerful, familiar holiday imagery provides the setup; state violence supplies the punchline.

The frame perversion pattern reached its most chilling form in another White House post labeled “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.” ASMR—short for “Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response”—usually refers to videos designed to produce calm or pleasure through soft, repetitive sounds. Here, that “soothing” frame was supplied by the hum of jet engines, the metallic rattle of chains pulled from a crate, the click of handcuffs, the quiet clink of leg shackles with each step up the gangway. These sounds are meant to relax the viewer, even as they mark the forcible end of someone’s life as they know it. Frame perversion, in this case, does not merely normalize cruelty. It invites the audience to relax pleasurably within it."

read analysis by Janet McIntosh

 When Cruelty Seems Like a Joke - CounterPunch.org

 

The Nazi Origins of the South American Drug Trade: Klaus Barbie, Cocaine and the CIA

 

 

"By the time Klaus Barbie went on the payroll of an American intelligence organization in 1947, he had lived several lifetimes of human vileness. Barbie sought out opponents of the Nazis in Holland, chasing them down with dogs. He had worked for the Nazi mobile death squads on the Eastern Front, massacring Slavs and Jews. He’d put in two years heading the Gestapo in Lyons, France, torturing to death Jews and French Resistance fighters (among them the head of the Resistance, Jean Moulin). After the liberation of France, Barbie participated in the final Nazi killing frenzy before the Allies moved into Germany.

Yet the career of this heinous war criminal scarcely skipped a beat before he found himself securing entry on the US payroll in postwar Germany. The Barbie was shipped out of Europe by his new paymasters along the “ratline’ to Bolivia. There, he began a new life remarkably similar to his old one: working for the secret police, doing the bidding of drug lords and engaging in arms trafficking across South America. Soon, his old skills as a torturer became in high demand."

read more by Jeffrey St. Clair  

The Nazi Origins of the South American Drug Trade: Klaus Barbie, Cocaine and the CIA - CounterPunch.org

Preces de Carnaval

 

PALAVRAS

 

Meu pai me disse algo quando eu era muito pequeno para me prover de confiança. "Ninguém no mundo vale mais do que você, mas também ninguém vale menos". É uma visão egualitária que tenho carregado pela vida. É por isso que sou a favor do ensino gratuito., de universidades gratuitas, de saúde gratuito e de creches gratuitas. Porque a nossa sociedade pode bancar isso. Nos Estados Unidos, as pessoas acham que democracia social é algum tipo de comunismo. Pensam que capitalismo é liberdade. Não é. É apenas a liberdade de explorar as pessoas. "  

Stellan Skarsgård, ATOR 

 

Willie Colón & Rubén Blades - Plástico

 Era una ciudad de plástico

De esas que no quiero ver
De edificios cancerosos y un corazón de oropel
Donde en vez de un Sol amanece un dólar

Donde nadie ríe, donde nadie llora
Con gente de rostros de poliéster
Que escuchan sin oír y miran sin ver
Gente que vendió por comodidad
Su razón de ser y su libertad

IN MEMORIA WILLIE COLON