MF_COOM

The level of anticommunist bullshit you could just fabricate whole-cloth before the internet was truly on another level. In this obituary we get the following claims/fuckups:

• "Stalker portrayed the Soviet Union as a mass concentration camp" ???????
• she makes up an actor in Stalker who as far as I can tell does not even exist: "Ivan Laptev"
• an assertion that the principal character and whatever character would be played by the fictional actors "represented the country's conscience" and WHO is the country's conscience you might wonder? That's right ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSN!!!! and antinuclear activist Andrei Sakharov
• it was apparently so obvious that these characters represented these two people that the film was banned in the USSR (it wasn't)
• it was based on Picnic on the Road by Stanislaw Lem and came out in 1980 (actually based on Roadside Picnic by The Strugatsky Brothers and came out in 1979).
• because the Strugatsky Brothers wrote such a reactionary script they struggled to find publishers after the release (they continued to publish until Arkady Strugatsky's death)
• similarly, the principal actor Alexander Kaidanovsky couldn't get any more acting work in the Soviet film industry (he continued to work in the Soviet film industry until the collapse of the USSR)

I'll stop here - it's genuinely impressive how densely packed the fantasy is here, an interesting document of how free to lie anticommunist expats were before the internet.

At least one of the cast members is pro- Palestinian activist (Liam Cunningham) which at least makes me hopeful it'll be decent.

To my white surprise the last posted one got taken down, we'll see how long this one lasts

Finally got around to listening to this today on my run. I don't know much about the pod itself it seems pretty lib-coded but they will have Breht on to open up the tank gun on their listeners etc.

Anyhow Jason Hickel is a great explainer in general, and since he's so involved directly in a lot of the research he discusses he has a deep fluency that allows even regular dumdums like me to understand. This is a great overview of the development of China's geopolitical position, and an easy listen - hard recommend.

I hate it when this happens multiple times a week

Apparently this was released yesterday? It's playing at my local theater.

Nominated for Best Documentary Feature this year (which it won't win), it's about the Belgium/US coup of Lumumba in 1960.

The jazz aspect is kind of tangential and mostly just serves to give the film a distinctive propulsive rhythm (though I didn't realize Abbey Lincoln was that cool). Mostly it's about decolonial history.

It's a movie made for us, since in my experience it's principally leftists who are familiar with decolonial history. It's got all the players: , , , , , Sukarno, Nehru, Hammarskjold, Alan Dulles, to the point where I was wondering how a person not already familiar with the history might make sense of it all.

I asked the guy sitting next to me who loved the flick despite not knowing anything about decolonial history, he said there was enough there to help him put it all together.

Anyways, banger flick y'all should check it out.

I relistened to this yesterday while making a kickass borscht and it felt new to me, like I'd never heard it before. It's kind of deep cut Parenti so maybe some of you haven't heard it before either!