‘I wanted “Song to the Siren,” by This Mortal Coil, for the film, and I wanted that song, I wanted it, and I told Fred, “You fucking get that thing, man,” and Fred said, “David, there are a bunch of problems,” and it was mainly money—money, money, money. So Fred said, “David, you're always writing little things on paper; why don't you send Angelo some lyrics and he can write a song.” I said, “Fred, first of all, there are twenty-seven zillion songs in the world. I don't want one of them. I want this song. I want ‘Song to the Siren' by This Mortal Coil. I don't think I'm gonna write things on a little piece of paper and send them to this guy I hardly know, and he's gonna write something that will top what I want. Not in a million years. Get real, Fred.”
Made me laugh quite a bit. Not too much in the way of any real insight, just funny little stories which is enough for a thumb through.
‘If the garbage in their voices could be scraped away, maybe they're intelligent or draw less stupid pictures or are prettier or something great that some vindictive, lesser mortals have so teased or criticized into seclusion that they're only true when fighting one another for attention with a font's cache of modifiers as their weaponry.
Maybe when they're not online, they shadow colleges' or high schools' walls. Maybe they're goths or emos who have gussied up life's hellishness into a daily Halloween. Maybe their trendiness solved people's meanness into an issue of conflicting tastes in fashion, which hurts less but makes it extremely difficult for them to make close friends.
Maybe they write poetry about their feelings and read that to one another while imagining their listeners are attachés or scouts from lyrically impaired but otherwise amazing bands. Maybe no one actually listens, they just wait their turn to read, and vice versa, so they don't know why they feel comfortable yet miserably alone when they're together.
Maybe they grew bold enough one day to post their poems on websites set aside for gloomy, unsophisticated artists and admirers of incompetent, cathartic art. Maybe they grew confident enough to stop pretending their scribbles were poetry instead of suicidal scrawls they might have chickened out and torn in shreds were not the Internet a wildly more rewarding trash can.
Maybe someone loved them once or twice, or said they did, which they no more believed than actors buy the love of fans that only know them when their feelings are impersonations. So, love got lost, and now that they're so doomed, or wish they were, they know that mutual addiction will have to do, and they're trying to addict someone right now.'
“And now we dedicate him to the war god, to Night-and-Wind, the Lord, the Youth, Honored Enemy, He-whose-slaves-we-are, Tezcatl-Ihpocal. We hope he will have a long life. Perhaps our Lord will support him for a little while. We leave him to become a warrior. There he will live at the place that is the house of penance, the house of lamentation, the house of tears, the house for youths, where warriors, eagles, and jaguars live and become men. There people serve our lord.”
“Every fucking one that died, I say, “__, here's one for you, baby. I'll take this motherfucker out and I'm going to cut his fucking heart out for you.”
“Would god my passion drove me to slaughter you and eat you raw....”
‘The story spread by Suharto hits on some of the darkest fears and prejudices held by Indonesians, and indeed men in general—around the world. A surprise night raid on your home. Slow torture with blades. The inversion of gender roles, the literal assault on strong men's reproductive organs carried out by demonic, sexually depraved communist women. It's the stuff of a well-written, reactionary horror film, and few people believe Suharto came up with it himself.
The similarities with the Brazilian legend of the Intentona Comunista are striking. Just a year after a coup in the most important nation in Latin America was inspired partly by a legend about communist soldiers stabbing generals to death in their sleep, General Suharto tells the most important nation in Southeast Asia that communists and left-wing soldiers whisked generals away from their homes in the dead of night to be murdered slowly with knives, and then both Washington-aligned anticommunist military dictatorships celebrated the anniversary of those rebellions in very much the same way for decades.
Historian Bradley Simpson at the National Security Archives in Washington, DC, notes, “Though we lack access to many of the classified US and British materials, it is highly likely that a key element of US and British covert operations in this period involved the creation of ‘black' propaganda inside Indonesia,” with the goal of demonizing the PKI.
There are many ways Suharto's propaganda team could have taken “inspiration” from Brazilian anticommunist legend. Maybe some US official handed Suharto the idea or helped craft his narrative for him. Thousands of Brazilian and Indonesian military officers studied at Leavenworth over the same period of time, and maybe someone talked about the Intentona there. Perhaps Indonesian officials simply grabbed at, and hyper-amplified, anticommunist tropes that were floating out there in the global consciousness, in the international anticommunist movement that was already large, well-organized, and interconnected. By then, there was already the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, made up largely of far-right Eastern Europeans; there was the Asian People's Anticommunist League, a kind of counter-Bandung group led by Taiwan and South Korea; and there was the Mexican-led Inter-American Confederation for the Defense of the Continent. Because of the intervention of a Brazilian anticommunist, all three groups had met in Mexico City in 1958, and had stayed in contact afterward. Even regular North Americans knew about those old, absurd references to “reds under the bed.” Or perhaps it's just a coincidence.'
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‘It wasn't only US government officials who handed over kill lists to the Army. Managers of US-owned plantations furnished them with the names of “troublesome” communists and union organizers, who were then murdered.
The prime responsibility for the massacres and concentration camps lies with the Indonesian military. We still do not know if the method employed—disappearance and mass extermination—was planned well before October 1965, perhaps inspired by other cases around the world, or planned under foreign direction, or if it emerged as a solution as events unfolded. But Washington shares guilt for every death. The United States was part and parcel of the operation at every stage, starting well before the killing started, until the last body dropped and the last political prisoner emerged from jail, decades later, tortured, scarred, and bewildered. At several points that we know of—and perhaps some we don't—Washington was the prime mover, and provided crucial pressure for the operation to move forward or expand.
US strategy since the 1950s had been to try to find a way to destroy the Indonesian Communist Party, not because it was seizing power undemocratically, but because it was popular. In line with Frank Wisner's early strategy of covert direct confrontation, the US government launched secret attacks and murdered civilians in 1958 in the attempt to break up the country, and failed. So American officials adopted Howard Jones's more subtle on-the-ground insights, turning to a strategy of building deep connections with the Armed Forces and building an anticommunist military state within a state. John F. Kennedy's active engagement with the Third World and especially its military, under the guidance of Modernization Theory, provided the structure to expand the power of this operation in Indonesia. When Washington parted ways with Jones and his strategy of working directly with Sukarno, it instructed its secret and not-so-secret agents to destabilize the country and create conflict. When the conflict came, and when the opportunity arose, the US government helped spread the propaganda that made the killing possible, and engaged in constant conversations with the Army to make sure the military officers had everything they needed, from weapons to kill lists. The US embassy constantly prodded the military to adopt a stronger position and take over the government, knowing full well that the method being employed to make this possible was to round up hundreds of thousands of people around the country, stab or strangle them, and throw their corpses into rivers. The Indonesian military officers understood very well that the more people they killed, the weaker the left would be, and the happier Washington would be.'
‘It was both survival strategy and ritual self-sacrifice: powerless souls hacking themselves to pieces-‘
“If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating.
Both of you are great light borrowers.
Her O-mouth grieves at the world; yours is unaffected,
And your first gift is making stone out of everything.
I wake to a mausoleum; you are here,
Ticking your fingers on the marble table,
looking for cigarettes,
Spiteful as a woman, but not so nervous
And dying to say something unanswerable.
The moon, too, abases her subjects,
But in the daytime she is ridiculous.
Your dissatisfactions, on the other hand,
Arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity,
White and blank, expansive as carbon monoxide.
No day is safe from news of you,
Walking about in Africa maybe, but thinking of me.”
“No,” I said. But no, not in the context of that's really messed up and just wrong on an ethical basis. I said no because it wasn't my kill. You shouldn't take trophies for things you didn't kill.
“Objects were rolling out of the galley, the aisles were full of drinking glasses, utensils, coats and blankets. A stewardess pinned to the bulkhead by the sharp angle of descent was trying to find the relevant passage in a handbook titled “Manual of Disasters.” Then there was a second male voice from the flight deck, this one remarkably calm and precise, making the passengers believe there was someone in charge after all, an element of hope: “This is American two-one-three to the cockpit voice recorder. Now we know what it's like. It is worse than we'd ever imagined. They didn't prepare us for this at the death simulator in Denver. Our fear is pure, so totally stripped of distractions and pressures as to be a form of transcendental meditation. In less than three minutes we will touch down, so to speak. They will find our bodies in some smoking field, strewn about in the grisly attitudes of death. I love you, Lance.” This time there was a brief pause before the mass wailing recommenced. Lance? What kind of people were in control of this aircraft? The crying took on a bitter and disillusioned tone.” lol
‘He came off a great ride and landed hard on his feet with his right knee sharply flexed, tore the ligaments and damaged cartilage. He was a fast healer but it put him out for the summer. When he was off the crutches, bored and limping around on a cane, he thought about Redsled. The doctor said the hot springs might be a good idea. He picked up a night ride with Tee Dove, a Texas bullrider, the big car slingshot at the black hump of range, dazzle of morning an hour behind the rim, not a dozen words exchanged.
“It's a bone game,” Tee Dove said and Diamond thought he meant injuries, nodded.'
“Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for Him at all, Christ has come uninvited. But because He cannot be at home in it, because He is out of place in it, and yet He must be in it, His place is with those others for whom there is no room. His place is with those who do not belong, who are rejected by power because they are regarded as weak, those who are discredited, who are denied the status of persons, tortured, exterminated. With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in this world. He is mysteriously present in those for whom there seems to be nothing but the world at its worst.”
Starts off interesting, albeit labored. Quickly dissolves into trite garbage and the projections of the author. Straw Dogs is a better version of this, although still painfully reductive and generalizing. But it carries the merit of not being nearly as delusional, masculine, and so terribly entrenched in norms held up as nature and western boug ennui and ego, this one takes the cake in all those regards.
‘Horselover Fat's nervous breakdown began the day he got the phonecall from Gloria asking if he had any Nembutals. He asked her why she wanted them and she said that she intended to kill herself. She was calling everyone she knew. By now she had fifty of them, but she needed thirty or forty more, to be on the safe side.
At once Horselover Fat leaped to the conclusion that this was her way of asking for help. It had been Fat's delusion for years that he could help people. His psychiatrist once told him that to get well he would have to do two things: get off dope (which he hadn't done) and to stop trying to help people (he still tried to help people).
As a matter of fact, he had no Nembutals. He had no sleeping pills of any sort. He never did sleeping pills. He did uppers. So giving Gloria sleeping pills by which she could kill herself was beyond his power. Anyhow, he wouldn't have done it if he could.
“I have ten,” he said. Because if he told her the truth she would hang up.'
“Your death is necessary not because you yourself are opposed to anything, or in favor of anything, but simply because people have to keep dying in order to make clear that opposition to those in power is neither practical nor even thinkable. Your death is necessary as a kind of exorcism of the abstract specter of opposition in the minds of leaders whose dishonesty makes them well enough aware that they ought to be opposed. Two thousand years ago the death of a Christian martyr was a supreme affirmation not only of faith, but of liberty. The Christian proved by martyrdom that he had reached a degree of independence in which it no longer mattered to him whether he lived on earth and that it was not necessary for him to save his life by paying official religious homage to the emperor. He was beyond life and death. He had attained to a condition in which all things were “one��� and equal to him. Cela lui était égal.”
“Why doesn't anybody question how difficult it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven? That's unquestionable. Comandante, from the theological point of view, it doesn't mean that Jesus discriminated against the rich; it means that Jesus opted for the poor. That is, in a society characterized by social inequalities, God decided to assume the likeness of Jesus; he could have been born in Rome, to a family of emperors; he could have been born to a Jewish landowner's family; he could have been born to the middle strata of parishioners. Instead, he chose to be born among the poor, as the son of a carpenter — one who certainly worked on the construction of the Brasília of his time, the city of Tiberias, built as a tribute to Emperor Tiberius Caesar in whose reign Jesus lived. It's interesting that Tiberias is on the banks of the Lake of Gennesaret, where Jesus spent most of his life and carried out most of his activities. In the Gospels, he doesn't visit that city even once.
So, what do we say? We say that Jesus unconditionally opted for the poor. He spoke to everyone, both rich and poor, but from a specific social stand, from the social stand of the interests of the poor. He didn't speak in a neutral, universalist, abstract way; rather, he reflected the interests of the oppressed strata of the times.”
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“Our people were inspired by their hatred of torture and crime; how could we possibly have set an example of torture and crime for our soldiers? It would have had a demoralizing effect. Those who don't understand that morale is a fundamental factor in a revolution are lost, defeated. Values and morale are humanity's spiritual weapons. As you know, regardless of their beliefs, we don't inspire a revolutionary fighter with the idea that they'll be rewarded in the next world or will be eternally happy if they die. Those fighters were ready to die — even those who were nonbelievers — because there were values for which they believed it was worth giving their lives, even though their lives were all they had. How can you get a person to do this if not on the basis of specific values, and how could you possibly stain and destroy those values?”