Things I Read Today

I haven’t used the blogging feature on this site to do actual blogging in ages — since I converted the purpose of the site to host my comics and promote my illustration work. But I’ve been feeling the bug to blog a little. Microblogging on social media can feel like too much brain farting. And right now I want to record some of the things I have read today without just reflexively hitting the share button. So here goes in no particular order.:

How Hollywood Lets Real Fascists Off The Hook — Noah Berlatsky.
“Fascism on screen is horrible because it’s all-encompassing. But fascism in practice is often horrible because it picks its vulnerable targets with care. Officers with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement harass people, hunt them, incarcerate them, and deport them for small infractions, or even for none. By most measures, an arbitrary police force whose goal is to target and torment a particular community is clearly dystopian. But Hollywood has taught us that dystopias involve prison camps for everyone. When the camps house only immigrants, it’s easier to ignore them, or to say that those who are suffering deserve it.”

Books That Mattered The Most to David Bowie — Chris O’leary.
“Though he once joked that he’d only read the book jacket of Nietzsche’s ode to the overman, Bowie was being modest. Zarathustra would be central to shaping Bowie’s work in the late 1960s and early 1970s—he’d quarry images from it for songs including ‘All the Madmen,’ ‘The Supermen,’ ‘Quicksand,’ and ‘Ashes to Ashes.'”

How Generations of Black Women Have Fought Incarceration — Joshunda Sanders.
“I’ve noticed that people take the word “bound” very literally, but I mean it as a double entendre. There are no images of Black women [being] constrained in the book. It’s not my aim or intention to constrain these women. Their lives and experiences have given me hope, [and] I in no way want to reinscribe constraint on them. Another definition for bound is to spring forth and resist, and people like Grace Jones and Eartha Kitt were constrained by the entertainment industry [but] continued to defy it.”