PICKS OF THE MONTH
diskurso art magazine's
November 2020 Picks
Published December 3, 2020
Song
>1
NASAAN ANG PANGULO? [Posted on Facebook by Danny Fabella, 24 November 2020]
"Nasaan Ang Pangulo?"
(Posted on Facebook 24 November 2020)
FACEBOOK. That's where Filipino protest songs can find their primary distribution channel inside the Philippines' music ecology. And in this case it's for free, to both distributor and audience! So, it's only natural that the absence of a Wall of Sound in these Facebook-posted folk music performances would be accepted as a part of these works' politics.
Meanwhile, it's true that Facebook has been available to sympathizers of the right, the center, and the left, to truth-tellers (whistleblowers) as well as to misinformation handlers and spin doctors (or farms) from whichever side. But as a whole the platform could now actually be regarded as the existential test for the planet's social and cultural (or sociocultural) systems. Populaces' intelligence and access to education or rounded information might now be placed at the center of all questions concerning all the large-scale psychological manipulations that have occurred on the platform and these manipulations' success rates.
And that's when a protest song like this one by Danny Fabella, with a title in the interrogative, can be treated as an axis for dialogue, debate, and information-seeking instead of for mere claims that would ask you to just believe. While the song may be accused―especially by red-baiting generals (of a government friendly with the Chinese Communist Party, what irony!)―of being part of the exchange of propagandas between the sectors of the political spectrum in the Philippines, its repeated question ("Nasaan ang Pangulo?") does sound like a democratic one sincerely demanding answers (yes, such demands are a part of the democratic engine, indeed are the sort of oil that would keep it running). Though Fabella's question is by itself an accusation, it still merely asks. It asks, even though somewhere it already assumes ("Laging naninisi at nagwawala") that a forthcoming effort to answer the question likely won't.
>2
Public interest advertising video
Rubber Bullets from Royale Film Co. on Vimeo, uploaded 9 November 2020
Rubber Bullets
(Uploaded to Vimeo 9 November 2020 by Royale Film Co.)
ABOUT this short film by Dan Brown, here's what Royale Film Co. had to say:
"Inspired by horrific injuries incurred by protestors in Austin, Texas (including a permanently brain-damaged college student), this spot illustrates exactly the kind of damage rubber bullets can do.
"Based on our long history with the Phantom camera, our friends at Wunderman Thompson reached out to collaborate on this striking and chilling statement. We filmed at 2,000 frames per second to truly highlight what these 'less lethal' rounds are capable of."
>3
Artivist work, social sculpture
Video: Case | METER Group | Meltdown Flags, uploaded later on 1 July 2021 by Serviceplan Group. Photos: Meter Group
Meltdown Flags
(Video produced by Serviceplan, Germany, later uploaded to YouTube by Serviceplan Group on 1 July 2021; project launched with a teaser video by Meter Group, early November 2020)
THE press release from Meter Group and Serviceplan states: "The flags of Argentina, Austria, Canada, Chile, France, Greenland, Iceland, India, Iran, Italy, Mexico, Norway, Pakistan, Peru, Russia, USA and Uzbekistan, all countries with glaciers, have been converted into ‘Meltdown Flags’, with the white areas in each flag reduced according to the historical data. Glacier projects for each country were collected from METER, UNESCO, NASA and the Universities of Zurich and Innsbruck."
>4
Cultural conference
(Launched 3 November 2020 online by The Open University)
WE didn't participate in this conference. The deepest part we ever got to was among the abstracts on the talks by the conference's various speakers (read these abstracts yourself in this pdf file). At least we can say that although we missed listening to the talks, we got to reading the abstracts on these, get it? instead of just swooning at the idea of the conference, like one's swooning at the appearance of someone's bookshelf in a Zoom meeting.
We're saluting this conference organized by The Open University if only for its overall desire to get at more academic (or deeper) takes on the context of bookshelves' sudden renewed popularity in this "age of the COVID-19 pandemic." If for nothing else, it's definitely something to emulate. But, again, at least read this conference's speakers' abstracts before you organize a similar one or improve on it. Unless you're just interested in the organizing of it and actually hate reading.
>5
Documentary film
Crazy, Not Insane
(Released on HBO Max 18 November 2020)
THE stories of pioneers are often magnetic to conservatives, unless they're the kind that founded something despicable to them in their hatred for, say, a certain race or people in a certain economic status; the latter sort of stories would be magnetic to them in a different way.
Crazy, Not Insane, a documentary assembled by producer-director Alex Gibney, portrays the struggle of Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis in the world of psychiatry and forensic psychiatry against such views as those espoused by Park Dietz and critics of the concept of dissociative identity disorder. Her espousal of the merits of DID identification has been ridiculed not a few times by rightist thoughts on criminal justice.
Lewis' research into the psychiatry of murders and how this has conflicted with the law and jurisprudence could be paraphrased in this statement she made in the film: "The law has a lot to learn from psychiatry. And, instead, psychiatry accepts the legal definition of what's crazy and what isn't crazy."
A critic of capital punishment, Lewis had this exchange with the reductionist conservative Bill O'Reilly on Fox News:
O'Reilly: "Anybody who pulls a trigger and squeezes a life out of somebody for the calculated reason of starting a race war where other people would be killed is evil."
Lewis: "Evil is a religious concept, it's not a scientific concept. And what society wants to do with a person like that is up to society, but it at least helps to know what motivates a serial killer or what motivates a . . ."
O'Reilly: "Right. Hatred. That's what's motivating it."
Lewis: "Well, it's more than that. There's much more than that."
Public defender Richard Burr (not to be confused with the alt-right Republican senator), a supporter of Lewis' thesis, had this to say about the death penalty in the film interview with him:
"In the Middle Ages in England, they had the death penalty. And the legal system had the view that if somebody had become mad, that madness itself was enough punishment. That's part of the English common law that came with the English colonists to North America. At some point, though, in death penalty cases in the United States, that notion got lost, that madness was punishment enough. And people could be executed despite being very psychotic. And as late as the 1950s, the US Supreme Court had examined a case like that and said that that doesn't offend the Constitution. It's not cruel and unusual to do that."
Let's continue this brief essay of ours with more quotes from Lewis:
"You're competent to be executed if you know what you've been found guilty of and if you know what it is to be executed. Now, that's a pretty low bar, wouldn't you say? . . . By and large, the law has taken on the very simple-minded criterion that ignored all that we know now about how the human brain works, about some of the genetics of disorders. . . . When (Bill) Clinton was running for president, he was called back to Arkansas to sign a death warrant because he was governor. Apparently, Ricky Ray was used to having his dinner at a certain time and saving the dessert for later, and he saved his pecan pie for after the execution. Now, I would say he didn't know what it meant to be executed. But my colleagues found him perfectly competent to be executed. And I don't know who ate the pie."
To hear/read all those and say that Lewis is for moving all death row inmates to mental institutions instead of remaining in regular prison is to miss the fact that Lewis did oppose the freeing of one such inmate, knowing that he was "crazy" enough to commit another murder. One cannot simple-mindedly reduce, again, however one may fancily articulate it, someone's resistance to the death penalty to an advocacy for freeing murderers. In fact, Lewis said this about that issue: "I am haunted by the prospect of condemning to death a person whose upbringing and brain function have made it hard, if not impossible, for him to control his acts. Granted, the person may be a menace. I have no problem locking him up and throwing away the key. Until we know how to treat such individuals, the public must be protected!"
Remember all those, Manny Pacquiao.
>6
Satirical music piece
Kenneth Copeland goes METAL! [HA HA HA remix]. Music by Andre Antunes; video uploaded 22 November 2020 by Andre Antunes
Kenneth Copeland goes METAL! [HA HA HA remix]
(Video uploaded 22 November 2020 by Andre Antunes)
CONTROVERSIAL American Pentecostal televangelist and faith healer Kenneth Copeland, identified as a preacher of prosperity theology within the charismatic movement in the United States, is also well-known as a US Republican Party-leaning and multi-airplane-owning pastor and conspiracy theorist, most recently as a Donald Trump-supporting COVID-19 conspiracy theorist.
That ha-ha-ha moment with him that was videoed and uploaded to the Internet went viral fast, and that contrived laughter of his was supposed to be his code for satirizing the US networks' calling the 2020 US presidential election for Joe Biden. To him the calls were not credible and worth laughing at, a mere joke. Guess that made him the joke on the Web, and this video by YouTube electric guitar performer Andre Antunes heavily counter-satirizes Copeland's uncomfortable satire with a prog musical one. A heavy counter-satire this one is, truly, for it's also been said . . . that heavy metal music is the medium of Satan. Hahahahaha!
(Go to Antunes' YT channel for more of these musical takes on ghost facts-inspired scream-memes from the purportedly Holy Spirit-driven "Christian" Right.)
>7
Documentary film
I Am Greta
(November 2020 theatrical releases: Italy, 2 November 2020; Mexico, 5 November 2020; USA, 8 November 2020 [Hawaii Film Festival]; France, 13 November 2020; Sweden, 15 November 2020 [Stockholm International Film Festival]; Sweden, 20 November 2020; Norway, 22 November 2020; Russia, 22 November 2020; Denmark, 26 November 2020. November 2020 streaming releases: USA, 13 November 2020; Germany, 14 November 2020 [ARD media library]; Canada, 16 November 2020. TV release: Germany, 16 November 2020 [Das Erste]. Upcoming streaming release: Spain, 3 December 2020)
GRETA Thunberg had been diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome and was bullied in school for being "weird." She turned to reading at home and having her own family for friends. It's no surprise, then, that she would today own all this focused knowledge about global warming and the current climate crisis, qualifying her in the process as a legit teen activist for the environmental futurist cause. Well, okay, she can also recite the table of the elements.
The isolation is all behind her now, now that every kid out there wants her to be their friend. Because she's now the representative voice of unheard young people fearful of an oncoming grim future and who want to scream, like her, "If you choose to fail us we will never forgive you!"
While being emotional is a disadvantage to those who are dedicating themselves to activism and politics, Thunberg has surprisingly carried it to her advantage. Because it is, after all, the emotions of the young, their fears and frustrations, that now have to carry the climate change argument forward, if scientists' stoic learned words are not tolling the alarm bells enough to lead politicians to scurry for drastic solutions now. Now rather than later.
This documentary by Nathan Grossman, with writing by Hanna Lejonqvist (story consultant), Per K. Kirkegaard (story consultant), Olof Berglind (story editor) and Thomas Jackson (development) based on an idea and concept by Peter Modestij, debunks the opinion that avers Thunberg is just a robot being used by her activist parents. It almost seems that her parents were not much into this activism thing before she became much of one. Her father helps her with her speeches, but most of the time she can be hard-headed about the words and sentences she would like to use, and her father can't do much but let her have her way. After all, she's the star now. Sometimes, however, the father has to put his foot forward in insisting she eat now. Now rather than later.
It's quite a revelation of Thunberg's character that she's aware of how she is being used by some government people for all the lip service around solutions to the progressing climate crisis. And how she addresses that use in public halls in front of leaders themselves without batting an eyelash is a triumph that non-Asperger's-suffering activists would envy.
This is a must-watch film on where we are now, and where we'll soon be, on this thing. How governments reacted to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic should be an indication of they will approach an oncoming water crisis, for instance.
Now, who will forgive them when the unmanageable time comes? For it is no less than certain now that this time will.
>8
Documentary film
City Hall
(Streaming release: USA, 28 October 2020; USA, 29 October 2020 [virtual cinema during the Philadelphia International Film Festival]; Czech Republic, 31 October 2020 [virtual cinema during the Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival]; Canada, 12 November 2020 [virtual cinema during the Montreal International Documentary Festival]; Netherlands, 20 November 2020 [virtual cinema during the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam])
WE got to preview this 2020 film, but we don't know yet how the rest of you, our countrymen here in the Philippines, can access this documentary work (as of this writing it's not available on either Amazon Prime or YouTube Movies). But somehow it'll find its way to you somewhere soon, so we wish you'd just put this on your wishlist.
This new project by nonagenarian Frederick Wiseman is 272 minutes long, does not have a standard narrative arc, and doesn't contain interviews. Still, even as it merely follows the folks at Boston's City Hall under the mayoralty of Marty Walsh as his government's people go about their daily business of trying to solve problems to do with racial justice, housing, climate change, and so on, it's quite magnetic. It's magnetic for the simple reason that it gives us a lengthy cinéma vérité picture of how some things in the planet's governments are a far cry, as well as a breather, from those that MSNBC or CNN would try to make sense of daily (whether it's a new tweet by Donald Trump or a new White House policy action) or from those that Fox News would make such an effort to defend. Even more of a far cry, to us Filipinos, from those that would be communicated by, say, the spokesmen and defenders of the "Mayor of the Philippines".
>9
Television documentary film
Kiss the Ground
(Released 26 October 2020 on Netflix Philippines)
PRODUCED by supermodel, activist and businesswoman Gisele Bündchen, Kiss the Ground is an argument for regenerative agriculture via the able lens and dramaturgy of Josh Tickell and Rebecca Tickell, and it's on influential Netflix! To clarify what we mean by that phrase "offering the film as an argument," let it be known that regenerative agriculture is still a controversial approach within the climate change scientific community, at least as regards its claims about carbon dioxide reduction. Probably also because there's the fear within that community that the regeneration argument would be used by the oil and gas industry as an excuse to go on with the unabated extraction of fossil fuel, although we have yet to see an oil drilling company investing heavily in reforestation, regenerative farming, and desertification reversal.
The part where the environmentalist community would not have any beef against regenerative agriculture, however, might be in the area of soil rehabilitation and desertification reversal. So, perhaps we can begin there?
But it must also be known that the criticism around the issue of regenerative agriculture is not going in one direction only. Mainstream climate change activism is in fact also getting a flak from the regenerative movement for being wrongly focused on carbon emission reduction solely, without putting a premium on that other necessary thing: drawdown. Drawdown is where regeneration comes in heavily. . . . Now, sadly, there's another antagonist to regeneration's efforts, for it seems that the movement's formula has been identified by the pesticides industry of the US, China and India as requiring substantial losses from their niche, and it would seem that it was largely on that demand for sacrifice that these three countries decided to beg off from the Paris Agreement, among other lesser reasons.
Starring the farmers and activists behind the regenerative movement, Kiss the Ground conscripted Woody Harrelson to man the narrator's (moderator's) mike and, to boot, an original song from singer-songwriter and agroforestry farmer Jason Mraz (who also gets to speak about his farm in the film).
To answer some questions about the message of the film, here's the Kiss the Ground world premiere Q&A panel video by the Kiss the Ground account on YouTube, saved after that Q&A's live airing on 23 September:
>10
Street art campaign, artivist works
Above: fight hatred with food, posted on Facebook by 9GAG, 25 November 2020. Below: uncaptioned Facebook post with same message posted by Cibo, 25 November 2020
fight hatred with food
(Facebook posts by 9GAG and Cibo, both 25 November 2020)
THESE dual Facebook posts from 9GAG and Cibo on Cibo's contribution to European political art doesn't need an essay. Let's just say that people from different sides of the political spectrum do indeed agree with each other often when the conversation turns to food, especially perhaps as such a movement as rightism is often if not always just a product of bad economics, and, in many cases, intermittent hunger.
>11
Film
Synchronic
(Released for streaming 21 November 2020)
THIS sci fi film written by Justin Benson and co-directed by Benson and Aaron Moorhead definitely has a unique time-travel concept that allows the narrative to visit the racist horrors of the United States' past and then congratulate the progress around that issue in the present.
The progress in the present? Well, yes. It does it by actually exclusively harping on this, seemingly aware of the fact that the aforementioned past's having visited the present as the American Trump era (with the old-new American psyche rampant in it) in some parts of the country needs no further coverage, indeed.
In short, in the Trump era of outright white supremacism, here's a film that stops short of complaining, instead found a way of celebrating something. It does it not through some white man's newfound awakening in the narrative, as in Green Book, but through a friendship that has been there from the start. A history within history, then, in synchronicity.
>12
Film
His House
(Launched by Netflix 30 October 2020)
KUDOS to director-writer Remi Weekes for successfully creating this horror-cum-thriller film for political cinema, thanks of course to the story developed by writers Felicity Evans and Toby Venables, as well as to the restrained primary acting dished out by Wunmi Mosaku, Sope Dìrísù, and Matt Smith supported by actors Javier Botet, Cornell John, and Emily Taaffe.
It's important to know how political as well as anthropological this story is in order to avoid castigating it for having a somewhat loophole-ridden horror film plot development. The major complaint I'm referring to has to do with the refugee couple (Mosaku and Dirisu) who goes through all this harrowing experience inside a haunted house assigned to them by the UK government, but who in certain rest moments would also be found in these same recently horror-filled rooms as if nothing previous had happened there. Worse, the couple doesn't really make it a point to hurry on and ask the authorities to move them after these nights of trembles. Even when Bol (Dirisu) does so, failing to convince the authorities of the sanity of their situation, he doesn't get panicked by the probability of an oncoming next horror night.
After a minute or so, of course, we realize that this is a story merely in the guise of a horror film, and is actually, more seriously, a psychological film trying to enter the psyche of traumatized individuals who just underwent more realistic horrors in South Sudan and in their journey out of it. Add to that, of course, all the beliefs, superstitious or religious, that would impact, or haunt, these psyches in their dreams and daydreams.
The amazing resolution of the film is in the male protagonist's articulation of the story's thesis, to the effect that it's not only our past environ but our deeds as well (during an escape, for example) that will be there to forever haunt us, that what there is to do is to stoically or bravely embrace the terrors of these as an eternal part of who we are now, in the present, wherever we go. This identity shall forever be our house, then, and all we need to do is build anew from inside it, especially as trying to escape the past will only further if not extend the terrifying effects of it.
>13
Print ad series
Two of the ads in Colégio Nova Dimensão's Save everything print ad series created by EBM Quintto, Brazil
Save everything
(Launched November 2020 by Colégio Nova Dimensão and EBM Quintto, Brazil)
>14
Music album
Good News
(Released 20 November 2020, 300 Entertainment)
"BLACK women are still constantly disrespected and disregarded in so many areas of life. I was recently the victim of an act of violence by a man. After a party, I was shot twice as I walked away from him. We were not in a relationship. Truthfully, I was shocked that I ended up in that place," wrote Megan Thee Stallion in a The New York Times op-ed. She was talking about the story behind Good News' opening track, "Shots Fired." But, fortunately, unlike Tory Lanez's album of songs about MTS's accusation against him, not everything in her 2020 collection is about it.
Pitchfork: "Amid a pandemic, and while recovering from a gunshot wound, the superstar rapper made an album that purposefully celebrates life. Her beats are playful, and her rapping is as sharp as ever."
Exclaim!: "Even with some slight shortcomings, Megan's reclamation of tragedy is refreshing. In a year where any good news has been hard to find, the bar-busting Texan, full of raw charisma and energy, is every bit of good news."
Slant Magazine: "A high-octane, heavy-hitting rejoinder that rearticulates the headlines of a year fraught by global and personal trauma for the Houston rapper."
Clash: "Raw and ruthless, Good News is the sound of Megan Thee Stallion pushing against the boundaries imposed on her until they break."
NME: "On her debut, the 25-year-old combines West Coast samples with the Southern sounds of her youth. The message: she's staying sunny, despite her setbacks."
>15
Music album
Positions
(Released 30 October 2020, Republic Records)
LIPSTICK feminism in pop music today in the strongest terms, underpinning Ariana Grande's left-leaning position.
Centennialbeauty.com agrees: "Directed by Dave Meyers, the ‘Positions’ music video is filled with feminist Easter eggs symbolising Ari’s left-leaning political views. From cooking pasta in her kitchen to leading the country as the President of the United States, the singer’s message is clear: No matter what role Ari chooses for herself, being a woman is her most powerful position of all."
The Line of Best Fit: "Positions is Ariana Grande’s most carefree, playful, and mature work to date."
The Observer: "With her pleasure-seeking hubris leaving little to the imagination, perhaps it’s unsurprising that the production plays it fairly safe: Grande falls comfortably back on '90s-indebted, trap-speckled R&B, her voice breathy and gleaming."
Pitchfork: "Her third album in two years searches for peace, tracing the quiet work of piecing yourself together and delighting in giddy new romance at the same time."
Entertainment Weekly: "It might not make for her most arresting album nor her most dramatic, but it’s certainly her most sensuous."
>16
Music album
DISCO
(Released 6 November 2020, BMG)
ASIDE from English Dua Lipa's, Irish Róisín Murphy's, and Londoner Georgia's 2020 disco releases, there was Kylie Minogue's parallel call from Down Under for the resurrection of old times, and in all caps at that! In our era, this―outside of its libertine or otherwise pandemic-fitness contexts―in fact also functions as a sort of timely rebellious rally against the racist and homophobic forces that in the '80s organized the anti-disco movement that presently continues to live on 4chan.