“Most filmmakers are concerned with storytelling— the emotional impact of a tale well told. And perhaps the moral statement within aforesaid. The filmmaker of the Bressonian/Tarkovskian type, however, seems to me to be more concerned with duplicating for the viewer, onscreen, the artistic sensations they themselves receive daily by life’s input. A walk down a street, across a field, five minutes staring at an discarded old paper cup on an abandoned contry road, a conversation with mother, etc, impacts them in a way that has, since they were young, prompted within them an urge to create… create a means of passing that experience along. They have the urge to propagate, to procreate— they feel the life process in a fashion that they know (or believe) is unlike that of their neighbor.. and their art is their method of explaining why they are the way they are, trying to express the best they can—by duplicating— what it is they are experiencing that excites them so, what it is that they think that they have within them that is a valuable currency, that by their obvious self-posession they’re not just pompous or mad dreamers lost on a tangent.”
(Source: thegreendiamond)
ADRIAN SCHOOLCRAFT: A GENUINE “AMERICAN HERO”
Wiki:
Adrian Schoolcraft is a suspended New York Police Department officer who in May 2010 released secretly recorded tapes to The Village Voice. Schoolcraft alleges that these tapes show corruptionwithin New York City’s 81st Police Precinct.[1][2][3] The recordings were later published as a series of articles entitled “The NYPD Tapes”,[4] and led to allegations that “commanders at the 81st Precinct pushed ticket and arrest quotas on officers.”[1]
The five-part Village Voice series on the tapes is essential reading:
Two years ago, a police officer in a Brooklyn precinct became gravely concerned about how the public was being served. To document his concerns, he began carrying around a digital sound recorder, secretly recording his colleagues and superiors.
He recorded precinct roll calls. He recorded his precinct commander and other supervisors. He recorded street encounters. He recorded small talk and stationhouse banter. In all, he surreptitiously collected hundreds of hours of cops talking about their jobs.
Made without the knowledge or approval of the NYPD, the tapes—made between June 1, 2008, and October 31, 2009, in the 81st Precinct in Bedford-Stuyvesant and obtained exclusively by the Voice—provide an unprecedented portrait of what it’s like to work as a cop in this city.
They reveal that precinct bosses threaten street cops if they don’t make their quotas of arrests and stop-and-frisks, but also tell them not to take certain robbery reports in order to manipulate crime statistics. The tapes also refer to command officers calling crime victims directly to intimidate them about their complaints.
As a result, the tapes show, the rank-and-file NYPD street cop experiences enormous pressure in a strange catch-22: He or she is expected to maintain high “activity”—including stop-and-frisks—but, paradoxically, to record fewer actual crimes.
This pressure was accompanied by paranoia—from the precinct commander to the lieutenants to the sergeants to the line officers—of violating any of the seemingly endless bureaucratic rules and regulations that would bring in outside supervision.
Read More:
Or listen to Schoolcraft’s story on This American Life.
David Axelrod - “Holy Thursday”
One of the greatest songs ever recorded. Listen to it, or risk dying a particularly slow and painful death.
What amazes me most whenever I write about this topic is recalling how terribly upset so many Democrats pretended to be when Bush claimed the power merely to detain or even just eavesdrop on American citizens without due process. Remember all that? Yet now, here’s Obama claiming the power not to detain or eavesdrop on citizens without due process, but to kill them; marvel at how the hardest-core White House loyalists now celebrate this and uncritically accept the same justifying rationale used by Bush/Cheney (this is war! the President says he was a Terrorist!) without even a moment of acknowledgment of the profound inconsistency or the deeply troubling implications of having a President — even Barack Obama — vested with the power to target U.S. citizens for murder with no due process.
- Glenn Greenwald (cont’d)
