meat beat manifesto - asbestos lead asbestos
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killer industrial / trip-hop pop tune from the mid-eighties, easily one of the top 5 best party tunes about a carcinogenic insulation material.
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"asbestos lead asbestos" is from the same time period as the Watchmen. What's more, both effortlessly candy-coat extremely dense material and grim social commentary in a brightly-colored populist shell. Bros and I saw the film opening night at battery park cinema, a destination recommended for its lack of crowds and proximity to the splendors of late-night financial district wastelands and dizzying urban neon schemes. some notes:
1. "the time is short." - watchmen takes place "five minutes to midnight," that is, in the shadow of an imminent Cold War apocalypse. In part it's about what the right thing to do is when time is running out. The first text to deal with the ethics and politics of running out of time? Saint Paul's letters.
2. the god left behind - watchmen also has two theological intensities. Dr. Manhattan is the American God, but he is an abandoned God, left-behind twice. Silk Spectre leaves him for Nite Owl, but moreover, Manhattan is a God alone in the universe, alone because he is alienated from the earth, the realm of material things and human concerns. This resolves one long-standing theological problem: why did God create the world in the first place? The answer: because, as every Bowie fan knows, it's lonely out in space.
3. the satanic christ - Ozymandias turns the Messianic event into a pure spectacle. There's a Guy Debord reading here if you want to go there - revolution as total image. Like the abandoned God, Ozymandias the satanic-christ or the capitalist-revolutionary is a brilliant dialectical formulation by alan moore. Ozymandias' plan is to save the world by destroying a part of it. The change that the film makes to the ending only further Christianizes the structure of his plan, even more tightly inverting the logic of fulfillment/sublation (aufhebung) that governs Jesus' crucifixion. Jesus on the cross represents the end of the law (nomos) because as he is punished as a criminal, he who is the most pure becomes the most impure - a parallel image to the inversion of Dr. Manhattan, America's savior, into the enemy of the whole world. Also millions are sacrificed for the sake of world peace - a demonically Hegelian twist.
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