extract from a g**d book

...The attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. were organized as epic horror cinema with meticulous attention to mise-en-scene. The hijacked planes were aimed to impact precisely at the vulnerable border between fantasy and reality. In contrast to the 1937 radio invasion, thousands of people who turned on their televisions on 9/11 were convinced that the cataclysm was just a broadcast, a hoax. They thought they were watching rushes from the latest Bruce Willis film. Nothing since has thrown cold water on this sense of illusion. The more improbable the event, the more familiar the image. The "Attack on America," and its sequels, "America Fights Back" and "America Freaks Out," has continued to unspool as a succession of celluloid hallucinations, each of which can be rented from the corner video shop: The Siege, Independence Day, Executive Action, Outbreak, The Sum of all Fears, and so on. George W. Bush, who has a bigger studio, meanwhile responds to Osama bin Laden as one auteur to another with his own fiery wideangle hyperbole.

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(no subject)

i can't post comments to zaubin, rebelyells, atouchsensitive and roguejournal

Come on LJ! Get your sh*t together!

messages to my unreachable friends

atouchsensitive + Have they release Kids in the Hall on DVD yet?

rebelyells + I'm sorry your trip wasn't good! Who is Jason?

roguejournal + Meire, I think your future lies with photography. You are a great teacher, but above all else, an amazing photographer.

zaubin + cheers for your band! Now... stop testing those poor mice! Their cannibalism is a clear sign that what you are doing is wrong wrong wrong.

Eck!

(no subject)

A land which bares itself to tourism veils itself metaphysically: it sells scenery at the expense of magic.

- Gerhard Nebel

(no subject)

In the early 1980s, (Carole) Gallagher moved from New York City to St. George to work full-time on her oral history of the casualties of the American nuclear test program. Beginning with its first nuclear detonation in 1951, this small Mormon city, due east of the Nevada Test Site, has been shrouded in radiation debris from scores of atmospheric and accidentally "ventilated" underground blasts. Each lethal cloud was the equivalent of billions of x-rays and contained more radiation than was released at Chernobyl in 1988. Moreover, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in the 1950s had deliberately planned for fallout to blow over the St. George region in order to avoid Las Vegas and Los Angeles. In the icy, Himmlerian jargon of a secret AEC memo unearthed by Gallagher, the targeted communities were "a low-use segment of the population."

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