Babel Blog

Qatsi & Crisis as Balance

Alexander de la Paz — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 01:33:04 +0000

Like its contemporary Akira, Koyaanisqatsi sheds light on something different: the freakish balance of mechanized life, its life-likeness, its symbiotic relations with disciplinary society, biopolitics, and crisis culture.

The Camera Kills Twice

Alexander de la Paz — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 20:15:43 +0000

The camera is a weapon like any other: "ready, set, fire," as the film DDR/DDR formulated, is not unlike "lights, camera, action." In both cases the scene is controlled with a profound aesthetic militancy: the shooter and the photographer strategically place themselves in relation to their prey; then, upon setting the proper calibrations via tracer rounds or test shots, they frame their target and fire; the volley, the mortar, the snapshot, then consumes the target and absorbs his form. History, in an instant, is both constituted and frozen.

The Public Service Announcment

Alexander de la Paz — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 05:06:13 +0000

Given this day and age, with its acute understanding of birth rates and death rates, crime rates and demographics, it is indeed no surprise that there are such tools as the public service announcement, such tools that are able to so successfully and subtly harness the body and make it governable, discipline it and regulate it as to form and perpetuate a general welfare, a common well-being, a collective mind, body, and spirit—a body politic whose customs, habits, and health practices are synchronized.

A Future Fixation (2)

Alexander de la Paz — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 16:37:52 +0000

Like Johnny, we're all poseur prophets ruled by micro-manias foretelling grand visions of the end of history. We want to be BIBLICAL again. Just like the Jews longed for the Freudian Moses they killed, so do we, perhaps, long for the God for whom Nietzsche wrote an obituary. It is that that God figure, after all, that impossible Real father, we now halfheartedly transcribe into our now celebrated friend-foes, the Natives, the dead noble savages from who we draw a tepid environmentalist ideology and 2012 insecurities.

The Coptic Martyrdom Cult – شهيد

Alexander de la Paz — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 06:24:39 +0000

It seems that this modern shaheed culture is not unique to Islam—it appears with shockingly similar aesthetics in the commiseration-commemoration pieces of Egypt's marginalized Coptic populations.

Zombie Films & Panopticism

Alexander de la Paz — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 03:18:14 +0000

In the wake of the post-apocalyptic towns' biopolitical failure to preserve the pure, there is indeed power, there is hierarchy, there is hegemonized politics—but it is not the politics of struggling pure, rather it is the politics of the now hegemonic profane: the politics of the Zombie

Cryptic Clues to Secretive Solutions (1)

Alexander de la Paz — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 08:51:57 +0000

PART 1: We're a culture obsessed with both constructing and deciphering glyphs—deciphering the constructed and constructing the deciphered. The X-Files, The Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons, National Treasure, and the countless biblical documentaries titled Secrets of [Whatever: be it the Exodus/Jesus/Armageddon/the Old Testament] all embody modernity's obsession with the alluring products of chaotic mystery's tempering by the rational, steady hand of science.

This is not a gay film

Alexander de la Paz — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 18:44:19 +0000

Fashion designer Tom Ford said the following of his directorial debut : A Single Man "is not a gay film." And he's right. Just as René Magritte's La trahison des images depicts not a pipe, but an image of a pipe, so does Ford's A Single Man depict sexuality—as an image not of homosexuality, but of sexually proper, a love of body—in the most cleverly silent manner, free of the crass verbose silence that makes Brokeback Mountain, Alexander and Milk exploitatively vulgar.

Satan On Film

Alexander de la Paz — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 03:48:43 +0000

Partaking in an archeology of Satan's depictions in film entails excavating man and his fears, man and his passions, wants, dreams and temptations. The freeze-frames and digital clips complied here, showing Satan the powerful, Satan the sexy, Satan the crafty, intend to excavate just that.

On ‘Spirituality’

Alexander de la Paz — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 17:18:54 +0000

Just as today's market is flooded with over-priced 'exotic' gastronomical and recreational oddities—that are, despite their faux-exoticness, simply sweeter, crispier, 'Coca-Cola' variants of their counterparts—today's market too is flooded with reified religion.