The Real Matrix: The Pentagon Invades Your Life

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/042508M.shtml

The Utopian Wars

By Thomas Lux
(from the March/April issue of The American Poetry Review)

Amish raiding party attacks a Quaker

Settlement at Muddy Crossing,

killing first the Quaker ferryman

(who is drunk, and never awakes until midstream

to find an Amish man tying an anvil to his neck)

before reaching the village

and killing dozens, quietly at first, by blade

and hatchet (hoping to blame the savages), and

burning nothing

as they work their way toward the center of

town. Kill on the way in, burn

on the way out. In the hills, meanwhile,

the Buddhists quick-change from bright orange

to camo robes, point their howitzers eastward

where they know the Episcopalians

milk cobras

to tip arrows

and fill their bullets' hollow-points.

The Baha'i sit back and sharpen their knives and

saws.

The wily Mennonites withdraw,

their leaders meeting for three days

in upstate New York,

while at the same time the few remaining Jains

turn their cheeks

to reveal slashed and bloody jaws

from the last time

they turned their cheeks.

enlightenment

To mother

There was a dream and I wanted you to be in it.
I would have put you in my pocket
So you would have been there.

But you were a little rocky mountain
That stood up against every storm
And stayed firm.

And so I dreamed without you
But always feel deeply
Our dreams could live together.

Now I see myself as always being
The dream of a dandelion
On the side of this mountain.

(c. 1969)

Everybody's a critic

I was privileged to write film reviews for publication for more than twenty years, starting with my first review published in the Champaign-Urbana Courier in 1976, eventually followed by a position as critic for Variety (my review name was "Pege"). Today, the field of movie reviewing is overrun, thanks mostly to the Internet. Even the Village Voice is letting its film critics go and smaller newspapers don't bother to pay for reviews, with all the people clamoring to write them for free.

Fine with me. Movies are so much more available than they used to be. I've been enriched by studying new Asian films this past year -- works by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Tsai Ming-Liang, Hong Sang-soo, Jia Zhang Ke, and others. I recently ruminated to my heart's content on films such as "Lake of Fire" and "Southland Tales." I don't miss deadlines and the provincial editor's demand for "consumer reports" style writing, star ratings included. Movies have always been better than that and serious film criticism is still around. You just have to look for it. And not very far, at that.

from the New York Times

MOVIES | April 1, 2008
Now on the Endangered Species List: Movie Critics in Print
By DAVID CARR
The reviews are in: “A dire situation” for serious film.