I have less than a month left of high school.
Last week was technically the last ‘normal’ week of classes before AP and state testing wreck havoc across the land. For me, it was the busiest week of my high school career. I had my final Model UN conference, which ended with a joke motion to “get rid of Ohio (via bulldozer boats)” (don’t ask). Guess I won’t be off to Kent State in August, for it had to be sacrificed to save America from the rapidly expanding, parasitic Buckeye State. On other days of the week, I found myself in parts of my school I had never seen in my entire four years of attendance there. The secret agent lurking inside of me adored that, though I still question why my school doesn’t use its perfectly preserved time capsule pool for more than the swim team and physics class boat races, or why I didn’t know they have a room full of iMacs.
All that aside, it gives me mixed emotions to know that the public school system I’ve been tethered to for the last twelve years will be soon be behind me.
It’s even odder placing my role as a freethinking high schooler in the context of our current culture. More and more attacks on critical thinking have been entering schools across the country thanks to concerned parents who would prefer their children remain ignorant to history and the world at large. Reading about book bans and threats towards teachers who teach the truth is disheartening and, frankly, terrifying. It’s a shame that we as humans, instead of encouraging nuance and intelligent analysis, have allowed for those actively promoting ignorance to have an increasingly large platform. Society is being rapidly dumbed down at the hands of these types, the ones who let their favorite political pundits and reality show stars—what’s the difference nowadays?—determine their every opinion instead of stopping to think about what they are consuming. They may be puppets, but they have power.
We live in a world of ever-increasing absurdity, plain and simple, and humans are basically just strange little animals trapped in an overcrowded cage. They do weird things and can seem very kind one moment and then be seen brutally mauling each other the next. Recognizing these truths is the only way to see the world for what it is. And when logical thought and critical thinking are placed at the forefront of this observation and emotions don’t blind us, work can be done and change can be made for the better—for all of us. When education devalues these qualities and promotes homogeny and close-mindedness in their place, you are learning nothing but a lie.
I’m genuinely grateful that I was able to receive a quality education throughout my high school career. And I’m miffed that the things that made those four years so valuable to me—the discussions I’ve had in my English and social studies classes, the documentaries I’ve watched and dissections I’ve done in anatomy class, the support I’ve received from my teachers—are being disparaged across the country. But then again, people still think that the Kent students protesting the Vietnam War on that crisp spring day in 1970—the anniversary of which is coming up rapidly—were the true agitators when the National Guard came to town. And that’s not stopping me any time soon.
As I enter the next phase of my life, I will continue to seek the truth.
What A Fantastic Movie I’m In
Wednesday, January 18th, 2023Someone on last.fm changed the album photo for Simply Saucer’s superb Cyborgs Revisited compilation from the good ol’ fashioned monochrome photo I’m used to to the original cover, the same photo soaked in searing psychedelic YMCK acid. It’s common for black and white photos to be everywhere on last.fm, and I do enjoy the combined old school-and-concise ethos of that mission, but I also appreciate the WHOA TRIPPEN OUT WOOOOOOAH effect of this shakeup.
I’ve been feeling the psych quite a bit these past days, to be truthful. Barbarella has been on my brain something fierce. As I get back to navigatrixing the trials and tribulations of Planet College, I guess I feel myself a tiny bit of its titular heroine, albeit less dumb (let’s be frank, she was pretty dumb) and more post-Babs Jane Fonda mugshot. At least, that’s what I’m trying to convey for myself. This is the semester I start going all in with the May 4 commemoration, after all, so I’ve got to get into that FTA ‘tude somehow. (Jane was scheduled to speak at the fiftieth back in 2020, but we all know how that went. NEAT.)
There’s a Barbarella remake in the works, apparently, which I only learned of fairly recently even though it was announced months ago. They’ve been trying for one since I think the nineties with actresses such as Drew Barrymore, and each try has ended in a quiet whimper of an abortion. This makes sense considering that Barbarella is a movie that could have only been made in 1968. How to you expect a modern audience to react to certain parts of that movie? Fittingly, there’s a plot summary for an early 2000s attempt (which of course I can’t find again for the life of me), and it sounds absolutely nothing like the original. Interesting if put in the right hands, but not faithful to the source material. Maybe it’s closer to the source material’s source material, which I am not yet familiar with. (Thanks to Mahvel’s subliminal effects on pop culture at large, I always forget that Barbarella is a comic book movie.)
That terminated remake seemed to take a more overtly political bent than the original, with lots of societal inequality and having your innocent past shattered before your eyes and the like. The original is also political, but in a super subtle way that is, obviously, drenched in copious amounts of sex. It is so sexy, in fact, that all anyone talks about regarding it is whether or not it is sexist. There’s surely a lens other than the feminist one that people can take about this movie* (while still recognizing Jane Fonda’s eternally radiating wonderfulness), and it doesn’t have to be an extremely serious one. Our world is more absurd, technologically advanced, and, frankly, stupid than ever, just like a Barbarella adventure. And what do we do? We refuse the laugh. It’s insane. And if you don’t recognize the insanity you can’t sustainably live.
2023! Less knee-jerk puritanical reactions, more embracing and exploring the trappings of liberation and all its hidden ugly corners, the pure intertwining with the reprehensible in perfect yin-yang union. If that remake actually happens, it is going to be awful.
* And I consider myself a feminist!
Tags:absurdity, Barbarella, FEMINISM, films, movie remakes, psychedelic, Simply Saucer, things I enjoy, trippy
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