Join us for our weekly meeting at Fisher Student Center in the Sunset Beach Room (#1025) @5:30 PM. The room is located in the hallway across from the UNCW Bookstore. Come be part of the conversation!
Our goals are to have open discussions each week, often focusing on current events, societal challenges, and examining beliefs.
Minutes
- Meeting Playlist:
Ginger Root — Loretta
Jon Hopkins — Emerald Rush
Laibach — The Whistleblowers
Vaundy — 踊り子
Röyksopp — Remind Me
MGMT — Time to Pretend
Polysics — Black Out Fall Out
Laufey — Falling Behind
Beirut — Elephant Gun
Himiko Kikuchi — Look Your Back!
Marie Madeleine — Swimming Pool
M83 — Midnight City
M83 — Outro
Brian Eno — An Ending - In playing Laibach’s “The Whistleblowers” (link in playlist), discussed was their unique performance in North Korea as part of a cultural festival for the 70th Liberation Day. Apparently, Milan voice, the lead singer of Laibach, was reminiscent of Kim Jong-il’s own singing voice. The band’s outward appearance borrows heavily from fascist regimes, which often confuses those newly introduced to them, and apparently was the case with the North Koreans that invited the band to play. The full performance as aired by the North Korean TV is available here without any edits, live and as it happened.
This spawned a documentary called Liberation Day about their experience dealing with the North Korean minders and officials that analyzed all video for the performance, as well as what they filmed while there.
Discussed was the tragic nature of life in North Korea, how oppressed the people, and how the leadership was not far from what Machiavelli espoused in his book The Prince. The book, written on how to become and rule as a prince, brought forth the idiom, “it’s better to be feared than loved,” with the caveat that this would be only if both were not possible. This book, authored by someone born in 1469, has been used by many contemporary world leaders, business moguls, and the like. As an example of instilling fear, Kim Jong-un ordered the conductor of a band to be executed by firing squad for daring to state that a performance was not that good. It was claimed the surviving band members of the band were ordered to watch the execution and examine the remains. A North Korean defector, Yeonmi Park, made a video discussing this incident.
A fun educational video which broke down The Prince into animated segments was shown briefly. Further comparisons to North Korean leadership and Machiavelli’s teaching was in that a leader should not be tirelessly evil, rather only briefly evil and then later provide celebrations for the people as to make them both fear and love their leader, rather than completely fear and hate them.
Not mentioned was the Daniel Miler connection, the founder of the record label Mute who also released his own influential track “Warm Leatherette,” also represented on his label Laibach, Depeche Mode, as well as M83. Daniel went along with Laibach to North Korea. - Bringing up the disaster X/Twitter has become in terms of bots (that Elon claimed to have eliminated) lead to the advent of ads on TikTok using AI to generate videos synthesizing celebrities such as Joe Rogan and Mr. Beast. Discussed was how these social media sites do so little to stop these ads.
This lead to the mention of how some music is thrust into popularity through TikTokers, which included finding that a bunch of people were singing along to the somewhat obscure song Swimming Pool by Marie Madeleine (link in playlist). - In watching the M83 video for Midnight City, their song Outro was suggested. In watching Outro, a video pulled up combined the song with the Lars von Trier movie Melancholia starring Kirsten Dunst. This lead to discussing Lars’ obsessively strict doctrine for film making called Dogme 95 in which no tripods are to be used, restricting all camerawork to be handheld “shakeycam” which can make some viewers physically sick watching.
While the shakeycam can be detrimental to the film, some of the other Dogme 95 goals were deemed laudable, such as using only real locations and natural lighting. An example raised was his film Dancer in the Dark, in which the protagonist played by Björk had extremely poor vision, so it could be interpreted that the shakeycam was to represent how her vision was impared. Conversely, his film Melancholia absolutely abandoned Dogme 95. - Discussed movies watch as part of studying psychology, including The Silence of the Lambs. This lead to mentioning the musical version of the movie, which was initially created by two brothers who studied film scoring, Jon Kaplan and Al Kaplan, to compose a collection of comedic songs in 2002 for a non-existent musical. They would over the next years make existent and in 2005 the had an Off-Broadway run, winning several awards. Listened to was: Silence! The Musical — I’d Fuck Me
- Mentioned the scream that was used to create the TIE Fighter coasting through space sound in Star Wars called the Howie Scream (not the Wilhelm Scream, but similar in that it is used in many productions).
- Also discussed was Gilbert Gottfried who famously exposed the word to The Aristocrats joke after getting a cold response to a 9/11 joke 18 days after the attack happened. He also made several jokes on Twitter about the Japanese Tsunami, one being “The Japanese are really advanced, they don’t go to the beach, the beach comes to them.” This cost him a long standing role as the Aflac duck.
- Christopher Hitchens was brought up, his amazing command of English and ability to tear his opponents apart verbally during debates. Shown was a clip of his defending fellow atheist Stephen Fry, who being gay was considered ineligible to be a Catholic as they view homosexuality as a sin. The clip is from a full debate between those in favor of the motion, Archbishop John Onaiyekan and Ann Widdecombe, and those against, Stephen Fry and Christopher Hitchens, arguing whether the Catholic church is a force for good in the world.
- The comedy musical duo Garfunkel and Oats was brought up and video about a loophole in the bible allowing anal sex before marriage was played The Loophole — Garfunkel and Oats.
- This lead to mentioning the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in which two angels are send by the Abrahamic god to destroy the Sodom. Discussed was the gender of the angels, that were by in Abrahamic religions genderless, but were sent to Sodom as men and threatened to be anally raped by male Sodomites. The idea that angels were genderless was compared to the transgenderism, how many faiths do not recognize the possibility that someone can be transgender, but yet angels can apparently change gender.
- Someone mentioned the word “proud,” this lead to viewing a clip from comedian Tom Green’s movie Freddy Got Fingered in which Rip Torn plays a gruff but proud father of Tom Green’s character Gordy. This lead to discussing how insane the movie is, including Tom gutting a deer and getting inside of it before being struck by a truck. Also shown were the shower scene and the skateboard ramp scene. The full movie is free to watch on YouTube.
Talked about was how the film was extremely meta in that Tom made a movie about the protagonist being given $1,000,000 for a TV show idea and doing whatever he wanted with it, while in the real world Tom was given a budget of $14,000,000 to make a whatever film he wants. It was essentially him taking the piss out of the movie studios. It was critically panned as one of the worst movies ever, but over the years gained cult status and regarded as far more clever than initially thought, as well as becoming a profitable movie through DVD sales and rentals. One of the best film analysis was done by Red Letter Media who demonstrated why the film was genius.
Tom Green was also compared to comedian Eric Andre, who would do similar stunts to what Tom Green was known for. Also mentioned was the amazing acting done by Emmy-winning Rip Torn, who was a real-life alcoholic who was arrested for breaking in to a bank and claiming he thought he was home. The bank was actually within a typical house structure. - The discussion of those who laughed inward rather than outward lead to discussing comedian and presenter Jimmy Carr. Carr, known by his distinctive inward “seal-like” laugh, has been for over a decade the host of the British comedic panel show 8 out of 10 Cats as well as the spinoff mashup 8 out of 10 Cats Does Countdown. A clip of Johnny Vegas being fed a giant éclair by Sean Locke was shown.
- The discussion came to how ASC member Steve would pass by John Jamelske’s house everyday to work, unaware of the horrors happening there. Jamelske was an extreme cheapskate who would visit the library near his house on Sundays in order to take the newspaper coupons so that he didn’t have to buy the newspaper himself. He collect vintage bottles and cans, drove a beat up car, and also was a millionaire. He also kidnapped several women and kept them as sex slaves in his underground bunker for months to years, but always released them later. He was a collector not only of bottles, but aimed to collect women of different races, and claims that they had loving relationships, even though the women were imprisoned and given only a bucket with a toilet seat atop to use as a toilet. One thing that wasn’t mentioned was that Jamelske would read bible passages to the rape victims before assaulting them.
- Discussion of the recent aircraft door plug blowing out lead to talking about explosive decompression, and how Hollywood will often portray inaccurately the forces of a compromised plane cabin (reference: Goldfinger [1964], Carter [2022]), that there is a momentary explosive decompression followed by normalization of pressure between the outside and inside which no longer sucks people out. Also, a single bullet hole will not affect cabin pressure as shown by Mythbusters. Referred to was that planes often have open doors for parachuting or cargo bay doors to drop cargo which do not constantly suck everything out. This was demonstrated by the incident of a large portion of the fuselage of Aloha Airlines Flight 243 in which only one person was sucked out.
- A later realized odd connection was that Rip Torn, the father in Freddy Got Fingered, also was the king in Marie Antionette starring Kirsten Dunst, who was in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia.
