Daily Archives: February 27, 2020

Tom Smith by Claudia Franke

The long-running, Miami-founded noise collective To Live And Shave In LA has counted an almost endless network of avant-garde American musicians amongst its ranks: producer and musician Don Fleming, Thurston Moore, Andrew WK, Hatewaves Nndr Nevai, Harry Pussys Adris Hoyos, Bill Orcutt, Sightings Mark Morgan, COCK ESPs Emil Hagstrom, Mr. Velocity Hopkins, and more.

Oscillator wiz Ben Wolcott was a founding member of the collective, as was one of its longest running members, International Noise Conference organiser, Laundry Room Squelchers leader, and demon of bass guitar destruction Rat Bastard. But the conceptual conceit and organisational structure of To Live And Shave In LA - a principle founded upon dedication to chaos, sleaze, hedonism, and libidinal materialism - is primarily the brainchild of the idiosyncratic mind of poet, producer, singer, good ol southern boy and contemporary druid Tom Smith.

Born to a working class family in Georgia in the 1956, Smith became enamoured with sound early. His dad operated a small race track, and Smith fondly remembers the crackle of the PA machines and threadbare noise blaring from its speakers.

Three years later, at age 13 I was listening to King Crimson, he says. I listened to electric Miles and had a friend who got me into Sun Ra also. I knew something was up. As the gods of avant-garde sound propelled him, so Smiths destiny was written. When Smith was in his early 20s in the late 1970s and caught the punk bug, he briefly moved to New York. I wasnt working and got skinny from getting fucked up all the time just trying to see as many shows as possible, I saw Suicide that was cool, he says. After the punk experience in New York didnt work out, he moved back to Athens, Georgia in 1978 which is where his music career truly began.

Working at a local radio station, he became sophisticated at turntable dubbing - he claims to have been doing these kinds of recordings before Christian Marclay got famous for it - and often made what can best be described as proto chopped and screwed dubs of various punk songs, from The Ramones to Television: My opinion was that I was the greatest producer in history, albeit one with no experience and little equipment, he says. I was able to make that dreadful second Television album stirring.

In 78, he founded a proto noise unit of ghastly incomprehensible sound called Boat Of - informed equally by Throbbing Gristle and Smiths hero Lee Scratch Perry - which lasted through the mid-1980s. After moving to Washington DC, he founded a trio called Peach Of Immortality - the band shared a space with Pussy Galore which resulted in Smith also briefly playing with those infamous scuzz rockers - featuring demented cello, psychotic tabletop guitar and Smiths spasmodic tape abuse. The band recorded two now incredibly hard to find albums, 1985s Talking Heads 77 and 1986s Jehovah! My Black Ass-R.E.M. Is Air Supply!, and would continue through the early 1990s. Notably absent from POIs assault though were Smiths vocals. Though POI was a devastating unit in both sound and look - in one video you can see Smiths cohorts Rogelio Maxwell and Jared Hendrikson decked out in Neubauten goth with jet black Flock of Seagulls haircuts looking strung out on morphine and Artaud while Smith appears in front clean cut and wearing a polo shirt like a liquored up country club golf pro who fucks all the club members wives - there would be little indication of the formidable frontman and obtusely poetic lyricist that Smith would emerge as in TLASILA.

To Live And Shave In LA is the longest running of Smiths projects and greatest evidence of his mythical talents as a producer, writer, and performer. In a contentious review I wrote about a recent Royal Trux compilation, I mentioned TLASILA and Smiths body of work more broadly as part of a lineage of transgressive American music that I call avant-americana. In avant-americana, American (and British) musical innovations - rock & roll, soul, funk, punk, hip hop - are celebrated, exploited, torn to shreds, and rebuilt as something more visceral and stranger. Under the leadership of Smith, TLASILA inhabits this aesthetic perhaps better than any similarly categorised band.

Smith - who often jokes that he was pomo before pomo was a thing - has long adhered to the mantra that genre is dead. In a brilliant essay by the contemporary philosopher Ray Brassier, Genre Is Obsolete, the thinker ponders on Smiths dictum and emphasizes that TLASILA (as well as Swiss noise artist Rudolph Eb.Ers Runzelstirn & Gurgelstck project) is most emblematic of noise musics genrelessness. Where orthodox noise compresses information, obliterating detail in a torrential deluge, he says. Shave construct songs over an overwhelming plethora of sonic data, counterweighting noises form destroying entropy through a negentropic overload that destroys noise-as-genre and challenges the listener to engage with a surfeit of information.

Glam, dub, noise, musiqu concrete, no wave, and good old fashioned American rock sleaze disrupt and reorganize meaning in TLASILA, devolving into a sickening abyss of perverse pleasures. TLASILA is made up of an endless network of collaborative components: Rats bass, Orcutts guitar, Wolcotts oscillators, etc. But it is through Smith - informed by Duchamps concept of the readymade and the Burroughs cut-up - and his hyper-focused production that the bands sound takes form. As Smith channels his collaborators through his production, they transmogrify into musical bodies without organs; Smiths vision allows his collaborators to speak a language without articulation that has more to do with the primal act of making sound than it does making specific meaning, to paraphrase Deleuze.

And yet, Smith diligently composes the isolated chaotic components of sound into an organised whole. TLASILA functions as a bricolage of sound. Smiths post-production obsessiveness has been compared to that of Kenneth Angers cinematic post-production; the edit arranges the calamity into a beautiful monster. If, as theorist Dick Hebdige has noted, punks presented themselves as degenerates to emphasise the signs of decay which perfectly represented the atrophied condition of Great Britain, then one could interpret TLASILA as transcendents who have already seen the world collapse and have magically arisen as something more than human.

And always soaring above the cataclysm is Smiths idiosyncratic croon. Unlike so much noise performance - a genre full of guys twiddling knobs in front of laptops - TLASILA is a thrilling live prospect. Glam and no wave signifiers collide as Smith acts as an avant vaudevillian grand maestro to a postmodern Grand Guignol; while his collaborators engage in orgiastic excess he appears relatively clean-cut and poised, directing the chaos while bellowing out his signature vocals. His voice sounds like Bryan Ferrys traumatised and murdered spirit howling for attention from the nether-realm hes trapped in, or latter period Scott Walker taken to its logical extreme. A lifelong devotee of Henry Miller, Smiths lyrics share Millers texts rebellion against moral and aesthetic censorship. Nick Land said the jagged and meandering character of Millers text attest to its torrential emancipatory energy. A similar description could apply to Smiths lyrics. On TLASILAs Noon And Eternitys song This Home And Fear, Smith moans: Cannot foretell with a cancer whose premises are to be found, two large vessels were found, photograph which was novel. There is a directness and opacity to the text that liquidates meaning.

Lurch X by Tom Smith

Smith is as active in music as ever. He regularly posts both TLASILA and solo tracks on his Soundcloud page, keeps up with contemporary music (he particularly enjoys Earl Sweatshirt and JPEG Mafia), and released a new TLASILA album last year. Living in Hamburg, TLASILA currently tours as a trio with Smith, Rat, and Tipula Confusa, (TLASILA alias: Lurch X) from none other than tQ favorites Guttersnipe. So impressed by the onslaught of Aurys musical destruction, Smith has started a new band with her under a new alias, Vy, and Paige Flash from COCK Esp and Cult of Youth called NH Meth. The new band will start touring Europe on May 30 and has a new record in the works, a sample of which you can hear below.

Smith and I spent hours on Skype discussing his lengthy and complex artistic history, from the earliest days of his career through the more known era of TLASILA.

Boat of - Bore the Entreaty from Forbidden Mourning Practice(1981)

TS: The reason I moved to DC in 84 was to join my friend Don Flemings band The Velvet Monkeys to do keyboards and turntables, but I was quickly kicked out of the band for sleeping with the drummer. So I started Peach Of Immortality. Don introduced me to Jared, who was doing tabletop guitar. We added cello. It was all improvd. No vocals. Jared and I were promoters for this club called DC Space which was the hub for experimental music, black music and all that tedious Dischord shit. And we had a home there, even though people really hated us. It was just a ferocious racket and most people didnt get it, but some did!

Peach Of Immortality

During the Peach Of Immortality days, you ended up sharing a DC space with Pussy Galore and briefly became a member in the band. How did that transpire?

TS: I found some cassettes in a trash can at an apartment. One was Pussy Galore, which sounded like Jesus And Mary Chain meets Test Department. Amazing. Good sleeve. Jon Spencer wrote everything in this horror font. He was a good illustrator. There was a number on the tape, I called, and they invited me over to their space. They needed a drummer, which I wasnt but I could count to four. I went to visit them at their massive house in Georgetown. I went down the stairs into the basement, and there was Jon and Julia Cafritz. That's how I got in Pussy Galore. I contributed a few ideas, but Jon pretty much wrote everything. And then we toured with both Pussy Galore and Peach Of Immortality, which was bizarre. After the tour I got kicked out of Pussy Galore because Jon and Julia thought I was trying to be their own Malcolm McLaren. Which was probably true to an extent.

To Live And Shave In LA 30-minuten mnnercreme(1994)

TS: Peach Of Immortality held on until I moved to Miami following a girl whod later become my wife in 1991. I met Rat Bastard right away, he had a record store next to his studio called Sync. I started recording there. The original engineer was rather inept, he couldn't even get me a headphone signal. So I had Rat save me. Rat said, "Ok, I'll fuckin' take care of you." I got the name To Live And Shave In LA from a Ron Jeremy porn film that took its name from the Friedkin film To Live And Die In LA. I thought it was a brilliant name. It fit into my aesthetics. High and low, stupid but immediate. I knew [TLASILA] had to be something that put all these ideas together.

And how did the recording of the first album 30-minuten mnnercreme come together?

TS: What really influenced me then was the Bomb Squad. I had the first Public Enemy 12" and album. The production on that album was insane. I learned how to mix myself because my girlfriend got me a job as an audio engineer at Telemundo. Off the clock, I recorded the first Harry Pussy single, lots of other music, and mnnercreme . I worked fast to get the fuck out because I didn't know when my supervisor would show up.

And Bill Orcutt played guitar on that first album, correct?

Tom Smith: Yeah. Bill is so good. It's wonderful that he's entering that rarified pantheon. He has a singular approach. There was a rivalry between us and Harry Pussy, even though our approaches were different. But Adris Hoyos and Bill ended up on that first album. It was amazing. Bill and Rat on guitar, Adris on drums, and me singing and producing.

To Live And Shave In LA - Vedder Vedder Bedwetter(1995)

TS: I wish Id done Vedder Vedder Bedwetter differently. There were no programs for editing and I had to get tricky sequencing tracks. We had two different DAT machines, so the bridging tracks sometimes got lost or the timing wasn't right. We couldn't cut it accurately like you can with software. It's a little messy. There's a lot of stuff that I didn't know how to bring to the fore as a technician. My girlfriend and I were listening to the re-release of Abbey Road recently; you can hear it as it was recorded, but clearer. That's something I'd like to do with Vedder Vedder Bedwetter. Make it audible. We lost Rat's bass sound because he was playing so fucking loud in the studio and there was no way to govern that sound and make it legible with the other sounds. Apart from that, the energy is there. Its like every track is viewed from three angles. The second and third albums were obtuse in the extreme. I like that album a lot but it's hard to listen to. It's just so piercing in the brain that it hurts.

To Live And Shave In LA - The Wigmaker In 18th Century Williamsburg(2002)

The Wigmaker took five years to make, which is alarming, but as Chris Sienko noted in his review of the album for Blastitude, it actually sounds like an album worthy of five years of labour. How did this album take so long?

TS: We originally finished The Wigmaker in 95; it was about 29 songs [in length]. It didnt feel particularly premonitory of the divorce Id soon experience. But I thought we could do the album better. Then my wife - the woman who I moved to Miami for - and I broke up. It was so painful. We kept trying to make it work. Because when you're hurt and you try to make it work, the wound deepens. Somehow the divorce in 1996 - we vacillated between reconnecting and breaking up for a while - was considerably more perverse than most divorces and I wanted all the louche and disfigured tangents of it represented. I was working at WFMU and used their studios to obsessively rework each track. I realised I had to tell this [break-up] story from both sides, not just mine. We had a long email correspondence where I saw how she felt. I wanted to use our story and frame it in a weird historical way that took the onus off of us. Once I developed this conceptual conceit it became easier to edit. There were so many tracks that got cut, even one with John Morton from the Electric Eels on it. I finally finished the work in 2001. I needed to exorcise the relationship. It was too painful and meaningful, like a knife that could never be removed. It was two years of feeling awful and therapy. I was gratified that the album had an impact because it was art born of misery. I don't know if the sound was affected by my pain, but people read that into it. I never have a clear concept before I work. For me, it's Corman and Allied Artists. You make a poster and the rest comes later. You make something that's scintillating that touches a nerve. That grief was kryptonite. The only way to deal with this loss was to work.

The amount of guests you have on The Wigmaker is dizzying, you have Ben Wolcott on the oscillators, Emil from COCK Esp, Weasel, Rat of course, and many others. How did the recording process work?

TS: They couldn't send files back then, so they me sent cassettes and I would transfer them in the studio and then punch them in and then work those samples and layer them in. I haven't listened to that album in so many years. When you create something you tend to let it go.

To Live And Shave In LA 2 - Flarn, Filth, Flarn (And Sampld)' from The 300 Dollar Silk Shirt(2002)

I am genuinely curious about the rumoured creative differences between you and Rat around the beginning of the 21st Century were real and if you were upset about the TLASILA off-shoot band he started with Weasel Walter, Nandor Nevai and Misty Martinez, To Live And Shave in LA 2?

TS: So in 1999, TLASILA was on the Free Glam tour. Me, Rat, Mondo and Misty. I was in a bad state because I was still unresolved in light of the crisis of my marriage. I probably seemed distant, and a bit incapable of dealing with things as the band leader. At one show, which we were paid huge money for, Mondo never made it to the stage because he was looking for heroin, and Andrew WK filled in. Something about the show felt off, like it was a pastiche of TLASILA, so I walked off the stage. That created some animus.

Rat and Weasel announced To Live And Shave In LA 2 shortly thereafter. And then there was Born in East LA, TLASILA1975 and I Love LA. Suddenly there were dozens of To Live And Shave In LA clone acts. It was madness. At first I was hurt, but then it became so strangely amusing that it was cool. I eventually met Rat and this guy named Gerard Klauder, who became a huge influence on me before tragically committing suicide, and he started several other TLASILA off-shoots. Gerard actually started his own TLASILA 2 before Weasel did his version. Rat told me everyone was just fucking with me, so to him it was no big deal.

So how did you and Rat work it out?

TS: Rat and I didnt feud about the off-shoot bands so much as we feuded over the production of Cortge in 2007 and it blew out into this horrible and bloody feud that made no sense. It lasted years. But when my mother died in 2014, Rat was at the airport waiting for me to be with me to bury my mother. He was there and he hugged me and I said, "Dude what are we doing? Let's move on." And he rasped, "I've been waiting for this and you to stop all this shit you asshole." And he was my brother again.

Ohne - 'Untitled' live in Minsk, Belarus(2002)

TS: I met Dave Phillips (Swiss noise artist and once member of grindcore band Fear of God and aktionist noise collective Schimpfluch-Gruppe Dave Phillips) at Gerards place in 1996. We started a band, Ohne, along with (Swiss Schimpfluch-Gruppe member) Daniel Lwenbrck and Reto Maeder, both who were from Zurich. TLASILA was on hiatus due to TLASILA2 and the band not speaking. Ohne was life changing music. Dave and I were trading tracks back and forth because by then the internet had advanced to the point where we could download tracks within a day. There was no real intersection of intention. Daniel's music was in the Schimpfluch vein. Dave had his own thing. And then I came in with my own perspective and I didn't want to dictate anything. When I hear the Ohne 1 album, it sounds out of time. Its totally alien and untethered. I have the strongest aesthetic bond with the Schimpfluch crew. Though geographically separated, we shared total commitment. Dave is raw. And the way he edits is similar to how Joke Lanz or Rudolph Eb.Er edits. He uses massive silences and then works in gut wrenching drops. He's so good.

To Live And Shave In LA - Noon And Eternity(2006)

TS: We tracked the album in 2003 at Sonic Youths studio in New York. Andrew WK played electronic drums. Thurston played guitar. Rat and Don Fleming played. Ben was there. I had to write the material in two days. My son came back from Iraq. I didn't want my son to go, but he volunteered. Hes fairly left leaning but he wanted a Hemingway adventure. I have a lot of love for my son, so a lot of those songs stemmed from revulsion to the Bush war machine. But tying something to a political moment can be suicidal for an artworks longevity. So rather than making those political connotations overt, I made them universal. I made it about the love of my son, who had been changed by his experience.

TLASILA live in Montreal, 2006

Compared with other TLASILA albums, Noon And Eternity has more of a rock sound. Its sludgy, and heavy, but clear. How was that achieved?

TS: The production was done mostly by Don and Andrew. Andrew was so fast on ProTools that he tracked and mixed the whole record in two days with a little bit of input from me. While Im geared towards calamity, Andrew is geared towards clarity. So when you have a really good producer working with challenging material it can go one of two ways: awful or really cool. I was very happy with that record. I spent so much time in Andrew's huge loft on 55th street. He had about 200 pairs of sneakers that he had gotten for free. I remember one night listening to Scott Walkers Tilt and taking huge hits off Andrews bong.

Miss High Heel - View of Delfi As Weepcore Emetic from The Familys Hot Daughter(2008)

TS: I was in Chicago recording the Scissor Girls final EP and stayed at the loft that they shared with Jim Magas. I was separated from my wife and was really going wild. I was insanely prolific. I also recorded the Electric Eels Brian McMahons solo album. And I did another album with Duotron called Duotron Meets Tom Smith . But with Miss High Heel, Weasel, Jim Magas, and I decided to put together a Chicago no wave supergroup of all the bands that were putting out records on Skin Graft. The band was me, Azita from the Scissor Girls, the Flying Luttenbachers, Nndr, Jeremy McMahon from Duotron, and some members of Lake Of Dracula. All the backing tracks are black metal and other cut-ups from Chicago radio. Its a demented record. That winter was so cold that our nose hairs would freeze when we went outside. All we did was stay inside. There weren't even drugs. It was just coffee and blankets and hitting record on the madness. I recorded four albums over four months, and probably overstayed my welcome in Chicago.

Lurch X and Rat Bastard by Tom Smith

To Live And Shave In LA - Two Form a Clique from As Gods Are Skinned(2019)

Like The Wigmaker, this new album also took five years to make. Was there anything in your life - like the divorce - going on that sharpened your focus to such an obsessive degree?

TS: This whole album owes its nascence to an exceedingly foul hangover I suffered after a 2015 performance in Europe. Our hosts had plied us with French moonshine. That morning I choked down 1200 mg of Ibuprofen and wrote two of the songs. Two Form A Clique gushed out of me the following evening at Instant Chavires in Paris. I could sense loathsome perfidy in the wind. Its obviously political and I wanted to get it right. The studio performances [by Lucas Abela, Rat Bastard, Balazas Pandi, and Graham Moore] were terrific. But Id tracked no vocals. I wasnt ready to commit to the words that Id written. Thus, a half-decade slog of gravidity. My motivation was to be true to the text [with my vocals]. I grew up besotted by Jack Bruce, Bowie, Bryan Ferry, Kevin Coyne, and Chris Bailey. No shrinking violets in that mob. What fed As Gods Are Skinned was the absolute calamity that befell humanity in 2016 and the fetid hell we sank into. Why not channel that into music?

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Features | Strange World Of... | The Strange World Of... Tom Smith/ To Live And Shave In LA - The Quietus

Express News Service

In Amazon Primes original series Afsos, Gulshan Devaiah plays Nakul. True to his name, he is a brother who doesnt matter and isnt as important as the other characters in his life. We get mentions of his ailing parents and a brother who doesnt think much of him but thats Nakul in his own words, one who pays a therapist to talk to him. Devaiah plays Nakul with his typical deadpan, dispassionate demeanour. The therapist Shloka Sreenivasan (Anjali Patil) at one point says that demeanour is everything and a persons state and attitude can be deduced from their demeanour.

Nakuls demeanour is that of a man in atrophy. Devaiahs face, limbs and the way he walks, all of them betraying this disinterestedness. The performance is measured to the minutest of details, self-reflexive in a way, as if Devaiah doesnt wish to be in the shot half the time. And it works, because thats what Nakul feels like all the time. We find him attempting suicide in the shows beginning. And we find him doing the same in the end. He regrets being part of the show. And he is really bad at disappearing off the face of the earth. Shloka makes for a terrible therapist. She gives out platitudes and almost by design, says all the wrong things. She is also a therapist in need of one.

Nakul is pictured in his tedious looking middle-class home where time stands still, a picture of domesticity that rejects even him. Nakul is so uninspired that he settles the bills, has ice cream and sits on the see-saw. We are not sure if he has a job but he hates it and he wants to be a writer. Hes lost count of the number of times hes been rejected. He believes he must be the author of his story because it is so badly written. There is an irony there that escapes him, he can be dim-witted like that. There is something shiny in this dim-witted person that is relatable, a desire to make life exciting. If impossible then at least create fiction that is exciting. But alas, he neither possesses the imagination nor the experience to conjure such fiction. Like Shloka, he too is mediocre.

Thinking about Afsos, almost every character is written to be terrible at their jobs. Inspector Bir Singh (Aakash Dahiya) from Uttarakhand, wants to do good but he is stuck with a police station in Mumbai that is a suction for mediocrity. He is there in search of Fokatiya (Robin Das), a baba who has massacred his mates in an ashram and is known to be in Mumbai, searching for the immortal man. Afsos is about this bunch of good-for-nothing characters caught in this endless search for immortality and the elixir that deigns it. Its light-weight Coen Brothers, think Burn After Reading, where half the people dont understand what they are after but they are at it anyway because maybe, for a while it will feed some joy and excitement into their lives. They all have that afsos regret. That novel, that loving partner, that big story, that dream police case, that satisfying murder.

Like Ayesha, the journalist, who is after this immortality story. She can only think in terms of headlines and click baits, even without a story in hand. She is one of those terrible journalists, sucked out by the system, a symbol of which is her boss Karthik. Heeba Shah plays Upadhyay, an assassin who is apparently great at her job but has run out of form after meeting these unfortunate characters. Afsos brings these people together, united only in their mediocrity and the inability to make their ambitions come true. They have something in common none of them has a reason to live, they slowly wither away into oblivion with only the adrenaline of the black comedy keeping them on their toes. In a madly entertaining and beautiful scene encapsulating exactly this, Fokatiya and Ayesha go on complaining about their respective lives, forgetting for a moment that a larger game is afoot.

Afsos doesnt care for too many details. A bunch of retired assassins who lend a hand in suicide? Check. The Kohinoor was really a decoy for the elixir of immortality? Check. A painter who wishes to stumble to his death, like his friend, so that his family benefits through the big-hearted boss? Check. Afsos keeps world-building to a minimum and writing and atmosphere at the maximum. Shloka literally framed at Upadhyays house, a hilarious video game shootout episode, repair and puncture with phone numbers on the wall behind Shloka and Nakul as they contemplate the latters future. It also weaves in timely social commentary at the most offhand moments, like the painter instance. Afsos is not consistently excellent but every time there is a lull, a storm gasps and bursts, ending with laughter, a sign of a thoughtfully put together tragicomedy.

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Mocking mediocrity - The New Indian Express

Heres the scoop 2019 was my favorite year in film of the decade. Now, however, we must look to a new decade in film.

Based on what I have seen, there are some exciting releases this year. It was difficult to pick just three, but aside from Dune, The French Dispatch and The Green Knight, here are a some of the most anticipated movies of 2020 worth keeping on your radar.

2020 Oscars analysis, takeawaysThe big news coming out of the 92nd Oscars Ceremony this weekend was Parasite being the first non-English film to Read

No Time To Die April 8

The fifth and final time Daniel Craig plays James Bond. Craig began playing the character in Casino Royale 14 years ago. Many, including myself, regard this to be Craigs best performance as Bond and one of the best movies in a franchise which spans seven decades.

No Time to Die will introduce us to a few new characters most notably, Rami Malek as a mysterious new villain who we see in a Phantom of the Opera-like mask with a disfigured face. It sounds like his plan may have something to do with immortality, as he says his skills will remain long after he is dead. Bond later says, history isnt kind to men who play god.

Another new face will be Lashana Lynch. She is a 007 agent in MI6 whom the trailer portrays as being in a hostile relationship with Bond. As if Bond didnt have enough on his hands during his farewell tour, Christoph Waltz returns and will no doubt be a threat.

Cary Joji Fukunaga is the director for the film, and I must admit, I have not seen any of his work. His filmography includes Beasts of No Nation (2015), True Detective (2014) and Maniac (2018). All in all, I am curious to see where No Time to Die ends up in the Craig-Bond series hierarchy, and hopeful it doesnt follow in the footsteps of Quantum Solace.

The Lighthouse immerses audiences in another world with unparalleled filmmakingThe reason I love movies is because, for two hours, I can enter another world. All my worries and doubts Read

Tenet July 17

Tenet is Christopher Nolans newest action thriller, starring John David Washington (Ballers, BlacKkKlansman), Robert Pattinson (Good Time, The Lighthouse) and Elizabeth Debicki (The Night Manager, Widows).

The plot largely remains under wraps, but we know it will involve the world of international espionage. At first, the trailer indicates that the protagonist, Washingtons character, must prevent a worldwide disaster original. By the end of the trailer, however, your head hurts because you remember its a Nolan film and nothing will make sense without deeper examination.

I saw an interesting Instagram post showing how Nolan has begun the past two decades with Memento (2000) and Inception (2010). In the former, the English director presents a character with severe memory loss trying to find his wifes killer. The latter deals with dreams and dreams inside dreams and so on. You get the point.

There is no combination quite like Nolan and themes of time and perception, as well as non-linear timelines. Like all his films, we can expect Tenet to be a spectacle. No director utilizes absurd large-scale practical effects and half million-dollar IMAX cameras as much as Nolan. Lets just hope he doesnt break his third one.

Check out Marquee Theater of Union South for free moviesFor the cinephiles on campus, finding theaters can be a struggle. But an option that often goes unrecognized is the Read

The Trial of the Chicago 7 Sep. 25

This is the last film on this list releases in the fall, so there is not a lot of information about the film yet. But, the little I do know about The Trial of the Chicago 7 earns the film a spot on my most anticipated list. The biggest reason this movie warrants excitement is Aaron Sorkin.

Sorkin wrote the screenplay, and it will be his second time in the directors chair. His first attempt was one of my favorite movies of 2017 Mollys Game, the story of Molly Bloom, portrayed by Jessica Chastain, an Olympic skier turned high-stakes poker table runner.

Not to beat a dead horse, but Sorkin truly is in a class of his own when it comes to screenwriting, and he is easily my favorite. His clever dialogue and witty characters are what make his films so entertaining and re-watchable.

We know The Trial of the Chicago 7 will take place in 1968 and will focus on the trial of seven individuals who incited a riot protesting President Johnsons Vietnam War policies. Sorkin has been outspoken about his fondness for courtroom dramas, and the title of the film starts with Trial, so I assume his focus will be on the legal proceedings.

Charges in the trial include conspiracy to incite a riot and excessive force by the police against demonstrators. I cannot wait to see this film. I am confident Sorkin will win best adapted screenplay next year, and hopefully more.

There is no chance I would leave you with just three films. I do believe 2020 will be a good year for cinema, and maybe even better than last year.

Honorable Mentions include Promising Young Woman (April 17), Antebellum (April 24), The Woman in the Window (May 15), Wonder Woman 1984 (June 5), The Kings Man (Sep. 18), Last Night in Soho (Sep. 25), Good Morning, Midnight and Mank (TBD).

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Three more movies coming in 2020 you need to check out - The Badger Herald

Bilal Lashari , the director of the much anticipated The Legend of Maula Jatt , warns audiences that the movie is not for the faint hearted. The film which is the biggest action movie in the history of Pakistani cinema, is action packed with fight sequences that promise blood and gore. Parents might not find the film suitable for their kids because of the graphic nature of few scenes so I would strictly advise against bringing children to cinema.

Such outright violence is not for the faint hearted and little ones. TLOMJ director has therefore advised faint hearted to stay at home.

Lashari has spent years perfecting the film for never seen before action sequences and showcasing the cast ensemble in their unique avatars. Said to be the highest budget film in Pakistan ever produced, the movie's production alone will set a bar for future movies to follow.

The Legend of Maula Jatt , releasing this Eid ul Fitr, is Pakistans most anticipated film which is Bilal Lashari 's contemporary take on the Punjabi cult classic. He stated,The film transcends cultural and linguistic divide. A Sindhi will enjoy it as much as any Punjabi. The content will be very palatable to the new generation that in times to come will extend the immortality of the fictional characters, Maula And Noori.

The Legend of Maula Jatt is set to be a VFX and special effects marvel, a first of many for the film in Pakistan. Packed with action and special effects, the film is described as too graphic and violent for childrens viewing. An ambitious film by Encyclomedia and Lashari Films, this magnum opus will be a huge step forward for Pakistani cinema for its cinematography and special effects.

While the insights into the film are being released after finally getting a release date, the film is already the most anticipated Pakistani movie till date.

The film boasts of a stellar cast with the likes of Fawad Khan, Mahira Khan, Hamza Ali Abbasi, Humaima Malick, Ali Azmat, Faris Shafi and Gohar Rasheed amongst others. This film is all set to become a cinematic wonder as a film of many firsts for Pakistani Cinema.

The film is a joint collaboration between Ammara Hikmat and Bilal Lashari under Encyclomedia and Lashari films produced in association with AAA Motion Pictures.

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The Legend of Maula Jatt not for faint hearted, children: Bilal Lashari - The Nation

Sci-fi aside, how long will I live?

Living to 100 will soon become a routine fact of (long) life. Life expectancies have been rising by up to three months a year since 1840 and although gains in the UK began to slow in 2011, it is still estimated that more than half the babies born in wealthier countries since 2000 may reach their 100th birthdays.

It is an impressive increase: in the early 1900s, the probability of a baby reaching 100 was 1%. A newborn in the UK today has a 50% chance of living to 105. There were 3,600 centenarians in 1986. Today there are some 15,000.

You do not have to be a newborn to benefit from this trend of increased longevity, though. A 60-year-old in the west today has an even chance of living to 90 and a 40-year-old can expect to live to 95.

But the longevity boost is not done yet: it is generally agreed that the natural ceiling to human life is somewhere around 115. Others say that even without cutting-edge AI or other technological wizardry, we could live far longer. Opinion broadly divides into three groups: the levellers who say we are at peak lifespan now. The extrapolators who argue that technology and education have made their biggest leaps but can squeak us up to a ceiling of 120 before levelling off for good. And the accelerators those determined to defeat ageing, who believe we are on the verge of major breakthroughs in scientific and technological research that will increase longevity, pushing us into the realms of immortality.

Life expectancy has been increasing since we cracked infant mortality in the 19th century. Economy, technology, healthcare and education have all combined with vaccines, safer childbirth and medical advances in the care of stroke and heart attack patients to keep the relentless pace of increasing longevity going strong.

But the growth in life expectancy began to slow in 2011 in the UK and people live longer in more than two dozen other countries.

There has not been a big medical or health gamechanger in the past couple of decades. While some argue that we should celebrate the longest lifespans that humans have ever attained, others warn that illness and infirmity risk turning long lives into slow, miserable declines.

In his essay on ageing, De Senectute, Cicero says there are four reasons why people write off old age: it stops you working, it makes your body weak, it denies you pleasure and every day is one step closer to death. Then he shows why each argument is wrong. The old retain their wits quite well, he notes, so long as they exercise them.

Dan Buettner coined the term blue zones for five regions he identified as having populations who live healthier and longer lives than others (they are Okinawa in Japan, Sardinia in Italy, the Nicoya peninsula in Costa Rica, Loma Linda in California and Ikaria in Greece). The diets of those living in these regions, he discovered, consist almost entirely of minimally processed plant-based foods mostly wholegrains, greens, nuts, tubers and beans. Meat is eaten, on average, five times a month. They drink mostly water, herbal teas, coffee and some wine. They drink little or no cows milk.

Other scientists have added different ideas to the mix. Sufficient sleep and a sense of purpose are important but exercise is key at least 150 minutes of moderate or 75 minutes of vigorous aerobic activity each week, plus twice-weekly muscle-strengthening sessions, to reap health and longevity benefits.

Having said that, short bouts of light physical activity, such as walking and cleaning, have been shown to increase the lifespans of older people. And a study published last January found that simply moving instead of sitting for 30 minutes each day could reduce the risk of early death by 17%. Some research suggests that club sports such as tennis and soccer are best for longevity because they also encourage social interaction, another vital ingredient to longevity.

At conferences on longevity, it is immediately obvious during the morning breaks that the buffets remain largely untouched and that everyone drinks their tea and coffee inky black, disdaining even a drop of milk. Most serious seekers of longevity also practice both calorific fasting and intermittent fasting.

In a nutshell, the approach is to eat 30% fewer calories and fast for 16 hours a day, though this may not be appropriate for certain vulnerable groups. In essence, it means skipping breakfast and not making up for the missed meal during the day.

No one knows quite why intermittent fasting works. The best guess is that it has something to do with metabolic switching and cellular stress resistance causing the body to increase production of antioxidants.

Repeated studies on mice going back a century seem to prove that it works on rodents, at least. Last December, the New England Journal of Medicine reviewed all the studies in this area and concluded that a combination of fasting and calorific reduction does slow ageing, extend lifespan and counteract age-related disorders, including cardiovascular disease, cancers, diabetes and neurological disorders such as Alzheimers, Parkinsons and stroke. Animal models show that intermittent fasting improves health throughout the lifespan, the paper concluded.

The problem with gauging its efficacy on humans is that, as the paper said: It remains to be determined whether people can maintain intermittent fasting for years and potentially accrue the benefits seen in animal models.

US scientists are raising funds to launch a five-year clinical trial of a product called metformin, commonly prescribed for pre-diabetics and diabetics. Longevity advocates believe it may have a side effect slowing the development of age-related diseases.

Im not telling everyone to go out and take it until our clinical trial proves it does what I believe it does, said Dr Nir Barzilai, the director of the Institute for Ageing at New Yorks Albert Einstein College of Medicine. But if our trials come back with the results I expect then, yes, I believe everyone should take this drug.

Even more niche are the the promises of Dr Aubrey de Gray, a gerontologist who founded the Sens (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) Research Foundation with the goal of undoing ageing.

Sens is defined by a focus on repairing molecular and cellular damage rather than on merely slowing down its accumulation, he said. The logistics of indefinitely healthy ageing will, he believes, be simple and affordable: Mostly itll be injections once a decade.

The latest epigenetic clock, DNAm PhenoAge, will shortly hit the shelves. Epigenetic clocks a form of molecular augury were first developed in 2011 and claim to offer a glimpse into the future. By analysing the pattern of chemical chains that attach to the DNA in your cells, these clocks apparently reveal how swiftly you are ageing and perhaps even how much longer you will live.

The big sell with these tests is that while DNA is fixed at birth, our epigenetic patterns change according to our lifestyles. The promise of those who produce these clocks for commercial use is that they enable us to calibrate our ageing.

The tests havent been independently evaluated and do not need to be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration but that has not stopped some life insurance companies using the tests to predict lifespans. Researchers have jumped on board, too, using the clocks to test anti-ageing drugs and to look for an anti-ageing diet.

Talk of immortality was outlaw science until a couple of decades ago but now it is attracting serious interest and big bucks: in 2013, Google invested $1.5bn (1.1bn) in an entire division, Calico, which is devoted to solving death. The PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel has given millions of dollars to De Greys foundation.

Instead of focusing on why, say, we get cancer or have a stroke and how to treat each distinct condition, this branch of medical research argues for all these conditions to be regarded as symptoms of one far larger and deadly disease: ageing itself. Instead of trying to treat all these different diseases that develop as people age, the argument goes, we should be trying to treat that one big disease. If we can do that, all the so-called age-related conditions that currently harm so many and cost so much will be by definition eradicated.

No one is saying it is going to be easy. This branch of research attempts to tackle ageing inside every cell of the body. In other words, change the whole genetic makeup of the human species. There are plenty of claims that we can already slow down the ageing of cells or senescence but the most radical adherents claim that the first person to live to 1,000 has already been born.

The Miracle of Fasting, Paul and Patricia Bragg

How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease, Michael Grege

The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Whove Lived the Longest, Dan Buettner

Lifespan: Why We Age and Why We Dont Have To, David Sinclair

The Telomere Effect: A Revolutionary Approach to Living Younger, Healthier, Longer, Dr Elizabeth Blackburn and Dr Elissa Epel

100 Days to a Younger Brain, Dr Sabina Brennan

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The 100-year life: how to prolong a healthy mind - The Guardian

A million fragments scattered before him as he hit the big blue rock with his axe. The minuscule particles glowed so white and bright that Ehtemam had to drop the axe and cover his eyes.

Having left his home behind, Ehtemam had been travelling like a madman for the past six months. Sleep, love, luxury nothing meant to him anymore. And why would it?

He was on a journey seeking something worthier and more precious than anything else in the world: a life of eternity, immortality, and hence more power.

If he could defeat nature, who would defeat him? Having taken the road less travelled, he had stepped into the far-flung areas of the Arabian Desert for the famous golden potion. The golden potion was nothing new to the world of seekers or saints. Several men had lost their sanity in its quest, while a few were rumoured to have found it. Where had they gone, nobody could tell, but it was believed that they were living their lives happily ever after.

Ehtemam was sure he could be among the lucky ones too and had already succeeded in finding two of the three ingredients: the drying wings of a dead Phoenix and the big blue rocks sacred powder. It was only a matter of finding some crystal water from an unknown stream in the plains, and his life would change forever.

As the days passed, he ran from one mountain to another, digging holes in the barren ground, but failed to find any sign of it. His eyes hurt from lack of sleep and his limbs had almost given up. By the time he came across a small cave, he had lost all his energy to walk. Crawling, he reached inside and darkness filled his senses.

When Ehtemam opened his eyes, he found an old man standing next to him. He looked at him blankly, then stared at his surroundings.

Son, youre dying, the old man announced.

Unable to grasp the sudden revelation, Ehtemam said nothing.

You have exhausted your heart, my son. It wont work anymore for you. I am afraid you have only got a mere 24 hours ahead of you to live.

No, Ehtemam shook his head in disbelief and whispered, This cannot be true!

His weary hand flew to his hair and he began to tear at it frantically. Only a minute or two had passed when he screamed it had suddenly occurred to him that he was, in fact, only a blue rock powder away from immortality.

I need to go! I need to find the waterfall! he looked the old man in the eyes and declared with renewed hope.

The old man shook his head. You will have to leave this silly search of yours if you want to die happy. Men often forget to accept the power of the present moment and waste their lives searching for eternity, the old man added in a mysterious tone of wisdom: Indulge in your now, and you will find all the peace you have ever wanted.

Ehtemam stared at the old man. Was he the devil trying to lead him astray when he was only, in fact, a few moments away from finding immortality? So what if he had exhausted his heart, if he could only find a few drops of the magical water he would never need any kind of healing again. His world would be a paradise on earth and he would rule over it forever and ever. How could he surrender when he was so near to finding it? He quickly pushed himself above from the ground and taking small steps, made his way out of the cave and straight ahead.

Behind him, a thin stream of blue water softly gurgled inside the cave.

Published in Dawn, Young World, February 22nd, 2020

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Story Time: The prophecy of eternity - DAWN.com

by Richard Gamble|February26,2020

Julia Ward Howes fame rests largely on The Battle Hymn of the Republic. Written at one of the Civil Wars darkest moments, the poem appeared on the front page of the February 1862 issue of the abolitionist Atlantic Monthly, and quickly became the best-known anthem of the Union cause. It appeared in newspapers across the North and West, while preachers incorporated it into their sermons. President Lincoln wept as he heard it sung in the Capitol in 1864.

Yet Howe hoped to be remembered for much more. By its very success, Battle Hymn simultaneously made and obscured her reputation. As she told one of her granddaughters late in life, pointing to the shelves of books that lined her large library, she wanted to be remembered for her mind, for a lifetime of study devoted to the world of ideas. Steeped in the writings of historians, novelists, and most of all the German philosopher Kant, Howe was an active participant in New England intellectual circles. Well known for her writings and public speeches which attracted flocks of fans from across the U.S., Howe viewed her erudition as a means of uplifting American lifeof delivering on the utopian, romantic moral ideals of equality and human brotherhood that Transcendentalists like Emerson and Thoreau had promoted before the war.

Howe was born in 1819, in New York City. Her mother, Julia Cutler Ward, died when young Julia was only five, leaving a shattered husband to raise six surviving children. Samuel Ward was a wealthy banker, philanthropist, and patron of the arts. He was also an increasingly devout Episcopalian concerned about Julias soul and mind, as his poignant letters to her and about her reveal. Ward saw to it that Julia was baptized and confirmed in their parish church, though she would later renounce orthodox Christianity for liberal Unitarianism or free religion, as she called it.

Howe recalled her father as a narrow, suffocating Calvinist evangelical, but he took risks in how he educated his children. He surrounded his daughter with books, provided singing and piano lessons, and sent her to private academies in the city before hiring a German-trained bibliophile to teach her and her sisters while his sons were educated at the progressive Round Hill School in Massachusetts. Julias capacity for hard work and her considerable intellectual gifts were obvious. When only 17, she published an essay on the poet Alphonse de Lamartine with her own translations from the French. At the age of 20, she published a review of a new American edition of the works of Goethe and Schiller.

Julia Wards marriage to physician and philanthropist Samuel Gridley Howe in 1843 brought her into the hub of Boston abolitionism, Transcendentalism, and Unitarianism. It was a time of turmoil. Calls for immediate emancipation of enslaved people threatened the survival of the Union. Liberal theology challenged the deity of Christ, the reality of miracles, and the historical veracity of the Bible that had been so central to the Calvinist orthodoxy of New Englands pulpits. Julias friends, mentors, and pastors led these reform campaigns, and she discovered a world attuned to her precocious intellect. The demands of a busy household and social life and the rearing of six children made moments of quiet study rare and precious, but Howe continued to read and write. In the 1850s, she helped edit an abolitionist newspaper with her husband, published two largely well-received volumes of poetry, and contributed poems, reviews, and travel essays to the Atlantic Monthly. Her public speaking career began in the 1860stentatively at first, but by the 1870s she was on her way to becoming one of Americas busiest professional lecturers, speaking from coast to coast on topics ranging from ethics to modern manners to favorite authorsalong with crowd-pleasing accounts of how she wrote her Battle Hymn. Howe frequently spent months at a time in Europe, soaking in the art and architecture of the continents great cities. She even hired a rabbi in Rome to teach her Hebrew.

Philosophy was never mere airy speculation forHowe. She wanted answers to the riddles of life. She was eager for guidance on the path to duty, the ethical life, and human progress.

Her great passion was German philosophy which, with its idealism and intuition, had supplanted the empiricism of John Locke among intellectuals of the time. A minister in Howes youth, likely her Episcopal pastor, frowned with great severity upon my early study of the German language, she later recalled; to him, German literature was undermining American Protestantism. Despite this warning, Howe became and remained proficient in the languageand throughout her life was quick to say that of all the influences on her thought, German philosophy did the most to form her ideas about God, man, and immortality, and the ethical life. Howe read Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, and Schelling. She became frustrated enough with Hegels seemingly willful obtuseness to abandon him in favor of Immanuel Kant, the Master; her journals indicate that by the 1860s she was studying Kant almost daily. Kant freed her, she testified, from dogmatism and religious enthusiasm on one side and skepticism on the other, taught her the limits of human knowledge, and gave her the confidence to build her own philosophy and ethical ideals from her consciousness. In 1866 Howe wrote a poem about her debt to him, On Leaving for a Time the Study of Kant: Dull seems the day that brings no hour with thee, / O Master! lapsed to eternity. Before Kants influence, she claimed, she had walked in rude chaotic ways until he re-formdst my days.

Philosophy was never mere airy speculation for Howe. She wanted answers to the riddles of life. She was eager for guidance on the path to duty, the ethical life, and human progress. She wanted a helpful philosophy, she said, and she wanted to share it with others. Her public career was driven by this sense of duty to the greater good of humanity. Her hearts desire, she wrote in 1895, was to assist the efforts of those who sought for this [helpful] philosophy of life.

Though she read widely in several languages, she chose carefully the books she read and urged others to do the same. Life is too short and too much crowded with great interests to allow us time for utterly profitless reading, she warned in 1890. A few, well-chosen books, the works of the truly great philosophers, poets, critics, and historians, would repay attentive effort. Books worth reading required an attentive mind, and the right intellectual and moral attitudereading was not to be self-indulgent or frivolous. New and controversial books should not be shunned; rather, they must be read against the background of what had come before. The modern skeptics Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, and Thomas Huxley must be read in light of Plato and Kant.

Howes image appears in the History of Woman Suffrage, published in 1887. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

But not all Howes reading was so heavy. She made room for leisure and even amusement, reading Thackeray, Dickens, Holmes, Longfellow, Macaulay, Howells, James, George Sand, Balzac, Dumas, Hugo, and many other American and European authors (while urging others to avoid scandalous books, such as Tolstoys Kreutzer Sonata). Even newspapers and journals were essential to practical philosophy. Through them, Howe argued, we know and understand the life of our own time. How else could one serve the needs of society? And to be sure, the press provided a regular outlet for her ideas, from childrens magazines to esoteric philosophical journals.

Howes erudition and dedication are obvious in her lectures and conversations at the Concord School of Philosophy and Literature, which met for a few weeks each summer from 1879 to 1888 on the grounds of Louisa May Alcotts Orchard House. The informal school fulfilled a longtime vision of Alcotts eccentric father, the Platonism and reformer Bronson Alcott. For her part, Louisa May Alcott professed to have no interest in speculative philosophy but put up with the hundreds of visitors who streamed to Orchard House because she loved her father and was delighted to see his dream fulfilled. If they were philanthropists, I should enjoy it, she told the president of Princeton, but speculation seems a waste of time when there is so much real work crying to be done. Why discuss the unknowable till our poor are fed and the wicked saved?

Many who shared Louisa May Alcotts impatience with the schoolwhich welcomed college students and professors, members of the general public with the leisure and stamina for study, skeptics, reporters, and the merely curiouscriticized it as an exercise in nostalgia. For a modest fee, seekers could bask in the mysticism of Bronson Alcott, hear some of the aging Ralph Waldo Emersons last lectures, discover an unexpected Henry David Thoreau in the unpublished journals read by his literary executor, and participate in long, free-flowing discussions of ancient Greek and modern philosophers, poets, and playwrights. There were walks in the woods and visits to the home of Nathaniel Hawthorne. The tone was serious, the setting bucolic, and the depth and breadth of thought dizzying to those uninitiated into the higher realms of Kantian and Hegelian speculation.

Aside from Emerson, Julia Ward Howe drew the largest crowds at Concord, lecturing on Aeschylus, Dante, Goethe, Emerson, and her beloved Kant. Howe paid tribute to Kant at the Concord School in 1880, during what was billed as the Kantian Centennial to mark the anniversary of The Critique of Pure Reason. The content of her lecture is not easy for the modern reader to penetrate, but her debt to the Enlightenment philosopher was obvious. Kants ethics provided the key to self-sacrifice for the greater good as she conceived it, to democracy, progress, and human freedom.

For the organizers and faculty at Concord, and certainly for Howe, there was no conflict between speculative philosophy and reformthe summer sessions sought to rejuvenate a nation threatened by the unlimited pursuit of wealth, scientific materialism, and agnosticism. Despite the Civil War and emancipation of slaves, America still needed redemption. In Kants writings I heard the eternal Thou shalt in its trumpet tone of victory, Howe told her Concord audience. The possibility of a rational solution of social and national difficulties, the superiority of reason over force, and the applicability of the first to what been always generally deemed the province of the latterare not these the results of applied philosophy?

And were they not the ultimate goal of the American experiment? They were certainly the goals of Howes conception of the national mission. Howe lived and worked among New England Idealists confident that the Absolute permeated nature, society, and the individual, summoning humanity to the duties of the ethical life, and leading on to freedom, unity, and immortality. If every country were governed upon principles of true philosophy, the Battle-Hymn poet asked, where would be war and crime, the scourges of the human race?

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The Philosophy of Julia Ward Howe - zocalopublicsquare.org

Every generation has its heroes. Who the heroes are is determined by the world that the generation grows up in and that is why for this generation, our definitive hero is none other than Takeshi Kovacs.

As a show, 'Altered Carbon' is a revelation. Sure, the original novels may have been written in the early 2000s but the core concept, a world where immortality is no longer just a fantasy, is one that's still pretty unique in the realm of science fiction.

The way the show bends our preconceived notions of mind, body and society as a whole is truly mindboggling but the point of it all is something far deeper. The show projects a world drastically different from our own and then uses this alien landscape to showcase the most human of foibles.

In 'Altered Carbon', most of the things that divide humanity today, like race or gender, are outdated concepts. But despite the fact that humanity has a chance to become something so much better, 'Altered Carbon' is still a dystopian show. The one divider that never goes away economic status still manages to find a way to twist the gift of immortality and turn it into something horrendous.

For a generation that's growing up in a world under constant threat of collapse due to unchecked economic expansion, the world of 'Altered Carbon' is not alien at all. But political angles aside, it's the hero himself who concerns us and he's a real piece of work.

Whether played by Joel Kinnaman or Anthony Mackie or whoever steps into the role next, Takeshi Kovacs is a broken man who surrounds himself with other broken people. He's not perfect in any sense of the word but it is his imperfection that makes him so very human and relatable.

Much like the people who watch him on screen, Tak finds himself in a world that's dark, strange and hostile. But he still finds a way to try and help people, to do the right thing.

We don't know yet if Netflix plans on continuing 'Altered Carbon' after Season 2 though we really hope they do. This show, much like 'Doctor Who', has the potential to go on for decades thanks to the lead role not requiring a particular actor. But whatever future might await him, we're sure Takeshi Kovacs will find a way to impress us over and over again.

After all, he is an Envoy and he takes what's offered.

'Altered Carbon' Season 2 will be releasing on Netflix on February 27.

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'Altered Carbon': Takeshi Kovacs is the definitive and imperfect sci-fi hero of this generation - MEAWW