Radio Phoenix Regazza

Or, Gil-Scot Heron may have been wrong.

Not sure how Lizzie Borden's Born in Flames eluded my attention for so many years, but I'm entirely glad we've finally had the chance to meet.

Reasons: the explicit skewering of the sublimation of radical (queer?) resistance to a party, the party, any party -- or, as the lady writers of the Young Socialist Review so pedantically illumine, the necessity for the division between 'politics' and 'action' to be dismantled -- all pencil skirts and goggle-glasses as they realize that, hey, maybe the politics of the women's army is born in praxis -- permanent deferral of theoretical coherence, recognition that this sort of revolutionary hermeneutics is forthrightly incapacitating.

Further Reasons:
a) The Slit's "Newtown" featured prominently on the soundtrack, diegetically re-visioning their riotous lament about specularazation and pre-fabricated 'community'
b) anti-rape action involving bike gangs, whistles, and ladies in short-shorts!
c) the use of weaponry on communications centers, following an empathic charting of the tendency for species-directed violence to lead to sorrow, retaliation, and further death.
d) the closing scene of the film, demonstrating thoroughly that all that was needed to be taken out re: the WTC was simply its capacity to broadcast -- not the whole damn building. Regardless of what Zizek and Baudrillard have got to say in terms of us (u.s.?) willing the attack, it's sufficiently clear that certain terms were different. At least for some of us, you know, internal terrors.

And I leave you with this:

"What one takes away after seeing this film is the image of a heterogeneity in the female social subject, the sense of a distance from dominant cultural models and of an internal division within women that remain, not in spite of but concurrent with the provisional unity of any concerted political action. Just as the film's narrative remains unresolved, fragmented, and difficult to follow, heterogeneity and difference within women remain in our memory as the film's narrative image, its work of representing, which cannot be collapsed into a fixed identity, a sameness of all women as Woman, or a representation of Feminism as a coherent and available image"
-- Terese de Lauretis, from "Rethinking Women's Cinema"