Friday, December 30, 2022

God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen

A 4-hour 5-star discussion featuring Gonzalo Lira, Brian Berletic, Garland Nixon, Alex Christoforou, Ian Miles Ceong, History Legends, Larry Johnson, Mark Sleboda, and Alex Stein -- each and every one banned on Twitter & Facebook!

So let's join in and enjoy a look back on 2022 -- the magnificent year when US vampiric control of the world began to slip. 

 Here's praying '23 drives the final stake into its dead heart.


Thursday, December 29, 2022

Luck Be a Lady

No, we probably won't be blessed enough to have her as a leader; and no one of course is perfect. But in the context of Washington's satanic drive to end the world in the name of Wokeness (when actually it's in the name of Israel-First pimple dicks trying to save their hidden accounts) -- she's special.


Monday, December 26, 2022

Christmas '23

Saturday, December 24, 2022

Eve

Thursday, December 22, 2022

Christmas: SCTV

My favorite, a miracle, from December 1982.

Tuesday, December 20, 2022

Monday, December 19, 2022

Finally?

 

Sunday, December 18, 2022

Why Not?

Friday, December 16, 2022

It's a Wonderful Life?

George Bailey's nightmare.



Gambling, alcohol, pool, pawnbrokers, dancing, and floozies!

A nightmare worthy of the iron heart of Rudolph Giuliani. . .

Frank Capra was a phony. While obviously a technical master within a factory system humming on all cylinders -- and the director of many interesting and speedy movies before he became classical Hollywood's Social Artist of the Day (American Madness, The Miracle Woman, Forbidden, Platinum Blonde, and the very special Bitter Tea of General Yen) -- Capra-the-Award Winner (and that happened fast) played it safe, took the road most traveled by while adding nothing new to it, and became increasingly sexless, reactionary, anti-romantic, witless, and slow, with every Oscar. (Also, his "Know Your Enemy" entry on Japan must be seen to be believed, worth sharing company with The Eternal Jew and Jew Süss.)

A different sort of nightmare. Produced by the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, here's a view of 1946 a lot closer to the daily concerns of the daily American, for all its technical messiness.

Wednesday, December 14, 2022

A Lost Claus?

Never lost.

Merry
Christmas!


Friday, November 25, 2022

Black Friday

Pope Francis:
We worship an economic system which values the God of money over human beings. A system that uses billions to rescue banks during times of financial crisis, but fails to invest even one thousandth of that money to help refugees and migrants fleeing their home countries who die in the Mediterranean Sea during their journey.

What is wrong with the world today? When a bank files for bankruptcy there's an immediate, outrageous sum of money, but when this bankruptcy occurs in humanity there's not even a one-thousandth portion to save these brothers who suffer so much? We must free ourselves from the economic ties that produce an attachment to material things such as luxury cars and designer clothing.

I am often asked if this means a Marxist type of society. Well, if anything, it is the communists who think like Christians. Christ spoke of a society where the poor, the weak and the marginalized have the right to decide. Not demagogues, not Barabbas, but the people, the poor, whether they have faith in a transcendent God or not. It is they who must help to achieve equality and freedom.

Unfortunately, often these policies are opposed by populations that are afraid of losing jobs and of lower wages. Money is against the poor as well as against immigrants and refugees, but there are also poor people in rich countries who fear the arrival of their fellows from poor countries. It is a vicious circle and it must be broken.

We must break down the walls that divide us: we must try to increase well-being and make it more widespread, but to achieve this we need to break down walls and build bridges that allow us to reduce inequality and increase freedom and rights.

No one should be forced to flee his or her homeland. But the evil is doubled when, facing terrible circumstances, the migrant is thrown into the clutches of human traffickers to cross the border. And it is tripled if, arriving in the land where he or she hoped to find a better future, one is despised, exploited or even enslaved.

The gap between the peoples and present-day forms of democracies is widening ever-more due to the enormous power of economic and mediatic groups that seem to dominate. Because fear, besides being good business for merchants of weapons and death, weakens and destabilizes us, destroying our psychological and spiritual defenses, anesthetizing us to the suffering of others and, in the end, making us cruel.

Do not fall into the temptation of being put into a box that reduces you to secondary actors or, worse, to mere administrators of the existing misery.
The great Leonard Cohen, RIP:
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes
Everybody knows

Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died

Everybody knows the deal is rotten
Old Black Joe's still pickin' cotton
For your ribbons and bows
And everybody knows

And everybody knows that the Plague is coming
Everybody knows that it's moving fast
Everybody knows that the naked man and woman
Are just a shining artifact of the past
Everybody knows the scene is dead
But there's gonna be a meter on your bed
That will disclose
What everybody knows

And everybody knows that you're in trouble
Everybody knows what you've been through
From the bloody cross on top of Calvary
To the beach of Malibu
Everybody knows it's coming apart
Take one last look at this Sacred Heart
Before it blows
And everybody knows. . .

Tuesday, November 22, 2022

A Man Died That Day


And a husband. And a father. R.I.P.

Monday, November 14, 2022

Strange Dickie Loudon



A very favorite Newhart, from February of '88.

Sunday, November 13, 2022

Slurp It

Thursday, November 10, 2022

Naked and the Dead

A solid episode of Naked City as it completes its final season, made special by a very moving David Janssen (six months before The Fugitive) as an advertising man dying of leukemia. The hour (including original commercials) is pure atmosphere, created by simply turning on the camera ~ New York in '63 was still saying goodbye to the impression that once some single power had had the place in grip, had given it an emotional and architectural unity and splendor now lost and forgotten. . .

"On the Battle Front: Every Minute is Important"

Tuesday, November 8, 2022

Out!

 
Get the fuck out you brain-dead, Fake Catholic malignancy. And take your used Tampon of a VP with you. (And someone get that bust of RFK far away from this motherfucking turd.)

(And oh yes, if the Dumbo Corporate War-Loving Fascists do not lose both Houses tonight -- THEY STOLE IT.)

Friday, November 4, 2022

Spill It

Wednesday, November 2, 2022

Dr. Stein

Monday, October 31, 2022

The Cross


Tag Gallagher on Carl Dreyer.



The complete masterpiece.

Saturday, October 29, 2022

Sare for President!


Currently running for United States Senate here in New York and -- better yet -- recently proclaimed an "Information Terrorist" by the Nazi Ukrainian government, Diane Sare says everything the gutless Pwogs in the Dumbo Party are too scared -- or blackmailed -- to even whisper. . . 

Thursday, October 27, 2022

Mighty Like a Rose

Monday, October 24, 2022

Start Making Sense!


Tulsi and Professor Jeffrey Sachs.
 

Saturday, October 22, 2022

Saviour

"I know there is a God -- and I see a storm coming;
 if He has a place for me, I believe that I am ready."
-- John F. Kennedy

[Today marks the 60th Anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis. As the 21st-century US Vampires suck the world's blood and drive it toward extinction, let us remember.]

He was the only one. The only one in the Administration who refused to attack the island. The only one who stood up to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stood up to the rest of his National Security State (which wasn't his at all), stood up to the established media chorus calling for invasion and air strikes, stood up to the strategic coup being organized behind his back by one of his future killers, Lyndon Johnson. As we now know, the Cubans and Soviets had over 100 operational battlefield nukes which, if fired, would have taken out Miami, Washington DC, and New York. Hence, the end of the world. At every turn, he refused confrontation. When the missiles and sites were discovered. When he ordered the blockade of Cuba, and the Soviet ships approached the quarantine line, he pulled that line back -- four times. When the Soviet tanker Bucharest, certainly not carrying any missiles or other armament, steamed toward the blockade line, he decided to let it proceed to Havana, again against all advice. Privately, Kennedy had begun to doubt the validity of CIA's photos, ostensibly proving the existence of the Soviet missiles. (CIA had doctored photos before, during the Bay of Pigs.) When Rudolf Anderson, Navy flier, was shot down in a National Security State covert operation directed against Kennedy by sending -- against direct White House orders -- a U-2 surveillance flight over the island at the hottest moment of the crisis, he kept the shoot down quiet until the crisis was done. "He chickened out again!" bellowed Air Force General Curtis LeMay. (A further anti-Kennedy covert op also involved a U-2: one just happened to "stray" low over Soviet territory, then was "rescued" by nuclear-armed F-102s back to base.)

"There was now the feeling that the noose was tightening on all of us, on Americans and Soviets and Cubans, on mankind, and that the bridges to escape were crumbling. But again the President pulled everyone back. . ." -- Robert Kennedy
When two letters arrived from Khrushchev -- the first agreeing to all United States demands, the second belligerent and escalatory -- Kennedy decided to proceed as if the second letter never arrived. (JFK would later agree, after the crisis was settled, to all the Soviets had asked for, in the second hard-line letter.) In the most dangerous moment in human history, when all force was on his side, he refused all force. As he whispered to his brother as the Joint Chiefs started clamoring for a first-strike against Moscow: "And we call ourselves the human race. . . I think of all the children in the world who have no idea what the United States or the Soviet Union even are. Well, better Red than dead."

Better Red than dead. Was this heard by anyone else? James Douglass:
For at least a decade, JFK’s favorite poem had been "Rendezvous" by Alan Seeger, an American poet killed in World War One. Kennedy recited "Rendezvous" to his wife Jacqueline in 1953 on their first night home in Hyannis after their honeymoon. She memorized the poem, and recited it back to him over the years. In the fall of 1963, Jackie taught the words of the poem to their five-year-old daughter, Caroline.

On the morning of October 5, 1963, President Kennedy met with his National Security Council in the Rose Garden of the White House. Caroline suddenly appeared by her father’s side, and she said she wanted to tell him something. He tried to divert her attention while the meeting continued, but Caroline persisted. The president smiled and turned his full attention to his daughter. He told her to go ahead. While the members of the National Security Council sat and watched, Caroline looked into her father’s eyes and said:
I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air-
I have a rendezvous with Death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair.

It may be he shall take my hand
And lead me into his dark land
And close my eyes and quench my breath-
It may be I shall pass him still.
I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.

God knows 'twere better to be deep
Pillowed in silk and scented down,
Where love throbs out in blissful sleep,
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
Where hushed awakenings are dear...
But I've a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.
After Caroline said the poem’s final word, “rendezvous,” Kennedy’s national security advisers sat in stunned silence. One of them said later the bond between father and daughter was so deep “it was as if there was ‘an inner music’ he was trying to teach her.”

Henry Miller often wrote that each of us are placed here on earth in order to learn one lesson. We then move on. It is hard to appreciate John Fitzgerald Kennedy's life apart from its ending -- a manner of ending certainly influenced by his actions during the Missile Crisis. Yet perhaps the miraculous singular purpose of his life was to save us all. For he did.

The Monday night, October 22nd, 1962 television address:



Many actors have played Jack Kennedy in movies and television, on stage. None have captured the self-effacing, realistic, inner grace of the man. The decency. The isolation. The melancholy and fatalism. Here Bruce Greenwood does. Thirteen Days (2000) itself is merely in the deep end of the theatrically-released Movie of the Week genre and is nearly drowned by Kevin Costner's endless, insufferable presence. (He plays White House Chief of Staff Kenny O'Donnell who had little to do with the Crisis drama.) Greenwood makes it special. A remarkably intelligent actor who gives us the hardest of all things to capture on film: thought. And he embodies Kennedy as not only the center (despite Costner's suffocations); but also as target.
No one has appreciated John F. Kennedy more beautifully and profoundly than Catholic theologian James W. Douglass, in his masterpiece JFK and the Unspeakable and in continuing lectures. Here is Douglass at his most moving, Seattle, Washington, September 2008.


Friday, October 14, 2022

High

Monday, October 10, 2022

To Keep Her Love Alive


I think of Dragnet Girl (Hijosen no onna), Yasujiro Ozu's 1933 silent gangster melodrama, as the Chrysler Building of movies. However one feels about Deco, has it ever been presented on screen with such comprehensiveness, concentration and beauty? And with, at least for the first half, such a sense of loss, as if Ozu felt a need to contain and preserve it before something else took its place -- like a man in a burning house who has 10 minutes to collect the valuables.

Something more than a celebration, however, is taking place. The objects are astonishingly beautiful -- typewriters, dice, ceiling lamps, clocks, hats, mirrors, iron gym rings, blinds, Victrolas: soft light, from no apparent source, spreads across them, leaving an irregular darkness. And the objects cast no shadows, and indeed seem edge-lighted as if the light is coming from within. Yet there's something sinister, as well as holy, in the objects. The era defined by the design of Deco was also an era of Capitalist Restoration, the first of the media age -- Deco is a Fordist atmosphere: the pure, clean, smart, of-the-moment, mechanistic new order of production made stunning and opulent. Yearning and mystery, perhaps for the past when the blood had a different throb -- excluded.

Until Tanaka takes over. It is hard to connect this sassy pool-playing moll (with a backside so cute everyone seems to want to watch it) with the suffering mothers and wives and sisters from her 1940s and 50s greatness. She is so pretty here, and one doesn't think of her that way post-war. And she turns the movie on its head, when she fears the loss of Joji, her lover, an ex-prizefighter now living off of Tokiko (Tanaka). His character, despite Tokiko's burning, remains to the end as abstract as the objects surrounding him (in Joji's case, a rather Frankensteinian abstraction). All the characters remain pure types, as fixed and frozen in their perfection as are the Deco objects themselves: soon-to-be Naruse's own Sumiko Mizukubo, playing the devoted sister; Hiroshi the confused and somewhat wacky brother; Yumeko Aizome, her own embodiment of astonishing slender Deco beauty. And the story is little but myths and notions of its time. Tokiko is the only force in the work who strives to bust the abstractions and settlements around her, who strives to change, who at the end shoots her lover in order to force him to not merely live in the perpetual now of externals and structures. She becomes a figure of disruption and freedom, the only force in the work that longs to become different. And she forces a work that started out in the land of Hawks and Von Sternberg, to become Bressonian. (Ten years before Bresson.)

Japanese Girls at the Harbor


Silent and wonderful and very strange. Director Hiroshi Shimizu -- one of the forgotten masters of classical Japanese cinema -- invented his own film language and here it is used to create a series of free-floating emotional tableaus, either in support of, or not, a story. (I can't tell.) It seems to be about two Yokohama high school girls who go their very separate ways, one called Sunako, the other Dora. (Dora in 1933 Japan?) Yes ~ for the movie cuts with an anti-Western edge, as it opens with foreboding scenes of foreign ships filled with non-Japanese passengers: we see foreign cars, a Christian church, gangsters right out of Scarface (1932), and the names Dora, Henry, and the troubled Yoko Sheridan. (Henry and Dora later get married and live in a thoroughly Western house.) The main character (and the movie's troublemaker) is Sunako (played by the rather limited Michiko Oikawa, who looks forlornly at the ground quite a bit). Sunako yearns for Western-style bourgeois respectability, while mistreating (and eventually tossing out) her devoted Bohemian boyfriend; and while yearning for the cheating ex-gangster husband Henry, who breaks his own devoted wife's heart. (Dora is played by Yukiko Inouye, who's reminiscent of Renèe Faure in Les Anges du Peche.) As we move along, many questions arise. Why is there no emotional weight given to the artist boyfriend? How did Sunako escape after shooting Yoko Sheridan? How did Yoko come to such dire straights? What crime did Masumi commit? What exactly is Yoko guilty of, besides getting shot by Sunako?

We don't know. Shimizu never tells us. But his language is so his own that you won't care and all you'll remember are the sequences: the disappearance dissolves; the shooting in the church; the slow track to the left revealing who Sunako's new neighbor is; the unraveling ball of string; the montage of "where we used to walk together"; Masumi's arrest; Sunako's bar search for Henry; Sunako's recognition of her neighbor; the ending's visual exhiliration.

Monday, October 3, 2022

Happy 70th Birthday, Mr. President

     Western countries have been saying for centuries that they bring freedom and democracy to other nations. Nothing could be further from the truth. Instead of bringing democracy they suppressed and exploited, and instead of giving freedom they enslaved and oppressed. The unipolar world is inherently anti-democratic and unfree; it is false and hypocritical through and through.
    Recall that during WWII the United States and Britain reduced Dresden, Hamburg, Cologne and many other German cities to rubble, without the least military necessity. It was done ostentatiously and, to repeat, without any military necessity. They had only one goal, as with the nuclear bombing of Japanese cities: to intimidate our country and the rest of the world.
    The United States left a deep scar in the memory of the people of Korea and Vietnam with their carpet bombings and use of napalm and chemical weapons.
    It actually continues to occupy Germany, Japan, the Republic of Korea and other countries, which they cynically refer to as equals and allies. Look now, what kind of alliance is that? The whole world knows that the top officials in these countries are being spied on and that their offices and homes are bugged. It is a disgrace, a disgrace for those who do this and for those who, like slaves, silently and meekly swallow this arrogant behavior.
    They call the orders and threats they make to their vassals Euro-Atlantic solidarity, and the creation of biological weapons and the use of human test subjects, including in Ukraine, noble medical research.
    It is their destructive policies, wars and plunder that have unleashed today’s massive wave of migrants. Millions of people endure hardships and humiliation or die by the thousands trying to reach Europe.
    They are exporting grain from Ukraine now. Where are they taking it under the guise of ensuring the food security of the poorest countries? Where is it going? They are taking it to the self-same European countries. Only five percent has been delivered to the poorest countries. More cheating and naked deception again.
    In effect, the American elite is using the tragedy of these people to weaken its rivals, to destroy nation states. This goes for Europe and for the identities of France, Italy, Spain and other countries with centuries-long histories.
    Washington demands more and more sanctions against Russia and the majority of European politicians obediently go along with it. They clearly understand that by pressuring the EU to completely give up Russian energy and other resources, the United States is practically pushing Europe toward deindustrialisation in a bid to get its hands on the entire European market. These European elites understand everything – they do, but they prefer to serve the interests of others. This is no longer servility but direct betrayal of their own peoples. God bless, it is up to them.
    But the Anglo-Saxons believe sanctions are no longer enough and now they have turned to subversion. It seems incredible but it is a fact – by causing explosions on Nord Stream’s international gas pipelines passing along the bottom of the Baltic Sea, they have actually embarked on the destruction of Europe’s entire energy infrastructure. It is clear to everyone who stands to gain. Those who benefit are responsible, of course. 
The historic speech in full, with translation:
 


The Saker, with a most brilliant analysis.

Thursday, September 22, 2022

Which Kind Are You?

The Marrying Kind:  what does that mean? As one who once married young and for love, I really don't know. I suspect, generally and not counting shotgun weddings, it refers to a personality more earnest than others, perhaps naive and silly, and certainly terribly optimistic. (Whoever said a "second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience" got it backwards. It's the first marriage that's pure hope.)

Director George Cukor decided to make a movie in search of the answer. New York City, which in 1952 included all the boroughs, not just Yelp Island. Young working-class newlyweds caught up in the deliriums of post-World War II America. Judy Holliday and a fine new actor, ex-prizefighter Aldo Ray. In-laws, broken dreams, money troubles; and the death of a child. The Marrying Kind find themselves pulled apart by The Practical Kind -- all those ready to provide every unmagical reason in the world not to stay together.

The movie says, "No -- love is not blind. In fact, love is the only state in which we truly see someone. To lose love is to lose vision, to lose understanding." For then the loved one becomes just like everyone else. . .

It is a very dear film. And how lovely to see a New York City that does not take itself too seriously, a place where people have real jobs (and real accents!).

Sunday, September 18, 2022

Good and Blonde


The flip side of Holiday (1938). Here the rich are wacky, good-natured types, who only need to be taught how to act, by a butler who's secretly a fallen member of the ruling class. And who saves the day by a stock-deal too similar to Johnny Case's Seaboard coup. There, it blows everything up. Here, it makes everyone whole.

Who cares? Lombard sweeps all before her.

Case


Johnny Case ~ one of the key characters from classical Hollywood, mostly forgotten. His eyes: far-seeing, haunted, engaged, melancholy. Case (and the man who played him) holds the secret of life, embodies the democratic nature of movies itself: joy, magic, movement, thought, energy, intelligence, luck, charm, grace, quality, hopes, dreams, and freedom.

In Holiday (1938), Case and his spirit are permanent polar opposites to all that is seen in the movie as anti-life and anti-spirit: money; and those who have it. Holiday reminds us what all Americans knew in their bones, until about 30 years ago: that the American very rich are stupid, humorless, in-bred pigs, capable of holding onto money and power only because of their single-minded opportunity and obsession to do so -- a brood that knows itself to be above others by right and beneath them in fact. (My Man Godfrey [1936] -- another great Depression comedy -- must've been more comforting to its slumming wealthy audience members.)

The story begins with Case -- proletarian and very temporary investment banker -- returning to New York City from a Lake Placid ski trip, where he's met the girl of his dreams. Visiting her home for the first time, he discovers she's the daughter of enormous wealth, living in a preposterously large Fifth Avenue mansion.

(The hole in the movie is the wholly unbelievable notion that Case could fall in love with either Doris Nolan the actress or Julia Seton the character. Another hole is Katharine Hepburn. In a work of beautiful, understated performances, hers is often as artificial as it is righteous.)

The movie revolves around Grant's magic, coming closer and closer, then drifting away. It begins on Christmas morning. (And we wonder: where are the decorations in this enormous house? 'Though we do see the family, sans Hepburn, attend Christmas morning mass.) Johnny's friends Nick and Susan (two classical 30s leftists, played by Edward Everett Horton and Jean Dixon) return him to himself -- when he's apart from them he is fretful and distracted. The negative attitudes shown toward Case on occasion by members of the Seton family or Seton family friends strike us as insane. Ned -- quietly played by the special Lew Ayres -- is someone we long to see brought in by Case, as comrade and brother-in-law: we know this will give him heart. Julia -- the intended -- will never take that heart, and so has no real use for Case. For the rich are naturally stunted, says the movie. Hepburn is already where she needs to be -- archly -- and how long could Johnny take her close-up, day-after-day? She already seems complete. The warmth and ardency of a young Lupino might've been a lovelier match. Or Ann Sheridan. . .

Seton Cram, played by Henry Daniell, seems to be playwright Philip Barry pouring it on. Yet aren't we now in a place of Seton Crams-on-steroids, runaway Crams draped in baggy Versace suits with washboard stomachs, carefully unkempt hair, tattoos and bee-stung lips? At one point Cram offers to help Johnny make his first million within a year: "It wouldn't take that long if we had the right sort of government." Ted Cruz couldn't have said it better.

And Grant to Hepburn: "There's a conspiracy against you and me, child. Vested interests. . ." Interests and conspirators who have completely won out.

Still, what a grand movie.

Friday, September 16, 2022

Godard

The great artist has died. (Fuck the Queen.)

Thursday, September 15, 2022

Wednesday, September 14, 2022

Hand Job


Monday, September 12, 2022

Magisterial

The man who would later be the victim of a WASP Mafia/National Security State execution tells the "Greater Houston Ministerial Association" where to stick it, 62 years ago today.

Sunday, September 11, 2022

Remembering 9/11


Forty-nine years ago today, the US national security state murdered Chile's President, overthrew his elected Workers/Socialist government, and installed a fascist corporate totalitarian state which now seems to've been the future model for the USA itself. Under the business dictatorship headed by mass murderer Augusto Pinochet -- hero to Ronald Reagan and the Chicago School of Economics -- tens of thousands were murdered or forced to flee their land, hundreds of thousands were imprisoned and tortured.

In memory.

Saturday, September 10, 2022

Fuck the Queen

 
 Chris Hedges.
The fawning adulation of Queen Elizabeth in the United States, which fought a revolution to get rid of the monarchy, and in Great Britain, is in direct proportion to the fear gripping a discredited, incompetent and corrupt global ruling elite.

The global oligarchs are not sure the next generation of royal sock puppets - mediocrities that include a pedophile prince and his brother, a cranky and eccentric king who accepted suitcases and bags stuffed with $3.2 million in cash from the former prime minister of Qatar Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, and who has millions stashed in offshore accounts - are up to the job. Let’s hope they are right.

“Having a monarchy next door is a little like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and has daubed their house with clown murals, displays clown dolls in each window and has an insatiable desire to hear about and discuss clown-related news stories,” Patrick Freyne wrote last year in The Irish Times. “More specifically, for the Irish, it’s like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and, also, your grandfather was murdered by a clown.”

Monarchy obscures the crimes of empire and wraps them in nostalgia. It exalts white supremacy and racial hierarchy. It justifies class rule. It buttresses an economic and social system that callously discards and often consigns to death those considered the lesser breeds, most of whom are people of color. The queen’s husband Prince Phillip, who died in 2021, was notorious for making racist and sexist remarks, politely explained away in the British press as “gaffes.” He described Beijing, for example, as “ghastly” during a 1986 visit and told British students: “If you stay here much longer you'll all be slitty-eyed.”

The cries of the millions of victims of empire; the thousands killed, tortured, raped and imprisoned during the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya; the 13 Irish civilians gunned down in “Bloody Sunday;” the more than 4,100 First Nations children who died or went missing in Canada’s residential schools, government-sponsored institutions established to “assimilate” indigenous children into Euro-Canadian culture, and the hundreds of thousands killed during the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan are drowned out by cheers for royal processions and the sacral aura an obsequious press weaves around the aristocracy. The coverage of the queen’s death is so mind-numbingly vapid — the BBC sent out a news alert on Saturday when Prince Harry and Prince William, accompanied by their wives, surveyed the floral tributes to their grandmother displayed outside Windsor Castle — that the press might as well turn over the coverage to the mythmakers and publicists employed by the royal family.

The royals are oligarchs. They are guardians of their class. The world’s largest landowners include King Mohammed VI of Morocco with 176 million acres, the heirs of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia with 531 million acres and now, King Charles III with 6.6 billion acres of land. British monarchs are worth almost $28 billion. The British public will provide a $33 million subsidy to the Royal Family over the next two years, although the average household in the U.K. saw its income fall for the longest period since records began in 1955 and 227,000 households experience homelessness in Britain.

Royals, to the ruling class, are worth the expense. They are effective tools of subjugation. British postal and rail workers canceled planned strikes over pay and working conditions after the queen’s death. The Trade Union Congress (TUC) postponed its congress. Labour Party members poured out heartfelt tributes. Even Extinction Rebellion, which should know better, indefinitely canceled its planned “Festival of Resistance.” The BBC’s Clive Myrie dismissed Britain’s energy crisis — caused by the war in Ukraine — that has thrown millions of people into severe financial distress as “insignificant” compared with concerns over the queen's health.The climate emergency, pandemic, the deadly folly of the U.S. and NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine, soaring inflation, the rise of neo-fascist movements and deepening social inequality will be ignored as the press spews florid encomiums to class rule. There will be 10 days of official mourning.

In 1953, Her Majesty’s Government sent three warships, along with 700 troops, to its colony British Guiana, suspended the constitution and overthrew the democratically elected government of Cheddi Jagan. Her Majesty’s Government helped to build and long supported the apartheid government in South Africa. Her Majesty’s Government savagely crushed the Mau Mau independence movement in Kenya from 1952 to 1960, herding 1.5 million Kenyans into concentration camps where many were tortured. British soldiers castrated suspected rebels and sympathizers, often with pliers, and raped girls and women. By the time India won independence in 1947 after two centuries of British colonialism, Her Majesty’s Government had looted $45 trillion from the country and violently crushed a series of uprisings, including the First War of Independence in 1857. Her Majesty’s Government carried out a dirty war to break the Greek Cypriot War of Independence from 1955 to 1959 and later in Yemen from 1962 to 1969. Torture, extrajudicial assassinations, public hangings and mass executions by the British were routine. Following a protracted lawsuit, the British government agreed to pay nearly £20 million in damages to over 5,000 victims of British abuse during war in Kenya, and in 2019 another payout was made to survivors of torture from the conflict in Cyprus. The British state attempts to obstruct lawsuits stemming from its colonial history. Its settlements are a tiny fraction of the compensation paid to British slave owners in 1835, once it — at least formally — abolished slavery.

The point of social hierarchy and aristocracy is to sustain a class system that makes the rest of us feel inferior. Those at the top of the social hierarchy hand out tokens for loyal service, including the Order of the British Empire (OBE). The monarchy is the bedrock of hereditary rule and inherited wealth. This caste system filters down from the Nazi-loving House of Windsor to the organs of state security and the military. It regiments society and keeps people, especially the poor and the working class, in their “proper” place.

The British ruling class clings to the mystique of royalty and fading cultural icons as James Bond, the Beatles and the BBC, along with television shows such as “Downton Abbey” — where in one episode the aristocrats and servants are convulsed in fevered anticipation when King George V and Queen Mary schedule a visit — to project a global presence. Winston Churchill’s bust remains on loan to the White House. These myth machines sustain Great Britain’s “special” relationship with the United States. Watch the satirical film In the Loop to get a sense of what this “special” relationship looks like on the inside.

It was not until the 1960s that “coloured immigrants or foreigners” were permitted to work in clerical roles in the royal household, although they had been hired as domestic servants. The royal household and its heads are legally exempt from laws that prevent race and sex discrimination, what Jonathan Cook calls “an apartheid system benefitting the Royal Family alone.” Meghan Markle, who is of mixed race and who contemplated suicide during her time as a working royal, said that an unnamed royal expressed concern about the skin color of her unborn son.

I got a taste of this suffocating snobbery in 2014 when I participated in an Oxford Union debate asking whether Edward Snowden was a hero or a traitor. I went a day early to be prepped for the debate by Julian Assange, then seeking refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy and currently in His Majesty's Prison Belmarsh. At a lugubrious black-tie dinner preceding the event, I sat next to a former MP who asked me two questions I had never been asked before in succession. “When did your family come to America?” he said, followed by “What schools did you attend?” My ancestors, on both sides of my family, arrived from England in the 1630s. My graduate degree is from Harvard. If I had failed to meet his litmus test, he would have acted as if I did not exist.

Those who took part in the debate – my side arguing that Snowdon was a hero narrowly won – signed a leather-bound guest book. Taking the pen, I scrawled in large letters that filled an entire page: “Never Forget that your greatest political philosopher, Thomas Paine, never went to Oxford or Cambridge.”

Paine, the author of the most widely read political essays of the 18th century, Rights of Man, The Age of Reason and Common Sense, blasted the monarchy as a con. “A French bastard landing with an armed banditti and establishing himself as King of England against the consent of the natives, is in plain terms a very paltry rascally original…The plain truth is that the antiquity of the English monarchy will not bear looking into,” he wrote of William the Conqueror. He ridiculed hereditary rule. “Of more worth is one honest man to society, and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.” He went on: “One of the strangest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in kings is that nature disproves it, otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule, by giving  mankind an ass for a lion.” He called the monarch “the royal brute of England.”

When the British ruling class tried to arrest Paine, he fled to France where he was one of two foreigners elected to serve as a delegate in the National Convention set up after the French Revolution. He denounced the calls to execute Louis XVI. “He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression,” Paine said. “For if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.” Unchecked legislatures, he warned, could be as despotic as unchecked monarchs. When he returned to America from France, he condemned slavery and the wealth and privilege accumulated by the new ruling class, including George Washington, who had become the richest man in the country. Even though Paine had done more than any single figure to rouse the country to overthrow the British monarchy, he was turned into a pariah, especially by the press, and forgotten. He had served his usefulness. Six mourners attended his funeral, two of whom were Black.

There is a pathetic yearning among many in the U.S. and Britain to be linked in some tangential way to royalty. White British friends often have stories about ancestors that tie them to some obscure aristocrat. Donald Trump, who fashioned his own heraldic coat of arms, was obsessed with obtaining a state visit with the queen. This desire to be part of the club, or validated by the club, is a potent force the ruling class has no intention of giving up, even if hapless King Charles III, who along with his family treated his first wife Diana with contempt, makes a mess of it.

Wednesday, September 7, 2022

A Tale of Two Heroes (and One Thief)

1957, a teenager's jalopy, a busted fan belt, a minister, Edie and Irma (two fetching and scheming girls), a bank robber, angora dice, a missing secretary, the meaning of heroism, and a rather radical way of telling the story.

Bud Anderson, carrying his new fan belt, is in a bank teller's line as the man in front attempts to rob the bank. Terrified, Bud faints, falling forward into the robber and accidentally trapping the outlaw's legs in the fan belt. Proclaimed across Springfield as a brave and fast-thinking young hero, Bud eventually confesses, when pressed by parents and his Reverend into making a speech on courage before the family congregation.



2011, first-class vs. coach, an obnoxious female Yuppie, too-long shoelaces, a smashed airline passenger, a $300 bottle of wine, a silly prick by the name of Ricky Gervais, an obnoxious gay waiter, a $500 male scarf, a British bitch actress, a $200 theater ticket, Mister Simmington -- a play about life and death and war, an attempted subway mugging.



Larry David, flying to Manhattan for no apparent reason (with no good use made of NYC in later episodes from a flat and disappointing 8th year), fails to interest an attractive female seatmate. (With your looks, Larry? Impossible.) After visiting a coach-class restroom (heaven forbid!), he trips over his sneaker shoelaces and falls forward into a large boisterous drunk who was about to assault a stewardess. Knocked to the floor, the drunken man begs befuddled Larry to not hurt him anymore, that he will go away quietly. Acclaimed a hero by stewardess and passengers, Larry returns to his first-class space alongside a now more-than-willing seatmate.

The rest of the episode is a series of sour and aggressive exchanges between David and Ricky Gervais. Larry's exposed as shoelace-tripper rather than hero, loses his seatmate -- turned girlfriend -- turned ex-girlfriend (now going out with Gervais). All ends with Larry coming to the subway rescue of Gervais and ex-girlfriend by beating the tar out of a Latino street tough with a loaf of designer bread.

Uh, huh.

Tuesday, September 6, 2022

Uh-Oh


Sunday, September 4, 2022

Time of the Assassins

"The one thing they did not want to hear about was that life is indestructible. Was not their precious new world reared on the destruction of the innocent, on rape and plunder and torture and devastation? Both continents North and South had been violated; both had been stripped and plundered of all that was precious -- in things. No greater humiliation was meted out to any man than to Montezuma; no race was ever more ruthlessly exterminated than the American Indian; no land was ever raped in the foul and bloody way that California was raped by the gold-diggers. I blush to think of our origins -- our hands are steeped in blood and crime. And there is no let-up to the slaughter and the pillage. Down to the closest friend every American is a potential murderer. Often it wasn't necessary to bring out the gun or the lasso or the branding iron -- they had found subtler and more devilish ways of torturing and killing their own. For me the most excruciating agony was to have the word annihilated before it had even left my mouth. I learned by bitter experience to hold my tongue; I learned to sit in silence, and smile, when actually I was foaming at the mouth. I learned to shake hands and say how do you do to all these innocent-looking fiends who were only waiting for me to sit down in order to suck my blood." -- Henry Miller

Wednesday, August 31, 2022

Sisters

Father Knows Best was alive for six years (1954-60) and -- sharing the same condition with Ozzie and Harriet and Leave It to Beaver -- crashed and burned when midnight approached on the decade. Like LITB (but unlike O&H which had the good sense not to turn Rick Nelson into a big man on campus), the Anderson kids changed quite a bit and not for the better. The show is at times preachy, always drenched in Eisenhower monochrome conservatism, somewhat predictable, and toward the end Jane Wyatt as Mother turned herself (or somebody did) into a piece of arch waxworks so annoying as to ruin most episodes from years 5 and 6. Still, I love it, most of the time. It is beautifully photographed, scored, and paced. What's most attractive is its radical faith in the basic goodness of people. Unlike O&H and LITB, there are unrepentant bad characters in FKB (unlike any other 50s family show). There's a war going on here -- internal and external -- between Christian light and Christian dark, and when necessary both sides get their due. But the human good, in the most earnest way, always has the last word.

A lovely episode from March 1955, "No Partiality"

Saturday, August 20, 2022

Gravity and Grace

Friday, August 19, 2022

Go

Three ways.

Sinatra.



Lee Morgan.



Brother Bill Evans.

Saturday, August 13, 2022

Happy 96th, Comandante

"The fascists stop at nothing. They try to find the weak spot. They invent the most ridiculous lies. They try to create terror and unrest among the people by telling the most outrageous lies. Their appeal is always to the gutter instincts: hatred, fear, envy, racism, economic insecurity, selfishness, ignorance. They feed off of keeping people stupid. They resort to every method they can think of. And what do fascists do when their own institutions no longer guarantee their domination? How do they react when the mechanisms they've depended on historically to maintain their domination fail them? They simply go ahead and destroy those institutions, without a moment's look back. The fascists stop at nothing."

Thursday, August 11, 2022

1962!


A sultry Friday night at Sportsman's Park, June 8th, 1962. Juan Marichal vs. Bob Gibson. Harry Carey and Jack Buck. The best club in San Francisco Giants history (they were 40-17 at the start of the game) against a young up-and-coming Cardinals team that would win three pennants later in the decade. Funny and sweet radio spots. Lots of smoking and drinking and lots more good cheer. . .

They've been saying around here that Camelot was a myth. The heck it was.

Wednesday, August 10, 2022

Say Hey?


This bizarre 1967 view of the greatest baseball player of all-time -- not counting Barry Bonds -- seems to have been put together by a circle-jerk composed of Roone Arledge, George Wallace, George Putnam, and Colonel Harland Sanders. Did Willie see the finished product? Did he know he was being set-up as the Good Patriotic Colored Boy while the police and army burned down Newark, Detroit, Cleveland, and Hue?

Well, at least we get the original commercials. . .



And at least we were spared this.


Dr. Hunter S. Thompson with some ideas on improving the game of baseball:
Hi, folks. My name is Thompson, and I don't have much space for this high-speed presentation, so let's get started and see how tight we can make it. My job is to devise a whole new set of rules and concepts to shorten the time it takes to play a game of Major League Baseball, or any other kind.

Everybody agrees that baseball games must be shortened, but nobody is really working on it ... Meanwhile, the games get longer and longer. The good old "meat in the seats" argument won't work after midnight, when the seats are mainly empty, and TV networks get nasty when they start having to refund money to advertisers when the ratings sink lower and lower. Pro wrestling and golf are bigger draws than baseball games ... I have not been to a live baseball game in 20 years, and I hope I never see another one. Not even the New Rules would drag me back to the ballpark -- but I am a Doctor of Wisdom, a professional man, and some of my friends in the business have asked me to have a look at this problem, which I have, and this is my solution, for good or ill. I am keenly aware of the angst and bitter squabbling that will erupt when somebody tries to screw with the National Pastime.... But it must be done, and if I don't do it somebody else will. So here's the plan.

ELIMINATE THE PITCHER: This will knock at least one hour off the length of a game, which is now up to 3:42. One World Series game took five hours and 20 minutes, which is unacceptable to everybody except the pitchers. Yes ... So we will ELIMINATE THE PITCHERS, and they won't be missed. Pitchers, as a group, are pampered little swine with too much money and no real effect on the game except to drag it out and interrupt the action.

LIMIT ALL GAMES TO THREE HOURS: Like football and basketball and hockey, the Baseball game will end at a fixed time. THE SCORE, at that moment, WILL BE FINAL, based on an accumulation of TOTAL BASES IN 3 hours.

ALL BASE-RUNNERS MAY RUN TO ANY BASE (but not backward) -- First to Third, Second to Home, etc. And with NO PITCHER in the game, this frantic scrambling across the infield will be Feasible and Tempting.

ALL "PITCHING", by the way, will be done by a fine-tuned PITCHING MACHINE that pops up out of the mound, delivers a remote-controlled "pitch" at the batter, and then drops back out of sight, to free up the whole infield for running. ... If a batter hits a home run with the bases loaded, for instance, his team will score 16 total bases (or 16 points). But, if it's 3 up and 3 down in an inning, that team will score Zero points.

Think of 22-5, perhaps, or 88-55. Yes sir, we will have huge scores and constant speedy action for three straight hours.

The heroes of the game will be CATCHERS, not Pitchers. The CATCHER will dominate the game and be the highest-paid player. ... With no pitcher and no mound to disrupt the flow, runners on base will be moving at the crack of the bat, and it will be the catcher's job to shut them down or pick them off whenever possible. Foot-speed and a bazooka throwing arm will be paramount. ... There will be no more of this bull about bullpens and managers scratching their heads on TV for hours on end, no more lame pick-off throws to first, no more waving off signs and agonized close-ups while pop fouls bounce off the roof.

No, there will be no such thing as a base on balls. Each batter will get five "pitches" from the robot -- only FIVE (5) and if he doesn't get a hit by then, he is out. ... And the CATCHER will control the kind of drop or curve or speed he wants the machine to throw. And it will obey.

Those damn pitching machines can put a slider past you at 98 miles an hour five times in a row, with no problem. They can throw hideous wavering knuckleballs and half-moon curves -- all depending and according to what the CATCHER wants to dial up on his remote-control unit. He can even order that the batter be whacked in the ribs by a 102-mph fastball, although that will cost his team TWO (2) bases, instead of one. And you won't want to have some poor Cuban drilled in the ribs when you're nursing a 31-30 lead.

OK, folks, that's it for now. I am already late, and I have written too many words -- but the concept is sound, I think, and there is a clear and desperate need for it. ...

Next spring ESPN will put my theories to the test by sponsoring a series of "New Rules" baseball games in New York, Chicago, Omaha and Seattle, among others. ...Tickets will be sold and big-time sports talent will be employed. The success or failure of these games will determine the fate of baseball in America.

Purists will bitch and whine, but so what? Purists will Always bitch and whine. That is their function.

Monday, August 8, 2022

After the Love Has Gone

This used to be a pretty happy country. Where'd it go?


Saturday, August 6, 2022

Monday, August 1, 2022

Stay Cool


A brutal summer here in the Apple -- on top of WWIII fear, economic collapse, police murders, and the Biden/Harris scumfest.

So Cool Struttin' by Sonny Clark: Jackie McLean on alto, Art Farmer trumpet, Paul Chambers bass, Philly Joe behind the drums, and of course the great Mr. Clark at piano.

Friday, July 22, 2022

Moses Supposes

Friday, July 15, 2022

Lance I

The two funniest episodes of a very funny series.

Lance White is the Bizarro Jim Rockford: cheerful, calm, lucky, free of self-doubt, liked by all (especially girls and cops). And amazingly stupid. As Jim says: "Lance always comes out on top in the end. It's always some innocent bystander who eats the bullet."

"White on White and Nearly Perfect" from October 1978.

Lance II

Rockford and Lance are nominated for "Best P.I. of '79" in this beauty of an episode, stolen by James Whitmore, Jr. as a would-be Sam Spade. Tom Selleck bankrolled these two eps into Magnum, P.I., unfortunately.

"Nice Guys Finish Dead" -- 11/16/79.

Wednesday, July 13, 2022

Cis This

A long way from Mario Savio. . .

   

Berkeley must be so proud. C.J. Hopkins with more.

Tuesday, July 12, 2022

Next?

Why, full-blown fascism, of course.

Monday, July 11, 2022

Falling

Dr. Michael Parenti's brilliant (and very funny) explanation of the Roman Empire ~ and our own.

Sunday, July 10, 2022

Vegetable vs. Man

Wednesday, July 6, 2022

Ghosts

I've never been much of a fan of Rod Serling or his original Twilight Zone. (Its contemporary genre sister One Step Beyond has always seemed more genuinely strange and mysterious and honest). There's a quality of over-literary slumming to most TZ episodes (the same feel I get from Herb Leonard's Naked City and Route 66 [George Maharis!] -- Method Museums both). Yet, from the position of hate and degradation we're all covered in by our current Commodity Culture, to deny the show's occasional greatness is absurd.

Episode number five was called "Walking Distance" -- premiering October 30, 1959 and starring the sadly forgotten Gig Young (who seems to have once lived in the Amberson mansion). Strange to say for a network TV show, but the greatness of "Walking Distance" is in its music -- perhaps the most moving ever written for a single episode of any series, by Bernard Herrmann, coming off of Vertigo and North by Northwest, and preparing for Psycho. An excess of love seems to come from the sound, a kind of abnegation and loneliness which speaks of what is tender and what is lost forever. Herrmann's music contains the ghost of tenderness itself. (And how much better the episode would be without Serling's nail-on-the-head narration.)

Monday, July 4, 2022

Go Forth

Friday, July 1, 2022

Miss Yamada is Waiting for You

The collage is formed from Ryuichi Sakamoto's music and the five movies Isuzu Yamada made with Kenji Mizoguchi, 1935-36: Downfall of Osen, Oyuki the Madonna, Osaka Elegy, Sisters of Gion and the recently discovered Ojo Okichi (a Mizoguchi co-direction).

Of the four members from the inner circle of Japanese Classical Actresses (Setsuko Hara, Hideko Takemine, Kinuyo Tanaka are the others), Isuzu Yamada is the most melodramatic and moving, the most beautiful and erotic, and certainly the loneliest. Under Mizoguchi, her atmosphere is like pure oxygen: if you breathe it deep it can make you dizzy and joyful; or poison you. Her always melancholy eyes and faintly hollowed cheeks make it seem as if she is feeding on her own beauty.

Friday, June 24, 2022

Angels Flight


Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.
-- Christina Rossetti, Remember

“There’s a new art in the world and this doctor’s starting a collection.” – Velda

That Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly (1955) is a great American film, one of the greatest ever made, only a rash or foolish person will deny. While its greatness seems now to be generally recognized (contemporary critics of the 1950s all trashed it), the core of the greatness appears not to be. It is normally taken up by the Quentin Tarantino / Martin Scorsese types who embrace it as little more than director Aldrich, in this only his third big studio picture, sneering around with private eye / tough guy / sexy girl genre works of the post-WWII period ~ a meta P.I. movie. It is way beyond that. Kiss Me Deadly seeks to capture and does, via early-50s Los Angeles and the private eye and science fiction genres, a moment caught between a dying Deco / FDR culture -- a culture which intensified the individual while strengthening the community beyond -- and the cold technical Modernist world to come.

The movie is based on one of the better jobs done by the most popular hack writer of the time, Mickey Spillane. Erstwhile Mike Hammer picks up a hitchhiking girl on the highway, a lovely girl wearing nothing but a trench coat. After gassing up and moving through police checkpoints, they're immediately hijacked, the girl killed, Hammer left for dead. It seems the girl (Berga Torn in the book, Christina Bailey in the movie) knows something very important and everyone wants to know what it is: the "Great What's It?" in the movie's words. Practically everyone (and in Robert Aldrich's original movie ending, everyone) winds up dead. The differences between the Spillane world and Aldrich's are enormous. In the movie, New York City becomes Los Angeles. Four-million dollars in heroin becomes a box of atomic power. The Mafia becomes the Dulles Bros. national security state. Most important, Spillane's thematic vacuum becomes a work about one era dying and something sinister and incomprehensible struggling to be born.

Aldrich is the anti-Carl Dreyer. Rather than stripping down all decor until one finds a purified essence, Aldrich floods the film with an excess of mid-50s urban Modernist detritus -- architectures, automobiles, ladies clothes; the interior designs of apartments, hospitals, business hallways -- making all of it seem radioactive, in what may be the first movie to be usefully called a film blanc. (Aldrich's '55 follow-up The Big Knife would also qualify.) While at the same time -- in a vertigo of decoration -- placing us firmly in a destroyed and desiccating Los Angeles: Kaiser Hospital, born in the 30s, seemingly refurbished by Mark Rothko; sweet Nick's dumpy garage where he works on Mike's white '51 Jag, then his '50 MG convertible, and dies working on the Hammer '54 black Corvette; a zinc-white Calabasas gas station; a haunted mansion on what was once called Hill Place; Bunker Hill, all of it, especially Angels Flight and the flophouse once home to Christina and roommate Lily Carver; the Hillcrest Hotel; Club Pigalle; Hollywood Athletic Club; Hotel Jalisco. All gone. Classical 20th-century Los Angeles, the L.A. of Raymond Chandler and Lew Archer, being destroyed as Kiss Me Deadly was being made, or soon after. In Aldrich's world, Mike Hammer seeks meaning and clarity, similar to Philip Marlowe in Chandler's "The Long Goodbye" from the same time, in a vanishing L.A. of the foreign, the frightened, the lost, the individual (while the authority figures all try to hold it together -- and all authority here, "criminal" or "the law," are interchangeable).

Into a normally muscular and artless genre (especially artless under the insanely butch hand of Spillane), here we are given the feminine and creative: poetry, opera, painting, ballet, sculpture, music both classical and jazz, writings. (Christina's stunning apartment inside the Bunker Hill dive is museum-like in her artworks and books and music.) And the movies. Aldrich and director of photography Ernest Lazlo, from the glowing titles which move backward, as Mike's rocket-ship car (and Nat Cole) moves him and Christina back into the past and toward the future simultaneously, a vertigo of time, an astonishing start to a movie (meaninglessly ripped-off by hack George Lucas to begin his Star Wars) -- from this opening shot everything is made strange, mysterious, beautiful, and unique. Throughout Aldrich intensifies Hammer's confusion and estrangement by intensifying the palette of his own form: extreme cuts and angles, dissolves and freezes and fades and his deep use of sound: the music and the soft protected sounds of homes and apartments, traffic noises always beyond the windows, Hammer's sorrowful wall answering-machine, echoing stone hallways and stairs, concrete sidewalks, the sounds of science and technology, the hollow under-furnished echoing of "Lily Carver's" terrible place. And Frank DeVol's overall score: Caruso, Chopin, Schubert, Johannes Brahms, his own. It is only extreme camera movement which Aldrich foregoes, as his main figure Hammer is frozen between Scylla and Charybdis.

Mike's journey -- movingly played in as beautiful a manner as it is brutal by Ralph Meeker -- is a despairing and failed one, however much he struts and smirks, however much he seems to have a magical power to get himself out of jams and to knock people out or to kill them. There's a greater magic against him, a State of anti-Grace, an occasion of sin. Mike's great love is for cars (and possibly for his sexy operative Velda) and yet most of the people he contacts die via car -- Christina Bailey, Nick the mechanic, boxer Lee Kawolsky, Nicholas Raymondo, the real Lily Carver. Those he touches who don't die by car, die anyway, including Velda and himself in Aldrich's original end-of-the-world ending. Mike Hammer stays tough and super confident, until he doesn't, until by the end he becomes a stunted wounded zombie -- dead too, in a way. Dead to all he knows.

Of all great movies, Kiss Me Deadly is perhaps the one that captures its moment in time the most deeply, beautifully, and mysteriously -- and most shocking: the most concretely. Until at the finish, when the Point Dume beach house explodes and the world ends, we are left with a giant, flaming, American Medusa unearthing her hideous face, freezing us -- as she had Mike throughout -- with an oracle of things to come.

Monday, June 20, 2022

Sympathy for the Devil

NOT the devil.
 

Friday, June 17, 2022

Beau Coup


There's been a recent rush in both interest and information about that most magical of American events ~ Watergate, as we approached the 50th anniversary of the "failed" break-in. John Dean over at Counterpunch revisited Woodward & Bernstein's reporting, and found it very strange. Nixon's treasonous dealings with the South Vietnamese government just before the 1968 election -- attempting to block a Johnson/Humphrey peace treaty -- is connected up to the creation of the Plumbers unit by the late Robert Parry. A new biography of Washington Post grandmaster Ben Bradlee makes the case that Bradlee never bought the "official" explanations of what was going down; and a newly discovered memo, called the Z Memo in beautifully Le Carrean fashion, strongly suggests Woodstein's editor-in-chief also didn't buy the existence of Deep Throat. The great journalist Jim Hougan, author of the best book on the scandal Secret Agenda, proves flat-out that if indeed Deep Throat did exist, he certainly was not FBI Associate Director Mark Felt. The scandal's "Final Mystery" is pondered by investigative reporter Jefferson Morley. And Robert Redford has put the finishing touches on a Watergate documentary.

Clearly, Richard Nixon was set-up, most likely by the same elements of the corporate-national security state who murdered John F. Kennedy a decade before, and for the same reasons: both men -- in very different ways and with very different motives -- sought to end the assumptions and structures known as The Cold War.

How Nixon handled the set-up, however, is a wholly different matter. Those who explain him as some sort of far-seeing political genius -- Hunter Thompson and Lew Lapham to the contrary -- only need to look at his endless gaffes and goofs throughout 1973 and 1974: letting Haldemann, Ehrlichman, and Mitchell -- his Palace Guard -- go much too soon; his extremist antagonism toward all levels and types of the by-nature lap-dog and gutless mass media; not burning the tapes (but of course he didn't because the men who set him up also had copies); refusing to pay sufficient hush money (when there was loads available) to every spy, saboteur, con man, extortionist, forger, imposter, informer, burglar, mugger, and bagman in his employ; not fighting hard for Vice President Spiro Agnew, instead throwing him to the wolves, when an Agnew Presidency-in-waiting would've snuffed out all talk of Nixon's removal; replacing Agnew with a favorite of the very body that controlled impeachment, Congressman and Establishment Waterboy -- and accessory after the fact in Kennedy's murder -- Gerry Ford; bending to requests for a new Special Prosecutor after the firing of Archibald Cox; not fighting against Leon Jaworksi, an LBJ hitman, as the new SP; running from rather than leaking information that he was an "unindicted co-conspirator" in Jaworksi's grand jury probe, at a time when the country was nowhere near ready for such a shock; not paying much attention to the make-up of the Ervin Committee; pressuring hapless FBI director L. Patrick Gray to bribe Matthew Byrne, judge in the trial of Daniel Ellsberg, with a high government appointment, causing Byrne to immediately dismiss Ellsberg's trial; not appointing a stooge as Attorney General in replacement of future felon Richard Kleindeinst, instead appointing Rockefeller liberal Republican Elliot Richardson; not justifying his cover-up of the "smoking gun" June 23rd tapes by explaining what he and Haldemann were really whispering about in the Oval Office: CIA involvement in Dallas; not taking full responsibility for the "18 1/2 minute tape gap" on the grounds of extreme National Security -- again what was erased going straight back to JFK's murder; appointing treacherous Alexander Haig as Haldemann's replacement as White House Chief-of-Staff; not blackmailing Israel to extend and widen the October '73 war by threatening to expose its involvement and motives in the USS Liberty massacre. Mistake after mistake after mistake. . .

But he was set-up. Russ Baker is that most special of characters: an old-style journalist. His book Family of Secrets examines in lengthy detail the very dirty history of the Bush Crime Family. His vibrant website WhoWhatWhy takes on investigations collaborators such as CNN or the New York Times would never go near. (WWW's recent take on the public destruction of John Edwards is a must read.)

Baker has posted a three-part history of what was really happening to Nixon, and to us, in the giddy days of the early 1970s. Again -- a must read.