The Post-$$$$ World

Danny Haiphong with the awesome Pepe Escobar.

Gangster State

The great Doug Valentine on the CIA Nazi Oligarchy aka The Ukraine:

 

Yes, He Will

On my birthday ~ you bet he will.

Happy Birthday to me!!

Ode to Joy

Do you know the game Smoke? It's sort of a Twenty Questions only with no limit to the questions and with more verve and flavor. There's one: If Grace Kelly were a flavor, which would she be? (The taste of an over-ripe pear?) If JFK were a car, which one? If Obama a city? (Gotta be someplace bland, smug, predictable, middle-brow, and entirely safe. Portland. No wonder Robert Kennedy lost Oregon.) If Oliver Hardy were a building? The Chrysler Building a person? Cary Grant a drink? (The 50s Cary Grant. The screwball Grant?) The movie Vertigo a flower? A wonderful game, bringing you closer to the heart of the answer and of the question.

Here's an easy one. If my daughter Saya were a movie. . . .

*

Bringing Up Baby (1938) is silly, sweet, smart, stylish, serious, and interested in only one thing: having fun from dawn 'til dawn. As the song says, the picture can't give you anything but love (baby). Dr. David Huxley (Cary Grant) takes all things very seriously within his very narrow world, a world within which he can barely move without falling down or speak without stammering. Over the course of a miraculous day-and-night, Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn) steals his golf ball, steals his car, rips his tail coat, nearly causes him to be mauled by a leopard, steals another car with David as accomplice, knocks a chicken truck off the road also with David as accomplice, steals his clothes, gets him arrested, and loses his Intercostal Clavicle (plus a million-dollar grant and the fiancée that came with it). By the end of the night, David wouldn't have it any other way. . .

As in all the best works of Howard Hawks -- The Big Sleep, Only Angels Have Wings, His Girl Friday, To Have and Have Not, Rio Bravo, El Dorado, Scarface, Twentieth Century, Red River, Monkey Business, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Man's Favorite Sport? -- the atmosphere thrown around us is the atmosphere in which life and death are equal, the movement is the movement that speeds on its way beyond good and evil, toward elation and transcendence.

Happiness and, I guess, all those things you've always pined for. . . .

Transfiguration

 

The greatest Western force against vampire capitalism and woke feebleness: Pope Francis.

 

Lies Lies Lies

Ritter Redux

The great -- and proudly banned at the cesspool known as Twitter -- Scott Ritter.

 

Rose Hobart

This is what happened to Joseph Cornell: He got his hands on a print of East of Borneo (1931) and became so obsessed with its female star that he began chopping away everything which wasn't a beauty shot of Rose Hobart. Left with about 15 minutes of footage, he added several pieces of an eclipse documentary, tinted everything, silenced the sound from both originals, added two Brazilian dance songs, then projected the work at silent movie speed.

What he accomplished is nothing less than the directorial ravishing of a screen star; and a seriously erotic capturing of her lust. The gaze that masters the movie is Rose Hobart's gleaming blue eyes, a gaze that can change atmospheres, eyes that seem to swim in sperm ~ she's always in a trance state of sexual longing, or perhaps remembering some great fuck. Her looks and body movement suggest nights of quiet landscapes, breasts beneath the moon, of love and wetness from night 'til dawn. . .

She's surrounded by pools of sucking water, volcanoes flowing lava, moonlight and rain clouds, bunches of bananas, torches, melting creme inside a cool chalice, erect palm trees, the wick of a flame in swollen close-up. And lots of men: natives, Poobahs, and the lucky Charles Bickford.

And the ravishment at the center: Hobart's panther-like walk, over it a glaze of passion, promising a woman who would lash around her lover like a storm. Her sleek slenderness. Her beautiful neck, arms, shoulders, and back. Skin that photographs like flesh.

The beauty and lust of a woman immortalized. And Cornell's perfect proof that millions of people in the world will never meet each other.

Scott Ritter!

And the Alexei (Mercouris/Christoforou).