Citizen Budd Shenkin has been making important contributions to our polity at his blog this season. What follows are slightly tweaked versions of two of his recent posts there.
Nation
What Just Happened? (Kiarostami in Tokyo & Obama in Johannesburg)
The late Abbas Kiarostami’s Like Falling in Love (2012) was originally titled “The End,” which would’ve underscored the final scene’s go-to-smash upending of viewers’ presumptions. The film, set in Japan, works like a gently penetrative Ozu-y character study until it’s transformed utterly by a sudden act of violence in the last second(s).
A Response to “When Children Say They’re Trans”
Talk About “Abortion”
It is more crucial than ever to speak about “abortion rights,” not choice. The word “choice” is meaningless and always has been a running-scared retreat from the real matter of bodily sovereignty for females. Biological determinism is a social idea. Just like social Darwinism, capitalism, and religion.
A Fascist Fashion Statement?
Historical analyses of FLOTUS’s fashion statement, such as one below, are being shared on social media…
This sort of analysis prompted Ty Geltmaker–a student (and ex-Professor) of modern Italian History–to dig into his own archives. Geltmaker comments below…
A Crime Against Humanity
Have the majority of Americans reached their tipping point? The trials of so many of Trump’s accomplices have yet to get under way and it will be months before the final report by Robert Mueller and his investigators is published. (Does anyone have any idea how many lawsuits against Trump and his policies are working their way through state and federal courts? The cumulative fees will be staggering by the time the cases are decided.) Patience may be a foundational democratic virtue but what if we’re in the midst of a cold civil war? Maxine Waters seems right on. The time for civility-mongering is past.
Our Developer President: A Dialogue Between Samuel Stein and Rachel Weber on Real Estate, Cities, and Trumpery
There’s a certain kind of person who sees real estate everywhere they look — someone who walks around a city and thinks not just, “who lives here?” but “who owns this, who’d they buy it from, and where’d they get the money?” Some think this way because they’re in the property racket, or hope one day to be. Others with this mentality are just perpetually pissed off at the ways land and housing have been hyper-commoditized, turning cities into luxury products. We are definitely in the latter camp, and as such have quite a bit to obsess over these days. The following dialogue, between two urban planners and property scholars (one in New York City and one in Chicago), ruminates on the meaning of the Trump presidency and the relationship between property development and governance.
Citizen Russ
In a recent interview, Charles Barkley told about an unusual phone call he received from Bill Russell–a call that persuaded Barkley to stop complaining about how much he paid in taxes…
Stormy’s Tale (Or: Protect Me From What I Want)
Extry! Extry! Read all about it. The president is a spanko.
A Hard Case
Ralph Peters–longtime Fox News commentator–just published an op-ed piece in the Washington Post explaining “Why I left Fox News.”
There Is No Gun
There is no gun in this poem.
The Doomsday Machine
I have been hit like a ton of bricks by Daniel Ellsberg’s new book, The Doomsday Machine, Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.[1]
Me Two Cents
One evening in the summer of 1960, while waiting on a rocker-sofa on the porch of a friend’s home to give him a ride to a party, his step-father sat down beside me – and grabbed my cock.
Feminist Criticism
Bill Cosby was a shitty comedian. His material on stage was smug, take-my-wifeish, and dated long before reports surfaced of his sexual predation.
Game Theory
Berlin 1936: Sixteen Days in August, by Oliver Hilmer (Other Press. 2018. Trans. from the German by Jefferson Chase) begins on the first day of that summer’s Olympics and ends on their closing. But the Olympics were a smokescreen, a puppet show, a diversion of less significance than the fireworks which concluded Joseph Goebbels $800,000 last-night party, bloodying the sky red.