Twenty, twenty-five-years ago, a Berkeley City College student started coming to the café where I took morning breaks. She was Mexican American, with pouty lips, a low-back tattoo, and a glorious torrent of black hair falling across and below her shoulders. She was a cousin of a barista, and soon was working part time behind the counter. When she returned a bracelet, I had lost, I offered to reward her, but she declined, so I left $20 in the tip jar.
Laughter in the Dark
My first brush with the audience for Film Forum’s Ozu retrospective was a trip. I got off on the wrong block and ran into another Ozu-er who was lost too. As we found our way around the block to the theatre, he told me he saw Tokyo Story when he was teenager, which led him (eventually) to spend decades in Japan where he got married. His Japanese wife met us at the theater.
L.A. Flashbacks
Persuaded by James to go downtown (from where we lived so close in Echo Park many years) first time in five years (shocked at new residential skyscrapers we were told are including formerly homeless), to The Broad’s superb “Keith Haring” exhibition which I had otherwise intended to avoid (given what I knew would be a kind of “euphoric fear flashback” to the even-pre-AIDS rough-around-town NYC 70-80 years before we moved to LA when we then really did swing into ACT UP action). Glad I went but no nostalgia.
Photos by James Rosen
Melancholy Serenade
I so vividly remember watching the Jackie Gleason show with my family as a kid. I always loved the finale when Gleason would do the Joe The Bartender sketch and Frank Fontaine’s Crazy Guggenheim would come out. (Seemed like all the boys in my grade school class watched Gleason because we’d all take a shot at impersonating his signature laugh thereby driving our supervising teachers — what else? — crazy.) The inebriated Guggenheim would tell some wacko story, get a lot of laughs and then, at Gleason’s request, sing an old-timey ballad in the most beautiful baritone around.
Moby Nic: Your Load Management And Mine
I Early Thoughts: It’s All Really Simple
The NBA playoffs are always an overly long slog, not just a Manichean struggle.
Cleveland Rocks
Cleveland’s sports venues are now 30 years old. The franchise owners want to have either major upgrades to the facilities or brand-new structures. The current stadiums and arena as well as the former Cleveland Municipal Stadium were built with public money which establishes a precedent. On the other hand, the long-gone Cleveland Arena and the Richfield Coliseum were owned and run privately without taxpayer assistance.
Mussolini, Europe’s Prize Bluffer More Like Bottomley[1] than Napoleon
Excerpted from an article published by Ernest Hemingway in 1923…
…Mussolini is the biggest bluff in Europe. If Mussolini would have me taken out and shot tomorrow morning I would still regard him as a bluff. The shooting would be a bluff. Get hold of a good photo of Signor Mussolini sometime and study it. You will see the weakness in his mouth which forces him to scowl the famous Mussolini scowl that is imitated by every 19-year-old Fascisto in Italy. Study his past record. Study the coalition that Fascismo is between capital and labor and consider the history of past coalitions. Study his genius for clothing small ideas in big words. Study his propensity for dueling. Really brave men do not have to fight duels, and many cowards duel constantly to make themselves believe they are brave. And then look at his black shirt and his white spats. There is something wrong, even histrionically, with a man who wears white spats with a black shirt.
There is not space here to go into the question of Mussolini as a bluff or as a great and lasting force. Mussolini may last fifteen years or he may be overthrown next spring by Gabriele D’Annunzio, who hates him. But let me give two true pictures of Mussolini at Lausanne.
America’s Bottomley
This clip from Trump’s Fox interview with Brett Baier is making the rounds…
Trump is boasting about how he used his pardon powers to free low-level criminals. He brings up a woman, jailed on a drug dealing charge, that he pardoned. Baier reminds him that under the policy Trump is touting, wherein he would execute drug dealers, this woman would have been killed.
It is a remarkable moment. For a split second the Fool is caught in his folly, and the gears freeze. Even Brett Baier has to laugh.
But what I see in this clip, more than Trump’s childish policy prescriptions, is one of the keys to the man’s success. How quickly the master Bullshitter comes up with, not one, not two, but three half-coherent responses. Responses graded on a bullshit scale of course. The bar is low.
But Trump is not wooing the genius vote. All he needs is to keep his base bamboozled. And I’m struck, watching this clip, at how quickly the stunned hamsters on the wheels in his brain recover and start spinning even faster than before. How manically the gibbons hurl bananas at the wall to see what might stick. And before you can say, Look out for the bull, you’re covered in fresh bullshit.
Would depend on the degree. Not retroactive. My policy would have scared her off. And his base goes, yeah. Makes sense to me. And he lives to play another day.
You almost have to admire it. It gets him from point A to point B. He never gets bogged down in the details or logic of point A. There’s always a point B and then a point C. And if you get to those points quickly enough, no one remembers point A.
Trump lives his life in five- to ten-minute increments. Whatever bullshit gets him through the next ten minutes. Hell, the next ten seconds. He’ll have new bullshit to spew if/when he makes it through the next ten. Trump family motto. “Trust the Bullshit.”
The $ubmersible $outh $udan
June 23, 2023, 5:01 a.m. ET
From a safe American home…
Our modern media world manufactured a new social equation this last week. While the exact math is still in dispute, it goes something like this:
Five people dying @ $250,000 per joy-ride to disaster-site = five days of lead stories.
A few fringe mathematicians have expanded the equation so the above formula is socially equal to:
120 people dying @ a day of famine/starvation in South Sudan = zero coverage.
Folks, this ain’t the new math.
The Ambassador (Redux)
Ambassador Poole from the late great Golden State has been banished to a terrible team, The Washington Wizards. Since he was sucker-punched by an envious Draymond Green, JP has had a Jamesian education in a world of lies. Two days before he was traded, Golden State’s new GM, had assured journalists that Poole and Jonathan Kuminga would remain by the Bay: “We love having those guys here. Jordan, especially with his contract extension, we plan to have him here for 4 more years at least.” (That “at least” is priceless.) Poole is, per his own words, “a child of God.” As a Christian, he’s probably trying not to cultivate his vengeful side, but I’m under no effing obligation. Ca ira to NOT root for a team run by scum. And I’m not talking (chiefly) about the egotist who punched Jordan here. I’m talking about the pale scum, the thickest scum, the scummiest scum who never dared to stand up to Draymond Green.
What follows is the (anxious) tribute to JP I posted earlier this spring. May there be more Poole parties in his/our future!
Being Republican
Senator Tommy Tuberville: “The Covid really brought it out how bad our schools are and how bad our teachers are — in the inner city. Most of them in the inner city, I don’t know how they got degrees, to be honest with you. I don’t know whether they can read and write. … They want a raise, they want less time to work, less time in school. We ruined work ethic in this country.”
Tommy would have been right at home on a southern plantation.
“Structuring Participation”: Class Matters Podcast with Jane McAlevey
Forget Succession. If you want drama (and spicy talk), listen in to the latest Class Matters podcast. Episode 12 (link below) features Jane McAlevey who is prompted by Katherine Isaac, Gordon Lafer, and Adolph Reed Jr. to explain (1) how the work of organizing jumps off in earnest AFTER a union wins a certification election. (Getting to a first union contract is hard.) (2) how the health of any union depends on constant engagement with workers as a collective body, not as atomized figures in one-on-one grievance proceedings (3) how real democracy in a union or anywhere rests on “structuring participation.”
Dialectical Imagination (Prerequisite)
Tom Conway, President of the United Steelworkers, and Rabbits, a 21st C. Wobbly from Northumbria, offer incongruous angles on labor struggles in the American South and the UK.
Notes on the State of Whiteness
Truscott wrote this column at the beginning of May, but his piece remains on time. “Whatever the speed of the news, the speed of understanding never seems to change, perhaps because understanding is shaped not by our ability to get the news but by our ability to digest it.” [1]
..
Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson has, with the recent exposure of an unredacted text message to one of his producers, done the American people a grand favor. He has unleashed for all to see the truth behind his, and racists’ like him, devotion to white supremacy.
Bread and Freedom
This talk was included in the collection, Resistance, Rebellion and Death (1961), published after Camus’s death. It originally appeared (per the Anarchist Library) as “Restaurer la valeur de la liberté” (“Restoring the value of freedom”) in the September 1953 issue of La Révolution Prolétarienne, a French syndicalist journal. The title was changed when it was reprinted later the same year. “Bread and Freedom,” incidentally, was also the title of the Russian translation of Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread.
Boners, Interiors, Bourgeois Bonheur & “The Boxer”: Quick and Dirty Angles on Bonnard
Pierre Bonnard, Nu (Nude, Yellow Screen) 1920
I missed this painting’s tumescent essence when I first saw it in the Bonnard show at the Aquavella gallery. The hard-on architectonics of its straight-up parallel lines didn’t come through to me until I was walking home around the Central Park reservoir. Thin phallic high-rises on the cityscape’s horizon had a Eureka effect. Suddenly I could sense the erection behind Bonnard’s construct.
You Made Beauty a Monster to Me
..I took the train to Sacramento. I thought about killers and about their victims, too. I thought about how I must be the only whore and the only romantic (which is to say, the only detective) on the entire train, or at least in my compartment. Did that mean the rest of the train was full of killers, or, at least, of accomplices? I was on my way to spend the weekend with Harvey. We had a small fight before I left, because my top surgery was coming up, and I said that if I couldn’t get the surgery I’d probably kill myself, and they said that was obsessive, they were worried about me, and I said but that’s why I’m getting the surgery, so I don’t have to kill myself, so I can be happy. It took me a long time to realize that I live, more than most people, entirely by instinct, in the murky sea of my instincts (my oceanic body), and that I never weigh the pros and cons of my actions, never think deductively, never imagine the forking paths my life could take, though in retrospect those paths, those labyrinths, become objects of dread and fascination (or is it that, instead of paths, life-in-retrospect becomes nothing but a series of crumbling, hallucinatory towers, a drowned dream, a womb that’s also a grave?) My reality is my body, and the other way around. When I was younger, I thought this meant I didn’t have dreams, since I didn’t have plans, bourgeois plans, but in fact it meant I was a consummate dreamer, that I dreamt with my eyes open. I became an alcoholic for twenty years entirely in an instant, without premeditation, just like I moved to South America for no real reason, or for entirely romantic reasons, just like I let Rebecca move in with me after our first date, just like one day I started taking hormones without thinking about it. I feel bad for people who aren’t like this, like me. I feel closer to a flower, a supernova, a subway schizophrenic, than to a res cogitans, a thinking thing. On the train, I read No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai and watched the sunset.
Work With Me Anna (A Tina Turner Diary)
J.T. Lewis wrote up “my Tina Turner story” a couple years ago. Wish it wasn’t on time again but…