C. Liegh McIness commended a lovely track by Prince that wasn’t released until after his death, Baby You’re a Trip, and that, in turn, led your editor to another amazement on Prince’s posthumous Originals collection. A version of this song, with the Cuban American pop singer, Martika, doing the vocal, was a hit in Australia. Here’s Prince’s version…
The City of Brotherly Love’s Brotherly Union: Ben Fletcher and Local 8
Anatole Dolgoff tried to give the great labor organizer, Ben Fletcher, his due in this First post. Dolgoff, who’s in his mid-eighties, worried that Fletcher’s legacy was at risk of being lost. Perhaps this next post, by a twenty-year old, will help put Dolgoff’s mind at ease…
On this and every Memorial Day, my family and I remember Grandpa
This is the way CNN commemorated Memorial Day in 2015, with a story they called, “The General Who Apologized to the Dead Soldiers on Memorial Day.”
“At the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery at Nettuno, Italy, Memorial Day 1945 was an elegiac occasion. Lt. Gen. Lucian Truscott Jr., who had led the U. S. Sixth Corps through some of the heaviest fighting in Italy and now commanded the Fifth Army, gave a speech that is particularly relevant for today when the trauma of our long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continues to haunt so many vets.
My Father’s War
Originally published here in 2011.
Entering War & Coming Home (Viet Nam, Fifty Years on)
Originally published here in 2020.
Most Army Soldiers came to and from Viet Nam aboard a 707 commercial airliner. Two years ago, I was seated next to a retired flight attendant. Somehow we started a conversation about Viet Nam. She told me she was a stewardess who flew the flights bringing soldiers to and from Viet Nam. I told her how, as we flew to and from the war, the stewardesses looked like angels, especially on the way home after my tour. She told me about the heartbreak she felt flying, “….so many boys to Viet Nam… how young they were… how depressing the flights to Viet Nam were. It was a different experience flying them home.”
“Come and See” (with English Subtitles)
CLICK ON LINK BELOW FOR FULL MOVIE FREE ON YOUTUBE WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES (TRAILER BELOW THE LINK)
Come and See | WAR FILM | FULL MOVIE – YouTube
Disney Time With Conner O’Malley
Since I last wrote about comedian/videomaker Conner O’Malley in 2020, he’s been posting much less frequently to YouTube, as his work has become more ambitious and elaborate. His latest, “Rebranded Mickey Mouse”, went online in March – and it may be his best to date. O’Malley compresses so much gobsmacking bizarreness – scary-funny-weird narrative surprises, uncanny use of deepfakes and grandiose world-building – into its ten-minute running time that he seems to have assembled all the elements of a totally fresh, satirical aesthetic. It both begs for and beggars analysis.
I won’t ruin it for you by attempting to summarize the story. [Editor’s Note: Watch it below!] But for starters, know that “Rebranded Mickey Mouse” refers to the video’s protagonist (O’Malley) – a young man who has given up his original human identity to embody a Jokerfied reboot of the Disney character.
O’Malley’s expertly tweaking the empty-headed Hollywood trend of gritty, “adult” adaptations of kiddie IP – like the just-announced TV series depicting Winnie the Pooh’s old pal Christopher Robin as “a disillusioned New Yorker navigating his quarter-life crisis with the help of the weird talking animals who live beyond a drug-induced portal outside his derelict apartment complex.”
Mayday Duo: “How I Became an Anarchist” and “A Theory of Everything”
Heresies: Anarchist Memoirs, Anarchist Art, by the late Peter Lamborn Wilson is a book in two parts. First comes reminiscences, rants and raps about anarchist theory and (in)activism. The second half of the volume consists of essays on Symbolism, alchemy and anarchism in the arts. (Your editor is hot to run the pages on Gauguin!) What follows are two chapters from the first swatch of Heresies…
How I Became An Anarchist
When I was 12 or 13, I wanted to be a cartoonist and I worshiped Krazy Kat, greatest of all comic strips: surrealist, mystical, Romantic slapstick about perverse love (across not only gender but species) and criminal anarchy: quantum weirdness and genderfuck written in slang poetry and drawn with slapdash-taoist panache by African-American artist George Herriman.
On Richard Wolin’s “Heidegger in Ruins”
This short sprint to the starting gate of a review of Richard Wolin’s solid “Anti-Heidegger,” his recent polemical book Heidegger in Ruins (Yale University Press, 2023).
Fifty years ago, Walter Kaufmann had already reduced Being and Time to bare life, noting how abusive Heidegger’s German was; how evident but unremarked the bleak mood during and after Germany’s World War I defeat, reappearing as Heidegger’s mood of “anxiety” (think: trench warfare) and as a requirement for authenticity; how close to plagiarism were Heidegger’s views on being-toward-death, considering Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich.
Kaufmann is droll and incisive on the academic resistance to criticism of Heidegger even in Heidegger’s own time. After declaring that classical scholars found Heidegger’s reading of a fragment of Anaximander to be untenable; that Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant “was widely repudiated by Kant scholars”; and that professors of literature considered Heidegger’s readings of Hölderlin, Rilke, and Trakl, among others, way stations to the destruction of German literature, Kaufmann concludes: “Even so (emphasis added, SC; read closely!), some who know their Kant are awed by the erudition of Heidegger’s classical interpretations; Nietzsche scholars find his Rilke essay stimulating and profound; and Rilke scholars bow before his Nietzsche exegesis.”[i]
Apocalypse
..I went to a friend’s Eid party and left within five minutes, because the moment I got there I knew I was in no state to be there, to be around people, the truth is I’d been spiraling out for at least a week, one night I relapsed, went out drinking with Christian and tried to buy coke at three in the morning and asked him if he would ever fuck a trans woman, to which he said no, but Harvey told me that was a lie, or wasn’t true (something that’s not true and a lie are two different things), and the next day Xylea came over to take care of me, she brought over cute little Daiso items and a cactus and held me in my bed and told me I was a beautiful person, and I told her I was in love with her, to which she said nothing, or almost nothing, and then the next day, or the day after that, I burned our friendship to the ground,
How to Cope
Stare at flowers.
Not the snap-necked daffodils or the hyacinth your husband flattened with the car.
Take in the unblemished blossoms left.
Remind yourself that future thoughts
and prayers probably won’t be for your town
and if your town, not your kid’s school.
And if they are, statistically your child
would be scared but safe, hiding in a closet
under mops or climbing from a window, running
dazed toward the expressway to flag help.
I wish they would show the pictures of the dead
This is the news photo used to illustrate the mass killing of five in Texas. AP photo.
Yet another mass killing happened yesterday in Cleveland, Texas, when Francisco Oropeza, age 39, took his AR-15 style semiautomatic rifle and killed five people, including an 8-year-old child, after parents had complained Oropeza was keeping their baby awake at 11 p.m. shooting his rifle in his front yard. There have been more than 160 mass shootings in the U.S. this year, and this is the 19th shooting that killed more than four people, not including the shooter.
Nobody Knows His Name: A Note on Adam Scheffler’s “Heartworm” (& “Googling Myself”)
“Piss expressively.”
The onomatopoeic first line of Adam Scheffler’s poem, “Advice From a Dog,” hints at his virtuosity and his modesty. This guy ain’t too proud to pet and be petted. Another one of his openers make you wonder if he’s about to give himself too much credit: “She said my butt was a piece of art…” Not to worry:
…my greatest asset, if
you will, although come to think of
it she didn’t say it was good art
only a “piece” of it, as if it’s
not complete without her hands
on it…
Scheffler is careful about intimacies. I doubt he’ll ever go Lowell. There won’t be lines from a begging (or pegging) partner’s correspondence in his poems. Nor does this nice Jewish boy suffer from Maileria. He’s no wannabe macho.
Far Gone (A Levin Compaction)
The 1000 pp. Novel: (1960-70)
Verse VII
Stanza B
It was a far out bar Maxs Drop Dead Inn.
You know who drank there?
Men and Women
“Men and women are Images, hanging ghosts in the air, faces painted on the wall, masks no face can enter, the rules of a game getting explained over and over again to everyone and getting explained by getting played. They are images, but they are not immaterial (nothing is immaterial): they determine who produces what, who lives what life, who is punished for breaking what rules, who can be raped with impunity, who can be beaten with impunity, who can be killed with impunity.”
..One time, Xylea said, a client was supposed to go down on me and cum on my feet, but he kept trying to fuck me, and so I started going on a long rant about Aileen Wuornos (the lore of Aileen Wuornos, the litany of her crimes, crimes like a Dadaist poem, a poem written in the flesh about the goddess Medusa and about men and about the abyss) and then when he tried to stick his dick in me I stabbed him, and he looked up at me like what the fuck, and I was like why do you think I was telling you about Aileen fucking Wuornos, retard?
Democracy in the Streets (Saturday Night in Tel Aviv)
Tonight there were much more than 150 thousand demonstrating in Tel Aviv alone. If Tel Aviv has a population of about half a million, and over 150 thousand people were holding flags in the center of the city and shouting in union “democracy,” what does this mean? This is not just about certain rules being crammed down our necks every day, or about politicians who should be in jail. This is about the concept of democracy, and to my mind it should not be only an Israeli issue or even just an issue for Jews around the world. It is about the danger to democracy all over the world. My Hungarian friends, my Polish friends, my Italian friends, and my American friends all know the terrible threats to democracy being faced and the delicate freedom to protest that can disappear in a moment. Tell the world to pay attention to the freedom we have and guard it carefully!
Taking Bad Bunny Seriously
First, some facts about Bad Bunny, in case you think he’s a rowdy pet. He’s Billboard’s artist of the year and Spotify’s most-streamed artist for two years running—an amazing feat for someone who sings in Spanish. His reach is global, but his songs are local, rich with Puerto Rican slang. (I’ve heard him introduced as “Ba-Boney” on Spanish-language TV.) He looks like he was born in a baseball cap, but he sometimes performs in a dress. He chose his stage name because, as he told the late-night host James Cordon, “even when he’s bad, he’s cute.”
“Old Violin” & Hate Songs
Anger is an energy. Per Johnny Rotten and Richard Meltzer, though I couldn’t recall where/when Meltzer mused on animus in rock ‘n’ roll attitude so I asked him for a steer…
I’m sure—I know—I’ve said it…and things much like it…in lots of places over the years, but I couldn’t give you a GPS on it…it’s just in multiple creases and cracks in the rock-roll road.
I’m sure I’ve said, specifically, that SECOND-PERSON HOSTILITY is an omnipresent aspect of rock all the way back to its Delta Blues origins, much deeper than anything as benign as “attitude”: I dislike, detest, abhor YOU. Add gender hostility to the package (usually, but not always, as “misogyny”) and you got one throbbing heap of reliably functional HATESTUFF.
Anger isn’t quite the same…no…but…well…good luck in your search.
