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A Specific and Subversive Beauty

That was far from what those who’d marveled at her mute beauty would have imagined her to sound like back in 1964, but such was Faithfull’s subversive power. She upended the expectations of all sorts of feminine stereotypes.  NY Times

You should not be able to guess that an article is written by a woman or a gay man just from the content of the piece.  But as soon as I hit that paragraph above, I knew that this was a woman writing about another woman and leveraging whatever modest achievements she had into a statement on the secret and unrecognized fantastic achievements of women that have been suppressed and minimized by our patriarchal, sexist society.

Undoubtedly, there are genuine cases.  There is also a lot of bullshit.  Marianne Faithful was a hot looking young ingenue in 1965 when she was spotted by a promoter at a party and chosen to be packaged, promoted, and sold by the music industry.  She got a recording contract, studio time, backup instrumentalists, producers, arrangers, and so on, all by virtue of having a pleasing face and robust figure.  She became an even bigger celebrity by virtue of her relationship with Mick Jagger, and her notoriety as the “naked woman” found in Keith Richards’ apartment when the Stones were arrested for drug possession.

Her “success” and fame and notoriety are all entirely due to the machinery of the pop music industry and celebrity culture.  She was a product of male fantasy and female aspiration.

She could sing a little.  She couldn’t act very well.  She was pretty.  Her most well-known songs were all written by other artists, mostly men.   Lindsay Zoladz would like to have you believe that she caused Mick Jagger to think deeply and write good lyrics and therefore deserves some of the credit for the Rolling Stones success.  That’s a very, very thin line of reason.

Soladz declares that “she upended the expectations of all sorts of feminine stereotypes”.

What she did do was lots of drugs, to the point where her child had to be put into care.  Her most arresting work, “Broken English”, is the product of good  studio engineering and arrangements and the exploitation of her broken voice and reputation.  A curiosity, worth a listen or two, but far from subverting anything it caters to a not uncommon trope of abject surrender:  I am a victim, of drugs, of pop culture, of men, and myself.  I am the spurned woman.  I am fucking mad.

 

 

 

 

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Ethanol

“I may have to spend a lot of time educating him about agriculture,” Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, the largest corn-growing state, just ahead of Illinois, said of Mr. Kennedy last month. “I’m willing to do that.”  NY Times

That chilling statement from Senator Grassley should remind us that there is only one political party in America and it is the money party.

What Grassley is alluding to is the fact that American farmers in the mid-west grow a lot of corn and they need someone to buy it.  That is why we have ethanol and corn syrup.  There is no good rational reason for ethanol to exist except for the purpose of providing a rigged, locked-in market for corn farmers, who vote in the primaries in Iowa– among the first primary states in the Union– and basically control national policy by holding onto the agricultural dick of the Republican party.   (And the Democrats.)

Mr. Kennedy’s critique is broad and deep. Generous federal crop subsidies of soy, corn and wheat artificially lower their costs, making byproducts like corn syrup cheaper for manufacturers who put it into everything from soft drinks to hot dogs to heavily processed bread.

What should freak most people out is the word “educate”.  It is a very suggestive choice of language.  It is Orwellian.  It is not sufficient to say that we don’t care about the health of Americans or the nutritional value of all the foods processed corn syrup is added to.  You must be “educated”:  you must publicly offer your unconditional obeisance to the mantra.  You must be seen to adhere to the perverse logic that provides massive government subsidies to a useless crop simply in order to keep those “hard-workin’ ‘mericans” juiced and happy.

Most of those farmers probably privately hold nothing but contempt for people on welfare.  It’s one thing to take money for sitting around looking after your kids and quite another to work hard at cheating the system, which most of those corn farmers do.  But you never know: maybe they have no problem with welfare.  Maybe they recognize that government hand-outs are okay, as long as you get your share.  Like Exxon and Tesla and the Tampa Bay Rays.

Fun facts:

      • fructose uses only about 4% of the nation’s corn product.
      • ethanol consumes about 40%.

Think about it:  what if you (as government) decided– correctly– that ethanol was a bad product that should not be subsidized by the government.  How would you make up for the deficit in the market for corn?  What would you do about the corn farmers– who are generally massively in debt– who would be out of work?  How would you deal with the political fall-out: you did something that hurt farmers?  Those paragons of hard-working American virtue?

 

 

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Revenge of the Mistress: Coralie Fargeat

But one of the most impressive feats of all is the way Fargeat subverts and co-opts the male gaze, turning it into something that’s both playful and fierce. The sexy and scantily clad Matilda Lutz initially looks like an irresistible piece of eye candy, and Fargeat knows you’re thinking that. She toys with your expectations of how a woman who looks like Lutz is normally photographed in a film like this before ultimately celebrating her character for the warrior she becomes.

From this review of “Revenge” by Coralie Fargeat.

A woman, Jen, is raped by one of her boyfriend’s hunting buddies while another buddy watches indifferently.  The boyfriend– who is cheating on his wife with Jen– returns and doesn’t seem very disturbed about it.  When she demands justice, she is chased to a cliff by the three men and pushed over so that she is impaled on a tree.  Remarkably, she recovers, and returns to the scene to take brutal revenge.

This reviewer, and others, celebrate this fresh, exciting story because, after all, she was raped: the men deserve to die, and the action sequences are pretty cool.

Maybe they do deserve to die.  That’s for another day, and another philosophical discussion.  Maybe the scenario is contrived to allow you to feel good about watching these men suffer and die.  (That is absolutely true.)    And maybe the transformation of Jen from an air-head exhibitionist potential valley-girl into an action hero capable of astounding acts of athleticism is a puerile fantasy.

It doesn’t matter: the critics fall over themselves to sing the praises of Fargeat.  Why?  Is it because action films that feature male protagonists chasing and murdering males is such marvelous entertainment that a simple role reversal only spikes the tension?  Or is it because those films have become boring and the role reversal makes it interesting again?

 

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Brutal Brutalist

Not overly impressed by “The Brutalist”.

One reason: it’s based on Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead”, which I thought was a really bad novel.   So “The Brutalist” starts in a cesspool.

Second reason: Brody’s acting seems showy and broad, and obviously pitched for awards. Emoting, emoting, and emoting.

Third: it’s written by the director (from the school of James Cameron of “who needs a writer? Can’t be that hard. I’ll do it myself.”)  Director Brady Corbet’s previous experience is almost solely as an actor.  His co-writer– sometimes, a director writing his own movie will smartly bring in a real writer to help– is his girl friend, Mona Fastvold.

Fourthly: it is permeated with pernicious method acting (I am SO intensely into this character that actual articulated sounds fail me).

Fifthly: overuse of jerky, hand-held camera.  I’ll concede that there are rare occasions in which jerky hand-held camera works (like in, “Dr. Strangelove”, during the attack on the base).  But today it is mostly used to substitute incoherence for trajectory, movement for action, and evasion for composition.   It has become universal, like autotune in music recording, for artists who have realized that the vast swath of audiences don’t care about real artistic quality any more.

It all reminds me another incoherent film, “Megalopolis”.   In fact, there are too many similarities to dismiss the idea that they are alluding to the same source material, “The Fountainhead” by Ayn Rand.

I’ll be rooting for Chalamet to win best actor over Brody, but Brody has two things working in his favor: “Brutalist” is a Holocaust film, and he plays a character with an accent. Bonus points for playing an architect (Hollywood loves films that evoke tastefulness).

Watch the scene where Laszlo is reunited with his wife.   The most obvious thing about it is that it’s a dud, it falls flat.  Why?  There’s nothing about the long time they have been apart that shows up here.  They act as if they had just seen each other minutes ago at rehearsal.

What Brody does looks like great acting the same way the Mormon Tabernacle Choir looks like good music.  It’s size and quantity, rather than quality.  Brody can be very good– he was great in “The Pianist”– and he’s not really terrible in “The Brutalist”; just too much, and untuned dramatically and tonally discordant.  He’s committed and passionate but he’s trapped in a narrative so obtuse and clumsy that it just feels self-indulgent.  He’s a catalogue of moments that do not add up to a character.

There’s a big difference between a great actor directed by a great director and a great actor directed badly.

 

 

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USAID

USAID has had it’s share of expensive failures (like any large corporation or agency does) but it has also had some truly extraordinary successes, like the HIV program, malaria prevention, and nutrition for starving children in war zones. It has literally saved millions– literally millions– of lives. It has often worked well with faith-based charities even if their values don’t perfectly align.

If Trump was really the genius he thinks he is, it would take little effort to appoint really competent administrators to fine-tune their programs and reduce waste. That would merely take skill and intelligence. Terminating the entire agency is easy– and of obscene criminality. It is beyond policy: it’s simply monumental mindless cruelty. All for less than 1% of the U. S. budget.

China, meanwhile, must be salivating at the opportunity to develop relationships with the countries USAID must now leave.

And Republicans in Congress are obviously terrified of offending the capo but the aversions and sidelong glances and evasive answers are telling.

Things Trump Did That I Liked

    • Got rid of the penny.
    • Reduced credit card interest rates to less than 10%.
    • Reduced inflation to below 2%.
    • Stopped the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
    • Reduced waste and corruption in military defense spending.
    • Reduced deaths from fentanyl overdoses.
    • Brought manufacturing back to America on a broad scale.
    • Put a stop to states competing with each other to offer tax breaks and incentives to corporations to locate there.

No, of course he didn’t do any of those things.  Not yet.  Probably not ever.  I just like to fantasize sometimes.

People should take note (most of the media does not) that most of the job losses in the manufacturing sector over the last decades has not been due to off-shoring but to automation.  An entire recent podcast by The Daily discussed the manufacturing issue at great length without once mentioning this fact.  In other words, all the tariffs in the world will not bring back most of the manufacturing jobs that have been lost.

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The Crypto Lottery Ponzi Scheme

When Bitcoin first appeared, I welcomed it.  Why?  Because at the time it appeared, I had just been involved in organizing an event in Montreal (2000) that attracted attendees from all over the world. Each of them had to pay a small fee to attend, which they had to send to the organizing committee to be deposited in a bank and then used to pay for the facilities and the talent at the event.

I thought– this should be easy, in today’s world, with the internet and all that.

I was wrong.

Many of the attendees actually mailed cash, in envelopes, to pay for their tickets.  Really?  Why?!  Why couldn’t they just go to their banks and direct them to send the money electronically, from their accounts to the organizing committee’s?  What was so hard about that?

Well they could.  But the bank-pimps demanded a lot of money to do something that naive me thought could not possibly cost very much to do.  The cost of sending money directly from their banks in Europe to my bank, BMO, in Canada was ridiculously, absurdly prohibitive.

WTF!

So the idea of Bitcoin, a currency that could bypass the banks and be used to purchase items through the internet without incurring outlandish surcharges sounded like a very good one.  I envisioned a world in which people buy and sell and get paid with this digital currency with no deposit fees or monthly bank fees or transaction fees or other such bullshit.  You do some work for a company, it deposits bitcoin in your bitcoin account (managed from your computer or smartphone) and you go buy your groceries or some shoes or a car and transfer bitcoin to the vendor and nobody pays the pimp.

It never happened.

A brief diversion: I set up an account with Coinbase to purchase about $3,000 worth of bitcoin many years ago– I forget when exactly but it was before 2010.  Bitcoin at the time was worth about $30 each. Yes, $30 for ONE Bitcoin.  I figured I could afford to lose $3,000 if it all went bad and I wanted to understand Bitcoin and the blockchain.  For unknown reasons, I was never able to connect my Coinbase account to my bank account and complete the transaction.  I didn’t feel strongly about it at the time so I gave up.

If I had succeeded, and kept the bitcoin, I would have, today, probably about 100 Bitcoin now worth about $7 million.

More likely, I would have sold part of it much earlier, but I had planned to keep about half for the long term.

Anyway, that’s what happened.  I mean that in a broad sense: that’s what happened.  Bitcoin became something other than a replacement for currency.  Nobody today buys anything with Bitcoin (for all practical purposes).  What they do is buy Bitcoin to see if it goes up, if they can make some money.

You can make money buying Bitcoin if you buy it low and sell high.  That’s it.  It has no other practical value, and even as an investment, it doesn’t have any real value, except for hackers who plant trojans on your computer and lock up your data unless you pay them, and kidnappers, and other criminals.

If Bitcoin is merely an entity of speculation, it is gambling.  It is a Ponzi scheme that only works as long as there is a continuous supply of suckers to perpetuate the demand.  The sustained viability of Bitcoin as a financial entity fundamentally depends on deception.  A sufficient number of customers must believe that it will continue to increase in value.

Inevitably, a number of investors will decide that it has peaked and will want to cash out before it crashes.  And  it will crash.  It has already crashed several times.  It is likely to crash more often as more and more ill-informed investors jump onto the bandwagon.

In the late 1920’s, an investor (some claim it was Joseph P. Kennedy) was getting his shoes shined and the shoeshine boy started chatting with him about the stocks he had invested in and offering him tips.  The shoeshine boy!  That was when, according to the anecdote, Kennedy decided to get out, because he realized that the market was being driven by foolish investors who were essentially gambling– not investing.

It’s not clear if the story is true but the point is well-taken.

When I say “suckers” I don’t mean that in a specific sense.  Some of the people buying vast amounts of Bitcoin are indeed very, very smart.  They understand what is happening, the same way a croupier at a casino understands what is happening.  Some people will become exceedingly rich from cryptocurrencies (there are now lots of them, including, ridiculously– absurdly– $Trump!!)

The meme coin, known as $Trump, was launched by the president on Jan. 17 and quickly surged, reaching a peak of over $14.5 billion in overall market value by Jan. 19, the day before his inauguration. It has since slumped by two-thirds.  From Here.

If there was a more obvious sign that the Trump administration is going to be absolutely rife with corruption, I haven’t heard it.  The fact that Trump is endorsing and even selling crypto currencies is a tell.  This administration is out to facilitate looting on a scale we haven’t seen since Coolridge.

 

 

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The Kennedy Center Honors

With Trump taking over the Kennedy Centre, we can look forward to Ted Nugent, Kid Rock, Mel Gibson, Kanye West, the Village People, and professional wrestlers receiving the honors.

That sounds like a joke, but we have learned that Trump is, in fact, a joke.  The joke is real.  He might well do the Village People.

Well, why not?  If they have previously “honored” Cher, Lucille Ball, Amy Grant, and others, why the fuck not The Village People?   (List of honorees.)

I don’t begrudge platforms out there that honor popular artists.  They have their place.  Actually, they are all over the place,  They are endless and infinite, a gigantic pool of triviality and self-infatuation that serves the masses when they want to believe that the trashy spectacle they prefer is somehow, literally “honorable”.   That the artists they love earned their way to popularity and were not the product of massive pr machinery that manipulated you into finding them interesting.

You have the Grammys, the Superbowl, the Emmys, the Hollywood Walk of Fame,  and all the banquets and dinners you could ever dream of.

And obviously, there are platforms that honor genuinely elite achievements in the arts, the Pulitzers, the Nobels, the Bookers, and numerous foundations and charities.

The Oscars straddle that uneasy compromise, trying very hard to be credible and popular at the same time.  They rewarded “Midnight Cowboy”.  They also rewarded “Avatar”, “Titanic 1997” (the awful James Cameron version),  “Rocky”, “Out of Africa”,  “Dances With Wolves”,  “Forrest Gump”,  “Braveheart”, and “Driving Miss Daisy”.  And “Gladiator”.  And “Chicago”.  Oh my– I didn’t think the list was that bad.  “The King’s Speech”.  And “Green Book”.

Okay– that’s not much of a compromise.  It’s all out craven publicity machine servitude.

In one of the most astounding acts of cultural reversal ever, the Kennedy Center even honored George Carlin in 2008 (with the Mark Twain Prize).  Yes, George Carlin of the seven words you can never say on television.   Even more shockingly, he accepted.  Shamefully, I think.  Shamelessly, I fear.

He died in June of that year.

In all seriousness, Carlin’s acceptance of the honor is one of the most depressing moments in the last 50 years.  For everyone, whether you know it or not.  The ultimate anti-establishment satirist, the caustic jester of the rich and privileged class, the man who mocked false values and hypocrisy for his entire career, feted and honored by a massive gathering of politicians, billionaires, celebrity journalists, and other privileged phonies.  And yes, of course, some legitimately honorable attendees: the bait.

Bill Cosby was honored (rescinded). The Who was honored — but they’re British.  I didn’t know they honored foreigners.

They honored both Cher and Philip Glass one year. I don’t think you could find two nominees whose audiences are less likely to overlap than those two.

The problem for Trump will be that not very many A-listers would probably be willing to make themselves available for the festivities given the current political climate. The problem solves itself because Trump’s constituency probably doesn’t believe Kid Rock and Roseanne Barr are not A-listers.

Should be interesting. Trump and Melania did not attend the annual festive night while President to not “distract” from the event with the political fall-out. (Some potential nominees would have refused the “honor”). So I presume, he plans to attend now, which means he needs a list of potential nominees who have no qualms about appearing with him (and attending the honorific dinners: Chairman’s Luncheon, State Department Dinner, White House Reception, and Honors gala performance).

Trump, while ceaselessly mocking the establishment, also craves the status and recognition that goes with hobnobbing with celebrated artists and performers. He loves to say, “look at this really smart guy and he’s hanging out with me.” I imagine he pictures himself posing for pictures with, say, previous honorees Bruce Springsteen, Paul McCartney, Yo-Yo Ma, Meryl Streep, Steven Spielberg, Joni Mitchell.

It’s just hard to imagine nominees who will go along with this with Trump in office and hosting, aside from The Village People, Ted Nugent, and Kid Rock. Kanye West, definitely. Wayne Newton and Loretta Lynn. Lee Greenwood.

Not exactly A-List in any respect.

They don’t want to be too embarrassed. I suspect he’ll find some marginally respected artists who will be tempted by the exposure and the opportunity to sample hors d’oeuvres with Megyn Kelly or do the frug with Elon Musk.

 

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The Ending of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

I thought the ending as it was was rather maudlin and contrived. I rewrite it in my head every time I think about the movie.

Why is Del waiting in the station? He doesn’t (or shouldn’t) know that Neal will come back. By all the rules of the film up to then, he should be on his way somewhere else. So why is he sitting there? Because the screenwriter couldn’t think of any better way to construct that last scene. And the expression on Del’s face when Neal finds him makes me cringe. It’s all laid on a bit thick and, for me, diminishes the film. Most of us like to think we would be compassionate towards Del, if we were in that situation, but in reality most of us would find him really annoying. It’s a childish ending catering to the overflowing self-infatuation of American audiences.

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The Shambolic Church

The evangelical church in American will never be able to wash away the pungent stain of having supported Trump. He radiates sleaze, materialism, sexual immorality, selfishness, mendacity, cruelty, and ignorance.

He’s your guy.

He’s your aspiration. He’s your exemplar. He’s your totem.

All of your preaching and outward habits manifest as pure unbridled hypocrisy. You can never again stand up and claim to represent virtue and morality because we all now know that it is a sham.

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Trump the Negotiator

If you read– and believed– “the Art of the Deal” you might have come away with the impression that Trump was a brilliant negotiator. You might be surprised that he negotiated himself into 6 bankruptcies. Ironically, he made his real fortune selling himself, in the “reality” (ha ha!) tv series “The Apprentice.” As a great businessman. Most of the buildings with his name on it are owned by people who paid him for the right to stick his name on the front.

Then you won’t be surprised if he seems to get paltry returns for his “tough” negotiations on tariffs. What he got, so it appears, is stuff that was already in place in both Mexico and Canada, and a few symbolic gestures.

The EU will take note of just how serious he might or might not be.

Canada spending over $1 billion to interdict fentanyl? About 47 pounds goes over the border annually from Canada. That’s about $21.2 million a pound we are spending on this puppet show.

Does not strike me as the most efficient use of tax dollars.