Posts

Posted on

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.

 

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

John Williams to tell you What to Feel

I keep seeing online commentators raving about John Williams musical scores.  Here’s a list of some of his projects.

    • Valley of the Dolls (1967)
    • Towering Inferno (1974)
    • Sugarland Express (1974)
    • Fiddler on the Roof (1971) *  (unfair really: the music in “Fiddler” is from the musical by Sheldon Bock and Sheldon Harnick)
    • E. T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
    • Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
    • Jurassic Park (1993)
    • Catch Me if You Can (2002)
    • Beach Blanket Bingo (just kidding)
    • Harry Potter (first three films, 2001-2004)

He has received the National Medal of the Arts (2009) and he is an Honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

And he is boring as hell.

I have watched a lot of movies.  I don’t think I ever thought a John Williams score was evocative or compelling in any of the films he has scored.  He is almost always bombastic, always predictable, and never striking or original or fresh.  His music is there for insecure directors who don’t have faith in their own work and want to make sure the audience knows what they are supposed to be feeling.

Here are some movies that I thought did have strong scores:

    • Amelie (Yann Tiersen, 2001)
    • Elevator to the Gallows (Miles Davis, 1958)
    • Psycho (Bernard Herrmann, 1959)
    • The Graduate (Paul Simon, 1968)
    • Blade Runner (Vangelis, 1982)
    • Once Upon a Time in America (Ennio Morricone, 1984)
    • The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (Ennio Morricone, 1966)
    • Dr. Zhivago (Maurice Jarre, 1965)
    • Paris, Texas (Ry Cooder, 1984)
    • Wings of Desire (Jurgen Knieper, Nick Cave, 1987)
    • Godfather (Nina Rota, 1972)
    • The Third Man (Anton Karas, 1949)
    • To Kill a Mockingbird (Elmer Bernstein, 1961)

In most of those movies, there is at least one sequence in which the music plays a powerful role in shaping your emotional response to the action on the screen.  The wistful, luminous score of “Amelie”, for example, has tinge of melancholy that deepens our response to the loneliness and regret expressed by characters she meets in the film.  “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” gives scenes of stark tension, fear, and waste.  Maurice Jarre’s music for “Dr. Zhivago” conveys the long and desire of Zhivago for his lost love, and life.  Vangelis contribution to “Blade Runner” helps create that disorienting, broken, shabby environment of the dystopian future.  Paul’s Simon’s music accentuates the generation gap at the heart of “The Graduate”.  The moody, exhausted landscape of a broken city and culture reverberate in Anton Karas’ zither music in “The Third Man”.

I am astonished that Steven Spielberg chose John Williams to provide the music for “Schindler’s List”.  And then I am not astonished.  Spielberg is a good director of schematic action sequences, and he can give you some good drama, but he invariably sloshes into sentimentality and contrivance, as in the last scene of “Schindler’s List”, and the awful, awful last scene of “Saving Private Ryan” (Ryan, as an older man, weeping at a graveyard in Normandy).

So, yes, John Williams is perfect, for a movie maker who never trusts his audience to “get it”.  The music is there to tell you how to feel, just in case the drama itself didn’t sink in.

 

Posted on

Tariffs

Sad and depressed? Disappointed in life? Hard to live with bad decisions? Annoyed by the success of others? Ask your doctor if you need Tariffs. Tariffs, from Trump Pharmaceutical, may be the answer. Tariffs will make you smile again. Tariffs will bring you joy and let you play with your children again. Tariffs will make that nagging feeling of unfulfilled expectations fade away into blissful contentment. Ask your doctor if Tariffs is right for you.

Side effects may include inflation, unemployment, trade wars, and recession.

Posted on

The Good Old Days

My response to a post on Facebook about “the good old days” when a single breadwinner (the man, mostly) could support a family, buy a home and a car, and send his kids to college on one salary.

The basic core of this is certainly true. From 1945 to 1980, the working classes did very well in our economies. Then the ownership class realized that working stiffs were getting a big share of the wealth and set out to take it back, and largely succeeded, thanks to marginal tax cuts and government subsidies, and diminishing unions. But I will point out that the “average” family in that era did not have a cell phone, big screen tv with cable, electronic games, advanced appliances including dishwashers and driers, air conditioning, travel, the surfeit of clothing and accessories we all have now, a lot of our pharmaceuticals and health care options, and so on. You sometimes see documentaries about a family doing the pioneer life, living in a log cabin, raising and eating animals and vegetables, and so on. When will someone do one with a family going back to the 1960’s, with landlines, unreliable cars, primitive color tv’s with antennae, and so on. It would be fun. Thomas Piketty’s book “Capital” is a good, detailed analysis of the general economic trends, but, yeah, it’s a slog to read.

Posted on

King’s Park Psychiatric Center

About this institution.

King’s Park Psychiatric Centre was a complex of dozens of buildings intended to house individuals with mental problems. It operated from 1885 to 1996.  At its peak, there were close to 10,000 patients.

The remains of the buildings are haunting.

The intent was good.  Of course.  The idea was to provide a healthy environment for these patients to live in, where they could work on farms and workshops and be fed and housed at state expense.

We are told that governments came to believe this was not a good way to deal with mental patients and the population of Kings Park was reduced through drug therapies, transfers to other institutions, and simple release.  I have read that many of these patients ended up homeless, but I don’t see any clear documentation about the disposition of the thousands of patients.  But they are all gone and the buildings have been abandoned for about 30 years.  Some of them were demolished. Some of them had asbestos in them complicating the idea of recycling the structures.  The remaining buildings are decaying.  There is a lot of graffiti.  People break into the buildings to take photos and videos.

There is something about the ruins that fascinates people.

Posted on

Crowning Prince Poilievre

Before everyone rushes to proclaim Pierre Poilievre the inevitable Prime-Minister of Canada, let’s consider a few inconvenient facts.

By the time Canada gets around to the next federal election, Trump will have been in the White House for at least 6 months.

Now, it is possible that he may prove to be a smashing success, leading a unified government that reduces inflation (something Biden already did for him), low unemployment, increased manufacturing, lower housing costs, and peace in the middle east.  Poilievre, glistening with overflowing luster as the Canadian Trump, glides to a smashing victory, reducing the Liberals to two seats.

It is more likely that Trump’s idiotic policies lead to resurgent inflation, high interest rates, less trade, reduced manufacturing, increased trade deficits, ridicule from foreign leaders, and a circus of bickering party members sabotaging their own party’s administration from the House.

Suppose the Liberals, with a new leader– likely, Mark Carney– provide a engaging contrast. Suppose he cleverly distances himself from Trudeau’s murky political sloganeering and tepid policy initiatives and stakes out a new course of his own.

The thing is, I don’t think most Canadians actually like Pierre Poilievre.  They say they will vote for him because they despise Justin Trudeau, but I rarely hear anyone say that they will vote for Poilievre because they like him.  There will be debates.  I doubt that Poilievre charms the pants off anyone in these debates, if he is genuinely challenged by a more formidable Liberal candidate.

Don’t forget that Quebec has a lot of seats, and the PQ might or might not take a lot of them.

The NDP, as long as they retain Singh as their leader, will be a non-factor.  Singh has lost almost all of his credibility, even among people like me who used to often vote NDP because, well, they used to have the good leaders like Ed Broadbent and Jack Layton.

It’s not likely, but it’s possible we could end up, in Canada, with another minority government.

The overwhelming consensus among political commentators right now is the Poilievre will win a decisive majority in the next election.  That is the kind of uniformity that raises my suspicions.

It reminds me of the belief that Hilary Clinton would crush Donald Trump.

Poilievre was recently interviewed by Jordan Peterson.

Peterson draws fans who are searching for meaning in life and want to learn from someone they see as a great thinker, and his huge social media reach makes him a coveted interview for right-wing politicians.  From Here.

Peterson is not a great thinker.  He reminds me of Malcolm Gladwell (though they have opposite political dispositions): smug and pompous writers who devise compelling anecdotes that cherry-pick facts and prove nothing but serve to assure miscreants that they’re really smarter than educated, competent people.

Peterson recently interviewed the neo-fascist Brit Tommy Robinson, a far-right rabblerouser known for inciting mobs against immigrants in the UK and calling Islam a “mental disorder”.  Robinson’s X account was restored recently by Elon Musk, after he had been barred for his inflammatory anti-immigrant rhetoric.

So Poilievre is happy to be hosted by an enabler of a very far right activist who is currently in Cyprus at a five-star hotel hiding out from an arrest warrant.

Poilievre told Peterson that young women just can’t wait to get pregnant and take up domestic chores again, after years of tiresome feminists lecturing them about equality and professional achievements.  He also wants to boost energy production to serve the mega-corporations lust for AI processing.

Poilievre thinks climate activists are “loons”.

Poilievre is extremely confident at the moment.  He is probably supremely disappointed that he won’t have Trudeau to run against– perhaps for good reason.

I don’t think most Canadians have looked closely at the man.  And I suspect that once they do, they will discover that he does not have the charisma he himself thinks he has at the moment.

 

 

 

Posted on

The Coming Republican Disaster

No one should say, when it happens, that nobody thought it would.  Everybody thought it would, just as they thought, eight years ago, that a vulgar, loud-mouthed, pathological liar like Trump could never be elected.   But don’t be fooled by a misfire on only one part of the equation.  Yes, Trump got elected,  once, and then again, for a second term, by a population that seemed oblivious to the real forces that shape and distort our economic and social lives.

This is a segment of the population that believes in barstool wisdom: some loudmouth sitting next to you at a bar and mouthing off about how high his taxes are, how crime is getting out of control, how America has outsourced all of the best jobs, how preposterous it is for people to choose their gender, could be the next cabinet secretary in a Trump administration.

When you hear interviews with the MAGA crowd, the first thing that is evident is that they have no idea what economic health or the cause of inflation is.  They believe that crime is on the increase when it objectively is not.  They have no idea that 75% of the manufacturing jobs that were lost over the last 20 years were lost to automation, not out-sourcing. They zero in on inflation and magically believe that Joe Biden’s policies caused it, even though it happened in every developed country.  They hated the constrictions imposed on them by the Covid epidemic but nobody had a magical formula for preventing its spread, and hundreds of thousands of deaths, while allowing everyone to conduct business as usual.  Nobody was going to be happy with any solution– and they weren’t.  They blamed Biden for the deplorable mess at the exit from Afghanistan, but only the generals who believed the U.S. should stay there for at least another 20 years had any alternative.  Diatribes about the messy exist almost never acknowledge the fact that the U.S. and it’s allies were losing, badly, by that time, and that the whole project was a colossal failure, and that it was the Republican Party that got America into that mess in the first place.  The honest Republican knows in his heart that it was their party’s great fortune that a plan devised by Trump had to be executed under a Democratic Administration.  Trump, who was just as determined to leave, would have fared no better.

Lost in all the flotsam around the Biden Administration, is the fact that he pulled off a singularly remarkable achievement: he kept the economy chugging along while reducing inflation.  Most economists will tell you that reducing inflation will causes joblessness to rise significantly.  Biden’s infrastructure investment and other policies prevented that.  That is a signal accomplishment for which Biden gets no credit.

I doubt that anyone would have fared better than Harris had Biden had the sense to not run for re-election.  It will be to his everlasting discredit that he allowed his ego to blind him to his own frailties, but had someone been nominated earlier, and contested the primaries, would it have made a difference?  A large portion of the voting public were ornery, dissatisfied with their lives, and infatuated with simplistic solutions.  Trump would make prices go down, houses go up, and people who don’t like me go away.  Trump will bring peace to Gaza and the Ukraine.  Trump will teach China a lesson.

And so we arrive at the Trump Administration.  I think it is natural for most informed observes to instinctively believe, on some level, that he can’t be serious.  He’s not going to impose sweeping tariffs on foreign imports, deport 15 million illegal immigrants, or invade Greenland.  He can’t let China bully Taiwan.  He can’t really end Obamacare.  He certainly won’t balance the budget.

He can’t be serious, because what he says he is going to do is stupid.

What will probably happen?

Either he will go ahead and impose the tariffs or he will grant so many exceptions that some people will realize– as if they didn’t already know– that he is a liar, like every other politician.  If he imposes the tariffs, he will re-ignite inflation, and that will be embarrassing, but he can try to blame it on some kind of hidden Biden policies that he couldn’t vanquish overnight.  But it will raise suspicions.  But then, other nations will retaliate with tariffs on U. S. exports, causing jobs to be lost and corporations to lose money.

He can try to round up millions of illegal immigrants, but that will require something that looks like concentration camps, and hundreds of thousands of state employees, guards, administration, lawyers.  It will be very costly, and it will have a large impact on some industries that depend on immigrants, like construction, meat packing, and agriculture.  Again, there will be a significant inflationary impact.

He will try to extend his tax cuts, due to expire next year, and add a few more.  This will lead to an interesting battle with the hard core tea-party Republicans who sincerely want to balance the budget.  Dream on.  In the meantime, Speaker Johnson will have a monumental challenge to get any budgetary measures passed given that he has a razor-thin majority and lots of members of his own party who won’t hesitate to sabotage their own agenda.  To keep the tax cuts, Trump badly needs an extension– or suspension– of the debt ceiling.  The Tea Party Republicans will probably try to hold the process hostage to their own radical agenda– massive cuts to the budget.  That should be fun.

Trump has nominated a bunch of clowns for the top cabinet posts in his administration.  Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Robert Kennedy Jr., are almost literally, yes, clowns.  You can be assured that most of government is actually carried out by deferential functionaries below the level of cabinet secretary, but these three, and the others, have big egos and extraordinary confidence in their own genius and may try to push through things that any sensible person would hesitate to push through.  Will Kennedy try to stop vaccine mandates, or undermine them?  Will he take on the processed food industry?  Will Hegseth stay sober on the job?  Will Gabbard try to restore Assad to power in Syria?

And will Trump cut off aide to Ukraine?  Ukraine does receive a lot of aide from other nations, including Germany, France, and Britain, but if it collapses, will the American public be as eager to wash their hands of it as Trump is?  And what if Putin, seeing the opportunity, starts to mass troops at the border of Moldova or Georgia?

Americans– aside from some Republican true believers– don’t care much about the deficit.  It will balloon under Trump because he will cut taxes even more than he did in his first term but won’t dare touch Social Security or Medicare, the two largest (by far) spending items in the budget.  But Republican strategy– the core of their very being as a political party– is to complain bitterly about the deficit only when they are not in office.

The last balanced budget in the U.S. was the last year of the Clinton Administration.

In Republican Fantasy, after a few months or a year of Trump, inflation will be down to below 2%, housing starts will rise, house prices will drop, mortgage rates will drop, Hamas will turn over the remaining hostages, Ukraine will surrender the seized territories to the Russians, NATO countries will increase their spending on defense, and thousands of factories will open to begin manufacturing televisions, washers, and driers in America.  With high-paying union jobs.  Wait– Trump is not going to be good for unions.

The sales of electric cars will decline while America will amazingly find even more oil to burn.  Don’t forget: crime will go down.

And if it happens, it will be due to the miraculous intervention of Donald Trump, or God, or both.  And if none of it happens, it will still be Joe Biden’s fault, whose administration policies were so bad that even Trump cannot undo them during his time of administration even though he told you that he could.

What he won’t be able to blame on Biden are the numerous scandals and blow-ups that seem likely to pervade this Administration.  Trump’s people are unusually shameless about wanting to get very rich while having a rather cavalier attitude towards ethics and propriety.  Trump’s family and cohorts are already lining up “investments” and real estate deals with the oil-producing Arab states.  In Trump’s view, MAGA people don’t mind. That’s why they elected him.  But there is a tiny smidgeon of shame left in the Republican Party and Trump is a lame-duck: he cannot run again.

I repeat: he is a lame-duck, who cannot run for president again.  If it is to the material advantage of one of his “friends” to turn on him, he will.  If it is to the political advantage of a Congressman or Senator to diverge from the Trump agenda, he or she will.

One last depressing probability: Supreme Court Justice Alito retires and, without McConnell to influence him, Trump gets to replace him with, I don’t know,  Donald Jr.  The most moronic president in recent history will have appointed four justices to the highest court in the land.