Mar 18, 2024





rage and brotherhood
motherhood and sin 

over here in America
post-orwellian

somebody just shoot Putin
and everyone thank

whoever that is















Mar 14, 2024





the char of the chart
the carta

the charm before the char
the charma













Mar 8, 2024





der deer der

der 
deer
der

der deer
der          der

                                      der













Mar 7, 2024

 



soft like the flat of a razor
soft like the tip of a whip

soft like a rose-wooded arrow
soft like a sinking ship









Mar 4, 2024

 


ad nauseum ad infinitum
blah blah blah

look at me, penelope












Feb 25, 2024

 



i am the god of stealth
not theft

go ask someone else
















Feb 15, 2024




do you

do you ye,s ye,s do you
ye,s do you ye,s do you
ye,s ye,s do you ye,s do
you ye,s ye,s ye,s ye,s

ye,s ye,s ye,s so ye,s ye,s 
ye,s so ye,s ye,s so .no







Feb 8, 2024





stargazers
sunflowers

stunglower











Feb 5, 2024

 



irina


who as we were leaving the apartment
on the last day to take me to the airport
in kyiv
asked if i had ever loved her

and i blushed and turned my head
because i could not remember 
and said i tried

everybody loves the voice
of their own breath






as we were leaving the apartment

to take me to the airport in kiev 

asked if i had ever loved her


i blushed, turned my head

because i couldn't remember

and said i tried


everybody loves the voice 
of their own breath










Jan 3, 2024

 


leather claw
fur wood feather
nare i








Jan 2, 2024

 


i was talking to the devil 
in the cold night air
he said your smile was pretty
and i'm trying to be nice
talking to myself
talking to you








Dec 22, 2023

 



i am the ego
of the first half of the 22nd century
my muses have been opportune
i am a storm and the sea rages
my mind is full
my tongue a sword
i am a seal
already broken
i am golden
orphaned or abandoned
my heart is teeth
white as reefs
of cinder
blistering bright
in a hand of fog
and halo
glimmerized












Dec 9, 2023


 

four legs 
criscross cross xmas-lites
fox








Nov 25, 2023

 



the gross of humanity

anatomies 

of analogies and lies


and every mythology prepubesces

and all of actuality divorce


catalyzero















Nov 21, 2023

 



short drop off a long ledge

shore


storied steep as star


as shadow as will as wisp as fury

as death as confine as process


pools













Nov 11, 2023

 



my unraveling is a dissembled disassembly.

vissioned flux. vlizz.


htwoo.

8 wish we did pronounce and use 8 as i.


apotheosis was a muse.








Jul 12, 2023





there once was a man named gregory
who was very much allegedly
but i forgot

but i'm quite sure this is all some sort of allegory


limerick












Jul 10, 2023






split the universe's every nucleus
in half



record of note








Jul 7, 2023





a randy diamond in the rough

carbon like steel

for a stylus

and there is tissue paper on my cock









Jul 5, 2023







i'm outside having a joint, can hear fireworks and cicadas

wanting you to clench your cunt
and writhe a lil










Jul 1, 2023




a bitterness of cruel
my father said
a teacher said
he was a dandelion

i draw in the negative
i care so much
 
a bit of god in you
that was more than god dreamt

the most amount of holes
the least amount of steps
 
 
recollation/recollage







Jun 29, 2023

  
 

The upper-right consists of solace;
the tenth word ninth; some percent
by now by volume running notation;
the last word was; the lower-left
is; the rest of it almost maps.
 
 
 
 
 





dawn's down
gradient night solving puzzles

before picking puzzles to solve
 

 









Jun 28, 2023

 

 
 
a dream within dream without dream
half-aquatic

half coyote
how quixotic
 
a fairy-tale i almost don't believe
 
 
 
 

  
 
i do not talk to anyone
this nakedly 
 
you were the first in a long time i did not take my own counsel 

AI will be a problem that solves itself
what will to think what they will

the shaking of leaves

be busy with me
grow old if you want to grow old

whatever kind of witch
 
 
 
 
 
 

Jun 27, 2023




you'd be a very pretty tree
gods of stars
 
stupendous scarf
resplendent

licking wind
you make me think of trees

doing the obverse of polishing pearl
down from the tree to observe

rats indefatigably from caves
of roots that hold no anchor
 
the other side stars


tarot


 

my memory goes back before time
i am not god


science




incurious by nature
inherent contradiction

there is no

writing to you

rivalorous
 
hatch of cun
 
you're weird
 
capital decarnivore
 
i want to write to you how i want to write to you
not wanting to write to you at all

breaking rebreaking
clue me in


margin




was days spent in your time
jet-lagged, anyway lost 
midnight near dawn, dawn near noon-- 
nigh midnight, nigh eve


sextant




let there a boat
as disabused temperance blind within sails
says just here of just here


sparrow









Jun 26, 2023

  
 
memory fields
filled with memory

life a surface
and negative space 
 
a flourish, a parish
what is real

my breathing the sky












i remember coming out from the head
of my father's cock, a memory mother formed

without the taste of light

 
 
 
 
 

 




Hands holding a book whick looks like vagina, sex education - stock photo






 






jen mezza, i want to read you



 


you are useless endeavor
in a mosaic of useless endeavor
myself

a cheshire, a bat
language terrain meaning












Jun 18, 2023

 

 
ark-angel outside ashton
gull a gross penetration a needle 
an abstraction there is no captain

we have these flaws that we are not taken in this pantheon
of mire these laws

a ballet AI choreographs






Jun 11, 2023

 





and oddly enough, snow airport for at least five days [aug 1 now] just looping in the shop

so that's fun as well







Mar 9, 2023











At a loss for worth













































Best bunker—
down now, tf right down—
now—






I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.


The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.


This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.


And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.


Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.



Aubade
—philip larkin



























do an indecent impression of a magnet
that draws the simpleminded ire 
of those obliviously on the spectrum.







۝ ㅊ Ⳃ ⧸ ᇬ ℍ⧸ ‱


hobbling hobbits. metronymphomania.
corking foramen magnum. petting kites.
flipya. flipya foreal. okay.























and now, The Nine Inch Nails—


“Facts and opinions, though they must be kept apart, are not antagonistic to each other; they belong to the same realm. Facts inform opinions, and opinions, inspired by different interests and passions, can differ widely and still be legitimate as long as they respect factual truth. Freedom of opinion is a farce unless factual information is guaranteed and the facts themselves are not in dispute. In other words, factual truth informs political thought just as rational truth informs philosophical speculation”
—Arendt, ‘Between Past and Future’





















just a little cleverity in the midst of sarcastrophe.













Arrows by any other do not sting as sweet.



squeak~


0


squeaksqueak~


squeak~


0hhh OKayy..


it fine,, sceend worst


Began small and hard to watch.


As universal as limitation.


Some intrigue with entrapment, identifying moments audiences shift with recognition.


Altho eloquently and eminently parahaeceititial.


(((divine)))


Epiquidditious.


Exquisite likewise any enchantment glimmered limning pluralities of nescience.


Powerless to correct faults in maps that map their own terrain.


Ended happier than children ever stay.


Beter then noth—


squeak~


fiN






“Ce n’est pas une banalna.”
—Andy Magritte








Blair McClendon
“A Gathering of Wolves”


THE PRESIDENT’S PERSISTENT AFFECTION for them notwithstanding, ratings have long outlived their usefulness. The Nielsen family grows less representative of the American media diet every day. The streaming giants do not need ads, for which the number of eyes on a screen set the price; they need subscriptions. The social media giants need engagement to mine your data. The news media needs a lifeline. It is increasingly less likely that any particular person deliberately watches a show so much as they allow a variety of images and texts to wash over them. I find it hard to imagine anybody, even the kind of anybody whose job it is to do so, turning on the TV and giving their undivided attention to the Republican National Convention.

I had an uncle who was one of those adults who liked to tell whining children that only boring people get bored. I bristled at this as a kid and still do. The convention was boring because the people who made it are boring, even if they also happen to be dangerous. Having insisted upon as much of an in-person event as possible, most of the speeches were given on the same stage in Charlotte filled with American flags. Speaker after speaker painted a picture of America that was not entirely inaccurate: rioting, protests, fury at the police, and feckless Democratic mayors incapable of bringing peace. They offered an alternative path, one where nobody can get an abortion, where so-called law and order prevails, and where Twitter and Facebook are not allowed to ban someone just because they promote antisemitic conspiracy theories. Trump warned that the left would prevent this all by somehow forcing Biden to install “radical judges” and as a result the American Dream would die. If that was what these people saw in their sleep, I thought, I hope we all wake up soon.

Trump’s first speech, mercifully brief compared to the one he gave on the final night, outlined the agenda for the rest of his campaign. He swore that mail-in ballots would be illegitimate, praised the enthusiasm of his base, and gloated about nearly starting a war with Iran. “We are going to fully fund law enforcement and hire more police,” he promised, which is in fact a point of commonality between the two campaigns even if they plan on spending the fall denying that the other means it. After Trump accepted the nomination on the first day, “Y.M.C.A.” by the Village People poured out of the speakers. Young man, pick yourself off the ground Victor Willis sang as an authoritarian septuagenarian walked away, his face briefly obscured by a WOMEN FOR TRUMP sign. There is a certain critical tendency, the same that catches on every moment of baldfaced hypocrisy, that would see incongruity in choosing this song for a gathering of racist homophobes. But fascist America, like America in general, has rarely had a problem with absorbing the cultural output of those it seeks to destroy. A banger is a banger even if it is gay and black.

The most coherent parts of the pageantry were delivered by the representatives of the anti-choice and petite bourgeoisie wings of the party. The Catholic nun and Abby Johnson, an anti-choice activist in big pearls and, in place of an American flag pin, a gleaming 1972, in honor of the last good year, before Roe v. Wade, were clear about what they wanted—a restriction on the right to abortion specifically and on women’s ability to participate in political life generally. The small business owners who felt “under assault from shutdowns” and “riots” needed order, a miracle cure and labor discipline. The couple invited for no reason other than that they pointed a rifle and a pistol at black people outside of their suburban mansion said that “Marxist liberals” were intent on “ending single-family zoning” and “defunding police.” The category error in the nomenclature aside, they are more or less correct. Their solution was to wave guns around. “What you saw happening to us could just as easily happen to you” is perhaps the right’s response to “it can’t happen here,” but the limits of this solidaristic second person are pretty obvious. It is hard for me to see myself on the grounds of a midwestern palazzo, fearful, furious, my finger dancing around a trigger, the barrel of my gun sweeping over a crowd of black people likewise fearful, furious and chanting the names of the dead. The night was not made to indulge my fantasies.

Over the four days of the convention it became harder to focus on what anybody was saying or doing. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and S.E. Cupp joined pundits like John Podhoretz in praising the effectiveness and production value of the propaganda, which made me wonder whether they had seen the kind America has produced in the past. Frank Capra and John Ford made propaganda. Tony Scott had to give Tom Cruise his iconic role in Top Gun because Matthew Modine thought it too propagandistic. We have never lacked for fine craftsmen of dirty lies. Here the key light was so strong on Mike Pence in a video highlighting Trump’s effect on ordinary people that viewers, accustomed to Hollywood productions capable of executing basic three-point lighting, thought he was speaking in front of a green screen. No conspiracy is needed where incompetence will do.

These bizarre interludes to repetitive speeches competed for attention with what was happening beyond the pageant halls. Kenosha continued to burn in the wake of the police shooting Jacob Blake in the back, and then Kyle Rittenhouse, 17-year-old former cadet and Blue Lives Matter supporter, opened fire, too. The link was obvious because everything has been strikingly obvious for some time now. Someone unearthed a TikTok Rittenhouse had recorded from the front row of a Trump rally months ago. The speaker at the podium shouts “record levels, record for African-Americans, record for Latinos, sixty-five-year high for females. This president doesn’t preach. He gets it done.” This was the same line that a shockingly high number of black speakers—a football player, a politician, a lawyer—offered in Charlotte. African-Americans should not be held captive to a party that has failed them; rather, they should side with the party responsible for the best times of their lives. The Republicans, like the Democrats, would describe some part of the years 2012–2020 as the high water mark in black American life. There are ways in which that is true, but that is not a high bar to clear. There is, of course, another way to read those years. They were years of near constant protest, disruption and uprisings. They could be characterized by the formation of a white supremacist movement emboldened first by the presence of a black president and then of one whose administration has winked, nodded and prodded them along. “You have the right to bear arms, especially when you look at a Portland,” Trump informed his supporters the day before two people were shot dead by one of them. This President doesn’t preach.

When dealing with people who do not preach I prefer to read them plainly. Years ago I interviewed the director Cristian Mungiu when his 2012 film Beyond The Hills was being released in New York. Known for a highly choreographed, sparingly plotted form of realism, he told me that he did not believe there was such a thing as metaphor in cinema. On the screen things are what they are. Is has no transmutative power like it does in language. If her eyes are diamonds it’s because there are diamonds there. It is true enough that I often repeat the principle. It is definitely true in political television. There is less of a need to read the feints and sleights of hand than to just look and listen. The black man who flashed his pearly whites, and slipped between them his anger at anarchists tearing up our cities and black people “not being trusted to speak for themselves,” was not a metaphor. He is Kentucky’s Attorney General and he has within his power the ability to oversee a serious investigation into the killing of Breonna Taylor. There he was speaking for himself, railing against “the politics of identity, cancellation and mob rule.” People are dead, his state is racked with grief and fury, and he smiled and inveighed against cancellation. Certainly a fear made for television.

Toward the end of the convention the only good TV currently airing was suspended. The Milwaukee Bucks attempted to forfeit their playoff match against the Orlando Magic in protest of the events in Kenosha. Other teams followed suit, and the restarted NBA was indefinitely postponed due to a wildcat strike. The action was infectious. WNBA players, MLB players, and MLS players struck. Naomi Osaka struck and brought the tennis world to a halt. Jared Kushner sneered in response. The cancellation of your ratings rival is typically a good thing, but the story was so unbelievable until the moment it happened that speeches paled in comparison. Conventions happen every four years, but wildcat strikes have been illegal since 1935. As the party faithful well know, there is little else like seeing people flaunt the law and get away with it.

The strike withered, but it highlighted the real undercurrent of the Republican Convention: to anyone psychically invested in the velvet glove of normal life, we are already in the throes of an insurrection that must be stamped out. We are nearing the end of a summer that taught us nothing is inviolable, not precincts and not the promise that black people will entertain us to the bitter end. Republicans know that what has been unleashed will not be pacified easily. Pat Lynch, the head of the NYPD union, gave a speech castigating the left and the Democrats and all but swearing fealty to Trump. The congressional Democrats who embarrassingly kneeled in kente cloth were featured in a video roll call of radicalism alongside the DSA and toppled Confederate statues. Riots have become so commonplace that there was little mention of the one that happened in Minneapolis this week. Millionaire athletes are accidentally starting sectoral strikes through the mere suggestion of refusal. These are not the kind of antagonisms resolved by counting votes.

There is a passage in Elfriede Jelinek’s Greed that I kept thinking about, whenever somebody said “law and order” or when Mike Pence invoked the “thin blue line.” In the novel a young woman is believed to have been murdered, and something is being pulled from the lake near town. “Because something is as big as a human being doesn’t mean it has to be one,” Jelinek writes of the thoughts of the people charged with the grim task, but “the men know what it looks like is probably what it will be.” I kept asking myself: what does this look like? Production value aside, it was a hymn to the Right and to the right to protect private property—with the police if possible, and on your own if necessary. A woman does not have the right to an abortion. It would be better if she were at home after a long day running a regional coffee shop chain, carefully loading a gun alongside her husband in case protesters made their way past the gates of her community. It is a strange but familiar politics, more plainspoken every day. As Hurricane Laura approached the Gulf Coast, I remembered reading about how in the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, when the levees had nearly burst, white men forced black workers at gunpoint to lay down and use their bodies to plug the holes so that the white townsfolk would have more time to evacuate. If you have ever seen the river you know that there is nothing that will hold it back, especially not something as frail as flesh. I thought of these things because they make do without metaphor. A person is a person, a body is a body, not something else. These politicians promised what they promised. The only thing that made it hard to parse was their insistence on performing to an empty room. They frequently failed to cut away immediately after the end of a speech, meaning that the camera would linger on what should have been a thunderous conclusion. Instead there was silence. We have seen the fascist stoking and stoked by a roiling mob. This was more like watching them rehearse in a bedroom mirror all wild-eyed and brimming with violence, but slightly pathetic. In light of this it was smart for Trump to give his speech in front of real people. What’s a fascist without a crowd? A lone wolf, I guess. There seem to be more of those every day.






























I. The Impact of AIDS on the Artistic Community is that when a 36-year-old writer is asked on a network news show about the Impact of AIDS on the Artistic Community particularly in regard to the Well-Known Preponderance of Homosexuals in the Arts she replies that if you removed all of the homosexuals and homosexual influence from what is generally regarded as American culture you would be pretty much left with Let’s Make a Deal.
The interviewer’s lack of response compels her to conclude that he has no idea what she is talking about and she realizes that soon many of those who do know what she is talking about will be what is generally regarded as dead.

II. The Impact of AIDS on the Artistic Community is that on New Year’s Eve Day a 36-year-old writer takes a 31-year-old photographer to get a chest X-ray and listens to him say with what can only be described as a certain guarded hope, ‘’Maybe I just have lung cancer.’’

III. The Impact of AIDS on the Artistic Community is that a 36-year-old writer has a telephone conversation with a dying 41-year-old book editor whom even the most practiced verbal assassin has called the last of the Southern gentlemen and hears him say in a hoarse whisper, ‘’I’m sorry but I just hate old people. I look at them and think, ‘Why don’t you die?’ ‘’

IV. The Impact of AIDS on the Artistic Community is that an aspiring little avant-garde movie director approaches a fairly famous actor in a restaurant and attempts to make social hay out of the fact that they met at Antonio’s and will undoubtedly see each other at Charles’s and Antonio’s and Charles’s are not parties and Antonio’s and Charles’s are not bars and Antonio’s and Charles’s are not summer houses in chic Tuscan towns - Antonio’s and Charles’s are funerals.

V. The Impact of AIDS on the Artistic Community is that a 36-year-old writer is on the telephone with a 38-year-old art director making arrangements to go together the following morning to the funeral of a 27-year-old architect and the art director says to the writer, ‘’If you get there first sit near the front where we usually sit and save me the seat on the aisle.’’

VI. The Impact of AIDS on the Artistic Community is that a 24-year-old ballet dancer is in the hospital for 10 days following an emergency appendectomy and nobody goes to visit him because everyone is really busy and after all he’s not dying or anything.

VII. The Impact of AIDS on the Artistic Community is that a 36-year-old writer takes time out at a memorial service for the world’s pre-eminent makeup artist and a man worth any number of interesting new painters to get angry because the makeup artist’s best friend and eulogist uses a story that she has for years been hoarding for her book which she can’t write anymore anyway unless she writes it as a historical novel because it’s about a world that in the last few years has disappeared almost entirely.

VIII. The Impact of AIDS on the Artistic Community is that a 36-year-old writer runs into a 34-year-old painter at a party and the painter says to the writer that he is just back from Los Angeles and he says with some surprise that he had a really good time there and he asks why does she think that happened and says it’s because New York is so boring now that Los Angeles is fun in comparison and that’s true and it’s one reason but the real reason is that they don’t know the people who are dying there.

IX. The Impact of AIDS on the Artistic Community is that a 36-year-old writer has dinner every night for 11 nights in a row with the same 32-year-old musician while he waits for his biopsy to come back because luckily for her she is the only one he trusts enough to tell.

X. The Impact of AIDS on the Artistic Community is that a 36-year-old writer trying to make plans to go out of town flips through her appointment book and hears herself say, ‘’Well, I have a funeral on Tuesday, lunch with my editor on Wednesday, a memorial service on Thursday, so I guess I could come on Friday, unless, of course, Robert dies.’’

XI. The Impact of AIDS on the Artistic Community is that when the world’s most famous artist dies of complications following surgery at the age of 61 it doesn’t seem like he really died at all - it seems like he got off easy.

XII. The Impact of AIDS on the Artistic Community is that at a rather grand dinner held at a venerable New York cultural institution and catered by a company famous for the beauty of its waiters a 39-year-old painter remarks to a 36-year-old writer that the company in question doesn’t seem to employ as many really handsome boys as it used to and the writer replies, ‘’Well, it doesn’t always pay to be popular.’’


THE IMPACT OF AIDS ON THE ARTISTIC COMMUNITY
—fran lebowitz












Lovecraft Country, ep.4: A History of Violence
Full-frontal nudity of a pre-op MtF transgender Native American was magnificient. That she was then killed off at last scene, superbly pointed.

P-Valley
Some plotting plods like pudding down a stairwell. More than makes up for that with as-yet transgressive moments not often seen, even within prestige trash.

Tenet
.won I t’nod had I a tub joke eivom about teneT the

Raised by Wolves
As ever, the glaring flaws in reasoning annoy like a mother; Prometheus-level. Not quite a hate-watch.

Gaga for Dada: The Original Art Rebels
One star. Why? Because Entarte Kunst should be hung by a cord just to mock those good Germans who’d hang the artists for true.

Stay Woke: The Black Lives Matter Movement
One star. Why? Because uppity Soros-funded SJWs should be dangled by a rope just to mock those good German-Americans who’d lynch the protestors for true.

The Circus
Capital recapitalism. Capitula redux, not capitis.

Cuties (Mignonnes)
The New Yorker’s Richard Brody and RogerEbert’s Monica Castillo get it right, but there is grotesque fun watching PTA Karens grotesker Spaß out in Puri-tyrranical horror with what might be best described as clinically nonsensical ideations concerning what ‘pedophilia’ entails and ‘pubescence’ engenders. At least it momentarily stays some of the shallowest of reactionaries from getting Huck Finn removed from school libraries [for man-boy love, of course] or Creationism [Ibrahimic] added to science curricula.

Valley of the Gods
Fine enough for literary surrealism. Erdrichian feel for Natives; tightly contrasted decadent interiors with natural wonder; and a better way to drink.

Ava
Have sat thru worse when it’s been men as protags. Still, Assassin v. Addict is tiresome, and the family drama can be ff>> right tf thru [or vice versa; not many pleased by both], but: The cold-blooded throat-slitting of an already paralyzed vic? And a Malkovich fight scene where his presence is there enough that it feels like his life is on the line? C’mon.

The Plot against America
Roth will have earned right to the first posthumous Nobel should things play out in real as in the novel.

Bulworth
It cringey. Like a crinkled syringe-y. And Poe’s Law is vmuch in play when there’s mental suicide bombers against plain fact sploded most anywhere one looks. Not so much that irony’s dead but that craxy has a Group-on to fly, skydive, and kame-kazi. From zero to orange-gee. Terminally deplorable ‘speed’.

Lovecraft Country
What I’m liking, is that the moments of black excellence under oppressive white supremacy, winning conflicts by vsmall degree, come off stronger as heroic portrayals [perhaps precisely -because- of the intentional cheese-weight of [many of] the horror scenes]. Which is vnice to see. Cuz usually, whatever horror is depicted -is- the peak no matter how horribly cheesed. Like it’s Law of the Unnatural.

Alien: Covenant
Not that I don’t like these [Prom&Cov]. Really do. Far more than say [coughs~] Star Wars. Which makes these fractured fails glare like Gorgons on every rewatch. Infuriating.

Dune
Gosh. 

Antebellum
Not perfect, but as a harsh shot at a worldview that would diminish anything with a black female protag? Yeah, sure: ‘slow’.

The Boys
Has taken the space left by Legion as best current comic-related series. Still, just like X-Men stuff [legion incl], there should be far far greater variety of minor powers [tho i spoke a lil soon on that since it’s now a plot point].

Legion
Would that they all had this [much] élan.

Ratched
Ken Kesey called. Called and left a message. Called and left that message again: “This is shit. This is shit.”

The Nest
Nice lil homage to the period [non-menstrual] when character studies were supplanted by blockbusters.

The Third Day
Autumn should be interesting, if it gets shown at all. Oh, hey, 12 freaking hours.

Enola Holmes
YA fanfiction. Sets are enviable. The rest is a sad excuse to bore you, the horse that bore you, and the boredom that bore that horse.

Lost Girls and Love Hotels
Like Lost in Translation with a bit more honest grit and no Murray.

The Leftovers
Sci-fi up there with Children of Men.

Children of Men
Better than Herbert’s White Plague.

The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq
As the map is not the territory, flags upon a map may be as wrong as ignorance compounded by bias twice over and are not taken as inerrant except by foolish tools. Which is most everyone to everyone generally, but most especially concerning a particularly real set of intentionally misread, abused, and accurate few.
—Michel Houellebecq

I’m Thinking of Ending Things
Embodying Pauline Kael to recursively synecdochically chip at self-awareness? With the blessing of Roger Zemeckis? OK!

Utopia
Well, that wasn’t much. The first season of the 2013 series was excellent. Why, the cinematography alone. But this lukewarm pablum that smells like dead fish, dead yeast, and won’t ever ferment? May as well read the Reader’s Digest Condensed Version of The Invisibles [not that the original utopia was -that- good, but still].

The Social Dilemma
Terrain decently laid. Not hi-rez, and doesn’t name enough names [as an olive branch to deprogram cultists], but pushed by Netflix’s own algos, it’ll do good enough and not just well.

The Comey Rule
4/5. Loss of a star as the only actor I want to see play Trump is Mads Mikkelsen in a rubber Trumpsuit. Potomu chto prichiny.

Trump Card
Won a Golden Raspberry Award while still in pre-production.

Bad President
Aside from bringing out those brain damaged by the LSD/PCP mix in the glue that bound Texas high school history books [thanks, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt!] who believe ‘Constitutional Republic’ is anything more than an etymologically circular red herring; that California ‘decides elections’ due confusion that arises with ordinal and cardinal counting and Cali’s incidental coincidence being near-primary for both [how fungible]; that the Electoral College isn’t both brilliant in the fact it -can be- manipulated, acting as honeytrap litmus designating those who should -not- hold power for moving it -away- from parity with democracy, and whose parity can be increased rather elegantly [electors mapped to vote count percentages, splits going to lead unless exists a tie [by which last percentaged elector is determined by coinflip [min. roundin’ err.]]]; or that the Senate can not be made more representational by a simple allotment of two senators per state with an extra senator for every partial ten million [starting at twenty million], at least the intrepid mycologist Stormy Daniels is doing fine.

The Other Lamb
It’s the Amy Karen of Scalia Barrett story. Kidding, ya more-unique-than-a-snowflake snowflake. This ends better than that will.

The Church
Uncanniness from bowel to belfry. Philip Glass performed by Goblin.

I Shot Andy Warhol
Beware synopses by ESL MRAs slipped thru IMDB, OK?

Harrison Bergeron
Lil too drawn out considering how short the Welcome to the Monkeyhouse story was, but Eugene Levy and Howie Mandel? Vonnegut, you solitaire playin’ during office hours bastid.

The Putin Interviews E04
Stone, after appearing soft and safe with Vladimir for three previous episodes, finally goes for the eyes and testes, and Putin’s equanimity ain’t: For a man whose act is not to have any cracks, the tells finally show. And they are chasms.

Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants
One of the true legends of legerdemain. And if there’s been better in the last fifty years, Mamet didn’t know of them. The patter alone, ye gods.

The Trial of the Chicago 7
SBC portrayed the intellect of a man whose suicide had “two hundred pages of handwritten notes […] nearby, many detailing his moods” and “had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 1980.” Nancy Kurshan, Jerry Rubin’s gf of four years at the time of the trial, says “Sasha Baron Cohen did a reputable job. But Abbie was more charming, and both funnier and more serious.” [one can look, and see that america Hoffman has the same sardonic and heavy air] And apparently, “The Judge was meaner and more idiosyncratic than portrayed. He really looked like Mr. Magoo and was a nasty piece of work. The prosecutors were also creeps, and we did not have cordial conversation with them as depicted. In fact, I recall Abbie, Anita, Jerry and I escaping to the Museum of Science & Industry, high on what was then an illegal substance, where we bumped into Schultz. Abbie called him out as a “Shanda for the goyim”, yiddish for “a front man of the white anglo-saxon establishment”. He did not wish us a good day.” And Dellinger was jailed simply for stepping between the guards and Seale, not for hitting anyone.

Pygmalion
The rest of the story need not be shown in action, and indeed, would hardly need telling if our imaginations were not so enfeebled by their lazy dependence on the ready-mades and reach-me-downs of the ragshop in which Romance keeps its stock of “happy endings” to misfit all stories.
—GBShaw

Boogie Nights
ANDERSON: Every time Burt said ‘Neverthless,’ I kept noticing something was happening to Ricky’s face. I said ‘What’s going on?’
And he said, ‘I can’t… I’m suppressing laughter when he says Nevertheless.’
I asked why, and he told me this great story, of being at a football game where this woman is being introduced to sing the national anthem, and her name is Helen Forrest or whatever it is. And the announcer says, ‘And now to sing the National Anthem, Helen Forrest.’
And somebody in the stands screams, ‘HELEN FORREST SUCKS COCK.’
And the announcer [without missing a beat] says, ‘Nevertheless…’

Just this. For obvious reasons.





Borat Subsequent Moviefilm
‘…Borat and his interlocutor settle on the right gift for Pence: Tutar. The guy doesn’t bat an eye. At a crisis pregnancy center, Borat and Tutar lead a pastor to believe that Borat has got his daughter pregnant. The pastor is visibly uncomfortable with this knowledge, but still argues against an abortion: “It really doesn’t really matter how we got to this moment… God is the one who creates life, and God doesn’t make accidents.” A plastic surgeon, on the other hand, is willing to cut into Tutar to correct her nose and enlarge her breasts in order to make her more desirable to men, though he reassures her that she does not appear to have what Borat and Tutar call a “Jew nose.”‘
—Masha Gessen

THE END: Inside the Last Days of the Obama White House
Spot the contrast. It is devastating.

Zodiac
Better than a Daddy issue doc. And one of his letters has finally been deciphered–

I HOPE YOU ARE HAVING LOTS OF FUN IN TRYING TO CATCH ME
THAT WASNT ME ON THE TV SHOW
WHICH BRINGS UP A POINT ABOUT ME
I AM NOT AFRAID OF THE GAS CHAMBER
BECAUSE IT WILL SEND ME TO PARADICE ALL THE SOONER
BECAUSE I NOW HAVE ENOUGH SLAVES TO WORK FOR ME
WHERE EVERYONE ELSE HAS NOTHING WHEN THEY REACH PARADICE
SO THEY ARE AFRAID OF DEATH
I AM NOT AFRAID BECAUSE I KNOW THAT MY NEW LIFE IS
LIFE WILL BE AN EASY ONE IN PARADICE DEATH

Sound like anyone you know? Run away.

One Night in Miami
Cue the noose: Dialogue abstracted from the historical records of what these ppl thought touches upon silencing, Whitewashing, misprision, and the sins of omission in an American paradigm greatly affected by White supremacy.

Louis Theroux: A Place for Paedophiles
Now imagine two further things: A person held within such a statist purgatory were innocent -and- had time added if they appealed their innocence. Fascism like that is cripplingly developmentally challenged.

Mr. Show
Spoiler Alert: This is a show.

Infinity Pool
Cronenialism.

EO
I am EO.