Burn that Tabloid to the Ground!

You always knew it was just a trashy tabloid. Crazy-ass stories. Ridiculous gossip. Nosy and annoying. Always there at the check-out counter in every grocery or pharmacy you've ever been in. You kind of thought it was just stupid reading for stupid people. Noisy, annoying, but basically harmless.

Nope. Not really. As Jeff Bezos has revealed (see previous post), The National Enquirer's business model was/is blackmail! “The threats, the blackmail, that’s their business model,” one former National Enquirer staffer told The Daily Beast. All part of the fame & shame culture. It would not be a tragedy if this tabloid was burned to a crisp and relegated to the trash-heap!

Inquiring Minds Want to Know!

Wow. This is kind of an interesting story. You could not make it up.

The Richest Man in the World, Jeff Bezos, founder/owner of Amazon & the Washington Post just published a series of letters which seems to demonstrate that David Pecker (yes, that really is his last name), his legal team, and his scandal-sheet, The National Enquirer are trying to black-mail & extort him.

Lawyers for The National Enquirer seems to be implying they have series of photos, "dick pics," and other compromising photos of Bezos while he was carrying on an extramarital affair. Bezos is going thru a messy divorce, and well, someone, somehow got access to a trove of intimate photos online.

How to blowup a black-mail/extortion attempt? Go public with it, right? Damn the torpedoes. Not many people would be in position to do that, but Bezos is certainly uniquely positioned. He can go public and take the black-mailers on. This is an excellent example of "The Truth Will Set You Free!"

This story has legs. And major political ramifications.

Remember the Washington Post is in the midst of major investigations on our 45th President, a man who just happens to be one of Pecker's "friends." There are rumors that Pecker also has a trove of stories and photos about 45 too. You wonder if he is holding those over his good friend too?

There is also an on-going investigation into the death of the Washington Post journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, who was brutally murdered by Saudi Arabian agents in the Saudi Embassy in Turkey. Did Saudi intelligence hack Bezo's phone or iCloud and share those photos with the National Enquirer? Did anyone direct them to do it? Are there folks in America who directed the hack and blackmail attempt? You know folks in high-profile positions in power who are in conflict with Bezos and the Washington Post?

Inquiring Minds Want to Know!

"We are but Blockheads!" - M. de M.

One of the best things about reading books? You get to see the world from other perspectives. New eyes. New brains. Other times. So happy to have recently "discovered" the philosopher Michel de Montaigne (1533 - 1592). He is the master of reminding us that we don't really know what we know, and we don't really know what we don't know.

"To learn that we have said or done a stupid thing is nothing, we must learn a more ample and important lesson: that we are but blockheads!"

AND...

"Our life consists partly in madness, partly in wisdom: whoever writes about it merely respectfully and by rule, leaves more than half of it behind."

Our Last Best Hope...

I didn't watch it, of course, why listen to a large, idiotic, always-blathering, no-nothing fat man?

I did catch this phrase on the radio this A.M...

"Ridiculous, Partisan Investigations..."

Some of us, of course, feel that those investigations are the last best hope for our reeling, beat-up, tattered little Democracy.

** A bit reminiscent of this moment in history: Richard Nixon's last SOTU in 1974.  "I believe the time has come to bring that investigation and the other investigations of the matter to an end. One year of Watergate is enough." - R. Nixon --- 7 months later he resigned in disgrace! 

Seen/Unseen!

The dichotomy to be seen, to be unseen.

Pop Culture & Capitalism try to make us believe that only what is seen, what can be viewed, touched, poked, prodded, purchased and consumed is real, (see previous post). Uncountable Wealth, Fame, Fortune, are promised to those who are seen by the most eyeballs.

This is a lie in our space, a lie in the public consciousness.

The unseen is just as real, just as important, most likely much more important to our lives and well-being. Think of all the unseen things, all the hard to envision, hard to grasp phenomena that make life worth living: Love, Grace, Compassion, Soul, Meditation, Prayer, Imagination, Day-Dreams, all that we feel, the endless thought-streams running thru our heads. The life of the Unseen offers a different path, away from the herd, away from all the needing, wanting, grasping of the teeming masses. There are also riches to be found in the Land of the Unseen: Peace of Mind. Clarity. Vision. Intuition. Humility. Creativity.

Some of us are lucky. We can easily find our way into a deep, welcoming solitude. We can be happy living in the world of the unseen. And when we do come out to face the world of the seen, we are careful about what we reveal, we are careful of what we choose to do, and who we choose to spend our time with. We have no problem saying No. Or saying Yes. But those decisions come from a deep calm center within.

There is something about having a Sacred Space, in your mind and body, which you can retreat to in a blink of an eye. Unseen.

A Grand Ritual Humiliation: Pop Culture's Finest Spectacle!

Superbowl #... whatever...

The game. What about the game? I actually enjoyed the game. It was a slog. A throwback. An existential defensive struggle; sputtering offenses battered around by excellent defensive schemes. It was sort of an old world NFL game, one that those ancient football beings Halas and Lombardi would recognize. The old world-style team beat the shiny, new-fangled team.

The rest of it?

The commercials and half-time show were a Complete Bleak Spectacle of Ineptness! Pop Culture eating itself. Feed everything into the Pop Culture Beast and watch it shit it all out in vivid technicolor. Somehow the ghost of MLK Jr was conjured up and worked into the spectacle. Just to sell shit. That is the point. Turn everything into shit, reprocess it, repackage it, and sell that same shit back to the teeming masses.

Then there was The Last Temptation of Adam Levine.  Whatever the man believed he was doing up onstage was not what was actually happening. It was a comic, horror-show of epic proportions. He kept undressing as the show went along. He finally stripped down and displayed a body full of tattoos.  Maybe it is his way of claiming his body for himself? He just looked like a confused human billboard of contradictory signifiers. Maybe he's serious, maybe he really is sincere, but it looked like Pop Culture has totally hollowed out, eviscerated and extracted this poor man's soul. A lost pilgrim, a hollow husk of a human, in search of the last remaining, misplaced cells of his integrity.

Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam once pointed out that when dealing with the demands of the masses, and the voracious Pop Culture Machine, one must learn it's often wise to say "No!" You don't actually have to take every gig, you don't have to pose for every camera, you don't need to expose yourself to every last eyeball. Sometimes the "No," will be your saving grace. No to this fiasco. Just No.

Did I really forget to mute one segment of commercials? Yes, I did. And I watched and listened to Bob Dylan's 60's Civil Rights Anthem "Blowing in the Wind," used to sell Budweiser beer. "How many roads must a man walk down..."

Yes, that is perfect. No, nothing is sacred, everything is infinitely consumable, everything is commodified, more product for the machine. That is the beauty and horror of Pop Culture. A Civil Rights Anthem one day, Cheesy Beer Commercial Theme Song the next. A Grand Ritual Humiliation. Pop Culture's finest spectacle!

Step Lightly...

Well, it is probably best to step lightly. To figure much of the world, and our experience in it is arbitrary, random, subject to lots of noise. In fact, most of our lives consist of noise. We try to make sense out of experiences, we cull out the best bits and tell ourselves stories, but of course, our stories of our life aren't really our life. It's all much more complicated and complex, and confusing than we want to acknowledge. We think it's better to wrap up things in a nice, neat narrative. We want to simplify and emphasize the things that we cull out, but that process is already overblown and misses and leaves out so much. Think back to a day in your childhood. Can you recall every last detail? No. Silly question. Of course not. We tell a story. We leave out so much. Who knows, maybe accidentally we leave out the most important details, or maybe we just don't even know what details are important to include or leave out. Random. Arbitrary. One story out of an uncounted multitude of stories we could tell about ourselves, if only we knew.

Aronofsky's Howl at the Moon!

Darren Aronofsky's "Mother!" is another bright, shiny, snarling beast of a movie (see previous post). Maybe it's the new film genre I'm into now? Bright, Shiny, Snarling Beasts! What is "Mother!?" Some call it a "psychological horror movie." Aronofsky calls it a "howl at the moon."

That's just perfect. Another movie about where we are right now on the planet. This one is a head-spinner. Totally compelling. Sucked us right in. Great performances from Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem. What is it with the Human Beings? The needing, wanting, grasping? I mean, like totally, freaking, yikes!

Despair & Hope...

Yes. Paul Schrader's "First Reformed" is a bright, shiny, snarling beast of a movie. There are resounding, deafening echoes of Robert Bresson's "Diary of a Country Priest" and Martin Scorcese's (Shrader wrote the script) "Taxi Driver."

So yes. A major work. It's a hard slog. Stony. Difficult. Forces you step by step into a world of despair. Oh yes, it's our world today.  You may hate this movie. It is not light entertainment. I didn't hate it. I think it's brilliant. Bitter medicine. Essential.

The movie leaves one with essential, real world, of the moment questions: "How to live in the world today? How to see clearly? How to live honestly? How to live with both despair and hope in your head at all times?"

The answer I am left with? Do the hard, good work. Always, even if it sometimes feels impossible.

Enforced Freedom.

Enforced  Freedom. 

That's a contradiction. The Weather Gods dictated that it would be insanely cold yesterday. Everything was canceled. No appointments. Nowhere to go. We never left our warm little humble abode.

It was a strange bonus day. No plans. No worries. No guilt. The Weather Gods demanded we just unplug. We made the best of it. We read books, we watched movies, we streamed a bunch of travel shows to warmer climes with the great, recently departed, Anthony Bourdain.

It was a brilliant day. In every way. Crazy cold outside, warm and comfortable inside. We can probably blame this all on our Climate Catastrophe. Things will continue to get crazy hot and crazy cold. We are wreaking havoc on our ecosystem. So I guess we should all expect more of this "enforced freedom." Which in the bigger picture is really no freedom at all.

But this one day. It was delightful.

Answering Machine...

It's insanely cold here in the Midwest. The radio tells me all-time record cold. So we are all hunkered in today. The plan is to stay in, amuse ourselves anyway we can.

I was just sipping coffee, randomly paging thru Jay Farrar's book "Falling Cars and Junkyard Dogs." There's a brief paragraph about one of his musical mentors Doug Sahm of the Sir Douglas Quintet leaving messages on Jay's answering machine. Jay kept those messages.

Made me think of my own answering machine in the late 90's and early 2000's. Filled with messages from my father, now long gone. I didn't keep those messages. Stupidly erased. It kills me that they are gone. The machine is gone now too. Don't even have a landline anymore. Time.

I recall long rambling messages. Monologues. Funny, insightful, ridiculous. My father was a fabulous talker, a great story-teller. I loved listening to his voice. Maybe those messages on the tape were some of the best moments. I mean, lots of our conversations were actually monologues. The tape gave him a free range. I just took those messages for granted, right? He'd fill the tapes. I'd erase them, knowing that he would fill them up again. I never thought of buying a box of tapes, keeping them all, like the precious cargo they actually really were.

Now. Just a fading memory in my head. Time.

Junun. Sound. Vision. Extraordinary.

Junun.

Searching for other things, I found this little buried treasure of a movie. One of my favorite directors, PT Anderson, made a documentary of the making of a record at Mehrangarh Fort in Rajasthan, India. A collaboration between the Israeli composer She Ben Tzur, Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood and the Indian ensemble the Rajasthan Express. Music recorded and produced by longtime Radiohead producer Nigel Goodrich.

What to say? See it. It is beautiful. Extraordinary. Sound. Vision. Gorgeous. An extraordinary collaboration between an amazing collection of human beings in one of the most breath-taking places on earth. Some of the most glorious, stunning shots are filmed outside the fort, but the scenes in the music-room, with all of the musicians working together, is entrancing and inspiring. These unique human beings, in this unique place, making this unique sound. Fabulous.

Time Tripping with Sergio Leone!

What a great way to spend a wintry Sunday afternoon. I time-traveled to 1969's Sergio Leone movie, "Once Upon a Time in the West." 3 hours long. Maybe that's why, up to now, I've never seen this film. Check out Roger Ebert's review from '69 here.

What to add? 

The movie is a myth of a myth of a myth... you finally peel back the layers of the onion and you get down to Jack Elam's scowling mug; eyes drifting in two wildly off-kilter directions at once. This movie isn't from another time and place, it's a missile from another planet, another galaxy. Or really just a rumor of a rumored missile from a rumor of a distant galaxy. It's figment of an over-boiled imagination. A deep and captivating fever dream from an Italian eccentric exploring the mythical West first conjured up by John Ford, Howard Hawks & John Huston.

It's about Death. Basically. And dirt. And sun. Mountain. Desert. Cruelty. Bad blood. Revenge. Greed. Progress. Das Kapital. Human Beings in a hard reality. The men are basically all Killers. The One Woman in the West is a Whore and a Saint. Of course. Faces. Hands. Guns. Stony hearts. Human beings scrambling around in the dust. The Noble Ones suffer, and slave, without complaint.

Oh yeah, and it's about Death in another way too. This film is so old, most, if not all, of the folks you see on screen are long gone. Which gives the movie another level of profundity, and a specialness to it. A lost time. There is even more gravity and meaning watching these actors play their parts to the hilt, knowing they are now long dead and buried. Weird too.

Loved the over the top stylization. Loved the Ennio Morricone score: Jew's harps and whistling. The spaghetti-ist of Spaghetti Westerns. Loved those long lingering shots of faces: Jack Elam, Jason Robards, Charles Bronson, Henry Fonda. The craggy, burned-out, sweating, dirty faces themselves are like stony landscapes. Rock-faces. The camera just lingers, and lingers and lingers. Fonda plays the heaviest of heavies. He walks and talks with such menace and such grace. The blackest of blackhearts. I'm sure Fonda loved the role.

Funny. Trashy. Brilliant. Absorbing. It's got a weird, convoluted plot. It takes a bit of effort to track with it. Highly recommended!

You Do Not Want to Be This Idiot in Chief!

What happens when the "strongman" stumbles, when the big, overstuffed Idiot in Chief suddenly appears weak, ineffective, ridiculous, over-matched, in over his head, above his pay-grade, defeated by an intelligent and effective Woman? What happens when the big tough-talking clown turns out to be a hollow pathetic wimp? How does it end for such a fool? Right now there are 17 investigations bearing down on this clown's administration. You do not want to trade places with this Idiot in Chief. Karma is a runaway train.

Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House, has Found the Dragon's Eggs!

Really? You mean to tell me that the Big Bad Bully got out-played by a Woman? 

Ha, ha, ha!

Best way to win against a Bully? As a wee lad, I learned, one sharp (and lucky) punch in the nose will do it. I mean, I am not advocating violence, but my own personal experience tells me that sometimes you have to stand up to the Bully terrorizing you; you have to call his bluff, especially if you are finally tired of having that Fat Little Kid knocking you to the ground, sitting on your chest, making you eat dirt. I remember one glorious, lucky punch that just accidentally landed on the Bully's nose. Blood flowed. Tears were shed, and that Bully never messed with me again. Almost seems like a Myth. But it really did happen. I know, I was there.

So yes, turns out Nancy Pelosi has found the Dragon's Eggs. And our Big Bad Bully Man Prez got his head handed to him. So, so sweet. And now, that the Bully is down licking his wounds, what does she do? She goes for the jugular...

First this: “In the face of 37 indictments, the President’s continued actions to undermine the Special Counsel investigation raise the questions: what does Putin have on the President, politically, personally or financially?” - Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House

And then this...

Death. The Big Enchilada!

Death is the Big Enchilada. Even if you don't eat Mexican food. Doesn't matter. Death.

I was talking to a friend yesterday. We are both advancing in the age thing. There is a point in your life, when it dawns on you that Death isn't just for other people. Nope. It's pretty much for everyone. Old, young, rich, poor. Whatever. Everyone.

We talked about how we each have different strategies for dealing with this unfortunate circumstance. My friend counts. He counts the days, the years. He banks $. He plans. He frets. He tries to think about how to prepare for the inevitable.

I take a totally different approach. I don't think about it. I mean, I have always been "death-haunted," but I work hard on pushing those kinds of thoughts out of my head. It's full time job just trying to not think about Death. I don't count days or years. I don't bank $. I don't plan. I don't fret. I do not think about how to prepare for the inevitable.

I try to live by the Wisdom of the Yogi: BE HERE NOW. There is an upside. I don't PANIC! The downside? I have no plan. None. I don't keep track of the years. I try to pretty much think about just about anything else. All the time.

Still that Big Enchilada is always looming out there. Think about it or not. Doesn't really matter.

Motion-Sickness on the Planet!

The earth is always spinning, right? We are on this little blue planet spinning in space. Weird, right? It's funny that we aren't always motion-sick. Or maybe we are, and we just don't even notice, because, well, it's always the case that we are spinning in the void, and we have, as a species, just adjusted accordingly.

Then again, sometimes human beings do spin out, right? And maybe we are entering that phase where human beings, as a species, are, you know, getting loopy, I mean, species-wide?! I think we are in that loopy phase right now. Maybe it's because we are globally connected and that never happened before, and we are tuned in to so much more information across the human spectrum. Never had that before either. And there are so many more of us than ever before. And resources are finite and beginning to dwindle, and the planet is heating up because of all the carbon dioxide we throw into the atmosphere is trapping the heat from the sun, creating a frying pan effect, and maybe we are starting to cook our brains and choking on the carbon dioxide too? Some of us are so damn afraid. Some of us are so damn hopeful. It's a mixed up ball of confusion, which is a crazy-ass recipe for adventure. But we are spinning. And spinning. I do believe that motion-sickness is seeping into our consciousness. That's a thing. Yes. I do believe.

Build a Wall Around the Idiot in Chief?!

Can we build a wall around the Idiot in Chief? Please? When Nixon resigned in the wake of Watergate his approval rating was at 22%. Come on America, the reckoning is coming! Let's get those disapproval numbers up, and those approval ratings down, we can do it!

A Worrying Problem!

You know, it's probably best to only worry about the things you can control. But, of course, it turns out, you really can't control anything. So maybe best not to worry about anything. Not easy to do, and not worrying sort of feels like an abdication of responsibility. So then, maybe instead, we all should worry about everything. Every. Last. Thing. That sounds exhausting. And probably impossible. There isn't enough worry in us to encompass the entire universe of things to worry about. So we worry along as best we can. And we worry that our worrying capability just doesn't quite measure up. Oh well. What's the worry?

MLK, Jeff & Brian

MLK Jr. ---

"Evil may so shape events that Caesar will occupy a palace and Christ a cross, but that same Christ arose and split history into A.D. and B.C., so that even the life of Caesar must be dated by his name. Yes, 'the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.' There is something in the universe which justifies William Cullen Bryant in saying, “Truth crushed to earth will rise again.”

Yes, one can hope. As Jeff Tweedy of Wilco puts it: "Where would we be without wishful thinking?"

Can we expect the Moral Universe to validate Dr. King's words? Sometimes it seems like we are just little cogs in a big wheel. That wheel keeps on turning. What was up is down, what was last is first. It just depends on the spin of the wheel. Time and Place.

Justice, Truth, Love. "Wouldn't it be nice?" - Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys