tag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:/rss/splice-originalSPLICETODAY.com2024-03-29T05:09:13Ztag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333782024-03-29T00:01:00-04:002024-03-29T01:09:13-04:00Allan Holdsworth - <I>Atavachron</I> (1986)tag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333722024-03-28T06:29:00-04:002024-03-28T11:34:48-04:00All Bets Are Off<p>A long time ago, in a small German town along the Rhine, my oldest nephew (shown in accompanying photo) was my bagman. We were in Europe for a month, and I was brought along by my oldest brother and sister-in-law to mind their two children while they took long museum jaunts during the day and dined at Michelin-starred restaurants at night. The itinerary included Paris, Copenhagen, Oslo, Belgium, Zurich, Frankfurt and any number of smaller stops along the way. There was a fast-food joint in the Rhine village where the kids and I had lunch for a couple of days, but it wasn’t just the wurst that was memorable; it was the row of slot machines that I parked myself in front of for 30-minute stretches. My nephew’s duty was to fetch plastic cups of beer from the counter (I was taken aback that the cashier accepted the order from a five-year-old, and lifted a finger in appreciation) and hold the coins I won playing mindless games of chance. I didn’t win or lose much (what casual player does?) but the rush was real and shared by my charges, who didn’t rat me out to their parents. They liked having a “special secret” with their Uncle Rusty.</p>
<p>I’m a small-stakes gambler, meaning I’ve purchased lottery tickets, made bets at the track (horse and dog racing), spent an hour or two at casinos in Monaco, Cairo, London and the Bahamas, as well as minor sports and political wagers—never more than $50—but it’s, fortunately, a very occasional activity, a vice that never consumed me.</p>
<p>As noted before in this space, I’m in favor of legalized gambling, as well as prostitution and drugs, not only because a citizen ought to be able to make their own choices, but it also frees up law enforcement. In truth, when politicians self-finance their own campaigns, isn’t that gambling? In Maryland, a Democratic candidate for this year’s U.S. Senate election, Rep. David Trone, has spent around $20 million on advertising; you can’t turn on the TV or hit various videos on YouTube without seeing a pitch for the guy. And this is before the May 14th primary: the winner will take on former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, an anti-Trump Republican who, at least according the latest polls, is significantly leading both Trone and his opponent Angela Alsobrooks. Trone recently made news by accidentally saying “jigaboo” instead of “bugaboo” in reference to a GOP tax proposal; Alsobrooks got an immediate boost that nullifies, I think, much of the Congressman’s feel-good ads.</p>
<p>I do have a current bet on the line with my son Booker: I say at some point this season Shohei Ohtani will face a slap-on-the-wrist suspension; he’s certain, even if Shohei is guilty of whatever infraction, the “booboisie,” as Mencken said, that run Major League Baseball will cover it up. A valid opinion (it’s likely the dirt on Ohtani, if there is any, won’t be revealed until sometime this season; and the superstar did temporarily quell the speculative fury on Monday, issuing a statement that he had no idea now-fired translator Ippei Mizuhara was bilking his bank account), but even if I lose a U.S. Grant note to my son, anyone who follows sports knows this is just the beginning, a potential scandal that might dwarf the steroid revelations at the turn of the century. Online sports gambling is ubiquitous—and it’s, by some accounts, the reason that young (mostly) men are following baseball and giving MLB a welcome demographic uptick. It defies common sense to believe that pro athletes, who have disposable income, aren’t tapping at their phones and making bets, both legal and illegal.</p>
<p>Aside from when he’s playing against the Red Sox, I love watching Ohtani play since the modern-day Babe Ruth has transcended baseball and entered the larger world of pop culture. But I’m not one of those scolds, who say “it’s bad for the game” if a star player gets nailed for bad behavior or has a season-ending injury; for example, I’m hoping that Yankees ace Gerrit Cole needs Tommy John surgery and isn’t, as GM Brian Cashman says, back on the mound in two months. That’s just being an honest fan. I’m creeped out by players’ domestic abuse, and the “alleged” pedophilia case of now-banished Tampa Bay Rays star Wander Franco, and am glad when they’re disciplined (although why serial abuser Aroldis Chapman still has a job is a weird mystery; maybe his agent has the goods on the awful MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred, but I suppose that’s hoping for too much). I’d be bummed if Red Sox pitcher Tanner Houck, hypothetically, was collared for an actionable offense, but those are the breaks.</p>
<p>In any case, the gambling mess isn’t going away, especially in an election year when politicians of both parties are trying to score points on whatever’s going on at the moment. <a href="http://cupofcoffee.beehiiv.com/p/cup-coffee-march-25-2024">As longtime baseball blogger Craig Calcaterra wrote on Monday</a>: “Once all of that is resolved, we can move on to the topic of how a how key employee of a major league baseball team—an employee who had close, personal access to the most famous and important player in the game—was allowed to associate themselves with sketchy-as-fuck gamblers for years without the league either knowing or caring the first thing about it.</p>
<p>Look at the clues to figure out when the picture of my bagman was snapped: Donald Coggan becomes Archbishop of Canterbury; <i>Monty Python and the Holy Grail</i> released in UK; Golden State Warriors win NBA championship; Iron Maiden is formed in London; Colin Dexter’s detective story <i>Last Bus to Woodstock</i> introduces Inspector Morse; Christina Hendricks is born and Susan Hayward dies; Charles Bukowski’s <i>Factotum</i> is published; Master Derby wins the Preakness; Zach Braff is born and Rod Serling dies; the <i>Edmund Fitzgerald</i> sinks; Robert E. Lee is pardoned; and Joni Mitchell’s <i>The Hissing of Summer Lawns</i> is released.</p>
<p><i>—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: <a href="http://twitter.com/mugger2023">@MUGGER2023</a></i></p>
Russ Smithtag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333742024-03-28T06:28:00-04:002024-03-27T22:57:18-04:00Fubar<p>It’s almost April and not a peep from an otherwise all-political pop culture. What’s the news? Israel’s continued assault on Gaza has paralyzed both major parties while a brutal conservatism grows in Generations Alpha and Beta. Who knows who’ll be the ones to end it all? Unlike the last eight or nine years, ever since Donald Trump reared his ugly head, Bernie Sanders improbably inspired a nation of millennials, and Hillary Clinton did everything she could to lose. Politics surpassed entertainment, fashion, and sports in our pop culture pyramid, and which side you were on—whose “team”—was no different than picking a haircut, or a certain type of jacket to signal who you were to others.</p>
<p>What’s so disgusting about the recent past is how many noble causes have been taken up and tossed away like so many trinkets and fashion statements, whether it’s police violence, sexual assault, gender conformity, or racism in America. Whatever guilt is being exorcised still comes out toxic: Clara Jeffries calling black people “magical,” others, during the summer of 2020, pledging to “use their precious white skin” to protect black protestors. This was the psychosis the Democratic Party latched onto, in the absence of a black hole presence like Trump. The right can cycle through all of their pet obsessions and phobias and use Trump to make it all moot; after all, he’s going to get the nomination, so what’s there to do or talk about until then?</p>
<p>Ditto Biden: if you weren’t already turned off by first three abysmal years of his presidency, then he’s probably lost you by committing, predictably, to Israel over Palestine. Only an idiot would’ve expected otherwise, but if you’re not paying attention—and most people aren’t—then Biden’s cold-blooded refusal to acknowledge or stop what’s happening in Gaza must be a new day rising for some. Nothing new can be gained from this knowledge, for Trump would’ve certainly done the same thing, if with a few more clever turns of phrase and bizarre malapropisms and pieces of physical comedy bordering on performance art. Trump wouldn’t/couldn’t stop Israel from doing what they want to do any more than Biden can, and if he wins in November, he’ll be in the unenviable position of having to agree with the Democrats: they will turn the Middle East into a plate of glass.</p>
<p>And no one’s paying attention precisely because they can’t do anything. If that lesson wasn’t already learned in 2014, or 2015, or 2016, or 2017, or 2020. Our government will tell you the sky is blue and demand you call it purple. Your love is fading. It’s all a means of testing what’s possible, what combination of disorders and phobias and neuroses could produce a totally willing populace, one without independent thought or action, one mass organism controlled by talking points and a moral barometer that uses the personal lives of artists and entertainers as a means to police the behavior of private citizens. Fucked Up Beyond All Repair—as Katt Williams recently said, “Seldom does the word ‘randomly’ appear in this universe.”</p>
<p><i>—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: <a href="http://twitter.com/nickyotissmith">@nickyotissmith</a></i></p>
Nicky Otis Smithtag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333712024-03-28T06:27:00-04:002024-03-27T14:55:32-04:00Shadow Play<p>I rode my 10-speed bicycle down Frankford Ave. when I suddenly noticed Jess standing on her doorstep. In junior high algebra class, we shared eager gazes walking past each other’s desks to turn in exams. My tests always came back with a dramatic capital F, front and center. Jess consistently scored A’s, tackling every problem with confidence; at the same time, I needed a tutor. Spring appeared greener than usual that year.</p>
<p>I wasn’t <em>Easy Rider</em> Peter Fonda arriving on a chopper, riding the most famous motorcycle in the world. However, I did have on a leather jacket grasping the handlebars of my bike. Bending forward was an opportunity for me to run my fingers through shoulder-length hair while lowering a pair of shades in an effort to impress. Looking over from a familiar front porch, Jess cracked a smile. I’d try anything to get her.</p>
<p>In 1969, Flower Power kids had no fears. The social unrest charged our own sense of boredom. <br />
Jess agreed for a stroll through Hamilton, a Baltimore neighborhood. Trying to contain my excitement, it became apparent the conversation wasn’t really about test scores, but another kind of education. Discretion seemed in order, which was hard to come by.</p>
<p>A couple of blocks from her house, Hamilton and Frankford Aves. were marked by a crossroads. The symbolic fork in the road intersection played a pivotal role in many coming-of-age stories. Walther Pharmacy was located on this triangle-shaped property. One side of the building was a drugstore: on the other, a lengthy soda fountain. Besides serving milkshakes, if you bent over sitting on your stool sideways looking under the counter, you saw a tremendous display of used wads of gum in every size, shape and color. The rear of the store had a carryout liquor department. The backdoor exit steps descended into a parking lot, where the older teens hung out by their cars.</p>
<p>Directly across the street, someone sorted dirty laundry in the glass windowed coin-operated laundromat. Next door, up a flight of concrete steps, a 1950s-style penny candy shop was called the White House. Display cases were filled with Sweetarts, wax teeth, lips, and mustaches, licorice twists and more.</p>
<p>There was a not-so-secret hidden entrance behind the White House. The older kids with alcohol would assemble in a wooded corridor to participate. When the large neighboring homes used to be farms, cows were herded along the dirt and gravel walkway called the “Cow Path.” There was a clearing in the trail’s center. Tommy and I would stop by to enjoy Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill Wine with the older teens, until the police raided.</p>
<p>Tommy, Jess and I attended the Baltimore City public school system during the 1960s; racism, drug abuse, and segregation played an important role in its history. After the riots of 1968, students were bussed from different communities to various schools located throughout the city. The desegregation plan was implemented to alter the racial makeup of the student body. Every weekday morning, I’d wait for the number 19 bus stop on Harford Rd., sometimes before the sun rose.</p>
<p>Mixed outcomes resulted from the bussing attempts. In certain ways, it was successful. Students learned how to conduct business properly. Drug sales reached unprecedented heights without signs of violence. Students unified their efforts and kept an eye out for the authorities; “Mannix” was the code name for the two-man, old-guy security guards.</p>
<p>Sitting in the back row of algebra class, made it easy to catch a few z’s. I got the occasional tap on the shoulder. One of the negative aspects of cutting class: you missed out on the return of test papers with purple ink. Students loved smelling the intoxicating mimeograph chemical aroma. No wonder a common problem existed among local boys who sought out cheap highs from huffing. Imagine suddenly losing all sense of body awareness and experiencing a complete loss of brain function. Inhaling harmful compounds such as gasoline, lighter fluid, Freon from air conditioners, and trichloroethylene cleaning products all posed a serious health risk. A common occurrence was comatose friends keeled over in bushes with spray paint circles encrusted around their mouths, one hand still holding a crumpled, brown paper lunch bag.</p>
<p>Back to Jess. Like I said, it was difficult finding privacy. A wise choice: seeking refuge in a parent’s pine-paneled club basement, but you had to be very quiet. If Mother Nature delivered on promises of nice weather, there were certain secluded sections in Herring Run Park. Dimly lit Friday night CYO dances at Shrine of the Little Flower auditorium had a few corners; all prospects for cat and mouse play.</p>
<p>Sometimes when her parents were at work, we snuck in a few pecks and a cuddle on the front porch swing when nobody was looking. I never experienced impulses like that before. She was sassy, craving to explore in her frayed, bell-bottom blue jeans, a pair of blue Jack Purcell sneakers and a loose, leather boutique belt. Her scent wafted beautifully, a perfect blend of patchouli, lemon, and musk. I was captivated by a remarkable skill when she popped and snapped bubblegum, then spun it into little rings on her fingertips, resembling a miniature beehive.</p>
<p>Our spring walk took us to the corner of Carter Ave. Among the two-level homes, a privet hedge lined a sidewalk. In the center of a fresh-cut lawn, the far-reaching branches of the towering maple tree evoked a powerful mysterious feeling. A light zephyr wind caused a patchwork of moving foliage. If one was positioned properly underneath in the shade—this was a discreet location for a lip-lock session. Time for shadow play.</p>
<p>“Look!” Jess said.</p>
<p>I replied, “Let’s find a spot where we can sit down.”</p>
<p>Without delay, we hurried across the lawn headed towards the tree. There was a massive rush of adrenaline. One’s transgressions might be significant. All I could think was, “Don’t do the wrong thing and look awkward.” Sensual, but not X—my hope was she’s an animal trainer because wild animals are capable of sudden behavioral shifts. I put my arm around Jess’ waist as we walked away at dusk, nothing worried us. Crickets chirped as a thin mist rose over the grass. Lightning bugs welcomed the fading light.</p>
<p>Jess and I could talk for hours on end about ridiculous things, always staying true to the pleasure principle. In August, her older sister’s boyfriend Mark parked his VW bus in front of the house. He was a prick, specifically pointing out that we were “too young” to attend Woodstock. We bummed because we enjoyed wild too, like the mad society we lived in.</p>
<p>One late-September day after classes were dismissed, Jess crushed my heart. Outside by the flagpole, I noticed her arms wrapped around another guy. He was older than me with much longer hair. The hardest part, it stung when we made eye contact. There was no more “We.”</p>
<p>I didn’t take the number 19 home that day. My long walk down Harford Rd. was a chance to gather thoughts. Then without warning, a loud air horn blast and the high-pitched squeal of an 18-wheeler. The big rig hit its brakes then skidded. A Mack truck just ran over an Airedale Terrier. Under a tire, the defenseless dog was crushed to death. The road turned red. Looking into the animal’s lifeless eyes, the grim sight revealed the bitterness in life. I pulled myself away, realizing how harsh reality is.</p>
Michael Gentiletag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333732024-03-28T06:27:00-04:002024-03-28T22:48:34-04:00Fear and Radicalism<p>You can tell a lot about people’ politics by what they’re afraid of. I was reading Instapundit, a group blog run by Glenn Reynolds, and saw a <a href="https://instapundit.com/638846/">post</a> by Mark Tapscott raising an alarm that “the invasion” (illegal immigration) threatens the U.S. food supply. This linked to an <i>Epoch Times</i> <a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/article/experts-warn-mass-migration-threatens-us-food-security-5606928?utm_source=Morningbrief&src_src=Morningbrief&utm_campaign=mb-2024-03-27&src_cmp=mb-2024-03-27&utm_medium=email&est=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAbOM5fl0YyNHb77waqkVeBrVzxw0NKCTH/jETkk7H7AEInIY8vs33">article</a> on that topic: “Experts Warn Mass Migration Threatens US Food Security: Tuberculosis carried by illegal migrants has already infected Texas cattle, but a longtime veterinarian says flesh-eating parasites could be next.”</p>
<p>The article’s main source is a veterinarian named Michael Vickers (note: not the former defense official Michael G. Vickers), who makes statements like, “This [Biden] administration doesn’t want us to eat cattle. They want us to eat bugs.” The cases he notes of infected cattle were from 2015 and 2019, and much of the article’s about disease outbreaks that could happen but haven’t. But it’s the focus on undocumented Latinos that makes this such a tendentious worry. <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/tb/publications/factsheets/general/mbovis.htm">Bovine TB</a> in humans is less than two percent of U.S. TB cases; it’s rare in U.S. cattle, and the bacterium that causes it, Mycobacterium bovis, is also found in deer, elk and bison, so hunters exposed to the blood of those animals might get and spread the disease.</p>
<p>If one’s worried about flesh-eating parasites, take <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/06/25/1009885640/flesh-eating-parasites-may-be-expanding-their-range-as-climate-heats-up">climate change</a> into consideration, not just illegal immigrants. If one’s worried about the food supply, give some thought to how food production would be affected by a massive crackdown on undocumented laborers. Those concerns, though, won’t get much traction among right-wing populists reading Instapundit and <i>The Epoch Times</i>. Moreover, the characterization of illegal immigration, a genuine problem, as an “invasion” is central to right-wing populism today, carrying authoritarian implications for what a second Trump administration or the right-wing more broadly might do to combat such a supposed threat to our country.</p>
<p>Recent Splice Today pieces by <a href="https://www.splicetoday.com/politics-and-media/were-the-nazis-leftists">Crispin Sartwell</a> and <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/06/25/1009885640/flesh-eating-parasites-may-be-expanding-their-range-as-climate-heats-up">George Sarant</a> analyze what left and right mean in politics, a subject I’ve <a href="https://www.splicetoday.com/politics-and-media/the-limits-of-left-and-right">pondered</a> too. I don’t agree with Sartwell that there’s “no way to characterize the left/right spectrum or any position along it in a coherent way.” I think it’s difficult, rather than impossible, to do so, since it’s a cluster of attributes, not just one defining factor, that distinguish left and right. Generally, purporting to defend or resurrect some part of the past (real or imagined) places you on the right, while claiming to offer progress beyond some past practice or belief is a left-wing theme. There are exceptions, such as when libertarians extol future technologies along with pre-New Deal capitalism. Other attributes must be considered. For example, presuming to promote some sort of equality (however, ineffectually in practice) is a left-wing inclination; claiming to defend excellence against some leveling tendency is a right-wing one.</p>
<p>Sarant cogently points out limits and flaws in the left-right spectrum as a conceptual framework but also states: “My own view is that this sort of long-tested means of organization will likely continue to prevail and even increase in the future.” That seems likely to me as well. Efforts to rethink the political spectrum—creating a new dichotomy, such as Virginia Postrel’s <a href="https://www.aier.org/article/embrace-dynamism-the-future-and-its-enemies-at-25/">dynamism vs. statism</a>; or adding dimensions to left and right, such as authoritarian vs. libertarian, to make a <a href="https://medium.com/@Meyvun/left-wing-and-right-wing-politics-imagine-4-quadrants-not-a-line-2478774b4902">four-quadrant plane</a>—haven’t succeeded in overcoming the familiarity and intuitive appeal of the left-right spectrum. I suspect readers of my opening paragraph had little trouble realizing that I was discussing right-wingers.</p>
<p>Sarant also writes: “I’ve often stated: conservatism is fundamentally anti-radical above all else. That’s true in any place at any time from Ancient Greece until now.” I can agree with that only if it’s offered as a definition, not a description. In practice, entities that call themselves “conservative” can be radical. Today’s Republican Party, in my estimation, has shown unmistakable radicalism, in choosing a presidential nominee who sought to steal the previous election; in its admiration for foreign autocrats such as Viktor Orbán; and in its promotion of a plan, Project 2025, that would turn the federal civil service into an arm of an autocratic president and his political party. Those are right-wing ideas that’re anti-conservative, in that they’d rip away at established institutions and political checks and balances.</p>
<p><i>—Follow Kenneth Silber on Threads: </i><a href="https://www.threads.net/@kennethsilber"><i>@kennethsilber</i></a></p>
Kenneth Silbertag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333702024-03-28T06:24:00-04:002024-03-27T14:50:24-04:00The Night Henry Rollins Was Almost Murdered<p>Henry Rollins is a hardcore music legend. As lead singer for Black Flag (1981–86) and the Rollins Band (1987–2006), he was a figurehead in the Los Angeles punk rock scene. He became a music radio host, an actor and columnist for <em>LA Weekly</em>. He was no stranger to violence, having engaged in fights with punk rock audience members for years. But in 1991, he nearly lost his life.</p>
<p>Rollins and his best friend Joseph Cole, a roadie for Black Flag, were making a documentary about homeless Vietnam veterans in Venice Beach. The two friends rented an apartment in the rough Oakwood section of Venice to facilitate filming. On December 19, 1991, they attended a Hole concert at Whiskey a Go Go on the Sunset Strip. They returned to their neighborhood around midnight and walked a block to an all-night grocery store. Returning home, they were confronted by two twentysomething men armed with guns. (Likely members of a local gang.)</p>
<p>The assailants forced Rollins to his knees and made Cole lie face down on the sidewalk. They pointed guns at Rollins and Cole and told them if they screamed they’d die. They demanded money but Rollins and Cole only had $50 between them. The robbers ordered Rollins to go inside his apartment and retrieve more cash.</p>
<p>Rollins rose and walked toward the apartment. He heard a gun shot behind him. Not looking back, he ran as one of the robbers fired at him missing him by inches. He sprinted through his apartment and escaped out a back window. He jumped a fence into a nearby alley and ran several blocks to a liquor store with a payphone and called for help. By the time police arrived, Cole was dead, shot in the head. The robbers were long gone.</p>
<p>Cole was a beloved figure in the LA music community. Hole dedicated their album <em>Live Through This </em>to Cole’s memory. Cole was also memorialized in the Sonic Youth song “100%” where Kim Gordon sang, “I can never forget you the way you rock the girls… But now that you been shot dead, I got a new surprise.”</p>
<p>Rollins spoke about the incident in a 1992 interview with <em>The Los Angeles Times</em>. “I dug up all the earth where his head fell—he was shot in the face—and I’ve got all the dirt here, and so Joe Cole’s in the house. I say good morning to him every day. I got his phone, too, so I got a direct line to him. So that feels good.”</p>
<p>In a 2001 interview with Howard Stern, Rollins denied rumors he kept Cole’s brain in his house. He told Stern that several days before the incident, record producer Rick Rubin visited their apartment to listen to Rollins’ new album <em>The End of Silence</em>. Rubin parked his Rolls-Royce outside. Rollins feared this would bring unwanted attention from nefarious locals who’d think Rollins was a rich rock star. That night, Rollins wrote in his journal that his home “is going to get popped.”</p>
<p>In 2013, Rollins reflected on the incident in his <em>LA Weekly</em> column: “Joe Cole’s murder gave me a powerful tutorial on guns and America…The murder of my friend taught me that America is a 50-state-wide killing field. None of that red state/blue state bullshit means a damn thing to me. As soon as I leave my house, I am on the kill grid… In the weeks and months after his murder, I was inundated with letters of condolence and, sadly, stories from other Americans who had been through the American gun homicide experience… It was perhaps the pointlessness of the deaths that was the hardest part to deal with… Joe Cole was like thousands of other Americans. He was shot and killed by another American. This is who we are.”</p>
<p>The killers were never found.</p>
Loren Kantortag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333682024-03-27T07:25:59-04:002024-03-27T07:25:59-04:00Seeds of Moscow Horror Planted in the United States<p>Mass shootings, whether in Moscow or Mall USA, get under the skin because we know it could happen any day, anywhere, to our loved ones. Second only to car wrecks, it’s the primal fear of many parents and grandparents. Those, for example, who have children or grandchildren in elementary schools, teens in high schools, and young adults in taverns, worry each day that a mentally-ill wasteoid, narcissistic incel, or sexually-confused cast-off will take lives that mean everything to them. Sports fans at large events and church attendees in older generations know it only takes one gun-wielding crackpot.</p>
<p>The discussion in the wake of domestic mass shootings always turns to the culpability of guns, as if confiscating the firearms of law-abiding citizens will stop the unhinged and malevolent from wanton murder. It’s the mental cases, and either proactively or in retrospect, their familial accomplices, who must be held accountable. Circumventing justice, if there ever is any justice, these mass killers often die of self-inflicted wounds or law enforcement gunfire. Meanwhile, the Democratic left’s destructive commitment to restorative justice floods society with criminals whose cases have been leniently adjudicated.</p>
<p>Terrorism is a different threat, as displayed last week in a Moscow concert hall. Ideological enmities that exist between the two countries aside, the human spirit lowers under a dark cloud of empathy for relatives and friends who had to bury the dead. Here in the United States, the possibility of terrorist attacks has risen in the three-plus years since the loathsome Biden Regime came to power. Galvanized by the motivation to destroy the country as founded as a free republic, due to obsessions with race and social justice, the apparatus behind the hollow man in the Oval Office is flooding the borders, both Southern, and now Northern, with unvetted illegal aliens, an alarming number of who are from countries inimical to our country. As reported across media, even by so-called legacy media, that’s part of the nexus seeking to end America as we know it and foment a world government, thousands of known terrorists, and many undocumented adult men with no family ties, have infiltrated through Biden’s collapsed lines of former sovereign demarcation.</p>
<p>ISIS claimed responsibility for the Moscow concert attack. Experts have no reason to doubt the claim, especially when considering the suspects described in <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/03/25/moscow-concert-hall-attack-russia-isis/">this <i>Washington Post</i></a> account. The Kremlin has released “intelligence” that implicates possible Ukrainian terror operatives in the attack.</p>
<p>The <i>Post</i> report is harrowing, the grief of the Russian families palpable. It’s worth a sobering read. While perusing the details, it’s instructive to consider two certifiable facts. During his term in office, Donald Trump finished a job Barack Obama started in in 2014, <a href="https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/islamic-state-defeated">by defeating the existing ISIS caliphate festering in Syria</a> in a matter of weeks. During Joe Biden’s term in office, his anti-American administration has rendered the United States virtually borderless, and flooded the country with the seeds of terrorist horror.</p>
Mark Ellistag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333672024-03-27T06:29:00-04:002024-03-26T23:21:28-04:00A Response to Crispin Sartwell’s Article “Were the Nazis Leftist?”<p><a href="http://www.splicetoday.com/politics-and-media/were-the-nazis-leftists">I read Crispin Sartwell’s Splice Today article with interest</a>: to understand this dichotomy you have to look at historical reality, especially in an American context. Historically “left” and “right” originated in the French Revolution, when members of the assembly sorted themselves out in this fashion. You can trace the birth of modern political ideology to this, and it caught on, especially in 19<sup>th</sup>-century continental Europe, but not in the USA.</p>
<p>This points to the questionable utility of using concepts that are rooted in 18<sup>th</sup>-century France in today’s political context. It was only in the 20th century that this dichotomy began to be shared more widely, thanks largely to left radicalism, which in turn raised the consciousness of everyone else. Highly popular in academic and media circles, the public’s largely oblivious to it. Nevertheless, these lame thought leaders go out of their way to retroactively apply them to the past.</p>
<p>The fundamental basis of all political reality is that the natural order is “conservative” in the sense that historically people across have been suspicious, if not resistant to change, and/or tacitly support the existing order. It’s only when elites screw up badly that an opening’s created for nascent radicals. As awareness of their activity and beliefs become better known a reaction develops in the mind of others who perceive a rising threat, while at the same time clarifying a certain order in their own belief. I’ve often stated: conservatism is fundamentally anti-radical above all else. That’s true in any place at any time from Ancient Greece until now. But it’s also about the only political constant. Humans are inherently “conservative,” except that they don’t know they are until a radical challenge arises. That initially defines them, but at the same time raises their consciousness about life as they’ve always understood it coalescing into a belief system.</p>
<p>Liberalism seriously arose in the 19th century, based upon 18<sup>th</sup>-century “Enlightenment” tenets, which still are the foundation for our own republic. This was primarily a British phenomenon which was subsequently adapted by 20<sup>th</sup>-century Americans with reference to a conservative-liberal dichotomy. But these terms have no constant meaning. Initially, in the 19th century, the Conservatives were the social reformers, while the Liberals were more laissez-faire. Subsequently positions flipped, especially in the US, rendering any consistent ideology impossible.</p>
<p>When “conservative” and “liberal” are used in a political context they’re simply terms considered positive in the same way that “democracy” or “republic” are perceived. This doesn’t mean that Republicans aren’t for democracy, for example, or vice versa. They could’ve called themselves Green and Blue and it’d resonate the same way. Parties are coalitions with shared views that could be called anything because the title as an appellation isn’t the same as the concept itself. So as a constant the dichotomy is meaningless.</p>
<p>We think of party politics as inherently part of “democracy,” when in fact it’s a relatively recent phenomenon, with longevity confined to the Anglo-sphere. Democracies, from ancient Greece to your local community organization, have revolved around personalities, i.e. leaders that others attach themselves to based upon some affinity, in an ever-changing system. Here personal relations trump ideology. That’s why parties come and go so frequently in Europe. If someone stands out in a parliament, before you know it others attracted to them form a new party.</p>
<p>Furthermore, when personalities lead the way what ideology exists gets transformed. Gaullists were once the “right” in France. Now it’s Le Pen. Different people, different times, different platforms. My own view is that this sort of long-tested means of organization will likely continue to prevail and even increase in the future.</p>
<p>We’ve limited ourselves with Anglo-sphere concepts and terminology, which is how we persist in these “dichotomies.” But looking at the world as a whole, and democracy across history, this is a distinctly minority viewpoint. You can only begin to understand this by stepping back and look beyond our own native experience.</p>
George Saranttag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333662024-03-27T06:27:00-04:002024-03-26T18:05:36-04:00RFK and His Vices<p>I can’t help wondering how Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s choice of Nicole Shanahan—the young, philanthropic, athletic, New Agey ex-wife of a Google founder—as his vice presidential running mate, will affect the ticket’s search engine rankings. Do we believe the algorithms operate objectively and without human rejiggering in these situations?</p>
<p>Consider that just a year ago, Google, its YouTube subsidiary, and most mainstream media prided themselves on downranking anyone touting vaccine “misinformation,” as RFK has spent half his political career doing—whatever we may think of that whole censorious period in cultural history, now that the pandemic is officially a year behind us. It would probably be simplicity itself for our tech overlords to continue helping “democracy” and “science” by turning their attention to burying some of RFK’s more positive press and boosting Biden in the process.</p>
<p>One recent report suggests Google has consciously intervened on behalf of Democrats some 41 times in recent years, after all. This isn’t shocking to me: I recall meeting a young, liberal, male Google staff member back when it was a small, new company, and he explained with bland, unimpassioned coolness his respect for—and belief in the thorough Americanness of—activists who shout down and silence unwelcome conservative speakers on college campuses. All part of the process, to his mind, but in retrospect a plain antecedent of more recent censorship battles.</p>
<p>Maybe Shanahan now has as many powerful, embittered Silicon Valley enemies as she does friends. Then again, maybe she knows better than almost anyone how to game the Silicon Valley system, via both online rankings and meatspace fundraising.</p>
<p>If there were truth to the rumors of an affair between Shanahan and her fellow Burning Man attender Elon Musk (purportedly the reason for her divorce from Google’s Sergey Brin, though Shanahan and Musk deny it), that might actually help her rankings on X. Musk seems at heart a polyamorist, for good or ill, and likely enjoys boosting his exes, no pun intended. If RFK and Shanahan make it to the White House, maybe they’ll all even get along well enough for Musk’s mate Grimes to make an inaugural gala appearance, despite her being Canadian.</p>
<p>Let us hope RFK’s wife Cheryl Hines from <em>Curb Your Enthusiasm</em>, too, is comfortable with her husband—who confessed to cheating on his deceased prior wife with about a dozen women in a single year—traveling the country for the next few months with a young woman who looks and sounds just a little like a smaller, East Asian version of Hines. Presumably, Hines has long since come to terms with her own resemblance to RFK’s mom, 95-years-old Ethel Kennedy. As long as they’re all happy, I’m happy for them. I’ll be even more happy if these connections lead to <em>Curb Your Enthusiasm</em> star Larry David being White House press secretary (“Pretty, pretty, pretty good prospects for resolving the current crisis,” etc.).</p>
<p>We’ll never know how much RFK’s signal might’ve been boosted by picking New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers as his running mate instead, but at least I, a New Yorker but not a sports fan, now know that Rodgers is a Jets quarterback, not just a vaccine skeptic talked about by RFK as a possible running mate on a Libertarian Party ticket. I also know that there are two(!) NFL teams in New York State. I’m still not sure about the rules or anything, but I’ve seen some footage of the kicking and tackling and so forth.</p>
<p>The most recent evidence that Rodgers is a conspiracy theorist, though, isn’t his skepticism about vaccines but his skepticism about whether a real massacre of kids occurred at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012—a view reported secondhand by someone who had a brief conversation with him about the topic. Rodgers is likely just a casual conspiracy theorist, not a professional one like ex-governor Jesse Ventura, who was also considered by RFK as a running mate.</p>
<p>My own position is that it should be socially and legally acceptable to raise weird questions about anything, though the risks of touting firm answers—repeatedly and with insults and aspersions thrown in—are underscored by HBO’s documentary <em>The Truth vs. Alex Jones</em> on the controversy, climaxing with a near-billion-dollar libel verdict against conspiracy theorist Jones.</p>
<p>Is<b id="docs-internal-guid-78e53a03-7fff-b690-8ed9-257f3ca29a7e"> </b>it mere coincidence HBO unveiled the documentary on the same day that RFK, had he not picked Shanahan, might well have unveiled Rodgers as his running mate? How many times can I ask that question before I too deserve to be sued? Are Pamela Brown and Jake Tapper of CNN (like HBO, owned by Warner) risking a future libel suit by Rodgers if they don’t merely counter his beliefs with facts but refer to those beliefs with seeming malice as “deranged conspiracy theories,” <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/13/politics/aaron-rodgers-sandy-hook-conspiracy-theories/index.html">as they do in this piece</a>?</p>
<p>Many, perhaps most, of humanity’s beliefs are crazy, but trying to control or silence most of them is even more crazy. So, I look forward to RFK being part of the dialogue for at least the remaining seven and half months of this presidential campaign season—and sounding a little bit like a green-libertarian-anti-duopoly-populist while he’s at it. It’s not as if his two main opponents are models of lucidity and rationality, after all, nor champions of liberty and fiscal responsibility.</p>
<p>—<em>Todd<b id="docs-internal-guid-e57e3c31-7fff-3e43-6794-08b45bba7788"> </b>Seavey is the author of </em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Libertarianism-For-Beginners-Todd-Seavey/dp/1939994667">Libertarianism for Beginners</a> <em>and is on X at <a href="http://twitter.com/ToddSeavey">@ToddSeavey</a></em></p>
Todd Seaveytag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333522024-03-27T06:27:00-04:002024-03-23T21:26:53-04:00The Word Is Third, Part Two<p>Continuing the walk east on 3<sup>rd</sup> St. in Greenwich Village from <a href="https://www.splicetoday.com/writing/the-word-is-third-part-one">Part One last week</a>, get some lunch at Gristede’s at Mercer St. The supermarket was begun by German immigrant brothers Charles and Diedrich Gristede with one store on 42nd St. and 2nd Ave. in 1891. Customers found the selection and service to their liking and the brothers opened new stores around town. By 1948 Gristede’s had 141 locations in Manhattan, Bronx, and the northern suburbs. The company had its ups and downs and at one time or the other had partnered with both Sloan’s and Food Emporium. Today, Gristede’s is owned by billionaire John Catsimatidis, who ran for mayor a few years ago and currently owns radio station WABC. Along with the old Food Emporium, Sloan’s and d’Agostino’s, as an “outer borougher” these were sort of mystery supermarkets to me since they were found almost exclusively in Manhattan. In Brooklyn, I patronized Key Food and in Little Neck, the World’s Smallest Stop & Shop that has since become a J-Mart.</p>
<p><img alt="" src="https://splicetoday.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/editor/pictures/3317/content_citywalls.jpg" style="width: 315px; height: 420px;" /></p>
<p>This 1970 mural by Polish-born, New York based, Jewish-American abstract painter, sculptor, collage artist Tatiana “Tania” Lewin (1920-1982) on W. 3rd St. near Mercer is the only remaining City Walls mural, as far as I know, that’s still visible in its totality. <a href="https://forgotten-ny.com/2016/08/city-walls/">City Walls</a> was a not-for-profit organization established in 1967 by muralist Jason Crum and other artists to brighten up otherwise drab NYC locations.</p>
<p>The works created by Crum (who later moved to Colorado) and his cohorts are no longer possible as so many empty surfaces are sold to advertisers who blare their wares in empty spaces that are becoming scarcer and scarcer. City Walls addressed, in a small way, the feeling that NYC was circling down the drain. If it was, it may as well look a little brighter.</p>
<p><img alt="" src="https://splicetoday.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/editor/pictures/3322/content_salvation.jpg" style="width: 315px; height: 420px;" /></p>
<p>Between Broadway and the Bowery, 3<sup>rd</sup> St. is interrupted as it’s called Great Jones St. between those two storied roads. E. 3rd St. begins its numbering at the Bowery, another clue that there was never a time when Great Jones was called E. 3rd. At #8 E. 3rd St. is a massive six-story brick building now home to the Renewal on the Bowery homeless assistance agency. The building went up in 1915 and was originally the Bowery branch of the YMCA, which has a lengthy history assisting the unfortunate on the Bowery, a neighborhood presence since 1872. In 1931, the branch served over 1.3 million meals in its cafeterias, managed to secure jobs for over 1000 men and provided overnight lodging in dormitories as well as longer-term shared accommodations for over 100,000 men.</p>
<p>A painted sign that partially reads “Bowery Branch YMCA” can still be seen on the building’s west end. The YMCA moved out in 1947, but the building has been home to assistance agencies since then. Directly to the rear of the building you can find the <a href="https://forgotten-ny.com/2014/07/marble-cemeteries-east-village/">New York Marble Cemetery</a>.</p>
<p><img alt="" src="https://splicetoday.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/editor/pictures/3320/content_nativity.jpg" style="width: 420px; height: 315px;" /></p>
<p>The spare 1968 <a href="http://catholicmanhattan.blogspot.com/2008/06/31-church-of-nativity.html">Roman Catholic Church of the Nativity</a><b> </b>stands at 46-48 2nd Ave., opposite the New York Marble Cemetery, replacing an earlier Greek temple-styled, Ionic-columned building constructed in 1831 as a Presbyterian church, but sold to the Catholic parish in 1842. The original church was demolished just before the new one was constructed.</p>
<p>I was dismayed, but not shocked to find the church abandoned. It merged with another parish in 2015 and closed the building. <a href="https://therealdeal.com/2020/03/23/la-real-estate-firm-buys-shuttered-church-site-for-40m/">The property was sold in 2020</a>.</p>
<p><img alt="" src="https://splicetoday.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/editor/pictures/3318/content_catholic-worker.jpg" style="width: 420px; height: 315px;" /></p>
<p>#55 E. 3rd is part of the East Village Catholic Worker complex. At 34-36 E. 1st St., social activist and convert to the Catholic Church <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Day">Dorothy Day </a>(1897-1980) initiated the St. Joseph Hospitality Church, a soup kitchen/hostel/office for the publication of <i>The Catholic Worker</i> in 1967. Day took the paper and Catholic Worker’s operations here to nearby 55 E. 3rd in a building known as Maryhouse in the 1970s. For several years Day resided in southwest Staten Island in a housing project set up by Spanish immigrants in the mid-20th century; it was razed in 2000. Reportedly, the canonization candidate died here at 55 E. 3rd.</p>
<p><img alt="" src="https://splicetoday.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/editor/pictures/3321/content_hells-angels.jpg" style="width: 420px; height: 289px;" /></p>
<p>This Street View clip from 2011 shows the Hell’s Angels NYC headquarters at #77 E. 3rd in 2011. <a href="https://nypost.com/2019/03/30/east-village-latte-sipping-millennials-are-chasing-out-the-hells-angels/">The Angels moved out in 2019</a>, decrying the East Village’s yuppification. The gang had been in the East Village since 1977 and had indulged in drug trafficking, but some said they prevented worse crimes (also the reason Howard Beachers celebrated the presence of John Gotti for so many years). One didn’t think about touching or moving any of the sawhorses protecting the chopper parking.</p>
<p>When I was a kid just out of school around 1980, we were heading into an E. 3rd Street bar one night when it was realized that the Angels were on the same block. A cross word or a disagreement with an Angel could result in unpleasantness that could leave permanent marks, so we thought better of it.</p>
<p><img alt="" src="https://splicetoday.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/editor/pictures/3319/content_holy-redeemer.jpg" style="width: 420px; height: 315px;" /></p>
<p>The campanile, or bell tower, of Most Holy Redeemer Catholic Church, 173 E. 3rd between Aves. A and B, dominates the East Village skyline. The church is cathedral-sized and the bell tower was once taller than it is today, as its original 250-foot height was lowered to 232 feet in 1912. The parish is one of the oldest in Manhattan, established in 1844 to serve German Catholic immigrants, and the church itself was consecrated by Bishop “Dagger John” Hughes in 1852—two years after St. Patrick’s Cathedral construction got underway. The church also contains a crypt below ground. Today its services are still bilingual but in English and Spanish. Oddly, there are no signs marking it as Most Holy Redeemer outside the building.</p>
<p><img alt="" src="https://splicetoday.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/editor/pictures/3316/content_bullet.jpg" style="width: 420px; height: 315px;" /></p>
<p>Bullet Space, an art gallery/performance space at #292 E. 3rd between Aves. C and D, now owns the space but it was originally inhabited by squatters on the property. <a href="http://bulletspace.org/site/about">In their own words on their website</a>: “A community access center for images, words, and sounds of the inner city. The center was founded in the winter of 1985 and was part of the squatter movement and reconstructed with or without the formal sanction of the city, invisible officialdom. The ground floor of the building is open-like, a bulletin. ‘Bullet’ first originated from the name brand of heroin sold on the block—known as bullet block, encompassing the accepted American ethic of violence; ‘Bullet Americana’—translating that into the art form as weaponry.”</p>
<p>With that, we’ve run out of 3<sup>rd</sup> St., as its easternmost section was taken over by the Lillian Wald Houses several decades ago.</p>
<p><i>—Kevin Walsh is the webmaster of the award-winning website Forgotten NY, and the author of the books </i>Forgotten New York<i> (HarperCollins, 2006) and also, with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, </i>Forgotten Queens<i> (Arcadia, 2013)</i></p>
Kevin Walshtag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333652024-03-27T06:24:00-04:002024-03-26T18:00:14-04:00Reva in Session<p>Reva never had enough time. She had a weekly therapy appointment with Tina that she often canceled. She’d been seeing (and canceling) Tina since the divorce, when the girls were still at home. Now that Reva was 50, she couldn’t shake that elevator doors feeling. When she was 30 and was running late, she’d sprint to the doors, and someone would notice and stop them from shutting. In her 40s, she’d scream out “Elevator!” and usually someone would hold it. But now that she was 50, when she’d encountered the closing doors, she hadn’t even bothered running or shouting. She quietly whispered, “Fuck it,” to herself and accepted that she’d missed the goddamn elevator.</p>
<p>Fifty was just a number, but it really wasn’t the number. It was the isolation of her specific life at 50. Life’s doors were closing in a semi-permanent way. She’d had the family she’d hoped for. Then her marriage dissolved into a post-traumatic-war-zone puddle. She kept herself together, worked her ass off and raised her daughters without too much regret. She’d yelled too much, and probably didn’t coax enough raw vegetables into them, but generally speaking, she was proud of them, and proud of herself.</p>
<p>Most importantly, her daughters were out of the house, and one of them was pointed in the right direction. With the other one, Reva was learning how to accept that sometimes it takes longer for a person to find their compass. Neve was wandering around the desert. Becca was wandering around Claremont, perhaps even studying.</p>
<p>When she kept the appointment, Reva went to see Tina on Thursdays at 8:30 a.m. Tina Castiglione wore purple frames on her small round face. Her silver hair was closely cropped. She resembled a grandmotherly Annie Lennox, with a pointed nose. She sat remarkably still in her chair, an owl-like creature, moving only her head and occasionally re-crossing her legs, while writing notes meticulously onto her pad.</p>
<p>It was too early for a therapy appointment, but it was the only time slot that worked with Reva’s schedule, allowing her to get to work by 10. She usually canceled because she hadn’t slept well or had finished the bottle of wine, instead of stopping at two glasses.</p>
<p>Tina had an hourglass instead of a clock, which she used for a timer. An old-fashioned one with white sand, sitting up on a bookshelf behind the chair where Reva sat. The chair was lumpy and scratchy and Reva had told Tina she needed to replace it at least three times. Tina just smiled and said, “I think people shouldn’t get too comfortable if they’re serious about unpacking their lives.” Reva couldn’t tell if Tina honestly believed that, or had inherited the furniture and was lazy, or just cheap.</p>
<p>Reva looked behind her occasionally, breaking the unspoken rule that the person receiving therapy isn’t supposed to be aware of the time. Reva knew that the therapist positioned the clock, or hourglass, behind the person in treatment. The purpose was to glance casually beyond and detect the time remaining without being noticed. When the session time neared its conclusion, the therapist could tactfully wrap up the conversation. Nobody receiving therapeutic advice enjoyed being cut-off, silenced, and then abruptly told to leave. Therapists had to dance around the fact that they held the clock and kept the time.</p>
<p>Reva turned her head in an obvious way every 15 minutes or so to let Tina know she knew her time was being measured, and billed, by the slipping of the sand. Despite the fact it short-circuited the impact of her sessions, Reva couldn’t stop herself from highlighting how the process was about power. Who gets to keep the time? Who gets paid? Who gets to pretend they’re in control of their lives and who admits the countless ways in which they aren’t.</p>
<p>On this specific Thursday morning, Reva was about 10 minutes early.</p>
<p>She opened her thermos and poured her coffee. An old oak shaded the lot but beams of morning light sliced through the openings, casting a spell over the quiet lot. Reva sipped her coffee. What did she need to talk about with Tina? She tried to think not of what she wanted to say, but what required digesting. It was easier to speak about the constant noises of life, but harder to find and then decipher the signals. Distractions surrounded Reva. Her apps and her desire to believe in life hacks and efficiency. She sometimes sensed that she needed someone to physically remove the phone from her hand, but nobody was there to remind her that her hand even existed.</p>
<p>Tina had once asked her about her habits of mind. Reva didn’t enjoy that session. Didn’t like being tactfully told she couldn’t focus very well and didn’t enjoy being reminded that her patience had been slipping.</p>
<p>Maybe she’d talk with Tina about dating. About the last date and why she stopped texting Henry the boring data analyst. Or maybe she’d open up about her nihilistic tendencies. Her wish to retire early, without enough savings, and live somewhere in rural Vermont, where she’d meet a middle-aged folksy tree man, who looked like Jon Hamm and who worked for the parks service, tapped maple trees for syrup and made her omelets every morning. Reva was always battling herself, sometimes rebelling against… she didn’t know. Not adjusting to this new online dating life. Not learning how to mellow without wine or how to let go of her intensity.</p>
<p>Maybe she’d talk about Jules. Her sweet old Dad who soon might not remember when to go to sleep or when to wake up. Or maybe she’d discuss her fears about Neve and Becca. How she ached with longing to see them, but how she refused to call them more than once a month out of some defiant urge to let them go and then wait for them to choose to come back to her. A kind of power-trip of disconnection and her own stubborn attempt to rediscover her own passions, which she couldn’t find anymore. Or maybe she’d talk about the north star of her suffering, her bipolar long-gone mom, Lisa. The mom who left without saying goodbye and then sent postcards and money as if she were a distant relative, an overseas aunt. Reva had no idea what the fuck to talk about.</p>
<p>An hour? Which of her terminal issues might possibly get resolved in an hour, while all that sand slipped away? She thought of the sand as something closer to measuring natural time than a clock. Our time as humans, surviving on earth, while the planet overheated and all the ice melted. The sand was her dad, slipping into a shell of himself, a frail and elderly man. The sand was her own body, slipping down toward the earth, turning her into a woman whom she feared soon nobody would want to have sex with, much less make an omelet for.</p>
<p>She screwed the coffee cup back onto the thermos and got out of the car. She walked with a sense of resignation into Tina’s office and sat down in the uncomfortable chair.</p>
<p>“Where do you want to start?” Tina asked, tapping her pen on her small notebook.</p>
<p>Reva didn’t want to start. She sighed. “When does this get easier? Being alive? I thought people were supposed to get happier with age.”</p>
<p>“Some people do, some people don’t,” Tina said.</p>
Jonah Halltag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333692024-03-27T00:01:00-04:002024-03-27T22:59:51-04:00Isabella Rossellini on the Set of <I>Bye Bye Monkey</I><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/HJVEgwXLzlM?si=zlbnKnTcGmnJ_uFv" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>tag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333602024-03-26T06:29:00-04:002024-03-25T03:29:22-04:00Free Flowing Revolution<p>The streaming landscape used to be different. Netflix was never the digital Library of Alexandria was for DVDs, although it was once more of a hub. Not even a decade ago individual studios had yet to Balkanize their properties to their own proprietary sites, Fandor was the only place to go for indie and festival affairs, and the Criterion Collection was hosted on Hulu. There wasn’t much form to it, just piles of catalogs loosely sewn together by threadbare algorithms that were still hemmed by human hands. Mubi was the notable standout back then, not just offering access, but limiting it. They used to launch a movie every day and only keep it up for 29 more. Thirty films, 30 days. They were the most interestingly curated, grabbing new alternative titles, practically undistributed international features, and pulling material up from the depths of cinematic memory. Their time crunch incentivized watching them too, instead of letting them just rot in a queue.</p>
<p>It was in this context I remember trying to write a paper for my 200 level film history class on Slow (or “Contemplative”) Cinema, trying to break myself again out of whatever cinematic comfort zone I’d wound up in. I wanted to push myself, find the extremities of the medium, especially from the contemporary and emerging digital world. I’d spent some time trying to track down the works of Lav Diaz, but beyond his latest (at the time) <i>Norte, the End of History</i> (2014) being on Netflix, his more aggressively experimental, slow, and outright long movies (<i>Norte</i> was short by his standards, clocking in at just over four hours) were pretty much impossible to find. It seemed like my last avenue was to try to reach out to my professor’s grad school roommate who wrote a dissertation on Slow Cinema, when out of the blue Mubi ran a retrospective on the recent master. All of a sudden, I could watch his previously impossible to see films, so long as I had a whole workday’s worth of hours free for one.</p>
<p>I immediately got to work on <i>Evolution of a Filipino Family</i> (2005), a transitional work in his oeuvre—both in material and form. Diaz spent nearly a decade making <i>Evolution</i>, first by shooting it on 16mm, then finishing the bulk of the 10-hour opus on digital, which revolutionized Diaz’s workflow and aesthetic possibilities. The transfer Mubi had back then showed plenty of evidence of this, with occasionally artifacting cutting in, whether black pixelated squares checkering the frame or the squeaky magnetic clicks of DV tape rupturing the soundtrack. It heightened the archeological quality of the film, from its period setting during the fascist Marcos regime to the quality of finding and watching a film that seemed like it was lost in the ether.</p>
<p>“... alam ko kung paano namatay si Jean Vigo.” (“I know how Jean Vigo died.”)—Taga Timog, filmmaker, reads the title card when the film cuts to black after over 600 minutes of relentless running. Taga Timog, the director character that acts as a stand-in for Diaz in the movie, translates from Filipino as “from the South” which—as Adam Katzman <a href="https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/lav-diazs-quiet-storm/">pointed out</a>—references both Diaz being born in Mindanao (the southernmost region of the Philippines) and his bottom-up approach to cinema. The Jean Vigo part is, at first, more illusive.</p>
<p>Vigo, that anarchist son of an anarchist, made one feature-length film before he died at 29 of tuberculosis. That film, <i>L’Atalante</i> (1934), along with his 47-minute <i>Zéro de conduite</i> (1933) are considered some of the finest films to emerge from interwar France, with some saying they’re a couple of the greatest films ever made. They’re the kinds of films everyone encounters when they first dive into cinema: we hear about “cool” movies like <i>Pulp Fiction</i> (1994) and Quentin Tarantino mentions French New Wave in an interview, and then you’re tracking down the film that inspired Truffaut to make <i>The 400 Blows</i> (1959).</p>
<p>I can’t say I appreciated the impact of Vigo’s films when I first saw them at 16 or 17, but images do come back to me time and time again—people dancing in Nice, framed as if they’re a part of the sky; feathers filling a dormitory after the school children have staged a revolution; a sailor running his hand over a record and music coming over the soundtrack. Vigo’s films, the few there are, were exuberant dreams of freedom, full of free-flowing form that feels far away from the hapless world Vigo was born into. In Vigo’s cinema is a liberation he fought and died for as the producers tried to cut his <i>L’Atalante</i>, and Vigo battled to preserve his vision while rotting away with consumption. It’s no different than his father dying in prison for anti-war beliefs, or the revolutionaries who’ve died in the jungle during the over half-century that the guerrillas have been trying to liberate the Philippines from a fascist and imperialist yoke.</p>
<p>Sometimes it seems like Jean Vigo’s cinema is the only cinema that mattered. For Diaz he seems to be a martyr of cinema—his ideals were the aesthetic promise of liberation, while also being destroyed by the material realities of the world. For me it was full circle: I’d spent so long trying to find the ends of cinema, its furthest reaches, and wound right back to where I started with canonical French works. I’d circumnavigated the globe of film, and found its revolution everywhere.</p>
Alex Leitag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333622024-03-26T06:28:00-04:002024-03-25T21:24:22-04:00The Unfinished<p>When is something over? Though popular as an ending for fairy tales, no one, as far as I know, has ever lived Happily Ever After, in an uninterrupted state of bliss. Maybe that’s the reason why so many popular songs fade out instead of coming to an abrupt end: it suggests the song never really ends. Who wants something they like to end? Something always comes up: an unpaid bill, a doctor’s diagnosis, a war, or a soft voice and a pair of pretty eyes.</p>
<p>In a court of law an ending comes when the law’s satisfied; this doesn’t always coincide with the truth but often with whom can afford the better lawyer. It’s a compromise made in the name of social cohesion. In great art, all endings are also a compromise. How many artists have written to the effect that if they could, they’d modify some element in their stories, paintings or pieces of music? If an artist was to definitively finish a work there would be no point in his ever creating a new one. It’s always the next work that “gets it right.” Redundancy is self-caricature.</p>
<p>Leonard Bernstein once said that the greatness of Beethoven lay in his ability to create a feeling of inevitability. Yet the symphony that Bernstein used as his model—the <i>Fifth</i> —belies this idea. That symphony comes to an end no less than four times before Beethoven finally puts a final amen to it. Even though this symphony’s labelled <i>The Symphony of Fate</i>, Beethoven’s saying nothing’s inevitable.</p>
<p>One must just say “Enough!” and let the chips fall where they may. Once that’s done, and the work is “out there” it becomes a fact and people start to find sense in it. Robert Musil, whose book <i>The Man Without Qualities</i> is among my favorite unfinished works of literature, regretted in later life that he’d allowed any of it to be published because he felt that meant it could never be changed.</p>
<p>This “becoming used to something” is a powerful psychological reality. When I was a child I inherited a copy of The Beatles’ album <i>Revolver </i>from my aunts. They’d played it so many times that it skipped during “Yellow Submarine.” I heard “In the town-the town-the town-the town” until I held the needle down forcing it to play through the scratch. Even today if I hear that song it doesn’t sound “right” because the skip’s missing.</p>
<p>The spectator likes to be reassured, feel the artist has overcome his ambivalence to make a definitive statement. This is the secret of The Leader: just keep a straight face and let it roll. Consider Bill Clinton’s "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky." Which was later followed by “I misled people, including even my wife, I deeply regret that." Both said with ostensible conviction.</p>
<p>At a certain time I was put off by the unfinished. I didn’t trust it. When first reading Kafka’s <i>The Trial</i>, only the first and last chapters seemed definitely established, but the content, to the degree that it is known, was the subject of constant revision. And there’s Proust who died before he ever could revise the last few volumes of <i>Remembrance of Things Past</i>. Considering Proust’s penchant for massive revision, these books certainly would’ve have changed. This gave me the feeling that I wasn’t having <i>the real experience</i>.</p>
<p>I’ve changed my perspective. Kafka’s <i>The</i> <i>Castle</i>, another unfinished work I love, finds its thesis confirmed by the fact that the book is shrouded in uncertainties. Accepting work as unfinished mirrors the uncertainty which reigns in life. We’re at sea, and though we paddle, ultimately we go where the waves carry us.</p>
Dick Turnertag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333642024-03-26T06:27:00-04:002024-03-27T06:16:16-04:00There’s Gay and There’s Neurologically Anguished <p>A little while ago I wrote, <a href="https://www.splicetoday.com/writing/why-i-didn-t-smile-at-the-girl-in-the-cafe">“If you’re gay you don’t want to be straight; if you’re straight you don’t want to be gay.”</a> I’ve been informed that this may not be true for everybody. A gay man told me that his life would’ve been a lot easier if he’d been straight, and that all things considered he would’ve preferred that road and not the one he’s lived. This rocked me a bit, first because I’m a good liberal and second because he’s accomplished things I could never do. When I think about being autistic, I think about everything I’ve missed in my life, and his life seems to me the sort I might’ve had if only… if only everything were different. But being gay has put him through his share of crap, from the way family reacted to him growing up to the way colleagues react to him now. (He works in sports, where being a soft-spoken gay man makes it hard to be taken seriously.)</p>
<p>I didn’t ask him if he’d take my symptoms in return for straightness. I do know I’d take gayness in return for a life without my symptoms. I’d take the truckload of garbage that society dumps on gays if I could just lead a real life. That’s how I see my situation: everyone else gets a life, I don’t. If you’re gay, there’s a barrier between you and the majority of people. If you’re autistic—with my symptoms, I should stress—you’re cut off from everybody. And from so many other things that make life worthwhile. When setting out on a big project, I’d like to feel like something other than a rowboat with one oar and a one-armed man to paddle. When looking back on big projects, I’d like to see goals accomplished instead of a list of fizzles. When I review my life as lived, I’d like to have some other picture than a bug trying to climb up the sides of a damp bathtub.</p>
<p>Unstop my mouth and what emerges is a wail, and it’ll keep going until I get tired and lie down. Unstopping is difficult, since who wants to look bad? Well, tough, because being a good sport won’t get you to the heart of the experience. This experience—all right, my experience, with my symptoms—is all about getting cheated by nature. I’m this close to saying I have it worse than the typical gay man. Two factors hold me back: first, I’ve never had to worry about my ribs getting kicked in, and second, I know how I’d sound. But the only thing wrong with being gay is how non-gays react, and the things that are wrong with autism just go on and on, and what they add up to is a placeholder existence. Does anyone hate being gay? I hate being autistic.</p>
C.T. Maytag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333612024-03-26T06:26:00-04:002024-03-25T03:31:23-04:00<I>Irish Wish</I> Is the Fake Romance Everyone Wants<p>“It's one thing to edit a book,” James tells Maddy in the new Netflix film <i>Irish Wish</i>. “But,” he adds,” you really shouldn’t go on editing your own life.”</p>
<p>The moral here is that Maddy (Lindsey Lohan) needs to stop trying to be someone she’s not. The less obvious moral is that fans of the romance genre need to stop dreaming of distant, fictional romance and seize the romance in their own life. Director Janeen Damian and writer Kirsten Hansen have created a self-critique of their own fantastical genre—a self-critique which magically makes the fantasy more believable. As in Jane Austen’s <i>Northanger Abbey</i>, when the author tells you that she knows that romance isn’t real, it makes her promise of romance more, rather than less, credible.</p>
<p>Somewhat inevitably in such a self-referential film, Maddy’s an editor and would-be novelist. At the beginning of the movie, she has a crush on her star writer Paul Kennedy (Alexander Vlahos), whose book she heavily reworked, turning it into a huge hit. She’s too shy to tell Paul about her feelings, though, and he ends up engaged to her best friend Emma (Elizabeth Tan).</p>
<p>At the wedding at Paul’s stunning Irish estate, Maddy stumbles on Saint Brigid (Dawn Bradfield), who grants her heart’s wish—she wants to be the one marrying Paul Kennedy. And so, magically, it’s no longer Emma’s wedding eve, but her own.</p>
<p>Maddy should be happy! But instead she feels like someone who’s started reading that romance in the middle, and missed out on key scenes—like the wedding proposal, which she can’t remember. Worse, Maddy finds herself attracted to the wedding photographer, James (Ed Speleers). Paul and Emma, meanwhile, have feelings for each other even in this alternate reality. Be careful what you wish for, Maddy.</p>
<p>Telling romance fans to be careful what they wish for is on point and hypocritical. Romance is a wish or a fantasy; the audience for <i>Irish Wish</i> (including me) wants to spend a pleasant hour and a half imagining themselves out of their own humdrum lives and into a more exciting, more beautiful world—one with dramatic Irish cliffs, for example. They want to imagine themselves in love with some fabulous someone—a dreamy wealthy, dashing successful writer, for instance.</p>
<p>Romance can be seen as a kind of fantasy infidelity. <i>Irish Wish</i> is very aware of that possibility. Though Maddy, in the alternate timeline, shares a room and a bed with Paul, the script’s careful not to have them do anything too inappropriately sexual. Maddy covers her eyes when she realizes Paul’s in their shared bathroom naked. When he puts his arm over her at night, she freaks out and accidentally kicks him in the balls. We don’t even ever see the two of them kiss.</p>
<p>Maddy’s wish can’t come <i>too</i> true, or she’s unfaithful to her true self and true life. Romance readers don’t in general <i>really</i> want to marry a stranger, any more than James Bond fans want to really be an international spy with all the attendant dangers. The dream of love has to stay a dream for it to be enjoyable.</p>
<p>You don’t want the dream to abandon plausibility completely, though, or you can’t suspend disbelief, and where’s the wish fulfillment in that? <i>Irish Wish</i>, with the indulgence of its viewers, plays a shell game. It warns its viewers not to let themselves get sucked into a fantasy of who they <i>should</i> love and who they <i>should </i>be. And then, as an alternative, it offers a reality which is also a fantasy: James, the dashing photographer, who isn’t wealthy, but who believes in and wants to encourage Maddy’s own novel-writing.</p>
<p>James wants Maddy to believe in her real self. But that’s also a fantasy; Maddy isn’t a real person, and her “true” story is as much fiction as the alternate, “unreal” wish world. Maddy’s relationship with Paul is a dream within a dream, a fantasy within a fantasy. The false path isn’t really there to lead her to the true one, as Saint Brigid suggests. Rather, the movie identifies the false path as false so the <i>other</i> false path takes on greater verisimilitude. The fantasy’s more solid, believable, and entertaining when it’s self-aware enough to dispel itself before it ushers you into the <i>real</i> wish.</p>
<p>This isn’t to say that a fantasy can’t have real life applications; “Don’t let your stupid boyfriend steal your ideas and put his name on them,” is solid advice. (The suggestion that real men don’t let women propose to them is maybe less so.) Nor is the point here that romance fans are dupes. On the contrary, the multi-level meta-fiction of Maddy’s multi-narrative suggests that romance fans are self-aware and they enjoy stories that play with the genre’s tropes of wish-fulfillment and with the semi-buried guilty thrill of imagined infidelity. <i>Irish Wish</i> provides the fantasy its viewers want by not giving them the fantasy they want. That’s how the romance genre, and much of fiction, works.</p>
Noah Berlatskytag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333632024-03-26T06:24:00-04:002024-03-26T01:59:45-04:00Tracking Errors and Uncertainties<p>I<b id="docs-internal-guid-79c1aa7b-7fff-0a9a-c66a-99e1ba2faea9"> </b>was nonplussed to read an article in <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/24/mike-pence-trump-00148698">Politico</a> stating: “Hours after announcing he wouldn’t endorse Donald Trump for president, Mike Pence huddled privately in Dallas with Texas moneymen such as former presidential candidate Ross Perot and the billionaire conservative Harlan Crow.” I double-checked that Perot was dead, then <a href="https://twitter.com/kennethsilber/status/1771864153029771306">tweeted</a> that point to Politico, which soon ran a correction noting that Pence had met with Ross Perot, Jr., which I’d suspected was the case when I’d seen the mistake.</p>
<p>As a <a href="https://www.splicetoday.com/politics-and-media/fact-checking-the-conspirators">fact-checker</a>, I notice errors, a tendency not limited to work. I watched <em><a href="https://www.magellantv.com/video/the-goering-catalog">The Goering Catalog</a>,</em> a Magellan TV documentary about Hermann Goering’s looting of European art during World War II, a topic with which I’ve no particular familiarity (I once got on a <a href="https://www.splicetoday.com/politics-and-media/we-the-jury">jury</a> in an art-world lawsuit based on my perceived lack of knowledge of art history). The film’s interesting, but I was disappointed to hear the narrator say that Adolf Hitler “appointed himself Chancellor” in January 1933, because, as makers of a documentary about Nazis should know, Weimar Republic President <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/timeline-event/holocaust/1933-1938/hitler-appointed-chancellor">Paul von Hindenburg appointed him</a>.</p>
<p>“<a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/179966/four-2024-post-election-scenarios-trump">There are Four Postelection Scenarios, and Not One Is Good</a>,” a piece in <em>The New Republic</em> by Brynne Tannehill, tells us: “If Biden wins the election but Republicans maintain control of the House of Representatives, it is very likely that Speaker Mike Johnson will refuse to certify the election, invoking the Twelfth Amendment to decide the election.” One problem with this is there’ll be no “Speaker Mike Johnson” in January 2025 unless he wins a vote in the House for that position then, even if he manages to hold onto the job through the 2024 election, which isn’t assured. Moreover, the Speaker, whoever it is, can’t just “refuse to certify the election,” but would need action by both houses of Congress, made harder by a 2022 <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/congress-approves-new-election-certification-rules-in-response-to-jan-6">law</a> tightening the process for objecting to states’ electoral-vote slates. <a href="https://www.splicetoday.com/politics-and-media/scenarios-for-post-democratic-america">Scenario-building</a> is an approach I value, but it shouldn’t boil down to multiple worst-case scenarios.</p>
<p>I<b id="docs-internal-guid-bad1d287-7fff-0a84-56c4-0c94d0908f56"> </b>thought I’d made an error in my recent piece “<a href="https://www.splicetoday.com/politics-and-media/varieties-of-evil">Varieties of Evil</a>” in stating that the leader of an online cult “is a 17-year-old Texan who was recently sentenced to 80 years in prison,” as had been reported in <em>The Washington Post</em> and elsewhere; my subsequent search through an inmate database showed him with a 20-year sentence, which the Texas Department of Corrections restated in an email. However, after subsequent discussions in which I contacted a <em>Washington Post</em> reporter, it turned out the 80-year sentence was correct (he was convicted on multiple counts, some running consecutively). For a while, I was wondering if Texas might mistakenly release the prisoner 60 years early, but now his <a href="https://inmate.tdcj.texas.gov/InmateSearch/viewDetail.action?sid=19984471">inmate page</a> shows his full sentence going to 2102. (I did err in suggesting he’s currently 17, his age when sentenced.)</p>
<p>Recently<b id="docs-internal-guid-1c865fbb-7fff-2982-0fed-d8a2064a789f"> </b>I tried to explain Hawking radiation to a quiz-bowl team I coach at my son’s school. I drew a diagram on a whiteboard showing a particle-antiparticle pair forming at the periphery of a black hole, with one particle sucked in and the other radiating outward. This is what I’d recalled from Stephen Hawking’s explanation of the phenomenon in <em>A Brief History of Time</em>. I saw an online <a href="https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/hawking-radiation-really-work/">article</a> asserting that Hawking had misstated his own theory, giving a popular version that distorted what he’d published in technical papers. Next I saw an article in <em><a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00768-4?fbclid=IwAR12ZgqPtyZDoKfhQ6K2-uNuBSn75eb5d4NHJ5pEdxpZN1M2ixu7l9SuG1M">Nature</a> </em>that restated Hawking’s explanation as I’d originally understood it. The bottom line is, I don’t know what to believe about Hawking radiation.</p>
<p>In<b id="docs-internal-guid-6f057355-7fff-112e-6218-1f73848c557a"> </b>assessing the credibility of people, publications and organizations, I give weight to their willingness to <a href="https://www.splicetoday.com/moving-pictures/enter-the-clones-and-artificers">acknowledge error or uncertainty</a>. Carl Sagan <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/86238-one-of-the-reasons-for-its-success-is-that-science">emphasized</a> that inclination as well: “One of the reasons for its success is that science has a built-in, error-correcting machinery at its very heart. Some may consider this an overbroad characterization, but to me every time we exercise self-criticism, every time we test our ideas against the outside world, we are doing science. When we are self-indulgent and uncritical, when we confuse hopes and facts, we slide into pseudoscience and superstition.”</p>
<p>The<b id="docs-internal-guid-a95eb627-7fff-9236-9e94-93c3abe4594d"> </b>error-correcting machinery, however, is itself imperfect, or at least may take time to click into gear. In an excellent piece in <em>The Atlantic</em>, Tom Nichols, who has focused on defending experts against populists, discusses “<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/experts-failure-covid-19-pandemic/677816/">When Experts Fail</a>,” including missteps during the pandemic. He opens with an acknowledgement of his own: “When I first started writing about the public’s hostility toward expertise and established knowledge more than a decade ago, I predicted that any number of crises—including a pandemic—might be the moment that snaps the public back to its senses. I was wrong.”</p>
<p>—<em>Follow<b id="docs-internal-guid-1935999f-7fff-3e8d-c44e-0ed3d003c220"> </b>Kenneth Silber on Threads:</em> <a href="https://www.threads.net/@kennethsilber">@kennethsilber</a></p>
Kenneth Silbertag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333532024-03-26T00:01:00-04:002024-03-23T21:31:21-04:00Allan Holdsworth - <I>Hard Hat Area</I> (1993)tag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333572024-03-25T06:29:00-04:002024-03-25T21:25:47-04:00Gambling on Clickbait<p>I’ve no idea what the office culture at <i>The Atlantic</i> is—probably stultifying, since it’s located in D.C.—but judging by the scattered number of stories I read there, there’s a lot of thumb-twiddling taking place. No shame in clicking on a clickbait entry, though, especially if the come-on whacks your funny bone—in this case, the literary world. (“Clickbait,” I think, isn’t so different from online gambling: a media outlet gambles—maybe like Shohei!—that enough people will hit the magic button and digital advertising will follow: the reader almost always loses, at least intellectually.)</p>
<p><a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2024/03/best-books-american-fiction/677479/">“The Great American Novels” was the headline for a March 14<sup>th</sup> survey</a>—the arbiters were “experts, scholars, critics and novelists,” all of whom must’ve been thumb-twiddling as well. There’s a grand opening paragraph citing John William DeForest as coining the term “The Great American Novel” (which ran out of steam, at least for me, when I heard the pedestrian joke, “Are you writing The Great American Novel” for the 500<sup>th</sup> time by 1971)—I’d never heard of the guy—in 1868, and then this comment: “In 2024, our definition of literary greatness is wider, deeper, and weirder than DeForest likely imagined… At the same time, the novel is also under threat, as the forces of anti-intellectualism and authoritarianism seek to ban books and curtail freedom of expression.” I don’t know about that: DeForest is dead, and there was plenty of fiction deemed “weird” three years after the Civil War ended.</p>
<p>Tastes vary, but I can’t argue with the inclusion of <i>The Great Gatsby</i>, <i>An American Tragedy</i>, <i>A Farewell to Arms</i>, <i>The Sound and the Fury</i>, <i>The Day of</i> <i>the Locust</i>, <i>Native Son</i>, <i>All The King’s Men</i> and <i>Play It As it Lays</i>, to name several acclaimed titles that I read a long time ago and still like. It’s in relatively modern times that I quibble with the list: I don’t care for Stephen King, Toni Morrison, Judy Blume (!), Jonathan Franzen, <i>American Psycho</i>, and never even cracked <i>Infinite Jest</i>. Anne Tyler’s completely snubbed, which is odd, as is Alice McDermott and Richard Russo, and maybe their absorbing and precise prose wasn’t “weird” or “deep” enough for <i>The</i> <i>Atlantic</i>’s august and “parlor-game” committee that was killing time until the Domino’s arrived. How Tyler’s <i>The</i> <i>Accidental Tourist</i> is excluded, for example, and Franzen’s <i>The Corrections</i> makes the cut is strange, but then again, list-making (still, I believe, a surefire internet success) is an okay time-killing exercise, the results of which could be entirely different if the same “experts” were polled a week later.</p>
<p>And it matters little. For example, and I’m not sure how it happened, I read four of Canadian Shari Lapena’s mystery novels and remember almost nothing about them, even the titles, save <i>Not A Happy Family</i>, which is atop a Louvin Brothers CD on my floor. Lapena’s a best-selling, mass-marketed author, which isn’t surprising (and if her numbers are believable, at least some people are reading, which is a line-drive single in this era) since “airport” or “beach” reads are always popular, even if the prose is studded with clichés, and the regrettable modern internet-infused lexicon. I whipped through the books and wasn’t at all put off: her books are the equivalent of a mid-run <i>Law</i> <i>& Order</i> episode, and though the conclusions, after the murderer is revealed, are hokey, what the hell, that’s in the bargain. I have no recommendations to offer, not for fear of embarrassment—as a former print whore, I used to read (or skim) <i>GQ</i>, <i>The Nation</i>, <i>Talk</i>, and <i>George</i>, after all—only because I’d guess there are a dozen Lapenas churning out “content” and you pick and choose. Or not.</p>
<p>Climbing the Ladder of Seriousness several steps, last week I read the Irish writer Colin Barrett’s first novel—his 2022 collection of stories, <i>Homesickness</i> was first-rate, even if it didn’t have the sales pull of a Lapena whodunit—<i>Wild Houses</i>, and it was a rib-tickling, and sobering, story about a dozen or so characters and the events of several days in Ballina, County Mayo. Just one of Barrett’s strengths is that he doesn’t succumb to the aforementioned internet-speak: no one in <i>Wild Houses</i> has to “wrap their head around” an unexpected occurrence; people are worried, not “deeply worried,” and no one asks, “Is heroin still a thing?”</p>
<p>The plot boiled down: teenager Doll English (short for Donal) is kidnapped by Gabe and Sketch Ferdia, brought to the home of sad-sack Dev Hendrick, where he’s held for ransom in a violent ploy to get Doll’s nasty older brother Cillian to pay off a debt from a drug deal gone haywire. Doll’s 17-year-old girlfriend Nicky—soon off to college, eager to escape nowhere Ballina, upon which she may or may not ditch Doll—is the smartest of the bunch, and she sets about trying settle the mess. The comedy’s in the witty dialogue, while the surefire tragedy concerns the immense, always panic-stricken Dev, whose beloved mother recently died.</p>
<p>Dev’s incapable of action or making a decision. He was bullied as a student, despite his size, and this bit from Barrett is poignant: “There was a logic to bullying, which Dev, in his absolute capitulation, was thwarting; what bullies really got off on was stoking up and then emphatically extinguishing a victim’s will, teasing a certain amount of resilience out of a victim the better to trample that resilience to pieces… Because he did not fight back, beating on Dev was easy it was pleasureless, and so pleasureless it became futile.”</p>
<p>Dev’s the opposite of Boo Radley, and his premature demise appears inevitable. But perhaps not. It’s unlikely, but if Barrett revisits this crew in a future short story, which I hope he does, maybe the fates of Dev, Nicky and Doll will play out in an expected way.</p>
<p><i>—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: <a href="http://twitter.com/mugger2023">@MUGGER2023</a></i></p>
Russ Smithtag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333562024-03-25T06:28:00-04:002024-03-25T02:50:57-04:00The New Fun Nun Movie<p>Go to a movie theater now. Not a superhero in sight. Marvel will implode soon, a victim of its own success, over-saturation, people moving on—the most natural thing in the world. While MCU and DC(EU?) films continue to be produced, announced, and scheduled, their reign is over. Even barring catastrophic collapse in the United States, I doubt people will return to Spider-Man and the Avengers for comfort. The films of the future will be blunt, cruel, and obvious, satisfying the demands of an increasingly illiterate, impatient, and intemperate population. Maybe they won’t go the movies, but parents still take their kids to the movies, and if you’re young enough and inclined, it’ll remain a lifelong hobby, maybe a career. That’s what will sustain the form of the narrative feature film as we’ve known it for nearly a hundred years.</p>
<p>In 2027, when sound celebrates its centennial, will we still be in the throes of yet another cycle of exploitation-lite? Ever since the turn of the century, pop culture has refused to reiterate new decades, instead cycling through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. It’s all very inbred, and the only “innovation” in the last 10 years has been the conversion of character into vessels for various political cause celebres. It’ll be remembered with scorn just as the cheesy orchestral synthesizer scores of the 1980s date the films they belong to so badly.</p>
<p>Among the many qualities that made the films of the 1970s so great worldwide was their music. Just last week, I reviewed Rose Glass’ <i>Love Lies Bleeding</i>, but neglected to mention the rollicking and adrenalized score by Clint Mansell, one worthy of Michael Small. That movie had a bit more going on than <i>Immaculate, </i>but this new nun movie starring Sydney Sweeney has no pretensions towards anything but grindhouse glee. It’s not <i>Schoolgirls with Chains</i>, but I’m glad Sweeney’s a movie star in a time when the tide is turning towards more challenging, original films across the American marketplace. We’re not in the 1990s, but what will these early years of the 2020s look like in 2027? What movies of our first quarter-century will be incorporated into the pre-show bumpers?</p>
<p>All I knew going into <i>Immaculate </i>was that Sweeney met director Michael Mohan and writer Andrew Lobel in 2014 when they were initially trying to put the movie together. She auditioned, but the financing fell through. She remembered them, and their script, and a couple of years ago called them up and now they’ve made it. <i>Immaculate </i>is a brisk 89 minutes, with about nine minutes of credits, with the songs and music cues all the way at the end. I stayed to make sure that they used Bruno Nicolai’s theme from <i>The Red Queen Kills Seven Times</i>, easily the most thrilling part of this quickie horror movie. Just two years ago something like this—starring Selena Gomez, perhaps—would’ve seemed absurd, offensive to some people. Now it’s another feather in Sweeney’s cap, and a boost to the careers of Mohan and Lobel.</p>
<p>Simona Tabasco, best known in the States for her the second season of <i>The White Lotus</i>, opens the movie, the very unlucky “first girl.” It was charming how Sweeney affected no accent nor broad caricatures of trauma—this is just a fun nun horror movie, with some great practical special effects and a wicked ending that <i>definitely </i>wouldn’t have been produced five years ago. A qualified taboo broken, a risk taken for a public Hollywood is finally convinced is ready for more brutality, more gore, more death in their theaters and at home. Well, that’s what movies were made for. Leave the superheroes to their comic books.</p>
<p><i>—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter and Instagram: <a href="http://twitter.com/nickyotissmith">@nickyotissmith</a></i></p>
Nicky Otis Smith