My first brush with the audience for Film Forum’s Ozu retrospective was a trip. I got off on the wrong block and ran into another Ozu-er who was lost too. As we found our way around the block to the theatre, he told me he saw Tokyo Story when he was teenager, which led him (eventually) to spend decades in Japan where he got married. His Japanese wife met us at the theater.
World
Mussolini, Europe’s Prize Bluffer More Like Bottomley[1] than Napoleon
Excerpted from an article published by Ernest Hemingway in 1923…
…Mussolini is the biggest bluff in Europe. If Mussolini would have me taken out and shot tomorrow morning I would still regard him as a bluff. The shooting would be a bluff. Get hold of a good photo of Signor Mussolini sometime and study it. You will see the weakness in his mouth which forces him to scowl the famous Mussolini scowl that is imitated by every 19-year-old Fascisto in Italy. Study his past record. Study the coalition that Fascismo is between capital and labor and consider the history of past coalitions. Study his genius for clothing small ideas in big words. Study his propensity for dueling. Really brave men do not have to fight duels, and many cowards duel constantly to make themselves believe they are brave. And then look at his black shirt and his white spats. There is something wrong, even histrionically, with a man who wears white spats with a black shirt.
There is not space here to go into the question of Mussolini as a bluff or as a great and lasting force. Mussolini may last fifteen years or he may be overthrown next spring by Gabriele D’Annunzio, who hates him. But let me give two true pictures of Mussolini at Lausanne.
The $ubmersible $outh $udan
June 23, 2023, 5:01 a.m. ET
From a safe American home…
Our modern media world manufactured a new social equation this last week. While the exact math is still in dispute, it goes something like this:
Five people dying @ $250,000 per joy-ride to disaster-site = five days of lead stories.
A few fringe mathematicians have expanded the equation so the above formula is socially equal to:
120 people dying @ a day of famine/starvation in South Sudan = zero coverage.
Folks, this ain’t the new math.
Bread and Freedom
This talk was included in the collection, Resistance, Rebellion and Death (1961), published after Camus’s death. It originally appeared (per the Anarchist Library) as “Restaurer la valeur de la liberté” (“Restoring the value of freedom”) in the September 1953 issue of La Révolution Prolétarienne, a French syndicalist journal. The title was changed when it was reprinted later the same year. “Bread and Freedom,” incidentally, was also the title of the Russian translation of Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread.
On this and every Memorial Day, my family and I remember Grandpa
This is the way CNN commemorated Memorial Day in 2015, with a story they called, “The General Who Apologized to the Dead Soldiers on Memorial Day.”
“At the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery at Nettuno, Italy, Memorial Day 1945 was an elegiac occasion. Lt. Gen. Lucian Truscott Jr., who had led the U. S. Sixth Corps through some of the heaviest fighting in Italy and now commanded the Fifth Army, gave a speech that is particularly relevant for today when the trauma of our long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continues to haunt so many vets.
Entering War & Coming Home (Viet Nam, Fifty Years on)
Originally published here in 2020.
Most Army Soldiers came to and from Viet Nam aboard a 707 commercial airliner. Two years ago, I was seated next to a retired flight attendant. Somehow we started a conversation about Viet Nam. She told me she was a stewardess who flew the flights bringing soldiers to and from Viet Nam. I told her how, as we flew to and from the war, the stewardesses looked like angels, especially on the way home after my tour. She told me about the heartbreak she felt flying, “….so many boys to Viet Nam… how young they were… how depressing the flights to Viet Nam were. It was a different experience flying them home.”
“Come and See” (with English Subtitles)
CLICK ON LINK BELOW FOR FULL MOVIE FREE ON YOUTUBE WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES (TRAILER BELOW THE LINK)
Come and See | WAR FILM | FULL MOVIE – YouTube
Mayday Duo: “How I Became an Anarchist” and “A Theory of Everything”
Heresies: Anarchist Memoirs, Anarchist Art, by the late Peter Lamborn Wilson is a book in two parts. First comes reminiscences, rants and raps about anarchist theory and (in)activism. The second half of the volume consists of essays on Symbolism, alchemy and anarchism in the arts. (Your editor is hot to run the pages on Gauguin!) What follows are two chapters from the first swatch of Heresies…
How I Became An Anarchist
When I was 12 or 13, I wanted to be a cartoonist and I worshiped Krazy Kat, greatest of all comic strips: surrealist, mystical, Romantic slapstick about perverse love (across not only gender but species) and criminal anarchy: quantum weirdness and genderfuck written in slang poetry and drawn with slapdash-taoist panache by African-American artist George Herriman.
On Richard Wolin’s “Heidegger in Ruins”
This short sprint to the starting gate of a review of Richard Wolin’s solid “Anti-Heidegger,” his recent polemical book Heidegger in Ruins (Yale University Press, 2023).
Fifty years ago, Walter Kaufmann had already reduced Being and Time to bare life, noting how abusive Heidegger’s German was; how evident but unremarked the bleak mood during and after Germany’s World War I defeat, reappearing as Heidegger’s mood of “anxiety” (think: trench warfare) and as a requirement for authenticity; how close to plagiarism were Heidegger’s views on being-toward-death, considering Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich.
Kaufmann is droll and incisive on the academic resistance to criticism of Heidegger even in Heidegger’s own time. After declaring that classical scholars found Heidegger’s reading of a fragment of Anaximander to be untenable; that Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant “was widely repudiated by Kant scholars”; and that professors of literature considered Heidegger’s readings of Hölderlin, Rilke, and Trakl, among others, way stations to the destruction of German literature, Kaufmann concludes: “Even so (emphasis added, SC; read closely!), some who know their Kant are awed by the erudition of Heidegger’s classical interpretations; Nietzsche scholars find his Rilke essay stimulating and profound; and Rilke scholars bow before his Nietzsche exegesis.”[i]
Democracy in the Streets (Saturday Night in Tel Aviv)
Tonight there were much more than 150 thousand demonstrating in Tel Aviv alone. If Tel Aviv has a population of about half a million, and over 150 thousand people were holding flags in the center of the city and shouting in union “democracy,” what does this mean? This is not just about certain rules being crammed down our necks every day, or about politicians who should be in jail. This is about the concept of democracy, and to my mind it should not be only an Israeli issue or even just an issue for Jews around the world. It is about the danger to democracy all over the world. My Hungarian friends, my Polish friends, my Italian friends, and my American friends all know the terrible threats to democracy being faced and the delicate freedom to protest that can disappear in a moment. Tell the world to pay attention to the freedom we have and guard it carefully!
Taking Bad Bunny Seriously
First, some facts about Bad Bunny, in case you think he’s a rowdy pet. He’s Billboard’s artist of the year and Spotify’s most-streamed artist for two years running—an amazing feat for someone who sings in Spanish. His reach is global, but his songs are local, rich with Puerto Rican slang. (I’ve heard him introduced as “Ba-Boney” on Spanish-language TV.) He looks like he was born in a baseball cap, but he sometimes performs in a dress. He chose his stage name because, as he told the late-night host James Cordon, “even when he’s bad, he’s cute.”
The Rose named Laetare
Dear Family and Friends,
Thilus just came back to us today, taking THREE MONTHS to get from Jacmel to Port au Prince.
He is 2 years old, his belly is tight like a drum and nearly bursting from an enormous and sick liver,
he has grey and flaking skin, he is weak and exhausted.
Jacmel is usually a FEW HOURS from Port au Prince by car. A little bit more by bus.
But not when your bus and everyone in it is KIDNAPPED crossing Martissant, on roads totally controlled by thieves,
and especially if there is no one on earth who can pay your ransom.
Twenty Years After
This piece, which Oliver Craner originally posted at his personal website last summer, offers a deep reading of Iraq’s post-invasion trajectory. Craner’s piece isn’t definitive. He gives a little too much credence to canny purveyors of the given such as journalist George Packer. Still, Craner’s account of Kanan Makiya’s journey beats what’s been on offer in most think pieces tuned to the 20th Anniversary of “shock and awe.” I commend, in particular, Cramer’s return to The Rope — Makiya’s own attempt to reckon with what happened in Iraq. The Rope, which refers to the one used to hang Saddam Hussein, tells the story of a Shiite militia-man whose life comes down to one sectarian betrayal after another. The anti-hero of the book — an orphan who looks up to his uncle as more than a mentor — will find out (before the book’s end) the uncle was behind the murder of the militia-man’s father. Iraq in a nutshell? It’s important to add, though, The Rope isn’t simply a fable. As Craner notes, Makiya’s fiction was founded on real events such as…
The War Poets
It has been a year, a year of bombs and voices. These people speak through translators, these people speak their lives translated through war. This is the collective landscape, wrapped in the mist and myth of the moment, told in the fractured piecemeal that is war.
INTRODUCTION TO THE METHOD
What happened
We were going to gather snow
From the tops of the mountains
In summer
That’s what he said he wanted
From there we would carry it back
On the backs of our “swans”
To the city
To sprinkle it onto the roiling streets
And citizens squinting up joyfully, gratefully
This we would do not for personal glory
But purely for that of the city
Eternal glory to the nest where we were born
He Could Sing, But He Couldn’t Fly
We heard about the memo: Legal Aid lawyers had to ask for papers,
a green card, policing what the law called illegal aliens, as if they
had antennae sprouting from their heads and searching the air,
sputtering in tongues from another planet, choking on oxygen.
This would account for their coughing, not the oil tanks empty of oil.
This Met is Mine
Manhattan’s Just Above Midtown (JAM) gallery became a haven for Black Atlantic artists in the 70s and 80s. A current exhibit at MOMA chronicles work first shown at JAM and includes art by Lorraine O’Grady. The author of the following post was born long after JAM’s moment. He encountered O’Grady’s work on the campus of the University of Chicago. It launched him on a trip that took him back to the playful start of his own art-life…
I came across one of the sixteen diptychs that make up Lorraine O’Grady’s Miscegenated Family Album—(Cross Generational) L: Nefertiti, the last image; R: Devonia\’s youngest Daughter, Kimberley—in the the Booth collection.
The Organization Man: Franz Kafka, Risk Insurance, and the Occasional Hell of Office Life
Most readers know Franz Kafka as the reclusive author of stories and novels that have since become monumental works of modern literature. Some readers also know him as a bureaucrat who, unhappy in his office, castigated the “hell of office life.” But few know that he rose at the end of his life to the position of Senior Legal Secretary at the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague (called, after 1918, the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute for the Czech Lands). Kafka was no Bartleby the Scrivener, no harmless office drudge. Rather, he was a brilliant innovator of social and legal reform in “the Manchester of the Empire,” which at the time of Kafka’s tenure, between 1908-1922, was one of the most highly developed industrial areas of Europe.
Chaos Theories (& Another Year)
Watching the ongoing humiliation of Kevin McCarthy leaves me struggling for the appropriate aphorism.