tag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:/rss/the-feedSPLICETODAY.com2024-03-19T05:14:56Ztag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333212024-03-19T00:01:00-04:002024-03-16T01:37:20-04:00John Malkovich Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characterstag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333282024-03-18T07:00:00-04:002024-03-18T07:44:30-04:00Canonized or Cannonized: Who Makes it to Classic and Who Gets Fired<p>For the last couple of months, I've paddled around in a real scholarly backwater: American "New Realist" philosophy of the early-20th century: the work of once-eminent but now entirely-forgotten philosophers such as William Pepperell Montague of Columbia, Ralph Barton Perry and E.B. Holt of Harvard, and Edward Gleason Spaulding of Princeton. In their own period, they were among the most eminent of American intellectuals. They were mentored by great philosophers such as Josiah Royce and William James. They occupied distinguished professorships at prestigious universities.</p>
<p>I've been extremely impressed by their work ethic: each produced a vast authorship over a long life, and each produced an internally coherent and elaborate philosophical system, as though they were American Hegels. (They hated Hegel though, and their Realism was the opposite of his Absolute Idealism, which had dominated philosophy in the previous century, and which the Realists dedicated themselves to destroying.)</p>
<p>Furthermore<b id="docs-internal-guid-346cb987-7fff-224f-ab04-0faa738d6c42"> </b>(and this is why I'm reading), they produced a number of fundamental theories on a number of fundamental matters (the nature of truth, the nature of human perception, the nature of values such as beauty and justice) that were fundamentally innovative when they wrote. Some of these, such as the <a href="https://www.ed.ac.uk/ppls/philosophy/research/impact/the-extended-mind-in-science-and-society">extended mind thesis</a>, the identity theory of truth, and the situational account of value, reappeared in much the same form a century later, put forward by people (me, for example) who had no idea that anyone had ever advocated the positions before, much less that they’d been systematically developed by Ivy League philosophers of mind a hundred years before. The extended mind thesis (and others) could’ve been part of the debate through the whole century. Instead, it died undetected and had to be naively reconstructed.</p>
<p>Maybe I should speak for myself. I had every reason and opportunity to know this work. I’ve studied the Realists' contemporaries and rivals the pragmatists elaborately (I wrote a dissertation about the aesthetics of John Dewey, for example, and a series of papers on James's epistemology). I’d dipped into Ralph Barton Perry's magisterial and Pulitzer-wining biography of his teacher James. I was vaguely aware that there was a book written by six philosopher-titled <em>The New Realism</em>. I was vaguely aware that Montague's theory of truth and mine were, roughly, the same.</p>
<p>I mentioned Montague and the book when I published my own system of philosophy as <em>Entanglements</em> in 2017. But what I didn't realize was that more or less the whole picture of the universe and the place of humans within that I advocated there had already been developed by American philosophers whose names I vaguely knew. This vagueness had causes. Their contemporaries Dewey and G.H. Mead carried the day for pragmatism against realism. By 1930, the Realists were already being forgotten, and pragmatism was widely termed "the characteristically American philosophy." It was forgotten even that many of the pragmatists' positions had been developed in specific contrast to the Realists.</p>
<p>The classical pragmatists and, in particular, their followers and descendants, no doubt narrated their victory as follows: American Realism was naive and incompetent philosophy. It had its role in helping the pragmatists refine their positions, but it was the very acme of mediocrity. Theories survive like creatures, according to a basic Darwinism: the strongest and best-adapted survive. The rest disappear, as they should.</p>
<p>But I have a somewhat different picture. I spent 40 years in academia, enough to see new dominant research programs take over and old ones fall by the wayside. The reasons are, in general, less survival-of-the-fittest and more oriented to eliminating one's opponents, fit or not. The driving force of intellectual history is academic politics. The people who tried to persist in Realism (and there were some, such as the now-also-forgotten Justus Buchler) got sidelined. The internal intellectual politics of departments skewed toward pragmatism, and slowly its opponents disappeared. This is the way academic politics works: you establish the next phase by eliminating your opponents' grad students. Who can do that in the long run is who wins the argument, and maybe the century. (The pragmatists, by the way, were in their turn eliminated in very much the same way, by analytic philosophers.)</p>
<p>By<b id="docs-internal-guid-b0fe3ced-7fff-f056-017d-1be219a3d457"> </b>the time I showed up in organizations such as the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy around 1990, a canon of American philosophy had been established. The 19th-century transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau gave way to the pragmatism of C.S. Peirce, James, and Dewey, along with a few satellite figures such as Royce and Mead. There was one path, and we young American philosophers were traversing it together. Lately, the "neo-pragmatism" of Richard Rorty has been canonized as the outcome or culmination of these developments. People such as <a href="https://www.txamfoundation.com/News/The-Legacy-Of-John-J-Mcdermott.aspx">John McDermott</a> worked their whole lives to establish this canon and this story. And to eliminate all others. Organizations such as SAAP, that is, also have a police function, and performing it is how the canon is formed. The intellectual history gets profoundly skewed: most things are eliminated, and there’s less and less indication that the dominant discourse has ever been challenged.</p>
<p>Do this for two generations, and the people coming along will have difficulty imagining an alternative. Do it for three generations, and no one will even have heard of what the American realist Roy Wood Sellars called "neglected alternatives." Even people who need the material for their own work (me, for example) might not be likely to find it anymore. And when they do, they're liable to be dismissed.</p>
<p>One book I've been reading in this vein is Spaulding's <em>The New Rationalism: The Development of a Constructive Realism Upon the Basis of Modern Logic and Science, and Through the Criticism of Opposed Philosophical Systems</em>, published in 1917. It’s incredible how much labor there is in it, how many fascinating and possibly fundamental ideas are here that were never further developed. Spaulding was a distinguished professor at Princeton, but I wonder whether, by the end of his life (1940), he was worrying about whether anyone would ever read his system of philosophy. Maybe he wondered why he worked so hard. Maybe his hopes had dwindled to “Perhaps someone will pull this off the shelf in a hundred years and realize I was on to something!" I’m trying to be that person.</p>
<p>The Spaulding situation makes me feel better and worse about my <em>Entanglements: A System of Philosophy</em>, which hasn’t even been reviewed. I also need a hypothetical future devotee to save my philosophy, circa 2124, if philosophy makes it that far. But maybe all that work was just futile. On the other hand, I enjoyed the process of thinking and writing, even as the thing sinks. But one thing these observations will allow me to do: assert that the neglect of me may be intellectually arbitrary, that the canon is formed in philosophy by sociological factors in which professors are embedded, not by excellence.</p>
<p>It may be self-serving for me to think that who gets canonized and who gets cannonized is intellectually arbitrary. I don't suck as bad as people think I do! And I regard this as true of all canons. I think The Beatles’ promotion to rock gods, or Dylan's, was arbitrary. There were a lot of novelists as good and at least as interesting as Philip Roth or Ernest Hemingway. I think Picasso is a repulsive person and artist, and there’s just no escape. It's all down to this: whose taste can be enforced.</p>
<p>I'm<b id="docs-internal-guid-6ab2f76f-7fff-9a81-715f-5f34eb88f16d"> </b>a little angry that I didn't know Ralph Barton Perry had written more or less my whole philosophy a hundred years before I did. True, I should blame myself. I should’ve found these figures and ideas and texts and pursued them. I could have, in some sense. But the reasons I didn't aren't just incompetence, but also to the scholarly atmosphere I came through in my training. Meanwhile, like Ralph Barton Perry and Edward Gleason Spaulding, I’m a <a href="https://youtu.be/5IjBXtFgqyQ?si=9PDJG3SgUjdYftpU">human canonball</a>.</p>
<p><em>—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell</em></p>
Crispin Sartwelltag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333322024-03-18T06:30:00-04:002024-03-19T01:14:56-04:00Modern Media Critiques Are Dead Meat<p>The cupboard is nearly bare when you attempt to pick a smart essay about modern journalism. Given my background, I do make a stab at such declarations, most of which are useless, concentrating for the 987<sup>th</sup> time in the past month about layoffs that “threaten democracy,” and that it’s the “elites,” not “ordinary people,” who control what’s left of the media that consumers believe. I don’t believe much of anything I read, at least about politics, housing prices, migrants (illegals!), crime, wars or education; even popular culture reviews and sportswriting are peppered with asides about Biden, Trump, Schumer and TikTok. It’s not an exaggeration that a Herculean effort is required that to discern even a nugget of truth.</p>
<p>Last week <a href="http://www.persuasion.community/p/how-pseudo-intellectualism-ruined">I did read an article by William Deresiewicz</a>, and it was a mixed bag, making some legitimate points about journalism, but marred by the author’s muddled thinking; he’s not at all, at least judged by the writing, a dim man, but I don’t think the five-time author thought “deeply” enough about the topic—Deresiewicz used “deep” or “deeply” throughout, an awful cliché, even as he criticizes, correctly, the misuse of the word “narrative” to explain what a modern journalist doesn’t really know much about.</p>
<p>He begins: “I was sitting across from the professor as she went over my latest piece. This was 1986, Columbia School of Journalism, Reporting and Writing I, the program’s core course… The main thing that I learned in journalism school was that I didn’t belong in journalism school. The other thing I learned was that journalists were deeply anti-intellectual… Now they’re something else: pseudo-intellectual. And that is much worse.”</p>
<p>Deresiewicz meanders into the now-trite explanation that today’s media is sullied by too many rich kids who’ve never had to consort with “ordinary people,” which skewers their work in attempt to please their fellow “elites,” and reaping the rewards of the “right” country clubs, squash courts, restaurants, etc. What Deresiewicz, before he launches into another tribute to long-ago working-class reporters like Pete Hamill and Jimmy Breslin (before they became celebrities), doesn’t mention is that he holds three degrees from Columbia University, and was a professor at Yale for 10 years, leaving after he was denied tenure.</p>
<p>He ignores that while the New York City tabloids were the “working people’s papers,” broadsheets like <i>The New York Times</i>, <i>The New York Herald</i> <i>Tribune</i>, <i>The Wall Street Journal</i> and <i>The Boston Globe</i> were selective in hiring and part of America’s Permanent Government. When John F. Kennedy complained about daily newspapers in the early-1960s, he wasn’t referring to the tabloids (although he undoubtedly relished the gossip).</p>
<p>Deresiewicz also writes: “Both were Irish Catholic: Hamill was from Brooklyn, Breslin from Queens, long before those boroughs were discovered by the hipsters and condo creeps… Hence the recognition, in figures like Breslin and Hamill, that the world is chaotic, full of paradox, that people evade our understanding. Hence their sense of curiosity and irony and wonder. At the source of their moral commitments, they had not rules but instincts, a feeling for the difference between right and wrong. For the masses, they felt not pity but solidarity, since they were of them.”</p>
<p>Never mind, for example, that Hamill was a friend of Bobby Kennedy, helped convince him to run for the presidency in 1968, and then covered the brief campaign.</p>
<p>My question is why Deresiewicz wasted money—if that was a concern—on journalism school in the first place. In 1986. I’m eight or so years older than Deresiewicz, but when I graduated from Johns Hopkins (my primary education there was the school paper, <i>The News-Letter</i>), I didn’t even consider journalism school, not only because it was too expensive, but mostly because I wanted to start my career in the field, for better or worse. Most of my colleagues at Baltimore’s <i>City Paper</i> and <i>New York Press</i> skipped it too, although there was an extraordinarily talented fellow I worked with at <i>The News-Letter</i> who did accede to the traditional route necessary to land a job at a major newspaper. You couldn’t just show up at, say, <i>The Baltimore Sun</i>—in those days still a respected daily newspaper—and expect a desk. You were told to get “seasoning” at smaller dailies, sort of like MLB’s minor leagues, and “work your way up the ladder.” He did: went from papers in Allentown and New Jersey to <i>The Philadelphia Inquirer</i> and then <i>The Los Angeles</i> Times, until that paper was in trouble and is now, at 68, working at the shriveled <i>San Antonio Express-News</i>.</p>
<p>I don’t disagree with Deresiewicz that today’s “journalists” are a sorry lot and I suspect he’s correct that many are “pseudo-intellectual,” although who knows, it could be that an ostensible moron like MSNBC cable host Chris Hayes spends his free time re-reading Baudelaire, Melville and Thomas Wolfe. On the other hand, it’s foolish to pin the “pseudo” label on current reporters and essayists like Bret Stephens, Kimberly Strassel, John Tamny, Thomas Frank, Christopher Caldwell, Oliver Bateman, Jeffrey St. Clair, Matt Welch, Andrew Ferguson, James Bowman and Emina Melonic. You may or may not agree with their published work, but there’s no doubt that they’re well-read and don’t just cherry-pick a random observation from Milton, Blake or Carlyle. I’d even guess that David Brooks, a journalistic scourge since the 1990s, is hardly “anti-intellectual,” and does have a presentable understanding of <i>The Federalist Papers</i>.</p>
<p>Deresiewicz does end with an indisputable truth: “Journalists are now incentivized to opinionate.” No shit.</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/333252024-03-18T06:29:00-04:002024-03-16T21:34:46-04:00Kristen's Love Gun<p>Telltale sign of a healthy American cinema: two movies with suspiciously similar premises and plots are released within months, weeks, days of each other. You know <i>Antz </i>and <i>A Bug’s Life</i>, <i>Armageddon </i>and <i>Deep Impact</i>, <i>Red Eye </i>and <i>Flightplan</i>, and if you were around for the Oscars in 1985, maybe you remember three films about women and their failing farms: <i>Country, The River, </i>and <i>Places in the Heart</i>. And even if you don’t remember <i>any </i>of that, you’ve probably heard a misquoted snippet of Sally Field’s Oscar speech for that last movie: "I can't deny the fact that you like me—<i>right now, you</i> like me!”</p>
<p>But maybe that moment has passed, too. Maybe all you can remember is Emma Stone looking horrified when she won for <i>Poor Things</i>—and now that awards season is over, the only bit that’s looking to stick around is Jonathan Glazer’s acceptance speech for <i>The Zone of Interest</i>, wherein he mildly condemned the insane regime running Israel right now. That’s the only piece of the show still talked about, which means it’s by some distance the most “important” thing to happen at the Oscars since Michael Moore said we were living in “fictitious times” in 2003. Whatever you think of him now or then, he was right.</p>
<p>Last month, I reviewed Ethan Coen’s directorial debut <i>Drive-Away Dolls</i>, co-written with his wife Tricia Cooke; it’s a much more impressive and exciting solo outing than his brother’s <i>The Tragedy of Macbeth</i>, one of only a handful of movies I’ve ever almost fallen asleep in, and it’s good to know that they’ll be back soon with another short nouveau grind house movie called <i>Honey Don’t</i> this time next year. For now, we have <i>Love Lies Bleeding</i>, the <i>other </i>lesbian crime movie that had the good/bad luck of coming out after <i>Drive-Away Dolls</i>. Directed by Rose Glass and co-written with Weronika Tofilska, <i>Love Lies Bleeding </i>can’t match even one Coen brother on the merits of its script, casting, or attitude.</p>
<p>This is a tall order: the Coen Brothers’ debut <i>Blood Simple </i>came out 40 years ago, while Glass is only 33—this is her second film; her first, <i>Saint Maud</i>, was released in the fog of the pandemic. <i>Love Lies Bleeding </i>is a much better film than <i>Saint Maud</i>, one with far more moving parts and places to go. Kristen Stewart plays a gym manager in 1989 Albuquerque; her dad is Ed Harris, career criminal with all local police under his control; Jena Malone’s her sister, and Dave Franco her asshole brother-in-law. Stewart’s gay and hates her dad—not because he’s homophobic, but because she thinks he killed her mom. Katy O’Brian walks into Stewart’s gym one day after screwing a stranger (Franco) in the parking lot. Stewart introduces her to PED’s, and she becomes addicted, popping veins like The Hulk.</p>
<p><i>Love Lies Bleeding </i>made me wary at first, with anachronistic lines like “Your body, your choice,” but it’s consistently hard to predict and genuinely weird for such a big movie. There are leaps and bits of magical realism that were really refreshing, and while you could call the ending a cop-out, it’s just dumb and obvious enough to work. It’s also a surprisingly nasty movie, one with a firmer grip on its tone than many American counterparts. Glass doesn’t just go for gore, she challenges the audiences and goes for laughs that would scare most investors out of the room. Two moments that made me howl with laughter: Stewart punching her already battered sister’s face in, and choking out that girl Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov) when she somehow wakes up from a gunshot to the head.</p>
<p>I was stunned by how much negative criticism <i>Drive-Away Dolls </i>received, and dismayed by how many writers are more eager to treat <i>Love Lies Bleeding </i>with kid gloves. The former is a much better movie, but they’re both merely excellent programmers, silly and violent films that can hold up a weak month like February or March. The violence and nihilism of both, particularly <i>Love Lies Bleeding</i>, feel essentially 2020s, post-superhero. Forget Emerald Fennell, Rose Glass is the millennial British director to pay attention to.</p>
<p><i>—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter and Instagram: <a href="http://twitter.com/nickyotissmith">@nickyotissmith</a></i></p>
Nicky Otis Smithtag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333242024-03-18T06:27:00-04:002024-03-16T21:23:19-04:00Why <I>Edge of Tomorrow</I> is the Only Good Tom Cruise Movie<p>Tom Cruise’s career is irritatingly inevitable and inevitably irritating. Ever since he stretched his cheek muscles into that smug, staid grin in 1980s hits like <i>Risky Business</i> and <i>Top Gun</i> he’s been an unavoidable screen presence, playing the same can-do guy with no particular acting ability who we all have to love because he’s superstar Tom Cruise with the uncanny valley wind-up smirk. And then playing him again. And again. And again. The smirk won’t die. No matter even that the smirker behind it is the leader of an abusive cult.</p>
<p>This is the genius of the 2014 sort-of classic <i>Edge of Tomorrow</i>. It’s a film in which Cruise smirks over and over. And then you get to watch that smirk get wiped off his face as he’s repeatedly, brutally, and satisfyingly murdered.</p>
<p>The story to set up the repeated Cruise-icide barely makes sense—but that’s part of the charm. The world has been invaded by a tentacular alien species which has conquered Europe and is moving on to Britain. Cruise plays Major William Cage, an American military publicity flak who through his own cowardice and incompetence ends up on the leading edge of the last-ditch no-hope final assault on alien-occupied Europe. Unsurprisingly, Cage gets killed. Surprisingly, he discovers that because a special tentacled alien bled on him, he now gets reset to the day before the invasion every time he dies.</p>
<p>It’s fun because, for Cruise haters, it recapitulates Cruise’s hateful career. He enters the story as a slick, sniveling glad-handing salesman, trying to grin his way out of having to join the fighting. And then he’s turned into a hero through sheer, numbing force of repetition. The God of the great studio that’s the world just decides to give Cruise take after take to become our savior protagonist. Nonsensical as the film is, uninspiring as Cruise may be, there’s no escape. He rises up, teeth first, into super-heroism and leading-man money.</p>
<p>If the film reiterates the terror that is Cruise, it also gives viewers a chance for cathartic revenge on his relentlessly annoying screen image. Because Cage keeps getting killed. He gets torn apart by tentacled aliens. He gets run over by a truck. He gets shot. He gets shot. He gets shot. He gets shot. He gets crushed by a falling plane. He gets hit by a truck. He gets torn apart by tentacled aliens. He gets shot.</p>
<p>And every time, <i>every time</i>, he pops up again, tightening those little muscles in his cheek, looking determined, sweaty, heroic. And then he gets killed again! He keeps thinking he’s the hero, like all those other movies, and instead, at last—at last!—he’s just another sad sack piece of canon fodder. Someone somewhere finally realized that this guy is a blight on cinema, and they’ve decided to eliminate him and make someone else the hero. Someone like, say, the talented Emily Blunt, who plays hardened sergeant Rita Vrataski, a woman who had the time-repeat power before Cage.</p>
<p>The Cruise defenestration is too good to last. Eventually the movie has to move forward. Cage turns into a standard action hero. Rita gets demoted to sidekick and (its implied) love interest. The last image is of Cruise standing there with the smug smile, assured that no matter how many times you kill him, he can never stay dead. Because, for some reason as unfathomable as the plot, audiences and Hollywood love him.</p>
<p>But that’s the way it goes. Not every movie can have a happy ending. But the joy of <i>Edge of Tomorrow</i> is that there are many endings, and in most of them Tom Cruise’s smirk vanishes from the screen forever to trouble us no more. It’s not real. But Hollywood lives on dreams.</p>
Noah Berlatskytag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333222024-03-18T06:24:00-04:002024-03-18T02:26:50-04:00The Merits of Good Teeth<p>We seldom exist as whole human beings. We’re compartmentalized and each compartment has its own life. To a priest we’re a soul in need of salvation; to a policeman either a criminal or a victim; to a cook a palate and a stomach; to a lawyer we’re a goldmine; to an artist, a potential collector; to a politician we’re fools. And to a dentist we’re a set of teeth and gums.</p>
<p>Dental hygiene has played an oversized role in my life. Yet, until today I’d never thought about what could be called <em>my dental life</em>. I realized that I’ve flossed for 50 years. How long would the string of dental floss stretch if it had remained a single strand? Five miles? Ten? Across the city? In all those years I’ve missed very few flossing days, sometimes flossing multiple times. If I don’t floss each evening, I feel ceremonially unclean.</p>
<p>My mother was obsessed with having good teeth and passed this on to her children. When we were kids, she tried every product imaginable. We were always the first on our block to have water pics, electronic toothbrushes and at-home fluoride treatments. It was only dental floss, along with the toothbrush and toothpaste, that stuck.</p>
<p>Dental floss is good for your gums. Mine are in good shape, but my teeth aren’t. This is because I was relentless in my use of the toothbrush. I’d brush my teeth five times or more a day using force like I was training for the Olympics. Only after years did I discover that I’d been brushing in the wrong direction, side-to-side rather than up-and-down. Now I have grooves in my teeth and the enamel is so thin I have to use “sensitive” toothpaste.</p>
<p>Good teeth do produce a certain effect. I once read the biography of Marie Duplessis, the courtesan on whom Verdi’s opera <em>La Traviata</em> was based. Her effect upon men was supposedly overpowering. Franz Liszt, the composer and piano virtuoso, an unquestioned super-star of his time, was just one of the many men who begged her to marry him. She rejected him for a banker. Among her numerous charms—she reportedly could speak intelligently on many subjects, play the piano well and had great wit—was that she had perfect teeth. This was a rarity then and added to her uncanny beauty. But even good teeth are no guarantee of happiness: she died from tuberculosis, alone and penniless, at 24.</p>
<p>When I was a kid the idea existed that all Europeans had bad teeth. I’ve noticed, at least here in France, this is no longer the case. Kids here have braces just like they did in the USA when I was younger. A lot of adults do, too. You still see the occasional crooked smile, strangely even among those who could afford to fix their teeth, but I imagine the same exists in the USA. Maybe it’s a question of pride.</p>
<p>A number of years ago, I met the experimental filmmaker Jonas Mekas in a café in Paris. It was late, he was there with two young filmmakers, proteges I believe. We were all drinking. In the course of the conversation, I told him I’d seen the film he’d shot of the Kennedy children in the early-1970s. I said what I remembered most was how all the Kennedys had such perfect white teeth. This made him laugh.</p>
<p>One could apply this same “dental” optic to all the compartments of one’s life. People speak of their sex and work lives as separate entities. But what about our other lives? Our depression life, toilette life, staring at a blank wall life, becoming-unreasonably-mad-for-no-good-reason life? There’s a point where thinking such thoughts would become intolerable. It’d require being self-conscious at every moment of the day. Teeth or no teeth, we must forget ourselves and just live.</p>
Dick Turnertag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333372024-03-18T00:01:00-04:002024-03-18T22:56:35-04:00Elliott Smith - Live in Columbus, OH (March 6, 1996)tag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333192024-03-15T06:29:00-04:002024-03-14T20:15:14-04:00The Pillow Shot<p>Yesterday the boss told me he’s quitting. “I can’t do this anymore.” He fell into the couch with a book by Robert Wagner and hasn’t left since. Yet he hasn’t stopped asking me questions about <i>SATUR-19</i> and its progress, “how’s the edit?”, all that. This man needs a break. But maybe I should look for other work. Da Boss told me in 2021 I’d be editing all of his films from now on, but this latest phase has gone on a bit too long, it’s time to look for backup. Maybe an SFX or post-house in Los Angeles, but that’s an oversaturated market, and way too many fried chicken restaurants. We have those in Baltimore, too, but rarely do they sport such hideous and offensive caricatures of our breed.</p>
<p>The state of <i>SATUR-19 </i>should mollify the boss but he appears more interested in Mr. Wagner’s fond memories of beating his wife or whatever. “It’s actually about the actresses he knew, loved, and worked with, Monica. It spans 30 years. Reading this is more fun than anything else I can think of doing right now. Nothing serious. Not a biography, not even a memoir. I don’t even think this book is 100,000 words. So what? He’s probably lying in most of it. I don’t care. It goes down easy. I’m comfortable. All of these people mentioned in the book are dead. It’s fine, I can read about it. I have a space heater. This couch is REALLY comfortable.”</p>
<p>During all of that, I stitched together a few title cards, written from Da Boss’ instructions. A sampling: “SEDUCED AND ABANDONED,” “I STRODE THE MOUNTAIN,” “GAMES WITHOUT FRONTIERS,” “YESTERDAY’S WORK,” “DISEASE AS MORAL FAILURE,” “WHERE ARE YOU,” “LOSING IT,” “WHERE AM I GOING,” “2020,” “2024,” and “YOUR LOVE IS FADING.”</p>
<p>I realized I never asked Da Boss what this movie was about—and if you’re wondering how I can edit a film without knowing what it’s about, please talk to any professional editor in Hollywood and get back to me, keep in mind I’m right and if they contradict me they’re wrong or lying to subvert not my but <i>your </i>best laid plans so watch out—and it felt like the right time. “What the fuck is this thing?” Da Boss explained that <i>SATUR-19 </i>was an experimental anthology film with “some connection to” the following films: <i>Fantasia, The Image Book, </i>and <i>My Winnipeg</i>. I asked him where the scary brooms were, and what about Mickey. He laughed and went back to his murderer memoir.</p>
<p>A lot of the transition shots, or “pillow shots,” come from scenes we didn’t end up using, entire sequences that, according to Da Boss, “just didn’t work.” He was right: they sucked. But there was enough good material in here for a feature film, one even a few minutes longer than Da Boss’ previous two. “How are we doing on dubbing?” <i>Uh</i>, I drawled like Butthead, <i>isn’t that, like, your job, dude? Uh-heheheh. </i>Da Boss sighed, got up, and pulled his phone out, texting with one hand and trying to undo the top button of his shirt with the other. I told him to turn around, said I’d help, jumped up and spur-clawed that button right off of his collar. It was the claw of love, and once he realized the shirt I ripped was basically worthless, he thanked me and told me to get back to work. “I’ll go to the Gap and you finish the breakdown section.”</p>
<p><i>—Follow Monica Quibbits on Twitter: <a href="http://twitter.com/monicaquibbits">@MonicaQuibbits</a></i></p>
Monica Quibbitstag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333182024-03-15T06:28:00-04:002024-03-14T20:11:50-04:00Any Publicity Is Good Publicity<p>Tim Yohannan: Most people are going to be co‑opted and if you look at most people, even the people who are most vocal and charged up at one point, five years from now, where are they gonna be?</p>
<p>Michael Imperioli: If you can see that, then you really kind of get down to the essence of why you’re doing what you’re doing.</p>
<p>Yohannan: That’s true. Your nails turn black.</p>
<p>Imperioli: I mean, without a doubt.</p>
<p>Yohannan: (<i>laughter</i>) Any publicity is good publicity.</p>
<p>•••</p>
<p>Imperioli: Once your consciousness gets tuned to whatever it is—an image, a story, a chord progression, a melody, and you’re working on it; you know, it might be a year, not all the time, but you’re working on it—once your consciousness gets tuned to that, anything that comes into your head related to that idea, you have to respect it.</p>
<p>Yohannan: An interview with a band gets done, it takes a month or two before it gets sent to us, four or five months before it comes out, band’s broken up.</p>
<p>Imperioli: Too much voltage at that age. The lines of what’s bad and what’s good get muddied.</p>
<p>Yohannan: It’s more a matter of them self-destructing and if there is going to be anything left for anybody else after that. It wasn’t crucial.</p>
<p>Imperioli: Yeah. Everyone’s young, it’s kind of innocent and still fun. It’s a <i>vibe</i>.</p>
<p>•••</p>
<p>Yohannan: That pays my bills and keeps me grounded and this is my hobby or fancy or whatever.</p>
<p>Imperioli: A bunch of different people call at the same time and it makes me think that something bad has happened.</p>
<p>Yohannan: I think I’ve been on the receiving end of that. But that doesn’t happen that often.</p>
<p>Imperioli: I think there’s a stillness to those moments. You’re in that level of awareness—and not just that level of awareness, but also I guess the realization of the truth of existence, interdependence, impermanence, and non-duality.</p>
<p>Yohannan: At this place, the waitresses don’t write down your order, they remember it all. Hours later, you can go up to the front and the waitresses remember exactly what you had.</p>
Raymond Cummingstag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333172024-03-15T06:27:00-04:002024-03-14T20:08:12-04:00Funeral for a Fuck Buddy<p>A sexy lesbian love story, which soon evolves into a scuzzy crime plot—the idea behind<i> Love Lies Bleeding</i> hasn’t been done this well since the Wachowskis made <i>Bound</i> in 1996. If you’re looking for a movie with earnest, positive LGBTQ representation, look elsewhere. Go watch <i>Rustin </i>on Netflix. But <i>Love Lies Bleeding</i>, while uneven at times, is an audacious delight, a movie not afraid to show its protagonists as violent and disgusting.</p>
<p><i>Love Lies Bleeding, </i>directed by Rose Glass (<i>Saint Maud</i>), is set in a small New Mexico town in 1989, and thanks to a reference to George H.W. Bush’s famous speech about crack cocaine in Lafayette Park, we know the exact date of the events, in early-September of that year. The period detail is just right for a depressed small town in the late-1980s, including vintage gym equipment and some of the worst haircuts you’ve ever seen on both men and women. Ed Harris’ bald head/ponytail combination is almost worth the price of admission by itself.</p>
<p>Ethan Coen’s recent <i>Drive-Away Dolls </i>was also about a lesbian duo taking on criminals but gave it a certain lightheartedness. <i>Love Lies Bleeding </i>has a darker and sleazier tone that recalls earlier Coen movies like <i>Blood Simple. </i>In <i>Love Lies Bleeding</i>, Kristen Stewart plays Lou, a gym manager with a mysterious past. One day she meets Jackie (Katy O’Brian), a drifter and aspiring bodybuilder with whom she begins a steamy affair, one rendered graphically in a series of love scenes.</p>
<p>Both have shady pasts, with Lou’s tied to her estranged father, also named Lou (Ed Harris), who controls the town’s criminal rackets. Adding to the scumbag action is J.J. (Dave Franco), the abusive and sleazy husband of Lou’s sister (Jena Malone), a man who sports an even worse haircut than his father-in-law’s. On the margins is Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov, Mikhail's daughter), who just about walks off with the film as a psychotic flirt.</p>
<p>Can Lou and Jackie’s love survive these circumstances and the difficulties of their pasts? Will Jackie ever make it to that bodybuilding competition in Vegas? And is <i>Love Lies Bleeding</i> the first significant film ever to paint the use of anabolic steroids positively? The performances are all outstanding, with Stewart successfully leveraging her public persona, and O’Brian breaking through with a one-of-a-kind role. Anna Baryshnikov, best known from the Apple show <i>Dickinson</i>, is terrifying as a character who uses a baby-girl voice to mask a surprising agenda.</p>
<p>The film keeps hinting at the possibility of supernatural elements, leading up to a final choice that’s bound to be divisive, and popular among certain niche fetish communities.</p>
<p>Stewart, an out lesbian for years, played the media like a fiddle in the leadup to the film, posing for a sexily androgynous cover for <i>Rolling Stone</i> and drawing the rage of certain right-wingers angry that “wokeness” had ruined the girl they thought was cute back when she made the <i>Twilight</i> movies. However, this isn’t a <i>Madame Web </i>situation where the star’s press tour was more memorable than the movie.<i> Love Lies Bleeding</i> is a thriller that isn’t afraid to get nasty.</p>
Stephen Silvertag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333162024-03-15T06:27:00-04:002024-03-14T18:57:37-04:00Don’t Give Condescending Advice to New Moms<p>I was at the cardiologist this week getting tests; turns out I just have some kind of arrythmia, so until some asshole breaks it or pisses me off dramatically enough, I’ll live. During the EKG I heard my heartbeat for the first time, and mentioned to the young radiologist I hadn’t heard that sound since I was pregnant over 18 years ago.</p>
<p>She said fetal heartbeats are so much faster, and that couldn’t believe her own daughter was turning two. I can’t believe my youngest baby girl turns 21 this weekend on St. Patrick’s Day, that my first baby turns 30 next month, I thought, but didn’t say it, instead rattling off my favorite quote about motherhood: the days are long, but the years are short.</p>
<p>The test went on for a while because she had to do measurements and positioning. We chatted about motherhood from its opposite ends—how she once had a desire to hurry things along: “I can’t wait until she walks!” until the day came when her baby did walk, along with the realization that she’d now be forever running after her, worried she’d fall and get hurt.</p>
<p>I<b id="docs-internal-guid-f46901a3-7fff-ebbf-c2fe-4b5bb5a51e10"> </b>didn’t say: the ever-sinister “<em>you just wait.</em>” Two or three kids ago I wrote about these moms, calling them the “<a href="https://www.splicetoday.com/on-campus/topper-moms-are-bottom-feeders">Topper Moms,</a>” and now that they’re empty-nesters, one of their pastimes in addition to sharing grandchildren photos on Facebook all day is finding young women with babies to prey on and hit with unsolicited advice.</p>
<p>When you’re a new mom, the last thing you need a stranger telling you (because undoubtedly your mother, mother-in-law or several other friendly-fire family members are probably all simultaneously doing it) is <em>just wait</em>. For what? Oh, any number of things: potty training, teenagerhood, first boyfriend/girlfriend, prom—just some future event that seems ominous and terrifying to a woman who’s just trying to get her bearings, maybe some sleep, and for today’s moms (something as a consumer of only the <em>What to Expect</em> books thankfully didn’t have to deal with) survive a crippling barrage of social media posts and Pinterest boards of how to “do things the right way,” whatever that is.</p>
<p>It's a shitty thing to say to a new mom. What’s the point? Establishing some higher status in a non-existent hierarchy of motherhood? Just wait for what… rushing past this moment of joy, enjoying a sweet-smelling infant grinning up at her because you don’t have that anymore with your cranky middle-schooler who calls you “bruh” and leaves dirty socks all over the house? Lame.</p>
<p>I’ll stick with my motherhood “days are long, years are short” quote because it’s relatable and nostalgic. My rule is always the kindergarten rule: if you can’t say something nice, shut the fuck up.</p>
<p>In 30 years of being a mother, I’ve learned a thousand lessons. How about we start telling new moms: you just wait, for all the joy there is to come—of course there are tough days, but there are so many more rewards. No matter what you accomplish in this life, nothing will be as meaningful and special as the relationships with your children when they become adults.</p>
<p>Once they walk, all we do is chase after them, worried they’ll fall and get hurt, I thought, when she said it. That never changes. They do fall. They do get hurt. Our only job as mothers is to be there for them when they do.</p>
Mary McCarthytag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333152024-03-15T06:24:00-04:002024-03-14T18:56:10-04:00Mindfulness: How A Made-Up Word Became The World’s Most Pernicious Idea<p>The Pali word <em>sati</em>, which is tremendously important to Buddhist thought, can’t be translated into English. The closest equivalent would be a whole sentence, like this one: “A harmonious awareness of oneness.” Becoming fully aware of an object, in Buddhism, means participating in the object’s fluctuating, protean existence. Everything is “alive.” Everything “thinks.” If you want to see the trees around you, think like a tree. Try to realize that you, and they, only exist in relation to each other. You’re linked like the words in this sentence. </p>
<p>Many know enough about the broad strokes of Buddhism to read about all this comfortably. “Sure, go ahead—commune with the forest, if that makes you happy!” But that’s glib. Reverse the dynamic and you’ll see at once what I mean. Imagine a Buddhist calling out: “Go ahead! Pretend you and the forest are different! I can’t forbid you from constructing a miserable, illusory self.” <em>Sati</em> isn’t a hobby, or a useful tool for blowing your own mind if cannabis is still illegal where you live. It’s fundamental. You can’t begin to talk sensibly about the world until you’ve become aware of its true nature by practicing <em>sati</em>.</p>
<p>But <em>sati</em> is <em>more</em> than an activity. It’s more than just a word. It’s the hub for a whole system of beliefs. “All things are one,” in the West, is an insult to most of Western philosophy. It’s a sacrilegious, heretical assertion that runs counter to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Things are very distinct from each other in the West. Most crucially, we separate persons, who are capable of action, from the inert world of things.</p>
<p>If “I am thinking,” I am using “my mind” to do it. I can proceed however I wish; thinking grants complete independence. This attitude is so ingrained that René Descartes, to liberate himself from his senses and surroundings, climbed all the way to Heaven on a ladder of pure thought. There’s something darkly funny about Descartes’s <em>Meditations on First Philosophy</em>. You get to watch him pushing the world away like someone excusing themselves from the dinner table. “I think, therefore I am,” Descartes writes, skipping lightly over enormous differences between intention, act, and meaning. “Certainly,” we might reply, like the infamous Caterpillar from <em>Alice in Wonderland</em>. “But… <em>who</em> are <em>you</em>.”</p>
<p>For to “be presently aware,” in the sense of the Pali word <em>sati</em>, requires us to keep ourselves busy. Everything you do, you’re obliged to do in a way that harmonizes with your entire environment. Imagine eating your lunch, at a food court, in a mall. Now imagine doing it in a way that aligns gracefully with everything you see, hear, and observe around you. Remember, too, that a truly harmonious meal expresses (in some reasonable way) your own feelings as they glimmer and evolve. Above all, you must continually remind yourself of the transience at the heart of all clusters, all things. You’re using up food, easing your hunger, and then moving on. You’ll gather up the plastic serving baskets, crinkle wax paper into a ball, and sweep lettuce off the table with your hand. In the end, it’s like you were never there.</p>
<p>If you want the closest Western equivalent to Eastern notions of impermanence, applied specifically to snack foods, I give you the wisdom of stand-up comic Mitch Hedberg: “I bought a doughnut and they gave me a receipt for the doughnut; I don't need a receipt for the doughnut. I'll just give you the money, and you give me the doughnut, end of transaction. We don't need to bring ink and paper into this. I just can't imagine a scenario where I would have to prove that I bought a doughnut.”</p>
<p>It's funnier when you see Hedberg perform it, but the essence of his humor shines through at the end: <em>I can’t imagine a scenario where I would have to prove that I bought a doughnut</em>. Hedberg <em>tried</em> to imagine a scenario involving that pointless receipt. He felt he owed the receipt, and the doughnut shop, at least that much. That’s what <em>sati</em> is all about: not merely jamming some receipt in your jeans, after taking it reluctantly from the cashier, but letting it whisper things to you about all the transactions that clutter up our lives.</p>
<p>You’ve probably already guessed what happened, in the late-19th century, when English-speaking translators set to work on <em>sati</em>. They settled on the term “mindfulness.” It’s a crucial misunderstanding. “Mindfulness” implies either a mind full of busy ephemera, or, worse, some kind of richness that’s purely mental. Sati is neither; it’s a state of harmony thoughtfully and slowly achieved. Perhaps it belongs entirely to a slower world more permeated with natural events; regardless, it has little or nothing to do with the process of “observing” one’s own feelings and letting them drift past, unjudged, which is how it’s come to be understood here in the West.</p>
<p>The worst thing you can do, as a person seeking to experience <em>sati</em>, is to flip through your phone until you find a meditation app, and then pressing “play” on one of their little guided trips. There’s nothing wrong, per se, with going on someone else’s mental adventure; that’s what reading is. But there <em>is</em> something wrong with achieving serenity by harmonizing yourself with an environment that’s been scraped down to a soundtrack, using noise-cancelling headphones that edit out the sirens, passing cars, screaming children, and other nuisances that make your environment so difficult. Are you consciously directing your attention? No, you’re letting Calm or Headspace do that for you. Are you achieving a state of awareness that makes it possible to “let in” the sirens of ambulances heading for strangers? No, you’re discounting their existence. It’s not necessarily easy or pleasant to work your way towards <em>sati</em> in an environment saturated with crisis, but it’s precisely the difficulty of that endeavor that makes the goal worthwhile. In other words, the nagging discontent that you feel when you’re trying to meditate may not be the app failing you, or you failing the app. It may be the world outside, knocking desperately for admission into your calm, tailored headspace.</p>
<p>Alan Watts, the philosopher and mystic who (perhaps) has tried the hardest to wake Westerners up from their misunderstandings of spirituality, put the matter thus in <em>The Wisdom of Insecurity</em>: “Once there is the suspicion that a religion is a myth, its power has gone. It may be necessary for man to have a myth, but he cannot self-consciously prescribe one as he can mix a pill for a headache. A myth can only ‘work’ when it is thought to be truth, and man cannot for long knowingly and intentionally ‘kid’ himself. Even the best modern apologists for religion seem to overlook this fact. For their most forceful arguments for some sort of return to orthodoxy are those which show the social and moral advantages of belief in God. But this does not prove that God is a reality. It proves, at most, that believing in God is useful. ‘If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.’ Perhaps. But if the public has any suspicion that he does not exist, the invention is in vain.”</p>
<p>Watts<b id="docs-internal-guid-badf0307-7fff-6a7f-5267-fc32cc631f52"> </b>is talking about articles like <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/talking-about-men/201912/prayer-and-mental-health#:~:text=One%20large%20population%20study%2C%20led,to%20those%20who%20never%20prayed.">this one</a>, published in the omnipresent and pernicious periodical <em>Psychology Today</em>, which concludes: “One large population study, led by Harvard Professor Tyler VanderWeele, found that young adults who prayed daily tended to have fewer depressive symptoms, and higher levels of life satisfaction, self-esteem, and positive affect, in comparison to those who never prayed.”</p>
<p>What are we to make of this? Consider the lurking argument for fundamentalism that seeps in around the edges of this claim. If a child who prays is better off—less depression, higher “life satisfaction,” and so on—then who’s to argue if that child also believes that homosexuality is a sin against God, and that the world was created in seven eventful days? At least they believe in something, right? They have accidentally found the cure for everything that drives the rest of us to distraction.</p>
<p>Modern<b id="docs-internal-guid-4dea398a-7fff-1c63-02f5-94fd1c5dd452"> </b>advice concerning gratitude is no better. (See, for example, <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/a-deeper-wellness/202312/understanding-and-practicing-gratitude#:~:text=A%20gratitude%20practice%20can%20be,takes%20only%20minutes%20a%20day.">this article</a>, which is one among thousands and also appeared in <em>Psychology Today</em>.) Why, it takes only minutes a day! But a stickler like Watts is every bit as unimpressed with trumped-up gratitude as he is with believing in God because it’s good for you, like eating your vegetables: “If my happiness at this moment consists largely in reviewing happy memories and expectations, I am but dimly aware of this present. I shall still be dimly aware of the present when the good things that I have been expecting come to pass. For I shall have formed a habit of looking behind and ahead, making it difficult for me to attend to the here and now. If, then, my awareness of the past and future makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world.”</p>
<p>It never fails to strike me as both laughable, and sad, that the film <em>Eat, Pray, Love </em>highlights the importance of gratitude at an Italian meal where its protagonist, and spiritual tour guide, Elizabeth Gilbert tells everyone she’s grateful for a meal served by a family she barely knows. The next day she departs for India. André Gregory put it well in <em>My Dinner with André</em>: “A child holds your hand, and then, suddenly, there’s this huge man lifting you off the ground, and then he’s gone. Where’s that son?”</p>
<p>The things for which we’re currently most grateful are as fragile and fugitive as the years themselves. That isn’t to diminish the importance of being aware of the goodness that sends its shivers through the world like arrows of light. But it’s to recognize, like Hedberg in the doughnut store, that where we are is <em>here</em>, with all its attendant difficulty and chaos. The adventure of <em>sati</em> is an adventure in the real world, where things are in flux, and where difficulty, madness, and want is as much a part of the fabric of existence as ease, health, and plenty. To live shrouded by manufactured gratitude is another way of filtering the world down to what it isn’t.</p>
<p>For many years, I wondered what the point of melancholy (or even despairing) artwork could be. It seemed perverse to get enjoyment from the music of Bon Iver, or the paintings of El Greco, when there are (somewhere) fluffy clouds and choirs of sweet-voiced singers, carrying on and trying their best. Ought we not to be most grateful for <em>them</em>? Then, as I was meditating on the 1960s mantra “Be here now,” I thought of the story “Car Crash While Hitchhiking,” by Denis Johnson. In the story, a woman loses all of her family to a senseless accident. When she finds out her husband is dead, she screams. Johnson writes, “She shrieked the way I imagined an eagle would shriek. It felt wonderful to be alive to hear it! I’ve gone looking for that feeling everywhere.”</p>
<p>And the hardest lesson of all to learn is that that feeling is looking for <em>us</em>, every moment, if we’re willing to let ourselves listen, and hear it: again, again, and again, in time with the real world’s broken beating heart.</p>
Joseph Kugelmasstag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333142024-03-15T06:23:00-04:002024-03-15T15:37:22-04:00Peter Thiel Needs to Write Me a Check<p>“Why is there so much stuff about novels, art and pop culture in here?” I was used to the question; interviewed about my book <em>The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs the New American Stasi</em>. It’s about the 2018 effort by the American left to destroy me and my high school friend Brett Kavanaugh, who was up for a slot on the Supreme Court. The American Stasi had used extortion, witness tampering, death threats and false accusations to destroy us. I got fed into the DNC’s soul-crushing machine.</p>
<p>It’s all in <em>The Devil’s Triangle</em>. There’s also stuff about the books, movies and music that shaped us as teenagers in the 1980s.</p>
<p>Conservatives ask why not just politics but the Pet Shop Boys and Picasso are in my book. The fact they’re even asking reveals a serious defect in modern conservative thought. We talk about how toxic the culture is, then question why someone would recall and celebrate a culture that wasn’t so toxic. We make loud and annoying voices like Ben Shapiro rich and famous, while neglecting artists and writers with genuine talent who could change the culture. That’s why so much of <em>The Devil’s Triangle</em> is about novels, movies, music and art.</p>
<p>The solution? I’ve decided that Peter Thiel needs to write me a check. A big one. The money would be to turn <em>The Devil’s Triangle</em> into a film—not to mention keep my journalism career going. Thiel’s the tech billionaire who has shown some sympathy for conservative ideas, bankrupting Gawker and writing an essay for <em>The New Criterion</em> about “the diversity myth.” <em>The New Criterion</em> just published a short story by Woody Allen, a genius who was canceled by the left. It’s a good start but we need more.</p>
<p>Conservatives love the raw meat served up by outlets like <em>The Daily Wire</em> and Libs of Tik Tok; we’ve gotten so used to this bloody diet that we blanch if something more nourishing is slipped into the mix. When someone like Alec Baldwin writes a memoir, Nevertheless, readers and fans expect talk of his family and upbringing, as well as the artists and actors who shaped him. The personal and the cultural go together. For some reason, conservatives like me aren’t supposed to do the same thing. The pop culture of the 1980s encouraged me to love beauty and America and be excited about the future. No book about me and Brett Kavanaugh as teens would make sense without talking about it. It’s a culture that was viciously attacked in 2018 and deserves defending. It’s dispiriting that so many MAGAs don’t get that. Baldwin supported my work a few years ago when he saw a short film I’d made. Where was Matt Walsh? Giving a lecture to the camera in his studio. His film <em>What is a Woman?</em> is great point-and-laugh stuff. It’s not <em>The Lives of Others</em>.</p>
<p>The right’s refusal to support artists leads many people to abandon conservative politics—or to not join. Last year I came across a very cool film called <em>Exemplum</em>. It was shot in black and white and made for $10,000. The director, producer and lead actor is a young talent named Paul Roland. Roland is a political conservative. He’s working to get his second film going, but finding financial backers is a challenge. Meanwhile, the tranny-obsessed <em>Daily Wire</em> is producing crap like <em>Lady Ballers</em>.</p>
<p>Roland and I became friends after I gave <em>Exemplum</em> a five-star review. We often talk about how if he were a gifted young liberal filmmaker he’d have all kinds of support—support he’s not getting from the right. Roland thinks <em>The Devil’s Triangle</em> would make a great film, and he’s not the only one. In 2018, right after my political nightmare ended, I got a call from a successful Hollywood actor—someone who has shared the screen with Johnny Depp. He was baffled no one on the right had expressed interest in a film about how a non-celebrity had come up against the leftist machine of the media, politicians and opposition researchers and survived.</p>
<p>I told him conservatives don’t like art, much less flawed protagonists like me. They prefer neat and clean come-to-Jesus stories. For <em>The Devil’s Triangle</em> he envisioned a psychological thriller with 1980s flashbacks. “Imagine the soundtrack!” We’re talking kegs, Jesuits, teen ragers, tenderness, love, Irish-Catholic passion, a terrifying enemy in the American Stasi, the Replacements, the Pretenders, Michael Jackson, Van Halen and Talk Talk. “Sydney Sweeney needs to be in this thing.” one old high school buddy told me. “She’s got an amazing rack.” Exactly.</p>
<p>At one point last year I reached out to Kirk Cameron, the former 1980s sitcom star and now active evangelical. Months ago Cameron asked for me contact info but never followed up. Instead, he’s doing a kids show. “We are now diving deeper into children’s entertainment with a children’s television show, combining timeless biblical moral values of <em>Mr. Rogers Neighborhood</em> but with much modernized, high-energy, animated storytelling,” the actor said to the <em>Washington Examiner</em>.</p>
<p>So what to do? Am I proposing that Thiel bankroll my journalism as well as a film based on my book? Yes. Conservatism can’t afford to lose guys like me and Paul Roland. </p>
Mark Judgetag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333202024-03-15T00:01:00-04:002024-03-15T02:09:03-04:00Jonathan Glazer's Oscar Speechtag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333102024-03-14T06:29:00-04:002024-03-13T18:16:19-04:00No Teacher’s Pet<p>As America’s public education system continues to plummet into the land of sick jokes—when will AFT president Randi Weingarten get sacked?—I’ve noticed a lot of old-timers and Gen X social media stalwarts letting the country know what teacher “changed my life.” I suppose for a tiny minority of people that’s true, but generally it’s almost as ridiculous as people (probably the same) claiming that an album or book made them what they are (or aren’t) today. Nineteen years ago, I read a column in a lefty weekly by a self-righteous know-it-all (understated)—who, still bitching about the 2000 election, usually closed his stream-of-nonsense blog posts with “Thanks, Ralph”—saying that as a 15-year-old Bruce Springsteen “changed my life” with his release of <i>Born to Run</i>. Weird, undoubtedly, and if the guy wasn’t such a dick I would’ve, momentarily, felt bad if that were true. I have a number of favorite LPs, with <i>Highway 61 Revisited</i>, at least today, on top of the heap, but none “changed my life.”</p>
<p>Nor did any teacher in the Huntington, New York public schools I attended. Looking back, I’d say the best educator—and, believe it or not, there were dedicated men and women who really were “educators”—I encountered was a straight-laced Irishman named Jerome McGillicuddy, a tall, ruddy-faced Catholic man who taught my 11<sup>th</sup> grade AP English class. He was tough but fair, and made no apologies for the heavy load of homework every week. I had no bone to pick there—many teachers tried to be friends with their pupils and went easy on grading and number of tests—since I read a lot on my own (some authors classicist McGillicuddy scoffed at, such as Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion), but we got along well.</p>
<p>What’s memorable about “Jerry” was the pre-collegiate curriculum he embraced, including a second-semester term paper that would count for half the grade. Like my buddies in that class, initially I was daunted by the task—my first in high school—but then dove in, selecting Dylan Thomas’ still-marvelous <i>Under Milk Wood</i> as my topic. There was no assignment I took more seriously: it meant repeated trips to the local library, checking out books on Thomas (in short supply) and straining my eyes at the micro-fiche contemporary reviews of the play that was published in 1954, a year after the acclaimed writer died at 39.</p>
<p>One advantage I had over most of my classmates was that I could type, and for three days, after a lot of organization, with notes, newspaper clippings and books spread out on the floor, I banged out copies of the essay on an old Royal at the dining room table, using white-out and carbon paper, and was finally satisfied with the 10 pages I turned in. I’m not sure if it was deserved, but Mr. McGillicuddy gave me an A, and took five minutes for a private conversation, in which he expressed his pleasure that I’d worked hard on the subject, and suggested I major in English at college. My self-confidence was high, perhaps obnoxiously so, but his encouragement put a spring in my step. Nonetheless, it didn’t “change my life.” That I remember his name 53 years later isn’t insignificant, but then again—talk about a cluttered mind—I could rattle off the names of 90 percent of my teachers from kindergarten to 12<sup>th</sup> grade.</p>
<p>However, unlike my son Nicky, whose pre-five-years-old memory is flabbergasting, my own recollections of life before school started are gauzy at best. Two exceptions: as a toddler my dad plucked me out of a threatening wave at Jones Beach, something I dreamed about often as kid (and for some reason Jesus Christ is present, giving me water from a pouch, which makes no sense). And I have a blurry vision of eating birthday cake and opening a Donald Duck present when I turned three.</p>
<p>The accompanying photo on a winter day (I’m on the left) at the porch of our house is a mystery. I recognize Kenny and Laurie McGuire, but not the kid at top, but why it was recorded for posterity is anyone’s guess; it must’ve been snapped by one of my brothers or mom, since my dad would’ve been working. I’ve no idea whether my companions on that day are still alive or what became of them. Truthfully, I don’t really care one way or the other, for they didn’t “change my life,” even though, unconsciously, there was no doubt I was born to pick winners and losers, get lost in the rain, and mix Texas Medicine and railroad gin.</p>
<p>Take a look at the clues to figure out the year: Lee Petty wins the first Daytona 500; <i>A Raisin in the Sun</i> opens on Broadway; the first two American soldiers are killed in Vietnam; Howard Hawks releases his masterpiece <em>Rio Bravo</em>; Miles Davis’ <i>Kind of Blue</i> is released; <i>The Wizard of Oz</i> is shown on TV for the second time, and becomes an annual CBS tradition; the Pan American Games are held in Chicago; Matthew Modine is born and Errol Flynn dies; John Knowles’ <i>A Separate Peace</i> and Philip Roth’s <i>Goodbye, Columbus</i> are published; Billy Wilder works with Marilyn Monroe for the last time in <em>Some Like It Hot</em>; Barclays is the first bank to install a computer; Margaret Thatcher becomes a Member of Parliament; Lloyd Price’s “Stagger Lee” is fourth most popular song; and Berry Gordy Jr. founds Tamla Records in Detroit.</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/333122024-03-14T06:28:00-04:002024-03-15T23:55:12-04:00I’m Not Ready for Bad Baseball<p>Are you excited for baseball season? Not me. As a fan of the Boston Red Sox, 2024 marks the least excited I’ve ever been for the start of a season since I started following the sport in 2005. The Red Sox are the most successful MLB team of the 21st century. They have four World Series rings, including one that ended an 86-year championship drought and another that concluded a season where they went 108-54. There was also the year when they had the most hyped rookie from Japan in Daisuke Matsuzaka and won a title (2007), and the year they won after radical Islamic terrorists bombed the Boston Marathon (2013).</p>
<p>Those wins provide fans with great memories but little to look forward to in the present. The Sox are coming off back-to-back last-place finishes, and various projections, including those from FanGraphs, have them finishing last for a third consecutive season. If that happens, as people expect, it’ll also mark the fourth time in five seasons that the Red Sox do it, as they were the worst team in the American League East in the lockdown-shortened 2020 MLB season.</p>
<p>General manager Craig Breslow must have one of the easier jobs in America since the team refuses to sign talented players as was the case under his predecessor, Chaim Bloom. Having a different GM and the same problem lends credence to the idea that Red Sox ownership, spearheaded by John Henry, has little interest in putting together competent ballclubs. The team no longer signs big-name free agents. It signed starting pitcher Lucas Giolito, who tore his UCL during spring training, and aging first baseman CJ Cron, who struggled away from Coors Field last season. The team signed Cron despite having no pressing need for a first baseman or designated hitter. Yippee.</p>
<p>The Sox were once great, but now ownership takes its fans for granted, understanding that, while ticket sales may slip, many people will still go because it's the Red Sox, it's something to do, and they were good at one point. The team’s struggles also make me wonder: how do fans of other, less successful franchises do it? How do people root for the Kansas City Royals, Oakland Athletics, or Los Angeles Angels? A few years back, the Angels had Mike Trout, Shohei Ohtani, and Albert Pujols, and they still struggled. They’re now without two of those three players, and Trout last played in at least 120 games back in 2019. The team's last playoff appearance came in 2014, and fans have little reason to expect that drought to end this season.</p>
<p>The Oakland Athletics were a punching bag last year, going 50-112, and ownership wants to relocate the team to Las Vegas. The Athletics consistently rank near the bottom of the league in payroll and, in 2024, increased leaguewide acceptance and use of sabermetrics dilutes an advantage the franchise had 20 to 25 years ago; the movie <i>Moneyball</i> also ignores that the team had great homegrown starting pitching.</p>
<p>The Kansas City Royals are another one. The team made back-to-back World Series appearances in 2014 and 2015, capturing the crown in ‘15, but the franchise has struggled since. It hasn’t had one winning season since 2015 and is coming off a 106-loss year in 2023. These three teams also have lousy farm systems, <a href="https://theathletic.com/5258158/2024/02/09/mlb-farm-system-rankings-2024/">according to The Athletic</a>. The Royals' farm system ranks 25th out of 30 teams, while the Angels and Athletics rank 29th and 30th, respectively. Imagine how worse things would be without MLB's communist draft system that rewards lousy teams and punishes good ones.</p>
<p>As a Massachusetts resident, I have one baseball season I can always look forward to: the Cape Cod Baseball League. It's arguably the top summer collegiate baseball league in America, the games are free to attend, and they have staggered start times (varying from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. on weekdays). Compared to Fenway Park, the concessions are far cheaper, getting to the parks is easier, and there far fewer obnoxious drunks starting trouble at the ballpark. Unfortunately, unlike other baseball seasons that begin this month, the Cape Cod League season is still a few months away.</p>
Tom Joycetag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/332712024-03-14T06:27:00-04:002024-03-12T20:12:58-04:00The Many Moods of Ben Vaughn<p>Music is a necessity for a well-rounded, balanced life. Mixed with sentimental emotions and the kind of good vibes energy that’ll make you want to get up and dance. Or at least tap your toes and play air guitar. Ben Vaughn’s a dancer and a player. He likes to make other people dance, too. Vaughn’s a man of many hats. As a recording artist, he's released 14 albums (including <em>Rambler '65</em>, recorded entirely in his car). In the world of TV and film, Vaughn created the musical identity for the sitcoms <em>That '70s Show</em> and <em>3rd Rock from the Sun</em>.</p>
<p>Tom DiVenti:<em> You started young, playing in bands. Was that mostly in Philly?</em></p>
<p>Ben Vaughn: I’m from Camden, New Jersey, across the river from Philadelphia, so my childhood was spent going in and out of Philly to all the record stores; you know, we had great Do Wop and soul music. It was a very vibrant and great place to grow up. American Bandstand was still going strong, so all the small-time label record hustlers and producers were working it, and radio at the time was phenomenal. We had two soul stations—two Top-40 stations—and we had the Geator [Philadelphia oldies DJ, Jerry Blavat]. When I discovered the Geator it was like being abducted by aliens. Because of his playlists, he never told you whether a song was old or new. He just played records that he loved and thought that his teenage audience would love.</p>
<p>TD:<em> Because they were timeless?</em></p>
<p>BV: Yes, I didn’t know, or I was too young to understand why the other radio stations weren’t playing these records. They were better, wilder, funkier and more primitive, and I couldn’t understand why the Top-40 stations weren’t playing these records because I didn’t understand the chronology of the history of rock ‘n’ roll. I was absorbed it all in an innocent way. I was 10 years old. I started playing in bands at 12, which was 1967; we still had to play all the old stuff. If you wanted to get hired back at a dance, you had to play music that teenagers would dance to. In Philadelphia and South Jersey, that meant oldies. That’s because of the Geator. We didn’t know they were oldies. He gave us this vocabulary of soulful music; it really is timeless.</p>
<p>TD: <em>Was the Geator a mentor to you?</em></p>
<p>BV: Yeah. I was a weird kid; nobody understood me. I was so into rock ‘n’ roll; I had these Tourette’s moments where I’d just start blurting out crazy stuff about records and music. I’d turn on the Geator show on, and he was weirder than me. I was drawn to him immediately because I thought he understood me.</p>
<p>TD: <em>He also set up his shows so they’d have themes, and I noticed listening to your show, “The Many Moods of Ben Vaughn,” you kind of do the same thing.</em></p>
<p>BV: Yeah, I got that from the Geator for sure.</p>
<p>TD: <em>How many bands did you go through in your youth before the Ben Vaughn Combo?</em></p>
<p>BV: For the dances, I’d join or form different bands constantly. We had a lot of fun making up names for the bands. They weren’t all the same players all the time but we’d change the name of our group for every gig.</p>
<p>TD: <em>Did you play the same set list?</em></p>
<p>BV: We did, which is a really bad game plan if you look for recognition or branding, but we had names like Johnny Cash & the Registers, Tomato, and my favorite one was Donna Esquanasi. She was a girl who sat in front of me in math class. So we just named the band after her. She was flattered. But by the time I graduated from high school, I wasn’t really playing in bands because of <em>Aqualung</em> and ELP. Edgar Winter, you know big arena rock, and I wasn’t that interested. I was always more interested in getting people to dance. You know, starting out as a drummer was great because you could see what’s working and what’s not by audience reaction. I started out as a dancer; I’d go to all the dances. I grew up in an Italian-American community, and dancing was big because of <em>American Bandstand</em>, and every disc jockey had record hops.</p>
<p>TD: <em>Did you play Baltimore in the past?</em></p>
<p>BV: I used to play at a place called the 8 ×10 Club. A guy named Dickie Gamerman. He was a character. He reminded me of Angel on <em>The Rockford Files</em>. There was this glint in his eye; you knew he was up to some trouble.</p>
<p>TD: <em>That was Dickie. We had the pleasure of seeing Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention every year on Mother's Day in Baltimore. He’d have guests like Flo & Eddie and Captain Beefheart. We were there every Mother's Day.</em></p>
<p>BV: I<b id="docs-internal-guid-2d6af1f1-7fff-427b-b616-63f19c19429a"> </b>met Zappa in 1970. He played a gig in Philly, and a friend convinced me we needed to hang by the stage door. Finally, Frank came out and gave us all the time in the world; he was just a nice guy. He sent his road manager away, telling him he’d find his way back to the hotel. He wanted to talk to us kids. We talked about do-wop; R & B, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_and_Dewey">Don & Dewey</a>. I recommended a record store that he should go to the next day. I was a do-wop kid. It was a great experience.</p>
<p>TD:<b id="docs-internal-guid-1d41e8ce-7fff-a335-955e-040411dd6659"> </b><em><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruben_and_the_Jets">Ruben & the Jets</a>.</em></p>
<p>BV: Exactly. I was the socially awkward kid like we all were, and I’m meeting someone famous. The patience he had with me was a real example of how you should treat your public. And I’ve always thought of that, like, when I meet people, even in my stratosphere of recognition and throughout my career, meeting people that are into my music, I think of Frank Zappa right away, like, What would Frank do?</p>
<p>TD: <em>Do you have any music tours coming up?</em></p>
<p>BV: Not touring so much, but I go to Spain once a year and tour because my records were really big over there in the 1980s. I have this alternate career there where I’m famous; it’s pretty funny. I get recognized on the street and take selfies with people. But I just got back from Rhode Island, with the band Deer Tick. They recorded one of my songs on their last album, and I just went there to record a whole new album with them backing me up, and we’re getting ready to mix now.</p>
<p>TD: <em>Your radio show is getting syndicated all over the radio stations everywhere now.</em></p>
<p>BV: My radio show’s on 28 stations now. It’s coming along. You know, world domination is the goal, but I’m falling short of that.</p>
<p>TD: <em>Where do you see the future of modern music heading with all the AI technology happening now?</em></p>
<p>BV: I don’t know. I just feel lucky to be alive. I don’t think too much about the future. I think even though the world is insane right now, I’m lucky to be alive. I can’t even explain why. I guess I’m an optimist. Even though I’m from New Jersey, I have a really good feeling this is a consciousness-raising moment, even though it doesn’t feel like it. Something is shifting. Like with most things, they get worse before they get better. As far as music, I played a gig last night, and we had a packed house. I’m just so impressed that people will leave home, get in their cars, find a parking space, and go to a bar to hear me play. I’m grateful. Live music is still alive. As far as the record business, I have no idea what happened. I don’t really relate to or really care about it, either. I’m just happy to make music, and if there’s a handful of people who like what I do and respond to it, it makes them happier or makes them glad they came out that night. That's a big thing for me. I’m at that point in my life where I really see things for exactly what they are.</p>
<p>TD: <em>Life, death, heaven, hell, and where do you fit in?</em></p>
<p>BV: I believe in reincarnation because, what’s real? I like that it inspires me to lead a life of self-improvement, always trying to work on myself so the next person who inherits my soul has an easier go of it. Because I fixed some things in this carnation that will help whoever comes next, and it might be a dachshund. Who knows?</p>
Tom DiVentitag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333092024-03-14T06:27:00-04:002024-03-13T18:11:28-04:00Meeting Ruby<p>Jules set his alarm for three p.m. He wanted to sleep until four, but Ruby was due then. He dozed off after reading a few pages from his book, glasses slightly askew. He startled and then settled back onto his pillow, removing his glasses and shutting his eyes again.</p>
<p>When the alarm beeped, he noticed tightness in his chest. Ruby would be here soon, he thought. He mustered his energy and flung his legs off the bed down to the floor. Jules made his way into the bathroom and splashed cool water on his face, taking a moment to look in the mirror. His skin was sagging and sunken around his cheeks and the corners of his eyes. His face was clean-shaven. Gravity really did a number on the body. Jules had shrunk about two and a half inches over the last 40 years. He was now down to 5 feet and 8 inches. What bothered him more was how everything began drooping around age 65. Despite his walks and decent eating habits, he was pulled ever-so-slowly toward the ground at all times.</p>
<p>Jules peed. At least that still worked fine. He washed his hands and then went into the kitchen and started a pot of coffee, wondering if Ruby would have a cup.</p>
<p>Jules sat down at the computer and opened the email Reva had sent about Ruby.</p>
<p><i>Subject: Ruby 4-6 </i></p>
<p><i>Ruby Gonzalez</i></p>
<p><i>Ruby has been working with IHSS for two years. Previously, Ruby worked in a medical clinic in her native Guatemala. In 2019, Ruby moved to California with her son. Ruby is fluent in Spanish and is currently studying English at Santa Barbara Adult School. Ruby has been described as “Exuberant, thoughtful and kind.”</i></p>
<p>Jules didn’t know more than 20 words of Spanish. Por favor and gracias. De nada. He liked that phrase, “De Nada.”</p>
<p>Jules remembered an interview he’d heard with Philip Roth. Jules was in college when he enjoyed Roth’s earliest work, <i>Goodbye, Columbus, </i>which landed him on the literary map. It was one of the books that had Jules dreaming of becoming a writer, as there was never any doubt you’d entered the vision of another human in Roth’s narrative style. Ten years later, he’d laughed at the masturbatory novel <i>Portnoy’s Complaint.</i></p>
<p>When Jules turned 58, Reva sent him Roth’s haunting tale of a father searching for his estranged revolutionary daughter. <i>American Pastoral </i>was a darkly riveting tale.</p>
<p>Roth’s ego was enormous. He was labeled “The voice of a generation” when he was a young writer. Maybe that was the issue: he couldn’t get over himself. After the 45-minute interview, host Terry Gross had thanked Roth for joining her. Whereas most guests replied with “Thank you, Terry.” Or “My pleasure.” Or “I enjoyed this,” Roth replied flatly, “You are welcome.” Maybe that was the inevitable view of interviews after 30 years of being asked similar questions and nearly universally praised by the critics.</p>
<p>Maybe that was what happened when you spent your life inside your head, wrapped up in your imagination, cut off from the rest of the world.</p>
<p>He knew some of the question words. Por que? Why? Cual? Which? Donde? Where?</p>
<p>Jules thought, “Donde esta Rubi?” as he sipped his coffee. While he waited at his computer, an email came in from Ruby. Jules looked at the clock. 3:45. “Hi Jules! I was running late. Sorey! Maybe 10 minits late.”</p>
<p>Jules sighed. At least she emailed, he thought. At 4:05, Jules was at his window, holding the curtain and peering out at the sidewalk. He spotted a young woman who was probably Ruby. She was walking briskly up the hill. There was a bus stop a block down.</p>
<p>Jules prepared himself for his new permanent afternoon guest. He sat down on the couch and took a few deep breaths, smoothing out his hair and trying to release his mild anxiety. He heard footsteps and then the doorbell.</p>
<p>Ruby was younger and more attractive than Jules expected. She wasn't more than five feet tall, but had a powerful presence, a hidden magnetism and penetrating hazel eyes. After taking inventory of the house as Ako had done, Ruby sat down with her clipboard and carefully wrote notes under the checklist. Ruby asked, "Are you hungry?"</p>
<p>Jules didn't realize how hungry he was. He checked his watch. It was 4:45. Had he eaten lunch? Since breakfast, he only remembered eating a handful of almonds and an orange around noon. Then he dozed off.</p>
<p>"What time you like me prepare dinners?" Ruby asked.</p>
<p>"Oh, hmm. I suppose I need to go to the grocery store." Jules replied.</p>
<p>"We make something today and we make plan. Order Instacart next time. I email Reva." Ruby said.</p>
<p>The service enabled Reva and Jules to interact directly with Ruby and Ako, though Jules thought it best if Reva was the primary contact in case he didn't get to an email in time.</p>
<p>Ruby searched the fridge and found a few vegetables at the bottom. She stir-fried some carrots and a green pepper.</p>
<p>She found a box of rice in the freezer, scowled at it, and said, “I make you delicious rice next time.” Next to the rice was a carton of frozen pork sausages. Ruby took out three and defrosted them in the microwave. “I no like microwave but this time is okay,” Ruby said, smiling at Jules.</p>
<p>Ruby seemed to be smiling all the time.</p>
<p>Jules thought of his mother and how rarely he saw her hold a smile. Morty was the only one of the five family members who consistently smiled. Probably because he'd learned to stop caring what anyone thought of him. That was after years of letting most everyone down. There was an odd paradox about Morty and his drinking: whiskey kept him from caring about next month or other people, but it also temporarily kept him smiling.</p>
<p>As Ruby chopped and stirred the pork, Jules thought of the email. “Your biography mentioned you have a son. What is his name?” Jules asked.</p>
<p>Ruby took a moment, looked directly at Jules and said, “My angel Ruben. He is three years old.”</p>
<p>While Jules ate dinner, Ruby sipped a mug of green tea and took Jules through her entire journey.</p>
<p>She explained that Ruben was autistic. They came together from El Salvador when he was still growing inside her. Ruben was born about a week after she arrived in the U.S. Her cousin Elena lived in Lemon Grove, about 15 minutes east of San Diego. Ruby left her village, taking a bus north, through Guatemala and then up through Mexico to Tijuana. Elena met her at the bus stop. They ate fish tacos together and celebrated their reunion. Then they drove north, crossing the border at sunset, and made it back to Lemon Grove.</p>
<p>After moving in with Elena, Ruby applied for asylum. Her husband died in a suspicious accident at the factory where he worked. Ruby was convinced he was killed for attempting to leave a gang he’d been forced to join as a teenager. Ruby’s whole family was threatened. The processing of the asylum claim seemed to take forever.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, Ruby was waiting to give birth. She wasn’t due for another month. One night after Elena came back from work, Ruby’s water broke. Elena drove her to the hospital. The doctor cut her stomach open and brought Ruben out. They were worried because he wasn’t crying. Ruby knew the chaos and stress she felt during the pregnancy had to affect her baby. But what could she have done? She made it the United States and was with her older cousin.</p>
<p>That was three years ago.</p>
<p>Elena worked as a nurse. At first, Ruby stayed home with Ruben. She was 22 and living in a new world, with a new baby, who slept peacefully in her arms, but whose eyes always seemed to wander, rarely meeting hers. She sang to Ruben. She gathered her courage and took him to the little playground two blocks down the street from the apartment. Then the pandemic hit and those playgrounds closed. Elena’s work became exhausting and even more vital. The hospitals were overflowing with patients and Elena showered every time she returned home from work, afraid of spreading the virus to Ruby or Ruben. Luckily, none of them ever became sick.</p>
<p>Ruby took English classes at Lemon Grove Adult School. She made friends who had young babies, too. Ruby’s English improved quickly at the Adult School. She learned how to play piano as a child. Her father noticed she had an ear for music and brought her to the church, where piano lessons were given on Saturdays.</p>
<p>Two years later, she moved up to Ventura with Ruben, and found a special pre-school for him, with Elena’s connections. Ventura was her new home because IHSS was hiring there.</p>
<p>“And that’s my tale! Happily ever after!” Ruby joked.</p>
<p>Jules was bowled over with feelings of compassion and wonder. He thanked Ruby for her cooking and her kindness.</p>
<p>“I’m so glad you’re safe now,” he said. “That was a very tasty dinner. And I didn’t even have any fresh groceries,” he added.</p>
<p>The time was 5:57. Ruby used the bathroom and then collected her things.</p>
<p>“I’ll drive you back down,” Jules said.</p>
<p>“Oh, no! Don’t worry,” Ruby said.</p>
<p>“I insist,” Jules said.</p>
<p>“What is “insist”?” Ruby asked.</p>
<p>“Just to the bus stop, if that’s what you need,” Jules asked.</p>
<p>“Okay, to the bus stop. Thank you, Jules.” Ruby replied, again with that dazzling smile.</p>
Jonah Halltag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333132024-03-14T06:26:00-04:002024-03-18T17:59:47-04:00Varieties of Evil<p>A couple of years ago, in my role as fact-checker, I had to read some of the manifesto of the Buffalo shooter, who’d murdered 10 Black people for being Black. Not many got to do this, as the document was pulled off internet servers soon after the shooting. But I was copyediting and fact-checking an opinion article by geneticists complaining the shooter had <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-must-consider-the-risk-of-racist-misappropriation-of-research/">misappropriated</a> their work, and so I requested and received from those scientists a copy of the manifesto and confirmed that it did cite their legitimate research, distorted by the shooter. One might think it could be interesting to see the world from the perspective of a murderous fanatic, but this document wasn’t worth reading.</p>
<p>Hannah Arendt wrote about “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem">the banality of evil</a>” after observing the trial of Adolf Eichmann. She was struck by the mediocrity of the bureaucrat who’d played a central role in organizing the Holocaust. Arendt’s insight that massive evil can be propagated by undistinguished functionaries is a valid one, but it reveals only one aspect of the malevolent. The Buffalo shooter, whose name I forgot, is an example of another malign type that’s gained prevalence in our time: the young person (usually male) who doesn’t have much of an in-person social life but finds camaraderie online with some group that espouses a hate-filled ideology and takes a sadistic thrill in violence.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2024/764-predator-discord-telegram/"><i>Washington Post</i></a>, <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/764-com-child-predator-network/"><i>Wired</i></a> and other journalistic outlets recently released articles in tandem reporting on the sickening activities of a group called 764 (named for part of a zip code) that preys on children via online platforms, extorting victims into sexual abuse and self-harm including suicide. The coverage emphasizes the group’s sadism, but mostly misses that it has an ideological connection too. According to the <a href="https://gnet-research.org/2024/01/19/764-the-intersection-of-terrorism-violent-extremism-and-child-sexual-exploitation/">Global Network on Extremism & Technology</a>, an academic research initiative, 764 is “adjacent to” the Order of Nine Angles, or O9A, a fascistic movement hostile to Judaism, Christianity, communism, capitalism and democracy, all seen as impediments to Aryan supremacy. O9A sees crimes such as those of 764, as well as Islamic jihadism, as helpful for undermining current social structures. The movement also has affinities for occultism and Satanism.</p>
<p>It shouldn’t be a surprise that people who delight in forcing a girl to carve a name into her thigh or to kill her own pet hamster, say, collaborate with people who think they’re setting up a new civilizational order; nor that in some cases they may be the same people. Varieties of evil tend to work together, including enthusiasts of mayhem alongside reactionaries who want a law-and-order crackdown on a decadent society. Political extremes of left and right often have found common cause, at least for a time, as in the Nazi-Soviet pact. Similarly, O9A are not the first White supremacists to embrace Muslim militants; precedents include <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/film/hajj-amin-al-husayni-meets-hitler">Hitler’s agreement with Hajj Amin al-Husayni</a> on keeping Jews out of Palestine.</p>
<p>In an <a href="https://www.splicetoday.com/consume/nietzsche-meets-bitcoin">article</a> several years ago, I noted divergent ideological tendencies within the current American right, and suggested these might become politically debilitating: “If one’s determined to force through politics a broad societal embrace of a set of values, one will have to identify at some point what those values are. If they’re a combination of aggressive Christianity and aggressive post- or anti-Christianity, the tension between those can’t be papered over forever.” I’m less sure about that now. It’s possible that people who reject Christianity on Nietzschean or even Satanic grounds, and people who want Christians to seize control of the “<a href="https://www.splicetoday.com/writing/the-threat-posed-by-demons">Seven Mountains of Societal Influence</a>,” can be allies based on shared antagonism toward liberalism and rationalism, or shared affinities for conspiracy theories.</p>
<p>The founder of the 764 group is a 17-year-old Texan who was recently sentenced to 80 years in prison, an indicator of how grotesque some of the group’s activities have been. Asked how the youth had responded to investigation by law enforcement, a police lieutenant <a href="https://www.beneaththesurfacenews.com/post/wondering-about-that-80-year-sentence-given-to-an-erath-county-teen-here-s-what-you-didn-t-know">said</a>: “He couldn’t have cared less.”</p>
<p>I’ve long had an interest in supervillains from fiction and fantasy, such as Doctor Doom in Marvel Comics or the Night King from <i>Game of Thrones</i>. In the real world, though, a lot of evil is done by figures that don’t have an impressively malign appearance: a colorless bureaucrat, for example, or a pudgy kid. The challenges of confronting evil include recognizing how deep it can run, and how bland it can look.</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/332702024-03-14T06:24:00-04:002024-03-12T20:25:37-04:00Why Can't You Just Get Over It?<p>It was two days before Christmas of 2022 when I got the news. Marilyn died. (I use a pseudonym to protect her family’s privacy.) The fact that there is something to protect, that there is shame when a suicide takes place, is much of the problem.</p>
<p>Marilyn was 24. She would’ve been 26 this March 14th. She was extraordinarily talented: a college athlete, a student of neuroscience and psychology, and one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever met. She bore a disturbing resemblance to Daenerys Targaryen of <em>Game of Thrones</em>. She loved to talk about health and longevity. I gave her my recipe for pumpkin spice protein cookies and she made a variation on it. Marilyn was never one to do things by other people’s rules, even baking cookies.</p>
<p>When someone dies, people ask, “Were you close?” It’s an offensive question. It implies you have to justify your grief by pointing out some specific way in which your daily life is impacted by their death. Can’t death just be bad, no matter how many times per day you texted?</p>
<p>I’d known Marilyn for four months. During that time, she talked with me about her mental health issues. As I reread all of our texts in the months that followed her death, I was struck by how many of her messages were about her psychiatric medication. Her doctors changed her meds. She had a bad reaction. The pharmacy gave her the wrong medication, and wouldn’t fill her prescription for the right one.</p>
<p>She’d been a healthy person, and played a demanding sport at varsity level in college. Now, as a result of the meds, she told me, she weighed 117 pounds at 5’8.” She wasn’t trying to be a supermodel, but rather to get her brain to work.</p>
<p>After Marilyn died, I fell apart. I cried and cried, lost interest in things I’d enjoyed that reminded me of her. The only person who understood was my mother, who spent years as a hospice chaplain. She knows grief. She helped me through. I tried to get help. One doctor I saw said my grief was just a rationalization. A therapist said Marilyn was a demon infesting me and performed an exorcism. To be honest, that helped a little. Just the fact that someone recognized that something serious had happened made me feel validated.</p>
<p>The exorcism, however, was weird. I didn’t return.</p>
<p>“Why can’t you just get over it?” was the theme of many communications from friends. I couldn’t. I spent hours thinking about the things we’d planned to do together. I asked why it was her, and not me. I was twice her age when she died: 48 to her 24. When someone takes his or her life, they get blamed. Their family gets blamed. Their partner or friends get blamed. We’re supposed to be quiet, not talk about it. Dante put suicides in one of the worst places in hell.</p>
<p>We’re<b id="docs-internal-guid-8d5e9650-7fff-d583-d831-e667a70793b6"> </b>not allowed to grieve when someone dies by suicide. I recently learned this is called “disenfranchised grief.” According to <a href="https://filtermag.org/author/sam-snodgrass/">Sam Snodgrass PhD</a>, who’s on the Board of Directors of <a href="https://broken-no-more.org/">Broken No More</a>, a group whose mission is “to provide support and guidance to those who have lost a loved one due to substance use, to advance the treatment of, and eventual cures for addiction/substance use disorder in a meaningful and useful way and to effect positive policy changes in the current failed war on drugs.”</p>
<p>Doing something positive to honor the person’s life, and perhaps to help save other lives, is a way to process the grief. But there’s no one right way to grieve. I have a painting of Daenerys Targaryen with her dragons on my home office wall. Daenerys looks so much like Marilyn that it feels like she’s with me all day.</p>
<p>People have told me to take the picture down, that I should stop looking at something that reminds me so powerfully of her. I’m not taking the picture down. I have every right to grieve, and to go on, inspired by the person she was and could’ve been. Her life, though short, was a gift. Her memory is a blessing. </p>
April Wilson Smith