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I’m sorry, but too much is perfect.The 1963 Stanley Kramer movie, It’s A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD World, is too much. It’s perfect.It’s too long – 3.3 hours in its restored form. The cast is way too big. The story is way too silly. The title is too long. (It started the trend toward obscenely long movie titles like A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum, How To Succeed In Bus…

BOREDOM, which is sometimes called THE BLANK CANVAS or THE EMPTY CANVAS, is a 1960 novel by the Italian Alberto Moravia.couple kissingBOREDOM is almost plotless. It is, appropriately, about how sterile, alienated modernity – bored, in other words – is also oddly obsessive and wildly driven.Driven for what reasons? To avoid boredom at all costs by being self-defeating. We demand…

For your consideration: I recently had a friend post a photo of himself chin-deep standing in the Amazon River, likely surrounded by voracious piranha fish, holding a beer over his head.What he accomplished was easier, more accessible, and quite likely less expensive than doing it virtually on a computer.a crusader king, as in the video game of the same nameI also once worked with a…

So says a reviewer on Goodreads of Anselm Jappe’s THE SELF-DEVOURING SOCIETY: Capitalism, Narcissism, and Self-Destruction.The book’s cover is of a monster eating its own limbs, a metaphor for capitalism.Jappe is a French social theorist and professor who believes capitalism forms mutants who can only interact with the world by consuming it in an out-of-control way. We are narcissi…

James Ward makes the death of Packard excruciatingly complicated, but it doesn’t need to be.To be fair, automotive historians, at least serious ones like Ward, have to go into the weeds.But, really, Packard died in 1958 because its cars were ugly and unreliable and had terrible build quality. More than one story involves the factory – and some owners – having to use crowbars to get…

And you thought music was just music.Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, Freud may or may not have said. But music is often sex.We’re done with foreplay, put down the damn lute.Music is sex in a gently sublimated form. It’s intellectualized and disguised and sometimes rubbed the wrong way, but all forms of music almost always lead to some kind of climax or resolution.Even a simp…

We are prone to saying “to each his own”.Sorry. Some things are always stupid, shallow, and indicative of people stuck at age 7. If you favor the tasteless, you’re tasteless.That is, sadly, most of us.True culture takes a beating every time a new, more naive class enters the marketplace. It used to be that going to college creamed your brain enough that you knew that pink ba…

Stuart Davis began as an artist of the Ash Can School, and ended up a father of 1960’s pop art. Pretty good for a dedicated Marxist.Stuart Davis, “Garage No. 1”, 1917Davis’ trajectory from Ash Can daily life art, often of poverty and the poorer commercial sections of New York City, quickly morphed into a commercial and advertising theme. By 1921’s “Lucky Strike” he was well on his way…

A sad, internal emptiness fuels most cases of individual political enthusiasm. To belong to a tribe, to take part in a war between alleged good and alleged evil, to be stimulated by outrage, to harden perseverative obsessive repetitive loops in the brain, to have an all-consuming addiction that dulls reality, to have a socially acceptable license to hate, to claim moral superiority, to rational…

Are the fathers of the Frankfurt School of intellectuals profoundly intelligent and important, or self-important upper-middle class trust fund babies all bloated with turgid and meaningless self-masturbatory road sand for brains?ADORNO & BENJAMIN: The Complete Correspondence 1928 -1940 proves both are true.It’s best to start in 1969, after Theordor Adorno called the cops on Germ…

I’m trying to figure out Susan Cheever.I haven’t read her fiction, but I’ve read some of her nonfiction, as you can see from my bookshelf below:John Cheever, Susan Cheever, and othersShe clearly can write. She clearly can think. She has clearly pondered deeply her relationship with her famous father, John Cheever.But there’s something about her writing and thinking that makes m…

I have a good habit of not doing what I don’t want to do. Novelist and short story writer Richard Yates was the same way. Only he crucified the USA and took it down in the process of being free.Richard Yates on his beloved Mazda, toward the endYates had emphysema, epilepsy, bouts of mental illness, was an alcoholic, and smoked 5 packs of cigarettes a day. He died in 1992 at the age of…

Modernist intellectuals proclaimed that the masses needed extermination, death by plagues, aborting, and gassing. Why?Author John Carey says it’s because of universal education that dragged almost everyone upwards toward the “higher classes”.The intellectuals – Virginia Woolf, T.S.Eliot, Jose Ortega y Gasset, H.G.Wells, Aldous Huxley, and many others – felt a sudden need, prom…

Director Terrence Malick’s BADLANDS is one of the greatest movies ever made. His next movie, DAYS OF HEAVEN, is close to great. After 15 years more or less hiding, his third movie, THE THIN RED LINE, is good.It went downhill from there.John Bleasdale’s The Magic Hours makes it clear that Malick’s BADLANDS barely got made. It had a non-union crew, had no decent financing, had tr…

“Open your mind. Figure out things for yourself.” These are the most frightening sentences to most people.David Lynch’s Red Room in the various TWIN PEAKS series and movieMost people either go to school, go to work, or are retired. And then they die.The Trinity test, the first nuclear detonation in history. Hell unleashed in TWIN PEAKS: The ReturnThese normal people do not wa…

Everybody hated John O’Hara. But he made a good living at it.I just finished Geoffrey Wolff’s biography of author John O’Hara, and I know less about O’Hara than I did when I started it. Like the previous bio I read, anything about him sucks your brains out your ears and you know less about him than when you or I read him in college.Perverse and prolific, O’Hara built, not unlike P…

Author John O’Hara was once beaten up at a bar by two midgets after he shouted at one, “What the fuck are YOU looking at?”a young John O’HaraO’Hara was a newspaperman, a journalist, a short story writer, and a bestselling novelist. He lived the first three-quarters of the 20th century, and nobody captured the essence of his times better than he did. As biographer Frank MacShane says, n…

In the penultimate scene in the greatest novel ever written, Don DeLillo’s WHITE NOISE, a nun in an emergency room tells the protagonist that he’s a dumbhead if he believes in God and heaven. The prompt for this was a calendar on the wall of the treatment room with a Norman Rockwell-esque painting of JFK and the late Pope John (of Vatican II fame) enjoying a pleasant moment together in a pa…

Woody Allen’s novel, WHAT’S WITH BAUM?, is so, so Woody Allen that it’s almost painful. But in a delightful way, if you’re a Woody Allen fan.But is it a novel? Or is it a novella, which, as far as I’m concerned simply means “a short novel”? Or is it a really, really long short story?Doesn’t matter. It’s vintage Woody Allen and it works.All the familiar things are here in Baum…

Incompetence is the hallmark of most forms of government, but especially of fascism. It’s amazing how many people die despite how ineffective and contradictory that incompetence is.Fascism tends to promote insiders and confused ideologues and, like American prep or WASP culture, nitwits famed for drinking the most in college who piled up contacts and connections, extroverts who did the most…

One of the many wonders artificial intelligence will bless us with is making bridges obsolete.“No longer will we have to take an old-fashioned route across water or chasms,” say research scientists, who we universally trust. “A simple pair of hip waders will be sufficient.”soon to be chuckedAI is steadily making our world a better place for all of us, not just tech tycoons. Soon…

Americans seemingly fall out of the womb with a desire to optimize.We can never just be. We feel compelled to do. And to not just do, but to improve. And what we need to improve is some product. Even if the product isn’t a mousetrap or a juicy slice of software. Even if the product is ourselves.This is so obvious that it feels obscene for me to even mention it.We get M…

I grew up in what political activist and sanctimonious Quaker Malvina Reynolds called ticky-tacky little boxes. So I figured I needed to read Edward Berenson’s “PERFECT COMMUNITIES: Levitt, Levittown, and the Dream of White Suburbia.” Edward, too, grew up ticky-tackily.My childhood homes might have been the sort built by Bill Levitt after World War II (and by my father, who was a cont…

You can’t kill music in your home, although many have tried to beat it to death.Roland Gelatt’s epic THE FABULOUS PHONOGRAPH 1877-1977 ends its story in 1977 because that’s when this now-rare book was published in its second edition.about 1900It’s a shame that it ends when it does because 1977 is about when digital music and MTV and eventually streaming started, and before long…

General Curtis LeMay once said something to the effect that if the United States lost the war with Japan, he’d be tried as a war criminal for his introduction of the aerial firebombing of Japanese cities. That level of critical awareness informed his every waking moment and yet never paralyzed him with doubt or hesitation.LEMAY by Warren Kozak and BLACK SNOW by James Scott are very co…

I’m writing this on a day when the word “appeasement” will be bandied about in terms of Trump and Putin and the Ukraine. By coincidence I just finished reading Charles Spicer’s COFFEE WITH HITLER about the informal diplomats who tried to “civilize” the Nazis by befriending them before World War II.British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain has gone down in history as being the biggest ap…

The way to power and wealth has always come to those who occupy the human hand.In the beginning, every hand had rosaries or prayer beads:In modernity, smokeables occupied hands, such that even bloated corpses underwater enjoyed them:Next came the hydration fetish, with water bottles in every hand:At this precious instant in time, iPhones come to all hands, in delis, m…

This is turning out to be a summer of WASPS, reading about rich clans that act like American nobility that are not Protestant but Catholic.William F. Buckley, conservative, pops in his memoir, OVERDRIVE, about one “ordinary” week in his life in the early 1980’s. Goldwater and Reagan kingmaker and friend of George Bush the First, he was at the height of his influence. In this book he ma…

Although Reagan was concerned about being perceived as gay.Have you ever seen a worse hairpiece?That this is what I took from reading Sam Tanenhaus’ 1,000 page biography of BUCKLEY: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America.Google’s artificial intelligence flatly states,” . . . there’s no credible evidence or indication that William F. Buckley Jr. was gay. While some…

I worked with a woman whose family would pack a lunch and go to the local insane asylum Sunday afternoons after church. It was entertainment for them.Viewing a Lynchian project is like visiting that asylum.David LynchLynch died of emphysema and a heart attack in January, after being forced to evacuate his compound during a California forest fire. He left behind a rich and disturbin…

The story of Tesla is ludicrous, says author and auto industry journalist Edward Niedermeyer.LUDICROUSIn his 2019 book LUDICROUS: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors, you can boil the story down to three things:Elon Musk is distracted.Elon Musk is a hype machine who is an expert salesman and promiser.Tesla gets innovation and concept right, but can’t be bothered with bu…

The life of a classical music musician is in some ways wilder than the life of a rock star.The anxiety is heightened by the fact that rock musicians can thrive on a lot of musical and personal mistakes. Mistakes can get classical musicians canned.Which is why the late cellist Janos Starker lived long enough, despite his taste for drink and smoke, to write a memoir of his nearly 90 yea…

Waterfront Mill by Niles Spencer, 1940

Arshile Gorky was a vital link between Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism.The Liver is the Cock’s Comb by Arshile Gorky, 1944Arshile Gorky, 1930’s

conductor Otto KlempererI remember how surprised I was as a kid to find out that Werner Klemperer – Col. Klink on TV’s Hogan’s Heroes – had a father who was more famous than he was.Werner Klemperer and Bob Crane, Hogan’s Heroes(Notice the massive baton Klink is wielding. Some things run in families.)I tried to resist the urge to mention actor Werner, but it was useless. Hogan’s…

GHOST OF A GENIUS by Paul Klee, pre-1939

Did a 15 year old boy on a family farm invent TV, or did a nasty old big corporation?Okay, so Philo Farnsworth was older than 15 when he came up with the first functioning electrical television broadcasting system, but he started when 15.Earlier, actually. He shared it with his high school science teacher at 15. According to the patents, he’s the one who did it.Philo T. Farns…

A less forbidding Egon Schiele painting:Four Trees by Egon Schiele, early 20th CenturyHis wife died during the Spanish Flu epidemic, while six months pregnant. He died of the flu three months later. It would be nice to have another 60 or 70 years worth of work from him.The man himself:Egon Schiele

Tree in the Autumn-Wind, Egon Schiele, early 20th century?, via Wikimedia Commons

We live in a mass, administered society. The cultural industries produce assemblyline entertainment that is triage for wage slaves. Half of your brothers and sisters have below average IQ’s. School is a medium-security prison run by, as my father said many times, “the stupid kids.”a blank canvasIt’s time to get rough with this reality.A blank canvas or an empty page is for you…

Our internal and external environments affect how we think. They can be inspirational. They can create epiphanies. If we’re lucky, they can create our life paths.Vesuvius ejaculatingIn “NAPLES 1925: Adorno, Benjamin, and the Summer That Made Critical Theory” (Yale/Margellos World Republic of Letters, 2024), author Martin Mittelmeier, with wonderful help from translator Shelley Frisch…

Here is abstract expressionist Adolph Gottlieb’s most iconic painting:Cadmium Red Above Black, Adolph Gottlieb, 1959, via WikipediaThis is what his work looked like in 1936, when he worked for the Federal Art Project, which subsidized fine artists during the Great Depression. It’s called “Sun Deck”:Sun Deck, Adolph Gottlieb, 1936Quite a freeing of the spirit over 20 years!Cad…

I know it seems hard to believe, but there was a time when classical music was as available and as free as country or pop.That time was in the early days of radio. In the 1920’s until 1950, broadcast networks such as CBS or NBC provided classical music, as did local stations. And there were a bunch of reasons why they did.When radio was a novelty, there was a civilized war, but…

by James Ensor, 1888The Haunted Furniture by James Ensor, 1888