DPRK Hackers

DPRK Hackers. Fast, reliable service without a smile. Ask for Mr. Kim. Film publicity, high quality plutonium, fully armed  warheads, labor (ask about our detention facilitates ) and basketball camps (including celebrity visits by world famous players like Dennis Rodman), providing life insurance since l948 (ask for a quote), full line of Disney characters, plan your next function in Pyongyang, or let our specialists provide deprogramming for your theater chain, full line of Sony products not available. Don’t wait. Be the first on your block to employ DPRK Hackers. Satisfaction guaranteed. We shut down businesses as well as countries. No job is too small. Are you annoyed by offensive behavior that’s excused as free speech? Ask about our three-fold program of embarrassment, intimidation and repression. You’ll never have to worry about neighbors keeping you up with loud music and parties. Our experts will leak your enemies most private e mails even about well known celebrities like Angelina Jolie and Barack Obama. Our expert hackers are fully accredited. Your inquiries will remain confidential and only be leaked in the event of a cyber attack. DPRK Hackers should not be used if you are pregnant, have high blood pressure or take Beta Blockers. Ask your doctor if DPRK Hackers is for you if you suffer from erectile dysfunction. If you have received any form of a tooth implant, you should speak to your dentist before using DPRK Hackers.

Pyrenees Journal II: Spellbound

photograph by Hallie Cohen

What was more brilliant Alfred Hitchcock choosing to use Salvador Dali to create the dream sequences in Spellbound or Dali’s creation of these iconic sequences himself? The sequences if you recall are exemplifications of surrealist technique which is not surprising since the very structure of surrealism with its interests in humor, aggression and sexuality derive from the most primal elements of all dream life. And yes the dream in the movie helped to solve the crime. If you visit the Dali Theater-Museum in Figueres you will see amongst other things a citation of Dali’s book about Millet’s  “The Angelus." The three figures in Millet’s painting a peasant, his wife and child receive shall we say an unconventional interpretation. They’re father and daughter praying for absolution from the sin of incest. Dali was a believer in extreme subjectivity and he could be deemed a proto-deconstructivist to the extent that he believed that everybody will have their own interpretations of art and reality. He called his theory the "paranoiac critical method." Derrida was a Dali clone it turns out. For example, a nude of his beloved wife Gala hangs, in the central atrium of the museum You see the real Gala in his museum, but it’s like a hologram. If you attempt to photograph it an image of Abraham Lincoln appears. In one sense it’s just recycled impressionism. But the effect is like that produced by double and triple entendres in literature. Dali, as many of the works in the Theatre-Museum reveal, was a master of illusion. He was both the patient and doctor in a life long self-analysis and in fact tried (unsuccessfully) to interest Freud in his work. His self-portrait (which faces a famous portrait he did of Picasso) shows a face with hanging skin interspersed with crutches. Underneath that is a piece of bacon and a fly. perhaps one of the flies who escaped from “The Persistence of Memory”--where time literally flies. Perhaps Dali was saying he was as fragile and easily consumed as a piece of bacon. But memory is the constant   Dali might have resisted contemporary neuroscientific investigations into the reconsolidation of memory.  From the outside the museum looks like Disney World and in fact Dali’s 7 minute animation created with Disney is on exhibit too (Dali also shared an interest in cryogenics with Walt Disney). There are huge eggs on the roof, reflecting Dali’s obsession with birth, funeral bread exemplifying his fear of death and female Oscar statues which attest to his fascination with transexuality. Is it a monument like the museum Picasso created for himself in Barcelona or a playground? But that is the point. He was a clown who famously sported Velasquez’s moustache. His Velasquez sculpture with Las Meninas emblazoned on the artist’s forehead appears in another gallery and it’s interesting to note when you visit the Picasso museum in Barcelona that there’s an youthful copy of Velasquez’s portrait of Phillip IV with the famed Dali moustache or is it the other way around? And wouldn’t that be Dali’s point?

The Terrible Twos

      photo:Wong Maye-E/Associated Press

Take a look at the picture of Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s leader on page 3 of Thursday’s Times (“North Korea Appears to Restart Plutonium Reactor,” NYT 9/11/13). He looks like a big baby. He lives in fantasyland both literally and metaphorically to the extent that he’s a great lover of Disney characters and he’s plainly acting like a child going through the terrible two’s. Significantly, in December,  it will be two years that Kim Jong-un took over from his father Kim Jong-il. So developmentally his behavior is totally normal. Thus we have a two year old having temper tantrums in which he starts smoke flying from his plutonium reactor according to the Times article. It’s actually not surprising that Dennis Rodman and Kim Jong-un have become friends. Rather than being a PR ploy, (Vice Media promoted Rodman’s original trip to Pyongyang) housing the hopes of furtive diplomatic overtures, what is really significant about the alliance between Rodman and Kim Jong-un is the fact that both have a tendency to behave like children; they can be adorable at one moment and utterly horrifying the next. However, where there’s smoke, there’s fire and the only problem with Mr. Jong-un’s current gambit is that it’s bound to fail. “Analysts said the re-emergence of steam at the plant—whether real or a contrivance—could well be designed by the North to try to force the United States and its allies into the talks in the hopes of winning economic aid by creating the fear that North Korea is preparing to add to its weapons stockpile,” the Times remarked.  “But the move could have the opposite effect. President Obama has been deeply reluctant to take steps that would reward North Korea for halting activities it had already agreed to stop.”

Disney Berezniki

Here is one of the greatest leads ever written. It begins a piece from the Times with Andrew E. Kramer’s byline datelined BEREZNIKI, Russia and entitled “A Russian City Always on the Watch Against Being Sucked Into the Earth” (NYT, 4/10/12). “Dimitry Rybolovlev, the Russian fertilizer tycoon who in February bought the most expensive apartment ever sold in New York City—the $88 million penthouse at 15 Central Park West—may have done a lot for real estate values there. But here in this old mining city in the Ural Mountains, where he made his fortune, not just property values, but properties too, have been plunging.” Rybolovlev, whose daughter Ekaterina was also the subject of a recent front page Times piece about how big Russian money is affecting prices on the top levels of Manhattan’s residential real estate market, is not exactly being blamed. Kramer makes it clear that Rybolovlev was absolved of responsibility for the sinkholes that have afflicted Berezniki by "a government commission," but there is an implication that without his potash mines the sinkholes might not have become an affliction of almost paranormal status. The holes even have names like "The Grandfather" (430 yards long and 780 feet or 50 stories deep), "The Tiny One" and "The Young One," which “sucked in a row of storage sheds and parked Moskvich passenger car.” Kramer reports that “So grave is the danger that that the entire city is under 24-hour video surveillance” (a picture of the monitors actually illustrates the story). But it’s a wonder that the local authorities have not exploited their problem, turning the sinkholes into a tourist attraction. If Disney got involved in the creation of a sinkhole theme park, the prices for luxury Manhattan residences would likely soar even more than when Rybolovlev and Ekaterina (or E-Kat as she will henceforth be known) first came to town.