Sacramento Journal: Lady Bird

If you’ve never been Sacramento your view of the city will forever be changed by Lady Bird and the charged relationship between Saoirse Ronan and her mother (Laurie Metcalf). You may find yourself looking for the street where the title character throws herself out of a car. It may be unfair but isn’t that the kind of association Fellini lent to Rome in La Dolce Vita. Anyway you’re more likely to get to Rome than Sacramento, which though the state capital is less a destination than say Los Angeles or San Francisco. Then again if you’re going to Yosemite the setting for another recent movie which may have left it’s imprint on your imagination (Free Solo) you may very well find yourself flying into Sacramento—a city that might otherwise elude preconception, having no Golden Gate or Sunset Boulevard to speak of. If Greta Gerwig hadn’t been born in Sacramento and the movie didn’t have an autobiographical element, this lack of facile distinction in the minds of many viewers might have been a reason why the director might have scouted it out, as a location for her movie. After all, the way it’s painted is as a launching point, a place to escape from for a person who wants to become a great actress. Of course the other element is the Catholicism. There are no bell towers like the one overlooking the Mission San Juan Bautista in Vertigo, but religion plays a part of the story. How infused in Catholicism is Sacramento? Lady Bird eventually ends up visiting a Presbyterian church when she gets to New York, but as for Sacramento, you've got to visit to fill in the dots.

The Final Solution: Ordering In Chinese During a Nuclear Attack

There are many people who regard take-out ordering from Chinese or other restaurants as an inalienable right. And restaurants have tried to satisfy that right even putting their employees in danger as they attempt to make bicycle deliveries during downpours in which there are torrential rainfalls and hurricane level winds. There's even anecdotal evidence pointing to establishments competing for business during tornadoes and tsunamis. When you talk about rights, there's always the matter of limits. In the famous Oliver Wendall Holmes decision (Schenk vs. U.S.) about “crying fire in a crowded movie theater,” the limits of free speech, for example, are questioned under certain circumstances. So what about the ordering of say Chinese food in the aftermath of a nuclear attack? Should those who enjoy ordering in, expect to see the world weary bicycle delivery person appear at their door with mushroom clouds appearing on the horizon? To what ends will your average Chinese restaurant, pizzeria and diner go to make sure their customers can  place their orders? Of course the right to prompt take-out service is not legally recognized by the constitution or by municipal or state authorities, but there's a de facto situation whereby any Chinese restaurant that's not fulfilling its orders promptly is going to find themselves as extinct as one of the species of pterodactyls who disappeared during the ice age. The implications are enormous both for restauranteurs--who are coerced into having to produce under life-threatening conditions--and for their clientele who risk facing starvation during nuclear Armageddon.

Pornosophy: Oedipus

"Oedipus and the Sphinx" by Gustave Moreau

Are you tired of girls asking what’s wrong? Do your passionate embraces often fizzle? Do you find yourself blaming women when you’re having a problem? Does your proud package look like two wilted Brussels sprouts and rotted carrot? Oedipus killed his father and slept his mother? If you murdered your father you’d be serving time. So maybe you just slept with your mother. Though not a capital crime like murder, not advisable either. Even worse maybe you were like Hamlet. Maybe you just wanted to kill your father and sleep with your mother and that’s what’s holding up the show. You’re so afraid of what might happen that you can’t do anything. Classical Freudian therapy, 4 days a week on the couch is one approach or if you have that kind of money you might as well sign up with SpaceX for the trip to Mars. At least you’ll have something to look forward to. Of course there’s Viagra and even Spanish fly. However, when you come down to it, you’re going to be fucked, and not in a good way since once the incubus inhabits your neurogenic pathways, it takes on a life of its own and you’re going to wish that you were somebody, anybody, but you. 

The Final Solution: Deconstruction in The White House

Deconstucting the Deutsche Bank Building, photo: ProhibitOnions

As the World Turns was a popular soap opera that ran for 54 years on CBS. What goes around is the point.The concept of “fake news” employs a perverse form of deconstruction to turn history on its head. MBS might have been responsible for the butchering of Jamal Khashoggi or not. Sure there have been floods and fires, but that could be the result of global warming or not. Holocaust deniers used to be considered outliers, but who’s to say that the Holocaust itself is not next on the list for the fake news crowd. Remember Paul de Man the Yale deconstructionist who was found to have ties to the Nazis? No one really has the answers anymore since as Rudy Guiliani recently and memorably said “truth isn’t truth.” Imagine Jacques Derrida as a roving cabinet minister with portfolio sanitizing Homeland Security, Housing and Development Resources and even the Defense Department from any imputation of truth. History has produced strange bedfellows. If radical feminists and Christian fundamentalists can bond over curbing First Amendment rights when it comes to pornography, who says the far left Ecole Normale Superior crowd can’t align themselves with the Trumocracy to defeat Kant’s categorical imperative? The president is in the real estate business and demolition is only a stone’s throw from deconstruction. 

The Final Solution: Holiday Forecast

More misery is predicted for Venezuela. The Saudis will continue to bomb Yemen. Oil prices should remain on an even keel due to the United States laissez-faire attitude towards the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. The migration of impoverished peoples to more affluent societies will continue to result in the rise of anti-democratic populist movements. Fires will scorch California and the West Coast while increasingly biblical level flooding will inundate the Florida panhandle and the Southeast. When and if he ever leaves office, Donald Trump will carry his policies forward by getting into the demolition end of the construction business. In the meanwhile the Russians with the help of Facebook will continue to disrupt elections. The friendship between Trump and Kim Jong-un will continue to blossom, despite their lack of progress on disarmament. On a local level bumper to bumper traffic on the George Washington Bridge will turn drivers into sitting ducks. Uber cars will continue to stop wherever they want to make their pickups. Mayor de Blasio will continue to blame New York’s City's problems on the State--and failing infrastructure. Speaking of lifestyle, people who continue to be randomly punched in the face on the streets of New York and other cities will serve as a metaphor for the current spiritual malaise.

Walking on Broken Glass

In Democracy in America De Tocqueville remarked on how Americans can go from poverty riches and the reverse in one generation. His point of course related to the lack of aristocratic dynasties in American society where you don’t have Merovingians or Windsors or any of the like (though for a while the Kennedy White House was referred to as Camelot). Now with social media, it doesn’t take a generation for one’s fortunes to rise or fall. Andy Warhol famously anticipated our cyber society when he commented that “in the future everyone will be world famous for 15 minutes.” Let’s take Michael Avenatti. When he first came on the scene he was a knight in shining armor defending Stormy Daniels against the Trumpocracy. His reputation has been like that of a great slalom skier who climbs to dizzying heights only crash land into charges of domestic abuse ("Michael Avenatti Arrested on Suspicion of Domestic Violence in Los Angeles, NYT, 11/14/18) Then of course there is the former Attorney General of New York State Eric Schneiderman (whose reputation has obviously suffered despite the fact that he will not be charged in the assault case brought against him), former NYS governor Eliot Spitzer and former congressman Anthony Weiner both of whom it would be kind to describe as being in the dog house. Al Franken is a stand alone issue and a cause celebre among those who feel he caved in too quickly to colleagues like Kirsten Gillibrand who urged him to resign. Then of course there are all the media celebrities whose careers were abruptly ended by the #Me Too movement amongst them Matt Lauer, Garrison Keillor and the Canadian Journalist Jian Ghomeshi whose non-apologia "Reflections from a Hashtag" caused an uprising that precipitated the resignation of the Ian Buruma from The New York Review of Books. In the current age of meteoric hyperbole, everyone is a potential Icarus, who walks on glass. "Walking on Broken Glass" sang Annie Lennox.

What's the Difference Between Turkey and Greece?

Wild Turkey (photo: Dimus)

Is there anything to Greece and Turkey, some cosmic correspondence between the names of two sovereign nations and the fact that replacing the name of Greece with its homonym results in a fact of culinary life? Turkey has been in the news lately due to the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi. But that turkey which is poultry produces grease when you cook it. It’s natural to chalk this up to coincidence. However, here you have two countries in nearby parts of the world whose very existence is a perfect statement about what goes on when you roast a bird. From a historical point of view, of course, the existence of turkey had nothing to do with the emergence of Greece, as a great power in the ancient world and the home of philosophers like Plato and Aristotle who provide the cornerstone of Western civilization. Greece wasn’t like Eve who supposedly came from Adam’s rib, though grease definitely is a byproduct of some of the more cartilaginous parts of the turkey. What can be noted is that Greece and Turkey are both ancient civilizations. Turkey’s past might be a bit more nomadic though Turkey too produced its share of great poets. However, noticing a linguistic connection may point to something akin to Noam Chomsky's universal grammar. If you travel to Macedonia and make stops at Greek and Turkish cities, you are, in fact, making a connection that encompasses everything from geopolitics to the realities of your Thanksgiving Day feast.