All the Critics Love U in New York

Posted on by Roboi2b

If there’s any celebrity you can be sure you did not know in any significantly real way, it was Prince. Shape shifter, name shifter/eraser, master of every style you can name. Intensely private and essentially flamboyant. Exhibitionist. Hermit. You don’t know him except in the ways you think you do, and that has as much to do with what you wanted him to be as it does with which little pieces of mythologizing he wanted you to see at any given time. Like the classic Trickster of legend, he could present multiple faces at the same time, and the face you got to glimpse, briefly, depended on which side of the road you were standing on. If Prince had been around then, Kurosawa could have made this pint-sized product of Minni-freaking-sota the centerpiece of Rashomon. That would have been cool. read more

image_pdfCreate PDFimage_printPrint

The Wheel Turns

Posted on by Roboi2b

At the end of the Civil War, the United States assumed ownership of Robert E. Lee’s family plantation, high on a hill in Arlington, just across the river from the Nation’s – the unified nation’s – capitol. The family home remains, but the grounds of that plantation, a place where hundreds of slaves worked and died, became the final resting place for more than 15,000 dead Union soldiers.1This ranks among the finest and most appropriate nose-rubbings in American history, and dog knows we have a history nose-rubbings both noble and ig. One hundred fifty years later, the body count approaches half a million.2It is a bitter pill that, as the cemetery expanded to fit all the fallen, a large community or freedmen was evicted to make room for more corpses. read more

image_pdfCreate PDFimage_printPrint

References[+]

It’s Darker Than You Think

Posted on by Roboi2b

You’ve got to be taught
From year to year,
It’s got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You’ve got to be carefully taught.
– Rogers/Hammerstein

It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there. – Bob Dylan

I recently ordered the book pictured above, a in-depth investigation of how the radical right has gained power over the past 30 years. Alongside the essential trilogy by Rick Perlstein (reviewed favorably by an obscure blogger here), Jane Mayer’s Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right fill in the blanks on one of the pressing questions of our time: read more

image_pdfCreate PDFimage_printPrint

Welcome, Bitter South!

Posted on by Roboi2b

Come on in, Bitter Southerners. Welcome to the Immune to Boredom vineyard, where The Writer toils day and night to amuse and delight you.

As if.

If you clicked over from the big Mardi Gras opus, please hang around a spell, maybe click the Follow button, maybe check out some of the existing posts that have amused and delighted tens and dozens of your fellow human persons over the past year or so. read more

image_pdfCreate PDFimage_printPrint
Theme: Overlay by Kaira.  Extra Text
Cape Town, South Africa