A line from Nelson Mandela
This is an America that is not
necessarily retreating from the
world stage but consolidating
its power through bullying &
dealmaking, where the influ-
ences of Christian nationalism
& the presidential vices are the
most apparent. Ushering in a
new golden age, says the new
National Security Strategy; but
to others it is the onset of a new
age of fear, of repression, of de-
privation & virtual slavery. To
oppose it is to not merely cast
off one's chains, it is a renewal
of life & liberty without pursuit.
notes from a broad
It's not that I think the world is broken, just that pieces keep falling off. At least, that's what I assume the debris around me is. & everywhere I go, more, & different, debris. Clips on YouTube, search results from Google, memories for sale on eBay, trivial newsbites from trivial news-sites; all mixed in with lines from millenium-old novels, fragments from mythology, subtexts, signs in shop windows, gall & philosophers' stones, lines from the decades of pop I have lived through, thoughts I & others have had. Or may still yet have.
It's a kind of bricolage, which means I'm a kind of bricoleur. I take these things I find around me & put them together; at least I try to. Not to repair the world but to see how the found objects look when rearranged—a parallel universe perhaps, a history or histories rewritten. Or, perhaps the world as it really is, because everything I write about comes out of the world around me.
We are subjected to information overload these days. So much so, in fact, that it becomes impossible to take it all in. Warhol's 15 minutes of fame has been reduced to 15 seconds so it fits as a soundbite in the evening news. Where it blurs, sandwiched between competing 15 seconds, goes digital, & we lose the last few words because the pre-programmed ads come in over the top & we end up not knowing if it was the grapple tackle or the retirement of Muttiah Muralitharan that caused the floods in, was it, Pakistan. Peccavi, cabled General Napier. I have Sind. It's a funny old world, & I milk the humor as much as I can.
Le Cicérone
after the 1948 painting by René Magritte
The temperance advocates come
knocking at my door but I haven't
had a drink for days. Nor do I
feel like one. Sorry to disappoint.
The pentecostal proselytizers pause
on the pathway. I instantly recog-
nize the pairing, can see more pairs
over their shoulders, say no thanks
politely to them before they have a
chance to open their mouths. & they,
inured to rejection, offer their equally
polite blessings & walk quietly away.
Then the politicians, the outliers only —
independents who seek to save the
planet; or those far to the right, want-
ing to stop immigration or gender e-
quality or renewable energy sources.
The mainstream parties mainly leave
us alone. Impersonal. Letterbox drops
& billboards. Polling booth handouts.
In the early evening the cicerone comes
calling. Said: "Saw you had a lot of
visitors today, thought you might like
to know their antecedents. What drives
them, what is behind their focus on a
singular cause whether it be bigotry
or hope or a need for an answer as to
why the world turned out the way it
has, & how it might be rearranged to
match their vision of it." "Come in" I
said "& get comfortable. Will make
you a coffee. Going to be a long night."
Melania
is a cheeseball infomercial of staggering
inertia, made out of car rides & cold silences,
so polished it slips out of (her) hands. I
immediately regret not buying popcorn
so at least one of my senses would be enter-
tained. It's a gilded trash remake of The Zone
of Interest, a forty-million-dollar journey into
the void, a film that should have been called
Day of the Living Tradwife, a lazy, bafflingly
incurious documentary that insults the
person it is trying to celebrate. All the money
in the world can’t make good propaganda, &
this is shameless propaganda that could put
you to sleep, a preening, scowling void of
pure nothingness, an unabashed, fly-on-the-
gilded-wall fawn job, a tedious, criminally
shallow puff piece, a Slovenian sphinx flick
nixed. Pure, endless hell, an unbelievable
abomination of filmmaking that if they
showed it on a plane, people would still walk
out. 20 stage-managed days in the life portrays
world events as B-roll between wardrobe
changes, feels entirely at a remove from any
objective reality, a face like a fist that makes
(her) look like Marie Antoinette skulking in
her cake-filled chateau. This must be the night-
mare endpoint of celebrity documentaries.
Does Melania dream of AI-generated sheep?
Sources:
BuzzFeed, Decider, empireonline, Los Angeles Times, MS Now, New York Magazine, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, The Guardian, The Hollywood Reporter, The Independent, The Irish Times, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wrap, Vanity Fair, Variety, & Vulture.