What was Andrew thinking when they…!? Just finished watching season 4 of the Showtime series Billions. So pleased t'was worth my time. I know sounds so so arrogant… Could I have 'learnt' more from any number of books on my endlessly updating reading list? Maybe. Too many ivory towers in this world. And yet Billions so seems luxuriating in ivory towers. Was only really curious of Billions because of Succession. Parallax. (great Alan J Pakula film btw)
Thinking the last week: give up this website. So many wrong people read it, misinterpret it. Why flagellate oneself sado-masochistically?! Then me thought: maybe thereby the parallax. After all, ivory towers originated with the dear elephant. Were they ever consulted?
Ain't gonna finish this tonight but one must move on. Thought of Billions' fictional Bobby Axelrod and the money he amassed during 9/11. Such folk were many throughout the world. Was New York so tantamount to sacrilegious. Yet how much money do …make when disasters of multi-thousand death happen in countries other than America? Death has no difference wherever it occurs. Clearly it has become. 2 legs good, 4 legs bad.
Guess I'll be hated for writing some more, well not truth. Observation. Mass observation.
Thought back to the elephants dying in Thailand thence to Bellini's opera Norma. Bel canto, ivory tower. Yet Norma and her pleading life for her children couldn't be any more real than the elephants saving their calf. Only Norma admitted her 'sins' warranted the sacrifice of her life not those of the innocent children.
Watching Billions did actually make me think in a way that I thought and wrote of Succession. Charles Dickens turned upside down. We see no poor people. Yet they are in every line of the scripts. We see no elephants in the room, but there they are. And in there, somewhere, we see Dumbo. We see Bambi. Pip, Great Expectations.
……tbc….t'was written on the spur of the 'mo
there's wonderful footage in a documentary of German director Werner Schroeter narrating his opera staging of Norma….so seek and ye shall find…
You don't need to be one denomination to appreciate this. All you need is belief. Whether it is Nietzsche at the top of but one hill, yet one he climbed, alas, alone. Arguably. Or whoever is serving water whatever at the bottom of another hill. Then there are the roads we must all take to the hill. Whether we have feet, or are amphibians or simply fly very very low as to avoid predators that wish to impasse. Perhaps not always a wise choice.
Whatever, it can only reside in you and i…..
