Твоїх дітей, не твоя війна?
Стали батьками доньки й сини
Все кольорові бачили сни.
How do you follow that?! Protesters being arrested in Moscow. Oh well, that sounds normal. Well. Until the you know that protesting in the U.K. is scarily soon and outrageously inevitably to be an arrestable offense. Just hold up the banner. Not even that and on go the handcuffs. You’d think there would be riots?! What happened to Britain?
Trying to cheer up my darkening demeanor (thanks to Covid one less social stigma worry over past years. Oh? Have you noticed how many people now resemble Olaf, or is that just me and a Disney thing?) So yes. Turning to Netflix digressing again, but they were always smart. Like, why let any of your product out cheaply or even free when you footed the bill for it all! I mean, what can you now buy for $2.50 p/w? Not even a o/w NYC subway fare. Barely a blah coffee.
So. Hoping for a streaming service deus ex machina I chose Steven Soderbergh’s The Laundromat. Well, back to the tequila even though S.S. never lets down the mind. Many of the folk in my past life flashing on the retina who didn’t actually seem so bad, but were they?;(…The bittersweet thereafter, something to be said for streaming service taste algorithms.
Up pops Martin Scorsese’s Pretend It’s a City, a series of interviews with writer Fran Lebowitz. Refuse the Netflix algorithm kudos my genuinely LOL since so long. If you’d never lost and loved and lost again knowingly deluding yourself all along in NYC then this series just wouldn’t get your LOL.
Finally. Sharing my tequila with someone who would moan with you, albeit without Zoom. Without the, ‘again loser look’. I’d give Netflix a dollar 25 for that. Half the weekly rental. The dollar shop’s now $1.25. The dollar pizza slice $1.25. Instead of Thoreau’s lives of quiet desperation, Fran Lebowitz’s world of quiet thwacked aspiration. New York allowance to almost get killed, almost despair the rent, almost well survive. Peter O’Toole’s content schoolmaster and hoofer Petula Clark’s boys’ school sobriety in Goodbye Mr, Chips nowhere in sight. Only, Sondheim’s Every Day a Little Death and Joan Didion’s Gawain: I tell you that I shall not live two days.
Do You Want to Build a Snowman?
[This series is a tough watch. Gets under your skin. Into your head. As it should. As it only could.]
© 2021 Netflix
I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned. ― Richard P. Feynman
Food for thought in these troubling times. Until the 1940s, Swan Lake’s black swan Odile was never dressed in black, identical to Odette. How many young ballerinas today know this? Does that change the way one perceives this iconic ballet? If that tutu color change hadn’t occurred until the racial equality era or Black Lives Matter?
Noam Chomsky was bizarrely demonized by many Washington administrations. Simply, all he asked of us was to question what we read. What we see. Even in our most trusted news outlets. In so doing, American foreign policy suddenly sported color.
As a kid, well teenager;)- history seems such an easy rewrite, the Australian sinologist Stephen Fitzgerald fascinated me, sitting, listening, way out of my depth. Then it was recent history, Gough Whitlam and Richard Nixon visiting China for the first time. Gough and Henry K almost met. Now there’s an entr’acte to the opera Nixon in China! Hegemony was a brand new word for me. It was the moment I sort questions rather than answers.
You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
Inventing Anna (dropped Feb 11, 2022) and has had the most viewing hours for an English-language series in a week since the service began new monitoring last summer. Is this a good thing?!
I read almost everything published about ‘the fake heiress’ since she was arrested back in 2017. So with much trepidation began…. As the eps ‘dropped’ my inherent skepticism waned. Creator of the series Shonda Rhimes has carved a formidable reputation. Above all, she knows how to oversee casting that compels an audience. Albeit, and most importantly, on the heightened plane of series drama.
If one doesn’t know NYC then the series and story may well feel fantasy. It’s real alright down to the fingernails, bath salts and $100 tips. That’s not to say NY folk are easily conned. Stupid. Gullible. Far from it. More often truth eludes as it stares back. Yet the fake Anna succeeded. The Vanity Fair writer/photographer Rachel Williams offering credit cards on a Morocco trip that Anna (later dismissed in court as defaulting on) feels unjustly served. Understandably.
No. Technically Anna committed no crime. In Ms Williams position confronted with police arrest in a foreign country for a non-payment hotel bill, what would you do? Not gullible, rather compassionate. At least she got to see the great Jardin Majorelle. Did she ever get back her money? More importantly her trust?
America, let alone NYC, is a place where money talks. Minted words not literature. Confidence not meekness. The double-edged sword of advancement. Few in New York could honestly plead not guilty to that. Fran Lebowitz’s ‘Das Rheingold’ just to facilitate dry-cleaning. Let alone….
The U.K.’s Daily Mail comments today Feb 28 on the latest Vogue article: ’Rachel is no wide-eyed ingenue dazzled by Sorokin’s tacky displays of wealth and gaggle of celebrity hangers-on,' Maitland writes. I had unlimited sympathy and empathy for Rachel before and after viewing the series, for what it’s worth. Perhaps for those whose only point of reference is the series rather than factual reporting then…If Shonda Rhimes launches something out in the public domain then like anyone else she should be held accountable. I’m on Team Rachel believe you me!
After serving five months of jail time, Simon Leviev was released on good behavior and now earns $20K for appearances. The Tinder Swindler.
Trying to find myself another LOL. Maybe check out James Corden’s Late Late Show. The Los Angeles sun surely soothing them along. And try as almost no-one can to be a devil’s advocate for the Kremlin’s actions, there are issues that have been somewhat less discussed. Most recently the racism at Ukrainian borders. Marcus Ryder was interviewed today on BBC news. This morning on BBC Radio a succinct 30minutes: Ukraine: How Did We Get Here? There was talk of Crimea but little of the 2015 Minsk peace deal and the Donbas region. One could not dismiss the intricacies of Russian UN Ambassador at the Security Council meeting.
And those intricacies are indeed about people, Russian people, not simply political maneuvering. The devil is indeed always in the details. And to the horror of most Russians, Ukrainians and the West the devil is loose. Yet comparisons to Hitler from both sides is both unproductive let alone inaccurate. Except for Russia’s absolute state control of the media. I’ve always believed many working class Germans may have indeed been blind early on to the Holocaust such was the Nazi’s grasp of media. Gleichschaltung. Hello Chomsky again.
An unfair segue, perhaps, to the doc Downfall: The Case Against Boeing. But for many Americans the two fatal plane crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia a few years back soured their breakfast cereal and the day went on. If one of those planes had crashed into a major American city there would have been media rage. Watch the documentary and tremble at how close and possible that could have been. Boeing corporate cost-cutting for shareholder profit. Racking my brains to remember what movie or TV ep was the guy selling sub-standard steel that could ultimately cause deaths. Most cost-management folk don’t wake in the morning as Harry Lime thinking ‘I got away with supplying outdated penicillin that’s killed all these kids’ but my family is OK. Most are basically decent people. ‘Well that could never happen’.
Should the West have listened more carefully to the Kremlin’s Donbas concerns? Could this unfolding humanitarian crisis have been averted? Perhaps not. Do you call 911 just because a neighbor is screaming in his own home? Everyone has the right to be Network’s Howard Beale. Nothing much has changed since the ‘70s. Has it? How the hell did it become a hit Broadway show? Someone must be listening!
Russia-Ukraine crisis: conflict in Donbas region explained
African nations condemn reports of racism against students at Ukrainian border
Seems like only yesterday, but this Chicago Uni lecture on the Ukraine crisis was given almost 7 years ago. President Biden “Go Get Him!” ending his State of the Union address this week. With no disrespect but it sounds like a line from my ‘Kitty movie script’. My cat indeed shares most of your fine qualities Mr. President. No sarcasm. How’s ‘Willow’ doing’? Not hiding shoeboxes under the bed is she;?
There was no intention of writing about the Ukraine crisis on this website but it has now touched every possible commentator whether it be business, sports, culture, news, or even pet care. Is the Russian line/demand of Ukrainian de-Nazification justified? That is for others to answer. Not me. The questions it throws are way more interesting, though. Remember when Germany’s Chancellor Kohl promised a new world for East Germany after the wall? Anyone with even a vague knowledge of that antiquated infrastructure knew it was a long haul space flight not a quick jaunt to even a Polish seaside resort let alone the Riviera. Nonetheless, everyone hopped aboard.
Why has the far-right been on the rise in Europe? The answer of disillusionment/disenfranchisement is obvious yet rather unhelpful compared to the questions of how and why. NATO lied and extended its reach to the former East German/Polish border. What would you have done? The formation of more questions.
It was folly rather than foolhardy for Russia to invade the Ukraine. Destroying a flourishing garden, albeit with some pest/ky weeds, to create a structure no-one wishes to visit nor entertain. New weeds will overgrow. There will be green. Has America’s foreign policy been any better over the last century? That is a question not an equation.
Most writers transcribe human foibles and fun. Some fantasize. Others, very special others, create a new world as if new born. If said shoebox is found, Mr. President, may we humbly suggest, you add or fill the receptacle with a copy of Gulliver’s Travels. See how that plays out? The scratch marks on a fauteuil easily replaced and welcomed on ‘Whisker@at’: design for discerning followers. Go figure.
Missing already, sitting on David Letterman’s lap as he strokes my teenage ‘fuzz’. Serpico started young, man! You didn’t make me LOL CBS on March 2, 2022. Unless that’s back dated, all those comedy losses. Well: holy cow. How is it we were so sad all these years yet bought half the Las Vegas strip? Only in America, folks!
Told Dave he should’ve got a desperate housewife for the series, even before their existence, but he insisted. Brains over beauty. The engineer in me always dreamt of that suspension bridge. The American public sure voted on that one!
Miss Kitty Litter’s come a long way since recording this song a year ago. So please forgive the ‘rrruff-ness’. She is currently working on her screenplay, Creatures of Kiev.
