In fifteen episodes of Supernatural, Lisa Berry plays Billie, personification of Death. Death has a room filled with shelves, an archive containing everyone's life history in black-bound books, infinitude of people's lives receding back into a mighty big library existing outside normal spacetime. One of the two protagonist, Dean Winchester (Jensen Ackles), holds but doesn't open the book of his life and how it ends.
Picture two characters in an enclosed carriage, traveling on a road to a city over the horizon. One of them, the man, doesn't remember how he got into the carriage. The other, an elegant aristocratic woman, has been waiting to rendezvous with someone. When he tells his name, casually in introduction, he says the name of the man she's trying to meet, although this he knows this is the first time he's uttered the name.
The two go to where, she promises, he'll recover his recent memories, find out, perhaps, who put him on the carriage and why.
In a house on the edge of a village, she takes him into a library, shows him a large thick book bound in green velvet, a curving X shape on the cover adorned with dark gems, one oval diamond in the center.
The Green Book, do you know it?
Everyone is familiar with it, he responds.
The Green Book records everything you do, lists your deeds as bad or good. When you die, the two columns will serve as guides for those programming your next life.
"Dreamer" by Supertramp, just listened to it. "Can you put your hands in your head, oh no!"
I can put my fingers in my mouth, oh yes.
A twenty-six year old Republican congressman, strong Trump supporter and promoter of the stolen election theory, criticized President Zelensky of Ukraine, something forbidden to do in today's jingoistic speech climate. Calling him corrupt, the congressman-firecracker alienated his colleagues. Republican congressmen and -women offered their ardor for Zelensky and his cause.
It's worthy of heated criticism, apparently, to criticize a foreign leader who's corrupt as fuck, a tool of United States foreign policymakers, and a leader who won't give up what small power he has as his country dies a slow death, taking years because NATO will supply the gas in the form of weapons.
The funniest contribution of condemnation for the twenty-six year old Republican congressman came from Congresswoman Liz Cheney, Republican, Wyoming. She called Putin a "war criminal." She's repulsed by war criminals, supposedly, yet her father, Dick, is a war criminal among the most impressive, combining the getting of wealth from chaos, destruction, and murder with the gall to pretend he's the moral superior of anyone.
Are you satisfied with the job performance of world leaders in 2022?
Is the Covid-19 pandemic finished?
Will Mark Zuckerberg succeed at pulling millions of people into his virtual reality prison?
If Michel Foucault were alive--he'd be ninety-five--would he write a new foreword to Discipline and Punish, taking into account the panopticon nature of the mass surveillance states of the twenty-first century?
Loyalty to Israel--like when written promises are made to not support Boycott Divestment and Sanctions. Loyalty oaths to other countries. That's coming with Ukraine, I think. It will be illegal, or highly discouraged, to express a lack of support for Ukraine's fight for survival. Is it okay to support the Ukrainian people, but not the Nazi element in the military there? The Nazi influence on Ukraine's government? Zelensky's Jewish identity and heritage have nothing to do with why he tolerates Nazi militias blowing the shit out of ethnic Russians in the Donbas, killing approximately 14,000 since the 2014 war began.
Zelensky will be overthrown by the Nazis if he compromises with Russia. Thus, he's called a new Winston Churchill, except that the analogy would work best if Churchill had had Nazis fighting for him.
The U.S. policymakers, going back to the 1940s, have demonstrated a willingness to work with Nazis. Rocket scientists, intelligence operatives, SS men, and Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon, unleashed on South America, trainer of coup forces on behalf of the U.S.
The Contras, al-Qaeda, ISIS, have all been on the side of the U.S. Why not Ukrainian Nazis? Use them to kill Russians, make Russia expend its wealth and energy into trying to get a grip on Ukraine. The money, arms deals, other countries wanting to beef their security, small nations buying American fighter jets. The rumble's coming, everybody bring something to cut with.
And it's all so fucking stupid. The small group of people managing the dry wood pile while boxes of matches are shipped continually into Ukraine (metaphor) are the stupidest motherfuckers of all time.
U.S. foreign policymakers' support of Nazis in Ukraine shouldn't surprise us. Maybe they've been Nazis all along? Providing weapons to Ukrainian Nazis is akin to providing weapons to al-Qaeda and ISIS in Syria. It's all on purpose, these events.
I prefer the writing of Robert E. Howard to the words of news puppets lying about why the Ukraine-Russia war came to be, promoting Russiagate, ignoring American military involvement and population punishment in the Middle East and Africa. Last night I read "The House of Arabu," published in 1951, posthumously, Howard committed suicide in 1936. The story takes place, I gathered, around 4,000 years ago in Mesopotamia. The setting in question is what we call Sumeria. A blonde northerner, Conan-like, big chest, corded muscles, a proto-Viking, has a curse put on him by his friend, the King. I don't remember why the King seeks the proto-Viking's torment and death. I read the story with interest, sitting up in bed at 1:30, not having to go to work in the morning, a night like tonight, 11:52 PM March 19, 2022, three years ago almost to the minute when my mother died.
Heaven's floor creaks. Chaos comes like a sky rock. Put Elvis in a spaceship to the Moon movie in 1968. Elvis, first musician on the Moon. Tina Louise, the hot number from Gilligan's Island, plays the King's love interest, Foolish McGuire. Everybody has a L'il Abneresque name...Edifyin' Smith, Papasito Buncombe, Divorcin' Pam (Paula Prentiss). Turns out Elvis's astronaut character, Typhoon Blisterhammer, can breathe easily in the vacuum of space. Incredible, huh? Elvis singing in outer space without a helmet is something to see, or laugh at, or at least to enjoy. Why not take in without harsh judgment entertainments of the past? After all, entertainments of 2022 will be judged as silly someday by people making entertainments that will be further misunderstood by 2122.
Imagine that year, A.D. 2122. 2 + 1 + 2 + 2 = Lucky 7. We will finally get a good deal on selling planet Earth. We don't even have to clean it before moving away. The new owners, from a planet 800 light years away, orbiting an orange giant some forty times wider than our sun. Each stellar system, including ours, seems to be unique, although categories of planets existing outside our system have come into being, into magazine articles.
"Hot Jupiters," the gas giants orbiting close to their parent stars, dorbiting rapidly, shedding mass to the stars, Cronus eats his children in many galactic neighborhoods.
Elvis strums a soundless guitar on the Moon near his landing area. He brought Foolish McGuire with him instead of his hero-worshipping Native American co-pilot, Down in the Dumps, played by a bronze George Hamilton.
Elvis isn't even affected by the cold of space. An infinitely intriguing human being, Elvis sunbathes nude on a heap of crates stacked to form a crude chaise-longe. He imagines the gray moon dust as beach sand. He sings a song about NASA, his voice carrying through the vacuum somehow. Put out, Foolish has to wear a suit. She can't kiss Elvis while he's outside. She can't scratch her nose until she returns to the landing module. She has to shit inside her suit, leave her bag of waste on the Moon, while Elvis drops his pants and shits and pisses wherever, delighted by the slowness of his pee arcing to the gray ground.
A group of gray aliens listens to Elvis's song. They dance like they're in a ballroom. They project the illusion of wearing suits now, tuxedos and evening gowns, short, spindly-limbed grays. Elvis laughs. He converses with a gray alien female, Poo-See. She informs him he must pay a fee if he wishes to use the park any longer.
"How much? I only brought my lucky fifty signed by President Grant." Strums a dissonant chord, would've sounded dramatic.
"You must surrender to us the female."
"Hand over Foolish? For what reason?"
"She will become part of a great experiment."
"Sounds unsound."
"She will come through it transformed for the better."
"I'll run it by her. The decision is hers, just so we're clear."
"We have no intention of forcing her to do anything."
"Good intentions. The road to H E double hockey sticks is paved with good intentions."
Elvis launches into a song called "The Road to..." The grays all dance, now wearing Hawaiian grass skirts, leis, flowers in hair, some chubbier aliens. Foolish joins in, dancing awkwardly in her white spacesuit with the American flag on her left breast. Song done, Elvis tells her about the aliens' idea for her.
"What are you going to do to me?" she asks Poo-See.
"We're going to bestow the gift of breathing in a vacuum."
"Sign me up!"
Somehow, Foolish can hear them in her helmet. Weird.
While she's being modified, Elvis walks on the regolith near the landing module, singing a lullaby, hands in pockets. He has a flashback to when he was in the U.S. Army, on patrol in South Vietnam, overseeing as an advisor to a platoon of ARVN, South Vietnamese Army men. Ambushed, losing two men in the first two seconds, First Lieutenant Presley blasts the fuck out of anything in front of him in a sweep taking in 170 degrees, killing another of his men who had rushed forward on the right, what a dummy! You're dead, dummy, you're dead because you were dumb!"
"You're dead because you were dumb,
you're dead because you were dumb,
you didn't make it today
you've got nothing to say, anymore,
so darn dumb."
Interrogating a captured Viet Cong fighter, Elvis merely describes tortures. His convincing vividness causes his victims to spill the beans, or at least say something, giving them a reprieve. His "Torture Song" never cracks the Billboard Top 100.
That was a bad movie, probably my worst. My Heart of Darkness in South Vietnam movie. Robert Taylor played my father. My name in the movie is Chet Daniels, I start out at seventeen, yearning to be an Army man. Robert Taylor lets me join even though I haven't finished my senior year in high school. The high school prom scene, where my character crashes it the night before boot camp and convinces Paula Prentiss (high school homecoming queen in her thirties) to drive around with him, get a hamburger, and pet.
Memories of Paula stored in my melon, I join the Army, some forty-five minutes of the movie. The drill instructor, Sergeant Asshole, is not a nice man. He beats me with soap in a sock. He yells at me, calls me a hick. I'm not a hick. I'm a famous actor and musician. I've fingered more dames than he has ribbons on his dress uniform, which I've seen him wearing, he looks very handsome.
Back home, Paula looks at her photo album, an hour of that.
Back to Elvis, required to then back to hold a hot iron bar while being tickled on the backside with a heron feather.
Paula cleans her gun.
Elvis graduates, toughened. In South Vietnam he finds himself. Adventure becomes his middle name.
In his spare time, taking breaks from being an advisor, he hunts wild boar, dines on imported Cornish game hen and hamburgers. When he sings, the sound of an orchestra or backing band manifests like the voice of an archangel. He sings in battle, firing his M-16, throwing grenades, his smooth baritone seducing the damp jungle leaves and even VC, enchanted before he mows them down.
President Johnson (as himself) awards the Congressional Medal of Honor, Army Version, to "the Singing Jungle Warrior."
Meanwhile, Senator Ben Sasse, a Republican from Nebraska, wants President Biden to "stop listening to all of your advisers who say Zelenskyy is a dead man walking...stop listening to those who say that Ukraine is inevitably going to lose."
Sasse thinks Ukraine can win!
"We should be on the side of these freedom fighters (Contras called 'freedom fighters' by Reagan)..."
He doesn't want to send in U.S. troops or use U.S. warplanes. He wants to use 44 million Ukrainians as soldiers against Russians.
"Ukrainians have the will to fight. We need to have the will to rearm them constantly." (italics mine).
In the short Politico article on Sasse's warmongering from a comfortable chair and state of the art health insurance, a six figure salary, and an apparent fondness for destabilizing already messed up foreign nations with weapons dumping, we may understand U.S. strategy in Ukraine:
Provide weapons indefinitely, bog Russia down in "endless" war, sponsor and arm terrorists--Nazis and other right wingers--let the people of Ukraine shoulder the burden in wrecked infrastructure, institutions subjected to pillaging and foreign manipulation, and mass killings of civilians by Russians and Nazis.
Ukraine's leader, Zelensky, released a video on March 18, two days ago as I write this, showing him in Kyiv, a spirits-raising message to the people, but wait! In the first second of the video one can see part of his upper left arm vanish, a building in the background showing through the twenty-first century Churchill. A glitch against a green screen? Would an actor turned president, like Zelensky, pretend to be in Kyiv while the Russian Army closes in? Did Zelensky flee Ukraine? Didn't Churchill, to whom Zelensky has been compared in the U.S. press and political establishment, fake his radio broadcasts, like he was really speaking from a radio station in Missouri?
It's a cheesy-looking video, but typical, perhaps of this age of fakery. It may be wise to spend a day not believing anything you hear on the news. If you watch a half hour of CNN, try regarding the people on screen as actors working for the same American money that actors in advertisements labor for. Anderson Cooper, popular CNN host, was a CIA intern during two summers in college. What he learned working there turned his hair Mike Pence-white.
Uschi Digard was in some Russ Meyer films. Every man's eyes become warm with delight when this woman appears naked on the screen. Sweden's Uschi Digard, born 1948, still alive, one gorgeous woman indeed.
Elvis singing on the Moon. Spirits go elsewhere to other planets, moons, asteroids, dust specks, black holes, neutron stars, nebulae, gravity wells, voids. Janis Joplin floats in a water ocean deep within Jupiter. Jim Morrison rides an ice cube around gas giant Saturn, singing,
"A ring, a great ring
We all sing, a great ring a great ring
We move! We spin! We melt!
We collide! Our cohesion
Is ended!"
Ray Manzarek, also dead, goes apeshit on his organ, listening in from Neptune's Dark Spot Nightclub.
Jimi Hendrix hangs out on the Moon in a crater near the North Pole where he can get good echo and reverb on his flipped upside down 1961 Stratocaster brought to him by Alan Shepard during Apollo 14. Jimi Hendrix also owns the golf balls hit by Shepard. He rolls them across his guitar strings, Fender amp cranked, the Moon shakes, China's Far Side Colony goes into high alert. NASA registers what is first thought to be a moonquake, but the vibrations came from the surface, near the North Pole. A drone launched from the White House travels to the Moon. Images taken reveal a lanky Black man playing an upside down guitar left handed. Prominent afro, colorful paisley shirt, a leather vest with a Cowboy pattern on it, a silver skull necklace.
The State Department dispatches The Three Stooges, Curly, Larry, and Moe, to Hendrix's position. The great guitarist is so absorbed in his licks and chunking rhythms he doesn't notice Moe approaching, but he feels Curly's fingers poking his back. Turning, Curly two-fingers the great guitarist in the eyes. Damn! The guitar sighs. Larry, coming in with a big rusty wrench, clobbers the great guitarist on the side of the head. Hendrix goes down, stays down, dead again.
Curly straps on Hendrix's instruments, plays left-handed the guitar solo from "Last of the New Wave Riders" by Utopia. Larry on drums, while Moe sings and plays a Fender Jazz bass.
"The whole universe is a giant guitar."* {*Note: a lyric from this great song, I write it here with the utmost respect to Todd Rundgren. "Last of the New Wave Riders" is one of the greatest fucking songs ever.
A rumor went around that actress Liv Tyler's real father is Todd Rundgren, not Steven Tyler of Aerosmith. Liv Tyler's mother, Bebe Buell, apparently enjoyed the company of rockers.
Is Todd the daddy, or Steven? Maury Povich never had them on his afternoon show to take a paternity test. The issue may have been resolved by now, though I don't care enough about the paternity of Liv Tyler to research it. It's 12:10 am, I have more writing to do before I go to bed.
Please don't ask me to research the Liv Tyler paternity mystery.
This is why I want a secretary working for me. I would ask her (my secretary would be a woman, my preference) to research the Rundgren-Buell-Tyler-Tyler enigma. I would give my secretary an hour to find the answers, she would probably have enough information in under twenty minutes, because how deep do we want to go with this story of the 1970s rock generation, their couplings and their interpersonal squabbles? Divorces, drugs, personal demons, Lana Turner out in Ritzy Ditzy Hills, California, still able to rock a mink stole, hair done up platinum, fifty seven years old, thinking she's got twenty years left to cut the mustard, has a vision while sitting at the hairdresser's with a black dome over her hair--
I'll act in a Tarantino film!
"Who could I be?" she wonders out loud. "Madge? Who could I play in a Tarantino film?"
"You could play the mother of one of those boys who kidnaps Bruce Willis. Pulp Fiction? Oh! You could be the parole officer of the gimp!"
"I think I'd prefer a western role, like a Miss Kitty type, you know, Amanda Blake in Gunsmoke?"
"So, a brothel keeper?"
"Yes, someone who takes care of men's needs. Cowboys weary from work in the hot sun, around cattle all day, smell of shit, shit on their clothes, in their mouths, in their hair. That's what the movies back in my day didn't get into. Shit on all those streets in TV westerns and in the movies."
"People don't want to see shit, darling."
"Scat munchers do," Lana Turner says.
"Don't bring up scat munching with Mr. Tarantino," the hairdresser advises. "He's apt to make a movie called Scat Munchers."
"I'll propose it to him, but I want to play a brothel keeper, whenever the era."
Tarantino spins counter-clockwise in his chair. The view of foggy springtime Berlin through his tall windows reminds Lana Turner of film noir, but of a Cold War spy premise as well.
"Scat Munchers, huh?" he says.
She nods, holding her white-gloved hands close together over her 29,000 dollar purse.
"I'm not going to make a movie called Scat Munchers."
"I'm not married to the title."
"I'm glad to hear it. Now what we have here is a conflict of interests, because your agent told me you want me to make a Western with you, and you want to play a Miss Kitty type, right?"
"Yes."
"I made a movie not long ago called The Hateful 8. Are you familiar?"
"I saw it, yes, on my television at home."
"That's a western. I don't want to do a western. I'm really not interested in making very many more movies, actually, maybe three, but don't hold me to that. But working with Lana Turner. And here you are in my office, flew all the way to Germany to see me."
"Why are you in Germany, if you don't mind my asking?"
"I don't mind. I'm making a documentary for the Institute of Grindhouse Studies. It's about East German cinema, East German film stars, who they were, what happened to them, East German directors, East German films, the Stasi, the fall of Honekker."
"Hanukkah?"
"Honekker. He was the leader of East Germany when the Wall was taken down."
"Which wall?"
"The Berlin Wall."
"There was a wall in Berlin? President Trump didn't get far with his wall, but President Biden continues the necessary work."
"You have the attitudes of your generation, Miss Turner."
"As do you of yours."
"I can tell you've got your acting chops still. Okay, let's make a movie."
Justice For Dee, Tarantino's western-horse opera-with comedy sketches 390 minute film, features a seventeen minute tracking shot on Lana Turner at her makeup table. It's 1989, Lana is about to have a lunch date with a possible beau, the CFO of a glass manufacturer, very impressive stock portfolio. She knocks over a framed photograph of herself looking like the thirty year old Lana Turner, in other words, hot. Glass breaks, the frame separates from the backing behind the picture, but there's another photo, silvery image of herself age thirty, wearing costume of 1881, deep in New Mexico Territory, verging on Arizona, The Pearly Gates Saloon And Woman Supplier For Tired Men Who Require Relaxation Of Tension.
Lana Turner, in her fifties with wrinkles, but Tarantino has CGI make her look thirty with good results, better than the animatronic look of Carrie Fisher in Rogue One A Star Wars Story. They attach electrodes to Lana Turner's face and to her blue skin-tight body suit. She looks like she's being studied.
The bloom of youthful movie star Turner, her heyday in the 1940s and 1950s, before Johnny Stompanato got stabbed to death by Lana's daughter Cheryl Crane, but that's another story. Peyton Place, Imitation of Life, two good Turner films in 1959, what an elegant-looking woman.
Tarantino keeps to himself a chuckle while watching Lana Turner study the script again for her next scene, inside a blue skin with circles and wires attached, a human being caught in a web in a science fiction horror movie about spiders--Wait, Tarantino thinks.
A giant spider movie, like Tarantula! Mara Corday, oh man, I wonder if she's still alive? That's what I'll do for my second of three remaining movies. Justice For Dee I'm not sure I like, but in time I might change my mind. My work is very good. Books have been written about my films. Books have been written about the directors I've ripped off, like Robert Aldrich.
Here's my contribution to the Rundgren-Tyler-Tyler-Buell controversy: Look at Liv Tyler's mouth. Look at Steven Tyler's mouth. Liv Tyler got Steven Tyler's mouth and long face, while also inheriting her mother's prettiness.
Conclusion: Liv Tyler is Todd Rundgren's daughter.
A responsible writer says, "I'm not sure where I'm going with this." An irresponsible writer--irresponsible to the "rules" of writing--creates irresponsible fiction, irresponsible non-fiction. Where I'm going with this is to the next thought.
For these are scrolls, some of these mishmash essays, started without knowledge of goal. Sailing randomly, arriving on Ithaca after ten years.
The war heightens consciousness, but really, the war has been going on for decades.
Peace in a jade plant, thick flesh of the green leaves, more like coins. Green money, green rent.
In corporate press, the thing is to deny the impact of Nazis in Ukraine. Thus, complicity with the genocidal and power goals of Nazis can be assigned quite accurately to Western mainstream news media. These media, however, overlook Yemen's pain as it's pummeled, its people dying in the hundreds of thousands, killed by Saudis, Emiratis, and Americans. What Noam Chomsky called "worthy victims and unworthy victims." Now, Ukrainians are worthy victims, while Yemenis are not. Russia's invasion supposedly happened in a vacuum space of a history wiped clean of a U.S. invasion of Iraq, the nineteen year disastrous occupation of Afghanistan, bombings of predominantly Arab countries, but America's victims lack worthiness. Putin's victims, like Hussein's victims, are worthy.
Falling for this propaganda trick means the dupe has come to ignore the real suffering of America's victims in other countries, and America's victimizing of most of its population.
The Buddhist idea of Right Action means one strives to be true to oneself, to be transparent so that what lies within lies without, lies pushed aside in favor of honesty and doing the right thing, to paraphrase the title of Spike Lee's third film.
His second film, School Daze, is interesting. College life, Spike looking too old as a student, but Jasmine Guy looks great. There's an excellent song and dance number with a group of Black women.
I haven't seen Lee's first film, She's Gotta Have It. In black and white, made cheaply, it's probably more interesting than some of the slick expensive movies he's made, though Malcolm X is a masterpiece, with Denzel Washington's eponymous performance some of the best acting I've ever seen.
America has for-profit prisons. A for-profit war, that is, arms industry. Security for profit. Patriotism for profit. Dreamland, the Hollywood we wish existed, extinguishes the old crew of actresses, Lana and even Olivia De Havilland can't be expected to make it past 120. Uschi Digard lives, as does Kim Darby. Glen Campbell, though, is dead, as is Rhonda Fleming, living it up on Vesta, the big asteroid, eating caviar off of John Garfield's butt.
Elvis, meanwhile, strums his guitar, trailed by the aliens, appearing as 1963 college girls. They hop in lunar gee into a poster for Heaven Is On the Moon.
Vic Neptune
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