Neighborhood Watch

Neighborhood Watch: I was surprised how enjoyable this video-on-demand crime thriller was. Starring one Johnny One Note actor I like (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and one Effeminate Nerd Method actor I don’t like (Jack Quaid), it’s a fairly standard buddy movie (the two main characters initially seem {bi}polar opposites, but of course, overcome their differences by film’s end) with just enough new touches to make it seem fresh.

Simon (Jack *Effeminate Nerd Method* Quaid) is a recently released schizophrenic still struggling with hallucinations of his abusive dead father and unable to find work (when stressed, as he frequently is, he speaks word salad gibberish). Wandering home after his latest fiasco of a job interview, he sees a young woman being beaten and forced into the proverbial white van. Our nutcase reports the crime to the police, but, of course, he can’t control his lunacy and the lady cop doesn’t believe him. Desperate to rescue the girl, our lunatic hero-wannabe turns to his cranky next door neighbor Ed (Jeffrey Dean Morgan in his usual gruff, sarcastic alpha male mode) for help. Ed is the retired former head of security for a college campus who is perpetually annoyed at being labeled a *security guard.* Initially, of course, Ed doesn't want anything to do with Simon, whom he nicknames *Screw Loose* and *Taffy Brain,* but with no friends and no job and nothing to do but stew in resentment, he relents and the two heroes set about saving the damsel in distress.

The looney tunes gimmick, Simon’s schizophrenic tics, hallucinations and verbal outbursts, keep the familiar story from turning stale, and I have to credit Jack Quaid for a fairly convincing performance, though there is still a whiff of the effeminate nerd to him. Jeffrey Dean Morgan is pitch perfect as cantankerous, brusque, self-assured retiree grappling with loss (his character wears a wedding ring but there is no wife to be seen) and diminishing relevance. Morgan and Quaid work well together and manage to infuse what could have been a yawner with just enough humor and pathos to keep the viewer engaged from beginning to end.

Untitled Painting

This painting, by the German artist Adolf Hitler, presents a haunting, mysterious scene that evokes themes of bureaucracy, alienation and existential introspection.

Known mainly for his postcard art, bland but technically skilled landscapes and city scenes quickly produced to procure the vagabond artist lunch money, here is a rare personal work which can be variously interpreted in light of his past disappointments and future rise and fall.

The image shows a hallway receding into infinity, framed by an increasingly smaller series of rectangular doorways or archways. Two men are present in the foreground. Or, two figures are present in the foreground. One, seated at a desk on the left, dressed in a formal suit, possibly a clerk or gatekeeper, is certainly male. The other, assumed by most art historians to be male, stands holding a document or portfolio, facing forward but not directly engaging the viewer or the seated man. Yet when I first saw the painting, I was struck by the *It’s Pat* nature of the standing figure. The long frock, the suggestion of breasts, the gender neutral facial features and hair, this figure struck me as the one-testicled, asexual Hitler’s possibly unconscious representation of himself.

I see Hitler waiting with his portfolio to be admitted for examination by the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. The pain of his two rejections by the Academy, the depression, the frustration of his life’s dream, the emptiness and loneliness of his future, the persecution by the bureaucratic Art Academy, are all foretold after the fact in this uncanny painting.

Dominated by dark, muted tones—deep grays, browns, and shadows—it conveys the coming somber, oppressive atmosphere for Germany. One can’t help but view the vast, receding hallway as the prototype for the Third Reich, in which the people will struggle against incomprehensible systems. Hitler’s masterful use of one-point perspective adds a sense of depth, guiding the viewer’s gaze inexorably toward Germany’s vanishing point, and foretelling his claustrophobic, helpless feeling trapped in his last days in his underground bunker.

Jack Nance & Ted Kaczynski

 

The alcoholic actor Jack Nance (born 21 Dec 1943) gained world-wide fame from his starring role as Henry Spencer in David Lynch's 1978 anti-industrial manifesto Eraserhead.  Nance brilliantly portrayed a despairing Ultimate Everyman driven to infanticide in a mercilessly bleak parallel world built from the rusting carcass of our industrial civilization.  Nance's character is a repressed, frightened little man who is unable to sustain relationships with women.  Henry is sexually dysfunctional, as evidenced by his near-continual leaking of individual worm-size genetically mutated sperm.  However, Henry has *fathered* a child with his sometimes-girlfriend (the virging?) Mary.  Their baby, the film suggests, was conceived when Mary came into contact with one of Henry's leaked sperm while she lay writhing in an orgasmic masturbatory frenzy on a bed she shared with the impotent Henry.  Hence, in an inversion of the Virgin Birth of Jesus, Henry is shown to be the *spiritual father* of the messiah of the dying industrial world.

But Henry's savior child turns out to be a hideous genetic freak—perhaps symbolic of Lynch's belief that techno-industrial man is no longer a fit vessel for the Spirit of God.  In any event, Henry is abandoned by Mary and left to care for the deformed infant. The infant cries continuously, but Henry is unable to respond in any meaningful way and he grows increasingly anxious and panicked—again, perhaps representing Lynch's belief that the frenetic nature of techno-industrial life is the result of man distancing himself from nature and God.  In the end, unable to recognize the infant's cries as anything other than a threat to his own feeble existence, Henry pierces the baby's side with a pair of scissors—thus in the hyper-speed of techno-industrial life, the savior is executed just days after birth.  

Jack Nance was murdered on 31 December 1996, just one day after sustaining a head injury in an alcohol-fueled doughnut shop brawl.  Oddly, in a case of truly Lynchian weirdness, Nance's Eraserhead character may have been the spiritual father of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski.

Eraserhead was released shortly before Kaczynski's first amateurish attack in 1978.  Did Kaczynski see Eraserhead?  Kaczynski, like Eraserhead's Henry Spencer, was never able to sustain a relationship with a woman.  What did Kaczynski make of the the bizarre pencil eraser experiments made on Henry's brain, did they remind him of the own psychological experiments performed on him while he was a student at Harvard?  Significantly, while working in a machine shop in Chicago (a microcosm of Eraserhead's techno-industrial world), Kaczynski's awkward sexual advances were rebuffed by a female co-worker.  Humiliated, Kaczynski fled to the pre-industrial wilderness of Montana. 

Did Kaczynski ponder the anti-industrial imagery of Eraserhead?  Did Lynch's cry for a redeemer of the techno-industrial world resonate deep within Kaczynski's own soul?  Did Kaczynski identify with the sexually feeble Henry?  Did he identify with Henry's impulse to murder?  We will never know the answers to these questions.  

Immigration Theater

The Trump administration is deploying the California National Guard in response to protests in Los Angeles over immigration enforcement operations that have resulted in some clashes between demonstrators and authorities, the White House said in a statement. President Donald Trump signed a memorandum "deploying 2,000 National Guardsmen to address the lawlessness" in California as demonstrations opposing Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations continue in the state, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement Saturday.  "In the wake of this violence, California's feckless Democrat leaders have completely abdicated their responsibility to protect their citizens," Leavitt said. "That is why President Trump has signed a Presidential Memorandum deploying 2,000 National Guardsmen to address the lawlessness that has been allowed to fester," Leavitt said.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a post on X that the Defense Department is "mobilizing the National Guard IMMEDIATELY to support federal law enforcement in Los Angeles. And, if violence continues, active duty Marines at Camp Pendleton will also be mobilized - they are on high alert." Earlier, California Gov. Gavin Newsom said the federal government was moving to "take over the California National Guard," calling the move "purposefully inflammatory" and saying it will "only escalate tensions."

This is the latest revival of a bad traveling road show: Immigration!

If anybody ought to know the true value of immigration in Late Stage Capitalism, it's Donald Trump.  Before earning his family empire tens of billions of dollars by selling White House access to foreign dignitaries and White House souvenir trinkets at $99.99 a pop to MAGA rubes, Trump made his fortune off properties that could not have been built without cheap, *illegal* labor.  Trump was one of the great contributors to the *immigration problem.*

But about twenty years ago Trump realized all the properties he had built off cheap labor (and even with the cheap labor, he never fully paid his contractors, his businesses employed a stable of lawyers to fight failure to pay lawsuits and then file bankruptcies) could no longer operate profitably.  His ugly hotels, casinos, golf courses were all running huge losses.  The money was running dry.  How to save the family fortune?  He branched into Entertainment with his Apprentice TV show, but that didn't provide nearly enough cash.  The biggest dollars were to be made selling American favors to foreigners.  Politics was to be Trump's last Golden Goose.

Trump used the one issue he knew something about, immigration, as his ticket to the White House.  Even though Trump knew Late Stage Capitalism was dependent upon the cheap labor provided by immigrants, he lied and told the gullible sheeple otherwise.  And then to further sell the lie, to make it the sheeple's greatest concern, Trump projected onto immigrants the two great crimes of his own personal life, larceny and rape.  He made the immigrants the thieves and rapists.  He made the immigrants the bad hombres.

After raising the sheeple's anxiety levels to the point he could win two presidential elections based upon nothing more than white sheeple's irrational fear of poor colored people, Trump had to offer a solution to the problem he created.  He had to convince the frightened sheeple he could save them.  Through border walls and theatrical round-ups of poor colored people, Trump offers the frightened sheeple the illusion of control.  The appearance of law and order being restored.  

And so we have these endless staged conflicts.  Look at the heavy-handed tactics, it's pure theater.  The military vehicles, the masked heavily armed ICE agents provoking poor colored people (whether they are immigrants or not doesn't matter, this latest spectacle started with ICE attacking a colored American citizen, a labor leader).  Create a problem, provide a dramatic, cinematic solution.  Theater.  Theater that's all too real to the poor coloreds being rounded up, their lives, at best, interrupted, and, at worst, ruined.  Theater to the sheeple watching through the lens of FOX News and who receive some placebo effect relief from their immigration anxiety.

Though this theater seems genuine to large portions of America, in truth it's no more beneficial than a civil war re-enactment.  The illusion of control.  The illusion of American revival.  But you don't have to be a prophet to predict that when Trump leaves office, the lives of the MAGA rubes will be just as impoverished, if not more so, as when he entered—and not just economically, but also socially and spiritually.

From The Basement III

Going through the box of old letters and shit in the basement has been very pleasant.  Sifting through the papers and mementos, I take pause over how many of the creators have now died.  They no longer exist.  At least, in this plane of existence.  DEAD.

The letters and other objects are relics.  Artifacts.  I feel by posting them here, by dusting them off and presenting them on the internets, I have, to a degree, resurrected the creators.  I have power over life and death.  I resurrect some, like the author of the above email, to life, and others, like the pathetic New York publisher mentioned in the first entry of this series, I resurrect to damnation.  To a degree, of course.  You understand that.

These dead are thought of, and will be thought of, whenever somebody will stumble across this internets page.  Even after I myself am dead, these resurrections will live on, for as long as this internet host lives.

Through these relics the dead will enter the consciousness of the living, and be, temporarily, psychically revived.  The dead will speak.

The creator of the relic above passed judgment more than twenty-five years ago, and this judgment will continue to ring for as long as this internet will last. 

This is my gift to the dead. 

Another One From The Basement

Here's another gem I found in that old box of letters and shit that was sitting in my basement.  This thing is probably around thirty years old.  It was a *work wanted* flyer from a self-proclaimed *fat slob* named Doug Holland.  Besides being fat and a slob and a general laborer, Holland was also a Prominent Figure in the 1990s zine scene (the oddball penpal movement in which oddballs published their own xeroxed magazines and then traded them through the mail to other oddballs who would then praise them in their own oddball magazines, etc., etc. in a DIY Literary Ponzi Scheme), first as the publisher of Pathetic Life, a monthly diary-type zine chronicling his low-rent San Francisco existence, and then as the William Randolph Hearst of zines with his Zine World, a zine devoted to reviewing other zines. Holland had a crew of oddballs volunteering to write the reviews.

The Holland Zine Empire probably lasted 5 years or so before he mysteriously vanished for 25 or so years before reappearing on his current internets page, in which he re-posts entries from the old Pathetic Life zine, as well as movie reviews and links to news articles documenting sex crimes committed by self-proclaimed Christians. Holland, for some reason, has always seemed to have a grudge against churchianity. He now seems to have acquired an additional grudge against MAGA. He also has a terminally ill roommate who can’t exit this plane of existence fast enough.

I tried calling the number on the flyer to see if I could hire Holland to clean my basement, but the number is out of service. Apparently Holland is now *retired,* living a comfortable hermit’s life care of his monthly Social Security stipend.

On two or three occasions over the past couple years I attempted to interview Holland about the old zine days and this and that, but he declined.

I always enjoyed reading Pathetic Life. It was a humorous, thoughtful, well-written account of lonely low-budget American life.

I Won!

In a bygone era I fancied myself a *writer.*  I typed a novel titled *Broken Crown* (not the same *Broken Crown* I am now selling on Amazon.com).  Only a handful of people have read it.  I remember it as being mildly amusing, certainly not Hemingway or Nabokov, but better than the shit being published in America today.  Anyways, I sent the novel to many, many publishers—they all rejected it.  After the first dozen or so rejections I changed the tone of my query letter or whatever you call it.  I knew it wasn't going to be published, so in essence I rejected the publishers first, LOL.

Anyways, I was cleaning out my basement yesterday and came across a cardboard box with old letters and shit.  Many of them were rejection letters.  One of them was from a New York snob.  Some uppity broad from a shit-ass little publisher named Soho Press.  I re-read this broad's rejection letter and laughed as loud as I probably did some 30 years or so ago.  And then I was curious, was this broad still alive?

No.

She's been dead for over 15 years!!  I outlived her!!  So, I WON!  Congratulations to me!