Movies, Music and (2m28s)
What is fake and what is real has been our preoccupation since we began to repeat sounds as words.
Always ambivalent about the truth, the USA has recently decided to go all in on lying.
We now let people lie all the time because telling the truth is “a hassle,” and if there’s one thing our culture won’t abide, it’s labor.1
Frictionless is next to godliness.
Of course, the truth is friction. Freedom is 1,000% friction – “your rights end where my nose begins.”
But, enough about our duties – I don’t want to be a drag! I came here to recommend three beautiful things.
Fake Music
This is a perfect video. It takes a simple topic – is it wrong to fake a perfect guitar solo – and quickly unravels it to reveal every thread of our society; especially the ones that hide behind the seams of our reality. If you don’t care about guitars, if you don’t care about ethics: this fast and funny video is for you.
Happy Cinco de Mayo
Last night I heard that Leonard Leo’s pope has some clever ideas about foreign films. You’re welcome to wrestle with that pig – good luck getting that shit off – but I thought immediately of this powerful essay by the same popular curator who made the Eartha Kitt video I shared last time:
TLDR; before the unipolar world that hastened our descent into degeneracy, when our elites thought we had to compete for hearts and minds in Latin America, the USA tried to use Carmen Miranda to channel soft power.
From our current morass, the why is almost titillating but the how is absolutely mind-blowing. The devil is forever in the details and these managed to surprise this hardened, wizened witness.
(Of course, I won’t let this holy day go by without linking to my 2016 screenplay about a deadly epidemic of violence that starts on a farm and spreads to a college town. Prophetic? Hardly. We’re just that pathetic.)
Reading
Because Google killed Reader which killed off RSS just as Facebook was replicating its function (in the same way that the pod people of Invasion of the Body Snatchers replicate their hosts), we now have… newsletters.
(Admittedly, a better name than “blogs”.)
Here are some of the newsletters I am reading, which I can heartily recommend to you as well:
Steve Vladeck – the rule of law
Margaret Sullivan – the news, or what’s left of it
Corbin Trent – the politics we deserve
Paul Krugman – what we talk about when we talk about economics
postscript
What draws lazy, impatient, incurious people to fascism?
Its promise of MEN OF ACTION.
aT lEaSt hE’s dOiNg sOmEtHiNg AbOuT ________.
We’ve been talking about decoupling with China – if not in those words – for decades:
Since 2000, there have been several attempts to repeal the Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China. The strongest attempt was in 2005 when House Representative Bernie Sanders and 61 co-sponsors introduced a legislation that would repeal the PNTR with China.[31]
Yeah, that guy.
What does fascism do? The worst possible thing. The dumbest possible thing.
Because, again, its aim is not to provide any lasting solution but to satisfy the whims of the laziest, most impatient, most willfully ignorant people.