American Digest

The cemetery at the top of Queen Anne in Seattle is busy this weekend. This even though a cemetery under all circumstances is seldom thought of as a busy place. We haven’t had busy cemeteries since 1945. Since then the long peace and its sleep was only briefly, for a few years every now and then, interrupted by a small war. The cemeteries fill up more slowly now than ever before. And our sleep, regardless of continuing alarms, deepens.

These days we resent, it seems, having them fill at all, clinging to our tiny lives with a passion that passes all understanding; clinging to our large liberty with the belief that all payments on such a loan will be interest-free and deferred for at least 100 years.

Still, the cemetery at the top of Queen Anne does tend to take on a calm, resigned bustle over Memorial Day weekend, as the decreasing number of families who have lost members to war come to decorate the graves of those we now so delicately refer to as “The Fallen.” They are not, of course, fallen in the sense that they will, suddenly and to our utter surprise, get up. That they will never do in this world. For they are not “The Fallen,” they are “The Dead.”

In the cemetery at the end of my street, of course, all the permanent residents are dead. But those who are among the war dead, or among those who served in a war, are easily found on this day by the small American flags their loved ones who still survive place and refresh. In this cemetery atop Queen Anne hill in Seattle, the small flags grow fewer and smaller with each passing year. It is not, of course, that the size of the sacrifice has been reduced. That remains the largest gift one free man may give to the country that sustained him. It is instead the regard of the country for whom the sacrifices were made that has gotten smaller, eroded by the self-love that the secular celebrate above all other values.

As you walk about the green lawn and weave among the markers, the slight breeze moves the small three-colored flags. Some are tattered and faded. Some are wound around the small gold sticks that hold them up. You straighten these out almost as an afterthought. Then the breeze unfurls them.

Here and there, people tend the grave of this or that loved one; weeding, washing, or otherwise making the gradually fading marks in the stone clear under the sky. Cars pull in and wind slow, careful on the curves, and park almost at random. An old woman emerges from one, a father and son from another, an entire family from yet another. They carry flowers in bunches or potted and, at times, gardening implements and a bucket for carrying away the weeds. It’s a quiet morning. Nobody is in a hurry to arrive and once arrived to leave.

When I lived in Villers-Cotteret , between Compaigne and Soissons, along the Western Front in France, the cemeteries were as quiet but on a scale difficult to imagine unless they were seen.

In the Battle of Soissons in July of 1918, 12,000 men (Americans and Germans) were killed in four days. Vast crops of white crosses sprouted from the fields their rows and columns fading into the distance as they marched back from the roadside like an army of the dead called to attention until the end of time. American cemeteries merged with French cemeteries that merged with German cemeteries; their only distinction being the flags that flew over what one took to be the center of the arrangement. I suppose one could find out the number of graves in these serried ranks. Somewhere they keep the count. Governments are especially good at counting. But it is enough to know they are beyond numbering by an individual; that the mind would cease before the final number was reached.

To have even a hundredth of those cemeteries in the United States now would be more than we, as a nation, could bear. It would not be so much the dead within it, but the truth that made it happen that would be unbearable. This is, of course, what we are as a nation fiddling about with on this Memorial Day. We count our war dead daily now, but we count mostly on the fingers of one hand, at times on two. Never in numbers now beyond our ability to imagine. This is not because we cannot die daily in large numbers in a war. September 11th proved to us that we still die in the thousands, but many among us cannot now hold that number as a reality, but only as a “tragic” exception that need not have happened and will — most likely — never happen again.

That, at least, is the mindset that I assume when I read how the “War on Terror” is but a bumper strip. In a way, that’s preferable to the mindset that now, in increasing numbers among us, prefers to take refuge in the unbalanced belief that 9/11 was actually something planned and executed by the American government. Why many of my fellow Americans prefer this “explanation” is something that I once felt was beyond comprehension. Now I see it is just another comfortable position taken up by those for whom the habits of automatic treason have become just another fashionable denigration of the country that has made their liberty to believe the worst of it not only possible but popular.

Like the graves in my local cemetery, these souls too bear within them a small flag, but that flag — unlike their souls — is white and, in its increasing rootedness in our body politic signals not sacrifice for the advancement of the American experiment, but the abject surrender of their lives to small spites and the tiny victories of lifestyle liberation.

In the cemetery at the end of my street, there are a few small flags. There are many more graves with no flag at all, but they are the ones that the small flags made possible. Should the terrible forests of white crosses ever bloom across our landscape — as once they did during the Civil War — it will not be because we had too few of those small, three-colored flags, but because we became a nation with far too many white ones.

[Originally published Memorial Day, 2007]

“If you tell someone they have a short attention span often enough, they might believe you enough to get one, but then they’ll forget what channel you’re on.” — TV producer, Fox News, 2002

No section of our society exemplifies ADD more than Big Media whose efforts in spreading fear, uncertainty, doubt, and confusion go forward daily with no signs of stopping and less than zero signs of shame.

Big Media is happy to spread the myth of ADD / HD (Attention Deficit Disorder / Hyperactivity Disorder) affliction. In doing so they point only at the young. They are happy to do it because, in a very real way, it protects them from being seen as the single profession in which ADD / HD is a virus that threatens the lives and happiness of millions.

For centuries it has been unfashionable in the West to kill the messenger. This convention, along with so many others in the post 9/11 world, may have to be reconsidered. [click to continue…]

On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair
Warm smell of colitas, rising up through the air
Up ahead in the distance, I saw a shimmering light
My head grew heavy and my sight grew dim
I had to stop for the night. [click to continue…]

Well, it’s not like white privilege is any big secret. Anyone can reach out and take some. Here’s how you do it: Go to school and study your ass off. Graduate from high school. Obey the law. Avoid recreational drugs and alcohol. Get a job. Consider no job, if it is honest work, to be beneath you. Work your ass off. Go to church. Avoid pre-marital sex and all-night partying. Do not have a child unless you’re married and are able to support one. Live beneath your means. Save money for emergencies. Do not hang out with criminals, slackers, or losers. This is white privilege in a nutshell. And what’s great about white privilege is, get this, you don’t have to be white to get it.

QQQ, re Trump – Maggie’s Farm “While we recognize that the subject did not actually steal any horses, he is obviously guilty of trying to resist being hanged for it.”

Desperate times are like gravity, it needs to get the upper hand only once. If you’re not thinking like an escapee from a Soviet gulag you’re not preparing for the worst. And if you’re not prepared for the worst, you won’t survive the worst. Woodpile Report

Matt Taibbi: The Beginning Of The End Of American Journalism Was The Lewinski Scandal Americans have become addicted to the news that agrees with their bias, and it was set up that way on purpose. The only thing anyone will hear when they turn on the news are stories specifically crafted to manufacture outrage, make you hate the other side, and fuel the addiction to anger.

If you are over the age of 50, you recall a time when consuming mass media was something you did on the train to work or when you got home. Within living memory it was easy for a man to be completely free of politics and mass media. Today it is close to impossible.

No one should be “allowed” to enjoy something that thinks so little of its audience. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is not disgusting because it’s the first to do this, but because it’s one of the first to do it without pushback. Even film critics can’t be pissed to do their job and thoughtfully pick it apart, evidenced by Endgame’s near-universal acclaim. Ultimately, it’s because these movies speak to one commonly held desire: to be coddled in the face of oblivion. [click to continue…]

“And don’t even get me started on the quarterly “style magazine” which is a paean to what was once an “alternate lifestyle” that the WSJ and others are attempting to mainstream. It’s a glossy spread of fashion, art and architecture by and for the LGBTQwerty crowd – as well as anyone who wishes not to offend them.”    MOTUS A.D.: The End of the Line? Part I [click to continue…]

Inspiring. Much more inspiring than those “Raptors” vs. those “Bucks.” (And what’s with that vaguely racist name anyway?)

These panels taught me … that the creative contextualization of a play like The Vagina Monologues can bring certain perspectives on important issues into a constructive and fruitful dialogue with the Catholic tradition. This is a good model for the future. Accordingly, I see no reason to prohibit performances of The Vagina Monologues on campus and do not intend to do so. — Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., President, University of Notre Dame

Like the befuddled Reverend Father above, I too — in a fit of “creative contextualization”— seek to bring “certain perspectives on important issues into a constructive and fruitful dialogue”. To further that mission, there is a secret evening of drama has been taking place in numerous undisclosed locations about the nation. We are all aware of the unstoppable chunk of feminist flatulence known as “The Vagina Monologues,” but few know about the blowback that is “The Dick Dialogues.”

The Dick Dialogues is usually performed on the down-low in the basements of sports bars, carefully darkened car-repair garages and the deepest forest amphitheaters of the Bohemian Grove. Attendance is strictly male and strictly invitation-only since in many states the mere thought of giving a performance of “The Dick Dialogues” would constitute a hate crime.

“The Dick Dialogues” consists of two men, traditionally named “Plick and Plack. the Fappet Brothers” slumped in Lay-Z-Boys in their Rec Room. Here they field calls on a speaker phone from a series of male, female, and neutered voices. The actors, clad in the traditional native garb of jeans, Hooters t-shirts, baseball caps, and tutus, respond to questions during an extended half-time at a fantasy football league’s Super Bowl. The cost of admission is a donation suggested to be equal to one month of the attendee’s child support. [click to continue…]

Thanks to the unremitting efforts of two wives and a number of desperate girlfriends I have, over the years, become a fully domesticated man. I cook. I iron. I put the seat down out of pure reflex.

And I clean.

Yes, I clean the house. I have a wide variety of products and tools for floors, ceilings, window, toilets, and countertops (I’m especially good on countertops since I not only have cleaning spritzers in plain acid wash and foaming bleach blaster, I also have a compound that renews the polish once the sanitizing has been completed.) I am the very model of the modern major traife buster.

I am, however, a bit sketchy on floors. This is not to say you couldn’t eat off my floors. You could because you’d find a host of food shreds there on any given afternoon. This is not because I like floors configured as mouse buffets but only because, being 6’1”, the floors are so far away I don’t really focus on them. My solution? The world’s most rapacious vacuum cleaner, “The Kirby.”

Actually, I have 2 (two!) solutions since I own 2 (two!) vacuum cleaners. The first is a kind of cheap, plastic metrosexual’s vacuum bought at some box store because it was cheap. Like all metrosexual items, it performs in a manner that lets you know all cheap things are worth much less than you spent on them. It sucks by not sucking as a sucker of floor dirt should. Very sucky. It is, at the best, back-up. Bags and parts for it are sold everywhere.

Then there’s “The 2004 Kirby Diamond” weighing in are over twenty-three pounds of solid chromed steel, titanium bristles that can skin a black rhino, and a woven cloth bag wrapped around the vacuum bag that could be made into an outdoor area rug. The motor in this bad boy is so powerful it can suck kittens out of my basement through the floorboards in the living room. It is the chopped Harley Hog of vacuums. [click to continue…]

for Tom Mandel, 1946-1995

[NOTE: Yesterday’s inevitable rupture of an old untended friendship among the plethora of my virtual-friends on Facebook put me in mind of another good friend and true from the past, Tom Mandel, and this memoir from 2005. I’m moving it here so that it will not perish from the Net. God speed, Tom. God speed.]

THESE DAYS NEW FRIENDS come more rarely and old friends begin to leave more often. Fate, accidents, God’s will, and misunderstandings take them, as they shall take us all, as the years roll on. And as these years roll on the need to acquire light friendships pales before the deeper ones that endure. But some end too soon, far too soon, and their leaving lingers as if the debt you owe to them is the debt of memory; one on which only the interest can be paid, never the principal.

Those that have left come back to the mind unbidden and at strange moments, moments unguarded and almost, well, casual. This morning I remembered, as I only sometimes do, Tom Mandel — ” the first friend I ever made before I met him.”

At dawn I was watering the eclectic collection of potted plants out on my deck that looks far out to sea from the Laguna Hills. This morning the sea faded into a long blue-grey haze as the light from behind the hills slowly descended on the smooth surface of those waters., Behind me the random selection from the iTunes library chose, at that moment, to play a song I’ve been favoring this past week or so, Tim McGraw’s “Live Like You Were Dying.”

When it got to the lyrics,

I went skydiving.
I went Rocky Mountain climbing.
I went two point seven seconds
on a bull named Fu Man Chu.
And I loved deeper,
And I spoke sweeter,
And I gave forgiveness I’d been denyin’.
And he said some day I hope you get the chance
To live like you were dyin’.

He said I was finally the husband,
that most the time I wasn’t.
And I became a friend,
a friend would like to have….

And there was good old Tom Mandel standing slim, well-dressed, and sardonic in my haphazard memory palace. And I thought, before he faded,

“Oh, yes. Tom. There he is. What a good man he was. How I regret that I failed him in those last days. I should have been more courageous. But the past is the past and that was the least of the past. What matters now is that, every now and again, I think of him and what a good friend and what a good man he was. Died young. But did he? How long is a life anyway? Has it really been ten years since he died? Turn around a decade’s gone.”

[click to continue…]

“And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.
Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. “

“Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.”

 “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.”

“Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs and seasons, and for days and years; and let them be for lights in the firmament of the heavens to give light on the earth.”

“Let the waters abound with an abundance of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the face of the firmament of the heavens.”

 “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

Background: At the end of 1924, Escher and his new bride purchased a house under construction in Frascati, a small town outside of Rome.

The house was finished in March, 1925, but the couple did not move in until October. Shortly after Escher moved into his new home outside of Rome, his brother was killed in a mountaineering accident, and Escher had to go to the site to identify the body. After this tragedy, Escher produced his famous Days of Creation woodcuts.

M.C. Escher Biography

These are the original Twelve Steps as suggested by the 2020 Democrat Android, BidenBernie 2.0.

1. We admitted we were powerless over spending — that our deficit had become unmanageable.

2. Came to believe that taxes greater than currently levied could restore us to solvency.

3. Made a decision to turn our nation and our lives over to the care of Socialism as we understood it.

4. Made a searching and fearless inventory of all the gold in Fort Knox and found two nuggets worth $325.99.

5. Admitted to voters, to the Federal Reserve, and to another eternal Government bureaucracy being the exact nature of our bankruptcy.

6. Were entirely ready to have the U.S. Mint print infinite money on whatever paper they could get at a discount down at Staples.

7. Humbly asked the voters to give us all their money and title to their vacation homes.

8. Made a list of all persons that still had something squirreled away, and became willing to  send in the National Guard to dig up their backyards and basements.

9. Made direct promises to replace any precious metals or gems found with paper money at ten cents on the dollar, to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would require a cash award of more than $49.98.

10. Continued to search for hidden assets and when we found them promptly seized them.

11. Sought through Universal Health Care and reducing the military to improve our nation until it resembled Great Britain in real power and influence, and confiscated all guns and ammunition we could lay our hands on to keep pesky disagreements with the National Guard on a name-calling basis, praying only for a disarmed, dispirited, depressed and Universally Medicated citizenry and for the power to rule over them.

12. Having had a rebirth of solvency for 72 hours as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to any surviving free societies and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

Now that magic mushrooms have been added to the legalized drugs poo-poo platter in Denver, it is perhaps time to look back at some of the street-legal drugs that existed back in the day when you used to go down to the all-night pharmacy or balsa-model hobby shop to see what over the counter nostrums could be counted on to give you a buzz.

Betty Boop Cartoon Banned For Drug Use 1934.

Laughing Gas, or nitrous oxide, has been used as an intoxicant since about ten seconds after it was first synthesized by Joseph Priestly in 1772. That, however, does not mean that by the 1960s laughing gas was regarded as passé. Au contraire mon frère. You have to remember that in those days people were trying to dry, roll, and smoke the inside of bananas. In those days, nitrous was just another established “fun” recreational drug. In those days you could buy a tank of nitrous just by saying you needed it for underwater welding. Yes, underwater welding. In Iowa. (“Hey, dude, there’s like water, like everywhere, man. Like in.. well. my bathtub, man.”)

A friend I knew in those days discovered that taking a hit of nitrous “helped” him with his creative writing. In a way he was right. He did create very clever and interesting short stories when he’d had a few whiffs from the tank. Indeed, in the spirit of the 60s drug counter culture in Berkeley an San Francisco, he became convinced that if any drug was worth doing, it was worth overdoing. (A common American attitude that persists to this day.)

He was 24 years old and impatient for fame.

In pursuit of more and more “creative push” from his tank of nitrous he designed a mask that would fit over his nose and mouth and be held there by some complicated elastics so he could type with both hands while whiffing from the tank.

It worked pretty well and I recall noticing that his writing did indeed get better and more interesting. Right up to the morning when they found him slumped dead over his typewriter with the mask fixed firmly over his nose and mouth, and the tank still hissing away. Yes, Virginia, there is a death claus in solid nitrous breathing after all.

He was 24 years old and impatient for fame.

He left behind two binders with his writings in them. The stories were good and full of promise as we editors like to say when something is still five years short of publishable. Decades later his short-life’s work was part of the sodden ashes of Paradise.

He “lived fast, died young, and left a good-looking corpse.” And two forgotten binders of “promising” work.

Too much heavy, heavy fuel…

I don’t care if my liver is hanging by a thread
Don’t care if my doctor says I ought to be dead
When my ugly big car won’t climb this hill
I’ll write a suicide note on a hundred dollar bill

‘Cause if you wanna run cool
If you wanna run cool
Yes if you wanna run cool
You got to run on heavy, heavy fuel
Heavy, heavy fuel
Heavy, heavy fuel

Well now, I get low and I get high
And if I can’t get either, I really try
Got the wings of heaven on my shoes
I’m a dancin’ man and I just can’t lose
You know it’s alright, it’s okay
I’ll live to see another day
We can try to understand
The New York Times’ effect on man
Whether you’re a brother or whether you’re a mother
You’re stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive
Feel the city breakin’ and everybody shakin’
And we’re stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive
Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive
Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin’ alive
[click to continue…]

Spring 1939. “Drugstore window in Washington, D.C.”

There’s nothing in the street
Looks any different to me
And the slogans are replaced, by-the-bye
The parting on the left
Is now parting on the right
And the beards have all grown longer overnight

— The Who, Won’t Get Fooled Again

As the days drift on towards the deeper daze of the coming summer it is becoming numbingly clear that the political divide in the nation is between Issues and Aholes. I say “numbingly” because the ceaseless screeching of the progressive witches, bitches, and snitches in search of stitches has risen to such a high keening pitch that human ears can no longer hear it as a pile of plaints but only as the dumb strum of millions of monolithic morons sucking their thumbs.

Once I dreamed that following the release of the Meuller Report I would have some shred of lost time returned, some moment of reprieve in which I could take a bit of a nap in the warm Spring breezes, one scintilla of an iota of a jot of a nanosecond wherein I could find surcease from the political progressive poltroons of the left and their inevitable Ahole blatherfests and exhibitions of autofellatio.  Alas, it was only a box of rain…

It’s all a dream we dreamed
One afternoon long ago.

Aholes cannot change their shape or their sphinctoid function. No matter what the Issue in our perverted politics Aholes must be Aholes. Example One –The Issue with the Meuller Report was simple: Did President Trump Collude with Russia In the 2016 Election? Two years of muck sucking and $40 million later the answer was, “NO.”

Game. Set. Match.

Right? Right.

When I get to the bottom I go back to the top of the slide
And I stop and I turn and I go for a ride
And I get to the bottom and I see you again, yeah, yeah

Issues-oriented Americans like to resolve an issue and then move on to another issue. Not Aholes if they do not get what they want. Every time that happens Aholes go back to the mattresses for a do-over because “not fair!” This time it was to ignore the no collusion conclusions of Vol. 1 and bellyflop into the soft and warm fecal pudding of the Meuller Report vol. 2 where their crackpipe media told them lurked the crime, the major and jailable crime, of “He wuz doin dat ob-struction thing.”  And so the dull death rattle of their insane ideology has increased in volume and violence until the sane Issues folks start re-reading the 2nd Amendment and buying ammo by the block. [click to continue…]

WANT: If I ever get a large hit from the money machine again, this is at the top of my vehicle shopping list. [click to continue…]

Doris Day, the freckle-faced movie actress whose irrepressible personality and golden voice made her America’s top box-office star in the early 1960s, died on Monday at her home in Carmel Valley, California. She was 97.

Beneath wholesome image, Doris Day was an actor of depth

The beloved singer and actress, who died Monday at 97, was a contemporary of Marilyn Monroe but seemed to exist in a lost and parallel world of sexless sex comedies and the carefree ways of “Que Sera, Sera” (“Whatever Will Be, Will Be”). She helped embody the manufactured innocence of the 1950s, a product even she didn’t believe in.

“I’m tired of being thought of as Miss Goody Twoshoes …. I’m not the All-American Virgin Queen, and I’d like to deal with the true, honest story of who I really am,” she said in 1976, when her tell-all memoir “Doris Day: Her Own Story” chronicled her money troubles and failed marriages.

There was more to her, and to her career, than not sleeping with the leading man. She gave acclaimed performances in “Love Me or Leave Me,” the story of songstress Ruth Etting, and in the Alfred Hitchcock thriller “The Man Who Knew Too Much.” Longing ballads such as “Blame My Absent Minded Heart” led critic Gary Giddins to call her “the coolest and sexiest female singer of slow-ballads in movie history.”

But millions loved her for her wholesome, blond beauty, and for her string of slick, stylish comedies, beginning with her Oscar-nominated role in “Pillow Talk” in 1959. She and Rock Hudson were two New Yorkers who shared a telephone party line. She followed with “The Thrill of It All,” playing a housewife who gains fame as a TV pitchwoman to the chagrin of husband James Garner.

Oh, give me your attention, there’s been a new invention
It isn’t any larger than an adding machine
It’s only fair to mention, though it’s a new invention
It’s one that you have heard about, but few have ever seen

It doesn’t do division and it doesn’t multiply
It doesn’t want to be a bird, it doesn’t try to fly
It came about because they made a big atomic bomb
The new invention’s clicking and because of all its ticking
I know where the idea came from
I tic, tic, tic, why do I tic, tic? [click to continue…]

“In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever character composed, passion never fails to wrest the scepter from reason. Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.” -James Madison

Oh, What a Lovely Race War! Leftist antiwhite sites that are allowed to exist by our benevolent internet overlords—sites that are allowed to have advertisers, sites you can post on social media—employ writers who are no more skilled than these murderers, and just as hateful. In terms of writing ability, I’d put Breivik and Tarrant up against any of the semi-tards who post at Salon. Hell, those two guys, whose manifestos together total more than 1,574 pages, are exactly the kind of prolific ideologues who, were they leftists, would be highly sought after by the editors of high-quantity political sites.

Roadblocks to impeachment by James Piereson Some have suggested that the House could order the arrest of the Attorney General and Secretary of the Treasury, and any other member of the executive branch for that matter, for defying the subpoenas. That would be an extreme step and a highly unlikely one, unless the Speaker of the House is prepared to send her Sergeant at Arms to arrest the Attorney General for contempt of Congress, thereby risking a fist fight or a shoot-out at the Department of Justice with the U.S. Marshalls assigned to protect him. That would be an unprecedented spectacle, though perhaps reminiscent of the occasion in 1856 when Rep. Preston Brooks of South Carolina went into the Senate chamber to beat Sen. Charles Sumner within an inch of his life (an event that signaled greater violence to come).

The doggedness of William Barr Dear Demowats, Be Afraid… Be bery afraid: “William Barr has pledged to answer the following questions: ‘How did the Trump-Russia investigation get started? Who started it? On what authority? For what reason? What was the rationale for the FISA warrants taken out against Carter Page and renewed several times? It has been alleged that assets of the DOJ spied on the Trump campaign: did they? The entire investigation was plagued by leaks of classified information, a felony: who leaked it that information? Who, for example, leaked the transcript of the phone call between Michael Flynn, Trump’s first, ill-fated director of the National Security Council and the Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak? There is only a small circle of possible candidates.’ [click to continue…]

ML A motherfucking year off the motherfucking boat and got a good business in our neighborhood occupying a building that had been boarded up for longer than I care to remember and I’ve been here a long time.

SWEET DICK WILLIE It has been a long time.

COCONUT SID How long?

ML Too long! Too long. Now for the life of me, I haven’t been able to figger this out. Either dem Koreans are geniuses or we Blacks are dumb.

This is truly a stupefying question and all three are silent. What is the answer?

COCONUT SID It’s gotta be cuz we’re Black. No other explanation, nobody don’t want the Black man to be about shit.

SWEET DICK WILLIE Old excuse.

ML I’ll be one happy fool to see us have our own business right here. Yes, sir. I’d be the first in line to spend the little money I got.

Sweet Dick Willie gets up from his folding chair.

SWEET DICK WILLIE It’s Miller time. Let me go give these Koreans s’more business.

ML It’s a motherfucking shame.

COCONUT SID Ain’t that a bitch.

[Note: First written in 2007 and still, for the most part, true. So far.]

Her earliest memory is being held on the shoulders of her father, watching the men who lived through the First World War parade down the main street of Fargo, North Dakota in 1918. She would have been just four years old then. When she was 90 years old she came to her birthday party wearing a chic black and white silk dress, shiny black shoes with three-inch heels, and a six-foot-long purple boa. She’s threatened to sing Kurt Weill’s ‘The Saga of Jenny” and dance on the table one more time. [click to continue…]

[click to continue…]

When Goodfellas what released many movie buffs marveled at the long single take of the entrance into the Copacabana…

But of course, it was only Scorsese’s footnote to the real master, Orson Welles.