The movie Us

Us!

From Apple iPhone Txts from me to Farbie:

OMG This Us movie from 2019 is one creepy shuddery movie! It’s a horrifying horror film, too, with underlying themes of racism, class war, privilege, zombies, shadows, the mirror universe, & demonizing the Other. It is well acted & Lupita Nyong’o is superb playing her dual roles. Scarier than those monster flicks! Continue reading

Is the USA a Republic or a Democracy?

Do we live in a republic or a democracy?

What kind of country do we live in?

One often hears or reads some strict conservative gleefully pointing out with a know-it-all winky wink the United States of America is a republic, not a democracy. Then you encounter progressive liberals speaking and writing frequently of the USA as a democracy. They rarely ever use the term republic. Both claim to speak for the US Constitution while lambasting the other’s interpretations. Some wryly and deliberately use the term capitalist republic, but such a label hasn’t caught on. Furthermore, one encounters so-called conspiracy theorists, people labeled as such by the mainstream mass media who ignore the fact our history is full of real, documented conspiracies from before the assassination of Julius Caesar to beyond the assassination of JFK, who warn and remind the rest of us corporate oligarchies of ultrawealthy elites, the plutocrats of the less than 1%, influence and control matters from behind the scenes. Not to mention the religious types who view us as under divine manipulation or torn between God and the Devil or between other Olde Gods. Or the UFO types who wonder or claim Alien agendas guided by NHIs or Non-Human Intelligences are at play. Others say our country is a nation-state composed of many countries, of many stateless-nations such as indigenous tribes. Yet others laugh at the notion we are a republic and point out we are an empire, a new kind of empire, an extraconstitutional empire of neofeudal transnational corporations and far-flung military bases and interdependent, neo-vassal allies. Continue reading

Kate Z & Moose Dog & Baby Whales & the Lone Ranger & Moose on the AT

A text from a father to his adult daughter morphs into creative chaos

Dylan, my oldest child, moved to New York from Seattle just in time for the Covid Pandemic. Somehow Dylan managed to graduate Summa cum laude (tho too shy to openly admit it) from the New School in Manhattan in 2021 with a Masters in Creative Writing (Nonfiction). They gifted me with a copy of this book from one of their favorite authors. Ms. Zambreno’s writing moved and inspired me as well during those uncertain times. Damn, we still live in uncertain times.

Good Morning over there in New York, dear Elder Daughter, it’s Midnight here in Seattle…

Hey, I still wanna hear more about Moosie Moose Dog^^^ and it dawned on me as I read a little more of Kate Zambreno’s weird, yummiliciously quirky Screen Tests from 2019 and went back to gaze upon its pinkishly pale crimson book color the image there was a horse on the cover. A frickin’ horse! Was so cool to have Kate Z’s black ’n’ white foto of her jamming on a piano peeking thru a jagged, torn fake hole in the book. Cool in a discordian kinda way. Tonight close to midnight an idea dawned on me, damn, that ragged rip in the spacetime of a 2-dimensional image is really a cutout of a flat horse. 

How many times have I peered at this cover? And not realized this? LOL! Perhaps looking hard past her cleavage as if it was merely what it was, a black gown, strapped, dressed for zany Zambreno performances. At least there weren’t any pictures of her baby rolling off the piano bench and falling to the floor to burst out with startled wails. Because her kids were human babies and not baby whales. Baby whales with tails to tell tales in cetacean code? So all these things flashed thru my pretzel brain supercharged with neurodivergence and strong black coffee before wondering if the cowboy on the horse was some weird ode to the Lone Ranger, to those iconic cowboys of old black ’n’ white cinema, or just a Mormon man who smoked cigarettes and drank Pepsi when not inside a church for Latter-Day Saints. But I always got LDS mixed up with LSD. So, was cute little Moose Dog really kidnapped in Seattle?

Continue reading