Hello Out There!
Once again I open with an exclamation mark! Two, actually, but why get technical about it? Despite said punctuation I’m actually not all that excited by what I have to tell you about the holidays. Luckily (for me anyway) one of my favorite annoying catch phrases is fake it ‘till you make it. Also, a jaundiced look backward will keep me from dwelling on the fact that tearing the heads off my Sinema and Manchin voodoo dolls seems to have done no damage to the humans they mimic.*
Onward, or rather backward, to time spent in what my brother calls The Bermuda Triangle (T-day, J.C.’s alleged birthday, and the moronic celebration of a new calendar year). We can skip Stolen Continent Day, for how many descriptions of overeating does one reader need? Probably not many. I will note that I did quite appreciate my pal Colleen’s suggestion that there should be Gandhi and Karen Carpenter floats added to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
So on to a belated Season’s Bleatings, regardless of whether December 25 has any connection to your own cultural traditions or your feelings about Mr. Bad Santa. At the very least I trust you got some kind of bang out of at least a day or two off work, the real reason to celebrate any federal holiday.
Despite many of you being disgusted with conspicuous consumption, I hope you received a maintenance dose of consumer goods to enhance what my employer kept reminding me is the most wonderful time of the year. Surely it is a time to deepen our appreciation of material things. Just think, many of them, certainly anything made of plastic, will outlive us. And life after death isn’t anything to sneeze at, especially during a pandemic.
Ha ha ha ho ho ho, he continued joyously, the previous paragraph reminds that I should incorporate the prayer from the end of Don’t Look Up, the new movie from writer/director Adam McKay, into my daily rituals. Said supplication is delivered by the actor Jonah Hill, who plays a truly vile White House Chief of Staff to Meryl Streep’s odious president, in appreciation of “dope stuff,” basically high end luxury goods.
Mr. McKay’s films have never been visually stunning or artfully constructed (the editing in this one gave me a headache) but at their best his stories are packed with sharply-observed, caustic political satire. Since it’s not really what we old timers call a movie-movie and hence suffers not a whit from being viewed on a small screen, I made Don’t Look Up the one Netflix movie I will use my roommate’s account to watch this year (life appears to be pretty fucking short, there are too many books clogging up my personal space, and the Criterion Channel boasts too many riches to put a serious dent in). Call me a snob (not to my face though) but I tend to resist anything that’s being talked up everywhere and I don’t really care about the zeitgeist, so I was going to ignore this flick just like I’ve done with so many others. However, as our political system shows us, rules are made to be broken so why be hard and fast about anything besides hatred of modern-day Republicans?
Besides, McKay calls himself a democratic socialist, evidence of which can be found in an earlier movie of his, The Other Guys (2010), a goofy mainstream comedy whose villains turn out to be predatory capitalists decimating the lives of working class people. My hilarious nephew Wilson will explain why it's a great film until the cows come home, and then continue explaining to the cows. As always, I’m not ordering you to watch it; if you do so and wind up disagreeing with me that is of course all good, as the youngsters say, as long as you don’t bend my ear about it.
This new feature is likely the best of McKay’s career. I say likely because they’re not all great and since I’ve already seen too many movies for one lifetime I’m not going to watch all of the man’s output unless somebody pays me to do so.** I hope its disgust with our corporate overlords and the faux populist politicians they finance, not to mention its savage takedown of a culture obsessed with celebrity worship and mindless social media click bait, will resonate with viewers and perhaps even get them to think about the hand basket we’re currently going to hell in. It’s not giving much away to say that a big part of the story focuses on widespread denial of of a comet en route to wipe out human life on earth, and if that doesn’t strike you as a little similar to how most of us humanoids are dealing with the reality of climate change I guess there’s no hope for you.
[Full disclosure re Santa’s day of excessive air travel: my NYC sis gave me Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930-1950 by Gerald Horne, so I was fully sated on the tearing open the package under the tree front despite not having any variety of tree in my apartment. For those of you who spent December moaning about the tyranny of gift-giving pressures, do recall that books and music are in a more ethereal category and need to be treated with reverence.]
I’m not crazy about mobs of drunken idiots so New Year’s Eve has never been my thing. Also, if you’re going to party, why do you need the calendar to give you an excuse? More to the point, it’s always struck me as odd that the first day of January is the one time of the year when we’re all encouraged to take stock, be at least mildly introspective, and commit to making changes in our lives. Couldn’t we engage in such behavior throughout the year instead of making a big deal out of it once every 365 days and giving people another reason to feel shitty about themselves?
Come to think of it, the high number of people who have declined to go back to what the late, great David Graeber rightly called bullshit jobs would indicate that pausing to reconsider one’s options might be catching on off-season. More power to them, I say. Now all we need is a Green New Deal and some strong voting rights legislation to pass both houses of Congress and we’ll be getting somewhere (cue squalls of bitter laughter laced with despair).
I started scrawling this rambling column on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, the only federal holiday that means anything to me (there would be one other if May Day was an official holiday in the U.S.). Dr. King’s full legacy should obviously be taught in all K-12 schools, including the ones whose curricula are under red neck cracker attack from honkies who don’t want their little darlings to hear uncomfortable truths about this country’s less than rosy past. Those kids should be hearing about Dr. King’s anti-imperialist calls for true social justice, present in these words from near the end of his life: “I think it is necessary for us to realize that we have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights.(…) [W]hen we see that there must be a radical redistribution of economic and political power, then we see that for the last twelve years we have been in a reform movement, (…) that after Selma and the Voting Rights Bill, we moved into a new era, which must be an era of revolution. In short, we have moved into an era where we are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society.”
Martin Luther King, Jr. was most definitely a hero to Arnold Hano, the writer, editor, and activist who passed away on October 24 at the age of 99. I interviewed Arnold at his home in Laguna Beach seven-ish years ago for Noir City magazine (thanks to Don Malcolm and Eddie Muller for helping set that up). When I arrived on his doorstep, Arnold was watching the 50th anniversary commemoration of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and as he led me inside he told me that one of his few regrets in life was not having marched with King in Selma. However he did, as he later told me, spend time in the late 1940s standing on a stool on the upper west side of Manhattan and loudly telling passers-by that the segregation in both New York City and the military he had just come out of was entirely unacceptable.
Arnold was worthy of an appearance in Noir City (and later in Namaste, Motherfucker! #3) because of his role in shepherding a slew of hard-hitting crime novels into print while serving as editor-in-chief at the paperback imprint Lion Books from 1949 to 1954. Among the authors he helped get published were David Goodis and Jim Thompson, both of whom wrote noir classics that inspired numerous cinematic adaptations. Being thoroughly disgusted with global militarism, Arnold also oversaw the publication of several important anti-war novels, including a reprint of All Quiet on the Western Front.
He is best remembered as a sportswriter, but Arnold wrote all manner of journalism and fiction, including several books Stark House Press has brought back into print. Of those, I recommend The Last Notch, which can safely be called a noir western, and Three Steps to Hell, which compiles three Hano novels: So I'm a Heel, Flint, and The Big Out. Said three novels are all compulsively readable and similar to each other only in the high quality of Arnold’s wordsmithing. On top of being a very nice guy, Arnold was clearly a most versatile writer.
Before I say ta-ta until next time, I’m happy to inform you that the Green Arcade event I plugged in my last Dispatch featuring yours truly and Namaste, Motherfucker! contributing artist Dmitry Samarov went off without a hitch. In fact it went swimmingly, which you can confirm for yourself by going to the link in the notes below. Er, ta-ta until next time.
* If you’re wondering why those two Senators should be forced to immediately quit their jobs in disgrace, read this January 18 analysis from historian Heather Cox Richardson: “Today, the Senate began to debate the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act to protect voting rights. Not a single Republican spoke up for the bill. All 48 Democrats and the 2 Independents who caucus with them—who together represent 40.5 million more people than the 50 Republicans do—support the voting rights bill, but two senators, Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), do not support a carve-out for the voting rights bill so that it can avoid a filibuster by the Republicans.” Sinema actually had the gall to salute Dr. King on the holiday commemorating his life while also effectively torpedoing voting rights legislation being passed. Clearly a special place in Hell awaits the odious Arizona Senator. Re Manchin, suffice it to say his Maserati driving, yacht-dwelling ass will be burning right next to her.
** To state the obvious, I’m not holding my breath.
NOTES
Great interview about the latter phase of MLK’s life and incredible work, no whitewashed b.s. here: https://eurweb.com/2022/01/17/tavis-smiley-death-of-a-king/
Samarov and Terrall in full pandemic glory: https://samarov.substack.com/p/a-san-francisco-treat
My old chum Charlie Sennott spent a year talking with Daniel Ellsberg; no book came out of it, alas, but Charlie did put together an impressive Ellsberg-oriented podcast: https://www.npr.org/podcasts/512643364/ground-truth