I’ve started reading a translation of Saint Paul: A Screenplay which is a movie Pier Paolo Pasolini never managed to make. It’s the life of Paul the apostle but set in the 1960s.
Here’s an excerpt from the foreword discussing a film he’d made about an impoverished actor playing the repentant thief in a film-within-the-film of a Passion play.
Here's a link to watch it. Hope your Italian is better than mine.
The politics of La Ricotta, which place ‘religion’ on the side of the oppressed, would reappear frequently in Pasolini’s theorization of the relationship between religion and politics. Throughout, Pasolini remained faithful to a notion of religion that was consonant with his radical politics, characterized by a deep solidarity with ordinary people. As he put it in a series of reflections and observations he offered to an English journalist, which he called ‘almost a spiritual-intellectual testament’, and which appeared in print only after his death, ‘To conclude I would like to say however that the “opposite” of religion is not communism (which, despite having taken the secular and positivist spirit from the bourgeois tradition, in the end is very religious); but the “opposite” of religion is capitalism (ruthless, cruel, cynical, purely materialistic, the cause of human beings’ exploitation of human beings, cradle of the worship of power, horrendous den of racism).
Commitment to a political ideology that aims to reshape the world, to destroy the visible and invisible forces that destroy ordinary people, is a religious commitment.
If you were a pirate you could download a copy of the book here. If you’re an upstanding book-buying citizen like myself you could join the Verso book club and get an epub of every single book they publish. Or you could just go buy this book from them.
Pasolini is most well known for his film Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom which I have no interest in seeing. From what I gather it’s about a bunch of naked people being tortured and that’s supposed to be a commentary on capitalism. OK.
His film Gospel According to Matthew rules. I’ve seen probably more movies depicting the life of Jesus than you have and I say this is the only good one. Jesus is a bit scary and has a unibrow. It’s faithful to the text. As director he decided they not re-do a scene so long as everyone got their lines right. In one scene this fly keeps landing on the lens. It’s an earthy, raw, real-life proletarian incarnation. God is some guy walking through the countryside, scowling, half-growling, “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.” Pasolini’s mom plays Mary at the foot of the cross. Hit up your local Blockbuster and have a movie night with your homies.
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This is a great read and if you’ve had your fill of hot takes about Mamdani, read it anyway. It’s not about Mamdani. It’s about the tragic failure of liberal institutions like “elite universities” and “establishment newspapers.” Vapid institutions written about with heartfelt prose, this essay delivers moral clarity in a lighthearted tone. A+ highly recommend.
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I had the misfortune of learning that the racist chatbot on Twitter has a mode called Grok Imagine. If using your imagination is scary let the billionaire’s chatbot do it for you. It can imagine a girlfriend giving you a compliment. The message of the age of machine-generated “content” is this: You are slop and you deserve slop.
In fact you are a miracle. Part of the universe is conscious and it’s you. What a thing to think about. Or, if you’re the kind of person that gets chatbots to mimic consciousness, what a thing to not have to think about.
To think these computer programs are an adequate replacement for human imagination requires you have no reverence for human imagination.
A friend of a friend played a song at a coffee shop I was a barista at maybe 15 years ago. The chorus went, “I’m not a machine! I’m an animal!” Fletcher, if you are reading this, thank you for writing that song and singing it at that coffee shop I used to work at. I think about you screaming those words often. It’s a nice thing to think about.
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The FBI is trying to shut down archive.today, one of the niftiest tools on the Internet. Here’s a fascinating investigation into its operation and origins.
Here’s where I caught wind of the story of the FBI subpoenaing the whois data for archive.today: 404 Media.
Archive.today is a useful tool for sharing paywalled news articles or avoiding advertisements. There are so many crappy websites in this world. I'm trying to remember to be grateful for good websites. Like Wikipedia or Sheldon Brown.
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I hate being advertised to.
“Desire causes suffering,” The Buddha allegedly said. Advertisers’ work is to plant desires in the hearts of fellow humans then convince them they can escape the discomfort of desire by acquiring physical possessions, or enrolling in some rent-seeking subscription or service. “Remove suffering by removing desire,” the Buddha also said. Not good at advertising was he?
Archive.today still works. Go read something for free!
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Buddha got me thinking about Nepal.
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Here’s a story about the government of Nepal being overthrown. If you don’t subscribe to Wired, no worries. This is an archive link.
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Here are some pictures from a visit to Nepal in 2017. Look how skinny I was! Rice and lentils and not so much beer will do that to a guy.
I saw some whackadoodle flora
There were leeches sucking my blood at the time this photograph was taken. All up in my shoes. I threw those shoes away yesterday. I had reglued the sole on a number of times. I gave up. I got them at Circle Thrift in Philadelphia in maybe 2014. Everything dies, baby, that's a fact. I still have the jeans, now jorts. The crotch has been mended.
I am always saying this.
At one temple we visited a monkey demanded Naomi's ice cream cone and she was like, "Hell no, monkey." The monkey scratched her and then stole the ice cream. She went and got a series of rabies shots just in case but first she went and got another ice cream cone. I got my series of rabies shots a couple months later when I awoke one day in our bed in Kolkata to find a dead bat between the sheets. The WHO recommends if you find a dead bat in your bedroom to go get the rabies shots. Now you know. I appear to not be dead from rabies. I assume the poor guy got bludgeoned by our ceiling fan and just fell to his death beside me. Life's weird.
Kathmandu from a hilltop.
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How should journalism be funded? If it’s funded by advertisers then they won’t print things advertisers don’t like. If it’s funded by subscribers then they won’t print things that upset those who both choose to subscribe and can afford to subscribe.
I subscribe to some journalism. I get the local paper, a couple monthlies. I like physical magazines, ones without ads. For years I subscribed to The Atlantic and read each issue cover to cover to see what the wealthy and powerful were thinking about. I grew weary of their thoughts and their advertisements for Rolexes and wealth management services and became ambivalent about and then eventually hostile to their publication. They’re good at selling magazines and that’s the only nice thing I have to say about them anymore.
Anyway. Publicly funded journalism is probably the move. Gasp! State media?! Listen. We have Capital media now. Do I/we/the people have any meaningful control over the legacy news outlets that are owned and operated by insatiably greedy capitalists? No. and yet they remain powerful culture-making institutions. Not very democratic is it?
I feel kind of bad bypassing paywalls of the little guys. Writers gotta make a buck too because without any bucks you starve to death in the freezing cold. There are people who think that’s a fair/just/reasonable arrangement.
Have a subscription to quality journalism you recommend? Leave a comment. This blog now has a comments section. I'll delete mean comments. I don't have time for mean.
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“Earn a living” has got to be the most fucked up unChristian phrase in the English language.
You don’t need to earn your existence. What if the peace and stillness of a kid watching worms wriggle through the dirt was exactly what God had in mind at the big bang? You are allowed to do nothing. In fact doing nothing is awesome. Doing nothing is the posture from which to breathe in the fresh air of unmerited unconditional positive regard of the creator of everything. You can take a nap.
Mary Oliver, poet beloved equally by snooty Episcopalians and anarchist dirtbags, really wrote a banger with that “one wild and precious life” poem. It’s about doing nothing and looking at bugs.
Here’s a grasshopper. Photo by my lover.
Here’s a praying mantis.
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I think too much about all this AI slop. Would love to not think about it.
I love the real world. Spooked squirrel dashing off my porch, stinging cold wind, the pungency of blue cheese. We’ve got all these nerve endings and olfactory sensors, the world is an endlessly needlessly sensual experience and people are spending it sitting in cars or gambling on their phones.
There’s an anti-life unreality to the world of cryptocurrency, casinos, NFTs, “essays” and “content” generated by chatbots, the whole stream of unoffensively digestible mediocre stew that is an affront to the choice to stay alive.
David Simon was interviewed about the use of AI by Ari Shapiro on NPR’s All Things Considered. It was during the writer’s strike in 2023. Here’s an excerpt:
SHAPIRO: OK, so you've spent your career creating television without AI, and I could imagine today you thinking, boy, I wish I had had that tool to solve those thorny problems...
SIMON: What?
SHAPIRO: ...Or saying...
SIMON: You imagine that?
SHAPIRO: ...Boy, if that had existed, it would have screwed me over.
SIMON: I don't think AI can remotely challenge what writers do at a fundamentally creative level.
SHAPIRO: But if you're trying to transition from scene five to scene six, and you're stuck with that transition, you could imagine plugging that portion of the script into an AI and say, give me 10 ideas for how to transition this.
SIMON: I'd rather put a gun in my mouth.
Full text of interview here.
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We can be almost certain that the president of the United States has raped children. He was for a long time close friends with the nation’s most notorious trafficker and pedophile as were so many of the wealthy and powerful.
I suspect Jeffrey Epstein did in fact kill himself, his last act robbing his many victims of the sense of closure they might have gotten if he was kept alive to be publicly condemned. It’s also entirely possible that Donald Trump ordered him to be surreptitiously extrajudicially executed. This is not an outlandish theory given Trump's penchant for non-surreptitious extrajudicial executions. Bombing people on boats in foreign waters is murder whether they’re “narco-terrorists” or not.
So it’s an established fact Donald Trump is a murderer and extremely likely he’s an unrepentant serial child-rapist.
The thing that gets me about everyone riled up about the failure to release the Epstein files is there’s this underlying assumption that just one more piece of evidence of his villainousness might dissuade his supporters from supporting him. As if the goal of engagement with fascists is to reason with them. The goal is to defeat them.
The “when you’re rich you can grab them by the pussy” stuff didn’t convince them. Every single person who voted for Donald Trump is willing to excuse a little bit of rape. So I don’t suspect they’ll care about a lot of rape. They’re pro-rape.
It’s bad!
It is reasonable to demand at a bare minimum impeachment/removal/prosecution of Trump and all of his enablers. They’re the rapist coalition. We don't debate the pro-rape bloc. We defeat them.
Which side are you on?