Armando Iannucci: 'The Death of Stalin' (2017)

Armando Iannucci's The Death of Stalin (2017) swirls around the crisis of leadership in the Soviet Union following the sudden death of Joseph Stalin (1878-1953). Count yourself lucky if you live in a time and place where there are institutional checks and balances set up to combat such abuses of power as Stalin committed.  

With comic touches, The Death of Stalin is even more chilling than straight drama. The ensemble cast is excellent, including Steve Buscemi as Nikita Khrushchev and Jason Isaacs as the colorful Georgy Zhukov. 

To independent courts, a free press and protocols that help guide us through times of crisis! And to President George H. W. Bush 41, RIP. 

Today's Rune: Signals. 

Olivier Azam and Daniel Mermet: 'Howard Zinn, une histoire populaire américaine’ (2015)

Olivier Azam and Daniel Mermet: Howard Zinn, une histoire populaire américaine (2015). First part: Bread and Roses. I first caught this on Free Speech TV. It provides a good sampling, focusing in good part on the Robber Baron period and the impact of the First World War.

Howard Zinn (1922-2010) devoted much of his energy on consciousness raising, building up an appreciation of the history of people and clashes and changes often forgotten or -- like the eight hour work day -- taken for granted. His work is influential; and he was a sweet person.   

"Between 1900 and 1920, like Howard Zinn’s parents, more than 14 million immigrants arrived in the United States. They came fleeing poverty or war, racism or religious persecution. They dreamed of a promised land, of wealth, or simply of a better life. The New World opened its arms wide to the poor and huddled masses of the Old: its unwanted, its fugitives, and even a few utopians . . . After all, the rapidly expanding industries of the time required cheap labor, and immigrant workers - men, women and children - were easy to exploit. But the same period also saw the birth of organized labor, with its strikes and conflicts, and the appearance of great figures like Emma Goldman, Mother Jones, Eugene Debs and the Wobblies."  (Source here). 

Olivier Azam and Daniel Mermet: Howard Zinn, une histoire populaire américaine (2015). Zinn's A People's History of the United States was originally published in 1980.

Zinn Education Project: link here.

Les mutins de Pangée est une coopérative audiovisuelle et cinématographique de production, d’édition et de distribution (en salles, DVD, VOD). Here is a a link.

Today's Rune: Initiation.  

Donald J. Raleigh: 'Soviet Baby Boomers' (2012), Part V

Donald J. Raleigh, Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia's Cold War Generation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

The Afghanistan War (1979-1989), according to Aleksandr Konstantinov: "'an absurd stupidity.'" (page 263) Olga Martynkina: "'terrible and unnecessary.'" (ibid.)  Gennady Ivanov: '"Besides heroism, it gave us nothing but cripples and drug addicts.'" (page 265)

"Diluted state repression remained an element . . . mostly because it constrained people's choices by switching on their self-censorship. Few Baby Boomers had direct run-ins with the KGBm but all felt its presence." (page 265)

Glasnost. Aleksandr Babushkin: '"You have to understand that any cultured person, intellectual, is able to distinguish between true and false information.'" (page 286)  

Perestroika. Olga Gorelik: "'it gave freedom to several strata of the population, to the intelligenstia, for example. But, on the other hand, it created complicated economic problems. Not everyone can restructure themselves, namely our generation.'" (page 288)

"For some [Soviet] Baby Boomers glasnost meant fulfilling a life-long dream of traveling abroad . . ." (page 295) 

Collapse of Soviet Union. "[b]y 1994, 67 percent of the population had no savings or extra cash . . . murders, suicides, and divorces reached extreme levels . . . Between 1992 and 1997 life expectancy for men fell from 67 to 57 years and for women from 76 to 70 . . . (page [312])

"The emergence of fifteen independent states from the ruins of the former Soviet empire . . . complicated life for the Cold War generation." (page 317)

Religion and Philosophy. Resurgence of Orthodox Church. New Age. Osho (Rajneesh). Buddhism. Scientology. Transcendental Meditation. (page 322)

Robber Barons. Oligarchs. Crime "five times higher" (page 323). "Privatization" gave "rise to a class of rich businessmen, as well as to a cohort of entrepreneurs who had accumulated massive fortunes . . .oligarchs, who acquired enormous holdings through insider trading . . . The resulting social inequality and effrontery of the new rich fed disillusionment with market economics and the democratic political system. Retirees looked back upon the Soviet days with nostalgia." (page 327)

Yelena Kolosova on Boris Yeltsin:  "'He was a massive man who drank, and therefore could be trusted.'" (page 329)

21st century. Vladimir Putin. Chechnya. "Russian liberals and others backing a free market system believed political freedoms remained as important as a strong leader; however, Russian Communists, nationalists, and supporters of Putin's umbrella organization, Unity, stressed the need for an authoritarian order in the country." A blueprint for Donald J. Trump in the USA: "Either Russia, will be great, Putin pronounced, or it will not be at all."  However, unlike Trump among Americans, Putin enjoyed "the backing of almost 75 percent of the [Russian] population." (page 334)

Lyudmila Gorokhova on Putin: "'Although he's not handsome, he has a great deal of charm. . . His range of interests is indisputably wide, and he's intelligent.'" (page 336)

A Russian doctor: "'I believe today's youth are awful. . . the wars contribute a lot. We see many Afghan vets, and many more after the wars in Chechnya. Military action has a very negative effect on people. As a rule, they become apathetic and depressed." There is "widespread alcoholism." (page 343)

Youth are adrift and slack in the mind; what happened to intellectual curiosity?  Vladimir Kirsanov: "'In the past, we had to get hold of information on our own by reading books, and by researching something, and this always makes the brain work more actively, but now information is absorbed passively. This is the main thing that distinguishes the two generations. Today's students don't like to read.'" (pages 344-345)

Anna Lyovina: '"The future is with people who have seen the world, analyzed things, compared, and took what they liked that was good and interesting, from wherever.'" (page 348)

A summary of the Soviet dream: pages 360-361. There was in Soviet society a double-consciousness, the projection of a public persona and the development of a private person. Raleigh doesn't use this term, but it seems equivalent: "there were two truths 'one for everyone, and the other that's inside you.'" (pages 366-367). This is how life is everywhere, to varying degrees up and down the spectrum. But would you rather live in Amsterdam, or Pyongyang?  

Today's Rune: Signals. 

Donald J. Raleigh: 'Soviet Baby Boomers' (2012), Part IV

Donald J. Raleigh, Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia's Cold War Generation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

"The Soviet practice of sending work cohorts on vacations together made it complicated for families to travel together, giving rise to vacation romances." (page 206

Families became smaller. "At the end of the 1970s, 52 percent of Soviet families with children had only one child . . ." (page 206)

On Lithuanians: "The people . . . are very peculiar  . . ."  (page 208)

Marina Bakutina, guide-interpreter: "'I could think whatever I liked, but not say it.'" (page 209)

"The Baby Boomers also continued to have vicarious encounters with foreign cultures through movies and books . . ." Olga Kamayurova: "'I like the films they used to show at film clubs, that is, complicated, sophisticated films not for ordinary viewers . . . They showed us lots of such films, including, my heavens, Fellini and Antonioni. It was like food for us movie lovers . . . Sometimes, when they picked some sensational film, I would think . . . this is so extraordinary.'" (page 210)

When some of the Soviet Baby Boomers moved to the USA, they were appalled by the high cost of health care and education (page 217).  

Travel: "'It's better to see something once than to hear about it seven times,'" goes the Russian proverb."

Viktor D. on the late Soviet era: "'health care was free and unequivocally on a higher level than now. Education was free, including higher education and graduate school . . . People received apartments, they had confidence in tomorrow. Maybe everything was on a lower level than in America, but there was stability.'" (page 237)

The Brezhnev to Chernenko era became an embarrassing gerontocracy, "'an awful spectacle.'" (page 240) "Yelena Kolosova recalled asking, 'Who's Chernenko? He was even worse than Brezhnev, absolutely nothing more than a joke.'" (page 243)

Oddly, at the New World resort in Crimea, some Russian Baby Boomers became New Age types, or joined Osho (the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh movement that spread worldwide, with a "Zorba the Buddha" style colony in Oregon) . (See page 246)

Ideas of existential freedom. L. G. Ionin: "'The Soviet people chose from among the available choices and understood freedom as having choices from among what was.' In this regard, for a free person, the Soviet Union was a free society. Freedom existed as a real choice, as an individual emotional experience." (page 249)

[to be continued.]

Today's Rune: Possessions. 

Donald J. Raleigh: 'Soviet Baby Boomers' (2012), Part I

Donald J. Raleigh, Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia's Cold War Generation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

An absorbing look at the world through the hearts and minds of the Soviet high school graduating class of 1967. Specifically, via two elite high schools, one in Moscow and one in Saratov, a city on the Volga River that is about 850 kilometers / 528 miles southeast of Moscow. From the perspective of "the Sputnik Generation," one also gets at the entire arc of the Soviet Union, from beginning to end, and then onward right into the Vladimir Putin era. 

Their grandparents' generation, generally speaking, experienced the First World War, Bolshevik Revolution and Russian Civil War; and their parents, the Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) era, including mass repression, the Second World War, and the Nikita Kruschev (1894-1971) "Thaw" after Stalin's death. 

The Baby Boomers benefited from the Thaw, were excited by Sputnik and Kruschev, but eventually became embittered during the Leonid Brezhnev era (1906-1982), especially toward its end; then on to Mikhail Gorbachev (born 1931), glasnost, perestroika, the breakup of the USSR, Boris Yeltsin (1931-2007) and Putin (born 1952).

Most of the interviewed boomers were the children of "third tier" elites -- those immediately below nomenklatura and second tier elites -- that is, they were children "of the mass intelligentsia -- professionals (doctors, research scientists, professors, engineers, architects, artists, teachers, librarians, etc.)," the kinds of bourgeois specialists who tend to help maintain a semblance of civil society (not only in the Soviet Union but also in 'The West'). (page 22)

Stalin, a brutish nationalist and proponent of the Cult of Personality (namely his own), turned against those with a more internationalist sensibility, and aimed, almost right up to the time of his death in 1953, "to root out 'cosmopolitanism,'" partly a code word for Jewish intellectuals, sophisticated urbanites and their "fellow travelers."  (page 32) Luckily for most, in the wake of Stalin's death came "the Thaw," which relaxed the atmosphere a bit.

As for attitudes and actions over time, Raleigh notes: "Within any historical situation, people pick their fates and live their lives both as passive objects and as active agents." (page 64)

Teachers were very important to the elite Baby Boomers: they "'had very colorful personalities' and played an enormous role in shaping their charges' worldviews' . . . 'They taught us to think, not only to learn things by heart' . . . 'Actually, all of the teachers were excellent! Except for a few individuals, they were all interesting.'" (page 91)

[To be continued.] 

Today's Rune: Signals. 

Jon Meacham's 'The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels' (2018), Part I

Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels. New York: Random House, 2018.

A thoughtful overview and discussion that helps put crazy times in perspective. Well-documented. 

In the introduction, Meacham brings up Richard Hofstadter's concept of "the paranoid style in American politics," a phenomenon even more widespread in 2018 than it was in 1963. There is always grand conspiracy, the End Times approach! "Time is forever running out." (page 17)

Just a few days ago, I came across a perfect example of the paranoid style in American society: TV evangelist Jim Bakker (born January 2, 1940), now broadcasting from Branson, Missouri. 

Jim continues to shriek about the End Times, but meanwhile, audience, send lots of money, buy containers of dried food, buy books and recordings. 

It doesn't add up. Bakker claims that Christians are persecuted and suppressed in the USA, even while he continues broadcasting away, one of legions of dedicated channels that spotlight tax-free Trump-supporting Christian evangelicals. 

Bakker's show is a perfect combination of paranoid, crazy, greedy and delusional, and somehow it's also crudely entertaining.

In The Soul of America, Meacham provides plenty of excellent quotations. Here's a snippet of Ike Eisenhower: "you do not lead by hitting people over the head. Any damn fool can do that, but it's usually called 'assault' - not 'leadership' . . . I'll tell you what leadership is. It's persuasion -- and conciliation -- and education -- and patience. It's long, slow, tough work." (page 39). 

From Robert Penn Warren: "a crazy man is a large-scale menace only in a crazy society." (page 53).  That's Trump in a tiny American nutshell.

One of the most perceptive of American thinkers that Meacham cites is Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), who comes across as more 21st century than 19th century in his outlook. Douglass' analysis of Robert E. Lee and Abraham Lincoln within an American context is brilliant. 

The current president, thinking Douglass still among the living, claimed early last year that "Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who's done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice."

Early on Douglass came to understand the value of reading and learning -- a good role model for all. Meacham gets it, too, even if a man named Trump never will. 

Today's Rune: Wholeness.    

Sally Rooney: 'Conversations with Friends' (2017)

Finished Sally Rooney's Conversations with Friends (London, New York: Hogarth, 2017; originally published by Faber & Faber, 2017) and Normal People (London: Faber & Faber, 2018) back-to-back. At the conclusion of the latter, my mind remained absorbed with it throughout the night. Both novels look closely at -- feel closely -- the intricate workings of social relationships.  

In Conversations with Friends, the main characters are Frances, Bobbi Connolly, Nick and Melissa. Other characters include Philip; Frances' divorced parents; Evelyn; Derek and Marianne. Much of the action takes place in Ireland, but not all of it. 

In the swirl of her intense relationships with Bobbi and Nick, Frances sometimes recoils. "I was a very autonomous and independent person," she tells herself, and her readers, "with an inner life that nobody else had ever touched or perceived." (page 275)

Sometimes Frances seems to be Waiting for Godot. "Gradually the waiting began to feel less like waiting and more like this was simply what life was: the distracting tasks undertaken while the thing you are waiting for continues not to happen . . . Things went on." (page 276)

Bobbi is sharp, "an active listener" (page 289) and engaged thinker/doer: "Who even gets married? said Bobbi. It's sinister [there are no quotation marks to delineate dialogue]. Who wants state apparatuses sustaining their relationship? (page 291) . . . Calling myself your girlfriend would be imposing some prefabricated cultural dynamic on us that's outside our control. You know?" (page 292). 

Exactly! Who, indeed? Rooney makes her writing seem simple, and maybe it is. But as in war, in writing even the simplest things are complex (see Marie and Carl von Clausewitz).

Today's Rune: Journey. 

Raoul Peck: 'The Young Karl Marx' (2017)

Raoul Peck's The Young Karl Marx (2017) spotlights the intellectual rise of Karl Marx and "Fred" Engels in the 1840s. It's a fun, interesting film, perfect for lively and intelligent audiences.

For a brief review of I Am Not Your Negro, Peck's powerful 2016 documentary about James Baldwin, here's a link.

Main characters in The Young Karl Marx include Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Jenny von Westphalen, Mary Burns, Lizzy Burns, Helen "Lenchen" Demeth, Pierre Proudhon and Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin (the anarchists), Wilhelm Weitling, et alia. The actors are uniformly excellent. The international aspects of the film make clear the cosmopolitan nature and universalist appeal of Marx and Engels' ideas. 

"Mary from Tipperary:" her parents emigrated from Tipperary, Ireland, to Manchester (where Mary was born), for work. She becomes Engels' main paramour.

"Happiness requires rebellion." - Jenny Marx.

"Everything is subject to change. Nothing lasts." - Karl Marx.

"All social relations -- slavery, serfdom, salaried work -- are historical and transient. The truth is, current conditions must change." 

"Do we not have all history before us?" -- Pierre Proudhon. 

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune. 

Spike Lee: 'BlacKkKlansman' (2018)

When all the smoke clears from our current Trump era, Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman (2018) will endure as a cultural document, a permanent indictment of White Power racism and other forms of atrocious stupidity. At some point, Trump will be long gone and the world will be looking back aghast and in amazement. In the meantime, this film is well-worth seeing on the big screen for maximum impact here and now.

With BlacKkKlansman, there's a lot to respond to, but for the time being, here are only a few observations. One is digging the way Lee shows consciousness raising in the 1970s. During a Black Power meeting featuring Kwame Ture (aka Stokeley Carmichael, played by Corey Hawkins), we see "floating faces" absorbing Ture's incisive analysis of race relations and power imbalances. In its sequel, Stallworth (John David Washington) and Dumas (Laura Harrier) advance in the direction of a burning cross, pistols drawn, ready for direct action as needed. (I've seen the latter technique referred to as a "People Mover" shot).

Also, we see a range of White Power behavior, institutional (as Ture termed it) within the Colorado Springs Police Department and personal; we also see a range of intensity of commitment and engagement in both the White Power and Black Power movements. Within the KKK, there's a local men's club figurehead, a clown, and a terrifying psycho (played by Ryan Eggold, Paul Walter Hauser and Jasper Pääkkönen, respectively). Somewhere in between these three at the national level is David Duke (Topher Grace). There are other characters to consider, too, such as the one played by Adam Driver (Flip Zimmerman). Dig it! 

Today's Rune: Possessions. 

Whit Stillman: 'The Last Days of Disco' (1998)

Whit Stillman's The Last Days of Disco (1998) features an ensemble cast that includes Chloë Sevigny and Kate Beckinsale. Set in Manhattan in the early 1980s with a smooth disco soundtrack, this is the other side, away from CBGB, punk and New Wave, none of which are mentioned. There are no Jim Jarmusch street characters anywhere in sight.

Whit Stillman's 1980s trilogy was shot in this order: Metropolitan (1990), Barcelona (1994) and The Last Days of Disco (1998), but the latter sequentially fits in the middle. The Criterion Collection set includes all three of them. Wry stuff.

Today's Rune: Possessions. 

John Gibney's 'A Short History of Ireland, 1500-2000' (2017)

John Gibney's A Short History of Ireland, 1500-2000 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017) provides an overview of modern Irish history and concludes each chapter with a "Where Historians Disagree" section.

After reading this and Thomas Bartlett's Ireland: A History (Cambridge University Press, 2010), one thing's clear: the state of affairs in Ireland at the beginning of the 21st century would seem to be far preferable to those of the 1500s and 1600s.  

Anyone who's delved into Irish history will probably know something of the horrors of Oliver Cromwell's activities in the 1600s, but the preceding Elizabethan period was also quite devastating to the Irish people, lands and ecology. Let's dive in, shall we?

In the 1500s, "Ireland offered scope for the unscrupulous to enrich themselves in ways that undermined any claim by the [English] authorities to be acting as honest and impartial brokers . . ." (page 27)

There was "a rise in the levels of violence employed by the Tudor state . . . increasing use of martial law from the 1550s onward . . . In July 1575 the earl of Essex . . . had six hundred men, women, and children killed on Rathlin Island, the stronghold of the MacDonnells, under a commission of martial law. This was gradually extended across Ireland as the reign of Elizabeth wore on . . . summary execution became a widespread practice, and decapitated heads became a common feature of conflict, whether as trophies of war or grisly receipts for rewards."  (page 27)

And pity anyone who found themselves shipwrecked. "[T]housands of survivors of the Spanish Armada were executed in 1588 by [order of Sir Richard] Bingham on the coasts of Galway, Mayo, and Sligo . . ." (pages 27-28)     

"[I]n June 1602 [Charles Blount] Mountjoy embarked on a scorched-earth campaign whose systematic nature and sheer scale marked it out as distinctive . . . livestock, crops, buildings, and people were simply eradicated across the north of the island." (pages 40-41) 

By the time Gibney reaches the 20th century, one is not at all surprised by the Easter Rising of 1916, the Irish Civil War, the Emergency (World War II period), nor the Troubles, nor by mass emigration in the wake of the Potato Famine in the mid-19th century.   

With the arrival of the 21st century, there is peace at last -- but also a looming Brexit and its attendant fallout. Still, much better than martial law and mass beheadings -- and Ireland finally wins.

Today's Rune: Breakthrough. 

Chapel Hill Daze: Pictures of Another Gone World: West Franklin Street, 1968-2018

Along West Franklin Street, starting at the Columbia Street intersection and heading toward Carrboro, there are still some vestiges of the Chapel Hill of 1968. There were more when I was a student at the University of North Carolina.

Of the "south" side of West Franklin, I've previously discussed University Square in another post. Next was Hardee's at 213 West Franklin (now there's a Panera at that address); Union Bus Station at 311 (the Franklin Hotel is now at that address) and the Chapel Hill Weekly newspaper at 501.

I certainly remember the Hardee's and the newspaper building, having eaten at the former and worked immediately next to the latter (at Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill).

The bus station building I remember vaguely. Having been completed in 1946, it soon thereafter became part of the history of the civil rights movement:

"On April 9, 1947, eight African American and eight white members of CORE (known as the Freedom Riders) set out from Washington, D.C. on Greyhound and Trailways buses; on April 12, both buses arrived in Chapel Hill. As the buses departed Chapel Hill for Greensboro on April 13, four of the riders were arrested. The commotion aboard the buses drew a large crowd of spectators, including several white taxi drivers. 

The men were taken to the police station, with a fifty dollar bond placed on each man. As white rider James Peck got off the bus to pay their bonds, a taxi driver struck him in the head.  

In May 1947, those members who had been arrested went on trial and were sentenced. The riders unsuccessfully appealed their sentences. On March 21, 1949, they surrendered at the courthouse in Hillsborough and were sent to segregated chain gangs." 

The bus station's food service desegregated in the early 1960s, under pressure.  Source: "Trailways Bus Station," Open Orange. Website link here.

Of the "north" side of West Franklin, an earlier post covered the first block off from Columbia Street, heading toward Carrboro. If you crossed Church Street going in the same direction in 1968, there was a Belk-Leggett department store at 206 West Franklin, Fowler's meats at 306, Carolina Grill at 312, Village Pharmacy at 318 and The Cavern at 452 1/2.  

The Bookshop (pictured above) came into being in 1985 at 400 West Franklin, a merger of Keith Martin Bookshop and Bookends (both Chapel Hill book shops). I remember all three of them, having bought books at each. The Bookshop closed in the summer of 2017, having lasted close to thirty-two years in that location.

Belk-Leggett was gone from its 206 location by the time I came to Chapel Hill. Fowler's was still at 306 for a while and then folded. There was one in Durham, too. 

I loved the Carolina Grill -- you could eat like a king on the budget of a college student. Which may be why they eventually had to close. I remember flat steaks there, excellent meat and potatoes type staples, probably requisitioned from next-door Fowler's. It was sort of like a large hall with tables, for some reason making me think of a Bavarian beer hall in memory. 

Village Pharmacy, 318 West Franklin, "Home of the Big O." This place was around for a while but must have eventually died on the vine. Browsing issues of the Daily Tar Heel, I came across an advertisement for Village Pharmacy from the September 28, 1949 issue: "Opposite Bus Station - Phone F-3966."  In "land line" telephone exchanges of the twentieth century, "F" might be named Flanders, Fleetwood, Factory, etcetera.  In any case, when I was working at Algonquin Books, I'd occasionally walk to Village Pharmacy for its soda fountain features. They served fresh lemonade, orangeade, milkshakes and grill food. No longer.

The Cave is a long-standing underground bar and music venue. Because I have detailed location notes from college journals dating to the 1980s, I'll devote more time to The Cave in a later post. It nearly folded after fifty years (1968-2018), but was saved by Melissa Swingle and Autumn Spencer in the summer of 2018 -- thank God! Here's a link to their website. Dig it!

Invaluable resource to cross-check memories, places:  OCCUPANTS AND STRUCTURES OF FRANKLIN STREET, CHAPEL HILL, NORTH CAROLINA AT 5-YEAR INTERVALS, 1793-1998, by Bernard Lee Bryant, Jr. Chapel Hill Historical Society, printed out by J.D. Eyre in 1999. Link here.

Today's Rune: Partnership. 

Boots Riley: 'Sorry to Bother You' (2018)

Boots Riley's first film, Sorry to Bother You (2018), takes the side of workers against one-percenters, the proletariat vs. late capitalism. The movie is satirical and surreal with a variety of sometimes bizarre comic elements. It's not all fun and games, certainly. During a first watch, one may feel anxious and uprooted by dread. After experiencing Sorry to Bother You, who will engage in direct action? Who will think about culture and economics a little more deeply?    

The tone of Sorry to Bother You very much reminds me of Lindsay Anderson's O Lucky Man! (1973) and, to a lesser extent, Anderson's Britannia Hospital (1982). The music is at times as eerie as the soundtrack of Liquid Sky (1982). It could have also been accompanied by a few choice Gang of Four cuts.  

In addition to its lively critique of capitalism, Sorry to Bother You takes into consideration interrelated variables of race/culture, gender, possibility, technology/communications, art/production/consumption and location (in this case, Oakland) -- among other things.   

Boots Riley is a music dude, too -- check out The Coup and Street Sweeper Social Club if you want to sample some. 

This kaleidoscope of modern American life is creating a stir, for sure. Actors in Sorry to Bother You include Lakeith Stanfield (Cassius "Cash" Green), Tessa Thompson (Detroit), Danny Glover, Armie Hammer, Omari Hardwick and Stven Yeun. 

Today's Rune: Separation (Reversed). 

Susanna Forrest: 'The Age of the Horse: An Equine Journey Through Human History' (2016, 2017)

Susanna Forrest: The Age of the Horse: An Equine Journey Through Human History (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2016, 2017).

Brilliantly written, fantastico!  Forrest clearly loves horses, but does not shy away from any aspect of their history or roles in conjunction with human beings.

Chapter headings (not including their subheadings; originals in caps): "Evolution, Domestication, Wildness, Culture, Power, Meat, Wealth, War."

The height of exploiting the horse must include the height of the British Empire. Certainly it was up there. "And so we reach the scrum of our London gentleman's horse-powered Britain, with its vanners, bussers, cabbers, pitmen's horses, farm horses, cab horses, costers' donkeys, trammers, drays, ferry and railway horses, all leaning their weight into their collars and drawing the nation along." (Pages 178-179). "By 1871, there were as many horses in the city as in the countryside, and by 1901, urban horses outnumbered rural by two thirds to one third." (Page 179). Contrary to popular imagination.

The change from horse-driven reality to truck and car-driven reality was even more shocking than the onset of self-driving vehicles will be in the near future. A similar "future shock" moment arrived with the replacement of the analog world with digital technology at the beginning of the 21st century. 

Think in terms of dramatic "tipping points" of the past, present and future. This is just one of may reasons that Forrest's The Age of the Horse is so riveting.

Horse Progress Days -- among the Amish in the 21st century, Forrest observes a twelve-horse team on display. "When this juggernaut marched on  . . . it was like standing by as a siege engine passed: the air was filled with the high jingle and clink of the connectors and heel chains, bits champed and mouthed, the work of muscle and mass, the soft rush of the Ohio soil as it was sliced deep, caught and turned over by the plough, leaving a black, shining and broken wake behind like a harbour ferry's." (Page 189).

Forrest crafts scores of such evocative, even exciting sentences, right up there with Marcel Proust and Vladimir Nabokov, among others.  I am deeply impressed.

I also like the fact that she wields the word "poleaxed" on more than one occasion. It sticks to mind.

Vivid descriptions do the job repeatedly. When Forrest is visiting China after "Golden Week," industry has paused long enough for air pollution to abate. "Over Chaoyang Park on the fourth of seven Beijing ring roads, the skies were deep blue and there was a fresh, brisk breeze that bent the tops of the silver birches lining the entry roads."  (Page 280).

To the Great Wall: "A rampart of rocky slopes rose straight from the plain, littered with huge yellow boulders, and the neat, grey crenellations of the restored Wall rose and fell along the peaks and gorges as vertiginously as a roller coaster." (Page 289).

Observing a bullfight in Portugal: "There was a cry and the gate flew open, clapping against the barrier, and out came the black bull, a surge of dark energy and muscle so thick that it guttered over its narrow rump." (Page 322).

On the adaptability of horses during the First World War of 1914-1918: "Even in Flanders in the Great War, the horses soon became accustomed to the shattering boom of shellfire and continued to pull their wagons as houses, roads and people disappeared into blasted mudscapes." (Page 334).

Horses prefer "cohesion, space and synchrony." (Page 339). The Age of the Horse is a stellar work upon which I'm still ruminating three days after finishing a first read-through -- a remarkable occurrence in the digital age, and something to be treasured.

Today's Rune: Breakthrough. 

Michael Schultz: 'Car Wash' (1976)

Car Wash (1976). Director, Michael Schultz (born 1938), African American director of Waiting for Godot (1966), Cooley High (1975) and Black-ish (2015-2017). Writing credit (with Schultz helping refine the script): Joel Schumacher (born 1939), director of St. Elmo's Fire (1985), The Lost Boys (1987), Batman Forever (1995) and House of Cards (2013).

Car Wash is a workers' movie, a kind we ought to see more of, a kind that had a strong showing in the rough and tumble 1970s. In many ways, the decade of the 1970s was a high water mark for positive change aspirations, certainly a peak period for introspection and multicultural expression. 

Spanish subtitle: Un Mundo Aparte / "A World Apart." It's a Marxian delectable: follow the money trail. Who owns the means of production? 

Speaking of money, Richard Pryor plays Daddy Rich of the Church of Divine Economic Spirituality, certainly not a caricature when you consider that even today, in 2018, Jesse Duplantis, "televangelist and prosperity gospel preacher," wants his followers to supply him with a new fifty-four million dollar jet. (See Tim Morris, "Jesse Duplantis just wants a jet for Jesus," Nola.com and Times-Picayune, June 3, 2018. Link here).

Other characters (all of them memorable) include Antonio Fargas (Huggy Bear in Starsky & Hutch, 1975-1979) as cross-dressing and apparently gay Lindy; T.C., "The Fly" (Franklin Ajaye); Lauren Jones as Marleen, a hooker; George Carlin as "the Taxi Driver;" Ivan Dixon as the gruff-voiced, cigar-smoking Lonnie; and Bill Duke as Abdullah Mohamed Akbar. The last two characters provide moral gravity for the film, which largely through them transcends itself from light commentary into incisive, still way too pertinent social commentary.

Abdullah: "I don't know, man, I don't know. I know I'm not crazy. But every day I have to come here and watch this clown show, man. Sometimes . . . just can't take it."

Lonnie: "I know."

Abdullah has these lines, too, which seem to have been cut from the version I saw: "[to camera] If you are watching this in the future, know that time has had its way with us, and that we knew it would. And it will with you. There is no escaping this. In a strange way, it's what makes life so beautiful and strange, that nothing alive stays the same."  (See IMDB link here).

Today's Rune: Possessions.