l. always puts me in mind of r. idkw?//?/

C. Nolan's The Odyssey -- I've of course not yet seen it -- is at present the cynosure of all cinema-critical eyes (MAGAt captiousness per imaginary people's haplogroup disregarded). I have form for art about the peregrinatory Ithacan -- see the first video here, for my song "Fails of Grave Ulixes".

19 JULY/IN ATLANTA'S LITTLE 5 POINTS/ WAX'S 50th @ the VARIETY PLAYHOUSE/ DEBUTING MY OTHER BAND -- UNRESPONSIVE IN MALIBU -- WITH A MIX OF ITS REPERTORY AND MINE/ OPENING THE SHOW AT 6:30 PM EDT SHARP (18h30 for the Euro-affected)/PLEASE CLAP 🤣

+VÆ·VÆ·VÆ·HABITANTIBVS·IN·TERRA+

Who always just links to/reposts content (even the leftmost) and never writes a headnote is not followed back by me. Hobsbawm- or Winstanley-grade prose not looked for; sporadic posting okay(-ish). If only rarely, further the discourse by assembling some of those 300 characters into your own voice.

A bad King Crimson-adjacent joke at House minority leader Jeffries' expense: clueless, the vibe AIPAC. (I SAID it was bad.) So who should be making conciliatory overtures to whom? Seems as if he in this puckeringly snitty pronunciamento has that relation exactly inverted. Get over yourself, Hakeem.

Comes the æstival solstice and so my new Substack yawp, its topic the Very Cool Thing in the hed that some people, some taken by large swaths of press and public as substantial enough to pilot our nat'l gov't through the Strurm und Drang of the 2nd quarter of the 21st c., are pretty exercised about.

Ted Turner's WTCG, UHF broadcast channel 17 in '70's Atlanta, furnished this YA lit major/acid aficionado, in Noo Yawk Art Scene b&w (because our TVs were), with wee-hours visual stimuli of unparalleled weird-/cheesiness, and for that and what CNN once, however imperfect it was, was, I am grateful.

Beltane, and my new Substack ejaculation (it does mean something else, you know). Some modern häxor fold Hekate, a numen of the liminal, into cross-quarter rituals. Pretty sure the lady of crossroads hates rape, so she'll approve this message. Also: Yijing, asking: when's lunch? And good governance?

And now yee know what withholdeth, that hee might bee reuealed in his time. For the mysterie of iniquitie doth alreadie worke: onely he who now letteth, will let, vntill he be taken out of the way. ++++++++++++[2 Thessalonians II: 6-7]++++++++++++

Humane Nature, emblematis'd & epitomiz'd; or, Aum ah hum, y'all.

Ausonius limns Echo; also 90% of our æon's influencers/podcasters: Æris et Linguæ sum filia, mater inanis indicii, vocem quæ sine mente gero. My gender-neutral paraphrase: "Offspring am I of Air and Speech, And parent of vacant yatter, Bringing, whether I coo or screech, No mind unto the matter."

Spring's sprung, like a meter out of Hopkins, and many subheds litter my vernal-station Substack's lawn: implicit contempt for usage standards from Epstein and other antisocial plutocrats; how and how not to save "classical" music; George Sandys on "Palestine"; fashy outerwear; and, as ever, Yijing.

Inadvertently, bien sûr, peradventure the most mordantly/grimly-hilarious utterance in the history of our gov't's (putatively) official remarks on a war: “The only thing prohibiting transit in the straits [sic] right now is Iran shooting at shipping. It is open for transit, should Iran not do that.”

So here they are in full cry, the neoterick contingent of Fifth Monarchy Roundheads that we were always certain infested the Merkin armed services. Did general and flag officers ever gainsay Trump and his fellow diabolists, frothing NCO sectarians might well instigate a MAGA-XPian mutiny from below.

The Fans, the Atl. band I was guitarist for in the '70s (and whose live demo for A&M is soon to issued by GA Music Hall of Famer Danny Beard), opened for Talking Heads there in Jan. 1977. Image, next AM: as snow fell, we eyeing the NYT review over coffee in rock scribe Trixie A. Balm's downtown apt.

But for invincible pig-ignorance and/or psychosocial/-emotional pathology, the 60% of the US's active white electorate persistingly allegiant to the orange gobbet of fæx would liquefy in shame for their cretinous contempt of the language of Cervantes, Lope, Góngora, Covarrubias Orozco, etc., etc.

My Substack hiccup for the wooziest cross-quarter day, St. Brigid's feast — we all bloated yet in mind & metabolism from solstice sybaritism, leerily eyeing Carnival & its Lenten freight — seeks a focus, glances fecklessly off one, fetches up at the sepulture of rationalism personified. Also Yijing.

In his 1615 travelogue, George Sandys inserts between two pairs of lines of Juvenal on Xerxes ordering 300 lashes be dealt the Hellespont (its waves having wrecked his pontoon bridge across it) the seething expostulation "O the dog-like rage and arrogant folly of Ideots advanced to Empire!" Indeed.

Though I've no particular brief for Plato (a colloquy for elsewhen), this tracks. Certes, such action would definitively end the republic, but: WHEN will the military intervene to depose him and arrest the criminals? Extraconstitutionality can in extremis be countered only by extraconstitutionality.

Winter drifted past at 10h03 ET today, thus necessitating bloviation, whereof I am as constant readers know a past and present master. In this Substack increment: Epstein's two words' worth of the Joycean; a defunct Podhoretz as revenant from 1953; portentously recurring patterns emergent in Yijing.

Mariah Carey has her seasonal thing, I have mine; here, in its sophomore Yule apparition, the latter. Listen/download gratis! NOTE: Per my totally made-up tradition, the track will only be available 13 Dec.-5 Jan. Download it now if you want it for your XPmas-in-July do. Happy excess and license!

As so often haps with an Andrew O'Hehir piece, this reads to me like my brain contents on the topic transcribed. Quite gratifying that, of all available to rail at, the Epstein implicado he chose to lambast is the one I may hate the most. Now: favor us with a pasquinade on Ken Starr's "Hugs". (HUGS)

Liminality, thy name is the ungrasped interim of now (must sound better in the original Tibetan). At this sliver riving All Saints' and All Souls' comes my cross-quarter Substack blurt: Fama's twin sackbuts wind lexicographical alarums, Elno is warned not to abet tyrannic tech, and Yijing is creepy.

18.x.2025: No Kings @ 33.90°N 83.38°W (+/-). L., staging at home pre-event; r., at the demo. Democratic action pneumatic in both theological and mechanical senses!

Sol breaching the wafty brane twixt Virgin and Scales, I call to witness respecting Libra, from Marston's Iacke Drums Entertainment (1601), the (possible) Shakespeare-avatar Planet: " ... like a paire of Ballance,/Thou wayest all sauing thy selfe." Out now & free to read: my Fall Equinox Substack.

Found while researching vaiśyas ("Gammas" in Huxley) for a projected essay on Adam Smith's view that they, de- not prescriptively understood and in any culture, should never dominate government. Contested planetwide: originalisms affecting whether fraternity or cruelty will be repressed groups' lot.

Reprobating capital punishment, I no more want the legion MAGA scelerati executed after the trials and guilty verdicts than I do anybody else. But, for this alone, I DO want them under the jail, and by "jail" I mean a Supermax, and by "under" I mean beneath the subbasement. And in solitary. Forever.

I've observed from an intimate vantage the corrosion that the Calle Ocho Revanchistas' acid efflux can work in even the most liberal (in a Plutarchan sense) nature, even one yoked to a luminous intellect. So this deracinated cipher could never have been anything but wet for some substitute Batista.

I'm sorry Charlie Kirk's dead to the extent that I wanted him, along with the other masters and movers of MAGA misrule, alive to face trial if the fascists are swept away. (Fat chance of that: of the 70% of the electorate not aligned with ethnonationalist-falangist memelords, over half don't vote.)

birth schoolwork* work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work retirement* sickness death _____________________________ * Nature and duration subject to arbitrary class/gender/race factors.

Now our definitive Horst Wessel. MAGA's vexillosexual version of the Blutfahne ceremony manifests in Trump's occasional lubricious flag-grind, so check that off your Fascism Bingo card. Luckily, they so far trip over their own braindead decadence whenever they try to gin up a Reichstag fire. So far.

@jimmy-jim-james.bsky.social : #6 « — mon semblable, — mon frère! » AMIRITE? Cheers!

My Lúnasa '25 Substack increment goes on and on about capitalism, the conceit monachic. Private substance is A thing, likewise deploying it in capitalization of commercial enterprises; «il est interdit d'interdire» and all that. But framing that ensemble as THE thing? «Non.» (Also: fortunetelling!)

Walküretagsgrüße!

This is our most esteemed symbol of gratitude. It is being awarded to @kevinmcfoydunn.bsky.social for bravery, for smartness and sexy efforts to advance our silly cause ! The efforts of Kevin will be recorded in the archives forever or until they unplug Bluesky.app

Git 'im, Whoopi. While you're at it, give Hakeem Jeffries some wholly-warranted grief for being a snitty priss about Zohran Mamdani. Y'know, I'm just as sorry as can be that the neoliberalism-infected Dem leadership is so fucking butthurt about burgeoning social-democratic trends in the party. Not.

Come now and let us reason together: Ghislaine Maxwell was immured for helping scratch the ephebophilic itch of moneyed XYs (maybe XXs too?) whose names would have appeared on the putatively nonexistent Epstein list. If really guilty, she IS the list. Wonder how many towels are stored near her cell.

Like living inside my head's political compartment; also, illustrative of why I despair of writing the like, and at the length, because (after Horace’s formula), in striving towards the concatenatedly comprehensive, he did and (in prose more baroque (it always is)) I would become sluggishly prolix.

Le quatorze juillet. It seems this image documents an actual ephemeral statue (in papier-mâché?) put up outside les Invalides for la Fête de la Fraternité of 10 August 1793; the engraver, sans prénom (as far as I can tell), one Citoyen Villeneuve. Les aristos à la lanterne et à bas les Fédéralistes!

This photo: to deploy in helplessness a hypershopworn locution, I can't even. More unoriginality: it's the lead photo for a parody in The Onion, it's a frame from Idiocracy; but real. (Apologies! The nausea hinders more nuanced expression.) Surely the Void's karmic weighting impends. As you were.

Indulging a wan but long-simmering access of pique, I just unfollowed some dozen wights. Chiefly people I know +/- personally who never reciprocally followed me after I initiated contact -- not all under the rubric, but most. They won't miss me. [Emblem from Paradin, Devises heroïqves (Lyon, 1557).]

Your filthy luste you colour vnder a courtly colour of loue, iniuries abroad vnder the title of pollicies at home, and secrete malice creepeth vnder the name of publick iustice. [Diogenes upbraiding the populace of Athens in John Lyly's court play Campaspe (1583). Print by Pierre Brébiette, 1620s.]

Imbedded in this piece on ethnonationalist spasms elicited by Mamdani's rise: a video (with titanic actress+ Madhur Jaffrey!) for a tune of his issued under the nom du son Mr. Cardamom. Matter aside, its mere existence sets up a direct sociopolitical agon with the said risibly-yawping bigots. Good.

"Centrism", falsely opposing left/collectivism-right/individualism, coerces putative contrarieties towards a zero point at which they arrive denuded of all but their limpest beliefs. Most hate the jejune result. Normies: "That proves it's great!" This strain + Yijing = my solstice squib on Substack.

To up the ante on her we’re-all-gonna-die blurt by impertinently (in both senses) prescribing her (and my!) Lord and Savior to people who want to live not eternally but just, like, maybe to 80 indicates that she has no fucking idea as to the appropriate bases of policy in a secular republic. Asshat.

Aided by the white supremacist Trump, a minuscule pod of the inveterate-if-not-congenital down-punchers that are racist Afrikaners (is that redundant?) essay, in simulating being punched down on, to pull off some major ingannation, but fail to cozen my denomination's leadership. +Deus vult, ECUSA!+

Note to all currently huffing fumum candidum with me: Leo I ... somehow? ... turned Attila around at Rome's gates, and Leo XIII is deemed the engineer of modern Catholic theory and praxis on social justice; so what may be expected of Leo XIV, who recently schooled the noisome Vance de ordine amoris?

My Beltane Substack entry treats of fate both projectively general and realizedly personal, that first in my obligatory Yijing scrying, the latter by way of a threnody for one of my oldest friends, he of those the one with whom I went through the most. And while he drew breath, he never let me down.

What I read about the currently-buzzy Klein/Thompson screed -- the involvement of the reflexively meliorist Ezra coloring my take from the jump -- sparks sour dubiety in me, but this is delicious: "When did the capital class get taken over by degrowther protectionists seeking 19th century autarky?”