Who's baking the cakes?

I have struggled to take a consistently serious interest in the corruption and sleaze in UK politics, largely because it seems so amateurish and small-time compared to what typically goes on here.

Perhaps Boris drew the UK a bit closer to the worthy comparison zone during the pandemic, but it was 'partygate', more a matter of wounded public sensibilities than the outright venality, which did for him in the end. 

 

Along comes Sir Keir and his Arsenal tickets, and it seems like more of the same. Though more of the same Downing Street merry-go-round is actually the least of what I anticipated back on July 5. 

 

I'm reminded a bit when the first allegations emerged about Jimmy Morales (or even our fallen local mayor Dr Vivar). Bogus breakfast bills seemed like less of a fundamental problem than the General's ruse of using the public purse to purchase private jets. 

 

Over time however, I've come to appreciate that questions like 'Who's baking the cakes?' really do matter, because a completely corrupt system can comprise a plethora of ethical conduct variants which mightn't appear especially repugnant on the individual level. 

 

The PM's attempt (while Opposition leader) to dress up a New York penthouse as his own London property during lockdown had me thinking back to some public messages broadcast by our previous mayor here (around the same time) from his plush crib in Cayalá. 

 

And I was intrigued indeed to hear how the Guardian's football podcast pundits lambasted many members of the Labour government front bench last week for accepting freebies from the Premier League. Snouts in troughs were mentioned. 

 

But the key point was that such largesse could very reasonably be associated with Labour's (earlier) stated plans to impose some sort of independent regulator — with teeth — on our national game. 

 

In the early 90s I counted among my clients several state-owned institutions, such as Post Office Counters Ltd. They had clear rules about the receipt of gifts and as far as I could tell they stuck to them. (e.g. They would not even accept a bottle of plonk at Christmas even if you backed up to their vehicle in an isolated car park.)

 

Whatever happened to the common sense notion that one ought not to accept freebies from someone who has a vested interest in one’s decision-making processes?

Safe Havens

Israel exists today as a modern, western values-leaning, democratic state — albeit within a surging sea of enraged tyranny — largely because of the fate of European Jews during the Third Reich — a unique genocide in world history, because it was the only one predicated primarily on Death — but one can also allow for the quickly-not-so-secondary need to provide Jews from all over, especially in the Middle East, with a safe haven from what we shall politely refer here to as the radical Jihadi 'way of life'.

And on some levels the modern nation we call Lebanon , itself came into existence in order to fulfill a similar function for the region's Christians and their broadly ancient civilisation.

 

This has not worked out so well. 

 

The decline in the number of Lebanese Christians is almost never stigmatised as a 'genocide', but looks a lot more like one than anything experienced by so-called Palestinians, whose identity is a partial fabrication in the interests of the ‘radical Jihadi way of life’, whichever way you look at it.

 

 

Hezbollah in turn, has cropped up for two explicitly nation-destroying purposes, alone: the eradication of Israel as a self-determined Jewish entity and the conversion of Lebanon into yet another monolithic model of the ‘radical Jihadi way of life.’

It has deliberately occupied the southern zones where these two objectives can be served, along with an area of the northeastern border with better access to Syria and its peculiar Medieval-Modern mix.

 

 
Those who obsess about the West Bank rarely trouble themselves to ponder the displacements that have occurred here.

 

 

Identities and Loyalties

The closest thing to an absolute truth is that anyone who could believe in any such thing represents a 'social problem'...at best.

Truth is always incomplete. That follows from the basic situation we find ourselves in. But if it is porous, unfinished, wishy-washy and so on, it is still Truth.

 

Let's look at a subset of the issue: peoples. 

 

Englishness is an actual thing, but what is it made of? There's a rough and ready geo-biological truth of it and a cultural truth, plus an awful lot of silly mythology, as any nation can attest, most of all our immediate neighbours, but the thing in itself surely cannot be dismissed outright as a noxious lie.

 

One of the greatest and most violent tormentors ever of the Jewish people was the Spanish Inquisitor Torquemada, a convert from Judaism to Catholicism.

 

Today, Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, who was once recorded observing that “they say that Hitler killed the Jews for being Jews, and that Europe hated the Jews because they were Jews. Not true!” is himself descended from a rabbinical family, self-professed Hebrews as recently as the 19th century. 

 

This should not be very surprising. A significant proportion of the card-carrying Jihadist loons in that region will inevitably be descended from the patchwork of 'indigenous' peoples who lived there long before the overwhelming Arab-Islamic conquest, now having gone full Stockholm Syndrome. (It will be interesting to see how much of the external narrative Bullshit associated with the Middle East conflict can survive the current extension into Lebanon, with its more obviously sophisticated history.) 

 

Anyway, the point here ought to be that there is a Truth behind identities and loyalties, which we need to respect, even if we can easily locate the intersections with fiction. 

 

Compromise often looks like a clumsy fudge, but sometimes it really is the Truth.

Medieval Moderns

Behind the ‘punchline’ coded into this would-be memetic message below, there is another deeper, cultural contradiction lurking, which historians would tend to find more interesting.

There's a lot more to it than 'one man's Jihad is another man's resistance'. The flag on the left symbolises a package of attitudes and behaviours which are basically 'Medieval' or rather locked in the seventh century, whilst that on the right symbolises an alternate set, 'Modern' and locked in the twentieth century.

 

On some levels the shift could be characterised as cynical, but more often than not, there's greater interchange than subterfuge, such that the very individuals in that region who are doing this — not just those easy enough to identify as 'terrorists' — clearly exhibit a distended obsession with both the hyper-Medieval and the hyper-Modern, to the extent that they themselves would not be able to adequately account for the balance between them in what we can call their everyday mentalities. (The 9-11 pilots were textbook cases.)

 

Most westerners are so completely ensconced in fairly mundane Modern environments that they can't (or won't) pick up on this.*

 

But, out here in the beyond of the developing world, latent pre-modern, pre-global mentalities have kept bubbling away for centuries. Yet whilst I could have a stab at explaining their impact on the cultural life of a nation like Guatemala, I'd not be able to detail anything quite so stark or indeed pernicious as some of the more muddled, shape-shifting outlooks of the Medieval-Modern Middle East**.

 

Right wing polemicists in the West tend to refer to a "clash of civilisations", which is a mis-characterisation and unhelpful. What is actually happening is a kind of lumpiness in this incompletely modernised, globalised world, a broad set of irregularities rather than an outright polarity which can be easily mapped onto (useful) political positions.

 

The Israelis say the Palestinians don’t want peace and their own modern state. The truth, more intriguing, and perhaps confounding, is that they kind of only half want it.

 

* Some western academics do seem to intuit, if not accept the implications of this, and their response is typically to infantilise the Jihadi-Palestinians, which takes the edge of both aspirations, Medieval and Modern. And in doing so, they compromise their own rigour and their ethics, ending up only half wanting a peaceful resolution themselves. 

 

** e.g. by day, tireless leader of the UNRWA teachers’ union, by night, demented Hamas terror kingpin.

Wolfs (2024)

 

Part of the joke here is that the two stars might just be a little bit knackered...past it. But this gag ends up functioning on more than one level, particularly with Clooney, pathos subsuming the bathos.

There are times (an extended Croatian wedding sequence, for example) where the grunts seem to emanate less from sciatica than all the straining to be funny. 

 

Then’s there’s the stream of highly-editable, hit and miss dialogue, accompanied by a score that’s pretty much genre-specific and/or generic.

 

Anyway, certainly more entertaining to watch than Wolves, a Premier League team from an English town in the Midlands, which famously lacks the latent likeability of Pitt and Clooney.

 

 

Ancestsoz

There are a few things that ought to be obvious to any student of history (...but which are apparently not.)

One of them, somewhat topical just to the north of us right now, is that nobody should be forced to apologise for the behaviour of their ancestors.

 

This is especially true of the distant kind — such that Parisians need not fret over inviting Norwegians to dinner unless they produce the magic words about how terribly sorry they are about the way Viking expats carried on around there long ago. 

 

Yet it is also true of the more recent kind, in that Jewish people ought not interview every young German they come across about their grandparents.

 

 

 

Mexico's extremely petty non-invitation of Felipe VI of Spain to the inauguration of incoming President Claudia Scheinbaum supposedly over his refusal to apologise for Cortés and the conquest back in the 16th century, is all the more silly because the King's surname, Borbón, is a bit of a giveaway here: his ancestors were busy being French at the time.

 

Should Spain in turn require some performative contrition from AMLO before he departs the scene, for all that industrial scale, ritualised mass murder the Mexica were ramping up before Europeans showed up and put a stop to it?

 

Another common piece of righteous ignorance we've seen applied to History quite a lot of late is the 'de-colonisation' fallacy, this map I came across last week being one of the most fanciful I've yet seen.

 

 

 

The basic idea here is that the Middle East can only expect to encounter lasting peace if the ascendancy of invasive Arab-Islamic civilisation (for which nobody seems to be in any hurry to apologise) is fully rolled back and the various 'indigenous' peoples of the region are permitted to reform their old ethno states (OK, in some cases, their old would-be ethno-empires).

The Turks in particular would seem to get the raw end of this deal. Do they have to set off back to the Asian steppes or would a simple 'sorry' to their resurgent Greek overlords suffice?

 

Anyway, utter nonsense, but the peak of it cannot be detected on this map, as that is the counter proposal to re-colonise Israel in the name of some sort of imagined de-colonisation.

Fanatics often reveal themselves via irate, demented and counter-productive approaches to History and culture.

At base any feigned reverence for dead people involves a disrespect for the living. History is important, and each of us has been fashioned by it, but ought to be seen as free of any moral responsibility, as individuals. 

 

All AMLO and co have revealed is the flipside of this basic common sense: the historical chip on the shoulder, which is equally unnecessary and dumb.

Common sense rarely prevails however. When not actually killing each other, the peoples and cultures captured by this alternative political map of the Middle East are likely to continue nurturing their chips and inviting each other to apologise inter-generationally, at gunpoint.

 

 In London, to grovel?

Exposed

From some of the stuff I’ve been reading it has become absolutely clear that if the Israelis had just carried out a cunningly targeted strike against a fleet of invading aliens dead set on destroying human civilisation and then eating anyone left over, there are plenty of people out there who would right now be raging against them.

As an information gathering tactic ‘Grim Beeper’ has not only opened a lid on Hezbollah and its noxious network in Lebanon, it also seems to have successfully baited and exposed many of the individuals elsewhere who have more or less camouflaged their anti-Jewish hatefulness (and/or Islamist indoctrination) behind the constantly equivocating ‘progressive’ rhetoric of Palestinianism.

And for some reason this particular incident, against a truly unpleasant corps of militants that are non-core to the conflict and represent a violent repudiation of the key values which many of these commentators appear to live by — an incident they might easily have just ignored — has fully disengaged their brains and scrambled their moral compasses. 

You can't really be an anti-fascist who hates to see bad things happen to fascists. This would be like shedding tears over a defunct Dalek in Doctor Who.

Yet this is what the above-mentioned fools have been up to for eleven months when it comes to Hamas, because they have at least partially re-imagined and doggedly re-packaged those exterminators as heroic resistance fighters.

But Hezbollah? Try the same trick with them and the moral high ground becomes a spot with the un-surest of footing.

 

Pescado Empanizado

Mexican seaside destinations pass through distinct phases, rather like Mesomaerican civilisations.

The Postclassic for example, manifests not just as a palpable sense of diminishing returns, but with a kind of pustulating pretentiousness.

Playa del Carmen surely had an Early Postclassic era made up largely of boutique and or ‘hip’ propositions around town, before the serious overgrazing commenced and content switched places with style. 
Almost every key structure from the apogee was demolished and replaced — they didn’t even bother themselves with encasing the old with the new.

I have found that one of the key markers one can make use of for determining which stage is current is the size and quality of the breaded fish fillets served in the beach restaurants — establishments which, back home, the lapsed-conquistadores call chiringuitos.

Much of Oaxacan coast appears permanently mired in the shamanistic Early Pre-Classic. Not a bad thing.

There is Huatulco however, laid down by one of those visionary ‘build it and they will come’ approaches to higher civilisation. But they didn’t, at least not really, leaving it as a seemingly incomplete exemplar of all the stages, juxtaposed. 

Blink Twice (2024)

If this had been Zoë Kravitz's first novel as opposed to her Hollywood directorial debut, I suspect she would have been assigned an experienced editor who would have pointed out the conspicuous (and not particularly complex) changes she would have needed to make in order to make the material more compelling.

That clearly didn't happen here, so instead we get a sort of calling card demonstrating what she is good at and not so good at in this new role. 

 

She can get very good performances out of her cast and she knows how to work with the camera to build arresting visuals. But neither the screenplay nor the on-screen storytelling is quite as A-list as they seem to think they are.

There seem to me to be a pair of good reasons for making a psychological thriller. Firstly to demonstrate mastery of the form, that controlled interplay with audience speculative responses leading up to the reveal. And secondly to place within that form a story with wider human meaning, either on the level of individual existential concerns or on the more collective plane: social symbolism.

I don't believe Kravitz undertook this with a strong sense of how to deliver the former, beyond applying the obvious tropes, and any underlying message is blurry at best. This is exacerbated by the inherent sketchiness of not only the basic mechanism of the scenario, but also the characters, and their ethical underpinnings.

The version we saw came with a trigger warning that doubled as a spoiler. The plot does indeed possess a lot of potential for some seriously disturbing darkness, but largely dodges it at every key opportunity. This has been fashioned as entertainment not as intellectual or psychological stimulation and as entertainment the film is substantially successful.

Adria Arjona, playing an odd sort of stand-in, second tier protagonist is kind of emblematic of some of the on/off issues here. I remember concluding during Hit Man that while she can definitely play a role, I’m less convinced when she’s playing a role within a role (or perhaps only seeming to).

One fun aspect of the film is the primary location, the strikingly red Hacienda Temozón, just south of Mérida. I remember skyping with a friend who’d found himself as the only guest there during the swine flu panic, and got a great little laptop tour of the location.

Colourful Characters

Up until my early 20s if you'd asked me about the things that make me proud to be British I would have named the BBC fairly close to the top of any such list.

Habitually I date the rude awakening to December 21, 1989, the day after the US invasion of Panama, when I witnessed a news report* which suggested to me that the Beeb might not actually be any more reliable that those shortwave broadcasts from Radio Moscow that I'd listened to regularly for a lark as a teenager.

Nowadays I have concluded that there could well even be something worse about Aunty, as the manipulative dishonesty is seemingly far less self-aware. And sometimes I have no solid clue as to WHY they choose to shamelessly push a particular agenda, such as Bush's back then, and Hamas's today, and on some levels I am not sure they do either. (Vladimir Posner knew exactly what he was up to.)

I'd had a clear inkling of what goes on a year or so earlier, if truth be told (the very thing the BBC seems to shy away from).

Producers decided to hold a televised debate hosted by Janet Street Porter and picked my college as the venue. The topic was the defunct newspaper known as The Sunday Sport, then considered the dregs of vulgarian reportage and so ripe for a going over by the Corporation.

I suppose the idea on paper was to see how a group of young, potentially high-minded Cambridge undergrads would respond to the views aired, but in practice that was not what was broadcast. The BBC had invited a small group of 'colourful' characters who were not members of Girton and whose questions to the panel were largely the only ones that were shown in the final edit.

The entire exercise was essentially a bait for the tabloids, and they duly responded, unfairly lambasting the attitudes and intelligence of Girtonians, unaware of the ruse.

Perhaps the eventual fallout turned out to be that the BBC packed itself with these very same 'colourful characters'?

* Not a matter of 'slant'. A Panamanian in the ruins of his home was asked a question by the reporter who then live translated it in a wholly dishonest manner. I had only just become bilingual and I cannot begin to tell you how much this shocked me.

Surprising turmout at the old school reunion...

Didn’t age particularly well.

Let’s suppose this strike had been carried out against a drug cartel rather than a well-organised gang of hateful Nazi-saluting militants.

It’s highly targeted, yet on other levels it’s also explorative, practically an information gathering exercise.

Most of the victims would be low level foot soldiers and associated auxiliary cell-members, but there are bound to be a few surprises, not just ‘higher-ups’, but individuals who are going about more openly in ‘normative’, not so explicitly murderous society, often exercising a role which would provide a measure of legitimacy or indeed, untouchability.

In Mexico, for example, one can only wonder who might be rubbing their crotches today. As a bare minimum you’d expect politicians and members of the judiciary to have entered the ‘net’, perhaps even a priest or two.

Israel has attempted to demonstrate in Gaza how UNRWA and media outfits like Al Jazeera provide Hamas with a parallel infrastructure, but there’s been nothing as definitive and uncontestable as an exploding pager. 

The Iranian Ambassador will surely not turn out to be the only crossover case identified this way.

(If anyone wants to establish the basis of sensible government in Lebanon, now might be a goodish moment.)

Rebel Ridge (2024)

The plot is a ‘chirmol’ and there are loose ends to deal with as the credits roll, but Rebel Ridge is gripping from start to finish.

Jeremy Saulnier’s last movie Hold the Dark (2018) featured an extravagantly violent, high body count police/suspect gun battle, and I am sure that for some, expectations had been set for some sort of reprise here, but instead the near final shoot out is almost comically chaotic and imprecise.

 

Indeed the material’s USP is the subtle frustration of viewer expectations (e.g. an ex-Marine Corps protagonist who apparently has a Wikipedia page detailing how good he is at Asian martial arts who doesn’t really do any of that stuff in the movie, which is named after a completely subsidiary location in the story etc), yet we never felt properly frustrated and a large part of this has to do with the commanding persona of Terry Richmond, played by Brixton-born Aaron Pierre— a late substitution for John Boyega — and now surely on the path to Hollywood mega-stardom.

Don't Turn Out The Lights (2024)

The trouble with genre horror movies is so often that whilst they openly tease so many possible explanations for what's happening to a given group of unlikeable 'teens', the resolution, when it comes, always feels a bit disappointing.

So here Andy Fickman gives us instead something far more unsettled (perhaps in the hope that jaded audiences will find this more unsettling), and not in the Henry James ambiguity kind of way either, rather a constant stream of ill-defined potentialities, up to and including the final shot.

Overall this results in an exploration of how abnormal or paranormal events are interpreted by those on the sharp end of them, rather than of these happenings themselves.

Does it work? Kind of. Something both formulaic and yet lacking that creeping expectation that habitually rides with these formulas is gripping, if ultimately imprecise in its narrative payload.

 

(The title seems to be an instruction to home viewers rather than a reference to anything that occurs on screen.) 

 

 

Amateurs and Antis

There’s a beautiful kind of amateurism — the kind we saw in say The Detectorists on the Beeb — and a toxic kind, which is little more than ignorance on steroids, a clear perversion of professional perspectives. 

Technology has unleashed both kinds, inevitably, but this is one area where we tend to feel the poison all that more because of the ‘gentle’ nature of the benefits of the empowerment and the higher-viz nature of the nastier kind of crank. 

Such an imbalance surely existed prior to the age of technology. If one were to conduct a survey of medieval cranks, one would undoubtedly find that the wilder, more fundamentally unhinged members of this fraternity encountered the greater number of followers. (Oddly enough, 'charismatic' is often a euphemism for spiteful sociopath.)

Digital media were supposed to represent a shift away from the broadcast model, yet ended up simply democratising it, thus amplifying the massed voice of those more interested in the talking rather than the finding out aspects of their disciplines. 

(When I started working formally in digital media and comms one could already detect a bifurcation between the residual amateurs and a new breed of self-styled professionals and if you were looking for people who knew what they were on about the former remained your best bet.)

In this context, open-minded niceness becomes almost esoteric. 

Back at the start of this century Oliver Sacks was invited on a tour of Oaxaca state by the American Fern Society. In his journal he would write...

“This sweet, unspoiled, preprofessional atmosphere, ruled by a sense of adventure and wonder rather than by egotism and a lust for priority and fame, still survives here and there, it seems to me, in certain natural history societies, and amateur societies of astronomers and archaeologists, whose quiet yet essential existences are virtually unknown to the public.”

A Flickering Light

 

The question of whether Nazism was the product of the Enlightenment or the anti-Enlightenment remains an open and fascinating one, with unquestionable relevance to today’s ‘border’ mindsets.

Hitler himself seemed quite adamant…

 

“National Socialism is a cool, reality-based doctrine, based upon the sharpest scientific knowledge and its mental expression...We have no desire to instill in the people a mysticism that lies outside the purpose and goals of our doctrine…For the National Socialist movement is not a cult movement...Its meaning is not that of a mystic cult...In the National Socialist movement subversion by occult searchers for the Beyond must not be tolerated.”

 

The trouble is, “I am not a cult member” is always a bit of a giveaway. And however ‘reality-based’ and ‘sharp’ it aspired to be, Nazi science was essentially a form of pseudo-science. 

 

American historian Eric Kurlander has recently attempted to revitalise the connection between Nazism and the supernatural, in the face of evidence that the Gestapo actively conducted surveillance and repression against occultists (and more trivial irrationalists like Tarot readers), in particular after it came out that Rudolf Hess had consulted an astrologer before embarking on his harebrained solo peace mission. 

 

Many of his claims have largely been debunked by Third Reich expert Richard J. Evans, yet how the Nazis behaved once in power should not be the entirety of the story, as it is in the very nature of all revolutions to persecute the assorted charismatics and other weirdos that made them possible. 

 

Indeed, fringe thinking is always relevant to this mix. Kurlander looks at our own political debates and concludes that ‘a renaissance in supernatural reasoning, shadowy conspiracy theories, extraterrestrial powers, and the omnipresence of a hostile ethno-religious other has begun to correlate with illiberal political and ideological convictions, influencing national elections, domestic social policies and matters of war and peace.’

 

It is certainly true today at least, that an interest in Nazi fixations correlates with a kind of obsession that could be characterised as ‘religious’. And when this becomes more esoteric, it expands the pool to more seemingly-secular ideologues. 

 

The crossover effect in the discourse is still very much present, with the enemies of these contemporary cultists depicted verbally and visually, Kurlander notes, as ‘vampires, zombies, demons, devils, spectres, alien parasites and other supernatural monsters’, adding that the end result was ‘an ideological and discursive space in which Nazism’s enemies could be dehumanised, marginalised and figuratively transformed into monsters requiring physical elimination’. 

 

Freemasons and Communists are no longer on the hook so much as they were, but Jews are very rarely off it. Add to them certain kinds of migrant, and other distinct groups perceived as a threat to organised irrationalists, and the modern parallels become that much clearer. 

The frontier between reasoned and magical thinking has become even less firm than it was a hundred years ago. As a result irrationalists now seem unsure how to safely select their allies and adversaries from amongst the friends and enemies of the Enlightenment.

The Sympathizer (2)

There are a number of different dualities bouncing off each other here. East and West, obviously, but also bourgeois and revolutionary consciousness, the nature of Revolution itself, before and then after the triumph and nothing, the kind that is really nothing and the kind that is actually something.

Halfway through I might have complained more confidently about the psychological make-up of the narrator, in part because he’s the only character in the story whose mind in shown to us with the requisite depth. And in part because he is battling another duality, that between being less than his two halves and twice as much as them, which to my estimation makes him the victim of either a chip or an inverted chip, character traits I never particularly warm to, and here they tend to accentuate an apparent weakness in his descriptions of others. Specifically almost all the non-Asian characters are white, middle-aged and somewhat crudely caricatured, but as the novel proceeds to its conclusion, one begins to appreciate how the author has covered himself rather well against such objections, for the entire written account turns out to be a) a confession to a Communist re-educator and b) a polemic about the denial of proper representation.

Some of the dust cover blurb suggests that this is a ‘novel about friendship’. It isn’t. It has lots of interesting things to say about a whole load of topics, but friendship, although it features, isn’t one of these.

Anyway, herewith the second batch of memorable aphoristic observations that I have culled from the text...

Confessions are as much about style as content.

Never underestimate what you can do to your worst enemy.

The anti-American already includes the American.

The only cure for being a bastard is to take a side.

This was the problem with a walk down memory lane. It was almost always foggy, and one was likely to trip and fall.

The loudest voice in the world is the voice of one’s own tortured stomach.

Happiness, American style, is a zero-sum game.

It seemed as much of a crime to commit a cliché to paper as to kill a man.

What one should never do was to require other people to imagine they were just like one of us. Spiritual teleportation unsettled most people, who, if they thought of others at all, preferred to think that others were just like them or could be just like them.

If you know how to steal it, time is on your side.

Nobody had more patience in listening to one than oneself, and while nobody knew one better than oneself, nobody misunderstood one more than oneself.

Americans on the average do not trust intellectuals, but they are cowed by power and stunned by celebrity.

The only worthwhile courtship involved persuading a woman who could not be persuaded, not a woman already predisposed to examine her calendar for her availability.

And although some say that America is a welfare state, in actuality it is a dream state.

The hardest thing to do in talking to a woman was taking the first step, but the most important thing to do was not to think.

Whereas women could look at us as much as they wanted, and we would appreciate it, we were damned if we looked and hardly less damned if we didn’t.

What makes us human is that we’re the only creatures on this planet that can fuck ourselves.

I was the kind bothered less by sinning than by unoriginality.

Love is being able to talk to someone else without effort, without hiding, and at the same time to feel absolutely comfortable not saying a word.

You must claim America, she said. America will not give itself to you.

Beauty is not needed to make a milieu more attractive. A very ugly object can also make an ugly room less ugly by comparison.

That omnipresent American narcotic, optimism, the unending flow of which poured through the American mind continuously, whitewashing the graffiti of despair, rage, hatred, and nihilism scrawled there nightly by the black hoodlums of the unconscious.

If Adam and Eve had debased God’s knowledge, we had in turn debased Adam and Eve.

She was a professional who had seen the likes of me a thousand times, which I could hardly complain about, given that I had seen the likes of her a fair number of times myself.

The true optical illusion was in seeing others and oneself as undivided and whole, as if being in focus was more real than being out of focus.

People who do not get the joke are dangerous people indeed.

And, again, a pair of longer ones...

Some animals could see in the dark, but it was only humans who deliberately sought out every possible route into the darkness of our own interiors.As a species, we have never encountered a cave, a door, or an entrance of any kind that we did not want to enter. We are never satisfied with only one way in.

No author was immune from having his own ideas and words quoted back to him favorably. Authors were, at heart, no matter how much they blustered or how suavely they carried themselves, insecure creatures with sensitive egos, as delicate in the constitution as movie stars, only much poorer and less glamorous. One only needed to dig deep enough to find that white, fleshy tuber of their secret self, and the sharpest tools with which to do so were always their own words.

Trap (2024)

 

On some levels a sort of shameless promo for the director's daughter Saleka’s talent and/or eyelashes.

 

Is there another active director so able to craft 'experiences' which register simultaneously as rather fun and utterly terrible? 

 

M. Night Shyamalan's signature silliness pervades every aspect of Trap. 

 

I’m not sure if any description of the plot counts as a spoiler, but here’s one for sure: the body count is not what you would expect with this sort of material.