Have we done this one before? Hell with it, it's nice.
Just a few words on David Lynch: Aside from the statements his films make, it may be his biggest achievement was breaking up our idea of movie time. All film directors play with time – film is almost like music that way – but when people talk about Lynch as “weird,” while they may be talking about the freakish people and creatures (rabbits, swaddled monster baby, whiteface Robert Blake and so on) I think they’re mostly responding to how his movies spool out rather than tell stories. Most of them barely have stories. They rely on tropes that we recognize from other movies -- the damsel in distress, the murder mystery, the haunted building, the couple on the run – on which Lynch hangs his visions and obsessions, and not on narrative as such. We hope to see the main characters elude or emerge from danger, but it’s seldom their heroic drive that gets them out, and often they just stay on that lost highway. And despite all the websites hunting down clues, his mysteries are never really solved. It’s very possible Lynch may not have even known who killed Laura Palmer when he set out on Twin Peaks. Many foreign directors had played around like this before, but Lynch had his own method and, more to the point, sold it to American audiences. (Part of the credit for that goes to another genius who’s still with us.)
Coffee break over, everyone back on your heads! Tubby grabs the wheel Monday, but like many of us I’ve been pre-gaming dread pretty heavily so it ought not to land so bad. (Also I won’t watch. Who needs it? I can read his yammerings later if the judgment of Clio demands.) Trump himself has been pretty quiet, but we already know from the statements of his flunkies and factota what a fash shambles to expect – as may be seen in the first of today’s FREE Roy Edroso Breaks It Down editions, covering the cabinet nomination hearings for one of REBID’s stock characters, Fox News star Poopmouth. Look, after Hegseth anything’s possible.
For the second freebie here’s a more serious-like essay on our feral billionaires, whose recent antics make Andrew Carnegie look like Francis of Assisi (and Carnegie was no Francis of Assisi). Everything bad about America has gotten worse, and the most obvious cause is rampaging capital; Reagan took the leashes off forty-five years ago and the moneyed went mad – though you may miss that they’re mad because, by the standard of self-enrichment, the only one they and our Prestige Press recognize, they’re perfectly rational. But if a man felt a chill and set fire to the whole neighborhood to warm himself you’d recognize the problem.
OH, AND: I neglected to mention when it came out, but the great Batocchio of Vagabond Scholar wrapped 2024 with his usual Jon Swift Roundup -- a tradition begun by a late lamented comrade -- of several bloggers' favorite posts of the past year. They're all winners, of course, by some of the sharpest folks around, and if you haven't looked in on bloggers like Driftglass and Yastreblyansky and Mad Kane for a while, might I suggest you take the opportunity? And check your old rolodex -- hell, I just noticed Kip Manley is still in business! Now that vinyl and cassettes are back, maybe it's time blogs got on the retro rotation -- after all, the last time we were a hot commodity was when the country was in the grip of a madman -- if anyone's prepped for the coming catastrophe it's us!
SPEAKING OF WHICH: In case you’re following me on social: Having abandoned Twitter months ago, this weekend I’m decommissioning my Meta accounts, i.e. Facebook and Instagram. (I may keep Messenger.) It’s not really a moral decision, though Zuckerberg's a moral disaster – I’m just sick of this shit. If you want to keep up I’m on Bluesky, and I’ve started to dabble in Spoutable and Pixelfed, all under @edroso. But I'm not sure how they'll pan out. You can always track my movements at edroso.com. Who knows what’s next. Burned all my notebooks, what good are notebooks, they won't help me survive.
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