Opinions, art, debate
This reminds me of that hilarious Russian ecranisation of Anna Karenina where the director wanted to cast his menopausal wife as Anna, and the entire cast was, of necessity, geriatric.
Love Denzel but a 71-year-old Hannibal is just as ridiculous.
Who watches this kind of stuff, I wonder?
We all come to this vale of tears with some modest mission that does not usually coincide with the boastful and high-sounding missions that, in our conceit, we attribute to ourselves; and in fulfilling that modest mission that has been assigned to us lies the grace of living.
Juan Manuel de Prada, Weirdos Like Me (2023)
I want to add that figuring out and accepting this mission is a crucial task of existence. Sad as sad can be is the life of people who reject the mission apportioned to them by God.
A joke from Ukraine:
Today is the 73rd anniversary of the day when Stalin finally became a good Communist.
Because he croaked on this day, in case you don’t know.
One little quote from Prada in Spanish so that those who know and love the language understand why I’m into Prada in spite of his extremely unfortunate geopolitical stances:
Pero Hello no creía en el éxito, sino tan sólo en la gloria, que no la dan los hombres; y aguardó esa gloria poniéndose a escribir todos los días, en un pequeño pabellón o belvedere, con las cristaleras abiertas hacia el mar y el sol naciente inflamando su escritura de un estilo ardoroso que, aun tomado en pequeñas dosis, abrasa las resistencias del incrédulo y descompone a los tibios y a los eunucoides.
I love it how he goes up and up in this very elevated style and, right at the moment when it reaches the level of utter pomposity, the writer collapses it all into comedy with the word eunucoides that is extremely funny and not very translatable.
Shoot it straight into my veins because this is the shit I live for.
A great quote from the inimitable and permanently pissed off Juan Manuel de Prada:
Today, a transgressive writer is not one who delights in invoking demons, but the one who dares to pray to the saints; it is not an activist of unbridled excess, but an apostle of temperance; it is not a shrill bard of freedom, but a discreet minstrel of tradition. A true rebelliousness today is not practiced by a spoiled, self-destructive, nihilistic child whose antics are applauded by the system, but an artist who dares to take subversion to the point where the system begins to foam at the mouth, like the girl in The Exorcist: to the point of scorning its democratic religion, to the point of denouncing its empty platitudes and pomposity, to the point of execrating its murky ideologies, to the altar where God becomes flesh.
Juan Manuel de Prada, Weirdos Like Me
I was in a seminar with Prada once, and dude, is he permanently peeved or what. I feared he was about to catch a stroke the entire time because of how majorly miffed Prada was. I don’t necessarily blame him because in every interview the writer gives, he has to answer the question of “why are you such a fascist?” Which he is most definitely not but he is openly conservative, and we all know how that goes.
Based on his girth and what I know about his life from the gossip circuit, Prada is not who one imagines when hearing about apostles of temperance but, boy, does he know how to write.
The quote is from Prada’s book on écrivains maudits, and he proposes his own definition of who the accursed authors of our times really are. I translated maudits as transgressive but I fully understand why the word I use is stupid. “Cursed authors” is not instantly recognizable in English as the expression is in the original French.
Before we all get too distracted by Iran, here’s an update on the Russian human safari:
We can start making bets on the maximum number of arrests some of these recidivists clock up until the justice system finally puts them behind bars.
People are naive. The real reason is grift. It’s easy to hide trees in a forest. And it’s really easy to skim off the top when expenditures are huge.
There’s this old, pre-Uber joke where an executive type gets into a cab. The driver asks, “where to?”
“Anywhere,” says the executive type. “Everybody everywhere needs me.”
I’m like that executive type. I teach MWF from ten to 10:50. You’d think for those 50 minutes three times a week I could be left in peace. But no, people storm the classroom, everybody with an urgent need.
“Where’s the secretary? I need to see her!”
Well, she’s definitely not in my pocket, is she?
“I lost my key, I left my phone in the car and now the two-step verification doesn’t work, what do I put on line 5 of the activity report, where can I find the Italian tutor?”
I go to the bathroom and come back to a group of people searching my office because they don’t know where I am. I haven’t been of the size that would enable me to hide in this office since age 5. It’s not large. Why are you searching it and exchanging panicky whispers to the effect of “I don’t know what happened. She was here just a minute ago”?
People are very nutty. Yes, parents know their child better than anybody. Why do we need AI and apps? Children love wordplay. They’ve always loved wordplay. And they’ve always managed to do it without any technology at all. A child doesn’t want or need to stare at an app. She should see her mother’s and father’s faces and not apps.
First, mom stares at a screen to build an app. Then, the kid stares at the app mom built. This whole time they could be looking at each other, goofing around, creating funny new words. No app can substitute time with mommy and daddy. It’s insane that one even has to say this.
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