Roaming Charges: Masked and Anonymous

We should stop going around babbling about how we’re the greatest democracy on earth, when we’re not even a democracy. We are a sort of militarized republic.

– Gore Vidal

+ George Retes was pulled over by ICE as he was driving near the violent raid on farm workers outside of Camarillo last Thursday. The ICE agents broke the windows of his car and pepper sprayed him, before taking him into custody. Retes is an American citizen and disabled US Army Veteran. He was held in federal lockup for four days , during which time his family and lawyer had no way of contacting him to find out where he was or inquire about his physical condition. He was released without charges on Sunday night. Is this what Thomas Homan meant when he told FoxNews that ICE can stop people based on their skin-color and “briefly” detain them without a warrant or probably cause until ICE is satisfied they’re American citizens?

+ George Retes: “Clearly it didn’t matter that I was a citizen, or a veteran, or that I identified who I was. They ignored everything I said, and they just they broke my window and they dragged me out. I let them know that I was a veteran and I wasn’t doing anything wrong, that I’m just trying to get to work.”

+ Reporter: Congressman, do you care if U.S. citizens accidentally get detained in ICE raids?

Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC): “No, I’m not concerned about that.”

+ A 35-year-old Irish tourist to the US had overstayed his visa by three days, when he was arrested by ICE, in the closing weeks of the Biden administration. Although he’d agreed to immediate deportation, he somehow he got buried in the system or lack thereof and was moved around to three different facilities after Trump took office. Because the detention centers were now overflowing, Trump’s ICE made a deal to lease prison beds from the Bureau of Prisons in Atlanta, where he was sent with dozens of other unfortunate souls abducted by the masked secret police. He languished there for more than three months in conditions he described as inhumane. Bunkbeds lacked ladders, the cells were teeming with mice and cockroaches, the prison clothes he was given were stained with shit and blood. The toilets didn’t flush, he was denied medication and doctor visits and fed “disgusting slop.” When he finally got his medicine, the prison guards threw it on the ground instead of handing it to him. “We were treated less than human.” After finally being released in March, he was deported to Ireland and banned from entering the US (where he’d come to visit his girlfriend) for 10 years.

+ A man posing as a bondsman rang the doorbell of a house in Arlington, Virginia near midnight. He began asking strange and misleading questions about the residents’ mother before pulling out a gun and forcing his way into the house. The man flashed a letter from ICE, but showed no ID or badge. He rummaged through the house, broke into a bedroom, threw a young woman and her uncle Orlando on the bed and asked for ID. He then handcuffed Orlando, who had been living in the US working construction for 20 years, marched him to his car, sedated him, and drove him around for several hours until the ICE office in Chantilly, Virginia to open. Orlando was deported a couple of days later to Honduras before the family could even contact a lawyer.

+ A CNN poll shows support for Trump’s handling of immigration has collapsed, suffering a 19% point net swing in just five months…

+ Until the Confederate surrender at Appomattox, Tennessee, like most southern states, made it a crime to help runaway slaves. Now it is going to criminally charge anyone who provides shelter to noncitizens. The law, which into effect on July 1, bans anyone from providing “shelter” to undocumented immigrants. Churches are even prohibited from providing services to noncitizens. The law also makes it a felony for local government officials to cast votes for “sanctuary cities,”  with a penalty of up 6 years in state prison. One woman told CBS News: “My husband is undocumented, and together we have built a life in Tennessee. This bill criminalizes me just for living with him.” 

+ Neither the state of Florida nor the Trump administration are releasing the names of the detainees locked up in cages at Alligator Auschwitz. But the Miami Herald got the list and published it today so that families and their lawyers at least know where their loved ones and clients are. In addition, the Herald’s reporters were able to document that 100s of detainees being held in these wretched conditions have no criminal record, despite the slanders made against them by Trump, Noem and DeSantis, who claimed the concentration camp in the Glades was for “vicious…deranged psychopaths”…Nearly 1/3 of the detainees have no criminal record and many of those who do have a record committed nothing more serious than driving and parking violations.

+ What’s going on in Florida (and elsewhere) now, where people are being racially profiled for traffic stops, then sent to places like Alligator Auschwitz without any notification of where they are or why is called is called “enforced disappearance” and it’s illegal under international law, which, thanks in part to Joe Biden, the US no longer even pretends to abide by (if it ever truly did)…

+ Masks for secret police, but not for public health!

+ ICE lawyers aren’t wearing masks to court (so far) but they might as well be. More and more ICE lawyers who appear at hearings to argue for the deportation of noncitizens and asylum seekers are refusing to give their names and, according to the Intercept, many immigration judges are letting them get away with it.

+ When the mask slips: Isaiah Hodgson, the ICE agent who arrested 2 U.S. citizens, including 20-year-old Adrian Martinez at Walmart and Job Garcia at Home Depot, is accused of entering the women’s restroom and approaching a female while intoxicated and armed with a handgun and a firearm magazine.

+ YouGov poll: 71% of Americans oppose ICE agents wearing masks.

+ Los Angeles Daily News: “In a scene described as “barbaric”— some two dozen children with their hands chained were videotaped shuffling single file in ICE custody. Jorge-Mario Cabrera of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights Los Angeles said that its attorneys had confirmed details posted with the video. The attorneys contacted the children and planned to represent them—adding the children were not accompanied by their parents.”

+ Malcolm Harris: “Pretty bad that all the big American cities officially offer sanctuary to immigrants because that is the supermajority position of the people living there, but not one municipal administration has enough control over their security forces to make good on the promise.”

+ By scrutinizing rendition flight manifests, a new report from 404 Media increased the number of people deported by Trump to El Salvador and imprisoned in Buekele’s CECOT concentration camp without trial to 281, 42 more than originally reported by CBS News. Many, if not most, of these people entered the US legally through official ports of entry, identified themselves to immigration and requested asylum. Some of their families only learned their relatives had landed in that foul Salvador prison after they saw their CECOT prisoner photos online. They received no notifications from the Trump administration. They were, in other words, disappeared.

+ Greg Gutfeld: “You know what? I’ve said this before, we need to learn from the blacks. The way they were able to remove the power from the n-word word by using it. So from now on it’s: What up, my Nazi? Hey, what up, my Nazi? Hey, what’s hanging, my Nazi?” Gutfeld, the former comedian whose nightly routine on Fox (at an annual salary of $7 million) has become that of bitter old white man, doesn’t have to act the part. He can play it with authenticity.

+ Bus drivers in LA have vowed to close their doors on ICE to keep immigrant riders safe. “I’m not going to open my doors, regardless if there’s retaliation or not. I’m going to do what is right,” a driver named Jaime told LA Public Press. “If I don’t stick to my beliefs, I’ll be failing [my immigrant mother] and I’ll be going against everything I stand for and come from.”

+ The US government has collected the DNA of approximately 133,000 migrant children and teens and added it to a criminal database. Even though these kids haven’t committed any crimes, they’re liked to be treated by police as suspects for the rest of their lives. Hope none of these kids get any kind of tattoo or they’ll probably be deported to the Sudan as hardened criminals.

+ Let’s see if The Onion can top this!

+ Amy answers the NYT question from yesterday on whether it’s ethical to make money off of prisons in the affirmative. Why I started calling her Sen. Klobocop during the 2020 primaries…

+++

+ In the last 50 years, humans have destroyed more than 22 percent of the Earth’s wetland ecosystems.

+ In the last two years, wildfires have burned more acres in northeast British Columbia than in the previous 60 years combined and nearly a third of the remaining forests could burn by year’s end. Lori Daniels, a forest ecologist at the University of British Columbia.”This region of the province is in a multi-year drought. It has been in a drought condition for six or seven years now.”

+ The US has experienced more than double the number of flash floods (4356) this year than average (1861).

+ In response to appeals from Camp Mystic and the state of Texas in 2013, FEMA removed dozens of buildings at the camp from the 100-year flood hazard map for Kerr County.

+ The top three wettest hourly rainfalls amounts in New York City have all happened in the last four years. The 2.07 inches that fell on NYC on Monday night between 6:51 PM and 7:51 PM was the second most ever recorded, ranking only behind the drenching doled out by Hurricane Ida in 2021. The remarkable aspect of this deluge is that it happened without a tropical storm.

+ Indonesia announced plans to transition to 100% renewables by 2035 instead of 2040, largely through solar.

+ Last month, solar was the leading source of electric power in Europe for the first time.

+ Share of global off-shore wind power installations…

China: 50.3%
Europe: 44.2%
Rest of Asia Pacific: 5.3%
USA: 0.2%

+ The top 13 fastest warming countries in the world are all in Europe…

1 Norway +3.47°C
2 Belarus +2.45°
3 Lithuania +2.35°
4 Russia +2.34°
5 Austria +2.31°
5 Slovenia +2.31°
7 Latvia +2.31°
8 Ukraine +2.29°
9 Czechia +2.28°
9 Estonia +2.28°
9 Switzerland +2.28°
12 Poland +2.25°
12 Moldova +2.25°

+ 27 million tons: the amount of micro plastics floating around in the North Atlantic, more than the combined weight of all wild mammals on earth.

+ According to a report in the New York Times, data center construction “has exacerbated water shortages across the world.” How long before a Supreme Court decision ruling that data are people, too.

+ An update from the Age of Barbarity: More than 10,000 black bears are lured by bait (often pizza, meat scraps, jelly donuts and grease stuffed into a barrel) then shot in the back by hunters with arrows and bullets. Every year. On public lands, including units of managed by the National Park Service. Even many hunters are disgusted by this slaughter. Lifelong hunter Dave Petersen, editor of A Hunter’s Heart: “Baiting orphans cubs. Baiting is not hunting at all as it requires no woodsmanship skills and no empathy for the game. Baiting is a crutch for fakers and losers. Baiting gives honorable hunting a bad name.” This week U.S. Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-Mich.) introduced the Don’t Feed the Bears Act of 2025 (H.R. 4422), a federal bill to prohibit bear baiting on public lands managed by federal agencies, including the National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, the BLM and the National Wildlife Service.

+ In 2023, Mexico’s total fertility rate was just 1.60. Lower than the U.S. (1.62, CDC). Not sure how that squares with the Replacement Theory fear-mongers.

+ Marco Rubio a couple of weeks ago: “USAID has little to show since the end of the Cold War.”

A Lancet study published two days earlier estimated that USAID global health programs have saved 90 million lives since 2001, including:

+ 22 million lives saved from HIV/AIDS

+ 11 million lives saved from diarrheal disease

+ 9 million from lower respiratory infections

+ 9 million from “neglected” tropical diseases like dengue fever and river blindness

+ 8 million from malaria

+ 5 million from tuberculosis

+ 2 million from nutritional deficiencies

+++

+ Trump on Jerome Powell: “He’s a terrible, a terrible Fed chair. I was surprised he was appointed. I was surprised frankly that Biden put him in and extended him.” Powell was appointed in 2018 by Trump. (Look at all that gilded decor. The White House is looking more and more like Liberace’s boudoir every day.)

+ Trump plans to hit Brazil with a 50% tariff even though Brazil has a 6.6 billion trade DEFICIT with the US, because he doesn’t like the Brazilian judiciary’s decision to prosecute Jair Bolsonaro for attempting to overturn the results of a presidential election. The Trump tariffs have very little to do with bolstering the US economy, reviving the manufacturing sector or adjusting trade imbalances and everything to do with Trump flexing his power on matters of his own personal pique, petty grievances and psychological insecurities.

+ Evan Verougstraete, a Belgian member of the EU Parliament from Macron’s Renew Europe group, is proposing an international coalition of Europe, China, Latin America and Canada to coordinate efforts against Trump’s tariffsIn the face of Donald Trump, it’s time for a united response. Power games can’t be one-sided. He must understand he doesn’t rule the world.

+ You can’t work for your Medicaid if you can’t find work: 25% of Americans are “functionally unemployed,” according to the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity. At least, 20% of job seekers have been looking for work for 10 to 12 months or longer.

+ The same politicians and billionaires who demand that you work for your health care also support automation and AI to replace you in the workplace.

+ Americans need to make six figures in order to afford a median-priced home, which is currently more than $422,000, according to the National Association of Realtors. In 2004, the number of first-time homebuyers was nearly 3.2 million. Today, that number is now just 1.14 million. 

+ FORTUNE: “The problem with Trump’s plan to tax copper is that the U.S. isn’t self-sufficient in copper.”

+ Obama pretty much killed off the Occupy Movement and in retirement he has become the on-call spokesman for the billionaires who let him cruise around on their yachts. Is it any surprise he supports Trickle-Down for Hipsters?

+ People 65+ only want Medicare for themselves? What an awful, selfish generation we turned out to be…

Support For Medicare For All

All: 59%
By Age:
18-29: 70%
30-44: 64%
45-64: 57%
65+: 45%

+++

+ CNN: “I think it’s going to require a little bit less navel-gazing and a little less whining and being in fetal positions. And it’s going to require Democrats to just toughen up,” Obama said at a private fundraiser in NJ Friday. “What’s needed now is courage.”

Moshik Temkin: “President Obama made a call to action at a private fundraiser” is the most Democratic Party thing ever.

+ In the latest general election poll, Mamdani at 40% is up by 16 pts over Cuomo (up 20 points among Democrats) and Eric Adams is polling at 8 percent among Democrats and 12 percent among blacks. Mamdani is polling at 68% with voters under 45!

+ Chris Hayes: Why are you not endorsing the guy that won the Democratic primary in a contested election in your backyard?

Hakeem Jeffries: I didn’t get involved in that primary election, and I don’t know him well.

+ The Democrats finally have found a politician who appeals to the future of the party, so of course they feel compelled to destroy him…

NYC net approval – Age 18-44

Mamdani: +43
Adams: -55
Cuomo: -55

+ Sounds more like it was a “tough meeting” for the “Partnership” of billionaires who encountered a politician they couldn’t intimidate or bribe into bending to their will…

+ Adam Johnson: “The NYT has mentioned ‘globalize the Intifada’ (54) five times more than ‘Hind Rajab’ (11).”

+ “Toxic Empathy”…is that how the New York Times’ style manual describes those of us who care about the daily slaughter of children in Gaza or the rendition of nursing mothers to some ICE black site by masked agents of the federal government? 

+ It tells you something fundamental about the nature of police unions that they regularly endorse indicted politicians, such as the 13 law enforcement unions which backed Eric Adams for mayor of NYC this week …

+ Rep. Jasmine Crockett: “Earlier someone [GOP member of Congress] was talking about cities being hellholes. Los Angeles contributes almost 20 billion in taxes. That’s more than all states in this country except for four.”

+ The Unbearable Bleakness of Being (a Democrat)

2028 Democratic presidential nomination.

Kamala Harris 26% (-6)
Pete Buttigieg 11% (+1)
Gavin Newsom 10% (+5)
Cory Booker 7% (+1)
AOC 6% (-2)
Josh Shapiro 4% (+2)
Tim Walz 3% (-2)
Mark Cuban 3% (+1)
Gretchen Whitmer 3% (+1)
Andy Beshear 2% (+1)
JB Pritzker 2% (-3)
Chris Murphy 2% (+1)
John Fetterman 2% (+1)
Wes Moore 1% (no change)
Jasmine Crockett 1% (-2)
Jon Stewart 1% (no change)
Stephen A. Smith 1% (+1)
Raphael Warnock 1% (no change)
Unsure 13% (no change)
Someone else 2% (+1)

Echelon Insights poll | 7/10-7/14 LV

+ The Supremes just overturned two federal court rulings and will allow Trump to gut the Department of Education without giving the slightest reasoning for how it’s constitutional (because they couldn’t even concoct a reason). Here’s a link to Sotomayor’s blistering dissent, which was joined by Kagan and Jackson…

+ Astra Taylor: “Supreme Court says the president can’t abolish student debt, but he CAN abolish the Department of Education. This isn’t hypocrisy. It’s end times fascism—a fatalistic politics willing to torch the government and incinerate the future to maintain hierarchy and subvert democracy.”

+ Even though she’s no longer a senator (praise Gaia!), Kyrsten Sinema, the ultimate grifter, spent nearly $400,000 in campaign funds over the past three months, including

– $86k on airfare and “in-flight services”
– $86k on security detail (including $600 on ski tickets)
– $7k on meals

+ Coo-coo for Cocoa Puffs…Mike Johnson: “God miraculously saved the president’s life — I think it’s undeniable — and he did it for an obvious purpose. His presidency and his life are the fruits of divine providence. He points that out all the time and he’s right to do so.”

+ So MAGA’s Supreme Deity sacrificed a firefighter to save Trump? What a perverse eschatology…

+ According to Wired, Metadata from the “raw” Epstein prison video shows approximately 2 minutes and 53 seconds were removed from one of two stitched-together clips. The cut starts right at the “missing minute.”

+ This week a clearly rattled Trump, raging over the irate response from his pedophilia-obsessed base to his DOJ’s decision to bury the Epstein files, called his own MAGA/QAnon supporters “weaklings” and “stupid people”: “I call it the Epstein hoax. They’re talking about a guy who died 3-4 years ago. They want to talk about the Epstein hoax and the sad part, it is people that are doing Democrats work. They are stupid people.” 

+ Is Trump finally unraveling? His wild denunciations of the Epstein affair are becoming more and more unhinged. Journalist Mark Helperin thinks it’s because Trump knows a major story in “one of the three big” newspapers about the origins of his relationship to Epstein is about drop:

How did Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein meet? Did Donald Trump ever go to Jeffrey Epstein’s townhouse? How many times? What occasions? One-on-one? Parties? What did he go for? How often did Jeffrey Epstein go to Mar-a-Lago? How often did Donald Trump go to Jeffrey Epstein’s Palm Beach residence? Where else, besides the townhouse and the two Palm Beach properties, did they ever spend time together? Did they have any financial dealings?

In the search for explanations about the president attacking his base in a way he’s never done, some people are pointing to his awareness of this story that’s supposedly coming soon. That’s what I’ll tell here.

+ Rupert’s revenge?

+ This presents a dilemma for Trump’s defenders at Fox News. Can’t ignore the WSJ, but can’t refute it.

+ Trump could easily have stayed out of the Epstein fiasco and blamed the whole bungled affair on Pam Bondi and Kash Patel. That’s what they’re there for, right? Not their competence in their posts surely, but their willingness to fall on any sword thrust before them. But he couldn’t restrain himself, whether from being unnerved by what might be revealed about his  ties to the sex trafficker or driven by his hubris, swelled to Sophoclean dimensions, about his ability to bend his base to his iron will, no matter how contorted they become from previous articles of faith. Trump had to insert himself into the thick of it, apparently believing that he is immune from the wrath of the people he relies on but secretly disdains

+ If you read Biden’s interview with the New York Times, ostensibly about his use of the autopen for presidential pardons, I don’t think he makes one complete and coherent sentence. It’s painful to read. If he wanted to demonstrate his competence, this tends to prove the opposite.

+ Speaking of competence in the Oval Office, here’s Trump at the AI conference on Wednesday of this week: “My uncle was at MIT, one of the great professors. Longest-serving professor in the history of M.I.T., 51 years whatever…Three degrees in nuclear, chemical and math. Kaczynski was one of his students. Seriously good. Do you know who that is? There is very little difference between a mad man and a genius.” Trump said his uncle told him all about Ted K.  In his own case, the gap between genius and madman seems pretty wide. Trump’s uncle wasn’t the longest service professor at MIT. He held a Phd in electrical engineering (none in chemical, nuclear or math), his uncle couldn’t have told Trump all about his prodigal student because John Trump died 11 years before Kaczynski became a household name and, more definitively, Ted Kaczynski didn’t study under Trump’s uncle. The Unabomber, like so many other famous bombers, went to Harvard.

+++

+ Ms. Rachel’s posts on Gaza have the clarity and deceptive simplicity of a William Carlos Williams poem and, as such, they linger in the mind…

+ On Israel’s Channel 13 last weekend, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert explained what’s happening in the West Bank: “In the West Bank, war crimes are occurring daily. Jews are murdering Palestinians. Burning them. When the Israeli government is responsible for them, the Israeli police are present there. It shuts its eyes. The IDF doesn’t do what it is supposed to do.”

The host of the show replied angrily that the real murders are committed by Palestinians, and a small minority of Israeli commit the attacks Olmert is talking about.

Olmert responded with derision, “You are making fraudulent and misleading claims. Every day, hilltop youth. Youths of horror, attack by the hundreds, and Palestinians are assaulted and run off their lands. Their fields are burned. Their homes are burned. Yesterday, a fellow, an American citizen, was walloped on the head with a club and killed.”

+ Olmert also said this week that the forced relocation of Palestinians in Gaza to the ruins of Rafah, which Trump and Netanyahu are referring to as a “humanitarian city,” would amount to placing them in a “concentration camp.” Having supervised the Israeli war crimes committed during Operation Cast Lead, it’s safe to assume, if you still had any doubt, that Olmert knows what he’s talking about.

+ Several of Israel’s leading international law scholars write in an open letter to the Minister of Defense and the IDF’s Chief of Staff that Israel’s latest plans in Gaza to confine the entire population to the ruins of Rafah “may be interpreted” as genocidal. They include Eyal Benvenisti who defended Israel at the ICJ and Yuval Shany who earlier argued that Amnesty International was wrong to call Gaza a genocide.

+ In a response to Drop Site News, the Trump/Rubio State Department alleges that The Hague Group, composed of around 20 nations of the Global South who are meeting in Colombia this week to discuss placing sanctions on Israel–”are transparently laying the groundwork to attack the United States,” an even more demented scare-the-base fantasy than Reagan’s assertion that the Sandinistas were plotting to invade the US at the exposed underbelly of the Republic, Harlingen, Texas, which the Gipper warned was “just a two day drive.”

+ As Ireland moves to enact legislation banning trade with Israeli-occupied territories, the US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee warned that the Irish better “sober up.”

+ Stephen Miller was already a fully-formed sadist in 2003: “To the issue of the Iraq I civilians: I think that as many of them should survive as possible, because the goal of any military conflict is to kill as few people as possible. But as for Saddam Hussein and his henchmen, I think that the ideal solution would be to cut off their fingers. I don’t think it’s necessary to kill them entirely  We’re not a barbaric people. We respect life. Therefore torture is the way to go. Because tortured people can live. Torture is the celebration of life and human dignity. (Snickers.) We need to remember that in these dark and dangerous times in the next century. I only hope that many of my peers and the people who will be leading this country will appreciate the value and respect that torture shows toward other cultures.” 

+ Jackson Lears writing in the LRB on “The Legacies of the War on Terror”: ‘Once the US became the world’s only superpower, universalist fantasies proliferated. But after 9/11 they widened, intensified and solidified into a new consensus. Washington policymakers and their media stenographers came to view endless war as a normal condition, and the world as a battlefield where morally charged confrontations could be staged repeatedly, perhaps for ever.’

+ One of the US diplomats expelled from Russia in 2017 in retaliation for US sanctions was also one of the over 1300 laid off from the State Department last week told Matt Dust: “Putin gave me five days to leave. Rubio gave me five hours.”

+ Trump is making a strong bid to win the Nobel Peace Prize by picking up the pace of his airstrikes. In the last five months, he’s dropped more bombs and missiles than Biden did in his entire presidency. Still trails Kissinger and Obama, though…

+ Is the President a Pod Person? Matt Drudge is on the case…

+ Pro Publica asked Texas Governor Abbott for his and his staff’s emails with Elon Musk and Musk’s companies. The governor’s office won’t turn them over, saying some contain “intimate and embarrassing” information that is “not of legitimate concern to the public.”

+ Back when almost every small or medium size town in America had a semi-pro or minor league baseball team, Mark Twain’s home town of Hannibal, Missouri had a team called the Hannibal Cannibals, 1908-1913 and again from 1953 to 1954, after which they were named the Hannibal Citizens. If a Cannibal can become a Citizen, why can’t a fruit picker from El Salvador?

+ Elon Musk: “Grok 4 is smarter than a human with a PhD, it just lacks common sense.”

+++

The Fender Precision bass Paul Simonon smashed during The Clash’s 1979 gig at the Palladium in NYC after learning that the club wouldn’t permit the audience to stand up and dance (who booked that venue?), the smashing of which was captured by British rock photographer Pennie Smith and became the cover image for London Calling, perhaps the greatest LP cover in rock history. I’d copped tickets for that show but I’d just seen them two days earlier at the Ontario in DC, was totally broke afterwards and none of my housemates would float me a dime to get to New York, having already had their fill of “Career Opportunities,” “White Riot” and “Garageland” played repeatedly at max vol late into too many nights, which they claimed disturbed their studies for the MCATs or LSATs, while I only had to write papers on “stuff” like Foucault’s History of Sexuality Vol. 1, which they claimed, with some merit, even my professors wouldn’t understand or take the trouble to read…

+ If you’re searching for a cinematic exploration of how masks liberate your inner sadist (and who isn’t in these days of roving bands of faceless kidnappers?), allowing, even compelling, the wearer to commit heinous acts of impulsive depravity they’d never contemplate with their face exposed, I’d recommend The Face of Another, Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 1966 film of Kobo Abe’s novel, which should be as celebrated as Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, a film with which it shares many thematic obsessions, including how personalities split and double. In Teshigahara’s discomposing film the mask is either absorbed into the body or absorbs the body into the mask, drawing out what’s beneath to the surface, revealing the buried perversities and thanatic impulses that have always lurked below the socialized facade and releasing them loose on the streets.

+ I was struck by this passage from an interview with David Foster Wallace, even though he’s a writer I’ve never been especially drawn to:

If you spend enough time reading or writing, you find a voice, but you also find certain tastes. You find certain writers who when they write, it makes you own brain voice like a tuning fork, and you just resonate with them. And when that happens, reading those writers–not all of whom are modern…I mean, if you are willing to make allowances for the way English has changed, you can go way, way back with this–[it] becomes a source of unbelievable joy. It’s like eating candy for the soul. And I sometimes have a hard time understanding how people who don’t have that in their lives make It through the day.

And it made me reflect on the post-war writers of English whose voices still echo in my head, whose books, essays and poems I go back to again and again, and tend to shape and reshape my own writing…

Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Rachel Carson, Gore Vidal, Jack Kerouac, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, Susan Sontag, Paul Krassner, Joan Didion, Jimmy Breslin, Adrienne Rich, Frank O’Hara, Dave Marsh, Raymond Carver, Janet Malcolm, Barry Hannah (Airships), Peter Mattheissen, Seamus Heaney, Germaine Greer, Alexander Cockburn, Harry Crews (A Feast of Snakes), June Jordan, James Salter (Solo Faces), Doug Peacock (Grizzly Years), Hunter Thompson, Robert Creeley, Joan Didion, Michael Herr (Dispatches), Jack Turner (Teewinot), Barbara Ehrenreich, the poet Bill Knott, Edward Abbey, Toni Morrison, Peter Linebaugh, and Lester Bangs.

Ultimately, Wallace didn’t make it through a bad day. None of us do in the end. But those voices led him through more of them than he otherwise would have survived. Same here.

+ I was up at about 2 AM and couldn’t get back to sleep because the friggin’ dogs (Lola Aphrodite and Freddy Krueger) were going bonkers for over an hour, probably at the coyote that’s been pilfering kitchen scraps from the garbage cans set out on Tuesday nights, so I started flipping through Hammett’s The Dain Curse and this line made me crack up: “He always got a lot of fun out of acting like the other half of a half-wit.” JD Vance sprang to mind.

+ The great James Coburn on filming the Made-for-TV miniseries of The Dain Curse: “We went for a mood piece and a lot of it worked. For television, it was pretty good. Still, we had to fight the network (CBS) to make it the way we intended to do it. We didn’t want too many close-ups. They didn’t understand. They said this is television and that’s not the way to shoot it Well, I said, ‘Fuck ‘em, let’s shoot it like a film’, and you know what?, we did for the most part.”

I Don’t Wanna Hear About What the Rich are Doin’,
I Don’t Wanna Go Where the Rich are Goin’…

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…

Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea
Marcus Rediker
(Viking)

A Philosophy of Shame: a Revolutionary Emotion
Frédéric Gros
(Verso)

Chile in Their Hearts: The Untold Story of Two Americans Who Went Missing after the Coup
John Dinges
(UC Press)

Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…

Tuff Times Never Last
Kokoroko
(Brownswood)

Affirmations: Live at the Blue Note, New York
Theon Cross
(New Soil)

Late Great
Laura Stevenson
(Reality)

It’s Real Because It Knows It’s Angry

From Charles Mingus’s “Open Letter to Miles Davis” (1955): “Just because I’m playing jazz I don’t forget about me. I play or write me, the way I feel, through jazz, or whatever. Music is, or was, a language of the emotions. If someone has been escaping reality, I don’t expect him to dig my music, and I would begin to worry about my writing if such a person began to really like it. My music is alive and it’s about the living and the dead, about good and evil. It’s angry, yet it’s real because it knows it’s angry.”

(Pretty good advice for writers as well, similar to Cockburn’s first question to every potential intern at the Nation: “Is your hate pure?” Cockburn’s second question: “Do you know anything about fixing brakes?”)

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