Keeper of the Clown Bell

As  ‘Post-election stress disorder’ sweeps the nation the fallout has been swift and terrible or exhilarating and wonderful (depending on your political affiliation) or something more nuanced and complex if you happen to be a "political moderate" and thank God we have a taxpayer financed Government News organization to document and make sense of the carnage/celebration/anxiety. “It’s been crippling,” said (Wally Pfingsten) the 35-year-old San Mateo, Calif., resident and political moderate who has supported both Democratic and Republican candidates in the past. “I feel angry, really, really angry, far more angry than I expected to be.” I'm sure Mr. Pfingsten will work his way through his P-ESD and even though he's got a long way to go, anger is only stage 2 in the Kubler-Ross model, a MAGA future awaits him if he will only believe. One of the many benefits of being a political moderate is ideological flexibility and comme ci comme ça sensibility that's absolut...

D.W.G prophecy from 100 years ago Back in the early 1980s I had a communications professor at university, Tom Cooper , who also had the unfortunate task of being my faculty advisor. One day we were sitting in his office shoot'n the shit and I asked him what he thought the future of cinema would look like. He said many things that have since come to pass and one very interesting observation he made had to do with the position films/movies (which were primarily shown in a movie theater in those days) would occupy in the future - he equated them with opera. People would go to movies and they would still enjoy the experience of siting in a theater and seeing images flashed upon the big screen, but films would be few in number and these extravagant productions would be very targeted to a particular audience. Movies of the future would NOT have mass appeal but instead would be high concept fetishes that appeal to folks with a lot of money. Also, there would be a financial imperative ...

On the other side of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge there's a big beautiful new development called the Gaylord and what better place to hold the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). You've probably heard of it because it happens every year, always gets coverage and serves as a bellwether for orthodox conservative thought in the U.S.A.  This year the Gay Lord got bounced from the Gaylord because McMulligan hacks dropped a video bomb on the Alt-Right and FAKE NEWS radiated the entire conference with Milo hate. It's too bad because CPAC had a very hip vibe this year and there was a sense of exciting change in the air which Milo Yiannopoulos would have played like a meat flute had he been given the opportunity. But as Steve Bannon pointed out in his comments on Thursday , the American people are confronted by a "corporatist, globalist media that are adamantly opposed" to anything and everything Trump - including Milo. It's not all beautiful and lik...

Reporter Danny Pearl was beheaded on camera (pre- Facebook Live ) by Khalid Sheik Mohammed for the "crime" of exercising his 1st amendment rights - the full report shows that those "rights" are not honored in Pakistan even though the country is a US ally. Mohammed slashed Pearl's throat, killing him, but one of his accomplices failed to operate the video camera , which they had brought to capture the murder for propaganda purposes. Mohammed restaged the killing, this time decapitating Pearl, according to the report. He then dismembered Pearl's body, and it was buried on the compound. Guards washed the bloody floor and then prayed, foreheads to the ground, on the same surface where their prisoner had just been killed, the report said . How did Mr. Pearl get into this unfortunate predicament? He was trying to figure out who was sponsoring Richard Reid the mad shoe bomber who tried to blow up a commercial jet on its way to America*. Why he wanted to lear...

Today Omar Abdel-Rahman, “The Blind Sheikh,” died this morning in a South Carolina prison hospital where the US taxpayer had been treating his various illnesses at great expense. Back in the early 1990's Omar had been traveling around the USA visiting Mosques preaching the destruction of America and influencing young Muslims to engage in jihad against the infidel. At the same time he was inciting terror he was also seeking asylum in the United States because people back home were understandably trying to kill him. He did find asylum of a sort because a few of the sheikhs followers decided to try and blow up the World Trade Center in NYC in 1993 and though the explosion went off it did not topple the one tower into the other and kill the estimated 250,000 people hoped for but it was still enough to get the blind lunatic convicted as a co-conspirator. That's why he rotted away in a South Carolina prison. I was living in Manhattan at the time and was hanging out at Washington ...

When comparing Washington D.C. and New York, NY nothing throws the two cities in such stark relief as their respective green spaces and appending cultural institutions and amusements. In D.C there is the National Mall with its flat formal grid and broad sandy walkway and in NYC there is Central Parks wild and treacherous pathways winding through the woods and rock - Flat and bland vs. wild and woolly. It's not just the terrain that sets to two cities apart but also the quality and majesty of their museums, performing arts centers, monuments and frivolities. It's not an exact science and there is not necessarily a 1 to 1 match for every edifice but there's enough to make my point which I will get to directly. NYC vs. DC DC vs NYC Scoring: Obelisk goes to DC because it's just bigger and badder than any other obelisk in the world Natural History Museum is better in NYC - by a mile and that's not because DC's is bad, but the house that Teddy built has it al...

Driving to lunch today I thought I might listen to a report on the saga of Michael T. Flynn from someone on the "inside" of his demise so I tapped some buttons on my iPhone and streamed up the TYTimes podcast called " The Daily: The 47-Day Fall of Michael Flynn ." Typical NYTimes hand wringing over "facts" spoon fed their reporters by "deep state" psych-opps professionals who unleash these same tactics on nation states all around the world in an effort to twist elections or overthrow governments or just gum-up the works and make life miserable for whoever it is running the show. Usually it's not even personal or strategic but just something to do - I mean they've got to do something to justify a paycheck - and hey, if it all blows up and a major crisis results from their meddling then fine because that just means more work for the many NSA cabals stirring the pot. This time it's personal and strategic: "The growing consensus ...

Natural disasters or acts of God as they are sometimes called often serve as a way to evade the influence of human hands when long foreseen, and perfectly logical, tragedy strikes. Hurricanes wipe out communities in south Florida but, of course, people are not meant to live in south Florida in the first place. Fires and mud slides destroy the Malibu bedroom communities but, of course, houses should not be built on the Malibu hills. It's like this all over the country (all over the world really) when people live and build against nature and, eventually, nature shows them the error of their ways. So it is with the Oroville dam and the terrifying events transpiring over the past few weeks as rain, sweet rain (and snow) poured down on parched California soil. 7 long years of draught erased in a months time with buckets of water rolling into the Golden State's many reservoirs and rivers filling them higher and higher and higher. Uh-oh, too much water - not that you weren't ...

We were kick'n back around the swimming hole on a Saturday afternoon when he pulled up in his scuffed pick-up. "Let's go snake hunting", he said once he'd got our attention. "Where?" We hunted snakes up on the Bull Run and this was back in the days before they'd blown up part of the mountain to complete I-66 - a black river of tar that scared the valley and brought the sprawl past Haymarket. In those days the mountain range was a natural barrier that protected everything to its west from modernity. It was in that anachronistic world that he grew up, the 4th of his name, hunting, fishing and living as one is supposed to live in this fast collapsing paradise. The blood that had spilled on the Bull Run made it hallowed ground and he loved it and honored it and dragged us up its rocky face, jumping over timber rattlers, that we might see the valley below. Using a stick he'd pin the slithering reptile and pinching the base of its head, tail wri...

little acorn I've been looking all over for my copy of  The Fourth Turning because I hear that Steve Bannon is using it as a text book to bring on World War 3 so I figure I better brush up on the whys and wherefores before the rapture and be prepared as the boy scouts say. I can't find it anywhere - must have tossed it somewhere along the way or handed it off to someone in the same way it was handed to me by a left-wing Democrat friend of mine in NYC imploring me to read it because it was such a great way to "understand" history. I read it and loved it because it was so Jungian and mystical showing how history repeats itself in a natural circular pattern just like the 4 seasons of the year. I wasn't alone because, say what you will about the problems of pseudoscience and historical determinism, the book tells a great story that frames the past in a way that "makes sense." Oh yes, T4thT was a big time book on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the...

According to the Smithsonian, the color coding of Blue=Boy and Pink=Girl was not formalized culturally until 1940's America and prior to that time the color/gender combination was reversed. An important point to remember when contemplating the past or prognosticating on the future. In researching and writing her book, Paoletti says, she kept thinking about the parents of children who don’t conform to gender roles: Should they dress their children to conform, or allow them to express themselves in their dress? “One thing I can say now is that I’m not real keen on the gender binary —the idea that you have very masculine and very feminine things. The loss of neutral clothing is something that people should think more about. And there is a growing demand for neutral clothing for babies and toddlers now, too.” “There is a whole community out there of parents and kids who are struggling with ‘My son really doesn’t want to wear boy clothes, prefers to wear girl clothes.’ ” She hopes o...