Keeper of the Clown Bell

In the pantheon of television male archetypes there are, from season to season, but one or two standouts who personify the contemporary zeitgeist and claim a piece of mental territory that lives on long past the show’s final episode.  These characters which, at their inception, are pure thought contrived by writers and transcribed on parchment take on a living persona when a thespian applies his black arts of transmutation and “becomes” the modern demigod. By way of electricity and the cathode ray gun this model of manhood is projected (shot) into the minds of impressionable humans and form a template which, though impossible to match, serves as a target which aspiring strivers aim to achieve.  James Arness as Marshal Matt Dillion on “Gunsmoke” (20 year run from 1955-1975) is the prototypical example of this modern magic but over the decades there have been a fist full of other larger than life players who live in people’s memory as powerfully as a real-life favorite uncle or ...

Who voted for this guy? It's been ten days since the results of the Maricopa County, Arizona ballot audit were released to the public and presented at a hearing held by the state senate. This exercise in democratic accountability had been going on for months and, if reports are to be believed, was completed well over a  month before the September 24th hearing where   overwhelming proof of an illegitimate election was presented to lawmakers . The audit showed multiple irregularities, fake ballots, duplicate counts, errors, omissions and egregious acts of sabotage and obstinance by the Maricopa County board of supervisors who did everything they could to withhold and destroy evidence of wrongdoing from the citizen sleuths. The misfeasance of Arizona's political leaders was clearly defined, shocking and (for some) beyond belief but somehow these facts were discovered, organized, packaged and suppressed for MONTHS by the Cyber Ninjas who were attempting to "get to the bottom...

Something is missing I didn't watch any of the 9/11 commemorative speeches or participate in the remembrance of the terror attack that occurred 20 years ago today. I have changed so much from that day to this as to make this tragic event a portal bringing me face to face with an enthusiastic patriotic sap who swallowed the official narrative of events hook, line and sinker - I can hardly stand to look at him. He was sitting in his office cube in Mid-town Manhattan having just dropped his 5 year old daughter off for her first day at school. A young staffer ran into the room shouting about a plane flying into the World Trade Center and they all waved him away saying "get back to work kid, it's just a plane" thinking that it must have been a single engine Cessna that clipped a sky scraper. About 15 minutes later the kid came sprinting back into the room yelling, "a second plane had hit the towers" and there was a long pause in that busy hive of activity. He wat...

  MAGA I have a soft spot for overly ambitious works of art that absolutely fail if measured by conventional standards of aesthetics and good taste but must be admired - worshipped in a way - for their sheer audacity and scope. The 1970's (especially the first half of that decade) is a treasure trove of these spectacular crashes which include John Boorman's " Zardoz " (1974), " Tales from Topographic Oceans " by Yes (1973), " Einstein on the Beach " by Phillip Glass and Robert Wilson (1975/76), Robert Pirsig's " Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance " (1974), " Mockingbird Wish Me Luck " by Charles Bukowski (1972),  Richard Nixon's Resignation  (1974) and  Evel Knievel's Snake River Canyon Jump  (1974). Evel Knievel was a boyhood American hero of mine and  his death defying AMC Harley-Davidson motorized leaps  over cars, trucks, water fountains and many other things are legendary but strapping himself inside a gi...

50 years ago Woody Allen made a movie titled “ Sleeper ” which was pretty funny and managed to cram  profound observations about human nature and revolution into a slapstick dixieland dystopia. I’m not going to call the film prescient or visionary because I believe almost all science-fiction is simply a reflection of the time it is created and NOT the dates chronicled in the book or movie (in this case, the year 2173). The formulation goes something like this :  1948 was 1984, 1984 was Neuromancer, 1999 was the Matrix, etc*. so that makes Sleeper the Nixon Presidency. About 2/3 of the way through the film we learn that "The Leader" has been successfully blown up in a terrorist attack 10 months ago and the nation has been flying blind for the better part of a year.  We the People are blissfully unaware of this crisis and simply live as "normal" eating at McDonald's, having our robots do our work and taking a well deserved break in the  orgasmatron. The Aries Proj...

Far be it for me to criticize the US war effort in Afghanistan because I, having been an eye witness to BOTH attacks on the World Trade Center in NYC, was all gung-ho to send our boys (and girls) into the Hindu Kush and kick some Taliban supported al-Qaeda ass in the autumn of 2001. Call me an impulsive warmonger or whatever but I knew people who got trapped in those flaming towers downtown and I wanted my payback in buckets of blood. In fact, two nights before the World Trade Center attack I was seated for dinner next to a very nice woman who subsequently perished in the terror strike. She burned alive while making trades for Cantor Fitzgerald and I've remembered the lightheartedness of our conversation on that innocent and optimistic night with a sickening sense of nostalgic foreboding many times over the past 20 years. To put my mood at the time in some kind of context I should point out that I was an early middle-aged husband and father of two enjoying the NYC renaissance under...

Smells (D)irty Back in the Bush 41 years I had a female friend (easy on the eyes) who worked the Senate floor managing the stagecraft and overseeing teenage Pages who fetch glasses of milk for the senior citizens who occupy the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body. How shall I say this? I’d like to tell a tale without incriminating the young lady who imparted the juicy anecdote that kicks off the narrative of this blog post. She told me her story in confidence and, as far as I know, I’m the only person other than her and the US Senator who stuck his tongue down her throat in room off the Senate floor to know about it. Oh well, fuck it, it happened a long time ago and snoops will have to do some serious digging to connect all the dots. She was the daughter of some big time industrialist who, I guess, thought he was doing his daughter a solid and called in a favor to get her thrown into the vipers pit of the United States Senate. Thanks Dad! In those days (1988-1992), I was a young buck lo...