In America most Americans fixate on America.

No wonder a Nobody shyster like Trump could become President and select a clone from The Handmaid’s Tale to the Supreme Court. 

Here’s a bit of iconic culture from across the Pond. I venture to guess 99 percent of America has never heard of Juliette Greco.

As the following DW piece points out America was not ready in the 1950’s for the mixed race relationship between Juliette Greco and Miles Davis. A lot of Americans aren’t ready in 2020.

Deustche Welle 9.23.2020.

French singer, actress and poet Juliette Greco has died at the age of 93. A darling of the bohemian scene in Paris, she was friends with Jean-Paul Sartre and more than friends with Albert Camus and Miles Davis.

Greco was well known within philosophical and writing circles, befriending Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Jacques Prevert and Boris Vian.

She also dated jazz trumpeter Miles Davis when both of them were becoming international stars. Davis called her his “greatest love,” once telling Sartre in an interview that he would have sought to marry her if he had thought that 1950s America was ready for a high-profile mixed race marriage. The pair’s personal experiences later in New York suggested it was not. They remained close for decades.

The statement to French news agency AFP said she was “surrounded by her family in the house she loved so much. Her life was one like no other.”

She became famous in the 1950’s and 1960’s with “L’accordeon” and “La Javanaise.” She interpreted songs from some of the most famous chansonniers such as Jacques Brel and Georges Brassens and became one of the first French women to perform in Germany after World War II.

Sartre once said Greco “has millions of poems in her voice that are not yet written.” He based a character on her in his “The Roads to Freedom” novel series.

Her closeness to Sartre, Camus and the French post-war bohemian scene earned her the nickname “the muse of the existentialists.”

She also acted in several movies, including a 1957 adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s novel “The Sun Also Rises.”

During World War II, her parents were active in the local resistance. Juliette was only spared being forced into a concentration camp with her mother and sister thanks to her age. Both of her family members survived their internment.

Her wartime experiences emboldened her to stay in the political left.

Greco kept performing until she had a stroke in 2016. Her only child died that same year.

In 2016, she was awarded France’s top cultural medal, the Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters, the last in a string of major national awards.

https://www.dw.com/en/renowned-french-singer-juliette-greco-the-muse-of-existentialism-has-died/a-55033813

The New York Times just published a real scoop.  20 years of Trump’s Tax Returns.

New York Times 9.27.2020

The Times obtained Donald Trump’s tax information extending over more than two decades, revealing struggling properties, vast write-offs, an audit battle and hundreds of millions in debt coming due.

Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750.

He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.

The tax data examined by The Times provides a road map of revelations, from write-offs for the cost of a criminal defense lawyer and a mansion used as a family retreat to a full accounting of the millions of dollars the president received from the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow.

Together with related financial documents and legal filings, the records offer the most detailed look yet inside the president’s business empire. They reveal the hollowness, but also the wizardry, behind the self-made-billionaire image — honed through his star turn on “The Apprentice” — that helped propel him to the White House and that still undergirds the loyalty of many in his base.

Ultimately, Mr. Trump has been more successful playing a business mogul than being one in real life.

As the president wages a re-election campaign that polls say he is in danger of losing, his finances are under stress, beset by losses and hundreds of millions of dollars in debt coming due that he has personally guaranteed. Also hanging over him is a decade-long audit battle with the Internal Revenue Service over the legitimacy of a $72.9 million tax refund that he claimed, and received, after declaring huge losses. An adverse ruling could cost him more than $100 million.

The tax returns that Mr. Trump has long fought to keep private tell a story fundamentally different from the one he has sold to the American public. His reports to the I.R.S. portray a businessman who takes in hundreds of millions of dollars a year yet racks up chronic losses that he aggressively employs to avoid paying taxes.

Now, with his financial challenges mounting, the records show that he depends more and more on making money from businesses that put him in potential and often direct conflict of interest with his job as president.

The New York Times has obtained tax-return data extending over more than two decades for Mr. Trump and the hundreds of companies that make up his business organization, including detailed information from his first two years in office. It does not include his personal returns for 2018 or 2019. This article offers an overview of The Times’s findings; additional articles will be published in the coming weeks.

The returns are some of the most sought-after, and speculated-about, records in recent memory. In Mr. Trump’s nearly four years in office — and across his endlessly hyped decades in the public eye — journalists, prosecutors, opposition politicians and conspiracists have, with limited success, sought to excavate the enigmas of his finances.

Welcome to the Supreme Court Judge Amy Coney “Handmaid” Barrett.

What is America becoming?  Or has already become? Or perhaps always has been?

Now we will have a Supreme Court Justice who is a member of  People of Praise a Group, or “Cult” if you will, which in its earlier days referred to women as “handmaids.”

When Margaret Atwood’s dystopian political tale “The Handmaid’s Tale” became an international TV hit the meaning of the word “handmaid” leapt into the public consciousness..

Handmaid Definition: Ripped from their previous lives by the Eyes, members of the government watch group, the handmaids are fertile women assigned to the households of the elite Wives and Commanders. Their only duty is to carry children for these families.

Aware of the uproar, Judge Barrett’s group now uses the anodyne term “women leaders.”

Excerpted from Mother Jones 9.24.2020

Two years ago, when Barrett’s name was floated as a potential candidate to replace retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy, a post appeared in a Facebook group of ex-members of charismatic Christian communities. “I don’t want a current member of this cult to be sitting on the Supreme Court,” the onetime People of Praise member wrote. “And it was not very many years ago that I admired them very much and was almost seduced into thinking they had something spiritually real and rich going for them.” More recently, another ex-member wrote, “I think we better start now fighting her nomination. I can’t quite imagine People of Praise on the Supreme Court.”

Members of the Christian right lobbied hard for President Trump to tap 7th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Amy Coney Barrett to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court. A current Notre Dame law school professor, 48-year-old Barrett is a devout Catholic and mother of seven children, two of whom were adopted from Haiti and one who is a child with Down syndrome—all attributes that conservatives see as evidence that she will help overturn Roe v. Wade if confirmed. But Barrett brings another resume entry to the table that, while possibly enhancing her appeal to evangelicals, makes her an unusual candidate for the job.

In 2006, she gave a commencement speech at Notre Dame law school in which she told the grads, “Always keep in mind that your legal career is but a means to an end, and…that end is building the kingdom of God.” But Barrett has not publicly addressed her involvement with People of Praise

People of Praise, a charismatic covenant community in South Bend, Indiana, that has been criticized by former members for being a religious cult. Though most of its members are Catholic, its practices, including speaking in tongues and faith healing, draw more from fundamentalist and evangelical Christianity than the Vatican.

One of its most notable features is the submissive role played by women, some of whom were called “handmaids”—at least until the Handmaid’s Tale aired in 2017, At that point, the group started referring to them as “women leaders.”

Barrett has written and spoken publicly about being a devout Catholic lawyer, even saying that during her confirmation hearing that she would not enter an order of execution if she were a federal trial judge because it would conflict with Catholic Church teaching.

It’s Not Anti-Catholic to Ask Amy Coney Barrett About Her Religious Group “People of Praise”

I saw the David Cronenberg film eXistenZ in 1999 and was completely blown away and mystfied by the story. It is film fare I had rarely seen. The plot line is bizarre, eerie and thought provoking. Plus the soundtrack by Howard Shore ads to the mystique.

Now, 21 years later, eXistenZ is lauded as a cinematic masterpiece which predicted the future of gaming.

Excerpted from Little White Lies 5.10.2018

David Cronenberg’s 1999 tech-thriller sees Jude Law and Jennifer Jason Leigh enter a strange VR world.

I don’t like it here. I don’t know what’s going on, we’re both stumbling around together in this unformed world whose rules and objectives are largely unknown, seemingly indecipherable or even possibly non-existent. Always on the verge of being killed by forces that we don’t understand.”

Cronenberg got the idea for eXistenZ after interviewing Salman Rushdie in 1995, when he was under a fatwa for writing The Satanic Verses). For when gamers vie with each other and even with the maker(s) to survive and find meaning in a complex, irrational cosmos, they are confronted with issues of free will and determinism, and with an existential angst and ecstasy, that mark them as little different, mutatis mutandis, from ourselves.

‘PR nerd’ Ted Pikul (Jude Law) is a newcomer to virtual-reality gaming, and while his responsibility to keep superstar game designer Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh) safe from a shadowy cadre of anti-game zealots requires him to plug in and play for his first time, diving deep into her constructed reality, his response to the all-encompassing experience is aways tempered with a measure of resistance. “I’m feeling a little disconnected from my real life. Kinda losing touch with the texture of it, do you know what I mean? I mean, I actually think there’s an element of psychosis here,” Ted tells Allegra at another time, before actually pausing the game for a breather. The problem is that there can be no real escape.

For eXistenZ – both Allegra’s latest beta release and David Cronenberg’s dizzying B-movie – makes the different textures of game, film and life increasingly difficult to tease apart, as Ted finds himself all at once seated in an audience, performing on stage, working through stages and levels to no obvious purpose, losing all sense of self (and all grip on autonomy), while also playing God. As Ted’s different worlds begin cross-infecting each other, his eXistenZial crisis matches the disorientation experienced by anyone engaged in fiction – or indeed living life.

Cross-infection, and the fear of viral contamination, are key to a film made in 1999, when anxieties over Y2K had everyone panicking about the possible dissolution of their online existences, and the profound disruption that this might cause to their real lives. Here, in keeping with Cronenberg’s usual obsession with what in Videodrome he termed ‘the new flesh’, the prototype consoles used by characters to port into Allegra’s virtual world are figured as biological ‘metaflesh’ game pods – organic, eroticised extensions of the body that have their own feelings and susceptibilities to damage and disease.

With nipples instead of buttons, these grotesque objects are stroked and palpated into action, and connected to players via an umbilicus, as though gaming were a procreative act. It is certainly – and perversely – sexualised. In order for Ted to get a gaming port, he needs to overcome his ‘fear of having [his] body penetrated’, and to allow illicit installer Gas (Willem Dafoe) quite literally to rip him a new hole – a hole which later will be rubbed with lube to make it more receptive to the insertion of ‘umby cords’ and other foreign objects. By the end, Ted is no longer a gaming virgin.

As the now intimately connected Allegra and Ted explore their strange new environments together – paranoid places full of conspiracy, double-crossing and violent rebellion – Cronenberg may emphasise the immersive, corporeal aspects of gaming, but he is no less interested in their corporate nature. His gaming worlds are reflexively populated by developers working in the gaming industry, and if their products – seen by some as a punishable sacrilege against reality, and by others as enviable playthings, or even articles of worship – are advertised to the viewer, so too are the means of their production.

For as development costs and profit margins are cited, and brand names and corporate slogans get bandied about with mantra-like regularity, we also glimpse the unethical exploitation of natural resources (in this case mutant reptiles and amphibians) to produce the game pods, and the insalubrious working conditions in the factories where they are put together – all a reminder that these games have more than one kind of occult attachment to the real world.

At the same time, the gaming worlds offer a metacinematic space wherein, even as the story unfolds, Allegra and others offer ongoing commentary on the quality of the dialogue, accents, etc. exhibited by the various ‘characters’ that they encounter or inhabit along the way. “Don’t you ever go to the movies?” Allegra asks at one point, incredulous that Gas cannot see the predictable trajectory of his narrative path. Meanwhile, one of the strongest hints that the ‘real world’ with which eXistenZ opens may already be part of the game is the obvious rear projection of backgrounds outside the car in which Ted helps Allegra flee her would-be assassins.

Here the artifices of cinema and the virtual reality of games are indivisible, as Cronenberg takes us on a “wild ride” through both. As the game taps into his brain and nervous system, replacing physical with imaginary experience while still retaining vestigial, mutated echoes of the real, newbie Ted serves as both cicerone and mirror to the viewer. After all, both are negotiating their suspension of disbelief as they struggle to find their conflicted place in an amazing, alienating world that they simultaneously welcome as their hospitable vacation spot and reject like a cancer.

https://lwlies.com/articles/existenz-david-cronenberg-gaming-future/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existenz

Every Picture Tells a Story – Ongoing Series

There is nothing but chaos and bad news these days.

The passing of RBG, The Pandemic, California burning, and Trump.

Thankfully we live nearby the Pacific Ocean where there are some beautiful vistas.

Photos were taken at the Sutro Heights Park, the Legion of Honor and the Veterans Hospital.  Jack is the co-star.

Lee Heidhues 9.22 – 9.24.2020

The American reality show nightmare continues.

Trump now is telling the world he may not leave office after he is tossed out by the voters on November.

This is the stuff of low rent political thrillers. Only in this case we’re talking about the once respected United States of America.

No more. With an imbecile like Trump in power America has lost its bearings.

TPM 9.23.2020

“Well, we’re going to have to see what happens,” Trump said.

Hitler inspecting a Volkswagen. He was elected, too.

Trump wouldn’t guarantee a peaceful transfer of power if he loses the November presidential election to Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, during a press conference at the White House on Wednesday.

When asked by Playboy’s senior White House reporter Brian Karem on whether there will be a peaceful transferral of power after the election, citing the unrest that has erupted in Louisville and many cities across the country during protests against police brutality, Trump offered a noncommittal reply.

Pressed again by Karem about whether he can ensure that there’s a peaceful transferral of power if he were to lose the November election, the self-proclaimed President of “law and order” largely ignored the question by continuing his rant against mail-in voting.

“Get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very peaceful — there won’t be a transfer, frankly. There will be a continuation. The ballots are out of control. You know it,” Trump said. “And you know who knows it better than anybody else? Democrats know it better than anybody else.”

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/live-blog/trump-white-house-news-conference-supreme-court-vote

Golden Gate Park was never meant to be a freeway. At long last San Francisco City Hall is in agreement. It has been a struggle.

I am beyond ecstatic. Despite the yammering and caterwauling of motorists and their political enablers who feel their right to unimpeded access to every nook and cranny is inviolate San Francisco has said STOP!!!

At long last cyclists, runners, walkers and all those who treasure a car free environment have prevailed.

The next step needs to be permanent closure of the Great Highway along the Pacific Ocean coastline.

Excerpted from San Francisco Chronicle 9.23.2020

San Francisco expanded its Slow Streets program recently with the opening of the final link of a car-free route through Golden Gate Park, enabling a cyclist, jogger or hiker to pass from the Panhandle to the Pacific without coming into contact with an internal combustion engine.

People on two legs, and on two wheels, were predictably ecstatic. People in four-wheeled vehicles — at least some of them — were hotter than a crankcase.

“This,” said cyclist Trevor Gould of San Francisco, coasting down Martin Luther King Drive toward the largest ocean in the world, “is wonderful. What a great freedom, not to have to worry about getting run over.”

“Our quality of life just went up,” said Justin Davis, who was pushing his 9-month-old son, Levon, in a jogging stroller.