"You can't change the world"

WWW--Ever heard of global warming? Economic development? You know, I was hoping to change the world by lunch tomorrow, but I can't fit it into my schedule--could you do it on the way home? And get some milk too? Thanks. I can't think of a better example of a straw man argument than that one. You express outrage over the way things are and you automatically get branded Superman, the messiah, the one who's supposed to fix it all. You know: daddy. I'm not saying everyone who pulls this kind of a move is being dishonest on purpose; were it that easy.

This is all about will which the status quo at least shows, as destructive as it is. One should hardly be surprised at their contempt for the victims that don't fight back. "Can't change the world?" They never heard of it, there's no such thing. What does someone mean when they say it then? That they feel powerless and that they've given up on doing anything at all. And who said confronting power had to be unpleasant? I'm having a very entertaining ride, yes indeed, it's not boring.

It's very simple: either you've accepted the mantle of victimhood, or not. If you reject it that then means you have to make some kind of effort at thinking about your place in the scheme of things and what you might have to contribute to the struggle against unaccountable power everywhere. That's inconvenient, a cardinal sin in a consumer society, so it's all on the "complainer." That's skyhigh B.S. and a defense mechanism.

Contrary to what some say, this does not mean that the entire fate of the world rests on your shoulders, a contention that needs no further comment. In other words, this is about getting real, which is the last thing most Americanized people are capable of. When you express hope for change and the fact that citizenship is a lifetime responsibility, you're reminding someone who has given up that they've copped-out and they're being irresponsible. The world is broken-up generally into "hawks" and "doves," victims and victimizers. That's not happy wisdom, but there it is. Struggle is eternal, accept it, or it will come looking for you one day.

Why else would someone irrationally put the entire onus on you? Now you understand the meaning of the term "working stiff." Dead man walking, dead man walking, dead man walking...

The Indiana GOP's Laughable Obama Mailer on William Ayers

South Bend, Indiana--What do you do when your party has nothing to offer the public except more of the same corruption, pederasty, whore-mongering, ethical-lapses, and an unbending loyalty to the rich at the expense of the rest of the public? You keep beating the same drum, over-and-over again because you have no new ideas or agendas and never did. In that moronic indefatigable spirit, Indiana's GOP sent this piece-of-paper to me.

This isn't to say Barack Obama is perfect by a long-shot, but the connection to former Weathermen leader Bill Ayers is stretching things more than a little bit. The truth is, it's a blatant lie meant to squeeze the rest of that 9/11 fear out of a frightened minority of the public.

Recall that this piece is coming from someone who doesn't intend to vote for Barack Obama, but for Ralph Nader (a write-in, Madonna's...well, Madonna, though Mickey Mouse is a real person). That said, I don't have a problem with the majority of the Weathermen bombings, though the truth be known, their core leadership (people like Ayers and Dohrn) were all rich kids throwing a tantrum over their parents' war. Like their parents, they had--and probably still harbor--a lust for power, which they got a good taste of during their rampage.

But the United States was committing genocide in Southeast Asia at that time, violence against Black Americans over the Civil Rights movement was appalling and widespread, and the nation was in flames and divided as it had been during the Civil War. Today, one could argue forcefully that we're doing the same things in slow-motion in Iraq, and that the GOP is doing their best to neglect and disenfranchise Blacks. One would expect similar activitites as the Weathermen today, but welcome to the post-9/11 and Oklahoma City bombing world. Today, domestic terrorism is unlikely to come from a leftward-direction.

If you're an individual who sees these things for what they are--unspeakable crimes against humanity committed by our government for the benefit of giant corporations, you have some options.The choices are few and difficult: you could just try to go on with your life knowing what's really happening in another country in your name. If you have a conscience, this isn't going to be easy, but never underestimate the power of rationalization, it worked wonders in Germany under Hitler. One of them is what Ayers and the rest of them did during the Vietnam war, though I don't recommend doing so.

Another option is to back what's happening wholeheartedly, eventually becoming a party to the slaughter, if only indirectly. This is the easiest route, since most of society and its institutions are going to tell you constantly that this viewpoint is not only valid, but necessary for "the maintenance of our way of life." And isn't our way of life wonderful? You'll be rewarded for doing what's wrong in most cases, but it's even money you won't be punished...at least not by Americans.

Yet another option is to take the route of nonviolent civil disobedience to the war, not even allowing for the application of violence against property that serves the war's expediencies--property that makes the war possible at all, like supply-dumps, recruiting centers, military bases, defense research labs, defense contractors and their facilities, defense research labs at public universities, and-so-on. These were the kinds of targets that the Weathermen targeted, and their main goal was to destroy property only, not to target human beings. But they did want to instill fear and terror in those who supported and expedited the war in Southeast Asia, making them terrorists. They wanted to "spread the love," which I don't find morally wrong.

Ultimately, I don't advocate what Ayers and others in the Weathermen Group did during the 1960s-70s. They and a group that became the PLP (the ineffectual Maoist People's Labor Party) splintered the most effective progressive student political organizations, SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) America has likely ever known. That's not the issue. The issue is Obama's connection to Ayers, which is practically nonexistent. Times have changed, but the GOP doesn't appear to have noticed.

For example, the generation of new voters never lived through the red-baiting of the Cold War years, scarcely knows all the details of the 1960s, and doesn't really care at all. They just know things are fucked-up and that they don't make enough money to live on. No "socialism" there, just common sense by ordinary people. The kids don't want to hear about Bill Ayers. Neither do the majority of Americans who want to hear about what McCain and Palin plan to do to "fix" the economy and to stabilize it. Reform is in the air, but all candidate McCain can do is talk about Ayers. This is because he has no "plan" and no vision, and neither does the rest of his obsolete party (who said they were ever good? not I).

Imagine that: all the GOP has to sell is fear. That's not a good platform for needed change that the vast majority of the public now wants and is going to start demanding before long. But please, please keep banging that same drum until the bitter end. I know you will. In one week--at-minimum--you're going to lose a lot of seats in Congress. And, oh yeah: thanks Indiana GOP, I needed kindling to burn the rest of my trash out here in the country. Thanks.

If Bill Ayers was a threat to anyone during the 1960s-70s, it was himself and the rest of the Weathermen, a cop, and a janitor. He and his wife Bernadine Dohrn helped splinter most of the New Left, making it essentially impotent in-the-face of an escalating war under President Nixon. It's all reminiscent of what Pier Paolo Pasolini said about the student riots in Paris during the Spring of 1968. "It's an internecine struggle." said the radical Italian Communist, poet, philosopher, movie director, and general polymath. Pasolini was right about Europe--and unwittingly--about people like the Weathermen. Ayers and Dohrn came from privileged-backgrounds. While underclass radicals went to prison in the 1970s-80s, Ayers and Dohrn were allowed into academia. Maybe that's why they do so much community work today. They should for the rest of their lives, they owe us and their comrades in our prison system.

This Republican mailer below omits quite a bit. If you were ignorant of the facts--as most Hoosiers are--you'd think Ayers met Obama right after he stopped bombing and turned himself in alongside his wife in 1980. Obama was a blip at that time, a nobody.

Barack Obama a radical Leftist? Take it from someone who actually is: that's a laugh. If only he was a Fred Hampton, a Malcolm X, or a Martin Luther King Jr. The fact is, he isn't. If....

Criterion's Salò DVD and "deleted-scenes"

The new edition of Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Salò or 120 Nights of Sodom" (1976) is a revelation and will bring with it a reassessment of what can only be described as one of the purest works of art barely released as a commercial film product. This was as Pasolini would have had it, though his work has become a highly sought after cultural artifact, a commodity of another kind altogether (but still a commodity).

Pasolini wanted to direct a film that was "indigestible" as a commodity and more a work that would stand a statement on "the anarchy of power," consumerism, the hopeless inevitability of hierarchy, and so much more. Perhaps our culture is ready for his message of power run amok, it couldn't be more timely.

Yet, there are always those who are going to claim that there's no definitive cut. This is partially-correct as Pasolini was murdered while working on the French cut of the film, not even finishing its dubbing. Pasolini strangely and enigmatically stated that the French version would be "definitive" before his untimely assassination.

What does this mean? We don't know, and probably never will, though some of it has a relationship with the artist's obsession with language, and DeSade was a French aristocrat who wrote in his native-tongue.

Conversely, the film was being made for an Italian audience first, having been backed mostly by Alberto Grimaldi, producer of Sergio Leone's (a close friend of Pasolini's) "the man with no name" trilogy with Clint Eastwood, as well as films with the rest of the Italian canon of directors during the 1960s-70s. He recently co-produced Martin Scorsese's "Gangs of New York" with the Weinsteins. Italians barely got to see Pasolini's film due to a succession of bannings that extended into 1978, though there were an unknown number of renegade screenings that caused a proliferation of grainy-prints--and some strange variations in the cuts.

The censored prints that eventually got shown to the Italian public only exacerbated this problem. Somehow, someone in the UK got a print with a scene that doesn't exist in any other...

Whenever I have a question about a master on one of my projects, my first stop is with our technical director, Lee Kline. He confirmed that our new HD transfer was made from an interpositive (IP) off of the original camera negative, which exists at Technicolor in Rome. An IP is usually the preferred source, especially when made from an original negative, since it’s wet-gated and contact-printed, and typically safer then using a cut original negative. Lee also confirmed that the missing scene is not in the IP. I had been in touch with a number of Pasolini collaborators, friends, and scholars as part of my general research on the project, and so I began asking them about how this scene might have made its way into the print used by the BFI for their 2001 release. ("Because You Can Never Have Enough," Kim Hendrickson, The Criterion Collection Blog, 08.28.2008)

Would Pasolini have wanted the scene in the final cut? There's no evidence of that, especially considering that this 24 second scene included in the 2001 BFI DVD and now Blu-Ray disk isn't found in any of the original materials, only a sole British print in their possession. Had Pasolini really wanted this tiny poetry reading scene in (there are others in the film), we would find it in these archival materials.

My own take here? It's only about marketing. The BFI edition simply has something that Criterion's doesn't, and vice versa--and that's about it. It strikes me as doubtful that there was any regard given over the director's original intentions in adding it to the cut, but more to feed a mania of "more is better" for a specific audience out there. Stupid, but there it is.

http://www.criterion.com/blog/index.html

AP: "Opening of ABBA museum delayed"

Stockholm Syndrome, Sweden--In the nation that gave the world one of the earliest examples of a social safety-net, socialized medicine, and women the right to vote, we have...ABBA.™

Today, we're hearing that the opening of the ABBA museum™ in the capital city is being delayed. ABBA™--a pop group with an extremely irritating name and sound--are loved by...well, millions of simple nimrods worldwide. Gay men who have no taste love them for reasons of trite camp. Dumb women love them because--why do you think?! Why do most chick flicks suck? Nooooooo claaaassssss.

These dames, they're stupid, Jesus Christ you know it, and these goobers and mooks are going to vote for that cheerleading Sarah Palin wacko like they did for Warren G. Harding in 1920 for no other reason than "because." John McCain will become infested with tumors, and she's going to be the first unqualified woman president who takes us all over the cliff. Anyone who would want a former glamor queen or a cheerleader to be president is batshit crazy.

Let's face it: Women have a way of doing incredibly stupid shit that's unique to their gender. Men aren't the only predictable and superficial ones out there, and to think morons are isolated to one gender (or party) is utterly ridiculous and absurd.

You know, in the 1970s, industrial pioneers Throbbing Gristle had a "thing" for these Swedish pop whatchamacallits, and it was done out of an extreme irony. Some of it, I assume, was simply to annoy punk rockers which is always good for an easy larf when you're bored. You have to remember that ABBA™ was created by a Swedish millionaire--they weren't a real "band" or "group," but a fiction-of-sorts. Kind of like George W. Bush or any presidential candidate, they were just puppets with a script singing to a playback.

But Throbbing Gristle had a good point: this kind of pop music is so vacant, so hollow, so insincere, that bands like TG, NON, Coil, SPK, Cabaret Voltaire, etc., could never compete with the subversive nihilism behind such an obvious expression of the spiritual abyss of this era. No more fucking ABBA™ indeed. 370 million (they bought multiple-copies) ABBA™ fans can be wrong, so very wrong every single time. Go read Oscar Wilde, some Pasolini, Gore Vidal and peruse the autobiography of Quentin Crisp. You'll actually get something out that.

"Opening of ABBA museum delayed," AP, 09.11.2008: http://enews.earthlink.net/article/ent?guid=20080911/48c897c0_3ca6_1552620080911-1516566394

Postscript: I've been informed that numerous porn production houses are searching desperately for Sarah Palin look-alikes. The Gods must be qwazy...

Postscript to the postcript: The Food Channel's delightfully cynical Anthony Bourdain had an episode in Sweden where he and a group of Viking-bikers threw battle-axes at an ABBA cd. "Mama mia that, you son-of-a-bitch! yelled Bourdain to the applause of the "Vikers." Goddamn if I don't love that guy. Ramones forever (just no copies, punk is over).

Everyone's a comedian, but what would Jesus™ actually do?

Jesus™ would (if he weren't carbonized-dust somewhere in Palestine):

1. Jesus would never call anyone "nigger," "spic," "chink," "gook," "slant," "wop," "kike" (we know this one), "mick," "spade," "ofay" (he wasn't white, get over it), etc. .

2. Wash AND dry, because he's a nice guy and a responsible guest.

3. Jesus would watch NC-17 movies because he had depth and curiosity, unlike his subsequent generations of followers. His favorite director is Pier Paolo Pasolini. I asked him last night.

4. Jesus would always be in-trouble because his beliefs wouldn't be popular in-practice today. Luckily, only a tiny minority of self-proclaimed Christians have ever done this: himself and St. Francis.

5. Jesus would vote independent, and never for a Republican or Democrat unless they were enlightened (there's a clear-and-empty shot there so far...). He would be a hard-left voter who hates the sick, greedy rich as most reasonable people have throughout human history.

6. As a carpenter in an industrialized, mechanized, and technological world Jesus...would do very little work. He would be unemployed unless he was lucky and had a journeyman's union-card.

7. Jesus would say, "I told you to give unto Caesar what is Caesar's, but I didn't mean 'worship him or myself as a god.' I never said, 'worship authority.' " Like the last time, nobody would listen or change their behavior and would go on like before in the standard dumbshow way.

8. Jesus would save green stamps, finding-out that they were worthless later-on, exclaiming as he did on the cross: "Lord, why have you forsaken me?"Indeed. Clouds would gather as they did in a Cecil B. Demille movie--but didn't at the actual crucifixion--and the mourners would gather (also more than at the actual crucifixion). Birds would fall from the sky, but the universe would shrug as it always does.

9. Because Jesus would see our industrial and technological reality as a hell on earth, and because he would see America as the New Rome, he would read Philip K. Dick, Mark Twain, Melville, Huxley, Blake, Poe, Marx, and Nietzsche voraciously. He might even smoke pot occasionally.

10. Jesus would avidly watch Sam Peckinpah movies because he hates violence and murder. His favorite would be "Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia."

11. Jesus would find Deborah Jeane Palfrey innocent for every reason you suspect.

12. Jesus would abolish the death penalty for every reason you suspect.

13. And finally, Jesus would be very-very angry that anyone would suggest what he would do, nearly 2,000-years after his untimely death, as most human beings would. Luckily, it doesn't matter, only what he taught about treating each other better does. "He who lives by the sword dies by the sword," said Jesus. So mote it be. We murder a guy for saying, "Be nice to each other," and then we feel bad and are haunted by the guilt of it for two-millennia. We're still pagans, barbarians flailing our way through history. It will end one day. So mote it be.

FOR NATO: Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salò (1975) review

Social order at the expense of liberty is hardly a bargain. ---The Marquis de Sade

So you say you've seen nearly every major Italian giallo? You've seen your Argento, Mario Bava, Lucio Fulci, Michele Soavi, and even all of the "classics" of Italian film? You've seen your Leone, Fellini, DeSicca, Bertolucci, Martino, and even most of the world classics? By this point, you've probably seen it all, and you think there's no film that will shock you?

If you haven't seen Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Salo: 120 Days of Sodom," you are flatly wrong. Pasolini didn't even live to see the release of this film. He was "murdered" by a male hustler (or so the official story plays).

Who was Pier Paolo Pasolini? Pasolini was the most important postwar intellectual in Italy, period. Like a Renaissance polymath, he was adept at journalism, the novel, poetry, screenwriting, directing motion-pictures, painting and drawing, and more. The polymath also liked cruising teenage boys, was a walking scandal, and yet paradoxically truly was the conscience of postwar Italy until his murder on November 2nd, 1975. He could only be an irritant in the culture he arose in, and he pricked the conscience of a nation. It's likely that he engineered his own murder, placing its date on the day of the dead as a frame...

Pasolini's revolutionary philosophy was simultaneously opposed to fascism and communism, and he had many enemies in the political arena, as well as the religious one with the Vatican. All said, however, it's possible that Pier Pasolini was murdered by a right wing assassination team under the aegis of "GLADIO," a NATO program of secret armies throughout Western Europe. GLADIO began, ostensibly, as a defense against a hypothetical Soviet invasion of Europe.

Overall, GLADIO was more often used to attack legitimate leftist political parties, trade unions, and populist groups. GLADIO operations were responsible for breaking the Marseilles dock strikes in the late 1940s as just one example of their handiwork. Their activities in Italy during the Cold War are known to be extensive. Italy is a flashpoint, a fixed, coordinate in the nexus of control of the Western power structure.

In Italy, the Red Brigade bombings in the 1970s were even instigated by GLADIO operatives to justify a law and order crackdown on the Italian Communist Party who were poised to take power at that time. It's a mystery as to how much influence the CIA had in all of this. The existence of the P-2 conspiracy (oddly, involving the Vatican, the CIA, KGB, and renegade Freemasons!) had yet to break in the international media. All this aside, there were dozens of politically motivated killings in 1970s Italy, and Pasolini's was just one of many.

One has to ponder the Vatican's involvement in his murder, as they were a primary adversary of Pasolini. And so, Salo enters this bloody fray. It could not be more controversial, and it's a scream of rage against how little we all really care about or value human life. Pasolini was outraged and disappointed with the human condition, and Italian politics had become a bloody chaos, leading director Sergio Leone to remark at the time that, "Italian politics have become ridiculous." Both directors were friends.

The scenario of Salo is fairly simple: a group of Italian fascists retreat to a palace in Northern Italy (where there was a great deal of support for Italian fascism and the Monarch) with a group of sixteen captive boys and girls. One is a bishop, a judge, a politician, and-so-on, representing symbols of established authority. It is Mussolini's short-lived Republic of Salo, created especially for him by the disintegrating Nazi regime. Hence, "Salo" is a title that almost any Italian of the 1970s (or today) might recognize. For 120 days, they degrade their victims in almost every imaginable--and unimaginable--manner.

There is homosexual rape, sundry forms of buggery, forcing people to eat excrement, forced heterosexual couplings, forced marriage, sadism of every kind, and finally, death. Just about everything you could imagine occurs, and worse. Of course, it's all based loosely on De Sade's tale and stays pretty close to the text's themes and scenarios.

Pasolini chapters each section with some of the structure of Dante's "Inferno," which is a real mark of his genius. One can even sense an atavistic Manichean influence in the work, which isn't surprising: Friuli has been historically known as an ancient citadel on the Northern "boot" of Italy, where the ideas of the world hating sect are still evident in the local culture. Pasolini's home state, Friuli, has been thought of as a place of subversion for centuries.

The Italian polymath understood that, under the right circumstances, we are all capable of these depredations. This is a lesson that he and others learned during the resistance to Italian and German fascism in Italy during WWII. Pasolini witnessed and experienced injustices committed by the partisans, losing his own brother to a firing squad.

There's a little Hitler in everyone, and we all the potential to become assassins under the proper conditions. Beyond that, To say this film is merely a statement on fascism would be wrong--it's a manifesto on what cruelty rests within all human hearts, especially once one has supped on power. In Salo and his other works in other mediums, Pasolini is saying that humanity has a dark heart and that nothing is really true.

This was the point that "Italy's conscience" had reached artistically by 1975, though his existential crisis regarding the future of humanity had begun much earlier. Salo was always lurking there in Pasolini's mind, waiting for its time to emerge. Some online reviewers have stated that they didn't find the film shocking--they should check themselves into a clinic somewhere, as Salo is beyond shocking. But it should be remembered that De Sade was only writing about the sexual habits of his kind--the aristocracy before the French Revolution of 1789. De Sade wasn't simply trying to shock. He was chronicling the sexual tastes and behaviors of the French aristocracy before the revolution.

I've noticed that even avid fans of contemporary directors such as Takashi Miike respect the power of this film. Miike has some similarities in theme and style with Pasolini, but goes for a more genre, stylized look (it's not the heady 1970s anymore). Even John Waters lists this film as sicker than his own worst offenders. It could be argued that Desperate Living (1977) is an oblique spoof of Salo. To say I was shocked by this film would be an understatement. But, besides being pretty sick, this film looks astonishingly lush and challenges the audience by shoving the beautiful and the grotesque in our faces. This is another aspect of Pasolini's genius of showing us depredations in such a lovely setting.

Salo transcends the subversive and never fails to shock. The late Tonnino della Colli's cinematography lends the film a look that could be hung in the Louvre, and it gives the film a greater subversive edge overall. Several of the shot compositions resemble well-known works of Western art. Della Colli was director of photography for Fellini, Sergio Leone, and many other classic Italian directors. It should be noted that the film is not "legitimately available" in the United State for copyright reasons. However, there are very good copies out there even though it's not in print. I found a copy that's an exact duplicate of the original US edition for a decent price, so it is out there to be found with a little searching.

The Criterion edition is reportedly the most expensive collector's DVD in the world, going for as much as $1,000.00 USD. [Ed., 08.31.2008--Which is now probably devalued with the new Criterion edition.] This was the best transfer in 1998, but it appears that there is a new continental European DVD purported to be definitive, as well as a BFI edition that's unexceptional. This writer possesses a few Ken Russell DVDs ("Salome's Last Dance") that are worth as much as $300.00 USD, so this is a shocker! It's funny to see used DVDs of the big Hollywood fare at $3.99 USD, while these are in the hundreds! It says a lot about what is lasting and meaningful to people, and it's not blockbuster movies.

A dubious company called "Water Bearer" has a set of Pasolini's other works, but I have it on good word that they are of extremely poor quality and aren't restored and come from aging 35mm prints. It would be nice if Criterion did a Pasolini Box that included a new HD transfer of "Salo" with extensive restoration. Salo is one of the most important films ever made. We all stand accused, even the filmmaker, and that's the point. Be forewarned: not for children or adults who fear soul-searing, raw existentialism. So, why? Why would anyone want to watch this? 

NOTE: The "ass-judging-scene" is similar to photos of the "flesh pyramid" at Abu-Ghraib. The new Criterion edition will bring a fresh reassessment of this Italian masterpiece, with only the omission of one extraneous 25 second scene. It will be HD from the best film elements. Brace yourselves.

(Revised 07.06.2008)

[Ed., 10.05.2008--I see no reason why Pasolini couldn't have been murdered by various rightist elements, while at the same time having brought it about purposefully. Why not?]

Pasolini's Teorema (1968) review

I cannot get this man out of my system, our era's ephemeral Socrates. Pier Paolo Pasolini haunts the modern mind, reminding us of the terminal crisis (ironically brought on by the human desire for freedom), in this, our common era of human society. The Italy of his lifetime passed from a preindustrial to a modern state in less than one generation and it was a shock to the WWII generation of Italians who had previously been very provincial, isolated, and basically an agrarian nation of peasants.

This would be like taking American history from 1877-1920, when we became an industrialized nation, and cramming it into roughly 30 years. The effects on the culture could only be devastating and genocidal, as Pasolini astutely described the Americanization of the Italian peninsula. Other nations fared far worse under the effects of modernization: We know the results in Russia under Stalin with the tens-of-millions dead. But the damage to Italy during the "economic miracle" of the 1950s, and passing into the 1970s, was almost unique: traditional Italian culture was slipping-away, and changing into an empty, bourgeois consumerism. This mindless industrialized technological consumerism now spans the globe. Pasolini saw the writing on the wall: the bourgeois revolutions were culminating in the destruction of the natural environment and human civilization.

Like many authors, artists, and intellectuals of (t)his era, he was doing what most artists do, namely questioning the social order around him. Like Philip K. Dick and Werner Herzog, Pasolini was concerned that this reality we are now surrounded by would strip people of their humanity, their symbols, and of any authentic qualities and spirit, and that we cannot continue along such a path, that the end was near if we did. We would lose our myths and we would lose our souls. Today, the damage is pretty obvious with movies that say nothing, music that makes the listener feel nothing, television that only seems to lie to us more than ever, devouring our creativity and our souls...a runaway consumerism that is literally metabolizing nature and a scientific and economic order that continually tells us that there is no meaning to anything, no truth.

Global warming and an impending ecological catastrophe are the realities that these artists and intellectuals warned us all of during the Cold War, and some still are. Pasolini didn't wax-nostalgic for some sentimentalized remote past, but he saw things as getting worse and that an apocalyptic calamity was waiting at the end of it all. In 2007, this doesn't seem so far-fetched, but one should realize that the alarms were already being sounded over 40-years-ago. So little has changed. Into the bloody fray of 1968 politics and culture came Pasolini's "Teorema," or "theorem." There really isn't another film like it in any director's canon, yet he would top it with Salo at the end of his short life. The film begins with what appears to be a newsreel story taking place at the gates of a factory called "Paolo." Is it a strike? Why are all the workers there, milling-about? The journalist (probably Pasolini, off-camera) with the film crew asks them what's going on, and we find that the owner of the factory has given it to the workers, lock-stock-and-barrel. You'll never see a scene like this in any American movie. But most slaves want to remain slaves.

Pasolini goes on by taking a swipe at the Italian Communist Party (PCI), by having a worker dismissing the miracle as "part of a trend." (!) It's the end of the story, and a lesson on how the Left--and most all of modern humanity--had lost contact with the divine and the ability to recognize it in life and within each other. Much to his credit, Pasolini scandalized all. Barth David Schwarz's biography on Pier Paolo Pasolini "Pasolini Requiem" (1992) illuminates the film's premise:

People expected Pasolini to deliver a straightforward if scathing attack on the bourgeoisie and its lack of religion. His apparently simple premise, the "theorem" of the film's title, was that when one family was faced with a power that constituted real liberation (by necessity sexual) and their values were revealed as bankrupt, its members would spin into "madness."
(Schwarz, pg. 519. Pantheon, 1992)

And so, the story "begins" where it began, the home of the industrialist bourgeois--a Milanese "borghesa"--and his family, in this antiseptic villa that seems almost empty (of belief? of values?). As in life, the bourgeois characters reside in their own social space, alone, living in virtual solitude without meaning. There is the daughter, the wife, the son, and the devout peasant maid who dream of some kind of a release from their life, some transcendence. Be careful what you wish for.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, a kind of salvation announces its coming. A herald in the form of young Italian boy announces his arrival in a note to the maid. In time, the "stranger" (played by a 28-year-old Terence Stamp) appears, and quite abruptly without any explanation. Pasolini had this to say about the stranger in his film:

Originally, I had intended this visitor to be a fertility god, the typical god of preindustrial religion, the sun-god, the Biblical-god, God the Father. Naturally, when confronted with things as they were, I had to abandon my original idea and so I made Terence Stamp into a generically ultraterrestrial and metaphysical apparition: he could be the Devil, or a mixture of God and the Devil. The important thing is that he is something authentic and unstoppable. (ibid, pg. 521)

Inautheticity withers in the presence of truth. Like all the great tragedies of Greece and Rome, the family passively accepts his presence as a symbol of their fate. The stranger rarely speaks, but he brings every family member love and a direct contact with the divine through sex. He fills the void in their lives of isolation and emptiness. Again: be careful what you wish for, you might get it.

The maid (Laura Betti) is first: he rescues her from a suicide-attempt, and makes tender love to her. Shortly afterward, she leaves the villa and the bourgeois reality itself to return to her village. She begins a fast of contrition and eventually seems headed towards some kind of beatification or sainthood, even levitating at one point towards the latter-half of the film. Her fate is the best one, although that of the son points to the interior life of artists and the authentic everywhere, and he is the next to be seduced by the stranger. Then comes the daughter Odette (played by Godard's wife at the time), who appears in some respects to be the most sexually-fulfilled. The mother and father, finally, end the seduction. For a time, they all seem to have lost that feeling of "loneliness" and incompleteness that comes with modern life...and then the stranger leaves, just as abruptly as he came, a hallmark of the divine. With his absence comes the fall, and a reminder that the void never left, a stunning metaphor for the limits of sexual-release and escapism. No, the void in life never leaves, and is made all-the-more lonely after coitus.

The once sexually repressed mother (the sultry Silvana Mangano) becomes a nymphomaniac, and begins to seduce young men in the nearby city, repeatedly trying to recreate her experience with the stranger, but to no avail. The son becomes totally immersed in creativity and contemplation, showing the dissatisfaction and longings of the artist that can never truly be achieved. Like Plato's "The Allegory of the Cave," he can never touch the true forms (the stranger) ever again. His fate is preferable to the rest of the family since he appears to at least have an outlet for his obsession. The daughter Odette lapses into a comatose state that seems permanent. After an illness that's healed by the stranger, the father becomes a sexual deviant who exposes himself at a train station by film's end. Throughout the movie, we see images of a desolate, gray landscape shot at Mt. Etna. It's meant to reflect the inner-loneliness of the characters and ourselves. This dead landscape is the modern worl, the empty space in all of our lives, and what's waiting at the end of this social order. By the end of the film the father is seen running naked through this volcanic wasteland, finally letting-out an almost inhuman scream of existential despair. From this, you can tell that Pasolini actually felt sorry for most of the bourgeoisie, something that I don't share with him.

Teorema is available through Koch/Lorber video on DVD, and is perhaps one of the greatest films of the entire 1960s. It won a special award from the International Catholic Film Office at the Venice film festival that year, but elements within the Vatican had it withdrawn. The students in the Paris, Rome, and Berlin of 1968 adored the movie, yet Pasolini tended to heap scorn on many of them, calling them "bourgeois," and that the New Left's fight with the establishment in France and Italy was a "battle between the haves and the haves...an internecine struggle." Once again, he was correct. One can see and hear Salo (1975) coming in this film, a work that probably got Pasolin killed before his time in a field at Ostia, a place where human sacrifices were once held. Salo is a dark chocolate, while Teorema is a truffle, the appetizer before the meal.

Revised, 11.27.2009

Boyfuckers Inc: the Mark Foley Story (MOLESTATION NATION)

"The GOP really stands for Group Of Perverts. Investigate Hastert and Boehnner while you're at it. They knew for at least 10 months. And yes, the Christian Right has no problem with this kind of behavior. Groping children and exploiting them is right up their alley."
--An anonymous poster at www.rawstory.com

"A world of secret hungers
are hurting the men
who make your laws.
Every desire is hidden-away..."
--From 'Brown Shoes Don't Make-it' (1967), by
Frank Zappa & the Mothers of Invention

Washington D.C.--In case you think this post is insensitive, think again. It's from a victim of child molestation. This perp from Florida needs to be put under house-arrest for the rest of his life.

More galling the whole affair is the fact that the GOP's leadership KNEW FOR YEARS that this degenerate was guilty of this. This is a criminal act, or at least was before the year 2000. Apparently, it isn't any longer if you're a Republican, a Bishop, or priest, or just powerful and connected.

I've done social work with children who have had their parents put-out their cigarettes on their bodies, beaten them, everything you can imagine and worse. The problem of abuse is far more widespread than most Americans know (or do they know?) or would care to admit. It's a "conspiracy-of-silence," our dirty secret as a nation.

The e-mails/IMs released yesterday by ABC were transmitted by Foley in 2003. It is likely the teenager alerted the press to this, good show.

The Washington Post really hits the GOP hard with the facts in today's article, it's stunning, but it appears ABC tipped-the-balance by actually doing their job. Once again, like Bob Ney, this scum says he's "failed his family." Well, no shit.

House Majority Leader John Boehner has admitted knowing since this Spring about Foley's sexcapades, a criminal act of suppression for not reporting it immediately, and a felony. The House Speaker, Dennis Hastert, is playing cagey about whether he knew of it or not.

At the Capitol Hill signing ceremony for the commissions bill, a GOP campaign priority, reporters asked Hastert only about Foley. "He's done the right thing," Hastert replied. "I've asked John Shimkus [R-Ill.], who is head of the Page Board, to look into this issue regarding Congressman Foley. We want to make sure that all of our pages are safe and our page system is safe. None of us are happy about it [my emphasis]." (Washpo, 09/30/2006)

There's an obvious problem with the last sentence: for as long as ten-months, page boys were unprotected by this veil-of-secrecy, done for political gain. Of course they "aren't happy" about it, but they don't really care about the victim--or the ones we might not know about. Ironically, it was a journalist who told members of the congressional GOP about what was happening between Foley and staffers.

We are a sick culture. With this example of Foley, our own social statistics on sexual molestation (the ones we know of), Abu-Ghraib, the torture sessions in Afghanistan and the CIA's secret prisons dotting-the-globe, we come-off as one big child molestation machine.

This is because we are. Small-wonder that people in other nations hate and fear us. They should, we are a shameful people, we are moral-cowards. Foley should be put in general population of a State Prison, where inmates will pour their urine on him every time he walks the cell-block. If there is there is a line--even for murderers--it is this: you don't hurt a child, and they will kill this child molester. If he somehow miraculously survives his time in prison, he should be under house arrest for the rest of his life, with no legal rights or protection.

Now we know what the GOP is willing-to-do to win in November, besides rigging the polls. Foley was also the co-chair of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children. He was also Tom Delay's right-hand (job) man. Apparently, the GOP has a sense-of-humor after-all, a sick one. He voted just like his other peers in the GOP: against working-class people, then felt he was above-the-law and molest our children too. The GOP is the part of child-abuse, the disease-made-flesh. The horror-of-it-all...

The email-exchange (molestation):
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/BrianRoss/story?id=2509586&page=1

Boyfucker-Central:
http://www.nrcc.org/

For Republicans, Conservative Democrats, Bishops & priests:
www.nambla.org

Tim Mahoney's Take on Marky:
http://www.timmahoneyforflorida.com/e3/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=19&Itemid=46