Porn industry wants a bailout

WWW--You gotta be kidding me. OK, I assume as everyone else does, that pornographers tend to be moral imbeciles with no sense of how corrupt and disgusting they really are, granted. But this is something: Larry Flynt and "Girls Gone Wild" owner Joe Francis want part of the bailout money. Will they get it? Get real.

I'd like to thank Larry Flynt for doing virtually nothing in assisting the late Deborah Jeane Palfrey. He didn't need to prove to me or anyone else that he's a greedy little creep who exploits women for their bodies, and in every way he can get away with. That he's scum is a given.

Francis is a little turd with tiny dick and no brains. Word has it that Larry once fucked a chicken--at least according to Al Goldstein, yet another pornographer, although he hit-the-skids ages ago around 2002. Compared to Larry Flynt, Al's a fucking aristocrat, a gentleman. At least he read Plato's "The Allegory of the Cave," and even understood it! Flynt? Francis? Forget it.

In the words of Al: "Eat a leper, fuck you," Larry Flynt.

"Porn industry seeks federal bailout," CNN, 01.07.2009:

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/01/07/porn-industry-seeks-federal-bailout/

Whore-monger Republican Senator David Vitter gets some future employers to pick-up the tab on his DC Madam legal expeses

Washington D.C.--Is it surprising? Vitter's legal defense fund released their report around the same time that the Tarpon Springs PD released their own that confirmed the obvious: Deborah Jeane Palfrey killed herself, she committed suicide by hanging.

Scholars say that Halloween was viewed by the ancient Celts as a time when people could commune with spirits and the dead, a time of divination and magic. There's something sadly poetic and disturbing about the parallel release of these two reports. What would Senator Vitter have said to the dead Jeane Palfrey had he the chance? Perhaps a visit to her graveside to apologize would be in order. Would he even want to? Doubtful, but who cares what he wants?

Vitter's behavior begs-the-question of what kind of hopelessly-flawed deity created this rock we live on, and the rest of the universe. Surely, it wasn't God, he's supposed to be perfect. I don't think people like Vitter or these donors really believe there is a "God"--if they really did, they wouldn't behave as they do. They feel that they are God. They aren't.

No, it must have been an emanation, an effluvium of deity that created our prison called earth, an excretion, something evil and degenerate. Or, there's no God at all, life on earth is just an accident from the big bang, and it's an existential universe where we're on our own. Does it really matter either way?

These "donors" ("graft-peddlers" sound more accurate) bent the rules to the breaking-point--with 27 donors, a curious percentage (seven-in-all) of them had the last name of "Chouest," all addressed to the same P.O. Box in Galliano, Louisiana. But why not? We can assume that at least one of the donors in the entire list was paying the bill at some juncture so that David Vitter could work out his problems with "getcha little somethin' that you can't get at home."

What's so pathetic about Vitter and the donors is that we all know this is only about money and that they'd give him this kind of aid and assistance if he was guilty of murder. Capitalism? Hardly. It's the anarchy of power, the belief in nothing...except more power and the maintaining of it. That puts its origins squarely in the natural world, a part of our animal-side. It doesn't matter, it really is as "natural" as a flower or a tree. Yet the hypocrisy is glaring here, and a woman is dead.

But at least Davey got laid, proved he was a "real man," a mensch, but really came-off as a total schmuck and a loser to anyone with a clue and a pulse. Does it matter whether he was a Senator at the time? No, because he misled the people of Louisiana as to what kind of person he was to get elected. He lied, and lied, and lied, and lied, and he's still lying and will continue to lie. What was it all about? The power that a woman can have over a powerful man in the kind of arrangement Palfrey and Vitter were in.

It most certainly was a witch-hunt, but rest assured that he's never going to be a presidential candidate and that his political career has been permanently damaged from his problem controlling his sex drive. In all, these corrupt Louisiana businesspeople and political figures raised $200,010.00 for a corrupt, whore-mongering politician. A wolf knows a wolf, and a whore knows a whore (and a pimp).

Forget about what I wrote about "hypocrisy," there's none to be had here.

But I have to thank Senator Vitter, the donors, and the entire GOP--it's people like you--at least--who remind me that I'll never run out of assholes to kick around. Thank you. With the job they and many other rich clowns have done on the economy, I'll hardly be the only one doing the kicking, and there isn't going to be anywhere left to run. And c'mon Louisiana, I know you have the self-respect to rid yourselves of this turkey, so quit waiting for someone else to do it, grow a pair. You too Wendy. I don't have to tell Vitter's daughters to dog him about all of this, that's always going to be underneath the surface anyway for the rest of his worthless life.

Was it all worth it, defending Palfrey? Yes. I rest well at night knowing that I helped cost Vitter and several rich turds a lot of money during an economic crisis, and that we tried to take down corrupt representatives like Vitter who protected what can only be the most criminal presidential administration in American history (just wait). Gloating? No. It was the right thing to do, pointing-out Vitter's unethical behaviors along with the rest of the internet. These dopes are your representatives, your mirror-image, your shadow on the walls of the cave.

Surprised the GOP was routed in the last two elections? You shouldn't be, they earned it and couldn't steal an election during a landslide. God knows they tried, and they will again. Vitter's time is coming, this mark on his life is his doing, and it's never going away. Eventually, even the GOP will discard him when he's no longer useful. That could be sooner rather than later.

"Vitter officially closes 'Madam' legal fund; see complete list of donors," The New Star, 10.31.2008: http://www.thenewsstar.com/article/20081031/NEWS01/810310335

Palin quotes Ronald Reagan during the VP debates

WWW--That's great, and it was from a Chamber of Commerce-backed LP that Ronnie made during the wonderful 1950s when white Americans were "free" from much social-interaction with those frightening black people.

It was Ronald Reagan who said that freedom is always just one generation away from extinction. We don’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream; we have to fight for it and protect it, and then hand it to them so that they shall do the same, or we’re going to find ourselves spending our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children about a time in America, back in the day, when men and women were free.

That's great to Alaska Sarah, a former beauty queen and now GOP cheerleader and little woman poised to take the throne in case the daddy-figure croaks in office (good chance there). The Apocalypse is nigh if McCain wins, so drink-up (I don't endorse the use of drugs, but do what you have to do).

She wouldn't lie, would she? She wouldn't be part of trying to take our freedoms away, would she? Get real. The real would be tyrants are inarticulate. She wins that one hands-down, but does she admire Wagner? She wouldn't even know who he was or that he inspired Hitler. Does she know of the myth of Faust? Doubtful. Has she ever read Herman Melville and understood his message? Also doubtful. Can she have any comprehension of her obvious vacuuousness? No. Does she even know what "detente" or "mutually assured destruction" means? Nope. Even Reagan did, that's how far we've fallen in the age of the little man (and woman).

Perhaps we're headed towards that moment where all will be one, as in the Hermetic mythology (and countless others) where the higher and lower orders join to become one, immobile, unmovable, and unchanging. Sound horrible? It's the end-point of most spirituality and religions, just not my own. Reagan was that grandfatherly old Shibboleth pushed on us by the business and finance community who reassured us as he took our rights, our jobs, and anything else he and his backers could get their hands on, so what does that make Palin? The smothering Mother of Death, of course, the shadow of the good, nurturing mother. Why? Why does there have to be a reason? Probably because it would get her off.

Reasonable people know there would be no hope of constructive change under her stewardship of government and that things would only worsen, identity politics aside. Never underestimate human perversity, we crave disaster, we want catastrophe to fall upon us. It simply is. Palin has a right to invoke "the great communicator," however. He initiated this mess that we're all in right now and many of the same criminals in the Bush II administration served under him.

Neoconservatism's daddy Grover Norquist served under Reagan, as did Donald Rumsfeld and several top staffers who have also served under George W. Bush. This was never a mistake or a coincidence, and Congress allowed these many appointments to pass, they authorized them. Palin is just the symptom of a much larger contagion rooted in the human condition. Reading this, one might make the mistake that I believe "all is lost." Hardly. This is a new beginning where an old order is falling-away.

Creatures like Palin tend to come out during such times, and must be taken down any way possible, but they also possess human perversity. They are mortal, they are as weak as any of us, merely being propped-up temporarily by social forces, only to return to the dust from whence we all came. Like the rest of us, these "great men" (and women) are as insignificant as a speck in the limitless reaches of the abyss. Curiously, they yearn to return to the primordial ooze that they deny we originate from, a paradox. Life is like that sometimes, yet I have a very real hope and excitement at the possibilities in all of this.

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