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Showing posts from July 29, 2018

Elizabeth Nietzsche: the original Trumpite!

Weirdly enough, amidst all the reporting about the conspiracy theories of Trumpites and their ferocity against the “fake news”, nobody is making the obvious connection with Nietzsche’s sister. So I guess it falls to yours truly – again! – to take up the task. It all goes back to a visit paid by Harry Graf Kessler to Nietzsche’s sister in 1921. Cut. Here we need to paste in a description of Harry Graf Kessler. This guy was the Zelig of his time. He knew everyone, from Hindenberg to Georg Grosz, and he was everywhere. He was rich. He financed avant garde art, hobnobbed with communists, and got himself the fuck away from Germany once Hitler took over. He put it all down in his diaries, which are fascinating even if you don’t know all the characters. If you want to know what the Cabaret era was like – the giant Kit Kat club of European artists, scroungers, heirs and heiresses, communist journalists, pacifists, sex reformists, nudists, psychoanalysts, surrealists, etc. – read In the

Rico capitalism- flashback to the Bush-Obama era

The recent death, or euthanasia, of the New York Daily News, with the attendant plutocratic criminal behind it, reminds me of this piece I wrote back in 2009. Enjoy! RICO CAPITALISM IN THE AGE OF BUSH-OBAMA December 22, 2009 at 6:30 PM “Now he's got Paulie as a partner. Any problems, he goes to Paulie. Trouble with a bill, to Paulie. Trouble with cops, deliveries, Tommy... ...he calls Paulie. But now he has to pay Paulie... ...every week no matter what. "Business bad? Fuck you, pay me. Had a fire? Fuck you, pay me." "The place got hit by lightning? Fuck you, pay me." Also, Paulie could do anything. Like run up bills on the joint's credit. And why not? Nobody will pay for it anyway. Take deliveries at the front door and sell it out the back at a discount. Take a 200 dollar case of booze and sell it for one hundred dollars. It doesn't matter. It's all profit.” – Goodfellas The merger of good business practice and racketeering in the 0

on jokes

When I was in my twenties, I often found myself in the midst of a joketelling orgy – that is, I found myself among joke tellers. I’d tell some jokes myself, but I did not have the rhythm of the great joke teller. I was equipped with one advantage, however: I was a great laugher. I could laugh until, literally, I ran out of breath. Not only that, but I laughed not only at the punch line – for the punch line, for the great joke teller, is only the final touch on the whole artistic edifice, the last gargoyle, so to speak, on the cathedral of shit – but I would laugh even more at the absurdities that the joke piled up, especially if it was an obscene joke. Obscenity requires a concatenation of circumstances that remove us more and more from social reality, and each step is funnier. In a sense, I was a strange audience for a joker, who is used to the laugh coming last. But the talented joker would realize that this was a set with a heavy infusion of improv and would get into using t