cheese it, the cops!

bye bye kevin

 

well, it's true, i have long held that, qua ack-toor, kevin spacey sucks. but yo he sucks indeed. his statement, also coming out as gay, seems almost designed as a devastating self-indictment. the first thing i want to say is that kevin spacey should have been out long ago. i don't believe in outing people, but i think that dividing the public and private self like that is, at this point, itself reprehensible. i can sort of see it if you are a male beauty doing romantic comedies with emma stone or something, but i don't see it affecting spacey's bizarrely over-rated career over the last decade or whatever. 

alright, but his approach of 'i don't remember it; if it happened, i'm sorry,' hints that it could be any one of dozens of boys. and then to explain that 'possibility' by 'actually, i'm gay,' is itself to equate homosexuality with pederasty. also i'm not impressed by drunkenness as an excuse. in that 'why they suck' column, i have to say that i was responding to what i experienced as an underlying vileness, and even if spacey is no kind of sexual predator at all, that statement is really vile. also i asserted that spacey's characters always seem to think they're the smartest person in the room, and other people do too, but that he rarely shows any actual symptoms of intelligence. that statement was almost bizarrely self-destructive, as though he's trying to alienate everybody as he tries also to placate them and make the whole thing go away.

in a bold counter to xi jinping thought, my splicetoday column this week is a tribute to the wonders of splittism.

a little gallery of suiseki, the japanese art form in which unaltered stones represent or encapsulate mountains or landscapes. these are collected in my immediate area in adams county pa. 

 

 

 

splicetoday: the march of euphemism. the key to human liberation is to replace bad words with neutral-sounding words. then those words sound wrong, and we'll need new ones, forever. still, at least we'll all be free. okay, not to go all pointed, but the people who think that word replacement and censorious editing constitute substantive blows for the resistance are, you know, 'idiots, imbeciles, the feeble-minded, and moral defectives.' or to be fair - they are saying with the utmost apparent sincerity and intensity what they and we know very well to be false: that words create reality. obviously, harvey weinstein can learn to talk like a feminist and just keep right on with the abuse. correct?

total depravity

I'm a Quaker, which is sort of an opposite form of Protestant Christianity, but let's just say I've always felt to the pull of a more puritanical approach. Also I've been teaching Jonathan Edwards again. Here's my splicetoday column this week, noting that the doctrine of original sin has a certain plausibility.

 

April may be the cruelest month, but October is a bitch...

 

 

Man. Woman. Nature. History. Art. Birth. Death. Infinity. Three chords and Truth.

https://www.veteranstodaynews.com/2017/10/09/dispatches-from-wolf-country-old-age-should-rage/

 

 

for a week or two there i was a reporter, embedded in the monument wars (piece for citylab). there really is some great public art in philly right now; today might be a good one to check out monument lab before the rain hits.

karen olivier, "the battle is joined," in vernon park

splice, yesterday

it won't surprise you that i, like you, am terribly in need of a comforter-in-chief.