Twas on the Crest of Beverly

The battle did commence

Among elite Air B&Bs

Each sparing no expense.

The glistening car, late model!

The air perfumed, and gated!

The party. Scattered bottles.

Late model guns, gold-plated.

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The kick of upscale killing

On cool Pacific nights

Shall ne’er grow old – too thrilling

To aim Sig Sauer sights.

To watch the brain and vomit

Start pooling ’round your head

While a fine and rare green comet

Goes streaking overhead.

Longtime readers know some of UD’s musical enthusiasms: Among singers, Julia Lezhneva; among pianists, Yuja Wang. UD tried to score a ticket for Wang’s upcoming Rachmaninoff blowout but failed.

I love the observation Wang makes in my headline: When a genius is fully inside of a musical piece, it becomes hers.

In my own primitive playing and singing of Purcell’s song Music for A While, I’ve felt something (very distantly) like this: The notes and the emotions and the ideas sometimes flow out of you so spontaneously and deeply — in such a known way — when you’ve played (and in my case sung) a piece so many times, that the fact of a person named Sergei or Henry actually empirically sweating the thing out vanishes completely, and it’s you and this music that your throat and fingers and soul squeeze out. And shouldn’t that be what the geniuses who wrote the stuff want? They didn’t just generate a ditty; they moved a collection of notes and silences into some generous super-artistic realm of universal expressivity.

Think of what James Axton, the protagonist of Don DeLillo’s novel The Names, says about the Parthenon:

 I hadn’t expected a human feeling to emerge from the stones but this is what I found, deeper than the art and mathematics embedded in the structure, the optical exactitudes. I found a cry for pity. This is what remains to the mauled stones in their blue surround, this open cry, this voice which is our own.

In great art (architecture) there is some value-added thing, some permanent, accessible … cry for pity, say; and if you enter and listen hard and vulnerably enough, you can not only hear it. You can reproduce it. You can even feel as if you are generating it anew.

… she’s illiterate.

Helluva distinction for Chapman: How many DEANS are disbarred?

But then – how many deans are credibly accused of treason?

Here’s a primer on it. The Newport News six year old who almost killed his elementary school teacher last week failed in his mission simply because he had to use some random pistol his parents had lying around the house for him. It’s true that his teacher’s mental health has been permanently shattered; plus since surgeons had to leave the slug in her, the student has the satisfaction of having left a permanent souvenir inside his teacher’s body. But killing her – and everyone else in the room, like the better-equipped boys at Columbine – eluded him because of his primitive weaponry. The JR-15 is the solution to all of these problems.

But the deep state can’t keep its hands off of the gun. Big news conference today where demo-rats called the gun disgusting and sick and grotesque and unconscionable blahblah. Blahblahblah.

DOG SHOOTS AND KILLS HIS OWNER

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UD thanks David.

When they tell you YOU get knocked up and make Japanese babies you stupid motherfuckers, you shouldn’t be offended because you’re the ones who make life hell for Japanese women and now you want to make it more hellacious by burdening them with children in a nauseatingly patriarchal state.

I mean, take a look at Hungary, boys! Same deal. How’s Hungary doing as it frantically tries to get its dick up the national vaginal canal?

Short answer: Not well.

They leave you shaken; the graphic terror on the faces of the tour guides, and even more so on the faces of ordinary citizens who somehow fail to get out of the way of the tourists and are forced to interact with them… Reading accounts of daily life in Richneck Elementary School under Superintendent George Parker, I thought of North Korea.

Read today’s accounts of terrified weeping children, frightened teachers desperately texting family members, staff people trying to get out of the way of a psychotic armed child, and see if you don’t think of some surrealistically horrifying police state full of traumatized, trampled, people.

His parents belong in jail, and let’s hope that’s where they’ll go, in the same cell with these creeps.

But as for lawsuits!!!

[S]chool leaders were warned three times that the boy might have a gun, … including by a student who tearfully recounted seeing the gun at recess.

[A] series of escalating warnings [occurred] on Jan. 6, when the police say a 6-year-old boy took his mother’s gun from home, brought it to Richneck Elementary School and fired at his teacher…

By about 12:30 p.m. on the day of the shooting, a teacher had searched the boy’s backpack, believing that he might have a gun … No gun was found, but the teacher reported to the school administration that she believed the boy had put the gun in his pocket before going outside for recess. 

Instead of searching the boy, …an administrator dismissed the threat, saying that the 6-year-old “has little pockets.”

Around 1 p.m. — an hour before the shooting — another teacher reported that a student had come to the teacher crying, saying that the boy had shown him the gun at recess and threatened to shoot the student if he told anyone…

A third teacher also asked for permission to search the boy, … but was told to wait, because the school day was almost over.

Hell, I’m up for a beer in half an hour, give it a break!

Oh, so now just because there’s been a third school shooting, you’re gonna throw him out?

On Tuesday, the Newport News School Board posted an agenda for a special meeting on Wednesday, saying it will vote on a separation agreement and severance package for Superintendent George Parker III. 

It’s not his fault the third shooter was six years old! That sort of thing gets global attention. The last two were teenagers, and that’s so routine it never makes much of a mark. If he’d been able to isolate the bloodbath to junior high and high school all would have been well. Give the guy a break and hope the killing goes back where it belongs – to the upper grades, among more mature and competent marksmen.

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Meanwhile, if they do fire the dude, he’ll get an enormous severance for keeping his trap shut about all the other violent and nonviolent scandals in the school system; plus, there are TONS of public school abattoirs (start with the Baton Rouge public schools!) where Parker’s bloody ways will fit right in. Don’t worry about Parker. Wave of the bloody future.

Hours after a mass shooting at one Baton Rouge bar – many of whose patrons come from LSU – an underage sorority member from LSU gets utterly wasted in another Baton Rouge bar, after which she’s gang raped and then fatally hit by a car. Not making this up. That’s how a 19 year old LSU student died.

Of course LSU has a long history of dead and almost dead frat boys; drunk, raped, and dead sorority girls is a new one on me. But you can see the progression that got us here. LSU’s brainless boozing in illegal bars, its sadistic fraternities, plus… what else is there? Football. Plus absolutely no discernable academics, or institutional ethics (an incredibly impoverished and ill-educated state, Louisiana gives tens of millions to LSU’s football team and almost nothing to LSU qua university). That’s about it. It all takes place in Baton Rouge, currently America’s deadliest city, guns going off absolutely everywhere.

The word for all of this is sleaze, mes petites; and if you really think this is the right college environment for your teenager, go for it.

Zzz

Well, when you’re Chicago, you have the nation’s highest kill-rate to maintain. Shutting down hookah bars, which guarantee several mass shootings a year, is not something you’re going to do lightly. Whatever the silly neighbors say.

… and ain’t that enough?

Hyuk! Guess not.

Well, for sure we’re prayin’ for the teacher he shot… Thoughts and prayers…

But this one’s like why hasn’t a mass shooting already happened forty times in that lounge. I mean, maybe it has, but locals are still pretending to be shocked at the mass shooting at another hookah bar down south.

As you know if you read this blog, there’s nothing more banal of late than mass shootings inside hookah bars in southern cities. And this one happened in Baton Rouge, and man I mean ROUGE like flowing all red in the streets!

Apparently there’s a grassroots movement down there to change the city’s name to SANG ROUGE. Better fit.

 Louisiana’s capital city [has made] it big in the world of crime and murder. Baton Rouge has outdone the rest of the state, which is [itself] 40 percent more violent than the nation as a whole. New Orleans is more popular, so Baton Rouge seized the opportunity to top the violent crime list. Baton Rouge isn’t a very large city, but it manages to attract attention by having 49 murders annually. If you have a death wish, it’s a great destination.

A few details here. Some locals – a few – feel kinda bad about the “lack of effort by the state government to address gun violence,” but baby baby baby that’s cuz they love their guns and they love it when they get a chance to shoot ’em off! Hookah bars concentrate large numbers of incapacitated victims in easily accessible, charismatic, locations, and, you know, take any random Saturday night and conditions are RIPE.

Given that everyone knows shooting’s gonna happen – note that Dior’s advertising stresses the word “safely” — wonder why – why does it… well… keep happening?

Look more closely at what Dior offers: Incredibly cheap booze. A dark chaotic place to whip out your guns and get some real killing off before someone notices. Rooms packed with idjits from LSU, one of America’s most violent and stupid locations.

Bloodbath keeps happening because Bloodbath is the state sport of Louisiana, and everything the state does — from basically zero gun restrictions to the proliferation of hookah bars – promotes the sport.

Shut down the bars? Are you fucking nuts? Death’s a way of life down there. UD‘s had enough of inauthentic local pols getting all ‘senseless… tragic.…’ … I mean, being all negative about it. Millions of Americans adore violence and go out of their way to legalize, mainstream, and personally experience it. Bloody, almost dead, and dead people scattered everywhere is Sang Rouge’s effing calling card, it’s their Graceland, their Machu Picchu, their one reliable tourist destination. Find a violent psycho like Jim Jordan to run the city – someone who revels in blood – and GO TO IT.

Remember White Noise, the most important American novel of the last fifty years:

“Look past the violence. There is a wonderful brimming spirit of innocence and fun.”