[F]eeling a little dopesick is part of the point of doing heroin… [T]o some degree, pain, shame, and degradation are part of the appeal. These are the feelings – not the high, not the euphoria – that actually crack a user loose from the ‘smothering chokehold of love and normalcy.’

The last phrase is Anthony Bourdain’s complaint about his childhood.

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Recall psychoanalyst Adam Phillips:

These are parts of ourselves – that don’t want to live, that hate our children, that want ourselves to fail.  [T]here is something strange about humans: they are recalcitrant to what is supposed to be their project.

We’ve followed many of them on this blog over the years, wrenching accounts of young innocents who adored college football and watched it obsessively until, you know, violence, concussions, asshole players and coaches…

I was watching when the Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa’s fingers twisted up during what looked like a seizure after his head slammed on the turf. But at least Tua had $30 million in the bank. He wasn’t a teenager, too young to understand the risks, counting on the adults to protect him.

… [I] can’t watch college football at all anymore…

Then a whole bunch of stuff about how mentally challenged coach/player-senators and senator-candidates mean all of America’s becoming college football by a different name.

Tommy Tuberville coached in the Cotton Bowl in 2007. He’ll be in the U.S. Senate until at least 2026. He is America’s future.

Maybe a tad overstated, but it’s the final three sentences of the piece and dude wants to end with a bang.

Anyway, people like UD have been saying the same thing about college ball for twenty years – accompanied by mucho scoffing/derision – but it don’t make no nevermind. I don’t actually think Tom of the Tuberville is our national future; but, like his exemplar Trump, he’s certainly able to kick up a lot of shit.

We’re way out there now.

Liberal Jews like me, who chronicle the appalling ways of the ultra-orthodox, will have plenty to do.

I have predicted that significant numbers of u-o based in the US — and increasingly harassed by our democratic government — will move to Israel. And hey: Israel’s a paradise for them now. Endemic lawbreakers here, they will be among friends there:

Israeli Jewish voters elected a slate of right-wingers—and convicts at that, or at least people in deep legal jeopardy. Netanyahu is on trial for three different serious counts; Aryeh Deri, the leader of Shas, the ultra-Orthodox Sephardic Party supported by Jews from North Africa and Arab countries, resigned from the previous Knesset with a plea deal for tax evasion; and Ben-Gvir himself has been convicted of inciting racism and supporting a terrorist organization, Kahane Chai.

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“The ultra-Orthodox mutation is a transition from the exiled way of life of the minority that has lived its own life, maintained its way of life and doesn’t provoke foreign rulers, to the new way of life of the minority that lives at the expense of others, an economic parasite, a draft dodger, absolves itself of civilian responsibility and has no real respect for the democratic regime and its principles,” said [Asa] Kasher, who is a professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University and a recipient of the Israel Prize.

The nationalist mutation is a transition from the religious way of life where there is adherence to the principles of justice and fairness, honesty and compassion; [a life] that reveres God but with humane conduct, to an unruly, wicked way of life that [primarily] sanctifies the land and controls its inhabitants with violence, using methods that have no justice, no compassion, no morals and, has more than anything else, a idol-like worship of the land, the nation and its corrupt leadership.

I remain a person of Jewish origin. I will always be so. My origin and my identity are the healthy Judaism that preceded these morbid, malignant, rude and repulsive mutations…“

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[T]his is the beginning of the end of the age of liberal secular Zionism. We can send Herzl’s remains to Vienna and Ben Gurion’s to Plonsk.

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[Yitzhak] Rabin’s assassination … killed the Israel that Mr. Rabin was imagined to represent. The Israel that many Americans — and especially American Jews — fondly remember for its irreverent secularism and vaguely social-democratic ethos no longer exists. It was always more myth than reality, but the facts that enabled the myth are gone: A conservative interpretation of Judaism increasingly dominates the public sphere. The last left-wing parties are headed to the grave. 

We were taught that the “awrah” (private area) for a woman is her entire body except for her hands and her face… We were taught that the Islamic hijab is an order from God, and not a choice… Most Muslims … tend to see the veiled woman as “pure” and therefore more deserving of respect, while an unveiled woman is seen as a “fitnah” (corruption)…

In recent years, the West has seen movements normalizing the headscarf, which I am not entirely opposed to. I do not believe that veiled women should be attacked or face discrimination in the workplace. However, considering its history as well as the way it is used in Islamic theocracies, I do not think the hijab could be feminist nor be truly “empowering.”  

While Western feminists may support Muslim women’s right to wear the headscarf, they should remember that there are those of us who seek the liberty to remove it — both in theocratic states and in Western nations. Many of us may not be controlled by a mullah but by our families and communities.

Ol’ UD will probably see it (on YouTube, months from now), but as she scans its scads of reviews, she’s reminded of the uses of authentic criticism.

Most of the responses have been emptily enthusiastic: godlike acting, provocative ideas, serious art about serious art … Only two reviews have both stirred her and given her a sense of something wrong with the film.

She found Richard Brody’s reaction, on first read, annoying; he presented himself as petulant and peeved throughout, and UD disliked this uncontrolled hostility. In itself it seemed at odds with the sort of ‘medium cool’ tone/content she’s come to expect from sophisticated art criticism — as in, by all means be enraged/contemptuous, but serve the thing cold.

And, coming from the New Yorker, the essay seemed a predictable attack from a culturally liberal position on a conservative film that Brody perceives, above all, as a manipulative, propagandistic, attack on identity politics. (The film amounts to little more than “relentlessly conservative button-pushing.”)

 It derisively portrays a young American conducting student named Max (Zethphan Smith-Gneist), who identifies “as a bipoc pangender person,” and who says that he can’t take Bach seriously because he was a misogynist. 

Yet isn’t anyone – much less a musician – who tells a roomful of people he’s Bach’s moral/artistic superior because he thinks maybe Bach was a big fat dead white fart (he’s not sure) instead of the way-woke person he himself is — isn’t he all too richly deserving of derision? The speaker is a very young student, so maybe the kinder route would have been patient correction or something; but, as described, one imagines oneself cheering Cate Blanchett as she unloads on the student.

Indeed the young actor who portrays the student seems to get it:

… Max really, really understands what Tár is saying. Max really understands Tár, but there’s just these principles and beliefs and things that Max just built up around them as part of their identity, and she just can’t accept it. At some point, it just breaks. It just becomes too much. [The student calls her a fucking bitch and flounces out.]

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The scene, then, isn’t so much derision as an actually rather paradigmatic educational moment, when a person disablingly committed to a narrow position begins to perceive a broader world. Think here of a scene from Tony Judt’s memoir, in which he recalls a professor who

broke through my well-armored adolescent Marxism and first introduced me to the challenges of intellectual history. He managed this by the simple device of listening very intently to everything I said, taking it with extraordinary seriousness on its own terms, and then picking it gently and firmly apart in a way that I could both accept and respect. That is teaching.

Judt’s professor indeed took the kind and patient route; but the same problem of rigid overconfidence, and the effort to unsettle it, is there in both scenarios.

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Anyway, I eased up on Brody a bit when I read this adorable review, which replaces Brody’s imperious irritability with humor and humility, but which lands more or less in the same place as the New Yorker critic:

[There’s] something inherently perplexing about the [Bach] scene; the feeling that Tár is meant to be a send-up of a world that doesn’t exist. Or of a milieu that’s already so minuscule and marginal that parody feels unnecessary. Are there really so many pansexual BIPOC aspiring composers out there being menaced by ruthless lesbian EGOT winners? What do we get out of imagining it? It’s a hat on a hat.

Hat on a hat. New one on me. Means taking an intrinsically okay point and overdoing until you kill it. Both critics agree, it seems, that the film looks to dramatize an inherently legitimate cultural problem: the flattening/distorting/cheapening effects of replacing self-transcended analysis/social engagement/aesthetic response with petty defensive egotism. (UD‘s favorite take on this is from the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips: When people say, “I’m the kind of person who,” my heart always sinks.) Both also agree that scenes like this one implausibly stack the deck. Both critics, above all, agree that this film isn’t real, in the sense that it lacks plausibility; and – Brody goes on to argue – it therefore devolves into a propaganda vehicle.

UD wonders, though, if the real subject of this film is the auteur… rather than the, uh, conducteur. Doesn’t Lydia Tár’s absolute, twisted power to do whatever the hell she wants throughout the film (until her comeuppance) most interestingly stand for the director’s absolute power to successfully propagandize a wide audience through his brilliant amoral artistic freedom? Tár doesn’t get away with it, but apparently Todd Field does.

Straightforward, clarifying words, as ISIS terrorist and all ’round sweetie Allison Fluke-Ekren awaits sentencing.

UD ain’t sure why garden-variety mentally challenged racist anti-semites like Ye, who will never do anything, get all the attention, while an existentially imperiling American like F-E gets quietly carted off to jail without anyone paying her the sort of attention she deserves if we’re going to protect ourselves from our bloodiest.

Kanye is safely all over the place (Christian/ Midsommarian/ Satanistian/ Nurembergian… Next up: Quilting Bees), while F-E has displayed, over decades, remarkable ideological stability, discipline, and resilience; she’s a real, highly trained, soldier, and she wants to kill all of us. She has killed quite a few of us, and UD thinks a long jailhouse interview, conducted by someone like Stephen Biddle, would be a service.

… and she will be sure to bring rain boots.

‘We have been obliged to waste our time publicly refuting the theory that vaccines contain nanobots…’

… frequent flyer miles.

Brian Nelson reported in the bankruptcy filing that he grossed $4,510 in income in 2019, while his wife had no income.

They had $8,803 in assets, including eight guns worth $1,850 in the home: five pistols valued at $1,600; a .22-caliber rifle worth $100, and two shotguns worth $150.

You wouldn’t want to sell that chunk of your assets to make your situation a bit less desperate. Better to hold onto it in case you need to kill your wife and six kids.

Might want to use more than one gun before burning the place down and killing yourself?

I must have startled it, because suddenly just overhead the huge dark bird appeared!

Just overhead — a wide, wide wingspan and a starry sky…

Fall.

Picked up this morning, on a glorious Garrett Park walk through sunlight, wind, and whirling leaves. I was on my way to Ruth Roth’s, a neighbor and friend. 93 years old, Ruth is writing a life wisdom book, and I’m helping her. I deliver her mail from the GP post office, and, since she doesn’t use computers, also drop off longhand communications about her text.

Don’t know if this image conveys that this leaf is enormous. Size of a dinner plate.

And – who knew – “eco-car with bamboo” appeared on a number of freight containers as an endless train banged by on my walk. I looked it up: Turns out bamboo flooring is the latest thing, replacing less environmentally friendly tropical hardwood plywood.

Best headline so far in the One Abortion Two Abortions Three Abortions Four / Five Abortions Six Abortions Seven Abortions More scandal.

You learn something new every day. Who knew that serious drug addiction can constipate you to the point where your bowel can explode?

And wow the miracles of modern medicine. You’d think it’d be absolutely impossible to come back from such an event – and most don’t – but the actor Matthew Perry did.

And WOW the power of addiction. Perfectly willing to stand around constipated for ten+ days if the drugs keep flowing.