Category Archives: Theater

by | January 28, 2016 · 9:00 PM

Good, Evil and the Inferno

Below, Anonymous (he is actually a friend of mine in disguise) has some interesting comments about Dante’s Inferno, one of the greatest books ever written. There are many translations available, but I recommend the one by John Ciardi, who is Italian himself by the way. Dante himself was a rather nasty man, extremely puritanical almost like a Christian version of the Saudi religious police. He used to stand outside and rail at the neighbors, calling them sinners. They probably were, at least in his book, but who likes a prig. He was also a stern, grim and rather mean-spirited fellow who seemed to regard most of his fellow humans with contempt as he felt they were “fallen.”

But then Shakespeare was a cheapskate, tightwad, penny-pinching, greedy bastard, litigiously fond of suing his neighbors for small amounts of cash. His own wife and children were said to not care for him too much.

But when I told my mother this, she got annoyed and basically said, “So what?” He pointed out that we do not remember Shakespeare because he was basically a bastard in day to day life with his fellow humans. We remember him for his greatest achievement, his plays with not only withstood the test of mine but possibly have not yet been surpassed or possibly even equaled.

You can make a good case that he is the greatest English writer of all time. His artistic achievement was so great that it surely outweighed his antisocial behavior in day to day life, although you might have a hard time convincing those who knew him well and suffered through his insufferable behavior of that.

Dante is similar. As a human, he was a pretty lousy. But so what? He is surely the greatest writer of the Italian language ever, surpassing even Boccaccio, and he is up there with Shakespeare with the greatest writers period of all time. He wrote in the 1300’s, but it could have been yesterday.

PS if you have not read the Inferno, you need to go read that book right now, dammit, unless you are one of those who I discussed in my piece who spends their life running from bad things. In that case, you will not enjoy this nasty little book, which is fascinating for its nine circles of Hell descending from the least sinful on the outskirts of Hell to the worst of all frying away for eternity in the boiling black heart of the first circle of Hell.

In limbo, the ninth circle, those who frittered and wasted away their lives for no reason (like me) are condemned to float in the air endlessly like a spaceman drifting about in zero gravity space. They’re the “floaters.” As the sins get worse and worse, so do the glorious punishments! It is ingenious the nasty punishments he comes up to torture these sinners for all of time. This delightful little book should be read with a wicked little glimmer in one’s eye. Be prepared to let your inner sadist out of his cell to romp around a bit as you read this nasty gem of a book. If you have the tiniest bit of cruelty in your heart, this book is plenty enough to sate your appetite for sadistic pleasure.

Purgatorio, the second book of the great Divine Comedy, is also awesome, unless you hate Catholics for their nasty little innovation, in which case, don’t bother.

Purgatory is for those who were not evil enough to be sent to Hell but nevertheless were pretty darn bad, not good enough to go to Heaven so they have to be sent to the way station between Heaven and Hell, Mount Purgatory, where they “work off their sins” in the most horrible of ways for a very long time with the slight solace that once they get through this 14th Century Auschwitz and work off their sins enough to satisfy God, they can at long last be admitted to Heaven. Purgatorio is not quite as good as the Inferno, but it is nevertheless excellent. I highly recommend it.

I have not read Paradiso. It is said to be the weakest of the three, but even a weak book by Dante is still better than 99% of the dreck floating around out there in Literary Limbo.

PS. He comments on “looking at life in the way that is described in the post. The main thrust of the post was supposed to be my idea that an intelligent Hell would be much superior than an insipid Heaven. I also discussed how most people spend their whole lives running from their pain, their painful history, their possibly painful futures and the painful world that surrounds us all.

While it makes sense to be an optimist, I personally have nothing against thinking about lousy things that have happened to me, are happening to me, or are happening around me because first of all, that’s how life is (Buddhists say “all of life is suffering”) so there is no sense running from 50% of the universe, and also because I have either made my peace with most awful things (especially those in my past) so it doesn’t really bother me or upset me too much to think about them.

I then point out that even lousy experiences, of which life has a ton, can at the very least be seen as a learning experience or an interesting bit of life if you want to step back, detach and be a bit analytical and philosophical about things, which isn’t as Aspie as it sounds. Sure life is painful, but it ought to also be numbing. That’s how you toughen up after all. You get a bit hard. And so what? That’s called “getting it done.”

Anonymous writes:

Inferno is a very interesting book, Dante uses symbols, metaphors, and allusions for pretty much every aspect of Hell. I thought this epic (I believe that’s its classification, since it’s poetic). But, despite this coping mechanism he uses to help liberate himself from depression, I don’t believe he ever got “better”.

On another note, would you call Dante hypocritical? Yes, his Hell did feature political rivals and other assholes that deserved their punishments. But, Dante himself, was not perfect (I am referring to his rumored love affair with Beatrice). Even his Hell is contradictory: his map of Hell is based off of the Heliocentric Theory, yet he sticks with the more conservative view that those who are not Christian stay in Hell (reason for Virgil being there).

So, what I am trying to “get at” is why is it okay to view yourself as good and others as evil. I think it’s okay to view yourself as innocent, but is it okay to view yourself as good…? Good and innocent are often associated with each other, but good is an adjective that describes character, while innocent is an adjective that can also describe an action. So, while a person can be innocent, they may not necessarily be good.

Don’t get me wrong: it is tempting to look at life in the way that’s described in this blog post. But, I keep feeling like there should be a grey, in-between area because I don’t want commit hypocrisy.

Maybe I misunderstood what was typed…but…

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Filed under Literature, Philosophy, Poetry, Theater

by | November 21, 2014 · 11:20 PM

A Lost Shakespeare Play You Never Heard of

Here.

The title is Double Falshood; or, The Distrest Lovers, or Double Falsehood, or The Distressed Lovers in modern English.

The play was written by Lewis Theobald, supposedly based on three copies of what he said was a lost Shakespearean play. He never produced the three copies that he had access to, and their whereabouts are presently unknown. The play appears to be based on The History of Cardenio (often referred to as Cardenio), by Shakespeare and John Fletcher. Cardenio is a famous lost Shakespeare play based on a chapter in Cervantes’ Don Quixote.

There has been much controversy about whether or not Double Falsehood is really based on Cardenio, but the consensus now is that Double Falsehood is based on a play written by Fletcher and an unknown author. A recent essay claimed that that unknown author is Shakespeare.

The Arden Shakespeare Series of books recently added this play to the Shakespeare canon, causing quite a bit of controversy.

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by | November 21, 2014 · 8:10 PM

The Doctor Diagnoses the Bard

Dr. Samuel Johnson weighs in his verdict on Shakespeare’s flaws. Now to be fair I should note that in this same essay, Johnson also praises him to the skies, and I believe he says he is the greatest of all writers. But any criticism of Shakespeare is interesting. There is one point we need to note. How many people have written essays or books extolling the greatness of Shakespeare in one way or another? Can we even count them. The cynic might say that if you write a piece praising Shakespeare, nobody is going to read it as it’s old hat. But criticizing Shakespeare? That’s not something that’s often done! So many some of these critics were just trying to get eye mileage out of novelty.

Anyway, this is a gorgeous piece of writing from England before the American Revolution by one of the finest writers of our time.

I changed some of the archaic English, but I left in most of the British spelling.

Shakespeare with his excellencies has likewise faults, and faults sufficient to obscure and overwhelm any other merit. I shall show them in the proportion in which they appear to me, without envious malignity or superstitious veneration. No question can be more innocently discussed than a dead poet’s pretensions to renown; and little regard is due to that bigotry which sets candour higher than truth.

His first defect is that to which may be imputed most of the evil in books or in men. He sacrifices virtue to convenience, and is so much more careful to please than to instruct, that he seems to write without any moral purpose.

From his writings indeed a system of social duty may be selected, for he that thinks reasonably must think morally; but his precepts and axioms drop casually from him; he makes no just distribution of good or evil, nor is always careful to shew in the virtuous a disapprobation of the wicked; he carries his persons indifferently through right and wrong, and at the close dismisses them without further care, and leaves their examples to operate by chance. This fault the barbarity of his age cannot extenuate; for it is always a writer’s duty to make the world better, and justice is a virtue independent on time or place.

The plots are often so loosely formed, that a very slight
consideration may improve them, and so carelessly pursued, that he seems not always fully to comprehend his own design. He omits opportunities of instructing or delighting which the train of his story seems to force upon him, and apparently rejects those exhibitions which would be more affecting, for the sake of those which are more easy.

It may be observed, that in many of his plays the latter part is evidently neglected. When he found himself near the end of his work, and, in view of his reward, he shortened the labour to snatch the profit. He therefore remits his efforts where he should most vigorously exert them, and his catastrophe is improbably produced or imperfectly represented.

He had no regard to distinction of time or place, but gives to one age or nation, without scruple, the customs, institutions, and opinions of another, at the expense not only of likelihood, but of possibility. These faults  Pope has endeavoured, with more zeal than judgment, to transfer to his imagined interpolators. We need not wonder to find Hector quoting Aristotle, when we see the loves of  Theseus and  Hippolyta combined with the Gothic mythology of fairies.

Shakespeare, indeed, was not the only violator of chronology, for in the same age Sidney, who wanted not the advantages of learning, has, in his Arcadia, confounded the pastoral with the feudal times, the days of innocence, quiet and security, with those of turbulence, violence, and adventure.

In his comic scenes he is seldom very successful, when he engages his characters in reciprocations of smartness and contests of sarcasm; their jests are commonly gross, and their pleasantry licentious; neither his gentlemen nor his ladies have much delicacy, nor are sufficiently distinguished from his clowns by any appearance of refined manners.

Whether he represented the real conversation of his time is not easy to determine; the reign of Elizabeth is commonly supposed to have been a time of stateliness, formality and reserve; yet perhaps the relaxations of that severity were not very elegant. There must, however, have been always some modes of gayety preferable to others, and a writer ought to choose the best.

In tragedy his performance seems constantly to be worse, as his labour is more. The effusions of passion which exigence forces out are for the most part striking and energetic; but whenever he solicits his invention, or strains his faculties, the offspring of his throes is tumor, meanness, tediousness, and obscurity.

In narration he affects a disproportionate pomp of diction, and a wearisome train of circumlocution, and tells the incident imperfectly in many words, which might have been more plainly delivered in few. Narration in dramatic poetry is naturally tedious, as it is unanimated and inactive, and obstructs the progress of the action; it should therefore always be rapid, and enlivened by frequent interruption. Shakespeare found it an encumbrance, and instead of lightening it by brevity, endeavoured to recommend it by dignity and splendour.

His declamations or set speeches are commonly cold and weak, for his power was the power of nature; when he endeavoured, like other tragic writers, to catch opportunities of amplification, and instead of inquiring what the occasion demanded, to show how much his stores of knowledge could supply, he seldom escapes without the pity or resentment of his reader.

It is incident to him to be now and then entangled with an unwieldy sentiment, which he cannot well express, and will not reject; he struggles with it a while, and if it continues stubborn, comprises it in words such as occur, and leaves it to be disentangled and evolved by those who have more leisure to bestow upon it.

Not that always where the language is intricate the thought is subtle, or the image always great where the line is bulky; the equality of words to things is very often neglected, and trivial sentiments and vulgar ideas disappoint the attention, to which they are recommended by sonorous epithets and swelling figures.

But the admirers of this great poet have never less reason to indulge their hopes of supreme excellence, than when he seems fully resolved to sink them in dejection, and mollify them with tender emotions by the fall of greatness, the danger of innocence, or the crosses of love. He is not long soft and pathetic without some idle conceit, or contemptible equivocation. He no sooner begins to move, than he counteracts himself; and terror and pity, as they are rising in the mind, are checked and blasted by sudden frigidity.

A quibble is to Shakespeare, what luminous vapours are to the traveller; he follows it at all adventures; it is sure to lead him out of his way, and sure to engulf him in the mire. It has some malignant power over his mind, and its fascinations are irresistible. Whatever be the dignity or profundity of his disquisition, whether he be enlarging knowledge or exalting affection, whether he be amusing attention with incidents, or enchaining it in suspense, let but a quibble spring up before him, and he leaves his work unfinished.

A quibble is the golden apple for which he will always turn aside from his career, or stoop from his elevation. A quibble, poor and barren as it is, gave him such delight, that he was content to purchase it, by the sacrifice of reason, propriety and truth. A quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it.

It will be thought strange, that, in enumerating the defects of this writer, I have not yet mentioned his neglect of the unities: his violation of those laws which have been instituted and established by the joint authority of poets and critics.

For his other deviations from the art of writing I resign him to critical justice, without making any other demand in his favour, than that which must be indulged to all human excellence: that his virtues be rated with his failings: But, from the censure which this irregularity may bring upon him, I shall, with due reverence to that learning which I must oppose, adventure to try how I can defend him.

His histories, being neither tragedies nor comedies are not subject to any of their laws; nothing more is necessary to all the praise which they expect, than that the changes of action be so prepared as to be understood, that the incidents be various and affecting, and the characters consistent, natural, and distinct. No other unity is intended, and therefore none is to be sought.

In his other works he has well enough preserved the unity of action. He has not, indeed, an intrigue regularly perplexed and regularly unraveled: he does not endeavour to hide his design only to discover it, for this is seldom the order of real events, and Shakespeare is the poet of nature: But his plan has commonly what Aristotle requires, a beginning, a middle, and an end; one event is concatenated with another, and the conclusion follows by easy consequence.

There are perhaps some incidents that might be spared, as in other poets there is much talk that only fills up time upon the stage; but the general system makes gradual advances, and the end of the play is the end of expectation.

– Samuel Johnson, Preface to The Plays of William Shakespeare, 1765.

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Filed under Britain, Europe, Literature, Regional, Theater

by | November 9, 2014 · 6:58 PM

Shakespeare’s Haters

From an appendix to Tolstoy’s A Critical Essay on Shakespeare. I have not read this essay yet, but apparently Tolstoy slams the Bard good and hard. This shocked me because I thought Shakespeare was beloved by all great literary figures all over the world and down through time, as he ought to be. Apparently this is not so at all. The criticism here is not directed at his art or his talent as a writer but apparently more at his role as a thinker and philosopher, in which some find him most wanting.

Another essay appears in the appendix of this volume, Shakespeare’s Attitude towards the Working Classes, by Ernest Crosby, who seems to be some sort of a socialist or leftwinger. This had never occurred to me before, but from the opening lines of his essay, Crosby sets about pounding the life out of Shakespeare for his reactionary, ruling class, near feudal mindset and his utter contempt for the masses, peasants and working classes.

This all makes sense when we learn what a tightwad and miser Shakespeare was that he even shafted his own family in his will, pinched pennies everywhere, filed endless lawsuits against acquaintances trying to recover petty amounts of cash, and perhaps worst or all but exemplary of his feudal mindset, hoarded food during a famine. During famines, food hoarding is considered a near-capital offense. If you are found to be hoarding food, a mob will raid your food, take all of it, beat you up in the process and quite possibly kill you. The law in famines is share or die.

So it seems that as with so many great artists and thinkers, Shakespeare was a nasty little bug of a man, while at the same time, I believe he was one of the greatest writers in English or perhaps any language of all time. A lot of artists were great artists but terrible humans. Sort of goes with the territory, sad to say. It’s well known that Dostoevsky was a miserable fellow, but he was also such a bastard some of his greatest contemporaries refused to attend his funeral.

I find it fascinating the Nicholas Rowe and especially Dr. Johnson pounded the Bard a few new ones.

Lord Byron and William Morris took Shakespeare to town? Wow. Morris makes sense as he was a socialist, but Byron?

And Voltaire, who earlier in life was a Shakespeare fanatic, grew to hate him more and more as he aged and presumably wised up? Unbelievable.

I am sorry to say that I am not familiar with the gist of these Bard slams is all about, but the fact that they exist at all is amazing. Perhaps there is more to Man from Avon than meets the eye, and it’s not all good. I am actually shocked. It’s hard to see a lifelong hero crumble right in front your eyes. Downright painful.

Letter from George Bernard Shaw to Leo Tolstoy (Extracts)

As you know, I have striven hard to open English eyes to the emptiness of Shakespeare’s philosophy, to the superficiality and second-handedness of his morality, to his weakness and incoherence as a thinker, to his snobbery, his vulgar prejudices, his ignorance, his disqualifications of all sorts for the philosophic eminence claimed for him…

The preface to my Three Plays for Puritans contains a section headed Better than Shakespeare? which is, I think, the only utterance of mine on the subject to be found in a book…

There is at present in the press a new preface to an old novel of mine called The Irrational Knot. In that preface I define the first order in Literature as consisting of those works in which the author, instead of accepting the current morality and religion ready-made without any question as to their validity, writes from an original moral standpoint of his own, thereby making his book an original contribution to morals, religion, and sociology, as well as to belles letters.

I place Shakespeare with Dickens, Scott, Dumas père, etc., in the second order, because, though they are enormously entertaining, their morality is ready-made; and I point out that the one play, Hamlet, in which Shakespeare made an attempt to give as a hero one who was dissatisfied with the ready-made morality, is the one which has given the highest impression of his genius, although Hamlet’s revolt is unskillfully and inconclusively suggested and not worked out with any philosophic competence.

May I suggest that you should be careful not to imply that Tolstoy’s great Shakespearean heresy has no other support than mine. The preface of Nicholas Rowe to his edition of Shakespeare, and the various prefaces of Dr. Johnson contain, on Rowe’s part, an apology for him as a writer with obvious and admitted shortcomings (very ridiculously ascribed by Rowe to his working by “a mere light of nature”), and, on Johnson’s, a good deal of downright hard-hitting criticism.

You should also look up the history of the Ireland forgeries, unless, as is very probable, Tolstoy has anticipated you in this.

Among nineteenth-century poets, Byron and William Morris saw clearly that Shakespeare was enormously overrated intellectually.

A French book, which has been translated into English, has appeared within the last ten years, giving Napoleon’s opinions on drama. His insistence on the superiority of Corneille to Shakespeare on the ground of Corneille’s power of grasping a political situation, and of seeing men in their relation to the state, is interesting.

Of course you know about Voltaire’s criticisms, which are the more noteworthy because Voltaire began with an extravagant admiration for Shakespeare, and got more and more bitter against him as he grew older and less disposed to accept artistic merit as a cover for philosophic deficiencies.

Finally, I, for one, shall value Tolstoy’s criticism all the more because it is criticism of a foreigner who can not possibly be enchanted by the mere word-music which makes Shakespeare so irresistible in England. In Tolstoy’s estimation, Shakespeare must fall or stand as a thinker, in which capacity I do not think he will stand a moment’s examination from so tremendously keen a critic and religious realist.

Unfortunately, the English worship their great artists quite indiscriminately and abjectly; so that is quite impossible to make them understand that Shakespeare’s extraordinary literary power, his fun, his mimicry, and the endearing qualities that earned him the title of “the gentle Shakespeare” – all of which, whatever Tolstoy may say, are quite unquestionable facts – do not stand or fall with his absurd reputation as a thinker.

Tolstoy will certainly treat that side of his reputation with the severity it deserves; and you will find that the English press will instantly announce that Tolstoy considers his own works greater than Shakespeare’s (which in some respects they most certainly are, by the way), and that he has attempted to stigmatize our greatest poet as a liar, thief, forger, murderer, incendiary, drunkard, libertine, fool, madman, coward, vagabond, and even a man of questionable gentility.

You must not be surprised or indignant at this: it is what is called “dramatic criticism” in England and America. Only a few of the best of our journalist-critics will say anything worth reading on the subject.

Yours faithfully,

G. Bernard Shaw

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Filed under History, Literature, Philosophy, Theater

by | July 25, 2014 · 3:22 AM

Julie Covington, “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina”

The best version ever, from the play Evita from 1977. There have been many covers of this song including a famous one by Madonna. None of them really come anywhere close to the original, which still reigns. Sarah Brightman and Madonna’s versions are simply not as good, though they have their fans. Better than Karen Carpenter’s too, and Karen is one of the finest female singer-songwriters of the modern era.

The only version that nearly matches this one is by Elaine Paige. It is the one good cover of this song, but even it does not quite match the original.

This is the Elaine Page version. Very beautiful, and her theatrics are the best of all. Very nearly as good as the original. Versions by Nicolle Scherzinger, Madelena Alberto, Babara Streisand, Patti Lu Pone, and Suzann Eren and Lea Salonga all have their fans, particularly those by Eren and Scherzinger.

This really is an operatic song, but it is nevertheless perfectly suitable for pop as Madonna showed us two decades later to great success.

Reactive in death, polarizing in life, for better or worse, Eva Person continues to define modern Argentine politics and culture.

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by | June 10, 2014 · 3:14 PM

Turgenev!

Turgenev is usually listed as one of the great Russian writers of the 19th Century along with Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Anton Chekhov and Nikolai Gogol. He was the favorite Russian novelist of Henry James and Joseph Conrad, who both said he was better than Dostoevsky. Vladimir Nabokov rated him below Tolstoy, Chekhov and Gogol but ahead of Dostoevsky.

Although Turgenev quarreled with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky during his lifetime, both eventually came to praise him.

After he died, Tolstoy said:

His stories of peasant life will forever remain a valuable contribution to Russian literature. I have always valued them highly. And in this respect none of us can stand comparison with him. Take, for example, Living Relic, Loner, and so on. All these are unique stories. And as for his nature descriptions, these are true pearls, beyond the reach of any other writer!

Turgenev never married but had many lovers and affairs. He had a lifelong affair with a Spanish-born opera singer who was raised in Paris. He spent most of his time in Western Europe, especially Germany and France. He preferred cosmopolitan Western Europe over his native land. He died at age 64.

He was particularly noted for his great ear for dialogue, as you can see in the excerpt below. Just to give you a taste of what he is like, here is a passage from the play, A Month in the Country:

You know, Ratikin, I noticed this a long time ago …You are wonderfully sensitive to the so-called beauties of nature, and talk about them exquisitely … very intelligently … so exquisitely, so intelligently, that I feel sure nature should be indescribably grateful to you for your beautifully chosen, happy phrases about her; you court nature, like a perfumed marquis on his little red-heeled shoes, pursuing a pretty peasant girl … the only trouble is, I sometimes think that nature will never be able to understand or appreciate your subtle language – just as the peasant girl wouldn’t understand the courtly compliments of the marquis; nature is simpler, yes, cruder than you suppose – because, thank God, she is healthy …Birches don’t melt, they don’t have fainting fits like ladies with weak nerves.

Nnnice!

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Filed under Eurasia, Literature, Novel, Regional, Russia, Theater

by | October 31, 2012 · 11:33 AM

All Hallow’s Eve with the Bard

On this Halloween, I leave you with this little tidbit from William Shakespeare, greatest of the literary greats, not yet equaled and possibly never to be:

Tis now the very witching time of night, when churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out contagion to this world. – William Shakespeare

Nice quote, n’est-ce pas?

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by | October 27, 2012 · 12:20 PM

Neighborhoods of LA, Gay and Otherwise

The gayest place by far in California is LA! They might as well change the name to LA Gay.

West Hollywood is insanely gay of course, but it’s also a fantastic place to pick up women. You can practically pick them up right off the street if you know what you are doing. The reason is because there are lots of single women there, and they are pretty desperate. Most of the guys are queers, and most of the rest are married. Any remainder are weird Orthodox Jewish guys from Russia with long beards and funny hats.

The areas surrounding West Hollywood like Hollywood proper and Beverly Hills are also quite gay, though most folks in Beverly Hills are straight. Hollywood proper also has many straights along with every type of human known to mankind.

A Hollywood district called Silverlake is incredibly gay. I knew a couple who lived there, and I used to hang out over there. Silverlake is practically gayer than West Hollywood.

Echo Park next door is full of Mexicans.

Los Feliz right next door is also full of gays, but there are lots of other types there. It’s a very wealthy area.

That whole general area is full of desperate single women, mostly young ones. There are plenty of women there, and most are not lesbians. And most of the single guys are queers. The rest are typically married or whatever. So there are way more available single women than single guys, so those neighborhoods are paradise for a single straight man if you don’t mind queers chasing your ass night and day.

The parts of the Valley bordering LA proper are fairly gay. I always thought Studio City was a fairly gay place.

Santa Monica is also pretty gay, but there are lots of other folks living there too.

Venice has some gays, but just about every other kind of freak lives there too.

East LA is full of Mexicans and Hispanics, not queers.

South LA is full of Black people, and it is rapidly filling up with Hispanics.

Koreatown is full of Koreans.

The MacArthur Park District is full of Salvadorans and other Hispanic types. It’s an extremely run-down, degraded and overcrowded area.

There is a large Filipino neighborhood just northwest of downtown. The name escapes me.

There are many Armenians in a town called Glendale northeast of LA near Pasadena.

LA is full of Jews! An area called the Fairfax District is the center, but Hollywood, the Hollywood Hills, West Hollywood, Beverlywood, Beverly Hills, West LA and to a lesser extent Encino and Studio City are insanely Jewish.

Malibu is where the movie and entertainment industry types live, but they also live all throughout the region.

Hollywood writers typically live in West LA, but also live throughout the area. A very large proportion of Hollywood script writers are Jewish.

The movie scene is not particularly gay, nor is the music industry, though looks are deceiving. Many actors are reportedly closeted. I used to go to movie industry parties for the behind the scenes folks (gaffers, storyboard artists, light crew, etc). They throw a great party, and I never saw any gays there. Both the movie and music industry are stacked to the rafters with Jews.

There is a very large theater scene in LA. There are little theatres all throughout Hollywood. I never knew anyone from that scene, but my impression was that the theater crowd was insanely gay. Now why the theater crowd (actors) would be so gay but the movie scene not does not make a lot of sense, except that maybe a lot of movie and TV actors are closeted.

There is also a huge local band scene in Hollywood, mostly heavy metal and punk, etc. This scene is overwhelmingly straight. Some of the big clubs were the Starwood, the Roxy, the Lingerie Club, the Anti-Club and the Whisky.

There is also a pretty big lit/poetry scene in LA. It’s not very gay at all. Just typical neurotic, boozing writer types and nerdy writer chicks.

There is a big art scene in LA. The artists generally live in or hang out in lofts in downtown LA. I was part of that scene for a long time. There were few if any gays in the scene that I was a part of. An artist party is like 300 introverts in a room, everyone scared to talk to each other. It’s pretty easy to get artist girls. Most of them are shy, nerdy types who don’t get laid enough, so they are a bit desperate. Plus once you get one, they’re often horny as Hell to make up for lost time.

Dance Scene

There is also a dance scene in LA. I used to know a woman named Mary Jane Eisenberg who was a big choreographer in town. Smart, cute, skinny, Jewish. She had her hair cut really short, and you know what that means, but I got the impression that she liked men. She was a cool chick; I would love to meet her again. Apparently she is still alive and still working as a choreographer.

I met her at a some wild, rowdy Dennis Cooper poetry reading (Cooper is gay) at some weird club in downtown LA the name of which escapes me.

She was with a couple of her dancers, two guys who were probably some of the best looking young men (about age 30) I have ever seen in my life. They were both apparently gay or bisexual.

They were so good looking and sexy that one almost wanted to turn gay because of them, if only for a while. I thought, “Man, I can see why guys are queer. You get to fuck the best looking people on the planet, just like that. I mean, they’re all guys, but hey! Minor point, no? How many straight guys get to screw the hottest chicks around? If you’re into screwing good looking people and don’t care much about gender, maybe gay is the way to go, eh?”

You could also see how just about any woman on Earth would want these guys. They were that sexy and hot.

Mary Jane asked one of the guys, who looked like Jamie Gillis, “So, what you guys been up to?”

The guy said flamboyantly, waving his hands in the air, “Ohhhhhh you knowwww. Just going to gay baaaars!”

Mary Jane shook her head like, “You’re nuts!”

The other guy heard his friend talking about going to gay bars and kept saying under his breath, “Nooo. Noooo. Nooooo. Noooooo.” Apparently he was denying his queery ways.

Later the same guy leaned over to me and purred, “Soooo, can I buy you a beer?” I told him no thanks and started shaking like a leaf. I was having a nightmare, and I was wide awake. I finished my beer and turned around and threw it into the trashcan, hard, like a punk, and it shattered. Then I sneered. The queer shuddered a bit when the bottle shattered, and then he left me alone.

It was a very weird night!

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Filed under Armenians, Art, Blacks, California, Cinema, Culture, Filipinos, Hispanics, Homosexuality, Jews, Koreans, Literature, Music, Poetry, Race/Ethnicity, Regional, Sex, Theater, USA, West

by | April 8, 2012 · 10:37 PM

Hell is Other People Revisited

I thought it might be time to revisit a prior post that I made on Sartre’s “hell is other people.” The quote comes from a play called No Exit. The play and my opinion of the meaning of Sartre’s play and the quote are in my previous essay here.

The take-home quotes from the essay:

According to Sartre, we are incapable of developing reasonable or real opinions of ourselves via ourselves. So how do we derive our opinions of ourselves? Via others.

…according to Sartre, we want to be our own masters, yet we cannot be. We are doomed to need others, whether we want to or not. This is the “no exit.” It’s also the “Hell is other people.” We are doomed to require respect and even adulation from others. We long to free ourselves from this addiction, but we cannot. We are trapped.

We are doomed to need others, but they will never give us quite what we want, and they will never treat us quite the way we want to be treated. We long to escape, but there’s no exit. It’s the necessary yet doomed “Hell of other people.” And speaking of Sartre, it’s also an existential issue or an existential dilemma if you will.

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Filed under Literature, Philosophy, Theater

by | January 14, 2012 · 9:59 PM

The Most Anti-Democratic Ethnic Group in America

Repost from the old site.

Unscrupulous “Professional Jews” and their Gentile supporters in the US have produced the usual tidal wave of BS, lies, sophistry, diversion, fake arguments, logical fallacies and nonsense that professional Jews produce whenever they lack an argument. Most recently, typical rejoinders are that “the play can be performed anywhere in the US”.

Yet as you can see, it was just shut down in Miami only in April. Yet another line is that since no one was imprisoned for discussing the case, there was no “free speech violation” . But what we are talking about is an attempt to censor the production of a play, not whether those discussing the play were thrown in jail.

Yet another nonsensical rejoinder is the notion that the organized Jewish effort to shut down showings of the play everywhere in the US was itself a form of…get this – “free speech”! Yes, people trying to keep plays from being performed are themselves involved in the most lofty application of the esteemed First Amendment!

Various slams against Rachel herself, mostly apparently from amoral Jews and their equally morally bereft Gentile supporters, are par for the course. One is that Rachel “entered a war zone and chose a side”. The “war zone” is apparently all of Gaza and all of the West Bank.

Now if I go to either of those places, I am “entering a war zone” despite the fact that on your average day in your average town in the Territories there is no fighting. Now if I go to the Territories and “choose a side” – in my case I would choose the Palestinians – according to these morally bankrupt Jews – apparently I deserve to get killed!

Another one is that Rachel, in trying to stop a house from being torn down, was herself “not innocent” because she was actually trying to keep the Israeli Army from shutting down tunnels that were used to smuggle weapons that were “killing Israeli civilians”. But the fact is that only a tiny number of Israeli civilians have been killed by such weapons.

Most of them, in Gaza anyway, were used to fight against the Israeli military. A vastly larger number of Palestinian civilians in Gaza have been killed by the Israeli Army. But the fact is that there is no support for the notion that Rachel was involved in an operation to keep the smuggling tunnels open. She was just trying to keep a house from being torn down on a moment’s notice.

The Israeli racist snakes use all sorts of garbage excuses to justify tearing down people’s homes. It’s almost always some sort of an “anti-terrorist operation”. Therefore, anyone who objects to their house getting torn down on a moment’s notice (as you or I might) is inevitably, in the eyes of the disgusting Israelis and their acolytes, actively supporting armed terrorism against civilians.

One of the most despicable aspects of the Jewish propaganda war is the way that they, as totalitarians often do, call anyone who calls them out on their thuggish intimidation campaigns a lunatic and a racist. This is a very common technique used by those involved in an ethnic conspiracy.

Anyone uncovering the conspiracy is first accused of being psychotic, since conspiracies do not exist (so say the conspirators!) and second, accused of racism for mentioning the obviously ethnic nature of the conspiracy.

Another rejoinder is bizarrely to attack the play itself as a lousy production as a strange diversion from the Jewish censorship campaign against the play. Whether or not the play is any good or not is completely irrelevant to any discussion of a Jewish censorship campaign.

The play, My Name is Rachel Corrie, about the life of American pro-Palestinian activist Rachel Corrie, who was murdered by an Israeli soldier with a bulldozer while she was trying to protect Palestinian homes from being torn down, is being suppressed and kept from the stage in town after town across the US and Canada.

The shutting down of the play is almost exclusively due to the actions of hardline Zionist Jewish activists in the US and Canada. On the other hand, some less tribal Jews have actually been involved in producing the play. The play itself, is not particularly remarkable. Nor is Rachel Corrie.

Corrie was an idealistic leftwing college student who got involved in the International Solidarity Movement, a movement that supports Palestinians bearing the brunt of Israeli Occupation and colonization of their lands in the Occupied Territories. She had no known sympathies with Islamist groups or anti-Semites.

If the group has any ties with any armed group at all, it is with the PFLP, a radical leftwing secular Palestinian armed group. Some of the Palestinians most associated with ISM in the US seem to have ties to the PFLP. This blog strongly supports the PFLP and DFLP in their fight against Israeli colonization of their lands.

Her guiding emotion seemed to be outrage at Israeli colonization and expansionism of Palestinian lands, a criminal enterprise which violates international law, civilized norms and various treaties such as the Geneva Convention.

When Israel started occupying the territories and colonizing those lands, at that point Israel officially became an international pariah and outlaw. It is this flagrant nose-thumbing at the entire world that drives most anti-Israeli sentiment, not mere anti-Semitism as militant Jews would have it.

In contrast to being some sort of “terrorist supporters”, ISM’ers are typically merely involved in trying to stop Israeli authorities from tearing down Palestinian homes, confiscating Palestinian lands, accompanying Palestinians to their homes and farms in the face of hostile troops and settlers and protesting against the Apartheid Wall.

That is the Wall that confiscates Palestinian land for Israeli colonization, prevents farmers and villagers from accessing their lands, and makes many prisoners in their own villages.

This is the mold Corrie fit in. As we can see, it is a rather mundane picture. There are photos of her burning an American flag along with angry Palestinians. So what? As long as the US continues to support Israeli colonization to the hilt, it’s perfectly understandable that Palestinians would burn US flags. What sort of reaction do we expect from them?

Militant pro-Israeli Americans, mostly but not all Jews, have since engaged in a campaign of vilification against Rachel Corrie, designed to destroy her character, even after her death. Sites such as rachelcorriefacts, run by militant Zionist Jews, are nothing but character assassination efforts by these Jews, something at which militant ethnocentric Jews, the finest propagandists on the Earth, excel.

The ISM does not “serve as human shields to obstruct counterterrorism efforts”. They may try to stop Israeli forces from tearing down homes, but that is hardly obstructing counterterror efforts. Corrie herself was standing on top of a pile of rubble, blocking the path of a bulldozer trying to tear down the home of a Palestinian family in Gaza, when she was killed.

I spent quite a bit of time reviewing the case, and it is obvious that the bulldozer driver saw Corrie, who was standing in plain view screaming and yelling on top of a rubble heap. There seems to be no way that the driver could not have seen her up there. He just simply went ahead and killed her, and then ran over her again afterwards just to make sure she was dead.

Furthermore, there was an IDF tank flanking the dozer the whole time and they were in continuous radio contact. The job of the tank was to monitor the situation to see if there were any civilians in the area of the dozer and then to notify the driver. Clearly, the tank driver could see Rachel. Furthermore, one of Rachel’s activist friends was also in the area and watched her get killed.

He and the other Israeli troops were obviously frustrated by the ISM’ers and Palestinian obstruction of their efforts to tear down the homes of Palestinian families. Propaganda says that the Israeli Army was just “trying to stop tunnel digging from Egypt to Gaza via the Rafah Strip.

Well, maybe so, but in so doing, they cleared an area about a football field wide, and destroyed any homes, roads or structures that happened to be in the way. Many Palestinian homes were bulldozed during this campaign.

Anyway, no tunnels were ever found in the area where Rachel was protesting, nor were any found under the home of the doctor that she was protecting. That home was destroyed.

How would you like it if Israeli troops bulldozed your house and didn’t even give you time to get your stuff out, nor did they bother to pay you for it. Would you still be “feeling the love” for the good folks who did this to to you or what?

Since she was an American citizen, her case caused a bit of a stir due to the efforts of her outraged parents, and there were even hearings in Congress. These all ended with the typical pro-Israeli whitewash. Big Jewish money trumps everything else, even when it kills American citizens.

Corrie was also rooting for the wrong side. Americans who seem to be rooting for the wrong team and who get killed by US allies tend to have their deaths whitewashed – see the murders of several Americans by Central American death squads in the 1980’s for example.

On the other hand, when the wrong team kills Americans for whatever reason, there are always ferocious attempts to drag the killers back to the US and put them on trial for homicide (“They killed Americans!” the Hearst-style yellow journalist MSM screams).

See the attempts to put Colombian FARC members on trial in the US for the killings of three US birdwatchers in Colombia a while ago. This was clearly an error on FARC’s part (this blog strongly supports the FARC). A local commander decided that the birdwatchers were CIA agents and had them executed on that basis. It later turned out that they were nothing of the kind.

FARC said that they were going to put the commander on trial, with the death penalty a possibly penalty if convicted. They supposedly did put him on trial, but he ended up having an absurdly light sentence. The point is that when US allies kill Americans, nothing happens. When US enemies do it, the s-t hits the fan.

The official story of Corrie’s death is that “she fell and was crushed”. Looking at the photos of her death, that does not seem to be the case. The only reason she “fell” is because the bulldozer driver smashed right into the pile of rubble she was standing on top of. The reason she was crushed is because he then kept driving in order to kill her.

The play has just been pulled from Miami, where the sentiment was running 85% in favor of the play. The 15%, almost exclusively pro-Israeli “professional Jews”, was loud, ferocious, activated and vicious enough to get the play shut down.

Earlier, it was dropped by the New York Theater Workshop and a Toronto theater company due to ferocious, manic protests by the same Jewish-Israeli Lobby. It finally made it to off-Broadway at the Minetta Theater, where it got mixed reviews.

A second production by the Seattle Repertory Theater got excellent reviews and has been on a good run in the US. Nevertheless, it got shut down by the Jewish-Israeli Lobby in Miami. South Florida has a huge Jewish population.

One wonders if there is any ethnic group in America as powerful, as vicious, as anti-democratic and as unscrupulous in defense of its ethnic interests (and as successful) as Jewish ethnic activists. More than any other ethnic group, these activists are a driving force behind the most blatant and thuggish censorship movement in our nation.

Along the same lines, see the hyperventilating, manic attack on a black student at Duke University for a perfectly reasonable article he published in the school paper, unfortunately titled, The Jews. Other than the misguided title, which is more poor taste than racism, there is nothing in that article that could be remotely considered anti-Semitic by any other than the most fevered and paranoid Jewish or philo-Semitic mind.

Nevertheless, the firestorm produced by this sensible, rational and actually pro-Jewish piece looked like an LA brush fire in October being whipped by Santa Ana winds. As usual when the Jews are offended, Kurian was made to submit a groveling, humiliating apology at the feet of the Tribe in order to get back into their good graces. (He should have told them to shove it!)

There were threats to throw him out of Duke. There were the usual delirious Jewish reactions that we come to expect in such cases, with Kurian, a Black man, ludicrously compared to White Supremacists and, as always, toNazis. As I was saying earlier, the most anti-free speech ethnic activists in America are…the Blacks? The Whites? The Hispanics? The Asians? No, no, no and no.

The Hispanics do try, with their wild, crazed smear attempts at calling anyone urging reason and sanity in our immigration policies a racist, bigot, KKK, neo-Nazi, etc. However, these Hispanic groups in general do not have the support of the most powerful sectors of America, sectors who are in fact fairly hostile to their cause. Further, the Hispanic Lobby is not nearly as organized and as successful as the Jewish Lobby.

The Jews? Yes. And what a shame that is.

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