Muchnesshttp://www.regulov.com/blog/en-US2012-02-23T15:57:20ZSquarespace Site Server v5.11.81 (http://www.squarespace.com/)A jokehttp://www.regulov.com/blog/2012/2/23/a-joke.htmlBill Snowden2012-02-23T13:28:21ZBooks Drugs The HolocaustI was telling someone about Primo Levi’s Holocaust memoir If This Is A Man, at some length, elaborating on the emotional and moral complexion of the camps as Levi presents them. Then I appended the information that it has a sequel. The book does, in fact, have a sequel, of sorts, with which it remains in print (in English, anyway) in a combined edition. The sequel is not about the Holocaust, but about the immediate aftermath of the war, and about Levi’s protracted journey home. I was holding forth, you might say, as I will occasionally do. The guy I was talking to was kind of a doughy dullard, and I had largely had to entertain myself that day. He was not a very interesting person; certainly not as interesting as I had hoped. To be fair, part of the reason he had had so little to say over the course of the afternoon was that he had taken LSD for the first time in many, many years, and was probably pretty high. I had also taken acid. I had taken four times as much as he had, but I had not told him this, not wanting him to think about it. And then I had had to keep coming up with things to do, to keep from getting bored. I was talking to myself, which is a sort of default activity of mine, and incidentally to him, and I looked up and saw him staring at me and I thought how funny that was, after all that talk of Auschwitz and starvation and survival and the erosion of personhood, to use the word “sequel”, and it made me laugh to think how it must sound, and then I said, “It’s called, Holocaust 2,“which I thought was very funny. And then I said, “This time it’s personal.” I thought that was pretty funny, too.

Of course, it isn’t funny at all. There’s nothing funny about the Holocaust. It is possible to forgive Roberto Benigni or Steven Spielberg’s sentimentality only because it is all but impossible to look directly at the Holocaust. One looks instead off to one side, at some more or less conventional narrative, to be comforted and reassured by the essential orderliness of stories. Or, like a schoolchild looking at an eclipse through a pinhole, one interposes a few facts and figures (by now worn smooth), which stand in for the thing itself and give one the impression of not needing to know any more. More instructive is the experience of watching Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, which is a ten-hour documentary containing very few laughs, and offering probably the most intimate and upsetting encounter with an unreconstructed SS officer it is still possible to have.

]]>-http://www.regulov.com/blog/2012/2/20/loading-the-player-gaudium-a-smile-on-your-face.htmlBill Snowden2012-02-20T09:23:49ZMusicLoading the player …

Gaudium: A Smile On Your Face Makes You More Beautiful

]]>-http://www.regulov.com/blog/2012/2/20/1329735012707.htmlBill Snowden2012-02-20T06:19:24ZArt Kids

]]>Miss Kubelik, I adore youhttp://www.regulov.com/blog/2012/2/19/miss-kubelik-i-adore-you.htmlBill Snowden2012-02-19T13:44:31ZFilmCarey Mulligan is the Shirley MacLaine for a new era. No samsara jokes, please.

I enjoyed Drive more than I expected to, but felt a little ashamed. It’s hard to deny it is a very decadent film: the Byronic intensity! The smouldering! The lingering! And above all the gazing—punctuated by convulsions of the old ultraviolence.1 Is this what we’ve come to? Well. And isn’t the unnamed hero something out of a chanson de geste, what with his mighty steed and his noble mien? Such rarefied courtliness! Of course, a lack of carnality in the bedroom is made up for in dead Saracens. The white knight even sports prominent heraldry! The dissertation all but writes itself.

All joking aside, this is what straight action movies ought to be. I watched Escape From New York last week (for a reason, honest), and by the end I felt as though I’d spent the evening with a dry-cleaning bag over my head. And while the anachronism emphasizes John Carpenter’s essential want of taste, nothing much has changed since 1981. An instructive comparison to Drive might be Jason Statham’s breakout vehicle, a very typical piece of high-octane flatulence called The Transporter. Macho stoicism, fisticuffs, car chases, damsels in distress, moody glares, double-crosses—but only one of these films is functioning above the level of the limbic system. Which one is it? 

1 In the words of Oliver Stone, “Holy shit—you see that fuckin’ head come apart, man?”

]]>I want to understandhttp://www.regulov.com/blog/2012/2/17/i-want-to-understand.htmlBill Snowden2012-02-16T19:41:32ZPoliticsThis is fun, where by fun I mean humbling and worrying: Daniel Davies has put together a choose-your-own-adventure simulation of this moment in the European debt crisis. I can’t pretend to really get it, being only a slump-shouldered, glassy-eyed moron; but just working through his decision tree with different parameters helps bring the issues into sharper focus.

]]>-http://www.regulov.com/blog/2012/2/12/deadly-patchcover-design-for-an-imaginary-book-about-th.htmlBill Snowden2012-02-12T10:41:43ZBooks

Deadly patch/cover design for an imaginary book about the Quebec biker war.

]]>-http://www.regulov.com/blog/2012/2/11/loading-the-player-randy-newman-short-people.htmlBill Snowden2012-02-11T11:57:54ZMusicLoading the player …

Randy Newman: Short People

(God, this crazy fucking song just never gets old.)

]]>-http://www.regulov.com/blog/2012/2/11/loading-the-player-mobb-deep-ft-kool-g-rap.htmlBill Snowden2012-02-11T05:33:31ZMusicLoading the player …

Mobb Deep ft. Kool G. Rap: The Realest

]]>-http://www.regulov.com/blog/2012/2/10/loading-the-player-hieroglyphics-at-the-helm.htmlBill Snowden2012-02-10T14:46:41ZMusicLoading the player …

Hieroglyphics: At The Helm

]]>-http://www.regulov.com/blog/2012/2/10/1329731900030.htmlBill Snowden2012-02-10T14:34:30ZPlaces Tail

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