Motley Kamuka

“The unstated premise of DeSantis’s approach was that there was little point in trying to attract Democratic or even moderate voters; if he got his loyalists outraged enough, they would come to the polls in sufficient numbers for him to win. Stuart Stevens, an adviser to Mitt Romney’s Presidential campaign in 2012, told me that Republican leaders have made a calculated choice in recent decades. As their reliable cadre of white voters shrank, they realized that they could either try to attract more minorities or try to motivate white citizens who rarely voted by tapping their racial insecurities.” New Yorker profile of Ron DeSantis. I've just hoped him away in my mind, but many people think DeSantis is the next president. He's more focused hard working than Trump, which if you disagree with him, means he's more dangerous. I saw an interview with an author once where it was suggested we don't elect full functioning people. Bush was a dry alcoholic, Obama was cut off by ra...

States rights was what anti-federalists were all about. The justices can say they have not overthrown Row v Wade, they have vacated the federal role, and wish states to decide. Legal mumbo jumbo is complicated. If you try to get an understanding of Roe v Wade , it's not easy. It leans on the 14th amendment . The complexity of the situation could lead someone to say 1) You just don't understand the legal hair splitting and it's unfair to say it's overthrowing anything, it's overthrowing federal intervention, putting back to the states. 2) Abortion is murder we know is committed. Someone could also die getting illegal abortions, but the problem isn't people dying from illegal situations, the problem is knowingly allowing murder and they are against that, mostly funding that. You make things against the law and if people die from doing them, then that's on them. The law has to guide us and we can't be held accountable for unintended consequences like the de...

Today is the 6th Obi-Wan Kenobi episode. The last Kenobi Wednesday. It's been glorious to have something to look forward to.  My big question is if Kenobi can guess that guess that Reva is going after Darth Vader, then why can't Darth Vader figure it out? Why didn't Vader kill Kenobi when he had a chance? A lot of people go on social media and complain about people complaining. I feel like I have to watch the show a few more times to have more deep thoughts.  I get it that storytelling isn't reality and you're always going to have plot weaknesses. Why did Cordelia just not placate her father to get her inheritance? Why does Macbeth keep killing and getting worse and worse? What doesn't Hamlet just kill his uncle? I hope I'm not seen as a hater, I do like the show, just asking questions. Like in the movie Hustle with Adam Sandler on Netflix, why didn't the Spanish player play in the Spanish league if he was so good, it would pay more than construction. Um...

 

Thomas B. Edsall quotes a study in his Times article : "...concluded that “social media shapes polarization through the following social, cognitive, and technological processes: partisan selection, message content, and platform design and algorithm.” Although they cautioned that “social media is unlikely to be the main driver of polarization, we posit that it is often a key facilitator.” I mean modes of communication will of course be a factor in what is going on. It's not just the 4 network's news and the newspapers now, information comes flying in from everywhere, and it's hard to evaluate the sources when it's not moderate network news. It gives me a chance to reflect on my own polarization. I think my polarization has come at the hands at watching the criminality of Trump, the loss of accountability, and the realization that under Trump the right doesn't want a political discussion, they just want power moves and dada lying, death cult, and just to wreck up...

Cover to the European edition I was so blown away by Inherent Vice , that I have to read V. now. This book came out in 1963. It was his first novel, and I think goes well with Gravity's Rainbow. I plan to read both this summer. Wikipedia summarizes the novel thus: It describes the exploits of a discharged U.S. Navy sailor named Benny Profane, his reconnection in New York with a group of pseudo-bohemian artists and hangers-on known as the Whole Sick Crew, and the quest of an aging traveler named Herbert Stencil to identify and locate the mysterious entity he knows only as "V." Pynchon Wiki has a section of supportive notes for the novel. Reading group guide from Publisher. Reddit reading group. New Yorker Mack Hayden 7 known photos of Thomas Pynchon. Pynchon is heady, hard to follow dreamscapes of various existential, historical self journeys alive to culture: military to jazz, opera to debauchery. It’s got a whiff of Ulysses, and a million other books the reader can im...

The critique of mental health is that it blames the traumatized. Doc in Inherent Vice says that Coy has been going to the right wing mental institution, private because Ronald Reagan closed down all the state institutions. But he kicked heroin. But he keeps going because the right wing sorting out needs refreshers? It's not clear. Maybe he's unstable without his family? Who knows. That psychotherapy is interminable? Maybe it's a good thing to get tune ups, and follow through. Deaths in Inherent Vice: Glen Charlock (?), El Drano (?), Bigfoot’s partner Victor Indelicato (Prussia, Puck), Rudy Blatnoyd (Crocker Fenway). Do Puck and Adrian die at the end? Not known. How does Doc make money. He made a little money going to Vegas with Trillian, who had Puck's number. But Hope Harlingen would perhaps pay. Hard to imagine it was enough to float Doc. One person gave him a bogus credit card for payment. Yet he doesn't want money from Crocker Fenway (movie)? It took me 8 days ...

What vice does each relationship Doc have represent? The whole frame of speaking about virtue is perhaps more of a square community narrative, but I think there is a sense where ethics can step out of lifestyle, sect, background, and class. Shasta is youth and lack of loyalty, chasing money. The virtue is loyalty, love. The movie has them getting back together in the end, like all Hollywood ending, they are false and feel good pablum.  Wolfmann's vice is that his reform is too late, like Lee Atwater. And then the forces of capitalism send him to a sanitorium to neutralize his insights perhaps gained from drugs. The virtue is generosity, the kindness of building good housing at an affordable rate. Sloane is glamour and again loyalty. She loves Mickey but she has her side piece. They're the swingers who stay together. It's hard to stay together around money and the sexual revolution, the changing times.  There are a host of women who's vice is promiscuity, though I don...

Background reading for Inherent Vice : Which to read first? Chaos  (2019) has higher rating on Goodreads, but Rage (2015) has more readers. Chaos is shorter but they're both big books. I think I'll go with Chaos first, and read Rage if I want some more. Tom O'Neill has instagram  and twitter for Chaos. He lives in Venice CA according to his website . I did not know about Operation Chaos : CIA's domestic espionage project targeting the American people from 1967 to 1974 whose mission was to uncover possible foreign influence on domestic race, anti-war and other protest movements. Imagine the right being interested enough to explore the influence of Russia on the January 6th insurrection. Amid the uproar of the Watergate break-in involving two former CIA officers, Operation CHAOS had been closed in 1973. Bryan Burrough  works for Vanity Fair and lives in Texas. Rage Reviews NY Times : "What is new and valuable in “Days of Rage” is the comprehensive overview i...

Slone, Mickey, Coy, Jade, Shasta, Doc, Penny, Bigfoot, Sancho, Hope, Rudy How has the government throttled the internet? Doc thinks that when they found out how good acid was, but how it made you not buy into the capitalist dreams, they outlawed it. He thinks the internet will be killed too. I'd say in my lifetime I've seen it turned into a way to kill many things. You can't read a text that doesn't have advertising spliced into it a million ways. While they got you to rush in, hooked you with free stuff, it has evolved to be one big advertisement. Netflix is even talking about adding in advertising.  Pynchon uses paranoia in connecting ideas as a narrative device. He puts it in the mouths of characters, and like with Shakespeare, you don't know how much he really believe it as more than a narrative device. Like Shakespeare Pynchon is hidden. Shakespeare through the mist of time, and Pynchon by consciously avoiding any publicity or press. It's worked for his bra...

I'm watching the movie a second time, and I'm halfway through the book. Among the movie's differences from the book. Sortilege starts off narrating. The movie doesn't have the school bell for the phone either, just a regular ring. It's really weird the way Doc shouts when he sees the photo of Amethyst as a baby. I guess it's to dramatize the negative impact of being pregnant and using, but the child we see looks pretty healthy. The child doesn't huff out because they're boring like she did in the book.  Superficially The Big Lebowski and Inherent Vice are similar but it's a completely different style of narrative. The Coen brothers are amazing, they have a very witty movie that I have loved for a long time. Pynchon is a whole other realm of fiction, and this conversion is fairly faithful, taking out the best lines and making it more compact. The audio book is 15 hours, the movie is 2 hours. Anyway, I like the different movies for different reasons. T...

What's inherent vice? California? America? Capitalism? I asked Reddit two questions. I'll see if they were good questions. It's a good artist that has you thinking about him when you're watching Mets highlights in LA. The aesthetic, the shapes of the advertisements. Thinking how they evicted the hispanics to build the stadium, read that in Inherent Vice .

 There’s also the 2022 riots that lead to a post currency world.

"Though Pynchon can impressively sling jargon and his encyclopedic knowledge he’s really a quite innocent sentimentalist at heart, always on the side of the stoners, losers, loners, and weirdoes—the romantic thinkers." ( Review  in Reverse Shot by By Jeff Reichert) NY Times By Walter Kirn  "The private eyes of classic American noir dwell in a moral shadow land somewhere between order and anarchy, principle and pragmatism. They’re too unruly to be cops and too decent to be crooks, leaving them no natural allies on either side but attracting enemies from both. Their loneliness resembles that of cowboys, those other mournful individualists who pay for their liberty with obscurity, and it makes them at least as intriguing as their cases, which usually start as tales of greed and lust but tend to evolve into dramas of corruption that implicate lofty, respected institutions and indict society itself." Christopher Tayler in the Guardian  "Behind a lot of Pynchon's...

Fay "Shasta" Hepworth played by Katherine Waterston in the 2014 movie Larry "Doc" Sportello: Our hero, gumsandal.  Shasta Fay Hepworth: Former beautiful love interest. Mickey Wolfmann: Real estate tycoon, Shasta's sugar daddy, paying for apartment in Hancock Park. Mrs. Sloane Wolfmann: wife. Has her own side piece Mr. Riggs Warbling Deputy DA Penny Kimball: lawyer from district attorney office, who fooled around with Doc for a time. Works next to Rhus Frothingham (female book, male in movie).  Aunt Reet: Aunt in real estate. "Bigfoot" Christian Bjornsen: Hollywood detective and actor. Married to Chastity. Spoiler: His partner Vincent Indelicato is wacked by Adrian Prussia, but Puck did the actual job. Mrs. Chastity Bjornsen: Gets on the phone on page 260 of the paperback to defend Bigfoot's day off from work. Calls Doc Mr. Moral Turpitude, accuses him of running up Bigfoot's mental health bills.  Denis: friend who he goes and gets a pizza with...

"In 1981, Reagan Republicans took power with the plan of cutting the government back to the form it took in the 1920s. But Americans like a basic social safety net and protection for consumers and workers, so to win votes for tax cuts and deregulation, Republican leaders warned that white Christian men who just wanted to work hard for their own success were under attack by a government in thrall to minorities, women, lazy organized workers, and secularists who were destroying traditional values and turning the country over to socialism." Heather Cox Richardson's opening paragraph in her amazing daily history of America. She goes on... "As wealth concentrated upward and it became harder and harder for ordinary Americans to rise, Republican leaders demonized Democrats and, when voters kept electing them, delegitimized elections themselves. Increasingly, they talked of the need for violence to protect individualism from an overreaching government." Then "Fina...

Spoiler Alert. Discussing the novel and movie will inevitably reveal things. Watching Obi-Wan Kenobi , there's an implication that Ben created Darth Vader, as though in good, there is also inherent vice, the yin and yang of life. Good can't be created without bad, and bad creates good. That makes me think of Megamind  (2010) and Watchmen (2009). Despite what the Tick says, the fight isn't between good and a little less good. Why isn't the novel called Inherent Virtue?  I'm listening to Country Joe & The Fish because the Pynchon wiki's first reference in the text is the band ( Chapter 1 ). Shasta used to wear one when she loved Doc. Mostly she was only capable of spending time, so she moved on, and she was involved with a real estate man, who was trying to get her caught up in some scheme, or rather someone else was trying to get her to betray him, though she doesn't really say who that is or why they have leverage over her.  Debt is everywhere. I have l...