Category: Spectacles

Words without song*

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 40 Comments
“I got nothin’ here,” says Miss Mia Sopaipilla.

How many different ways are there to write, “This fuckin’ mook is 300 pounds of bellowing bullshit in a 10-pound Brioni bag?”

Beats me. I’ve read a ton of variations on that theme, even had a few goes at it myself, to no particular effect. Manhattan Fats and his Brooks Brothers bandidos just keep rolling merrily along, stealing everything that isn’t screwed to the floor, stenciling his name in gold Krylon on whatever’s left, and bombing the rubble just to watch it bounce.

It’s like watching a CBS remake of “The Maltese Falcon” in which Kaspar Gutman grabs the bird, the real one, and gets away scot free, while Joel Cairo and Wilmer Cook announce their campaign for the White House, Brigid O’Shaughnessy gets a talk show and a book deal, and Sam Spade goes to jail. And we’re just supposed to sit down and watch.

Did I mention it’s a series, not a movie? On every channel and streaming service 24/7? And not so much as a tiny box of stale popcorn with a watered-down soda for the rubes. No fertilizer, no corn. Thanks, Obama!

Subscribe! Follow! Like! Share! CGI junk food in an A.I.-slop sauce. Eighty-six the side of fries. No fertilizer, no spuds. Thanks, Sleepy Joe!

It’s starting to feel like even the bots have run out of scrapes for this tepid potboiler. Take “It Can’t Happen Here,” “Idiocracy,” “Dr. Strangelove,” “It,” “Grapes of Wrath,” “Lost,” the final installment in “The Godfather” trilogy, and the entire Marvel Universe catalog (except for maybe “Iron Man,” which was really pretty cool), throw it all in a big-ass blender, purée the shit out of it until all the ingredients are completely unrecognizable, and serve with a side of Motel 6 toilet paper.

Are we all just hanging on in hopes the final season will include a riff on the “Godfather III” scene in which the Devil — like the rest of us, mumbling, “Awright, OK, enough awready” — finally cuts Michael Corleone’s strings, leaving him to topple out of his chair like the dirty old man Tyrone F. Horneigh falling off a park bench in “Laugh-In?”

Well … maybe that’s just me. And in any event, we should all remember that the rest of the mob did not perish alongside Michael.

*Apologies to Felix Mendelssohn and his “Songs Without Words.”

Pontificating from the rectumry

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments
Barking mad and talking out his arsehole as per usual.

His Excremency King Piggy the Sticky-Fingered will be farting higher than his ass this evening during what the legacy media insists upon calling “the State of the Union address” but will almost certainly be more along the lines of the late George Carlin’s “Complaints and Grievances,” only not funny.

I will not be watching for mental-health reasons. Not his mental health; that leaky vessel has sailed, caught fire, exploded, and sunk. My mental health. What with the tariffs and inflation and whatnot, new TVs are way too pricey for me to be shooting ours in a fit of rage.

What say we all give it a miss this time around? If the senile old toad doesn’t stroke out tonight in what he promises will be a long airing of Crimes Against Him, he might just get ferried across the Styx tomorrow by the sort of ratings you might expect from a live goat fuck on the Trinity Broadcasting Network.

Wishboned

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments
Oh, eat me.

What’s on the Thanksgiving menu this year? Why, it’s a heaping helping of the fabled Epstein Files, which everyone expects — hopes? — to feature the sticky deets of something on the order of Caligula, the Joker, and Prince Prospero hosting a masked ball at the House of Usher on the Island of Dr. Moreau.

Bon appétit!

Anyone else get a whiff of teenage miscreants frantically policing up the red Solo cups, roaches, and rubbers from an unauthorized bacchanal as their parents pound on the door?

“Hold on, be right there, uh, just got out of the shower, getting dressed, door seems to be stuck for some reason, no, don’t know what that smell is (sotto voce: open some fucking windows for chrissakes, throw a pillow over that stain on the couch, and … shit, is that Suzi curled around the toilet?). …”

It is the hee, and also the haw. This den of thieves has all the transparency of the Shield Wall on Dune, and I don’t see Paul Muad’dib rolling up on a sandworm with the family atomics to let a bit of daylight into the fucker anytime soon.

What we’re likely to see once the fear-sweat evaporates is the massively redacted, heavily abridged, Democrats-only, Reader’s Digest version of a Nextdoor tirade about The Worst Airbnb Ever, featuring a hidden lo-res camera in the crapper and a creepy host who kept popping over in his bathrobe “to see if you needed anything.”

I mean, c’mon:

Representative Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, said that once the Epstein resolution becomes law, the Justice Department could not refuse to release the files, or release them with the names of perpetrators redacted. The resolution prohibits the redaction of names “on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm or political sensitivity.” 

“They will be breaking the law if they do not release these files,” he added. While true, the only way to enforce the Epstein resolution would be for Congress to hold President Trump’s Justice Department in contempt, and for the department to then prosecute itself for failing to release the files, an unlikely sequence of events.

Breaking the law? Seriously? For this lot, that’s what it’s there for.

ICE, ICE, baby

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments
He’s cold as ICE. Think someday he’ll pay the price?

The ICE boyos have brought a chill to Chicago, Aurora, and even the desert Southwest as Jesus Hitler starts making good on his promise of mass deportations.

Round up the usual suspects. A little song and war dance for the TV cameras. “Dr. Phil” even got in on the act in Chicago.

Shock and awe, baby. It works, for a while. But some folks just don’t take kindly to being shoved around.

Soon even the fanboys will find the price of admission to the Dingaling Bros-Barnum & Beelzebozo Circus (“There’s One Born Every Minute!) just keeps going up, as honest immigrant workers vanish alongside the bad guys, citizens decline to take their jobs in agriculture, construction, manufacturing, food processing and service industries, and goods and services get more expensive and/or harder to find.

But never fear. We’ll be annexing Canada! And Greenland! And the Sudetenland (whoops, wrong fascists, never mind). The Circus will roll on a Road of Bones until the world is under One Big Red White and Blue Tent (handmade by skilled artisans in border internment camps)!

While you await your own personal invitation to assist the authorities with this project (and their inquiries) you might as well listen to the latest All-American Episode of — yes, yes, yes — Radio Free Dogpatch. Could be the last one. You never know who’s lending us an ear, or why.

• Technical notes: RFD favors the Ethos mic from Earthworks Audio; Audio-Technica ATH-M50X headphones; Zoom H5 Handy Recorder; Apple’s GarageBand, and Auphonic for a wash and brushup. The trailer theme from “Fort Apache” comes from YouTube, as do Rick’s conversations with Major Strasser and Sam in “Casablanca.” Bob and Doug McKenzie say “Good day” from SCTV’s YouTube page. The drum-heavy martial music (by Gregor Quendel) and “Out of Step” are both courtesy of Zapsplat. The Mescalero Apache tribe’s take on a member’s run-in with an ICE agent can be found here. The Guardian reports on a Navajo experience. Lawmakers from New Mexico and elsewhere view with alarm. The Associated Press covered immigration raids in Chicago. At The Atlantic Mark Leibovich had some fun visiting Greenland, soon to be our 52nd state. And at The New Republic Matt Ford shredded the pestilential ordure dropped on birthright citizenship. All the noisy, less-well-reasoned palaver comes from Your Humble Narrator.