New Form of Photography

That special new genre of political photo, of Trump as a fuzzy orange Rothko  blur in the foreground, and in the background some lickspittle –– Bolton –– the General whose name I’ve already forgotten –– Tillerson –– Jared –– each looking pained, plaintive.

"Trump and David Lynch: The Hidden Hand."

Apart from the fact that OVERCOMBER DONMB appears to have emerged from the Black Lodge just around the time of the testing of the atomic bomb in the Nevada deserts ( –– coincidence? –– nope –– ) –– he's a slight variant of the "Gotta light" lumberjack, only he smears himself in orange paint instead of pitch –– here are two other highly suspicious connexions between David Lynch and Donald Trump, exposed exclusively by this office.

1. Predilection for the used-up word "Disruption" –– every time I hear the word "Disruption" now I think of Ivanka.

    Ivanka / Disruption
    Ivanka / Disruption
    Ivanka / Disruption
    Ivuption / Disranka
    Ivuption / Disranka
    Ivuption / Disranka
    Irruption / Disvanka
    Irruption / Disvanka
    Irruption / Disvanka
    I must not use the word "disruption" in my academic writings
    I must not use the word "disruption" in my academic writings
    I must not use the word "disruption" in my academic writings
    I must use the word "Disvanka" in my academic writings
    I must use the word "Disvanka" in my academic writings
    I must use the word "Disvanka" in my academic writings

Back in 2017 I was living in LA, loafing, bumming, freelancing up and down the PCH as a boogie-board instructor and when I wasn't doing that also editing audiobooks for errors.  One audiobook that crossed my desk was Ivanka's book on female empowerment, whatever the fluck it was called. I have neither the inclination nor the energy to google it. Was it even ever published? I know it was held back indefinitely. Was it killed outright? You look it up. Okay. That book. As I was checking it for errors –– a paradoxical quest inasmuch as the book entire was one comic celebration of the concept of "error" –– all I heard was Ivanka vaunting DISRUPTION.

This is a word academics grew to like when they had used the word "subversion" once too often in one paragraph. "Gah. Lemme see, what's a fucking synonym for fucking subversion –– oh cool, disruption." Academics: always talking about subversion and also transgression. It's as if they see every action done in the past as somehow "subverting the norm". What norm? The norm of history as they kind of vaguely imagine it. "Without thinking much about it I imagine things were quite strait-laced and puritanical back in the past so this would have been subversive."

After Ivanka used the word disruption I could never stand to hear it, let alone speak it, without shivering in disgust. Let us outlaw this word –– call it "the D-word". It is to be an anti-shibboleth –– a word the usage of which instantly exposes its user as a toolkit professor of the first order.

Cue David Lynch, oblivious to all this (i.e., the stuff of reality, of the actual planet), and he was all giddy about the word too and he starts bandying the word around incessantly too. He even organized a "Disruption Festival" –– I checked to see if Ivanka was a "keynote speaker" but apparently she wasn't. But if you were to seek out champions for the cause of total fucking obliviousness then I think that Ivanka and David Lynch would both be splendid ambassadors for it. Lynch told the Guardian that Trump could "go down in history as one of the greatest presidents in history because he has disrupted the thing so much." (My italics.) What "thing" has he disrupted exactly, David? "Oh you know –– people's lives."

This, Lynch's pro-Trump utterance was taken up by Breitbart and then by Trump himself, both of whom apparently really wanted to court that considerable section of the population that loves racism, nihilism, and also avidly watches Twin Peaks. Trump crooned softly from the dais at a KKK rally in South Carolina that Lynch's career was probably "over" for supporting him so openly. This penetrated even David Lynch's thick cranial veneer of self-obsession and mock-innocence, and Lynch was placed in the uncomfortable position of having to sheepishly clarify one of his gnomic utterances. Characteristically he mouthed some Woodstock-era flannel and in essence bade Trump go forth henceforth and, uh, do good and to please always follow "the Golden Rule". Didn't he know? Trump hates the Golden Rule even more than G.G. Allin did.

2. Emin Agalarov –– The secret "easter egg" hidden in Lynch's blundering floundering "charitable actions" concerns one Emin Agalarov, a name with which eagle-eyed CNN-spotters will be familiar.
Paging Jeffrey Toobin.

Emin Agalarov is the simpering moon-faced weeble shmoe who –– presumably by the judicious use of Russian troll farms and little else –– enjoys the virtuous status of a "pop star" or what passes for such a thing in Russia. (Can you imagine Russian pop music? It must be like French hip hop.) He is also connected through to the craw with Trump, Manafort, &c &c &c His name was invoked in the Trump Tower debacle –– it was Emin's weird creepy English manager who put DUMBN JUNIOR in touch with the Russians who claimed to have "dirt" (the official term) on the woman now known in Trump fanboy circles simply as "Crooked". That is well-known and established.

Less well-known is that David Lynch's "foundation", as well as hosting lacklustre events featuring a seemingly-random array of TM enthusiasts (I attended one where Donovan was the main event), puts out records, puts out shitty CDs like the one featuring Emin Agalarov, alongside such luminaries pulled from a hat as Alanis Morissette, Andy Summers of the Police, Ben Folds, Ben Lee, anybody named Ben in fact, Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics, Donovan, Nancy Sinatra, Peter Gabriel, and "Pink Jaffee with Jakob Dylan and Daryl Hannah". Is David Lynch a magnet for these hard-up chancers? You can imagine Jakob Dylan and Daryl Hannah weaving their way, hand-in-hand, across a Hollywood Hills party, to speak to Lynch. And Lynch, with his chronically defective bullshit detector throbbing, thinking that they have hit-making status and this could be a great record and Trump could be a great president.

One thing that categorically opposes Trump and Lynch is their hair. David Lynch, for all his shortcomings, is a great filmmaker if only he would stick to that (–– his forays in the musical world, the world of religious and cosmic speculation, and obviously his blind questing on the earthly plane where politics is to be discussed, are as ill-advised as his humiliating explosions into the world of painting and drawing, where he exhibits the aptitude and mindset of a twelve-year-old boy ––) and he undeniably has a formidable, even prodigious, head of hair. Donald Trump, meanwhile, is bald, and has glued hair from other parts of his head to the top of his head, in tribute to the late Mr. David Ferrie, scout leader to Lee Harvey Oswald.

"Trump's Election and That Rise in Suicides."

This isn't really a joke. Does anybody monitor the suicide rate globally? And if so, has anybody noticed a remarkable rise in the number of suicides since You Know Who entered "office"? It seems to me that I am hearing about suicides, both in the press and in everyday existence, every other day.

RELATED:––

I was in Sainsbury's a few days ago and thinking about how many overweight people there were. I thought: "It's Trump. Gotta be. People are stress-eating."

RELATED:––

Similarly, in my current job, I am cataloguing academic books from the presses. A casual observation, given with kind intent: a whole lotta nonsense coming from these "sterling" presses. I thought, "It's Trump. It's gotta be. People cannot think straight they're so nutso by now. Academics are in a panic like headless chickens in the barnyard running in circles."

Althpugh actually, and then again, I think you could possibly blame it mostly on Jacques fucking Derrida and Trump gets off scot-free.

In fact I think you could blame Trump on Derrida.

If you really want my opinion, and apparently you don't, well here it is: no Trump without Derrida.

"Frankly."

When Trump says "frankly" –– which is to say every time he begins a sentence –– he sometimes speaks "frankly" and other times he speaks a terrible untruth.
   
Like when he'd read the autocue and suddenly wake up from his psychic haze, his eternal demonic drowse that he has infected us all with, to remark, usually with some surprise, "That's really actually true, I actually agree with that."

Trump's so used to saying things he doesn't actually believe that he has to comment when he says something he actually thinks is true.

What I mean is he expects to lie when he speaks.

"One or Two Things I Know About Trump."

1. What with the Government shutdown and the latest Russia revelations, nobody speaks much anymore about Stormy Daniels, but I have intended to make this observation since before Christmas and I must be allowed:

CNN got into the habit of calling Stormy Daniels a "porn star" while they called Karen McDougall a "Playmate". They are always very precise about the fine differentiation.  Unfair.

There that's it.

2. Trump was talking about the vaporous mystery atop his fat, bumpy head. (Always a bad idea to draw attention to it.) He defended it, saying that it was his "own hair." Sophistry!

I thought about this and eventually decided he said it  –– on the recommendation of his lawyers and after a subsequent, intimate and lengthy bull session with Alan Dershowitz at Mar-a-Lago –– so that he could not technically be caught perjuring himself. It is in fact his own hair –– but it is hair that actually sprung from the back of his head, that abundant and considerable source, his mullet hair, which was cut off and then grafted to the top of his head. So do you see, when he says it is his own hair, he is not actually lying. It just happens that it was moved from one place to another and reapplied.

Like the House of the Seven Gables in Salem, Mass.

Or London Bridge.

3. A couple of times now, at the height of a spirited rant in the car for the unfortunate audience of my wife, I have looked down mid-rant and seen with unfeigned disgust that I am actually making the trademark circles between my thumbs and forefingers, popularized by none other than the leader of the Western World. I looked on in candid horror –– recoiled in shame now –– tried to throw my hands away from me like alien and remote objectoids.

I then calmed down and returned to my indefatigable habit of fucking analysing everything that comes along. I said to my wife, "Imagine, if I'm doing that, making Trump shapes with my fingers, how many others of Trump's worst habits have been subconsciously absorbed and assimilated by all the world. We watch this guy every day, in the morning and again at night, and take it all in hypnotically. His vocabulary, his psychology, what he has in lieu of a moral philosophy. Word begets Trump, and Trump is virus."

4. They always say that the only person Trump doesn't criticise is Putin. It's a banality, a saw. Then inevitably it is asked, "What's he got on Trump?" What they don't say, but should, is that there is another person Trump doesn't ever criticise –– and it's incredible –– it is Kushner. Now what's he got on Trump? What awful things has Ivanka told him I wonder?

5. Roger Stone was on Chris Cuomo last night, fresh from a night in the Tombs. Chris couldn't stop marveling that he had this guest. "He's nuts to be here, dunno why his lawyers okayed it, in fact I dunno why his lawyers haven't got him sedated in a cabin off Lake Tahoe, handcuffed to a metal bedframe, but WTF it's all gravy. Let's go."

There was now an image of Roger Stone in a box in the top left of the screen. For a moment it seemed like it was a still photograph, but then it blinked. Creepy. Like the old portrait in the haunted house in every episode of Scooby Doo ever. The eyes moved. It blinked repeatedly, rapidly. Then it moved its head slightly to one side. It was in fact a live feed of Roger Stone in the green room, radiating intense anxiety, blinking quite incessantly. Maybe he was signaling his Nazi handlers like Trump with the hand gestures and the blowjob mouth shapes. Maybe he was just nervous because he had made a real fucking rookie error of judgment as the sun was setting on this late twilit stage of the last act of his political career.

His eyebrows seemed to be a smudge of colour celebrating their fierce independence from the peroxide-and-nictoine hair on the thin wedge of his head. I saw that documentary about him last week and have painstakingly charted the peculiar career of his hairline. He now has a sort of Stan Lee plastic surgery festival that suggests he has vibrant bangs from the very front of his pate that he is forced to slick back with nuclear strength Brylcreem every morning. The dream of the bald man. "Too much hair at the front. It gets in my eyes." As a result of this skin-grafting melee he presently looks like one of the fabled "Aztec Children" that P.T. Barnum used to exhibit –– those sad victims of microcephaly. His eyebrows meanwhile seemed to be a tribute to David Ferrie, Lee Harvey Oswald's former scoutmaster and also his own personal Angela Lansbury (from Manchurian Candidate, not Murder She Wrote). David Ferrie was completely hairless and enjoyed gluing scrapes of fake fur to his face roughly in the places where clumps of hair usually occur on the human cranium and physiognomy.

6. The "in" thing to do now is to disdain the talking-in-tongues Trump sometimes does at the White House lectern. He doesn't quite fall on the ground and writhe on his back with a rattlesnake in each fist (yet), but he does everything else. He says anything and everything that occurs to him in the transcendental moment. They are calling it his "word salad." This seems to me inaccurate.  Unkind to salads. It is hardly a salad, lacking the complexity and heterogeneity of a salad, unless you mean by salad a sliver of iceberg lettuce and a dried up slice of carrot. It is more a club sandwich –– or in fact a "hamberder".

"John McCain."

It seems as though the outpouring of eulogies for John McCain is secretly driven by –– what else ––animus towards Trump. They're saying what a great American McCain was as though every word is an awful insult to Trump. Every kind word is a nail in Trump's coffin –– or at least in his leg.

People love the double-whammy of appearing to be respectful and grieving when also getting to shaft the Pres.

By the way I still can't believe that Donald Trump is the President of the United States.

People want to say, "Trump killed McCain! There, I said what everyone else is thinking, I said it aloud! It was Trump that killed him!"

I felt it too when Aretha Franklin died. It was all the CNN pundits could do not to say, "Fuckin' Trump!"

In other news they say that Doug Cowie has officially applied to have the address of his flat in Archway changed to "The London Think Tank and Archive for John McCain Studies." It is unknown whether the Royal Mail will comply with this nonsensical but obviously heartfelt request.

"Eight Is the Magic Number."

On CNN last night two news items broke simultaneously:–– Paul Manafort was convicted on eight counts, and Cohen surrendered and took eight lashes for sins against the Republic. My wife gripped her fists and cheered. It was like when Obama won the election. I was more jaded about it.

"This is a turning point in history," remarked one of CNN's knowing ones. This would carry greater weight perhaps if they didn't apply it to sundry occurrences on a daily basis, if not an hourly one. Either they are given to hyperbole or we are living in a heightened age.

Could be both.

(I was in a hospital in LA a couple of years back, being prepped for ear surgery. I was having tissue from my earlobes grafted over holes in my eardrums –– those self-same holes previously bored permanently into my eardrums using lasers by ingenious doctors in New York years earlier.)

(There was something of an East Coast–West Coast divergence of opinion. I don't say it was an inter-coastal war but my LA doctor pronounced the practice of his Eastern brethren barbaric. He referred to the time it had happened as though it were the dim Dark Ages when he chuckled and said, "They loved lasers then. They thought everything could be solved with lasers." I was actually passed around quite roughly like a common wanton, a sort of Barnum incroyable for the edification and amusement of medical students visiting the ENT wing in those days. I remember one lady doctor, a specialist on the ear who ironically was a very poor listener, asking a young naif if she would like to look closely into the zone of scarified trauma within my "shell likes". The girl backed away –– she shrank back –– shaking her head in horror just at the thought of it.)

(And as I went through all the preliminary processes one of the lady nurses told me that eight was a lucky number in Chinese numerology.  'Yes, I'm really lucky," I said, waiting to have as I said tissue from my earlobes grafted over holes in my eardrums.)

That was six thousand miles away and two years ago –– wonder why I even mentioned it actually –– it's not like I'm getting paid by the word –– and now here I was, drool cup in hand, hearing through –– aye –– admittedly imperfect ears, the verdict against Trump's hench flunkies. CNN's anchors kept interrupting their pundits because new footage was rolling in. Wolf even cut off the great Toobin in his Connecticut retreat.

They had a shot of the front of the courthouse where Cohen had just sung like a canary. A cluster of microphones was all, and everyday New Yorkers going past on their way home. Perhaps to a bar, perhaps to Grand Central for the commute to Long Island. Westchester. Connecticut. Points west. Yonkers. All out for Bronxville. Suddenly Wolf became excited because Michael Cohen emerged from the courthouse and swiftly darted off to the left. His right, our left. He dashed into the crowd and disappeared. I had a premonition –– the scene recalled to me Lee Harvey Oswald being led out in front of Jack Ruby –– RFK's ill-fated trip through the hotel kitchens –– it had that air of the ungluablich that precedes political assassinations.

"Somebody's going to shoot him," I told my wife. "Trump's going to shoot him –– on Fifth Avenue! It's finally going to happen!"

Good joke but it was at a downtown federal courthouse and Fifth Avenue only starts above Washington Square, about twenty blocks north.

Still I wonder if that's how Trump will signal his resignation –– by shooting somebody on Fifth Avenue. It's like –– yes –– the gun in the Chekhov play.

I used to think that that was quite a learned reference –– read it in a Phillip Roth novel I think –– but it actually cropped up in an issue of Squirrel Girl recently.

"Kim Jong Un's Hair Conclusively Explained."

Nobody can explain Kim Jong Un's hairstyle, any more than they can explain the ethereal dust bunny atop Trump's "bonce". That is its explanation. Kim Jong Un's hair is a sardonic direct reference to Trump's hair –– a taunt. Why else would it exist? He permanently slicks back his hair to demonstrate his thick head of hair, evident without any transparency. Trump constructs his calendar, his whole life around avoiding having his hair mussed except in controlled, deeply partisan environments (vide the Jimmy Fallon TV appearance). Kim Jong Un shaves the sides, in a particularly erratic style, to prove that he needn't scrape material from the back and sides of his head over the top of his head (as Trump does and must).

Trump has hair at the sides and the back, like any baldheaded man, which he must artfully drag up and over his head and then seal in place using industrial-strength glues. 

Trump is like a disgraced samurai (NO HE ISN'T) who has had his topknot cut off (NO HE ISN'T) and so his hair hangs down like a humiliated Haight-Ashbury hippy who still haunts the old scene. In the bushido this is an offence to the personal honour that can only be resolved by ritual suicide. 

More accurately, Trump is like our old friend Dog the Bounty Hunter, who similarly uses day-glo paints to dye his hair and then utilizes a complex wattle-and-daub tapestry technique to keep his bald areas hidden from fake news organizations and Bob Mueller-guided "Deep State" government drones. 

How it must burn Trump up that Kim Jong Un has no need of hair at the side of his bead –– he positively shaves it off in a cavalier manner –– because he has the upper part of a human hairstyle on his head. Not even the bottom part –– he doesn't need that. It's like he had his barber cut off the lower part of the hairstyle because it was redundant. After all, Kim Jong Un (editors –– should I refer to him as "Un"?) only lives to tease Trump, it's the only fun he gets out of life. 

Heck gosh it's the only fun any of us can have at the moment. 

"Stormy Versus the State."

On Wolfe Blitzer's CNN show lately he's been asking everybody he can about Stormy Daniels. He starts to stammer, his palms become clammy, he coughs and groans inwardly in tormented horror and delight grotesquely combined, as he leads the subject –– any subject –– around to Stormy Daniels.

One moment he is asking the worthy senator from Rhode Island about the steel tariff or about the Mueller investigation and then he will spontaneously all but abandon the subject, brush it aside as though it were so much lint, fluff, nasal discharge and say instead "What about St– St–– Stttt–– Stormy Daniels the porn star Stormy Daniels?"

Jack Reed (the Rhode Island senator in question) was flustered too –– he actually said that there was a "stormy path" ahead for President Combover, and he didn't even cover himself by adding, "PUN INTENDED!"

Wolfe was too busy wiping his forehead with a handkerchief to say "NO PUN INTENDED SENATOR!"

Poor old Laura Coates was drafted in to talk about the legalese of the matter when Wolfe plainly just likes to hear Stormy's name said aloud, particularly by women.

He plainly delights in talking of her, but he always brings her up awfully politely, like a nervous professor at a cathouse, fiddling with his bowtie and with a bunch of daffodils in his hand. "Is–– is–– is–– is the porn star Stormy Daniels receiving visitors?"

DUDES GOT A SCHOOLGIRL CRUSH AAAAAAAH HAAAAAAA>HA LULZ.

"Hope Hicks Jokes."

Has anybody made this joke yet? I've been out of the "Foggy Bottom loop" because I'm working as a temp in a laboratory and I haven't been able to watch CNN twenty-six hours a day like usual.

"Trump's lost Hope."

"Trump is now more Hopeless than ever.'

"Fucking Hopeless."

There is further fun to be had from this woman's name that sounds like a classic character from a comic book (Lois and Lucy Lane, Lana Lang, Wally West, Peter Parker &c. &c.).

"Trump Loses Hicks."

"Hicks No Longer Supporting Trump."

"Trump Abandoned by Those Knuckle-Dragging Hayseeds and Mouth-Breather Hillbillies Who Voted Him Into Power."

Lastly, my wife said last night, "Define a white lie anyway."

I cracked back: "Lies by white people."

"Trumpy Trumpy North Philly."

Did you see Overblower Don in funky funky North Philly the other night? Did you, then, perhaps, also mark the triple-decker peanut-butter deluxe Clif Bar nutburger behind him? Yes, the gentleman on the right (Trump's left) with the quaker beard.

I feel like Trump employs the former casting director of Justified to get crowds behind him at rallies. It's as though he singles out the most snaggletooothed [sic], outre, Southron Gothic nondescripts he can get to attend his rallies. It's like he's thinking, "Who are the most ridiculous, upsetting-looking vermin I can locate and exploit?" In the old days Barnum loosed good Johnny Greenwood on the wider world to "curate" exaggerations and distortions from humanity's terrific warp, woof and tapestry. Barnum had "agents" to plunder the exotic countries for the shock of the new the exotic the unprecedented.  Does Trump have a John Greenwood hired exclusively to chase up these hare-lipped cloven-hoofed wights wyverns and mermen? Or –– awful thought –– could it be a natural fact that anybody who attends a Trump rally does so because they are already warped, distorted, exaggerated, possess tails &c. &c. &c.? Made vile and mean by the poxy souls within them?

Like in comics shops, are the faithful brethren there every Wednesday (in the "variants queue" even) because they were teased at school and did they became comics readers as an inevitable result? Or did reading comics stunt and gnarl their natural growth &c. &c. &c.?

* * * * * * * * * * *

Trump at CPAC. He went "off-script" and started rabble-rousing the audience (or, if you are unkind, the "rabble"). In his delirium he flailed wildly about for a Nazi flag but couldn't find one alas. A thing that he did instead was to make a quip and then point at people in the audience. "I see you." "I see you, laughing with me." "You and I are alike." "You and I are kindred spirits." When did this pointing motif begin and what is its purpose? I know Hillary Clinton did it too. But Trump is the most blatant demagogue ever. He is like demagoguery from central casting. When he had quite  finished pointing at the audience, he clapped gently with a smug look on his face, before crucially playing with his mic and mic stand.

By the way, did you see Rick Gates's contrite look? He grew a beard. It suits his new mood of gravity and candour. Is he to go out also in sackcloth and ashes, a penitente even, flogging himself in the street with a cat o' nine tails?

Meanwhile... Laura Coates looked great this week on Don Lemon.

"Melanesia."

"Love is lovely."  U-ROY.

Irritated my wife badly by perfectly reasonably pointing out that Melania is the best looking First Lady in the history of the "form".

"Say what you will..." I began –– always a bad start.  I put all the obloquy on hold for a moment to remark, magnanimously, "He's a lousy feral shitbird of a Prez, he's a spoilt child AWOL in possession of a golfcart on the world stage, he possesses a negative Amazon rating for charm, wit and a hairstyle, he wears clown shoes in bed, all that I concede, but it remains that his wife is the best looking wife a President ever had. I don't like it any more than you do –– I wish with emotional sincerity that his wife was butt-ugly! –– but there it is. She ain't. She fine."

"Did you ever see Eleanor Roosevelt? Or 'Lady Bird' Johnson? More like 'Stag Beetle'! Sheesh, the previous holder of the title was Mistress Bush. No not that amateur sumo wrestler Barbara –– I'm talking about Laura! Jackie Kennedy was not even in the running. She wore her eyeballs on the actual sides of her head."

I resisted saying, "It is what it is."

I also wisely resisted continuing by arguing with my wife that Stormy Daniels is not, as my wife claims, a "hook-nosed blowtard," and that I actually albeit very sheepishly found her quite attractive too.

I will say absolutely nothing about Ivanka.

"Trey Gowdy Vs. Mark E. Smith"

Since returning to England wife and I have been watching CNN (American) and Bravo imports on Hayu almost exclusively. Like millennials, we don't watch TV as it used to be envisaged. We do not crowd around the telly with mum and gran for Corrie or Eastenders or  Holby City or Dancing With the Stars. We do not follow the mad works of Theresa May, Jeremy Corbyn, Bill Brewer, Jan Stewer, and the other people whoever they are. We do not allow the mad works of Theresa May, Jeremy Corbyn, Dan'l Whiddon, Arry Awke and especially Peter Gurney to interfere in our fun.

We illegally streamed CNN America on a channel named after, for reasons that were never clear, the Hulk. One day the Hulk was banished. Did Dr. Strange send him to the crossroads of reality? We scrabbled for replacements. We must watch Don Lemon, Anderson Cooper, Chris Cuomo, Wolf and Kate Bolduan (on maternity leave and with terrible stand-ins) and we resent it when Amanpour or Richard Quest blunder in on our programming as it is on English CNN.

How to describe it when Don Lemon at the height of one of his ecstasies of spleen is interrupted abruptly by the grey monotone of the interloper Amanpour with her piffling stuff from the postcolonial planet. Take me back to Foggy Bottom –– now.

CNN in Britain and Europe is earnestly capitalistic, rubbing its palms over Dubai and Africa and China like dull economics students from public school. How many times have I seen that advert with the rapper from the Middle East.  Then the story about the nuns who have "donated their brains to the study of dementia". It shows a nun quipping, "What good is it to do me when my brain is six feet under?"

Don't they believe in the eternal resurrection?

The Europeans at Davos, oblivious, barefacedly greedy, giving Trump a "ow you say, a fair shake of the whip".

All this is preamble to the fact that Mark E. Smith died on Wednesday and I didn't even know about it til today, although I had been keenly following stories such as Trey Gowdy backpedalling over Mueller and the ongoing obscure machinations of Devin Nunes, not to mention the minutiae in the lives of Stassi Shroeder, Scheana Shay and that interesting personage James Kennedy, the "white Kanye".

I phoned up my brother today to say, "Uhhh... whatsitcawled... did you see that Peter Wyngarde died?"
"Yes," he said. "And what about Mark E. Smith?"
"What about Mark E. Smith? How is Mark?" I said, quite oblivious. "I am only interested in Trey Gowdy."

I am only interested in Nikki Haley (AKA "Niki Hoeky")

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dyo_xZnvsA

Nikki Hokey [sic] swears she isn't having an affair with Trump. Says she's only been on Air Force One the wunst. This sort of rhetorical device –– diversion by employing an ancillary factoid –– is suspicious. It's like Trump saying he didn't have Russian prostitutes urinate on him because he's got a hygiene neurosis.

Nikki Hokey should have said, "What I don't know about this scurrilous ugly rumour is: who is more insulted by the allegation? Who comes off worse in the transaction if I snog the Prez?"

Last observation. Wife and I were watching Chris Cuomo's late night show.
He's on in the morning and he's on late at night.
I said, "When does this guy sleep?"

Does he sleep?

Where do you go to my lovely, when you're alone in your bed?

Forget I said that.

"Steve Bannon Looks GREAT!" B/W "Devin Nunes Kit-Kats."

Devin Nunes is the worst.
The WURST.

I'm like Arya Stark with her list of people she doesn't much like. Right at the top of my long list are Stephen Miller, Mike Pence and Devin Nunes.

Journalists are collectively, and quite obviously, trying to get Stephen Miller fired by saying that he is manipulating Trump. They're trying to get Trump angry at him by saying that he's trying to steal the limelight from Trump. But Trump is perverse and he might work out what they're doing and he'll like Stephen Miller even more, because everybody hates Stephen Miller just like everybody hates Trump. Well it is said that "my enemy's enemy is my friend."

Trump likes people who people hate.
Trump hates people who people like.

I was so incensed by Devin Nunes skidding about DC, his latest frantic clowning around Foggy Bottom, that I started trying to draw pictures of his face with a pencil and some post-it notes that were close to hand.

There is a particularly funny picture of him online, the first one that comes up when you Google him indeed, where he is trying (I believe) to smile, but the concept is alien to him and instead he is obviously seething with fury. His lips are a membrane stretched tight across clenched teeth. I used that as a model.

I drew some pictures of his face and then –– unconnected –– I took two chunky Kit Kats out of a biscuit tin. I thought, "I'm going to put them in the fridge."

They were in the biscuit tin, but I needed a knife to cut them into small pieces, and it would be more convenient to put them like I said in the fridge.

I am on a diet so given how many calories there are in a chunky Kit Kat I thought, "I'll be good, I'll only have a third at a time," so I have been cutting them up into three bite-sized treats.

You are probably wondering what this has to do with Devin Nunes.

Well I'll tell you.

I had the Kit Kats and the post-it notes with pencil drawings of Devin Nunes on them both in front of me on the coffee table, and I thought, "What if I could wrap those post-its around the two Kit Kats, I wonder whether they would stay in place. You could have a Devin Nunes Kit Kat."

I did it and you can and I do.

STEVE BANNON UPDATE

"Sloppy" Steve is finally out of the news. When people reach a certain level of suspiciousness and they go on "Bob" Mueller's Arya Stark-like list,  they suddenly disappear from the public eye. You might be forgiven for thinking that they are perhaps inside a maximum-security undersea prison complex like "The Vault" in Marvel Comics, there for their own safety to keep them from black-ops wetworks assassins in the hire of UBERCOMBER DON. Or are they all hiding out with Kevin Spacey, Harvey Weinstein and Louis CK at an Arizona "clinic"? Where for example is "Joseph Mifsud," the enigmatic absent-minded Maltese Professor straight from the pages of Graham Greene?, or that oleaginous toady Rob Goldstone? Where is "Strzok" and his "lover" (––D.J. Trump) Lisa Page? Where oh where in this hour of need is Christopher Steele with his eighties footballer hairstyle? As Boyd Rice would say, "Come back, come back!"

Rob Goldstone is, on inquiry, apparently in Thailand, "writing a book."
Yes Mr. Goldstone I'm sure you went to Thailand to "write a book"! Their famously colorful liberality when it comes to sexual mores just happens to be a coincidence!

About Steve, I was reading the Wolff book and perhaps the most shocking thing of all that I read in it was Bannon's age.

I said to my wife, "How old do you think Steve Bannon is? Go on, have a guess."
"I don't know," she said crisply, tired of my little mind games.

(Another time, I showed her a drawing of a New York street scene that looked like a rather amateurish version of a Saul Steinberg sketch, with little yellow cabs and crappy skyscrapers in a naive outsider hand.
I said, "Whaddaya think of that? Nice, right?"
She said, "Yes, did you do it?"
I was elated that I had caught her so well in my awful sinister trap.
"No I didn't do it," I said. "You see DONALD TRUMP DREW IT. YOU JUST ADMIRED A DRAWING BY TRUMP."

She was sorely miffed.)

Anyway, I said "how old do you think Steve Bannon is?"
She said "55".
I said, "No, he's 63."

63!

Even so even I can't quite believe what I said then:

"63. He looks great for his age."

"Trump's Gonna Live Forever AND YOU AIN'T."

The President's doctor gave testimony after the President's check up. The press pack was baying for blood, or at least enflamed nymph nodes. It was fruitless. They got nothing.

"Do you have a life expectancy range for the President?"
("How much longer do we have to put up with this asshole?")

"He's gonna live forever. He's gonna outlive the lot of you."

"Does the President by any chance have cancer? Please?"

"Is this guy ill? Got haemorrhoids at least?"
"Nope."
"Is his head an actual haemorrhoid?"
"Might be. Science doesn't yet have a name for his head."

"What about his prostate. You check his prostate?"
"His prostate is beautiful."

"Give us something. Is he dying. Say he's dying. Even if he isn't."
"Nope. He's great. Nothing you ask me is going to change the fact that he's in the peak of human condition." [sic]

"Is he ever gonna die?"
"No."

"Are we talking about the same guy you and I? Grimace with the Hamburglar hair?"
"You mean the Ubermensch? Six foot three and he weighs in at one hundred and thirty pounds?"
"You must mean one hundred and thirty stone?"

"Sorry folks, nothing to see here. Any other questions?"

"Yes, doc. What has the President got on you exactly?"

"Salty Talk in the Shithouse Locker Room." Or, "Architectural Critique."

The breaking news is that Ubercomber Don did not say "shithole"–– he said "shithouse".

Is this an architectural critique of Haiti and Nigeria.

Or is the usage of "shithouse"intended here to mean a toilet.

As per the sentence, "The President is as crazy as a shithouse rat."

"The Prez is potty."

Is this more of that "salty talk" we have heard about.

Is this more "locker room" naughtiness.

Is there salt in the locker room.

Is the locker room we are referring to within the building known as the "shithouse".

"My father's shithouse has many locker rooms." –– BARRON TRUMP.

"Idea for a Quiz Show."

We were watching Real Housewives of Atlanta.

Sheree's son "Kairo" was on the screen making a cheeseburger. "Look at that. Two patties and a flitch of bacon," my wife purred. It made me think of the President who curls up in bed at 6:30 PM with a cheeseburger. Then very fluidly, very organically,  my mind moved to another dynamic idea.

I said, "They should have a quiz show where Sheree's son Kairo competes against Barron Trump. Who I wonder would win this contest of the minds."

My wife goes, "Don't be mean to Barron."

I said, "Who's being mean. I just said they should have him compete in a general knowledge quiz show against Sheree's son Kairo."

"Ain't no shade."
"I am not being sarcastic at all."

To get all this it obviously helps if you watch Real Housewives of Atlanta.

It might even be a prerequisite.

"Shithole Is The Word."

                          

Everybody in the news industry was taking the opportunity to swear flagrantly on teevee. It was a swear-fest. They loved to do it. They were collectively going at it like longshoremen. The word "shithole" was bandied around with secret glee, I suspect. They loved the chance to swear. Chris Cuomo's co-anchor in the morning, [INTERN: PLEASE FILL IN HER NAME HERE] was dignified and wouldn't do it, she devised a series of stately pirouettes around the word, she made a stand for decency. Chris Cuomo leant over, pinky raised, and hollered, "I believe the word you are looking for is SHITHOLE." She pulled a pollyannaish moue and squirmed in her seat.

"Thanks Chris."

(Update: my wife pointed out to me that it wasn't Chris Cuomo at all but the guy who stands in for him [INTERN: PLEASE FILL IN HIS NAME HERE]. Talk about your "fake news media.")

Some people were trying to bowdlerize the word by saying "S-hole" which is pointless, because it sounded like they were saying "ASSHOLE" which is almost as rude as "SHITHOLE".

They should have substituted "piehole" for the children, man.

Republicans who called Trump's earlier pro–rape remarks "locker room talk" gathered in a hubbub again and decided to designate this language by the epithet "salty". This atrophied schoolmarm Republican woman was claiming, "I use 'salty' language like that in my home too!"  I tried to picture it. Couldn't.

"Trumpworld" Republicans were trying to spread the message that "Stand-up blue-collar every-day Joe-Blow Americans everywhere use salty language like this in the privacy of their own living rooms." They were blaming it on the people, turning a disgusting picture of Trump on them and claiming it is a horrifying mirror. 

Don Lemon made a whole speech, a good speech, a noble speech, a St. Crispin Crispian speech, and he actually threw one of the fat bulbous-headed Trump proxies off the show. That made the news. What didn't make the news was that Don had the Trump proxy back on about five minutes later when fat bulbous-headed proxy rather insincerely apologised to Don ("You know I love you Don.").

Next Don had on that former CIA man who always gets riled. Phil Mudd. I like Phil, because he's on our "side", but I do wonder privately how successful such a hothead can have been at the CIA. He explodes and vents whenever a camera turns to him. Not a great poker face, Colonel.

This time he made the most of the current taste for profanity. He kept shouting "SHITHOLE" around the room. He said "I'm a vicious shitholer and I'll fight the man what sez I ain't." Then he called himself a "wop," and I said to my wife, "I respect his self-loathing, but 'Mudd' doesn't sound very much like an Italian name."
"Maybe his mother is Italian," my wife said helpfully.
"Maybe," I said. "Good point."

Meanwhile Phil Mudd was calling Don the "N word". He did it twice. The balls on this Italian-Irish-American! I'm surprised he didn't spazz utterly and start calling the other panelists profane epithets. "Hey fuckface." "Hey jizz-licker." et cetera.

SEARCH TERMS:

Mudd Lemon shithole,
Trump Philip Mudd shithole,
Trump shithole,
shit Muddhole,
Shitphil,
Muddphil,
Muddle,
Muddleshit,
Philshit,
Philhole,
Muddshitphilip,
Muddy Lemon.

I was half-expecting Don Lemon, who also had his dander up, to go "Nice segment, Muddle. And by the way, if you ever call me that name ever again I will cram my whole adult fist up yer PHILHOLE."

That would have been a clever and original way to close the segment.

I just looked at Phil Mudd's webpage to see what his actual military title is, if he has one (yes, I actually do cursory research for this page), and only hours later he is openly hawking t-shirts with the slogan "PROUD SHITHOLER" on them. He's trying to copyright it I think. He's making –– and the pun is fully intended –– lemonade out of lemons.

Where will it all end, I wonder? Will anchors now take to calling eachother "dickhead" casually on air? Will the cheery call "fuck you" become as popular on air as it is off?  Is "shit" no longer profane, in the era of the poop emoji?

Trump should have said "piehole" or "cakehole" and a inserted a winking emoji and maybe there wouldn't have been such an outcry. He should have said "poop hatch" and inserted the turd emoji that has become so associated with his presidency and he would have been applauded.

OTHER NEWS.

Thought: Trump is like a character from Judge Dredd.

"Donald Trump is the President? (II)."

Every so often I'm abstracted, sifting through the clouds, reading bad old numbers of Punisher War Zone by Chuck Dixon, rooting through the garbage for something to eat, watching back to back documentaries about the Manson Family or episodes of Real Housewives of Atlanta, and I'll think –– "What am I doing?" And I also forget momentarily that Donald Trump is the President.

Today I was washing up and reevaluating reality for the thousandth time this year. And I thought, "We take it as a given held self-evident that all those hicks and sourmash addled hayseeds in the Red Zones voted for Trump, but why would a bunch of Kentucky miners vote for a swaggering flabby privileged incompetent New York ( uh –– Queens County ––) rich kid businessman?

(Never mind calling a seventy-year-old man a "kid" –– he still has the natural bearing of a tubby school bully. He is indeed the locus classicus of the ubiquitous type.)

Who can credit the people people vote for?

I remember somebody saying a similar thing once many years ago in a book warehouse in Oval. "Who can explain the people people fall for, especially on the rebound?"

I was watching CNN idly last night and there was a piece about the kerfuffle in Peru. They showed the former Peruvian President, who had been arrested and charged with corruption, now in hospital. He was patently Japanese. Even his name was Japanese.

He has been pardoned by the current President of Peru. Camera cut to a shot of the current President, a white man with a bright red face. His surname is Kuczynski.

A good Peruvian name.

Peruvians seem to prefer to vote for people who are as unlike them as possible to rule over them.

Et cetera
Et cetera

"Trump Versus Tillerson Haircut Competition."

Trump versus Tillerson in a competition over which weirdo's hairdo looks more like a thin cobweb was draped across their shining bald pates.

Whose [sic] gonna win.

Ever walked through a cobweb in the early hours of the morning and looked at yourself in the mirror and you didn't know if you were Trump or Tillerson?

"I felt so lousy I didn't know if I was Trump Tillerson ot a ten tonne turd!"

Trump resents Tillerson because when they stand next to each other neither man looks exactly hirsute.

Tillerson resents Trump for bringing the very idea of hair into disrepute.

Tillerson resents Trump for bringing the very reality of hair into doubt.

Trump resents Tillerson because his hair lacks conviction. It lacks "gumption".

Trump resents Tillerson because he will not partake of the sunbed treatment that gives his hair its signature urine colour.

Think of the strange arachnids that wove the gossamer that was then deposited unceremoniously on these two politicians' heads and then crafted –– by cynical men –– into hollow pompadours.

Think of the number of tunnel spiders required to coat Donald Trump's head each night.

Who would win in a headbutt smackdown between Trump and Tillerson? Neither one –– they'd both be knocked unconscious by the sheer lack of cushioning afforded by their thin layers of hair.

These guys should be outiftted with compulsory cycling helmets to protest their heads, because those illusions of hair they have on now ain't going to cut it in a smackdown or a pile up.

Are these magical Icelandic chefs being paid exorbitant amounts to maintain a thin film of moss on Donald Trump's head?

Are the premiere video installation artists of New York's famed "Soho" zone being paid to craft holograms on top of Tillerson's bald bonce?

_________________________________

I was watching Don Lemon. Don had been trying once again to make the case that Trump is "shithouse batshit crazy". He seemed to hope that if he could say the words in the right order the whole country would finally realise tbis simple golden truth.

Heck, I believe it. But I'm not a shitkicker out of old Kaintuck. My vote doesn't count.

The Matt Lauer story had broken and nobody knew who was going to turn out to be a sex pest monster next. Correspondent Angela, a woman of colour, was complaining about how even on this show she had been interrupted mid-sentence by men and such unchivalrous behaviour had surely had its day. Don and the fat white Trump proxy both nodded soberly and clucked sympathetically.

Five minutes later she couldn't get a word in edgeways as Don and the fat Republican were yelling hoarsely at each other again. Angela was on the video screen but Don had his hand up to stop her from speaking while he bellowed at his adversary.

"Don Lemon gets really angry," I said pensively.

"I think one day he's going to just stop and say, 'That's it, I've had enough, I can't take it anymore'" said my wife.

"You know, Wash Cowie thinks Don Lemon is dumb," I said to my wife, wondering for the first time if Wash Cowie has a point.

Charlie Rose is gone and Don Lemon ain't doing so well.