Christmas special New Year's Eve anticipation episode Caribbean rhythms episode 151 today I talk you movie reviews. I did not sleep two nights last time I did this show I'm not complaining it was not because I was up two nights recording. It's simply a matter of the moon's cycles and I hear Mercury is in the retrograde until January 1st I'm not an astrologer But many friends have reported feeling off around the world something going on. Maybe it's Planet Motion, but For me, it was merely psychological anticipation. I don't know episode 150 maybe I add special material to Caribbean a little show from now on what do you think but after in any case I couldn't sleep I went To get fruit their special fruit store. I like a few blocks away

I got watermelon juice, which apparently has certain benefits of sexual power. And I was looking on their daily specials and they had these small tangerine types. I picked them up and by the time I get to the cashier I'm already chortling because I saw these small tangerines, they perplexed me, you know, the small oranges. I think these are a mystical fruit. Prokofiev has surrealist operetta, the love of three oranges. It's based on an Italian play, which is in turn based on very ancient Italian Mediterranean fairy tale. I do believe in this. I think that citrus fruit are pregnant with vibrant powers, neon powers, neon grapes and such. I believe in this. So maybe this way, but I couldn't stop when I saw this girl at the check, the cashier, she started to weigh these small tangerine.

I just start losing it. And I made full of myself hysterical laughing fit. she had this upset offended look on her face and maybe I'm still imagining it but maybe she thought I was laughing at her so after I walk out because I'm such a nice guy I made it worse I go back to explain to her I'm not laughing at her but throughout doing this I'm hysterical laughing crying fitted continuous so you see she had exasperated disgusted look on her face but it hasn't stopped me from going back to store. I like small pineapple. And then later I find out that Chrysippus, the Stoic philosopher and logician, head of the Stoic school, he died in a fit of laughter. His men primarily transmitted a point at which the Stoic school was not just any more in

the Greek world, but became widespread in the Greco-Roman world. But he died in a fit of laughter also from watching a donkey eat figs, which the fig is another mystical fruit. So you know maybe this same spirit of laughter and fruit sees me. There's something magical about supermarkets at night, 24-hour supermarket. I like to walk through in middle of night if they exist in your city. I suggest I hear such things becoming more difficult in America though because of a certain element whereas in Tokyo, for example, you can walk whole city at night any hour, nothing happens, but look this is happy show, light show, I don't want to talk mostly such negative political things, I recommend movie recently, The Mustache, from, by the way, on movie review

show as usual, I will give spoiler, I'll tell you what happens, no suspense, so if this is a matter for you, maybe you watch these movies first, before you listen to me, I will Talk the Mustache, La Ventura by Antonioni, and Cure by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, all foreign, you can say, art fag, art house movies. But I don't think of it this way, they are space cadet, all very enjoyable movie, actually all spin-offs of mystery movie formula, which like Mulholland Drive, they do unusual twist on mystery detective movie, which for me has high interest, because the novel that I'm working on my second book half of the plot is mystery plot the main character in search of a missing person so of course this is very difficult because

novel is so much unlike movie though and is the novel a dead art form anyway I don't want to say because friends write also and obviously there is well a back you can still do good novel today successful novel I guess but has any novel now or since some time ago, let's say 1950, or has any novel the emotional impact of Dostoevsky, who's not even a good stylist, or Stendhal, or any other such. Camille Paglia claims no. She says that since some time, since 1950, the novel is a dead art form. And although her explanation is that electricity or the experience of visual media somehow vaguely she doesn't explain changed attention span but it's not really satisfying or that the events today move much faster so that a novel is obsolete

by the time it's even published but I don't think that's true I don't know that anyone has with satisfaction described however the very genuine problem that does exist with novels today so will I solve it I will try yes I do disagree with Paglia about the timeframe anyway, in that Yukio Mishima does have novels that move you as much as a great 19th century novel does. For example, Spring Snow, indubitably, everyone loved Spring Snow, maybe you start with that one. Anyway, the movie The Mustache, directed by Emmanuel Carrère, is an adaptation of his own novel by the same name from 1986, which was I think Carrère's third novel, but it's It's the one that brought him a big audience, so okay he say, I haven't read it by the way, but he say I will adapt it to screen.

The movie is made I think 2005, but the movie I enjoy, like Mulholland Drive, you should see it though as a kind of comedy, not take too seriously. But then if it has serious aspects to it, it will move you anyway in an unrational aesthetic sense even while you're laughing, should it have this power. The plot is simple, the main character Vincent Lindon, played by Vincent Lindon, his name I think in movies is Marc, he's an architect living a kind of sterile life in Paris with his wife played by famous actress Emmanuel Devos and he has mustache, both are famous French actors, but he has mustache in this movie, implicitly he has had mustache for many years and one day he decides to shave it and his wife doesn't notice and then he

become more exasperated as his colleagues at work and his and his wife's friends and others they don't notice either, which at first he thinks is a joke set up by his wife, but then it becomes clear either that she's gaslighting him, so with reference to Hitchcock movies where finally they even eventually drug him to take him away to mental asylum, but he escapes, I'll say more on that in a moment, or if she's not gaslighting then either He is very mentally ill because it comes in course of events that is not just a mustache. He seems also not to remember his father died a year before. Many other such things he seems to imagine much of his life that doesn't actually exist or else that there is something supernatural happening.

And I always prefer supernatural or occult explanations for such movie. I don't like this, oh it's all in his head, that's very lazy. But usually the non-supernatural explanations, it's complete banal. You know what I mean? This kind of movie especially invites that kind of interpretation. He's having a midlife crisis. It's all a metaphor. And he woke up then, this kind of thing. But Holland Drive, that also a common interpretation that it's a wish fulfillment dream, a psychodrama. Really what would be the point of that at all, making a movie about that? Most of the commentary you see on this movie, The Mustache, is psychoanalytic or deconstructionist light drivel. You might see phrases like, it's a commentary on loss of identity, an encounter in dealing with past trauma.

Many such things that the interviewer sounds like he's saying something, you know the type, but it's, what do you mean it's a commentary? These kinds of movies unfortunately invite this because they're open-ended, the mystery never clearly resolved, which is not necessarily a sign, by the way, that there's no resolution. If I were to make mystery movie, I don't know about novel, but certainly in a movie, I don't know that it's a good idea to show the audience the resolution to the mystery even if you know there is one. Anyway, I do believe it's possible to resolve the mystery both in The Mustache and in Mulholland On Drive, there are many visual cues given by both directors throughout, Carrere plays with you from beginning.

There are small and big clues if you want to watch it second time. For example, when Mark, the main character, the one who shapes his mustache, and his wife Agnes, they are meeting some of their friends early in the movie before these events and another couple, I hate this phrase couple, but okay, I'm forced to use it, what else can I say? And the man in that couple of their friends is played by Matthew Amalric. You may recognize him. He has this kind of annoying very French face. He played villains in some American movies too like Quantum of Soul as James Bond. But he ends up telling a story of how when he had been a boyfriend of Agnes, the main character's wife, so these two are exes. In their youth, he was Matthew Amalric, an Amalric

character who was her boyfriend, and they went on some trip during which at a certain point she, it's not important, but she messed with the temperature controls in a cabin they were sharing with others for selfish reasons, keeping everyone else in the cold, short circuited. But at that time, they caught her red-handed, but she adamantly insisted that she was not lying and she didn't touch the controls, although it's obvious that she had. And even in this scene, when he tells this story, this woman Agnes, the main character's wife, continues to insist that no, she never did that and she didn't lie, which, okay, do you know people like this? Unfortunately, I know quite a few, they will deny something they've told you even 10 minutes

ago, which is one reason I've given up on arguing with people in person completely or debating people. I know not everyone likes this, but it's my experience with such people, you know. But okay, so you're set up to see Agnes as a consummate or at least very stubborn, self-convinced liar. And this actress, Emmanuel Devos, plays it very well. She has actually very strong vibe of villain, superficially nice, but empty, unreadable, enigmatic smile on her face, even menacingly annoying. So you could totally believe she's come up with a plot to have her husband put in a mental asylum for whatever reason. The power of movies like this or Mulholland Drive is there is no reduction to an internal versus external problem or breakage.

These are continuous and there are very nice clues left as a labyrinth to entice you to solve the mystery of this person's broken recollection or broken mind. because you're crazy doesn't mean there's not a conspiracy against you. For example, in the beginning when Mark, the main character, the guy who shaved mustache is playfully hiding his face and he has to go into the closet, says he has to go into the closet because he says he needs to get another pair of shoes because the laces broke on despair. But I don't think they did. It's a small detail. But halfway then through the film when much later on, some months later you believe he's putting on shoes, the laces really do break. And this suggests the whole workings of apperception are shuffled for some reason.

He remembers and forgets the future. He goes forward into the past. It's like slot machine that doesn't match up anymore. Time and space don't match up. And whether this is his brain or reality at large or both continuous as I say, luckily the film never says. This is my friend Yama opinion, excuse me, did you see what they did something to my my throat while I talk to you about this, but I watch movies with Yama, although we live very far apart, but we put on movie at the same time and sometimes we're on phone and we talk this movie while happening. The most beautiful part of the mustache, the most touching is later on when he runs away, I mean they drug him and you hear that the mental hospital people are on the way, but he is not yet asleep, so he wills himself, he awakens,

He runs out of his house, grabs a jacket and his passport, and he ends up at the airport, takes the first flight out of Paris, which is to Hong Kong. And in Hong Kong, he just meanders, dazed, completely dazed in that city, you know. It's a city with very special feel, like it's kind of Tokyo or Manhattan, but very special Hong Kong feels, perfect for such movie of wandering in Blade Runner night metropolis. And eventually he ends up on the ferry between Kowloon and Hong Kong and he takes this back and forth endlessly. He sleeps on it and essentially he ends up living on the ferry. It becomes a fixture of life for the locals there on the ferry with the passengers recognizing him, humoring him and so on. He fits into their daily routine and it's unclear how long he spends there, whether

it's days or maybe even months. I found this very poignant of why? Because I imagine maybe Emmanuel Carrere, the director and the writer, maybe he saw this. You see this, Euro or American man like this in the random places in East Asia or in Third World who are essentially homeless, some type of homeless eccentric and you wonder what's their story? How's he end up there? And I wanted, I was thinking maybe part of movie was inspired by this, the Genesis story, the wild story of how such a type that maybe Carrer noticed or talked to, how such a type came about. Because if you ever talk to them, aside from their delusions and their obvious madness, they have actually interesting and normal background stories sometimes and they end up in such places unexpectedly that they can't leave.

So movie I think quite touching is origin story of schizo-eccentric in the remote Hong Kong village of a white man and so on or on the Star Ferry in Hong Kong and so on, eventually he does end up in a village in small room like Odysseus essentially shorn of all possessions and everything he was shorn and on a foreign shore or beach somewhere among aliens. But then something odd happens in movie, he lets his beard grow out of neglect and as soon as his moustache together with his beard grows back, one day he enters his motel room and his wife is there and she seems not to know that anything is wrong and it sounds actually that they've been here just a few days on vacation. She says they have a dinner date with friends that night at casino or something like this.

She doesn't understand what he got the absurd jacket and he just goes with it. I think he shaves but does not shave his mustache. And the last scene is the two of them on a boat on their vacation at night and he throws in the water an apology postcard that he had written her from Hong Kong during his meandering time on the ferry which he had held on to this postcard. And this scene actually recalls from earlier in the movie when during his dispute with his wife whether he had had a moustache or not, he had a photo of himself with moustache from a recent trip with Bali and he could have shown it to her as proof but inexplicably he never did. He just held on to it and other such, I think also at the airport, his photo on passport has a moustache.

But yes, movie does not resolve mystery explicitly, but I do think it leaves unusual clues like this for you to piece it together what's going on. At least you can say, well, I don't, you know, it's a kind of brain trick, you know, it forces brain to keep questioning and thereby forms because your brain's trying to piece it together. this sense, aura of mystery that actually has no real end. In the same way that Schopenhauer says of Gothic architecture that the buttresses and many other such things that appear to support loads that don't exist, and your brain then is constantly trying to understand what's the purpose of these architectural devices that otherwise in a Greek temple all the feeling of weight is explicit, I mean what columns

support what loads, it's very clear to the eye, very satisfying, whereas again the the seemingly purposeless ends of something like a flying buttress or other ornaments in a gothic cathedral, your brain constantly trying to figure out but can't from your sight so you are left with a feeling of awe and mystery at something grand and hidden. So it's the same feeling of menace and mystery that you get from absurdist Russian story like Dostoevsky the double, right? In fact, watching this movie, the moustache felt to me almost exactly like I felt when I read Dostoevsky the Double, which I also strongly recommend that story. But I don't really care if movie has explicit resolution. It's expertly made for feeling of menace and uncanny that you are not who you think you

are, that maybe you're someone else. Maybe you will meet me one day running small boutique hotel slightly dilapidated in Pointe Noire, port city in Congo, stacked with volumes of the economic school of Brazzaville and I'm living under a different name with unusual thin moustache and a Blackamoor wife and maybe you wake me out of my dreaming state and this evil dream. I will be right back. Movie La Ventura from 1960 is film about nothing that will wake you up like psychedelic experience. It show you world and way you knew it could be where the small things, small detail around your landscapes, the nature, people's facial expressions are all somehow presented new and afresh, the world awakened. I go to sensations from movie almost instantly, from beginning scenes where a brunette girl

who in later movie she's going to disappear, later in the movie, her sexor's love encounter with absent and somewhat estranged lover at beginning of movie, an older man who is, he's like Mark from The Mustache is an architect, but from that beginning scene you feel a wave of freshness over you, like something you have not seen before. Am I over selling this movie? I don't think so. I got similar wind freshness even though it's black and white with 1960 movie, but I got same type wind freshness. black-white true-for movie, Four Hundred Blows, or Bergman's Persona, which I also highly recommend, in which all of these have supposedly influenced the course of cinema, these three movies I mentioned, and their innovations actually, yes, have been largely assimilated

by various filmmakers since they were made. But for me at least, the freshness, the newness of what they do is unchanged even after, what is it, 80 years now since this movie is made. It's amazing. 80 years, and of all the three movies I'm talking about, La Ventura is the one most appropriate if you want to watch with a girl. It's suitable both for genuinely artsy girls with B-clustered personality. All fuckable girls in the West are likely some version of B-clustered personality, I'm told. Other nations keep these girls in line by beating them. It's also suitable for pretend artsy girls who are mostly normal fat girls. You put this movie on, she will probably think you are sophisticated, but look, it's just a pleasant movie. Visually, it's beautiful.

Beautiful landscapes, beautiful girls. It loses nothing by being made in 1960 in terms of production quality, and I generally don't like black and white movies. I know as a cinephile, you're supposed to praise some very older movies, and for example, I have no doubt that pre-Moral Code Hollywood movies from 1920s and 30s have interesting themes, plot, modernist dialogue, or who knows, but for me cinema is primarily visual experience and I can't really stand a bad picture sound quality of old movies, very old ones I mean. But Love and Tura loses nothing by being black and white, the cinematography beautiful, and These criterion remasterings are very well done. You should watch on HD screen if you can. Same with Persona. It's almost a movie special made for black and white.

The cinematography is like painting, loses nothing by being old. But La Ventura main advantage is both in the moment and in the sweep of the actions shown, although nothing really happens, you're constantly surprised, I mean, at times even entranced because acting is so perfect. The actions themselves are often inexplicable, you know, the changes in mood and such, whereas in a psychological novel or most movies both before and even now there is an effort to give some kind of narrative reasons or explanation for one character falls out of love with another why it happens, you know, or comes into love with a third. There's effort on movie maker part to explain to you some word or narrative or major dramatic changes like this. These are shown here unexplained and unjustified.

Usually the justifications even in a novel are clumsy unless you're dealing with a master psychologist but you're often not. But the movie mimics in some way not life as such because of this, which art I think should never try to mimic life as such because daily life is dreary, often fake, and this movie's virtue is it doesn't depart from dreariness of everyday lies with things that are too strange or random. In other words, they're just at edge enough. Antonioni manages to capture subtle but significant moments in people's lives, which you as a viewer will recognize, you will recognize, yes, I've seen that, I may remember seeing something like this, it's uncanny. This is not something random or supernatural or totally zany and unexpected, but it's something

that you see rarely because it's revealing somehow the momentous manifestation of somebody's character that you've known or a momentous manifestation of the beauty of the world and so on. this I just say again watch the beginning scenes. They captured me immediately even before the three characters depart on their voyage. The story is essentially about a voyage but just the beginning the sexor's love encounter in Rome between the brunette and the male lead you see her face and you see what I mean despite the movie's influence on later cinema and videos on you rarely if ever see this kind of acting that just it jolts you out of expectations in an uncanny way. I'm still thinking over facial expressions and his and

wondering, yes, that's what it can be like. Why don't other directors try to capture things like this? But maybe they try, but here it's done successfully thanks also to the skill of the actors. Anyway, the story itself isn't about nothing. It's technically a typical mystery story as you might find Hollywood movie or Hitchcock, same with mustache. In In this case, the girl you see at the beginning, the brunette you think is the lead, she ends up disappearing after an argument with her lover. And the rest of the movie is this lover, her ex, and her best friend, who is the actual lead of the movie, played by Monica Vitti, who ended up starring in Antonioni's other famous movies and who became international star because of this La Ventura.

But the two of them try to find her and they never do find her. You never find out if she just ran away or died in accident, suicide, murder, but it doesn't matter because the movie is really about the search and the love affair especially that ends up sparked between her friend Monica Vitti and her ex-lover who are the ones who are searching for her. And yes, this is shown really refreshing, a totally external visual way. No psychologizing, no justifying, it comes fresh surprise. The most beautiful parts of the movie are when the two of them are in the hinterlands of Sicily because the movie starts really as they're planning and then they're going on a trip to Sicily, then these two are traveling through countryside and they're in this abandoned church parking lot.

And many of these images Antonioni plainly recreated from Giorgio de Chirico paintings. If you check my Twitter account, near the top there should be, I retweeted someone who who long ago put up Decirico paintings side-by-side with scenes that I'm talking about now. And that was, even before I saw that tweet, that comparison when I was watching movie, that was in a way the visual and mysterious trans highlight of the film. It's a visual film and it has a trans visual highlight as opposed to a dramatic narrative peak, which this movie doesn't really have. But it occurred to me even then, yes, and I figured he must have been copying Kiriko, but I'm not just being biased, that those scenes are really very haunting. The church, empty town in middle of summer day Sicily, very haunting.

I should say I had no idea regarding his Kiriko ties. You may know I like this painter, I brought him up sometimes on this show. And in fact, although Antonioni reproduces some Kiriko scenes, the movie does not at all have a kiriko feel. And what I mean is, it is easy. Yes, if you take pretty much any abandoned Italian or Sicilian town on a summer afternoon, and you put the camera right, and you can sort of capture the superficial setting of what Kiriko is showing in many of his paintings. But there's also a particular nostalgia dream feel in Kiriko, and also especially feel of mystery especially menace, menace religious transfiguration. Remember again, Andre Breton literally jumped out of a tram car when he saw Kirikou painting in a gallery.

He felt that here was a rival of a new religious moment. And that's missing from this movie, it has none of that. It has almost no tension, no menace. The feel of it is very different from what Kirikou is showing, but it's also remarkable that almost no narrative tension. Yes, it's a mystery movie, detective story, but it never feels like really a detective story. It's without a doubt, yes, he tried to recreate some superficial arrangement of those scenes. Not only, by the way, in a church parking lot by themselves, but also, and this is maybe the scene of the movie that stay with you the most, you see a train with steam engine in Sicilian countryside with the sea, the water in the background. So the train going horizontally, steam coming out, and water behind it, which is, this is

a signature kiriko image, touch, and the two of them are in the grass by the train tracks kissing. And movie is very beautiful, it's almost designed to display such scenes, which if he was a painter you could maybe say he does it in one image, but the virtue of movie form is that it builds up to that, again not dramatically but visually and in mood. So when that image I just said appears, it has intuitive emotional and mood significance for you as viewer different from what you'd get from a still shot or this. The movie is Sicily based and vacation based and you could see the title Love and Tura, The Adventure, as maybe slight ironic because there's not really any adventure. Yes, they fall in love, but that is itself questionable.

They go to nice locations, they meander, they are aimless, they travel in beginning on a yacht with a noble woman and her retinue. And at one point Antonioni contrives it, so they go to Noto later on. Noto is a beautiful Baroque architecture town, I think outside Syracuse a little bit. And there's a nice dig at Sicilians when the Vitti character, I posted this actually on my account, the Vitti character is alone in town plaza and she gets surrounded by all kinds of Sicilian men gawking at her, Bob and Vagine style, you know, you think they're getting ready to gang rape. It's a scene reproduced almost exactly in the second season of White Lotus. White Lotus is a great series by Mike White. I also recommend this. Let me go on slight tangent about this series.

There are two seasons, the first featuring Sydney Sweeney and some other girl, but Sydney Sweeney everyone posting her boobs online now. But these two girls are made to mimic the vocal pattern of the Red Scare girls, who I think Mike White is an admirer of that podcast. But these two play two woke adolescents on vacation with Sydney character parents at a so-called luxury resort in Hawaii, although I think that's part of a joke because again in first season the resort seems to be only pretend luxury. And it's about the guests and staff of the resort. It's a comedy, a dark, biting comedy. Nobody comes off well in the White Lotus. Everyone suck or is annoying. And I'd say both seasons have implicitly right-wing message or at least very anti-woke, anti-left-wing message.

Although it's subtle and there's plausible deniability and the reason I even watched The White Lotus in the first place is because someone recommended it in a reply for this reason that it's a good model for what so-called right-wing art today could be, which is not really or actually at all explicitly right-wing or at all political, that's not art, that's a homily, not engagement in moralism or hokey nostalgia either, but full immersion in modern life as it is, full showing it how it is, which results naturally in biting satire. And it's also just very enjoyable to watch, beautiful scenes. The second season, there's a third being shot now at the resort in Thailand, I am told, but the second season takes place at the resort, same called White Lotus, it's like a chain

right in Sicily, where Mike White just reproduces particular scenes and even ideas from this movie I'm talking about by Antonioni, although again it's filtered through parody and satire. And Monica Vitti's counterpart in White Lotus is actually a very annoying, frigid American lawyer cunt. And the lives of Roman and Italian high society that gets shown in La Ventura without much judgment is reproduced here in White Lotus as scheming and murderous faggots on the make. So anyway, I recommend this series and yes, I recommend emulation of what Mike White is doing in this series if you have the tools to. But anyway, I mean to say a lot of movie La Ventura is a vacation around Sicily. It's not really an adventure. They had tremendous difficulties, I hear, with funding and production of movies.

So much so that the company Antonioni had managing the movie, it got bankrupt in middle so the whole cast got stranded without food and water on this tiny rock in the middle of the sea, they had to be extricated, but Antonioni persevered, persevered by the way also after the movie premiere at Cannes where it was absolutely killed by the audience, they booed, they catcalled the movie, so much so that Antonioni apparently had to leave the screening in the middle, similar maybe to reception at Rite of Spring by Stravinsky which caused a riot of anger on premiere, but Antonioni persevered. By the way, let me go on still another tangent because later in the show I will mention Carl Jung. Since I'm talking movies, there is a very nice movie about the life of Jung in opposition

to Freud by Cronenberg. It's called The Dangerous Method and I think Viggo Mortensen plays Freud and Fassbender plays Jung. I enjoy this movie very much and I am wondering actually if Freud deserves the bad reputation he has now, not only by the way the left attacks Freud, feminists attack Freud, but a lot of people on the right dismiss him and I'm wondering because I have a slight prejudice against psychoanalysis because I feel that you go to a therapist and he could unwind your spiritual or psychological tension when that tension should be maybe a thought bow to shoot an arrow to make you – I've heard from people and even their therapists told them, yes, I can cure you of your neurosis but perhaps you will also get rid of the source of your

creativity, you will lack spiritual tension you need. I don't know, is this true or not? I think it could be true in some cases but in the case of Rachmaninoff, since we're talking about failed premieres, his first symphony did very badly, similar, got killed by critics. I don't know if audience booed but it might have. And Rachmaninoff was a sensitive young man, so sensitive that really it crushed him. It made him go into a deep depression and he couldn't get out of it and he went to a therapist. He saw a psychoanalyst and it cured him. It worked for him in the same way that in this movie, A Dangerous Method, you know, I think sometimes psychoanalysis actually works. It cured the woman that's depicted at the center of this relationship in Dangerous Method.

I think for some people it worked, and it worked for Rachmaninoff, and the result was he wrote the second piano concerto, which he dedicated to his psychoanalyst. And Second Piano Concerto, I'm sure even if you are a casual music listener or you've seen it in Hollywood movies, it's one of the most beloved pieces of classical music, popular ones at least worldwide. And so I don't know, maybe sometime psychoanalysis works. Should I, as a joke, attend psychoanalyst? I don't know. But anyway, Antonioni persevered and the male lead of, to go back to talking about La Ventura, the male lead plays an architect and it's funny when they visit Noto with its dramatic architecture and cathedral, this town in Sicily, he goes, the main character in La Ventura

goes on a somewhat thread reactionary rant, perhaps much like what you'd find the traditionalist urban planners on Twitter, or my friend the rat of none, I don't mean to imply he is very calm account, he does not rant, but he goes on this rant about how people used to build for the ages and now you build for 10, maybe 20 years at most, and he's this kind of character, he complains about his career, his dreams of genius and so on, he says yes, I have money and so on, but implies he had many grand plans, artistic plans to be a genius. And in this scene, as also in the drifting of, let's say, this high bourgeois characters, the vacation locations, their idle love affairs, their idle concerns, the boredom, the languor,

the lack, you know, a lot of nonsense has been written that this movie is about class or that it's a subtle attack on the bourgeois and so on. You know, again, there are fancy parties also in the movie at the beginning and at end with Italian aristos. The movie begins outside the nobleman's mansion that is being surrounded by ugly development modernization. So, you know, there's a feel of jaded aristocracy and jaded high bourgeois that perhaps feel put upon by an ugly world and are trying to escape it. Then the movie immediately, when they're going on vacation, it goes to a yacht. Although it's funny as an aside to know what this yacht in the movie is, when you look at the time what it was, it's a yacht belonging to an Italian rich noblewoman, but it looks

actually very basic breads, very basic bread and butter boat compared to an Abramovich yacht, let's say, or even to the yacht that the counterpart faggots from White Lotus have in today's time. Looks much more luxurious and so on. But yes, I mean, it's a movie about the rich and idle, you could say, but I don't think Antonioni's point has at all anything to do with class in the end. It's not a criticism of the rich and idle as such, but maybe of humans in general. It's about getting lost, some kind of inability to find a center, disappearing, never really doing anything, never going anywhere. Maybe when all human needs are taken care of, your only choice is to disappear, to fade away and wander and never connect with anyone.

And seen in a fully this way, it could be an intuitive and imagistic rendering of Schopenhauer's insight that human existence swings only between poles of pain on one hand and boredom on the other. It can even then be seen as a criticism of Marxism and actually really all Hegelian visions of the human condition which see a resolution in material or otherwise social political measures. So it's more to my interest the movie is maybe inspiration for David Lynch, Paul Holland Drive and others similar in the sense that there is a missing girl, an inscrutable mystery surrounding her missing, and a good rendering of Paglia's hopes for cinema, films as dream, dream as art form older than Aristotelian narrative drama. Like Bunuel, Antonioni is about fading away.

Before this movie, the only other Antonioni I'd seen is Blow Up, it's about a fashion photographer in London fashion scene in 1960s, and it also pursues a murder mystery but also never gets solved. And the main and his aspirations just kind of fade away in the search and the glamorous milieu he's in. But the way he does it, it's never boring, Antonio, these movies stay with you. And I wish I'd watched La Ventura much sooner. One thing I do object to is the score, the music. If you read cinephile appreciation of this movie, actually they all rave about the score. by one Giovanni Fusco. I don't know if I'm pronouncing it correct. Giovanni Fusco is apparently a well-known Italian composer. He did many film scores for Italian movies

including for Antonioni's other movies like Red Desert. And it's said to be discordant, modernist, I suppose technically it is. But I think actually it's inappropriate for the imagery and very much like it feels to me like much a relic of older, hokey movie making with major key, hokey, random scores. Let me give you a sample. This is from Laventura score. Okay, now you listen to that. Now listen to this. Here is also maybe 20, 30 seconds from another score. Listen to this. This was from Leni Riefenstahl, yeah, Riefenstahl. Riefenstahl's Olympia. She made actually beautiful movie about 1936 Olympics in Berlin. And the score is also by modernist German composers in this case, but I can't really stand it, okay? So I kind of boast these scores, they sound similar to me,

and yes, it's discordant in the sense that a mariachi band also is. They have mariachi band, major key, annoying vibes, random, and that in both cases I think really take away from the imagery. I redid an edit of the famous diving sequence from Olympia and I posted it to Twitter, where I just changed the music to a relatively normal-fag electronic ambient tune, I think it works much better. I also re-did the opening sequence where she had... Lenny had beautiful images of Parthenon, and I re-did this with Hautecre ambient music. And again, I think much better from their album... I like their album Amber, by the way. It's probably their most famous album. But again, it's much better than that kind of annoying Hokey score that I just played for you before.

I think similar that La Ventura could have better musics. Either some kind of more dreamy, suspended, modern ambient can be re-scored, or otherwise if you want to go really discordant artsy, just let go of the annoying film-scory mariachi. Just do Scriabin, or do one of Scriabin's lesser-known followers like Roslavec who actually do leave you with mood of dreamy, lost, fading away, nostalgia suspension fading away in a vast sea of ecstatic blue. So then I put this music for you now as I go to break. Though I continue to talk art house, art fag shows, art fag movies I mean, but not really. They are all very enjoyable and this next one, probably the most fun of the three, Cure, is a Japanese space cadet, ultimate space cadet movie

as my friend Yama say from 1997 by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, not related to more famous Akira Kurosawa. He was a maker of pulp Yakuza or is a maker started as pulp Yakuza type horror and then horror movies. By the way, speaking of Yakuza, the series Tokyo Vice is great. I recommend watch. I will wait for second season and maybe actually I review on a soon episode. It's about a young aspiring weeb American journalist who is the first non-Japanese to get hired at Japan's biggest newspaper daily. And he investigates Yakuza with help of film noir jaded detective. And there's a great scene where as they are hiring him or just after they hired him, one of the newspaper guys asks him if he works for Mossad or assumes he does and if it's

true that the Jews control world finance and if he knows about this or something like that. It's a music, it's based on true story of guy who did this and yeah, he happened to be a Jew in real life and on the movie he plays one. The actual actor of course is a Michelin, half Russian Jew, half Norwegian. He has a typical Miche look. It's funny. I ask again regarding Prigozhin, is this going to be a Michelin century? In last century Niels Bohr almost made it Michelin century. I'm joking of course. Maybe I do special segments sometime on the Michelin type. But anyway, Tokyo Vice, great fun to watch. Detective is played by Ken Watanabe. You recognize him. He's been in a number of American movies including I think The Absurd One, the one where Tom

Cruise learns samurai Jedi tricks over a single winter in Japan. What an absurd movie you know. If you don't know anything about Japan and you watch that, you'd come away thinking the the samurai were a primitive tribe there that explicitly compared to the American Indian. This kind of victimization narrative is only one that, it seems only thing that Maroons of our time can stomach if you portray a group that way then you can like them, it's always just passive aggressive moralism. Anyway, I get carried on tangent, Cure is nothing like that. It's a Japanese detective movie where main lead is played by Koji Yakusho. You've seen he's in other Japanese movies. It's perfect film noir detective he plays.

And of the three movies I'm talking tonight, again, this is maybe the most normal fag-friendly one and most conventional in its story, although that's relative. It's very actually uncompromising art director movie on its own, and it's said to have sparked off the great craze, the horror Japan movie craze of the late 1990s, early 2000s. still going on actually in world of Korean cinema and many American horror movies made recently follow this conventions a format of Japanese horror it's evident in many small things in this movie cure the pacing the nature of the villain which is you know it's quiet indirect slow creeping killer rather than you know werewolf or even like Hannibal Lecter the villain in this movie is ultimate inscrutable oriental and you can see just based on what he

plays where the evil character in a ring and many similar type Japan's movie come from when you watch this although there's nothing supernatural really in the cure not overtly so anyway but you see it in also some of the visual devices Kurosawa uses the visual triggers that the villain uses on his prey because he's a hypnotist and he gets them to fixate on certain visual triggers like creeping water or flame of lighter. And the way these are shot, especially the creeping water, falling water imagery, this was copied many other movies since, still is. But yes, in general outline, it's conventional story about brooding, typical film noir space cadet detective. Actually, many would call him autist, and many also would call the villain autist, but I don't.

I think this word is overused by now. They're not autist, and they're different from each other, but both detective hero and villain are slow, calm, contemplative in their own way. It's a movie that inspires the contemplative serene mood, actually, despite the very disturbing images. But this detective is essentially hunting serial killer. And the serial killer is a hypnotist and this is rendered very effective because his personality, special charisma, hypnotic, in turn the movie is hypnotic. It aims and succeeds to lull you, lull you in trance. This is something true about all movies I'm talking tonight in a way, especially this one in La Ventura. And it's really one of the hardest things I think to do right because you don't want to cross the line into boredom.

It's very easy to cross that line and actually recreating dreamy trance mood to actually capture viewer in hypnotic state, this is a real achievement. I don't know how to do this. For me, one of great aims of certain types of visual arts. I think it's special only to cinema and possibly certain types of Apollonian poetry which are no longer performed anyway. So aside from cinema and maybe some paintings or architecture that point to this rather than capture you in it directly, actual Apollonian state, trance state, very difficult to achieve through art since antiquity times. And before cinema, I think it largely depended on the receptivity, the extreme sensitivity I mean of certain appreciators of visual art.

In antiquity, Apollonian poetry would have induced this state more easily to more people through repetitive rhythm, such as you find in Homer's Dactylic Hexameter, but certain other types of lyric Apollonian poetry too, accompanied always by repetitive drone music. Imagine a lute, or a theorb, or a harp, but not played like in a massage, relaxation, Sparum or this, but a repetitive drone strumming, similar to some sitar music. Its own particular form of ecstasy, I think, yes, ultimately traceable or related to Siberian shamanic ecstasy. Remember the priest of Apollo, Calcas, in the Iliad, he leads the Achaeans to Troy because he went into divine mania, inspired by Apollo. So it's not maybe what you think the Socratic Aristotelian focus on reason, balance, moderation,

know yourself, know your own limits, that's, as I said on the most recent episode, it's a gross editing, it's a limitation of the Apollonian side of spirit to one of its outward aspects. Whereas the inner, broader and far more important aspect of Apollonianism is the state of divine mania, a waking dream where insight into the future or into the secret nature of things is possible. Anyway, yes, I'm not trying to say this movie will take you into foaming at the mouse pithia Apollonian trance, but as art form, it's one of best to inspire this kind of contemplative yet at same time hyper aware slight manic state of insight. As a detective, as movie starts, you don't really know that it's a serial killer he's pursuing that are just separate murders committed by unrelated people but all

take the same form and this is inexplicable to the investigators because they say they don't let media know how how are these different people killing in this very specific form and detective eventually guesses there must be a manipulator there must be someone eventually guesses doing it through hypnotic suggestion the murders take place through a method is an X cut into the neck or upper chest area. And I think this is also Manson, like the Manson cult, Manson signature. The movie makes implicit reference to Manson murders as they try to trace down, catch this villain hypnotist mastermind, who is another of its very memorable villain, I would say. He's an amnesiac or pretends to be in order to lull his victims into a suggestible state.

But this leads to, whenever he's questioned finally by police, or before that whenever he's trying to ensnare a new prey, the way he forgets what was just said, the repetitions in his questioning, the constant questioning of his interlocutor, who are you, and this types of, it drives both the other characters he's talking to, but you also is at the same time hypnotic, paralyzing, but also enraging, extreme annoying. And I'm wondering by the way if you can do this, if you're ever questioned by law enforcement, if you can just pretend you don't know who you are, you don't remember, you don't remember things they ask that are very obvious or you re-ask questions, you pretend you don't remember what was said a minute or two ago or what the premise of the question was.

You question the questioner on who he is and many such things. Is this possible? Would you do this? I don't know. Talked to a lawyer before but I'm wondering would be amusing. But it's done to great effect in this movie as this villain stay with you. In the case of the detective, as in all great detective stories, and certainly the ones I'm talking about tonight, the search of the detective for his object is ultimately also a search into a truth about himself, and this is complicated in this movie by fact that his wife, the main lead's detective wife, is mentally ill. And so many of the movie scenes, when it looks at the detective's private home life, it's It's about the difficulties he has in taking care of his crazy waifu.

And the occult aspects of the movie, not quite supernatural, but the occult aspects are revealed when later on the villain is shown to be a student of hypnosis, a researcher, a scientific researcher into hypnosis and a historical researcher of the doctrines of Mesmer, who is a real figure. And the movie left me wanting to learn this art. Can I learn art to mesmerize to hypno? It must be real. 100% real. Rasputin was a real thing, right? So I want to learn this art. Maybe I do what Willem did in this story and I go closely study Mesmer, Franz Anton Mesmer, 18th century Swabian German doctor. He was living in Vienna. He was patron of Mozart's work, possibly, probably himself a student of alchemical or other occult traditions. And he was pioneer idea hypnosis.

Then I learned this Sith art and actually original name of Cure movie was Evangelist because the detective after studying the villain concludes that he is a missionary, an evangelist, a missionary for the very real cult, the new religion of Mesmer reborn although it's never fully explained what the purpose of the murders was, whether to show the power of this new technique and mind control or whether to actually cause widespread chaos as a preliminary to something but anyway Kurosawa had to rename this movie because the onshinrikyo terror attacks in Japan subway took place while he was making it, making the movie and so to have a movie somewhat maybe even glorifying a cult that causes widespread murder mayhem,

maybe it was seen as too sensitive or bad taste at least so he changed the name from evangelist to cure, I think also edited out some of the more cult-like suggestions in movie, it is hinted but not explained also then that the detective's wife was at some point herself connected to the mesmer hypnotist serial killer's teaching, whether she was being his first disciple or something of this kind. But the movie does this well, where this is the weakest part, I think, of any mystery detective noir plot, but thankfully Kurosawa handles it well and avoids tedium. I mean, where the detective's own life or private life or story intersects with that which he's pursuing, that's often the weakest part of any plot. You know, he has to race home and save his wife or child.

The movie maker thinks he's making some kind of climax crescendo, but if you've seen it once, you've seen it many times, it's a very poor device. It doesn't make for re-watching. It's contrived, right? In many movies you can think, I'd like this, or where the detective finally confronts the villain in a physical struggle on his own. And again, often there's a tedious crescendo. The Chris Nolan movie, I otherwise like Chris Nolan, I like Memento, but this movie Insomnia starring Al Pacino as a detective in Alaska, I think it's in Alaska, it's daytime all the time. And I remember from this movie, it's a tedious final sequence where Pacino confronts the villain, it's very formulaic. And again, much like the revelation of the mystery, it's It's often the weakest part of any detective story.

Hitchcock is great, by the way, and I love North by Northwest, but in that movie, again, Revelation of Mystery is a letdown, as is also letdown in a movie Spellbound by Hitchcock, which since I mentioned La Ventura and Kiriko, and La Ventura by Antonioni openly makes visual references to Giorgio de Chirico but does not feel like Kiriko, but again, unless I'm confusing Spellbound with another movie, Spellbound actually does capture some of real menacing critical mystery, nostalgia, amnesia, uncanny feel, you know. But Spellbound, I think, falls apart like North by Northwest when the mystery is revealed, which yes, it's inadvisable, you know. By now you should know even if you as movie maker know the resolution to the mystery,

you have clear idea of who did what and so on, I think it's inadvisable to reveal it explicitly to the audience. It takes away the story's reason for existing, makes re-watching really impossible, you know. So I'm saying Kurosawa at least avoids the worst of this, you know, the crescendo-type boring thing where he confronts the villain or realizes the villain is targeting family etc. But he actually does execute the hypnotist. It's done though in artistic and calm contemplative way in keeping with style of rest of movie. And the problem is not fully resolved because at the end it is shown a waitress, a waitress in diner is shown with knife about to go on rampage. So in some sense the seed of destruction, the gospel of chaos and hypnotism the villain

planted somehow continues without him or through others who he had taught, like possibly the detective's wife. Well, the context of this is okay, I like it, it makes me want to become hypnotist, But the real meat of the movie is the style, the long shots of the detective, jaded, emotionless detective looking on sunset images of Tokyo, his journey of discovery as he talked to experts about hypnotism. And the excruciating but also serene, hypnotizing, paralyzing space cadet interaction he has with the villain, who really captures in a way a rare, even when a movie is about an ancient subject today, it's really a modern way of thinking that's shown. You see a guy behaving like people you know today and that's a failure, right?

You get Agamemnon acting like a machine party boss from House of Cards or something like this. Whereas in this movie, Cure, you actually get a glimpse at least of an entirely alien personality, unique, totally alien priorities of this villain. So it takes you in that way too out of yourself. Above all, never boring. I highly recommend this family fun classic, Cure by Kiyoshi Kurosawa. I will be right back, talk Nietzsche and this problem, Ressentiment, what it mean. I be right back. The segment of show on Nietzsche is, however, on very hot topics in Nietzsche, which animate many people, are almost always misunderstood. I mean, the Nietzschean idea of Ressentiment, which is almost always misused, and second, his ideas on anti-Semites, who he famously had contempt for.

And I'll end this by reading a one or two sections from the last chapter of Genealogy of Morals, where he talks about the anti-Semites of his day, which have curious continuity with certain types of our day, meaning it's a consistent psychological type, at least in modernity. But as for recent imam, you know the way it's almost always used in that opposing parties now just accuse each other of this, and it's used synonymously with jelly hater. You're envious. You're a jelly hater of me. My political opponents are obviously driven by Nietzsche and Rissentimon, and obviously, if it meant just this, he could have used the word envy, if that's what you mean. Just use that word and call people jealous haters and so on.

But as with Carl Schmitt friend-enemy distinction, which is also misused by partisans on all sides to call for uncompromising group enmity and disregard for all rules as if it were a prescription for intolerant war footing. In both cases, people like to invoke, I guess they think it gives them an air of intellectualism to hide under this, to hide their emotional reactions or calls to war under the names of Nietzsche or Schmidt or whoever. But that's not what the word means in particular. It doesn't even mean resentment in the way the word is used in day-to-day life in English. The French word is much closer literal meaning of re-sentiment, re-feeling, right, re-sentiment. In other words, a repetitive return of a certain feeling, a savoring of it, an obsessive rate

that gnaws away at you and which Nietzsche praised Dostoevsky for describing so well in his novels. And so it doesn't, like most people think, it doesn't really have a fundamentally social sense or economic sense, least of all a political one, right? The poor envying the rich, that isn't recentement in this sense. It can be that as well, but as such it is not. Or a social class inferior, feeling whatever he feels for a superior envy or such, or least of all a political sense, as if in one party is out of power, and I mean not in the United states one party, but really a faction out of power, let's say in a city-state, or even if a people is defeated and oppressed by another, that doesn't mean they have a recentement,

or even actually resentment necessarily in the way people use this normal word, right? The Ionian Greeks, when they were under Persian domination, they certainly didn't like it. They eventually revolted. The Phocaeans just packed up their whole city and left for Italy, but there's no evidence in their thought or manners of recent imam in the Nietzschean sense. Most permanently to Nietzsche, he wrote some early essays in his life. I think he was either in high school or certainly as an undergrad. He wrote some very important philological essays on Theognis, a Greek aristocratic poet from Megara who was deeply embittered at the fact that his party was ousted and the Democratic Party won in that state and that his city was being destroyed as he saw it by the plebs of bad blood.

But as far as I remember Nietzsche never accuses Theognis, who he knew so well of, of Ressentiment. That he would definitely be accused of that by the way people use this word today. And even though Theognis is like, yes, you faggots destroyed the city and the noble bloodlines are being blotted out by mixing with the plebs because of money, and so the city is becoming trash, and I hate my enemies so much that I dream of drinking their black blood. He has this beautiful line. And yet that's not resentment if you think it is, you very much misunderstand what Nietzsche is talking about because precisely, precisely in its being so overt, in not being an underground sentiment that gets refelt in a different way, Theognis is explicitly hoping for and

even planning his revenge as political enemies or even rivals plan, right? Even within their lifetimes, two aristocratic rivals will have envy of each other and even resentment at times, but that's not recentiment, okay? But in any case, Theognis, you could say, as many in his position throughout history of whatever party, have simply plotted or hoped for their political revenge, and that's just the drive to revenge or wanting to vanquish your enemies. That's not recentiment. Okay, when Nietzsche talks about Themistocles, that's another famous example, well famous if you know it, but nobody reads Nietzsche. He says essentially Themistocles, who was the mastermind of the defeat of the Persians and he's considered one of the great statesmen of antiquity, maybe of all time, but listen

to how Nietzsche describes him in Homer's context. This is an early and beautiful essay of Nietzsche you should read. I'm reading now. The greater and more sublime, however, a Greek is, the brighter in him appears the ambitious flame, devouring everybody who runs with him on the same track. Aristotle once made a list of such contests on a large scale. Among them is the most striking instance of how even a dead person can still incite a living one to a consuming jealousy. Thus for example Aristotle designates the relation between the Colophonians, Xenophanes and Homer. We do not understand this attack on the national hero of poetry, Homer, in all its strength, if we do not imagine, as later on also with Plato, the root of this attack to be the ardent

desire to step into the place of the overthrown poet and to inherit his fame. Every great Helene stands on the torch of the contest. At every great virtue a new light is kindled. If the young Themistocles could not sleep at the thought of the laurels of Miltiades – this is the hero of Marathon and the previous victory against the Persians was widely celebrated in Athens, Themistocles was jealous of him, I continue reading. If the young Themistocles could not sleep at the thought of the laurels of Miltiades So his early awakened bent released itself only in the long emulation with Aristides in that uniquely noteworthy, purely instinctive genius of his political activity which Thucydides describes. How characteristic are both question and answer when a notable opponent of Pericles is asked

whether he or Pericles was the better wrestler in the city, and he gives the answer. Even if I throw him down, he denies that he has fallen, attains his purpose, and convinces those who saw him fall." And I stop reading now, right, okay, so it's good to stay up. If another guy or historical figure is keeping you up at night and you want to best them or compete with them out of ambition and envy, even if you hear a friend of yours is improving himself learning an ancient language while you're wasting time, I don't know, online chess or jerking off, keeps you up at night, you want to learn that language or a different one, to best him, that's good. Or it's not necessarily good or bad, but without a doubt it's one of the causes of human greatness that what I just read from Nietzsche.

It's rather denying the legitimacy of this desire for contest and for greatness, for that kind of competition. It's denying that that leads to pathological expressions of resentment maybe, right? When as for example, the modern elite or the modern education encouraged by this elite, which all were not interested in power or admiration or glory. We just want to do good to others. We don't want to dominate others. That typifies the modern elite as also I believe is a cause of their corruption or a reflection of a third thing that causes this corruption, like the denial of this drive, the pretense that you're a good person, which is common also, by the way, in the preposterous movement known as effective altruism and these other forms of ethical rationalism based on entirely

lying assumptions about human nature and about yourself and which really present covert ways to hide even especially from oneself to hide or rebrand selfish motivations that don't need to be bad such as the drive to distinction and glory. In the same vein, I believe concept of noblesse oblige as popularized by Steve Saylor and And it's used now as a formula by many on the right to describe ancient aristocracies or patriciates. I think it's another kind of mistaken misunderstanding of historical elites and what they would like. So it's actually the current, what I call occupational class, because to me the word elite is good, but it's the current occupational class which has a lying self-misunderstanding

where they pretend even to themselves that they are there to do good, that their position is justified because they can do more good to others than the elite they imagined they replaced, right? The stated desire to do good justifies my position, and so on and so forth. While not exactly the meaning of Ressentiment either, by the way, the moral code that drives all this, the lying moral code that I'm describing to you, I believe, yes, is fueled by Ressentiment. You get a very good image of this in the main character Dan from the original Gossip Girl. It's the upper middle class, chip on the shoulder against the old American upper class. And it's, I'm there because I'm a good person. I'm not like these Trump-like evil people. I'm there to do good. I'm righteous. It's despicable, I think.

It's morally lying despicable. But as such it doesn't mean, it specifically doesn't mean ambition, is what I'm saying, or even the overdrive for revenge against, for example, your political enemies. Paul Kagame, the ruler of Rwanda, when he was out of power, I think he was maybe for half his life or even most of his life, and he was planning revenge and a coup in Rwanda and the return of the Tutsis to power, that's not recentement. Resentiment is a re-feeling, or the feeling of revenge frustrated precisely from this type of open display and hope, and then taking subterranean shape, and that feeling re-emerging specifically as a form of moral self-righteousness, re-emerging under a moral or humanitarian

or other similar self-righteous guise, which in most cases is obscure even to the feeler himself. He didn't even genuinely think he's a noble, moral sentiment, although these kinds of people have a particular aspect to them that's very not noble, overtly, but really it's this other thing transformed. Nietzsche says he has high respect for the oldest books of the Bible, what's the founding story there? It's the story of Moses. It's the story of slaves being liberated to freedom, but it's also that act is the founding of a people. not just simple liberation and Nietzsche never says that that story is motivated or driven by Ressentiment. He sees it as the noble self-expression of a people, right? The state they founded, which Spinoza calls the Republic of the Captains of the Tribes,

a kind of confederation, that's not the story of Ressentiment. The element of Ressentiment in the Bible that Nietzsche talks about are later developments as this people is gradually overtaken and corrupted by their priestly class, which lacking outward possibilities for expression of similar feelings of vengeance or need for power, then they go subterranean and they get reborn as it were, they come out in the garb of social justice movements, moralistic movements, moralistic interpretations of the world and many such things. And the phenomenon of recitimand therefore corresponds specifically or at least almost always to things about the world or about oneself that one would like to change but one cannot change, which excludes actually, right, political especially, but also economic

and social position can change within an individual's lifetime and for the people also and so on and often has in history. And again, I'm saying unless there are other factors that check out, such simple things cannot be used to describe this phenomenon or set in mind. It can't be used in simple conflicts or enmity between factions, classes, cases, peoples and so on. also includes that, but that as such doesn't determine it. The most egregious use of this word in recent years has been by the, let's say, the parvenu occupational class and especially by, if I may, the ashk press against the manga movement in general and even Trump in particular, which I find just absurd. Given that Trump is the most light-hearted, funniest public figure in decades, if not even longer in the United States.

if you don't count Berlusconi in Italy. The one most positive in character and whose desires Trump's animal desires are the most overt and innocent, which is why he's so appreciated by rich Asians, by Japanese, by, you know, crazy rich Asians in Singapore and that type of thing. They just love it because they think it's such a positive naive expression of the American character. I feel about it the same way too. And it's especially egregious claim coming from the parvenus of the media class and I've said before this show, especially the ashk in America who seem, let's not use the full Nietzschean word, recentiment even here, but if resentment, if there's anyone where it applies in America, it's people like them or some of the other marginal minorities or

people who are upwardly mobile in America for the last few decades and who have a tremendous chip on their shoulder about the WASP America in particular. You know the story, right? The constant thought in your side that your granddaddy didn't get into some country club, the country club thing just over and over again doesn't stop. Or the constant attempts in Ashk produced media like Mad Men or many such, the constant feeling of butthurt. Butthurt inferiority and desire for revenge in regards to the WASP Brahmin type, but it's a desire for revenge that doesn't usually at all express itself naively or innocently or overtly as, yes, we are ethnic competitors, I want revenge, but again, it's under the guise of social justice or self-righteous indignant claims of moral superiority or many

such things. And this comes much closer to the meaning of Nietzsche and Ressentiment, especially when it takes form of biological envy, which is one of these things that can't be changed. And so it's sensitive matter, excuse me, but the arshts aren't the only ones guilty of this. There are many other minorities, especially now guilty of it too, because the WASP type, and I mean physically, the Anglo-colonial type, is often very impressive in terms of physical beauty, you know, I mean, I don't look at Solbra, right, but there are many such men in South Africa and Australia, you know, and even if they're not refined in manner like the French, in terms of physical grace and such and that aspect of things, and the

undercurrent then of sexual envy and sexual desire also, it really gets at, again, blacks feel the same way, they have this chip on the shoulder about blond wasps, Indians, they feel the same way, definitely the chinks, the chinks like nothing else, the Chinese absolute, you know, they're not like the other Asians who admire it because they're confident in themselves, the Chinese just tremendous chip on the shoulder about the wasp Brahmin, But the ASK are the most unfortunately eloquent in their savoring of these feelings, and certainly the ones who have had the most opportunity to embarrassingly display them in movies, series, cinema, media, and political and social agitation and so on. So one of the most disgusting recent examples was the UVA fake rape accusations, which was

a total mixture of pathologies of modern America, the University of Virginia rape story from the Obama administration, the fake claim right, which is really a racial blood libel that blonde handsome fat boys and you have to see the way that described at the beginning of this article, I'm not making it up, at the University of Virginia had raped in this lurid and like right out of a fantasy. You could make a caricature fantasy that a hysterical Jewish leftist woman would have and it's in this article written by one such woman. The things they were alleged to have said during the rape, which actually, you know, not that they've raped anyone, but I have a feeling for such things, and when men rape they don't say things like what are alleged to have been said during this rape, okay?

And the overt description at the beginning of the article where the victim is depicted, you know, as a dark haired, that's emphasized, like an innocent Anne Frank of this time, right? All of the Ashk press honchos jumped on this line. The guy who runs the Atlantic jumped on it. Fueled, by the way, the lie was fueled and probably set up in the Obama White House. I think that it's not just a conspiracy theory. I think it's relatively well documented that the journalist was directed by someone in Obama White House to make this lie up. But all of the Ashk press jumped on it because it confirmed not only their political wishes because there's again this kind of deep psychological wound that they nurse at the wasp for being more handsome, more sexy, more overtly superior in various ways.

In fact that they owe actually their lives, their success, their literacy even to living in this wasp society and whose paragons are these athletic, preppy, happy blonde people that write just read the Philip Roth descriptions and you get a good idea of this. Or watch 1980s movies with bullies. And that's the thing. If you want to go there, you know, if you want to go there where you talk about who is driven by resentment, it's not the Maga. You know, it comes masked in this garb of lies and obfuscation and especially moralism, which although I wouldn't necessarily fully exemplifies, even so, what Nietzsche meant by recentement, it comes closer than what, you know, what people mean, which is mere political opposition. And that said, I don't want to go into more detail here on this matter.

Maybe I write an article of it because I mean actually to talk about anti-Semites, who as a type I mean not as an opinion, let me make that clear, but as a type, because there is a type of anti-Semite, the opinion can have multiple causes, but as a type, and I'll clarify what I mean by that in a moment, but they are a different kind of biophysiopsychological disaster than the anti-Semites. But fundamentally the meaning is what I just, it corresponds to an individual bio-physio-psychological type and motivation and not to a structural, political or social position. So in fact in history some of the most interesting examples of damage types, let's forget the anti-Semitism discussion for a moment and just talk about recent demand for a moment,

but some of the most damaged types of this guy are from high social position, sometimes the highest. It doesn't get higher than a Roman emperor, for example, especially, let's say, a Roman emperor born into the imperial family, and yet Tiberius, who is one of the worst examples of the resentment type, maybe. You must read Gregorio Maragnone, he's a Spanish doctor, 20th century, he wrote one of best biographies of anyone, period, ever, Tiberius, a study in resentment, Cornelio, the ACHVAC A liberal Spanish friend told us all about this at first, but there's a translation of it in English. I believe it's available on archive. I don't know. It's just such a great biography. But here's a guy raised in a lap of luxury and power who becomes ruler of the world and

is driven by these things that eat away at him and then re-emerge under another guise driven in large part by his family life and so on. Or take another such case I've mentioned before on this show, Charles of Anjou, again not only from a noble and even royal family, but the founder of what could have been a Mediterranean wide empire, a notable historical man. He could have been a Catholic universal empire with him as secular lord counterpart to the Pope. And again, though as a man, despite all of this, as a man he was deeply damaged psychologically, driven by resentment of what happened in his early childhood and so on. And this is actually a case where arguably these personality faults led to the demise of his political project as well.

Nobody's made a movie of this, it'd make a wonderful miniseries or movie, but his nascent empire was destroyed very fast, yes by Byzantine conspiracy with his political enemies in West Europe who wanted revenge for what had happened to the Hollandstauffens, but really because of his own political decisions that were I believe signature telling personality mistakes with causes in these psychological faults. So recent demand is actually something that can describe people at the very highest positions historically and actually in genealogy Nietzsche's most profound thoughts are regarding how recent demand forms the core personality of the priestly type even when that type is in a socially a politically dominant position.

And the really genius aspect of it is how Nietzsche explains concretely how certain kinds of moral codes and ultimately how certain kinds of valuations about life itself come from this phenomenon recentement. And this reminds me of recent spat I see on Twitter about Carl Jung, right? Some left-wing freak complained that Jung, you know, actually this is a good example of Riesentbed, the guy who made this tweet, he was complaining that Jung butthurt that Jung, society, political dimension disappears for him and he reduces everything to the individual, to his desires, to neuroses, to the individual as microcosm of the macrocosm, which all attacks on Jung and Freud aside, in the 20th century, they as followers of Schopenhauer probably

understood better than others what meant when Schopenhauer says that microcosm, the human soul is a reflection of the macrocosm. Jung had very good reasons for focusing just on the individual soul and so on. But how this is unacceptable, especially as Jung lived through such momentous political times, right? Nazism, of course, is mentioned and so he lived in a time of Nazism and Stalinism. So how could he not talk about politics and historical and social forces? How dare he focus on the individual psychology and individual needs and visions and journey alone. And I think this is just so telling in many ways, because somebody like Jung or Freud could understand something like Ressentiment much better than any of the society-oriented

or history-oriented wankers, precisely because they disregarded those things and focused on what ultimately exists in front of you, what matters, which is ultimately the way life is concretely lived by individuals. It's ultimately the individual that exists, the aspirations and visions of life that animate the individual. Even nations and groups only exist through the individual psychology of its individual human members. Or else please show me where this abstraction of group actually exists materially in front of you. And I found this attack on Jung to be such a perfect illustration of leftists' self-misunderstanding. Not only the leftist, but let's leave it at that for now, the leftist self-misunderstanding

where you're constantly running away from the devastation that is your life, that is your own psyche and its mess, from your own neuroses and subterranean feelings misunderstood in the belief that membership in a group or that political solution or social solution or historical forces of some type solution exists and can resolve that pain for you. But it never can, of course, which is also Schopenhauer's attack on the Hegelians and how they hope to solve the strife and pain that is inherent to human life in some kind of constitution or in material plenty. I think, and this is real, I've seen this myself, fat leftist girl, fluorescent lit, wretched room with other leftists, and some law or measure they wanted actually got passed.

And so something like that, I actually forget what it was, but this fat bitch literally said so naively, what new cause do we find? Because these causes are my life, without this I have nothing. What will we do without the political cause or organize for something? Without that we are nothing. I was plastered drunk, I don't actually remember even what the cause was. But this is the engine of the left especially, other groups too, but the left. Or what the Marxoid once said to me, a Marxoid academic. Again so naively about Flaubert novel, Sentimental Education, and how it's supposedly an attack on the bourgeois because they have all these momentous political events happening around them and these revolutions in the background, but they're entirely absorbed in their private

love affairs and sentiments and so on. And it's like maybe this book was or wasn't an attack on the bourgeois, but this judgment, as if the mess that is your life and your aspirations can be resolved in political agitation and public moralism, as if that's what a healthy human being does, is focus on public solutions. But this is much closer to what I'm talking about on this segment, you see. And I will end now by reading from Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, chapter 3, sections 13 and 14, two especially important sections. I was going to say famous, but really they should be famous, they should be better known but are not. I won't really comment after this because it's better I leave you, the audience, thinking

about what Nietzsche means here, but listen carefully to what he says about resentment and many such things, recentement actually, about the psychology also of the anti-Semite. And as you go without saying, by the way, that he doesn't mean here that anti-Semites are jelly haters of Jewish success like, oh, they don't like the Jewish doctor or Jewish billionaire or wealthy Jews or that, which this is the thesis of men like Luttwak, who I otherwise like, but that's not what Nietzsche's talking about here. He's not saying that it's driven by that. Nor is he saying that having anti-Jewish views is as such objectionable, least of all for reasons of tolerance or such things because such opinions can have various causes.

For example, Nietzsche never abandoned his admiration of Voltaire, who famously disliked Jews, and who Nietzsche knew disliked them, but he never accuses Voltaire of being an anti-Semite in this sense, nor does he accuse Schopenhauer, by the way, who also had very strong views against Jews, but he never accuses either of them of being this type. Because what he's describing here isn't the opinion as such, but the reason people like this have this opinion, like the bio-psychological type that latches on for whatever reason to this particular opinion more often. And actually the two things, as I mentioned, it's quite revealing because at one point Nietzsche says Voltaire and Schopenhauer both use their love of animals to hide their hatred and enmity of other groups, which is obviously true.

But it comes off as funny in this kind of innocent way in their case. And it's not just Jews that they dislike, by the way, Schopenhauer also hated, really hated Anglican priests and English Protestants and so on. And often this dislike of his gets channeled into his thoughts about animals and the dissection and such, as also does his admiration of Hinduism, but that's a different matter. But it's interesting because it's in the same way that, for example, Voltaire or Schopenhauer, love of animals is a sign of a rather innocent, in this case, a sign or cover for something else. In the case of anti-Semite as a type, it's not really about the Jews. Their obsession with the Jews is a cover for something else. The analogy I'm making is, again, it's quite surprising if you read it.

If you listen to this and then you read the whole chapter and whole book of Genealogy of Moros, it's not that long, you can read it in one or two sitting, but it's quite surprising what he means. Listen to what Nietzsche says here about the noble indignation and especially the words ruined sensuality, a quite surprising connection, right, but possibly by what psychological mechanism is antisemitism as a biopsychological type related to the type of a ruined sensuality. I bet you didn't expect that. And it may be that both these things are rather varieties of a third thing that you must look look into, et cetera, but that's what he's describing here, a consistent type that still exists in our time, not the opinion.

By the opinion itself, by the way, Nietzsche would be called an anti-Semite today, not just by the woke leftist, but even by a libtard. I've mentioned on this show previously, I'm sorry, I cannot use power of voice anymore, they got to me, but I've mentioned on this show a book by French libtards called Why Why we are not Nietzscheans, where one of them makes the observation that Nietzsche didn't like Jews and that he also didn't like anti-Semites and why is that not obvious? Well, it is. I may talk about that some other time. But he would be called, by normal FAG standards, an anti-Semite today. But that's not what he means. He's describing a type that latches onto anti-Semitism in a very embarrassing way and that embarrassed him in his own lifetime.

He complains about them in his letters, you know, these idiots are bringing me a bad name, they're misrepresenting what I say, and it's, you know, these retard idiot anti-Semites is what he's talking about. And you see the same type online now, sure on the right, they are, they have multiplied under not just Elon rule of Twitter, but even before. It's the Eugene During type, it's the anti-Semitic socialist specifically. It's still very much a thing and it's perfectly described by Nietzsche here, the moral braggart. It's the form it takes and why it takes that, what it reflects about this particular type. I will read now. I read now, okay? Sections 13 and 14 of third chapter of Genealogy of Morals. But let's go back to our problem.

The sort of self-contradiction which seems to be present in ascetic people, life opposing life is, this is much is clear, psychologically, physiologically and not only physiologically considered simply absurd. It can only be apparent. It must be some kind of temporary expression, an interpretation, formula, make up a psychological misunderstanding of something whose real nature could not be understood for a long time, could not for a long time be described in itself. A mere word caught in an old gap in human understanding. So let me counter that briefly with the facts of the matter. The ascetic ideal arises out of the instinct for protection and salvation in a degenerating life, which seeks to keep itself going by any means and struggles for its existence.

It indicates a partial physiological inhibition and exhaustion, against which those deepest instincts for living, which still remain intact, continuously fight on with new methods and new innovations. The ascetic ideal is one such method. The facts are thus precisely the opposite of what those who honor this ideal claim. Life is struggling in that ideal and by means of that ideal with death and against death. The ascetic ideal is a maneuver for the preservation of life. As history teaches us to the extent that this ideal could prevail over men and become powerful, particularly wherever civilization and the taming of humans has been successfully implemented, it expresses an important fact. The pathological nature of the earlier form of human beings, at least of those human beings

who had been tamed, the physiological struggle of men against death, more precisely against wariness with life, against exhaustion, against desire for the end. The ascetic priest is the incarnation of this desire for another state of being, an existence somewhere else, indeed the highest stage of this desire, its characteristic zeal and passion. But the very power of this desire is the claim which binds him here. That's simply what turns him into a tool which has to work to create more favourable conditions for living here and for living as a human being. With this very power he keeps the whole herd of failures, discontents, delinquents, unfortunates, all sorts of people who inherently suffer focused on existence.

He keeps them, he keeps, he, I'm interjecting here, the priest as demagogue of Chandalas, keeps them by these means focused on existence because instinctively he goes ahead of them as their herdsman. You understand already what I mean. This ascetic priest, this apparent enemy of living, this man who denies, he belongs precisely with all the great conserving and affirming forces of life. To what can we ascribe this pathology? For the human being is more ill, less certain, more changeable, more insecure than any other animal. There is no doubt about that. He is the sick animal. Where does that come from? To be sure, he has also dared more, innovated more, defied more, and demanded more from fate than all the animals combined.

He is the great experimenter with himself, unhappy, dissatisfied, who struggles for ultimate mastery with animals, nature, and gods, still unconquered, always a man of the future who no longer gets any rest from the force of his own powers, so that his future relentlessly burrows like a thorn into the flesh of his entire present. How should such a brave and rich animal not also be the animal in most danger, the one which of all sick animals suffers the most lengthy, almost profound illness? Human beings often enough get fed up, and there are entire epidemics of this process of getting fed up, for example around 1348 at the time of the dance of death. But even this very disgust, this exhaustion, this dissatisfaction with himself, all this

This comes out of him so powerfully that it immediately becomes a new chain. The know which he speaks to life brings to light, as if through a magic spell, an abundance of more tender yeses. In fact, when he injures himself, this master of destruction, of self-destruction, it is the wound itself which later forces him to live on. I end quote briefly, that's chapter 13, extreme beautiful profound statement of what the priestly ascetic ideal really is and how it develops. Now I read 14. The more normal this pathology is among human beings, and we cannot deny its normality, the higher we should esteem the rare cases of spiritual and physical power, humanity's strokes of luck, and the more strongly successful people should protect themselves from the

most poisonous air, the atmosphere of illness. Do people do that? Sick people are the greatest danger for healthy people. For strong people, disaster does not come from the strongest, but from the weakest. Are we aware of that? If we consider the big picture, we should not wish for any diminution of the fear we have of human beings. For this fear compels the strong people to be strong and in some circumstances terrible. The fear sustains the successful types of people. What we should fear, what has a disastrous effect unlike any other, would not be a great fear of humanity, but a great loathing for humanity. Similarly, a great pity for humanity. If both of these were one day to mate, then something most weird would at once inevitably

appear in the world, the ultimate will of man, his will to nothingness, to nihilism. And as a matter of fact, a great deal of preparation has gone on for this union. Whoever possesses not only a nose to smell with, but also eyes and ears, senses almost everywhere no matter where he steps nowadays, an atmosphere something like that of an insane asylum or hospital. I'm speaking as usual of people's cultural surroundings, of every kind of Europe there is right here on this earth. The invalids are the great danger to humanity, not the evil man, not the predatory animals. Those people who are from the outset failures, oppressed, broken. They are the ones, the weakest, who most undermine life among human beings, who in the most perilous way poison and question our trust in life,

in humanity, in ourselves, where can we escape it? That downcast glance with which people carry a deep sorrow, that reversed gaze of the man originally born to fail, which betrays how such a man speaks to himself, that gaze which is a sigh, I wish I could be someone else, that's what this glance sighs. But there is no hope here, I am who I am. How could I detach myself from myself, and yet I've had enough of myself. On such a ground of contempt for oneself, a truly swampy ground grows every weed, every poisonous growth, and all of them so small, so hidden, so dishonest, so sweet. Here the worms of angry and resentful feelings swarm. Here the air stinks of secrets and duplicity. Here are constantly spun the nets of the most malicious conspiracies, the plotting of the

suffering people against successful and victorious. Here the appearance of the victor is despised. And what dishonesty not to acknowledge this hatred as hatred. What an extravagance of large words and postures. What an art of decent slander. These failures, what noble eloquence streams from their lips. How much sugary, slimy, humble resignation swims in their eyes. What do they really want? At least to make a show of justice, love, wisdom, superiority. That's the ambition of these lowest people, these invalids. And how clever such an ambition makes people. For let's admire the skilful counterfeiting with which people here imitate the trademarks of virtue, even its resounding tinkle, the golden sound of virtue.

They have now taken a lease on virtue entirely for themselves, these weak and hopeless invalids. There is no doubt about that. We alone are the good man, the just man, that's how they speak. We alone are the hominess bona e voluntatis, the men of good will. They wander around among us like personifications of reproach. Like warnings to us, as if health, success, strength, pride, and the feeling of power were already inherently depraved things for which people must atone some day, atone bitterly. Oh, how ready they themselves basically are to make people atone, how they thirst to be hangman. Among them, there are plenty of people disguised as judges seeking revenge. They always have the word justice on their mouths, like poisonous saliva, with their

mouths always pursed, always ready to spit at anything which does not look discontented and goes on its way in good spirits. Among them, there is no lack of that most disgusting species of vain people, the lying monsters who aim to present themselves as beautiful souls and who, for example, carry off to market their ruined sensuality wrapped up in verse and other swaddling clothes as purity of heart, the species of self-gratifying moral masturbators, the desire of sick people to present some form or other of superiority, their instincts for secret paths leading to a tyranny over the healthy. Where can we not find it, this very will to power of the weakest people, the sick woman in particular? No one outdoes her in refined ways to rule others, to exert pressure, to tyrannize.

For that purpose, the sick woman spares nothing living or dead. She digs up again the most deeply buried things, the bogos say the woman is a hyena. Take a look into the background of every family, every corporation, every community. Everywhere you see the struggle of the sick against the healthy, a quiet struggle for the most part, with a little poison powder, with needling, with deceitful expressions of long suffering, but now and then also with that sick man's pharisaic tactic of loud gestures whose favorite role is noble indignation. It likes to make itself heard all the way into the consecrated rooms of science, that hoarse, booming indignation of the pathologically ill hound, the biting insincerity and rage of such noble Pharisees.

Once again I remind readers who have ears of Eugene Düring, that apostle of revenge from Berlin, who in today's Germany makes the most indecent and most revolting use of moralistic gibberish boom-boom during the preeminent moral braggart we have nowadays even among those like him, the anti-Semites. They are all men of recentement, these physiologically impaired and worm-eaten men, a totally quivering earthly kingdom of subterranean revenge, inexhaustible, insatiable in its outburst against the fortunate, and equally in its masquerades of revenge, its pretext for revenge. What would they truly attain, their ultimate, most refined, most sublime triumph in revenge? Undoubtedly if they could succeed in pushing their own wretchedness, all misery in general,

into the consciences of the fortunate, so that the latter one day might begin to be ashamed of their good fortune, and perhaps would say to themselves, it's shameful to be fortunate, there's too much misery. But there could be no greater and more fateful misunderstanding than if, through this process the fortunate, the successful, the powerful in body and spirit should start to doubt their right to happiness. Away with this twisted world, away with this disgraceful softening of feelings that the invalids do not make the healthy sick and that would be such a softening. That should surely be the ruling point of view on earth. But that would require above everything that healthy remains separated from the sick, protected

even from the gaze of sick people so that they don't confuse themselves with the ill. Excuse me to interject. I know he's talking here about psychologically and spiritually sick and so on primarily, but after this pandemic and the measures that were taken against the healthy, the lines are a little bit blurred after the measures that were taken by the old and decrepit and especially the hateful, hysterical middle-aged females who were the worst enforcers of the lockdowns and so on. Anyway, I return to reading, I'm sorry. Or would it be, perhaps, their assignment to attend on the sick, or be their doctors? But they could not misjudge or negate their work more seriously. Something higher must not demean itself by becoming the tool of something lower.

The pathos of distance must keep the work of the two groups forever separate. Their right to exist, the privilege of a bell with perfect ring in comparison to one that is cracked and off-key, is indeed a thousand times greater. They alone are the guarantors of the future. They alone stand as pledge for humanity's future. Whatever they can do, whatever they should do, the sick can never to do and should not to do. But so that they are able to do what only they should do, how can they have the freedom to make themselves a doctor, the consoler, the person who cures for the invalids? If I may interject, he's talking here especially about the mistake the Socratics and Aristotelians made in turning philosophy into a cure for invalids, but I go back to reading.

Well, there are many parallels to modernity too, but I'll get into that some other time. You can think of that yourself. I continue reading. And therefore, let's have fresh air, fresh air. In any case, let's keep away from the neighborhood of all cultural insane asylums and hospitals. And for that, let's have good companionship, our companionship, or loneliness if that's necessary. But by all means, let's stay away from the foul stink of inner rotting and of the secret muck from sick worms. In that way, my friends, we can defend ourselves, at least for a while, against the two nastiest scourges which may be lying in wait precisely for us, against a great disgust with humanity and against a great pity for humanity. End quote. Isn't that wonderful? I hope you enjoyed this show.

I will be right back. Until next time, BAP out.