The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Petrified Hollywood The ossification of empires RADIO FAR SIDE Hollywood began as a battle to the death between Thomas Edison and Georges Méliès, with Edison pirating Méliès’ work, particularly  Le Voyage dans la Lune   (1902), leaving the pioneering French director bankrupt and destitute. Edison is analogous to George Lucas, while Georges Méliès would be Steven Spielberg — the former is a consummate technician whose greatest film was  directed by someone else , and the latter a consummate storyteller and illusionist. Thus, Hollywood was born as a swindle and not much has changed. For folks who follow the laments of  Doomcock ,  Nerdrotic  and  Critical Drinker , much has been made of the decline and fall of Hollywood. The consensus is that Hollywood has Gone Woak and is in the process of Going Broke, and to a greater or lesser extent this is true. Certainly, the giants like Disney, Paramount, 20th Century Fox, and Warner Bros. have nose-dived i...

  Magical Negroes, Eclipses, and the Collapse of Zionism Trying to keep it real DONALD JEFFRIES Last week, we had a total eclipse of the sun. For some reason, human beings always get excited about an event they’ve probably experienced at least a handful of times in their life. But then again, people at least in my neck of the woods, still become spellbound when the snow starts to fall. Maybe it’s a form of childish innocence. Here in the D.C. swamp suburbs, nothing much happened on the day of the eclipse. Well, actually nothing at all happened. It didn’t really even get overcast. My extremely sensitive and high strung golden retriever Riley didn’t seem to sense anything out of the ordinary. We took one of our countless walks outside during the eclipse, and she wasn’t distracted from sniffing various spots of ground, rolling playfully in the grass, or acting as if every person walking, most of them with their own dog in tow, was holding a big check from Publisher’s Clearing House. I...

  Hollywood, Predictive Programming and You: Are We Living in a Science Fiction Movie? By David Gosselin As part of our on-going civilizational short story project, enjoy this latest deep-dive into the magical world of movies and fiction. It’s one of life’s great ironies that fiction often comes closer to truth than anything else. The latest wire, headline, or speech notwithstanding, the greatest stories handed down to us over generations endure in ways that the typical Hollywood blockbuster or major news headlines rarely can. These stories do so because they capture something immutable and timeless about the nature of man, transcending both the time and space we inhabit. And yet, they are perennial reminders of the revelations awaiting within each of us daily. How many other things can we say that about in life? However, while fiction ironically possesses the magical ability to reveal the transcendent and poetical dimensions hidden beneath everyday reality, another kind exists. Un...