AfterPunk

Does it ever get personal? Sometimes. I remember when Ben Shapiro was enjoying a burst of publicity by joining the National Review Never-Trumpers as if he was defending the Holy Grail of real conservatism. What a crock. He thought he’d found the launching pad for a kind of media stardom that transcended party lines. Thought he was going to become David Brinkley or at least William F. Buckley, Jr., Junior. At the time I expressed a desire to debate him, and one of my few Facebook commenters opined that Shapiro would kill me in a debate. “No,” I said. “Fact. I would tear him apart in ten minutes.” The commenter didn’t attempt a subsequent sally. He’s always been a phony. His career subsequent to his spectacular failure to take down Trump proves it. From Wikipedia: He’s supposed to be wunderkind, a kind of intellectual prodigy we should immediately bow down to. I’m the last person to peddle that shibboleth to. I was wunderkind myself. Shapiro graduated from UCLA at the age of 20. Wow. I...

 Patrick Prentice (1943 to 2017) His IMDB entry. Ebullient, brilliant, dying giant who befriended me and  became  my  closest ever confidant, even though I never laid eyes on him .  I have a photo I can’t find right now of Patrick posing with his son in front of a bookshelf crowned with his three Emmies and featuring half a dozen of my books. The pic above is from IMDB.com, which listed his many video productions for the National Geographic. He had traveled the world more than I ever did, he’d thought about a ton of the same things I did, he was ten years my elder, and we came to love each other. When we first spoke he was dying of prostate cancer… [Bear with me here. Blogger or the Internet or Something doesn’t want this post. Two whole sentences just disappeared. I’ll try to recapitulate them.] … but he was still living large, spending long weekends with women he only winked over the phone about because gentlemen never tell. He was also drinking, as he knew I...

They’re just screwing with us now. Breitbart is just a bunch of weed-smoking cynics. Breitbart again. What a grotesque onslaught. It’s called sexual extortion, people, actively pursued by corporate cultural cannibals, corporate media, and clueless patsies like Breitbart. First they bombard us with advertising of women’s products designed to put a spotlight on everything that can go wrong with women’s bodies (actually, EVERYTHING is the mot juste),  so we have to watch them pooping constipatedly at every streaming break, gratefully peeing their Depends, sweating like pigs through menopause — which seems like a relief after the battery of products, shown in engineering detail, required to manage oceans of menstrual flow mechanically and pharmacologically — and battling every kind of ailment from depression to ‘Irritable Bowel Syndrome’ to “awkward” breastage holsterifications (“Call us at 1-800-SAG-TITS”) to cancer cancer cancer drugs to recurrent COVID infections with prescription m...