Nov 25, 2023·edited Nov 25, 2023Liked by Linh Dinh
When I finally emigrated from super-violent armed madhouse America several years back, I experienced a wave of creative inspiration. This rainy, dank island of Ireland had ancient ghosts hidden under every mossy stone, and these endless rivers and streams hinted at enchanted creatures nearby. Fast-forward to today and my mind is again filled with bombs, and war, and mass murder, and strident political craziness. Turns out the old joke about the USA was true: "the only thing worse than living in America and being subjected to its domestic policy, is /not/ living in America and being subjected to its foreign policy."
Clearly, the USA, and UK, and Israel, and the entire West, will never willingly allow anyone, anywhere, a moment of peace. It's like having a cop's bullhorn implanted in your skull, barking frenzied orders and warnings and instructions at random times throughout the day, every day. Contemplation? Verboten!
I once hoped to make meditative films like Bresson or Ozu. Now? I just want that cop to finally shut the hell up that I might die peacefully by some old Irish river, perhaps while remembering a fragment of some poem I read, or maybe even wrote, long ago.
I'm coming to the conclusion that's because the radically diminished consciousness imposed by this culture doesn't allow for that level of artistic expression. It's the same reason contemporary poetry tends to be complete crap. We're all constantly degraded by being kept in a low-grade survival—if not a fight-or-flight—mode of perceptual experience.
Even if you chuck all your gadgets it won't be long before the landlord wolf is at the door and the classic low-grade survival mode of perceptual experience known as capitalism has you grubbing around for a buck. It's pernicious. Recall Bresson's final film 'L'Argent' was an indictment of the evil that is money. Most people can't think of anything else any more. Life is one long financial emergency.
I believe it was Mr. Dinh, our accommodating host, who made the astute and revelatory observation that art no longer exists in contemporary America; only schlock. It was one of those brilliant insights that makes one say, "of course! why couldn't I see that?"
Congratulations on having escaped the American madhouse. I'm leaving for foreign climes next month. If I don't get shot in a drive-by first.
I was first clued into this quite awhile ago by Boston University Film Professor Ray Carney. His 'Path of the Artist' notes collections series is essential:
"Never forget that to be an artist is, above everything else, to be a truth-teller, one of the few left in a culture seized in a death-grip by media-induced fictions and journalistic clichés."
Thank you very much for the introduction to Ray Carney's work and thoughts. I knew nothing about him. His ideas on film making and cinema are very revelatory and provide much to think about.
I guess I've always been more of a book lover than a film aficionado. Many of my favorite films Carney (and yourself) would probably find insipid, perhaps infantile.
But Mr. Carney's insights and information are appreciated, at least by me. Thank you.
With all the easy money floating around and falling into the laps of so many undeserving douchebags, it is sad no one thinks to patronize an artist to make real art of their own for the sole purpose of supporting the work of creating beauty. Life wasn't easy for Mozart but at least the old elites supported the arts in a some way.
Even as late as the early nineties it was possible to work in a bookshop 25 hours a week while maintaining a crappy studio apartment in lower Manhattan and focusing on your art/music. The explosion of rent prices has destroyed more young artists than we will ever know of. The result is the absolute cultural destitution of America now. This is of course spreading everywhere as the large institutional investors buy up all the housing stock and jack rents to the sky.
This is increasingly a machine culture that can't even conceive of what possible importance art could have, beyond its potential utility as a clever investment vehicle. So yes, all that remains is Hollywood militainment, the woke propaganda and narrative management that is Netflix, and the softcore porn of the likes of HBO and that ilk. Someone once said America is best understood as an oil company with a military, and that's really all anyone needs to know about the place.
I will not ask you to forgive Americans, but since I am still here, I feel it is important to see how we got so broken and twisted so that I can do my small part to free at least a few of us to be the moral, dignified beings God intended us to be. You know everything here is synthetic and mass produced. Everything is poisoned. The water is "treated" with a fluorine byproduct if industry. The food is GMO. The hubris of thinking we humans can tinker with DNA and have no irreversible negative consequences! Before the jabs were GMO, they at least had to be polluted with mercury and aluminum and a grab bag of unknown viruses like the carcinogenic SV40 virus that found its way into millions of people via the polio jab. The entertainment certainly had to introduce poison like sexual "liberation", intemperance and the templates to be filled in during times of war to make aggression look like sticking up for the underdog. But it goes deeper than that. Religion itself has been warped and engineered to invert good and evil. In the south it is the Baptists. In California, probably the epicenter of mind control of the world, it is the non-denominational churches recently profiled favorably in a mainstream move called "The Jesus Revolution." Anyone who has read E Michael Jone's "The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit" will recognize the oxymoron in the title of that movie. But most Americans have not. The Israeli Treasury cuts checks (literally) for evangelical Christian leaders in the US to mislead well meaning, sincere Christians into the Satanic genocidal project of Zionism. The psyop Scofield Reference Bible is the theological foundation for this movement. Anyone who wants to understand how people who think they are following Jesus who called for peace but yet support the genocidal conquest of Muslims and FELLOW CHRISTIANS in the Holyland by sociopathic Jews needs to look into the history of this psyop bible and its influence on American Christianity. Of course if there had never been a hubris filled reformation, Christianity could never have gotten this untethered from the teachings of Christ. So that is where I put the beginning of the end. But if you want to understand what allows millions and millions of Americans to be led to become enemies of their own selves and their own progeny, you need to understand the manipulation of Christianity that has allowed it all to happen. According to Jones, it was stated in 1890 in Civilta Cattolica, a Vatican supported publication, that any country which turns away from the laws based on Catholic Church teaching and God's eternal law will end up being ruled by Jews. That has turned out to be the case in the United States of America. They tried to warn us. If only the Vatican had the PR operation that the Zionist movement has. (No unit 8200 like the IDF. I bet the vast majority of those 300,000 reservists called up last month in Israel were put behind a keyboard to deceive and harass people online. ) But fear only God. God will not be mocked. Truth always prevails and the evil Israel is doing today is what is causing its end. That is the cunning of reason or God's hand in human history. May God protect you always, dear Linh Dinh.
America is the worst, of course, but I wish it was just America, or just the Jews, or just Anglos or just Someone, but it isn't. It's all of us. The West (the world?) has lost its way, and it's not just the leaders, but the people too, or we wouldn't have seen billions of masked-up people lining up for an experimental shot. People in the West are not even reproducing, are not forming families, and are gladly joining suicidal movements like "climate activism", "feminism", "transgender rights", etc. Until we go back to Reality, things won't stop.
Speaking of "looking backward..." Mr. Dinh, I am reminded of a (rare and rare gift) linguistics class offered in the Anthropology department of a community college for which I signed up with greedy anticipation lo, many years ago in Sacramento, California. (At Sacramento Community College.)
The text book for the course claimed one of the native South West people (I can't recall whether the Navajo or the Hopi) possessed a language that viewed the world "backward"; that is their orientation was toward the past and not the future as our Western language is. When an elder of the tribe was asked by an anthropologist why this was so his response was, "We know the past, but how can we know the future?" Or something to that effect.
The professor who taught the Linguistics class was a young man from Italy. He was a very nice, approachable guy who spoke English with the most charming Italian accent (kind of like Father Guido Sarduchi on the old Saturday Night Live skit). This professor told us he had come to The States because he met a young woman on-line and they wanted to get married. He told us his father had roundly condemned him (the professor) for traveling to American to marry a woman he hardly knew on such a whim.
The last I heard from the chair of the Anthropology department at that school, the young Italian professor had left but worst of all had abandoned his teaching duties having given no notice!
I sometimes wonder if he returned to Italy perhaps lured back by an evocative Fellini movie?
Not to change the subject but you mentioned Italio Calvino in another post. A great American and a great admirer of Calvino was the late, great Gore Vidal. (Vidal lived in Italy for much of his later life.) I firmly believe if every literate American (and I know, that's a dwindling number) read Mr. Vidal's political essays on contemporary American life published in The Nation magazine (in the 1980s and 90s) we would not be in the pickle we, as a nation, are in. Vidal was the knower who knew. He understood America in general and the machination of Washington like no other, before or since. Rest in Peace, Gore Vidal; you walk among the gods now.
Sure do miss Vidal! Why do we lose people like that while vampires like Dick Cheney and Kissinger live forever? Or did I answer my own question? Heh...
Forgive my gushing patronizing but your June 7, 2023 essay/editorial on your (can one refer to it as a blog or a vlog?) "In the Sacred Ruin" is stunning (and terrifying). Are those real people? Albeit people with exceedingly low I.Q.s. Someone please tell them to read Orwell's "1984" and Huxley's "Brave New World"! For god's sake. Haven't they the slightest clue what they're buying into?!
Technophilia is a very prevalent phenomenon in this culture, especially out on the West Coast where a lot of that stuff emerges from. Sure it's oppressive, but is it Satanic? Well, where I'd once have laughed at that idea it's becoming less funny the further and faster down this tech rabbit hole we plummet. In terms of VR/AR I'd say the evil of it is quite obvious. AI on the other hand for me brings to mind something Chris Hedges once said: "I'm for anything that fucks 'em up." And they are scared AI being released in such an uncontrolled state has perhaps fucked 'em up. So... yay?
What can be said, other than we are terribly cursed to live in extraordinarily interesting times?
Thanks for the kind words about my substack. Some people seem to like that stuff but I honestly don't work hard enough on those essays to think they merit anyone's time. It's basically a throwaway public journal of ideas I consider for a moment and then move on from.
You say so much in so few words, Linh. I almost feel like I am reading a haiku when you "speak." You spotlight the emptiness (and ultimately evil) of so much that passes for discourse in our modern age -- just endless posturing and narcissism everywhere we look, and a thorough abandonment of any intellectual or moral gravity about the most basic aspects of our humanity. Thank you, as always.
3/is the universe here on purpose? could there be a connection between that purpose and the life of our own species? is it possible to improve your own ability to know and to cooperate with that purpose, to the extent possible, in your own place and time?
4/my neighbor had a snake in her house and it freaked her out - the county has an animal control department and the man who came in response to her phone call picked it up with his bare hands
5/caitlin johnstone, an australian writer with an american husband who reads her pieces aloud for her, says "Find someone who loves you the way Israelis love murdering hospital patients and childen" - in reference to a report on the destruction of the indonesian hospital in gaza
6/as i write this president biden is live on tv - talking about the release of hostages held by hamas - and saying a 2 state solution is the only way to ensure peace there in the long term
7/neil young: "i know things are gonna change / i don't know bad or good"
8/the optimist said, enthusiastically: this is the best of all possible worlds!
the pessimist glumly agreed: you may be right
9/famous aviator lindbergh's daughter translated a prayer of st francis of assisi:
for all thy gifts of every kind/we offer praise with quiet mind/be with us, lord, and guide our ways/around the circle of our days
P.S. By the way, I had never read before or even heard of this "Emperor of Ice Cream" poem. I didn't like it. I didn't even understand it. And I'm one of those rare people who actually read and like poetry occasionally. Wallace Stevens, huh? Nah, give me Yeats or T. S. Eliot among the modernists. Or Robert Frost.
Well, you can be modest or even self-effacing about your sub-stack; I still think it's very good. I'm not really qualified to judge writing so I won't attempt to; but subjectively to me, your ideas and insights into contemporary American culture are brilliant.
I didn't come away from your "In the Sacred Ruin" with a sense of well being. Neither did I after reading "1984" and "Brave New World." I took from it (and them) a powerful dose of reality. If I had wanted an augmented, artificial, corporate sponsored sense of well-being I would run out and by one of those $3,500 head sets that those deluded morons gush over.
In this article, Linh mentions Max Igan. - A couple of days ago, in Max's commentary there on the bed next to Max is a cat!!! Such a treat to see that Max has adopted a cat. The video didn't show much of the kitty, except for a few glances here and there. Hopefully, in an upcoming Max video, we will get to see the cat. He mentioned, at the end, something about introducing the cat, but then said that she was sleeping.
When I finally emigrated from super-violent armed madhouse America several years back, I experienced a wave of creative inspiration. This rainy, dank island of Ireland had ancient ghosts hidden under every mossy stone, and these endless rivers and streams hinted at enchanted creatures nearby. Fast-forward to today and my mind is again filled with bombs, and war, and mass murder, and strident political craziness. Turns out the old joke about the USA was true: "the only thing worse than living in America and being subjected to its domestic policy, is /not/ living in America and being subjected to its foreign policy."
Clearly, the USA, and UK, and Israel, and the entire West, will never willingly allow anyone, anywhere, a moment of peace. It's like having a cop's bullhorn implanted in your skull, barking frenzied orders and warnings and instructions at random times throughout the day, every day. Contemplation? Verboten!
I once hoped to make meditative films like Bresson or Ozu. Now? I just want that cop to finally shut the hell up that I might die peacefully by some old Irish river, perhaps while remembering a fragment of some poem I read, or maybe even wrote, long ago.
I like Bresson and Ozu. Almost no one makes films like that anymore.
I'm coming to the conclusion that's because the radically diminished consciousness imposed by this culture doesn't allow for that level of artistic expression. It's the same reason contemporary poetry tends to be complete crap. We're all constantly degraded by being kept in a low-grade survival—if not a fight-or-flight—mode of perceptual experience.
Even if you chuck all your gadgets it won't be long before the landlord wolf is at the door and the classic low-grade survival mode of perceptual experience known as capitalism has you grubbing around for a buck. It's pernicious. Recall Bresson's final film 'L'Argent' was an indictment of the evil that is money. Most people can't think of anything else any more. Life is one long financial emergency.
I believe it was Mr. Dinh, our accommodating host, who made the astute and revelatory observation that art no longer exists in contemporary America; only schlock. It was one of those brilliant insights that makes one say, "of course! why couldn't I see that?"
Congratulations on having escaped the American madhouse. I'm leaving for foreign climes next month. If I don't get shot in a drive-by first.
I was first clued into this quite awhile ago by Boston University Film Professor Ray Carney. His 'Path of the Artist' notes collections series is essential:
"Never forget that to be an artist is, above everything else, to be a truth-teller, one of the few left in a culture seized in a death-grip by media-induced fictions and journalistic clichés."
https://people.bu.edu/rcarney/indievision/pa1.shtml
Thank you very much for the introduction to Ray Carney's work and thoughts. I knew nothing about him. His ideas on film making and cinema are very revelatory and provide much to think about.
I guess I've always been more of a book lover than a film aficionado. Many of my favorite films Carney (and yourself) would probably find insipid, perhaps infantile.
But Mr. Carney's insights and information are appreciated, at least by me. Thank you.
With all the easy money floating around and falling into the laps of so many undeserving douchebags, it is sad no one thinks to patronize an artist to make real art of their own for the sole purpose of supporting the work of creating beauty. Life wasn't easy for Mozart but at least the old elites supported the arts in a some way.
Even as late as the early nineties it was possible to work in a bookshop 25 hours a week while maintaining a crappy studio apartment in lower Manhattan and focusing on your art/music. The explosion of rent prices has destroyed more young artists than we will ever know of. The result is the absolute cultural destitution of America now. This is of course spreading everywhere as the large institutional investors buy up all the housing stock and jack rents to the sky.
This is increasingly a machine culture that can't even conceive of what possible importance art could have, beyond its potential utility as a clever investment vehicle. So yes, all that remains is Hollywood militainment, the woke propaganda and narrative management that is Netflix, and the softcore porn of the likes of HBO and that ilk. Someone once said America is best understood as an oil company with a military, and that's really all anyone needs to know about the place.
I will not ask you to forgive Americans, but since I am still here, I feel it is important to see how we got so broken and twisted so that I can do my small part to free at least a few of us to be the moral, dignified beings God intended us to be. You know everything here is synthetic and mass produced. Everything is poisoned. The water is "treated" with a fluorine byproduct if industry. The food is GMO. The hubris of thinking we humans can tinker with DNA and have no irreversible negative consequences! Before the jabs were GMO, they at least had to be polluted with mercury and aluminum and a grab bag of unknown viruses like the carcinogenic SV40 virus that found its way into millions of people via the polio jab. The entertainment certainly had to introduce poison like sexual "liberation", intemperance and the templates to be filled in during times of war to make aggression look like sticking up for the underdog. But it goes deeper than that. Religion itself has been warped and engineered to invert good and evil. In the south it is the Baptists. In California, probably the epicenter of mind control of the world, it is the non-denominational churches recently profiled favorably in a mainstream move called "The Jesus Revolution." Anyone who has read E Michael Jone's "The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit" will recognize the oxymoron in the title of that movie. But most Americans have not. The Israeli Treasury cuts checks (literally) for evangelical Christian leaders in the US to mislead well meaning, sincere Christians into the Satanic genocidal project of Zionism. The psyop Scofield Reference Bible is the theological foundation for this movement. Anyone who wants to understand how people who think they are following Jesus who called for peace but yet support the genocidal conquest of Muslims and FELLOW CHRISTIANS in the Holyland by sociopathic Jews needs to look into the history of this psyop bible and its influence on American Christianity. Of course if there had never been a hubris filled reformation, Christianity could never have gotten this untethered from the teachings of Christ. So that is where I put the beginning of the end. But if you want to understand what allows millions and millions of Americans to be led to become enemies of their own selves and their own progeny, you need to understand the manipulation of Christianity that has allowed it all to happen. According to Jones, it was stated in 1890 in Civilta Cattolica, a Vatican supported publication, that any country which turns away from the laws based on Catholic Church teaching and God's eternal law will end up being ruled by Jews. That has turned out to be the case in the United States of America. They tried to warn us. If only the Vatican had the PR operation that the Zionist movement has. (No unit 8200 like the IDF. I bet the vast majority of those 300,000 reservists called up last month in Israel were put behind a keyboard to deceive and harass people online. ) But fear only God. God will not be mocked. Truth always prevails and the evil Israel is doing today is what is causing its end. That is the cunning of reason or God's hand in human history. May God protect you always, dear Linh Dinh.
America is the worst, of course, but I wish it was just America, or just the Jews, or just Anglos or just Someone, but it isn't. It's all of us. The West (the world?) has lost its way, and it's not just the leaders, but the people too, or we wouldn't have seen billions of masked-up people lining up for an experimental shot. People in the West are not even reproducing, are not forming families, and are gladly joining suicidal movements like "climate activism", "feminism", "transgender rights", etc. Until we go back to Reality, things won't stop.
Speaking of "looking backward..." Mr. Dinh, I am reminded of a (rare and rare gift) linguistics class offered in the Anthropology department of a community college for which I signed up with greedy anticipation lo, many years ago in Sacramento, California. (At Sacramento Community College.)
The text book for the course claimed one of the native South West people (I can't recall whether the Navajo or the Hopi) possessed a language that viewed the world "backward"; that is their orientation was toward the past and not the future as our Western language is. When an elder of the tribe was asked by an anthropologist why this was so his response was, "We know the past, but how can we know the future?" Or something to that effect.
The professor who taught the Linguistics class was a young man from Italy. He was a very nice, approachable guy who spoke English with the most charming Italian accent (kind of like Father Guido Sarduchi on the old Saturday Night Live skit). This professor told us he had come to The States because he met a young woman on-line and they wanted to get married. He told us his father had roundly condemned him (the professor) for traveling to American to marry a woman he hardly knew on such a whim.
The last I heard from the chair of the Anthropology department at that school, the young Italian professor had left but worst of all had abandoned his teaching duties having given no notice!
I sometimes wonder if he returned to Italy perhaps lured back by an evocative Fellini movie?
Not to change the subject but you mentioned Italio Calvino in another post. A great American and a great admirer of Calvino was the late, great Gore Vidal. (Vidal lived in Italy for much of his later life.) I firmly believe if every literate American (and I know, that's a dwindling number) read Mr. Vidal's political essays on contemporary American life published in The Nation magazine (in the 1980s and 90s) we would not be in the pickle we, as a nation, are in. Vidal was the knower who knew. He understood America in general and the machination of Washington like no other, before or since. Rest in Peace, Gore Vidal; you walk among the gods now.
Sure do miss Vidal! Why do we lose people like that while vampires like Dick Cheney and Kissinger live forever? Or did I answer my own question? Heh...
Forgive my gushing patronizing but your June 7, 2023 essay/editorial on your (can one refer to it as a blog or a vlog?) "In the Sacred Ruin" is stunning (and terrifying). Are those real people? Albeit people with exceedingly low I.Q.s. Someone please tell them to read Orwell's "1984" and Huxley's "Brave New World"! For god's sake. Haven't they the slightest clue what they're buying into?!
Technophilia is a very prevalent phenomenon in this culture, especially out on the West Coast where a lot of that stuff emerges from. Sure it's oppressive, but is it Satanic? Well, where I'd once have laughed at that idea it's becoming less funny the further and faster down this tech rabbit hole we plummet. In terms of VR/AR I'd say the evil of it is quite obvious. AI on the other hand for me brings to mind something Chris Hedges once said: "I'm for anything that fucks 'em up." And they are scared AI being released in such an uncontrolled state has perhaps fucked 'em up. So... yay?
What can be said, other than we are terribly cursed to live in extraordinarily interesting times?
Thanks for the kind words about my substack. Some people seem to like that stuff but I honestly don't work hard enough on those essays to think they merit anyone's time. It's basically a throwaway public journal of ideas I consider for a moment and then move on from.
You say so much in so few words, Linh. I almost feel like I am reading a haiku when you "speak." You spotlight the emptiness (and ultimately evil) of so much that passes for discourse in our modern age -- just endless posturing and narcissism everywhere we look, and a thorough abandonment of any intellectual or moral gravity about the most basic aspects of our humanity. Thank you, as always.
1/maybe it was tolstoy who said "god knows the truth, but waits"
2/analysis of the stevens poem at wikipedia seems pretty good to me
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor_of_Ice-Cream
3/is the universe here on purpose? could there be a connection between that purpose and the life of our own species? is it possible to improve your own ability to know and to cooperate with that purpose, to the extent possible, in your own place and time?
4/my neighbor had a snake in her house and it freaked her out - the county has an animal control department and the man who came in response to her phone call picked it up with his bare hands
5/caitlin johnstone, an australian writer with an american husband who reads her pieces aloud for her, says "Find someone who loves you the way Israelis love murdering hospital patients and childen" - in reference to a report on the destruction of the indonesian hospital in gaza
6/as i write this president biden is live on tv - talking about the release of hostages held by hamas - and saying a 2 state solution is the only way to ensure peace there in the long term
7/neil young: "i know things are gonna change / i don't know bad or good"
8/the optimist said, enthusiastically: this is the best of all possible worlds!
the pessimist glumly agreed: you may be right
9/famous aviator lindbergh's daughter translated a prayer of st francis of assisi:
for all thy gifts of every kind/we offer praise with quiet mind/be with us, lord, and guide our ways/around the circle of our days
'There are societies where intellectuals, professors and pundits are content to regurgitate, constantly, other people’s vomit.'
Sounds like the British House of Commons for which we shall shortly 'vote' up or down...
Thank you Mr.Dinh for once again 'sharing' your brilliant apercus. You are like a kind of ancient Greek lavatory of the public 'mind'. Well done.
Magnificent, thanks Linh.
P.S. By the way, I had never read before or even heard of this "Emperor of Ice Cream" poem. I didn't like it. I didn't even understand it. And I'm one of those rare people who actually read and like poetry occasionally. Wallace Stevens, huh? Nah, give me Yeats or T. S. Eliot among the modernists. Or Robert Frost.
Is Wallace Stevens' poem about the importance of simple experience appreciated fully in the now? Am I high?
sadly lovely
Well, you can be modest or even self-effacing about your sub-stack; I still think it's very good. I'm not really qualified to judge writing so I won't attempt to; but subjectively to me, your ideas and insights into contemporary American culture are brilliant.
I didn't come away from your "In the Sacred Ruin" with a sense of well being. Neither did I after reading "1984" and "Brave New World." I took from it (and them) a powerful dose of reality. If I had wanted an augmented, artificial, corporate sponsored sense of well-being I would run out and by one of those $3,500 head sets that those deluded morons gush over.
In this article, Linh mentions Max Igan. - A couple of days ago, in Max's commentary there on the bed next to Max is a cat!!! Such a treat to see that Max has adopted a cat. The video didn't show much of the kitty, except for a few glances here and there. Hopefully, in an upcoming Max video, we will get to see the cat. He mentioned, at the end, something about introducing the cat, but then said that she was sleeping.
i had cats - one was named pau - imagine the following as a rap rhyme
This is your Pau - what a great cat
Enjoy your Pau and love him like that
Groove with the rhythm, bopping down the block
move his paws and tail as he go hip-hop
Purr at the neighbor, purr at the sky
Life is a blessing - why ask why
Energy moving his fur and bones -
This is his life - this is his home
Something good happen - maybe soon
Maybe next week - maybe next June
Count all your blessings - let go of strife
This is your Pau - treasure his life