Christopher Bray calls Daniel Blue’s forthcoming (in June) biography of the young philosopher The Making of Friedrich Nietzsche: The Quest for Identity, 1844-1869 “lacklustre,” but since he’s wrong about the survival of the photo of military Fred with sword, who knows what else he’s wrong about?

(The current price quoted by Amazon is awfully steep. Let’s hope that a better deal becomes available when the book is actually released.)

Had you been down at Naumburg barracks early in March 1867, you might have seen a figure take a running jump at a horse and thud down front first on the pommel with a yelp. This was Friedrich Nietzsche, midway through his 22nd year and, thanks to a sickly childhood, no stranger to hospitals. The doctors were obliged to operate, and Nietzsche lost several ribs and part of his sternum, leaving him not so much pigeon-chested as angle-grinded. Once recovered, he celebrated by having his picture taken in full uniform, sabre at the ready, glaring at the ‘miserable photographer’ like a warrior set for battle. Alas for comedy, this portrait is lost to history.

Daniel Blue has no such regrets. He is convinced the photo would have been ‘unflattering’ — though nowhere near as unflattering as the picture Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche painted of her brother after his death in 1900. …

Josh Karp, in Vanity Fair, recounts the story of another never-finished Orson Welles masterpiece film, The Other Side of the Wind. Imagine a film about a troubled director in which Orson Welles collaborated with both John Huston and Peter Bogdanovich. What could possibly go wrong?

In early 1970, director Orson Welles returned to Hollywood after more than a decade in Europe, and later that year he began work on his innovative comeback movie—The Other Side of the Wind.

The movie was the story of a legendary director named Jake Hannaford, who returns to Hollywood from years of semi-exile in Europe with plans to complete work on his own innovative comeback movie—also entitled The Other Side of the Wind.

Welles said it wasn’t autobiographical.

The story line of The Other Side of the Wind was supposed to take place during a single day. At one point, Welles intended to shoot it in eight weeks. Instead, it took six years, and the film remains unfinished nearly four decades later.

Based on a script Welles revised nightly, the film was financed principally by the Shah of Iran’s brother-in-law and offered possibly one last shot at topping Citizen Kane. The making of The Other Side of the Wind began as a tale of art imitating life, but ultimately morphed into life imitating art, on a set where it sometimes became difficult to tell the difference between the movie and real life.

During production many people asked Welles what his movie was all about. To his star, John Huston, he once replied, “It’s a film about a bastard director…. It’s about us, John. It’s a film about us.”

David Goodman aka Spengler finds plenty of cause for gloom in this year’s international election season.

Marx was wrong when he quipped that great history appears twice, first as tragedy and again as farce. He forgot surrealism.

Who would have expected the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to present them themselves in the personages of a billionaire reality-show star, an aging Vermont hippy, a Glock-toting Austrian rightist and a British-born Pakistani who “sucked up to extremist Muslims” through most of his career. I refer to the presumptive Republican nominee for president, the second-place candidate for the Democratic nomination, the likely next president of Austria and the just-elected Mayor of London. These are portents of the future, like comets or two-headed calves.

The lives of perhaps two billion people around the world are going pear-shaped, and the great battles of our time are not about the allocation of scarce resources, but of abundant misery. …

The Trump voters and the Sanders voters have a common view of the world, which is that someone else must suffer for them to benefit; they differ on who should pay (Chinese and Mexicans vs. the wealthy). No-one will tell the American Millennials that they were sold a trillion-dollar fraud in the form of university education, and no-one will tell their aging parents that never again will Americans be paid for being Americans. No-one will tell the Europeans that it doesn’t really matter what immigration policy they choose: if they do not have children, soon enough their lands will belong to migrants from Africa and the Middle East. In politics, it doesn’t pay to be the bearer of evil tidings, as in Robert Frost’s poem: “As for his evil tidings, Belshazzar’s overthrow,/Why hurry to tell Belshazzar What soon enough he would know?”

Kong Wall

Jeff Goldstein does a better job than Scott Adams in unpacking the hermeneutics of Trumpism, and while Adams seems to hint that we ought to smile and enjoy the ride, Jeff Goldstein has a much better solution in mind.

In Richard Brautigan’s Sombrero Fallout, the titular Mexican hat appears inexplicably in the center of a small town, having recently descended from the Heavens like some empty, woven-straw signifier. To those inclined to map teleological import to such an event, the hat is much like a Jesus-faced pancake or a Central-American statue of the Virgin Mary weeping blood; or perhaps it’s the mark of an alien visitation, a gift from some far-flung taco-loving race of slightly zany oversized hat-sharers; or else it’s part of some sinister government psy-op to gauge how a town, confronted by such a conveniently fraught occurrence, will react to an epistemological crisis made frighteningly immediate by the appearance of an unclaimed, unmanned Bandito bonnet. It is, in short, to them a sign rather than a signifier — and as such, it must be reacted to, made to mean something. The plan of the town’s political bosses is to control the framing, to own the narrative it must first invent and then defend. The pols seek to determine meaning and browbeat recalcitrant apostates into joining in a united front proclaiming the portent of this sudden sombrero — the hope being that to define the event is to control it and somehow constrain its trajectory.

— Which may just be the perfect metaphor for the Trump “movement” and the current RNC campaign to validate it — from Reince to Newt to Noonan to whatever program it is that runs the Hannity talking points generator FNC props up all Max Headroom-like on the TV screen most nights — save the nagging regret that Trump’s YUGE Skull Island Kong Wall, had it been built just a little sooner, would have kept the filthy, rapey Mexican hat out of an American street to begin with. Because Trump, like that sombrero, is an outsized blank slate dropped in front of a gawking crowd, a gibbering physical signifier to which the hopes of needy and largely pig-ignorant voters have been pinned, the whole mess then punctuated with a signature red ball cap.

Read the whole thing.

Bialystock and Bloom were behind the whole thing!

Saturniidae caterpillar

There occurred a bizarre psychologically-inexplicable transference phenomenon by which voters distressed and made unhappy by the results of Barack Obama’s performance and leftist democrat policies, turned in fury on the opposition leadership, blaming it for supposedly being in cahoots with the enemy, and then ran off with an unprincipled, non-conservative celebrity clown with a lengthy record of supporting liberal democrats.

In the primary contests this year, there was little voter interest in returning to Republican pro-growth, pro-freedom, economic restoration policies. What the yobbo voter wanted, it turned out, was essentially Fascism: a blend of Socialism and Nationalism.

The new primary voter ecstatically opted for a crude, loud, and abrasive leader (most decidedly not a gentleman) unburdened by ethical inhibitions, conventional speech taboos, or even good manners, who rather than promising to dismantle government, affirmed the Welfare State safety net, and promised special governmental protection for the working-class voter’s particular special interests above the general interest. To the American worker he promised to give protection from labor competition domestically through a crackdown on immigration (Nativism) and –a bit late!– protection from labor competition abroad via tariff barriers, trade wars, and specific presidential intimidation of companies considering lower costs by exporting jobs.

Trump won his massive and enthusiastic following by appealing frankly and openly to crude selfishness, to class animosity, to anti-intellectualism, and to dim and brutish nationalistic hostilities: hostility toward immigrants, hostility toward foreign labor and business competition, and even hostility toward American military alliances with other countries and toward America’s international role and international responsibilities.

Donald Trump succeeded precisely by appealing to the worst prejudices, the worst ideas, and the worst attitudes of the American electorate. And he successfully won their hearts and enthusiastic support by fighting dirty: by shamelessly lying, by contradicting himself and reversing statements and positions, by bullying and name-calling, by interrupting, and by generally misbehaving.

Trump turned the Republican Primary Contest into a combination of TV reality show and professional wrestling extravaganza. Trump’s characteristic man-bites-dog behavior kept the attention of the dim-bulb media fixated on him, and delivered an estimated $2 billion in free publicity. And the unhappy Republican voter ate it all up.

Donald Trump built a successful candidacy essentially by the grossest kind of inversion of values. He appealed to voters by breaching good manners and decorum and by an extraordinarily open display of contempt for civility, integrity, and principles, with wheedling, limitless braggadocio, and flattery piled high on top. It seems possible that he could go on to win the presidency by outdoing even the democrats in appealing to the basest and most contemptible aspects of human nature. You can’t blame any Republican leadership failure for any of this. You can only blame what Isaiah Berlin used to speak of as “the crooked timber of Humanity.”

Principled Republicans should not unite behind Donald Trump. What we need to do now is to stop Donald Trump and to nip everything he stands for in the bud.

Yesterday The Donald got in a simultaneous commercial and political plug.

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Whyn Lewis, Through the Night, 1994