“Once I knew of about d’Offay’s painting, I could no longer put the behaviour of Printz and King-Nero down to inexperience. The existence of the canvas suggested instead a deliberate policy to reshape Warhol’s achievement, to rewrite art history by denying authenticity of a pivotal work, which they had the strongest evidence of Warhol’s authorship.”

“Stewart liked to look like someone willing to square up and fight in the streets and fields of America, when it came down to it, he was always behind police lines, just toeing the legal line and never actually leading the charge into the fray. And thankfully so.

“I believe that the more extreme elements, like the Proud Boys, saw through this image Stewart tries to portray very quickly and saw him as a poser in that regard.”

ahead of the curve.

The curious & brilliant Gary Lachman was already familiar to me through his rather seminal 2014 biography on Aleister Crowley, the most extensive & revealing on the man I’ve read so far.

As a prolific & respected scholar on occultism, former bass player for Blondie, & a supposed practitioner of “the craft” himself, his knowledge & expertise carry even more weight on the subject.

So when I heard he had written a book on $ump – Dark Star Rising – relating to occultism & black magic, I was instantly allured & wanting to read it as soon as possible.

“In the half-decade following the end of World War II, both McCarthy and Cohn had taken advantage of growing anxieties over social transformations and an uncertain global political situation to secure positions of influence in the emergent national security state. They had portrayed themselves as founts of masculinity, able to undertake the urgent task of defending the United States from enemies foreign and domestic.”

its guaranteed to end in tears. Nuclear tears.

“There’s a reason why monocultures do not exist in nature.”

“How did we go from ‘grab ‘em by the’ – I don’t know if I can even say that word, but you know what I mean – to images of him being [almost another] Jesus. I don’t understand it.

“ – how could a cultured nation which had produced Goethe, Beethoven, Bach, Schiller, Einstein, Kant, Hegel and so many of the world’s greatest thinkers and artists allow itself to be led lemming-like to the precipice of self-destruction by a ragged collective of criminals, misfits, sadists and petty bureaucrats – the very dregs of society?”

chronically overdue, but better late than never I guess? This is an excellent & up-to-date documentary examining U.S. military veterans personnel in domestic extremist/terrorist groups within America, with a special focus on the insurrection/capital storming of Jan sixth.

“All I could think was… we’re in the middle of what a lot of people consider potentially a massive medical scandal we’re seeing detransitioners talk about how let down they’ve been, how irreversible the interventions are, how angry they are that nobody paid any attention to anything else that was going on in their lives.”

“Everybody saw what was happening, but nobody said ‘stop’. Concerns raised are dismissed, complaints attacked. There’s something powerful and disturbing at play” – Dr. Juliet Singer