‘Wag the Dog’ Still Wags the Dog
When “Wag the Dog” hit theaters on Christmas 1997, nothing could have seemed more cleverly prescient. About a fake war staged to draw focus from a first-term U.S. president’s sex scandal, the film was released a month before then-President Clinton was accused of having sex with intern Monica Lewinsky and an Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan was subsequently bombed by the U.S. Viewed ten years later, this dark comedy seemed even more relevant. Though the world was verging on an economic meltdown after the collapse of the subprime mortgage market, the media was distracted by Britney Spears’ nervous breakdown and Brangelina’s growing brood. Only today does this adaptation of Larry Beinhart’s novel American Hero read as depressingly dated — if only because we have entered a new era of fake news and governmental deception. Continue Reading →
Mercury Retrograde Casualty
I was so into this Mercury Retrograde. Delightful! I crowed. It’s a trickster, engineering sparkly run-ins, bewitching us with time-travel adventures! Then tough-love Saturn entered big-daddy Capricorn on December 19 and it’s been a shite show, not a star shower.
Website hacked, wages garnished for unpaid taxes that in fact I paid, transportation black holes, clusterfuck communications, unseemly encounters applying exclamation points to long-simmering emotional run-on sentences. Then there’s the U.S. Plutocracy taking its reality-TV larceny to new let-em-eat cake levels: Climate change denial. Orwellian language control. The destruction of national monuments and healthcare for millions. Emboldened Nazis. Stolen Supreme Court seat. Crushed net neutrality. Cabinet departments handed to people bent on destroying them. Tax welfare for corporations.*
Am I learning? Yes, motherrrrrr, I am. But these lessons are proving as charmless as a Masshole when the Sox are losing. The good news: today’s winter solstice is sure to puncture this overarching darkness. In the meantime you can find me cowering with Gracie beneath the covers with champagne, hot sauce, and oranges from 
Rachel, laughing like a hyena with (not at) the brilliant sorceressery of Broad City and trying valiantly not to check my phone. Bright light to you, loved ones.
*Hat tip to Shawn Levy for breaking it down.
Bourbon Is Kosher, Right?
I have no menorah candles and am rampantly under the weather and just got my periodic table and blew out all the electricity in my house and am biting my knuckles over the Alabama election and and and. Still I feel it. The light in the dark is always present, and miracles are everywhere we look, even America 5778. Chag Urim Sameach.
art: Joyce Dell
Update: In a true Chanukah miracle, Doug Jones won! Ain’t no dreidel party like a fuck-you-GOP party!