“If you must get in trouble, do it at the Chateau Marmont.” – Columbia Pictures founder and CEO Harry Cohn to young stars William Holden and Glenn Ford 

“On some days it seems like I have lived at the Chateau Marmont for half my life. There is blood on these walls, and some of it is mine. … I am not just liked at the Chateau, I am well-liked. I have important people thrown out or black-listed on a whim. Nobody from the Schwarzenegger organization, for instance, can even get a drink at the Chateau. They are verboten.” – Hunter S. Thompson (Doomed Love At the Taco Stand, 1997)

It was some time after noon at the Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood and I was shitting in a wooden men’s bathroom stall just off the hotel’s lobby when I read on Bluesky that Charlie Kirk had been shot in the neck.

“Huh. This is going to be stupid shitstorm,” I thought to myself, and kept scrolling. I forwarded the news to a few people, finished my gastrointestinal business and returned to the lobby lounge to wait for our ruinously expensive suite to be ready. Sitting nearby was one of those eccentric chatty characters that are common to the Chateau Marmont during daylight hours, and he soon launched into an hour of delightful wide-ranging conversation about many fascinating topics, none of which were the assassination of our mad oaf-king president’s favorite reactionary charlatan podcast host.

Let’s stop right here. Before you groan and eye-roll at the thought yet another think-piece about that dishonest asshole’s murder, or What It All Means or some such shit, I promise you I’ve said all I want to say about him. My postscript is that it’s a shame Christopher Hitchens didn’t live long to publicly humiliate Kirk and his fraudulent “debate” of teenagers. It could have saved Kirk’s life by ending his white nationalist campus barnstorming grift and spared the rest of us the hypocritical canonization of what was a racist, fascist douchebag who valorized his own sinister bullshit.

“All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.” — Tennessee Williams

Since his murder (and yes, it was undeserved), there’s been a cascading series of increasingly ugly and stupid events courtesy of the repulsive Trump regime’s sweaty thirst to illegally occupy Democratic-controlled cities with federalized Army National Guard and active-duty U.S. military forces. Grotesque presidential vizier and fanatical sectarian bigot Grima Wormtongue Stephen Miller and alcoholic wife-beater Defense Secretary “Whiskey” Pete Hegseth (the idiot bastard wino son of Col. Jessup and Maj. Frank Burns) appear to be fulfilling the Confederate fantasy of occupying Northern cities with troops from Southern states. At its core, it’s a continuation of our Civil War that didn’t actually end at Appomattox Court House 160 years ago. It simply went from hot to cold war, and now is heating up again.

Now we also have:

• A leaked Young Republicans group chat that’s filled with racial and ethnic slurs, calls for gas chambers and slavery – rhetoric defended by the vice president
• Trump seeking to expand our ongoing and literal ethnic cleansing by restricting refugee immigration to white Europeans and South Africans while seizing anyone that looks vaguely brown and sending them to concentration camps before deportation to random harsh places
• A likely invasion of Venezuela in the works amid continued extrajudicial murder of alleged drug trafficking boats in the Caribbean without a shred of evidence provided
• Trump expanding his illegal targeting of political foes
• The right-wing Supreme Court appears eager to roll back the Civil Rights era’s progress by decimating the Voting Rights Act to ensure there are more white Republicans in Congress and to cement white one-party rule over America
• Trump, in one of his illegal imperial decrees, ordered cops or troops to arrest anyone that burns the U.S. flag, which long has been determined to be an act of free speech
• The American people are being forced to give the imbecile Libertarian clown president of Argentina a cool $40 billion bailout (while slashing critical benefits for Americans) because it turns out, as every sane expert said, Libertarian economics are childish bullshit
• Some of the dumber bootlickers want to illegally put Trump’s hideous likeness on a new dollar coin
• ICE intentionally shot a pastor in the face with pepper balls after then attacked the peaceful crowd, and the regime defended shooting the Presbyterian minister with demonstrable lies
• My hometown Cleveland Browns not only suck, they’re moving out of the city into a hideous subterranean stadium (it looks like a suburban mega car dealership or a community college student union) by the airport that’s being financed by taxpayers who had no say in the matter

There’s been a bunch of other corrupt, insane, illegal shit coming out of this fraudulent administration. Our country is currently fucked. Or, if you’re one of millions of bigoted fascist mediocrities skittering about, things are going great. The line is pretty bright on which side you’re on.

So far, only a thin line of federal judges has held back the worst of this regime’s authoritarian impulses to reshape the United States into a permanent Confederate Gilead, but how long that resistance lasts is anyone’s guess. The Supreme Court majority is willing to grant Trump just about anything he desires and almost certainly will weigh in soon on Trump’s intent to send troops into cities that simply are not the ravaged war zones he and his cronies insist they are in lie after demonstrable lie.

Our ignorant and incurious Confederate felon president (and credibly suspected child molester ring participant and longtime sexual assault monster) McDonald Trump stood in front of U.S. Navy personnel a few weeks ago and said all sorts of insane shit that would instantly disqualify anyone else in history from the office, along with his usual senile ramblings and grievances. “We have to take care of this little gnat that’s on our shoulder called the Democrats,” he said at one point to clapping sailors, which is alarming in more ways than I care to list.

That’s atop his Oct. 3 retweet of a post calling Democrats “the party of hate, evil, and Satan” which drew minimal media interest in the wake of the demands from the right and their centrist allies for political rhetoric to be toned down amid violence.

It was almost a decade ago that Trump called journalists – which I once was and maybe still am – the “enemy of the people.” And because I am an anti-fascist, I also am now a domestic terrorist. I vote for Democrats (as a social democrat with limited choices), so I guess I am also a Satanist despite my atheism.

Oh, well. As the Rev. William Joel once famously sang, “I’d rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints. The sinners are much more fun.”

There’s a national No Kings rally on Saturday. I’m attending. Are you? The Trump regime has taken every opportunity to denounce the rallies as hating America, communists, pro-Hamas, a paid-off fake movement, and whatever else their small smooth brains can gin up. (Aside: Where the fuck is my Soros money these Nazis keep on about?)

Why are the administration’s loyal MAGA stormtroopers all whining in front of TV cameras about the No Kings rally? Because they’re nervous. Resistance is growing and is starting to seep into the mainstream. Much of America is filled with people uninterested in politics despite politics affecting every aspect of their lives. And many are starting to notice and get uncomfortable or pissed at what the regime is doing. There’s fear within MAGA’s ranks because they understand a mass protest movement will bring them down.

Bullies bully out of insecurity. They punch down out of insecurity. Trumpism is the most insecure political movement in history.

There’s also criticism of No Kings rallies from the far Left, which spends most of its time making memes and lecturing everyone else that They’re Not Doing Protest Right. Conservatives want only polite protest hidden far from public view – castrating the entire point of protest – and Leftists bitch and moan that it’s not being done properly without ever actually explaining what they want protest to look like. Some of them really do not like the people dressed in whimsical inflatable suits that apparently deflect gas pellets shot at them by cops. Critics say it’s performative – the same critics that I do not see engaged in anything themselves.

The No Kings events are for mass mobilization, solidarity, and intended to be a visual representation of the size and strength of the movement opposed to the corrupt Trump regime’s Confederate fascism. They’re not intended to be direct-action operations against ICE. Most rallies on Saturday will be in places that are not ICE hot spots. And it’s insane to expect millions of people, including a heavy contingent of Boomers and older Gen Xers, to pull off some French 75 operation against the state’s mindless and massively armed brutes.

The regime wants any excuse to starting killing protesters and labeling everyone a domestic terrorist. That’s why they bristle at antifa, which is simply antifascist and not an actual organization — it’s a bogeyman manufactured by MAGA as a pretext for its own Reichstag Fire fantasies. Which makes them inherently fascist even as they deny the classic fascist actions and rhetoric they’re deploying every goddamned day. Texas is planning to have the National Guard deployed to try to intimidate the No Kings attendees there. Hence, peaceful mass protest – and eventually, wide-ranging strikes – is the answer for now.

As a teenager, I watched millions of people gather peacefully in Eastern Europe, and all they did was topple 45 years of oppressive Soviet dominance in those nations. And there were people dancing and in costumes in 1989, and a fearsome totalitarian monolith simply crumble without a shot fired. Whimsy, satire, and scorn are things totalitarians cannot abide. Seeing people dancing in inflatable frog costumes drives fascists mad because it makes their armed troops look foolish. Fascism is obsessed with aesthetics and cannot tolerate being mocked, so they become furious with their rhetoric and are willing to turn their praetorians loose to gas and beat and maybe murder unarmed crowds (or to plant agitators within those crowds to spark violence).

It’s why the regime is forced to tell feeble lies about Portland and Chicago and L.A. being ravaged warzones. It’s the Orwell line about trusting only what The Party tells you and not to trust your own eyes and ears.

Intimidation is a tool of a weak, so insecure regimes must always project force lest the public notice that the emperor and his entire court of demented Nazi freaks are naked, wrinkly, weird, and pathetic. These vindictive clowns considered themselves the only “real” Americans.

We face a long road to get back to our previous path where progress was being made toward becoming a genuine pluralist democracy that lives up to the noble but unfulfilled ideas in its founding documents. Battles will be lost. More bullshit is coming. But the fight never ends. Maybe one day, a tragic day, we are forced to turn to rifles and Molotov cocktails, but let’s hope we peacefully topple these sadistic shitheads long before that. If not, it’s my unwavering belief that good people eventually emerge victoriously in revolution. Maybe that’s Pollyannaish, but I refuse to believe an openly evil, corrupt, and astoundingly stupid and ferociously bungling regime is capable of lasting.

We shall see, and I hope I see all of you at rallies on Saturday and in the future. Take selfies so your grandkids and future generations see that you stood up against evil and told it to fuck off.

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In other news, I started therapy, which I wrote about in my last essay that now feels a million years old. And the vacuum cleaner that was central to that essay overheated and nearly exploded the other days, which led to me driving to the Dyson store and the discovery that it’s closed on Mondays. My patience, already so thin as to be two-dimensional, is on life support not covered by insurance.

The vacuum did get repaired (huzzah!), but then my beloved cat Marti got expensively sick. She’s on the mend, thankfully. After that, my college sophomore son needed emergency minor surgery yesterday. He, too, is on the mend. I feel barely held together by the thinnest of cheap threads.

Being angry (and helpless frustrated and disappointed) all the time isn’t fun nor healthy, no matter how righteous the anger. My next therapy visit is supposed to begin the process of coping strategies and possible chemicals. I’m deeply unsure about taking anything because I don’t want to lose my edge during my nation’s worst political crisis since 1860. But I also do not want to always feel like this. My regular doctor gave me a Trazodone prescription to help me sleep. I had been taking 20mg weed edibles to loosen up and sleep, and they work magnificently but with one drawback: the munchies.

When I get stoned, I lose tenseness and anger, but holy shit do I get hungry. That’s bad for me because, as my most recent blood panels show, my A1C and glucose are dangerously high. And I guess that’s my problem – being dangerously high. I work out three times a week and walk several miles on non-gym days, but the munchies ruin all of that.

Aside: I’m ardently against the exploitation and toxicity of capitalism, but I’d set that aside for the person that invents munchie-proof gummies.

Until that miracle occurs, I need to deny myself the pleasure and relief that edibles provide. Raw-dogging life in the 2020s is rough, even from a place of privilege. Seeing people that look like me doing the same evil shit that they have been doing for centuries is an incredible downer. It’s take people like me – mediocre white middle-aged men – to educate and shame, if necessary, all the other mediocre white middle-aged men (and younger and older) into not being dreadful assholes.

We need to teach more people about John Brown, who did nothing wrong, and it says everything about America that he was executed for treason, but Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis were not. Did you know there are still hundreds of American grade schools named for Lee and Davis, but not one for Brown? That’s extremely American. So is our government’s defense of white supremacy.

It’s all so fucking exhausting.

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Speaking of aging radical stoners, I saw Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film “One Battle After Another” (OBAA) recently and it was the first time in my life I got angry in a theater. Not at the movie, which should be a lock for Best Picture and is arguably PTA’s greatest directorial achievement thus far. No, I was angry because what was on the screen is occurring right now in our streets. It felt as much a documentary as a Pynchon caper and action flick, which it is.

I’m not going to spoil anything. Go see it. Encourage everyone you know to see it. Get mad. Yes, there are some laughs, but as my film student son noted, the humor in past Paul Thomas Anderson movies (particularly in his last Pynchon adaption, Inherent Vice) stems from characters acting seriously in absurd situations while in OBAA, what is happening in the movie isn’t ridiculous. It’s here, now, outside our doors and will eventually come for all of us.

The scenes of oafish sadists in camouflage fatigues and masks and tactical gear assaulting unarmed protestors, rounding up brown people, and using sinister methods to intimidate and break resistance is all too real. Yet it was filmed over a year ago, before Trump 2.0 arrived to darken our lives. Yes, violent migrant round-ups are nothing new, but PTA captured the widespread Trumpian brutality that’s been ratcheted up on a grand scale. It slyly shows us that the barbaric oppression, marginalization, and dehumanization that non-whites in America have endured for centuries has now reached white people, too. The imperial boomerang theorized by Aimé Césaire and Hannah Arendt was inevitable.

Chicago cops got tear gassed by ICE goons, who have attacked American citizens, protestors, bystanders, children and even infants. The raid on a Chicago apartment building, which used helicopters and saw U.S. citizens including children zip-tied, was a military act on an unarmed civilian population. They even separated brown from Black people they rounded up.

It could have been a scene in OBAA. Due process and even human rights are merely speed bumps to be ignored in the name of protecting the Fatherland and protecting white heritage and culture and blood purity and all the other Third Reich rhetoric and imagery shit out by this administration.

Pynchon and Anderson use absurdist humor, such as their last collaboration, the underappreciated “Inherent Vice.” I enjoy dark comedy, but during OBAA others in the theater laughed a lot more than I did. I just couldn’t find the gags as funny as they were intended. A few moments made me chuckle, particularly as I closely identified with Leonardo DiCaprio’s middle-aged stoner ex-revolutionary character. DiCaprio is a few months younger than me, and his character’s radicalized middle-aged disillusionment is also mine. Viva la revolución, etc.

The movie’s third act lifted my spirits a bit. It reminds us that no matter how grim things get, the fight goes on. The next generation picks up the torch. I’m reminded of the recent talk between Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ezra Klein that vividly illustrates two mindsets – winning elections and power no matter the cost and which vulnerable groups are sacrificed versus trying to represent the people. Coates explained how he keeps going even when the forces of good are losing to the immense power of hate:

I’m Ta-Nehisi Coates, I’m the writer, I’m the individual, right? But I am part of something larger, and I’ve always felt myself as part of something larger. I have a tradition, I have ancestry, I have heritage. What that means is that I do whatever I do within the time that I have in my life, whatever time I’m gifted with, and much of what I do is built on what other people did before them.

Then, after that, I leave the struggle where I leave it, and hopefully, it’s in a better place. Oftentimes it’s not. That’s the history in fact. And then my progeny, they pick it up, and they keep it going.

I take solace in that even as I struggle with despair and frustration. As someone that’s studied history his entire life, I often see parallels and our current era feels like 1940-41 when the Allies were taking hit after hit, losing battles and countries fell to the Axis. Millions died in that darkness, and it felt hopeless to many as fascism was globally ascendent – the great German-Jewish intellectual Walter Benjamin killed himself when he couldn’t flee to Spain in 1940.

I’d give Anderson’s film all the stars, yet it’s not one I want to see again, at least not until we’re on the other side of our current national crisis. It’ll certainly get its Criterion Collection edition, and I’ll buy it. I hope I am able to laugh at it by then.

Now let us speak of better things and keep passing open windows.

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So how did I spend my summer, aside from anger and munchies? I don’t remember that much of it until September when we took a trip out West for nine days starting with a flight to the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. The city has become grotesquely more expensive since I last visited a decade ago, which has contributed to a perilous drop in tourism. Even the hotel’s lazy river charged $35 for a pool float that was free ten years ago.

After Vegas, we drove through the Mojave Desert, from the Hoover Dam to Palm Spring to Los Angeles – a seemingly endless journey on U.S. 95 and Interstate 10 through empty vast tracts of deadly nothing under pretty blue cloudless skies and distant mountains.

I’d never been to the American desert before. What a vast wasteland. Yes, it can be gorgeous, and nature is incredible and must be protected, etc. … but driving for hours through a desert expanse (not even cactuses!) eventually makes a Midwesterner like me long for suburban sprawl. That may be the sickly capitalism poisoning my blood, but I am in my heart a suburban Ohio boy that prefers four distinct seasons and a Target and a mall within easy reach.

I’m glad we made the drive, and the side quest to the Hoover Dam was worth it – I have now stepped foot into Arizona for the first time – but in the future I’ll be connecting Vegas and L.A. by airliner.

We stopped in Cabazon on the approach to L.A. to visit the big dinosaurs made famous by “Pee Wee’s Big Adventure” – which is finally getting a Criterion Collection edition. I had no idea there was a gift shop in the larger dinosaur. RIP, Large Marge.

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For anyone that’s known me for any length of time, they could tell you that high on my list of fixations and obsessions and passions is the Chateau Marmont, which has been a walled stronghold for celebrities, writers, and entertainment industry grandees since its 1929 opening.

Loving such a place a bit of dichotomy for me, and feels a bit hypocritical, because I present myself as a working class essayist and mild social democrat provocateur (my ego fancies myself as a “dissident writer” without actually facing any consequences from the regime – yet). I am infatuated with this old, incredibly expensive “shabby chic” hotel where the famous and infamous have rested or abused their heads and livers and genitals for nearly a century.

John Belushi died from an overdose in bungalow No. 3 (after visits from Robert De Niro and Robin Williams) just up the steps from the pool in March 1982 from a speedball provided by the notable professional groupie Cathy Smith, who was the subject of Gordon Lightfoot’s violently bitchy little hit tune “Sundown.”

“Sometimes I think it’s a shame

When I get feeling better when I’m feeling no pain”

I get that, Gordo. And I spent a good part of my recent stay in Room 38 pleasantly buzzed.

The Chateau Marmont’s first year was actually as an apartment building, but the Great Depression forced a recalibration into a hotel. Since then, it’s been a nexus for bohemians and barbarians and everyone and everything in between.

A list of the famous that have stayed, and even lived for years, at the Chateau Marmont would run into deep into the hundreds. Just about any name from early Hollywood through today, they’ve been there to hide away to create, recuperate, or raise hell. Often all three. I once stayed in the room where a young Grace Kelly spent several months living, and I’ve also stayed in the suite Lindsay Lohan trashed and was booted from over an unpaid $46,000 room service bill.

I’ve had my share of shenanigans and blood-letting at the Marmont and may have once paid a maid to help me clean up, but nothing especially outrageous.

“We are in a top-floor balcony suite in the venerable Chateau Marmont, my usual working headquarters when I come to L.A. They know me here. My blood is on these walls, and my spirit haunts the elevators. I have suffered grievously in this place, many times, for reasons we need not discuss now. The memories are intolerable when it rains and I come under stress — and I am very much under stress Now.” Hunter Thompson wrote that in 1997, one of several times he’s written fondly about the hotel he loved so well, dating back to the 1970s.

The hotel’s louche history, its treatment of all guests as potential celebrities, and that it has maintained its basic aesthetic for nearly a century is part of its charm and why it has such a loyal clientele. It also welcomed non-white guests long before other hotels did the same in America. Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, and Sidney Poitier were all regulars. Ellington’s “Swinging Suites” album is named for the hotel, where he composed it.

There’s a mirror photo Anthony Bourdain took of himself eating In-and-Out Burger at the Chateau Marmont, two of his favorite pleasures (I share many life fixations with Bourdain and regret he left us before I ever got to meet him).

“I would not feel cheated by life if I died in Chateau Marmont, in Los Angeles,” Bourdain told Travel + Leisure years ago. “I love that hotel above all others.”

The hotel wraps itself around you in a cloak of history and mystery, the feeling that an adventure could break out at any moment and some icon will come around the corner any time day or night, and you’re forever in its grip. It’s eerie. And it sucks Bourdain didn’t get to make his exit while staying there.

The iconic fashion photographer Helmut Newton died at the hotel in 2004 when he suffered a heart attack and crashed his Cadillac while exiting the garage. Lord knows how many non-celebs have died there. Once I am gone, the Chateau is one of three places where I want my ashes spread, after The Chart Room Bar in Key West and the original Factory of Sadness (the site of Cleveland Municipal Stadium).

Musicians have long enjoyed staying at the hotel, including Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, The Velvet Underground, Graham Nash, Courtney Love, Lana Del Ray, and many more.

Jim Morrison and the rest of The Doors were photographed by Art Kane for Life magazine in 1968 at the hotel and Morrison may or may not have dangled from a window and broken a bone there. Below is Morrison on the left (obviously) in a Chateau Marmont hallway, and me in 2019 in one of the hotel’s other halls.

Also, the band’s eponymous first album, specifically its first single, was advertised on the enormous billboard just outside the Hotel on Sunset, the first band to ever get such marketing treatment. It worked.

Staying there is something like a rite of passage if you’re in the music and movie businesses. Writers, whose celebrity tends toward the more distant rings of fame or infamy, have also made the hotel home. Shawn Levy’s 2019 book “Castle on Sunset: Life, Death, Love, Art, and Scandal at Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont” is your ultimate guide to the hotel’s rich, sordid history.

During my stays, I’ve encountered Matthew Broderick, Michael Madsen, Gerard Butler, Trent Reznor, Óscar Núñez, Avril Lavigne, Rian Johnson, Robin Thicke, DiCaprio, Toby McGuire, and Lana Del Ray. I’m sure I’ve forgotten some.

As I get older, I’m sure there’ve been young celebrities at the hotel while I’ve been there that I didn’t recognize. There was some heavily tattooed band lounging and laughing and boozing and smoking and fondling giggling groupies by the pool during my recent stay, and they were either famous or were cosplaying at it. That I didn’t recognize them doesn’t mean anything. They acted the part. Everyone does there. No one quite knows if someone is notable or not there.

I hadn’t stayed at the Marmont since pre-pandemic 2019. It was nearly unchanged six years later. The spaghetti Bolognese (pictured below, before I inhaled it) remains in my top ten all-time favorite dishes. I’d go back more often if it weren’t so fucking expensive to stay there.

We also spent a couple of days at the elegant and equally expensive and famous Beverly Hills Hotel, where every room is an ultra-upscale gift shop.

This was my first time staying there, and its elegance and its obsequious staff were a little too elitist for my crude peasant taste. I mean, it was very nice and lived up to its ruling class reputation and history, but I am no better than the maid or valet or doorman or bartender, and am uncomfortable being treated with reverence because people think I could be rich and powerful.

The bathroom mirror had a fucking TV within it. And the hotel’s version of spaghetti Bolognese, written into Rick Ross/ Drake lyrics, rivals the Marmont’s version. But I’m more cut out for the Red Roof Inn or Best Western. So’s my wallet.

I mainly wanted to visit the Beverly Hills Hotel’s famous bar.

The long-time bartender in the hotel’s Polo Lounge immediately understood why I ordered a Singapore Sling, a cocktail that long been out of favor but has a literary attachment to the hotel.

“We had actually been sitting there in the Polo Lounge – for many hours – drinking Singapore Slings with mescal on the side and beer chasers. And when the call came, I was ready.”

The call was Sports Illustrated in March 1971 asking Hunter S. Thompson to go to Las Vegas to write a short item about the Mint 400 desert bike race. History remembers the ensuing account of it as “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.”

Not long ago, I called Vegas a “neon orgy in the desert” and that’s true but the city ignores the most famous literary work about it. I supposed that’s because the city isn’t portrayed in a flattering light and has done nothing to improve its image as Sin City. Which is silly because Vegas should genuinely embrace being a den of debauched gambling, sex, booze, drugs, and general bad craziness rather than sterile casinos fronted by endless rows of M&M stores, CVS, Ross Dress For Less, and tourist gift shops. It looks more like tacky retail capitalism than “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.” It seems like mostly what’s happening is shopping for shit you can buy online or back home.

Much of new Vegas gives the verisimilitude of wealth and class, but some of the town’s slummy old era can still be found. It feels more honest.

We wandered up to the Strip to the disheveled Circus-Circus casino that was the nexus of Thompson’s book. It was mostly empty and looked the same as when I saw it last a decade ago. It’s tired and one of the holdouts from the days when Vegas had more goofy themed hotels. Word is that the casino is on its last legs and soon could be sold by its elderly billionaire Trump crony owner and razed for something new and glitzy and soulless on the enormous 102-acre footprint it occupies along the Strip. The land is worth more than the history.

“The Circus-Circus is what the whole hep world would be doing Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war. This is the sixth Reich. The ground floor is full of gambling tables, like all the other casinos … but the place is about four stories high, in the style of a circus tent, and all manner of strange County-Fair/Polish Carnival madness is going on up in this space.”

The carnival acts and games are still there. So is the former rotating bar that’s now just a soda and candy stand pictured above. HST would still recognize the Circus-Circus but also the corporate moral rot that has left the place threadbare and sad. It’s not surprising the casino refused to participate in the 1998 movie adaptation of the novel, but that now seems foolish. They should have latched onto anything to keep people coming in, and that book continues to have its fans. Especially now, when we really are degrading into the Sixth Reich.

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Some things I think are worth your time and money to read …

David Roth’s thoughtful analysis of “One Battle After Another” in Flaming Hydra (a paywalled site worth every penny).

Israel Daramola also weighs in on the movie over at Defector, another paywalled site for which I have paid to access since it’s arose out of the ashes of the Good Deadspin.

Defector’s Patrick Redford, another writer I greatly admire for his thinking and his words, penned what is perhaps the definitive analysis of professional snitch Bari Weiss being installed as the new and absurdly unqualified head of CBS News. His article, which is also about the wider hijacking of our national journalism by rich right-wing assholes, is lightyears more honest than anything you’ll find in the New York Times and Washington Post.

A couple of samples from Redford’s piece:

“Weiss is not in the same orbit as rabidly partisan Newsmax operators or extremists like Nick Fuentes, which is precisely what defines her utility. Unlike those hooting idiots, Weiss speaks the language of elite liberal institutions, and her intended audience is people who know how to read. The project—hers and that of her backers—is to establish herself and her cohort not as new-right media, but as the new liberal media, staking out the leftmost acceptable position within the new right-wing paradigm.”

“If you are a billionaire buying a media organization in order to consolidate your power, you could not find a more eager servant than Weiss, someone blissfully captured by the richest people alive, and invested in smashing the last vestiges of liberal power in this country: universities, civil servants, and the media. She has a cop’s heart and a tadpole’s brain, which makes her the ideal partner for someone like David Ellison.”

Apologies for ending on that sour note, but I’ve said too much after not saying anything for too long. Go see the movie, go to the rally, defend what’s left of our democracy from these malicious, cruel shitheads. It’s later than you think.

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