Esoteric Brezhnevism

  Finished in 1971 but not exhibited theatrically until 1974, writer-producer-director Christina Hornisher’s sole feature film, the remarkable Hollywood 90028 , mostly languished in obscurity in the decades since its release until being rediscovered and reassessed in recent years. Despite being reissued under the lurid title Twisted Throats and as The Hollywood Hillside Strangler to exploit the notoriety of the 1977-1978 “Hillside Strangler” murders, Hollywood 90028 is not a horror film so much as a somber character study that happens to be about a serial killer. The film captures the downbeat post-Manson moment when the increasing seediness of the entertainment capital’s freewheeling sixties with its adult bookstores, strip clubs, and peep shows revealed a darker, more dangerous side. In addition, the grim film arguably carries an anti-Semitic undercurrent. Christina Hornisher Hollywood 90028 follows the parallel trajectories and intertwined doomed lives of two midwestern tran...

  Though communist ideology ultimately would become synonymous with its Jewish usurper, Karl Marx, several figures – Gracchus Babeuf, Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, and Étienne Cabet among them – predated him as pioneers of European socialist thought during what became known as its utopian phase, before the Marxists would introduce pretensions to “scientific” rigor. Another trailblazing communist, one whose name has fallen into obscurity since the nineteenth century, is German labor agitator Wilhelm Weitling (1808-1871). The sole English-language book on Weitling, Carl Wittke’s The Utopian Socialist: A Biography of Wilhelm Weitling, Nineteenth-Century Reformer , has long been out of print, and – as if to symbolically underline the subject’s neglect – the used copy I obtained was easily the mustiest-smelling book I ever purchased. A journeyman tailor and autodidact, Weitling was the son of a German servant girl and a French soldier who never returned from Napoleon’s Russia...

  Lee Cronin’s 2026 film The Mummy concerns an ancient Egyptian demon, the Nasmaranian, that has to be neutralized and contained through periodic re-mummifications in a series of innocent victims’ bodies. The story opens as an impending flood of the site of the demon’s burial threatens to disrupt its imprisonment, obligating its caretakers to find a new body and resting place for the otherworldly menace. Unfortunately, American TV news correspondent Charlie Cannon (Jack Reynor) happens to be stationed in Cairo with his family when the evilly sexy Magician (Hayat Kamille) sets her sights on Cannon’s daughter Katie (Emily Mitchell). The Magician, appearing to Katie through a fence at the end of her family’s garden, tempts her with treats and eventually dupes her into accepting a nectarine from which a scarab beetle emerges and crawls into Katie’s mouth. Absconding with the incapacitated Katie to use her in the latest mummification ritual, the Magician sets in motion a years-long ...

There was another plumbing apocalypse in my apartment. Wednesday night, after I’d gone to bed, I started hearing loud gurgling noises out of both of my toilets. Getting up, I saw occasional bubbles surfacing in one of the bowls, but it didn’t seem like a very serious problem. The following morning, not only were both toilets backed up, but a splatter of black goop had spewed up into my bathtub from the drain. I reported it to the management and went to work. When I got home, a harried plumber was at work on what turned out to be a hard-to-get blockage under my building. In the meantime, a large quantity of standing black water had collected in my shower and both toilets were caked with thick sludge from the depths. The plumber gave up for the time being and said he’d come back the following day. I decided to get a motel room for the night so I would at least have access to a working toilet without having to drive to a gas station every hour to take a piss. Dotted along one of the mai...

Launched in 2021 by energetic and superficially likable commentators Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti, Breaking Points is today among the top political programs on YouTube. Joined the following year by Emily Jashinsky and Ryan Grim, the popular show, as its Wikipedia entry uncritically accepts the format, “includes one left-wing populist anchor (Ball) and one right-wing populist anchor (Enjeti), who provide news and commentary from an independent platform, separate from the mainstream media” [1]. The quartet’s putative independence warrants scrutiny, however, their mouthing of economic populism and ostensible anti-Zionism notwithstanding. Ball, previously a Democratic congressional candidate and contributor to MSNBC and HuffPost , was in 2017 and 2018 the treasurer of the People’s House Project PAC, which raised funds for Democratic candidates but came under fire for allocating, according to Open Secrets, 69.74% of its money to People’s House Project staff salaries and another 12.82% ...