A good dramatization of an event that gripped, and troubled me, in my late teens. The sad thing is, Trump’s America is far more dangerous. Yes, an ‘Authoritarian Nightmare.’

Aaron Sorkin’s new movie has his usual fizzy dialogue and stacked cast, but it explores a dark political moment, when left-wing protesters were unfairly put on trial by their government. Sorkin’s usual brand of stirring reverence for America’s institutions is blunted here, but that’s a good thing (The Atlantic).

In my late teens, followed the events closely, as part of the trauma of 'watching' the escalating Viet Nam war, almost daily, on TV

Fragment of an Elegy
 by Rainer Maria Rilke
  
 Now shall I praise the cities, those long-surviving
 (I watched them in awe) great constellations of earth.
 for only in praising is my heart still mine, so violently
 do I know the world. And even my lament
 turns into a paean before my disconsolate heart.
 Let no one say that I don’t love life, the eternal
 presence: I pulsate in her; she bears me, she gives me  
 the spaciousness of this day, the primeval workday
 for me to make use of, and over my existence flings,
 in her magnanimity, nights that have never been.
 Her strong hand is above me, and if she should hold me under,
 submerged in fate, I would have to learn how to breathe
 down there. Even her most lightly-entrusted mission
 would fill me with songs of her; although I suspect
 that all she wants is for me to be vibrant as she is.
 Once poets resounded over the battlefield; what voice
 can outshout the rattle of this metallic age
 that is struggling on toward its careening future?
 And indeed it hardly requires the call, its own battle-din
 roars into song. 

 So, let me stand for a while in front of the transient: not accusing, but once again  admiring, marvelling.  And if perhaps something founders
 before my eyes and stirs me into lament,  it is not a reproach. 
  
 Why shouldn’t more youthful nations
 rush past the graveyard of cultures long ago rotten?
  
 How pitiful it would be if greatness needed the slightest
 indulgence. Let him whose soul is no longer startled
 and transformed by palaces, by gardens’ boldness, by the rising
 and falling of ancient fountains, by everything held back
 in paintings or by the infinite thereness of statues -
 let such a person go out to his daily work, where
 greatness is lying in ambush and someday, at some turn,
 will leap upon him and force him to fight for his life. 

I am fighting!

He studied at the Sorbonne University in Paris and got MBA degree. During this time, he also studied drama in L'Actorat, Paris. He lived in California during the years 1980-1987, studied painting and film-making at the CCAC, in California. He has had several shows in New York, California and Paris. He returned to Turkey in 1987.
He has had 142 one-man-shows in around the world in addition to participating to numerous group shows. Baykam is one of the pioneers of the New-Expressionism movement and of multi-media and photo-painting oriented political art. He is the author of 29 published books, two feature film scripts; there are also 52  catalogs and 8 books about his works.

AND IT DOES MAKE MORE PSYCHOLOGICAL/EMOTIONAL/PHYSIOLOGICAL SENSE THAN 1 January …

MOR DRIST TRES TRIST SO SAD THAT SO MANY NOWADAYS TRIVIALISE THIS MOST SACRED OF FEASTS - I WILL BE 'GREENING'  Y LLE TAN, THE FIREPLACE (PHOTOS TO COME) IN A FEW DAYS.

Barbarians is a 2020 German television series created by Andreas Heckmann, Arne Nolting and Jan Martin Scharf and starring Laurence Rupp, Jeanne Goursaud and David Schütter. The series covers the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest and its backstory.

The Battle of the Teutoburg Forest (German: Schlacht im Teutoburger Wald, Hermannsschlacht, or Varusschlacht), described as the Varian Disaster (Latin: Clades Variana) by Roman historians, took place in the Teutoburg Forest in 9 CE, when an alliance of Germanic peoples ambushed and destroyed three Roman legions and their auxiliaries, led by Publius Quinctilius Varus. The alliance was led by Arminius, a Germanic officer of Varus's auxilia. Arminius had acquired Roman citizenship and had received a Roman military education, which enabled him to deceive the Roman commander methodically and anticipate the Roman army's tactical responses.
Despite several successful campaigns and raids by the Romans in the years after the battle, they never again attempted to conquer the Germanic territories east of the Rhine, except for Germania Superior.

Laurence Rupp (born 10 August 1987) is a famous Austrian theatre artist, actor, model, television personality, and entrepreneur from Vienna, Austria. He is famously known in the country for his best performance in theatre plays. As per the sources, he polishes his acting skills by performing in theatres. According to Wikipedia, Rupp is a member of a famous German theatre called “Berliner Ensemble”. Not only this, but he also worked in Burgtheater.

He who writes in blood ... does not want to be read, he wants to be learned by heart." - Nietzsche

Like Nietzsche, cervus fugitivs or the fugitive stag, has meant living with real flesh and blood companions … the story of my psyche written with, and in, my own blood.

“Of all that is written, I only love what one has written with his own blood. Write with blood: and you will learn that blood is spirit.” Nietzsche.

James Dowd (2016) – thanks for this: “Simply, our Blood is our innate talent. Skills can be learned, but our natural ability, our irrational spirit, the Blood for the work, can never be taught.

This natural, savage style of work, and our passion for it, thrives on uncertainty. If we always knew what it would look or sound like, we’d be too bored to complete it, so we must stumble over ourselves for a time in order to truly create. We must embrace our curiosity and imagination and reach out into the darkness. We must open a vein and bleed.

If we don’t bleed, our work, our world, becomes a tired exercise of habit and commonplace. We find our routines and our style, and we repeat, repeat, repeat. Someone who doesn’t write with Blood becomes a tourist to the work. They go to the same old, uninspired places. They become predictable, hitting the spots everyone expects them to hit. They’re never truly seeking new worlds, or looking to create them. They aren’t sneaking down back streets to discover the mysterious and unknown. They aren’t creating truly unique experiences.“

As I experienced many many years ago (in my Introduction) : After her decapitation Medb was unveiled as Medusa.  She became the Patroness of my project, the creative flow, the life-blood, that weaves its way through the story of my cervus fugitivus from beginning to end

 I want to have goblins about me, for I am courageous. The courage which scareth away ghosts, createth for itself goblins--it wanteth to laugh.” Nietzsche’s TSZ 

Fellini’s masterpiece opens with a helicopter flying through the air carrying a statue of Jesus.  No subtle symbolism.  Religion in the modern age = celebrity worship.

In La Dolce Vita: Twentieth-Century Man?, Bernard Knieger writes that “the view of man suggested by La dolce vita itself and by its exploitation is that modern man is degenerate as demonstrated by his sensation-seeking.” He adds that Marcello and his pleasure-loving friends “enjoy the decadent atmosphere for what it offers them; they even enjoy seeing suffering and making others suffer.”  There are too many distractions and temptations that real communication and real human relationships can’t exist. Knieger further attributes man’s degeneracy to the failure of Christianity. “What is here dramatized is man’s alienation from God and consequently from his fellow man [and] is man as the living dead inhabiting a Waste Land.” Christianity was unable to successfully adapt to the modern world and instead became something to sensationalize – as portrayed in the sequence with the children and Madonna – rather than something that would give modern man a moral direction. For Knieger, the monstrous fish found on the beach at the end of the film also takes on a biblical meaning, meant to imply that Christianity is dead. (Lena Kim).

Lockdown Armageddon *

And do those feet in present times
Walk upon Wales’s mountains green,
And does our holy man of God
Appear on Wales’s daily TV screen.

It is a vision so divine
That shines upon our clouded hills,
As Armageddon brings decline
With no more money to pay our bills.

Bring me my pen of burning gold,
Bring me a heart that’s still on fire:
I have no fear, won’t be controlled,
Here in my Chariot of Desire …

I will not cease from mental fight,
I’ll keep on writing day and night,
Till I have freed our Principality
From FM’s Lockdown Mentality!

* with apologies to the incomparable William Blake –
I think he would approve today.

Michael Palin’s Quest for Artemisia review: rape, torture and sexism – all in a day’s work for a 17th-century artist https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/dec/29/artemesia-gentileschi-tv-review?CMP=share_btn_tw