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Fragmentos de textos e imagens catadas nesta tela, capturadas desta web, varridas de jornais, revistas, livros, sons, filtradas pelos olhos e ouvidos e escorrendo pelos dedos para serem derramadas sobre as teclas... e viverem eterna e instanta neamente num logradouro digital. Desagua douro de pensa mentos.
“She suffered from what happened on the set and then from what happened when the movie came out,” Vanessa Schneider said via video from France. “For puritanical viewers, she was an easy woman who made pornography. It was brutal for her, especially since it wasn’t at all in her nature — she was pretty modest, reserved and fairly conservative in certain respects.”
After “Tango,” she turned down most scripts involving nudity, her cousin said. “This created a reputation as someone who was difficult to work with,” Vanessa Schneider added. “Then drugs came into the picture and she got this reputation in the industry as someone who wasn’t reliable.”
read more>
‘Last Tango’ Derailed Maria Schneider’s Life. A New Film Takes Her Side. – DNyuz
"Strangers turning up at your house, a vehicle vandalised, violent commentary online, eyes tracking you as you shop – the last episode of Adolescence chillingly shows the modern consequences of sudden public attention.
But the creators of the Netflix show – already seeming certain to sweep the prizes in next year’s TV awards – have, in an upsetting case of life imitating drama, experienced something of this attention (although without, we hope, the criminal elements).""
READ MORE
"A amizade entre eles cresceu em silêncio. Diferente de muitos no meio musical, eles não a exibiam. Harrison a convidou várias vezes para o Friar Park, sua casa na Inglaterra, e a visitou em momentos tranquilos, longe dos flashes dos paparazzi, muitas vezes sob a chuva que camuflava seus encontros. Pessoas próximas contavam que passavam horas falando sobre reencarnação, escalas musicais e o apreço mútuo por Bob Dylan. Para Nicks, Harrison era uma fonte de sabedoria serena; para ele, ela trazia uma energia vibrante e caótica, reminiscentes dos anos 60, antes de tudo se tornar tão pesado."
leia mais>>
A amizade entre George Harrison e Stevie Nicks – PORTAL BEATLES BRASIL
"Mr. Musk fired back on Tuesday, calling Mr. Navarro a “moron” and “dumber than a sack of bricks” in a post on X, the social media site he owns. Later in the day, Mr. Musk doubled down, posting that he wanted to “apologize to bricks.”
“That was so unfair to bricks,” Mr. Musk wrote. He also used a slur to refer to Mr. Navarro, calling him “Peter Retarrdo.”
read more>>
Musk Disparages Trump’s Trade Adviser, Exposing Rift in President’s Inner Circle – DNyuz
Every era produces its own emblematic array of knuckleheads and butterfingers: Mack Sennett’s Keystone Cops. The Three Stooges. The 1962 Mets. Beavis and Butt-head. Wayne and Garth. In Stanley Kubrick’s Cold War classic, “Dr. Strangelove,” the fools wield apocalyptic weapons rather than custard pies. Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper, played by Sterling Hayden, grows so feverish and paranoid about a Communist plot “to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids” that he goes “a little funny” and orders a thermonuclear strike on the Soviet Union. But such fantastical heedlessness is the province only of comic fantasy, no?
In the initial months of Donald Trump’s second Administration, the qualities of malevolence, retribution, and bewildering velocity have obscured somewhat the ineptitude of its principals. This came into sharper view with recent reports in The Atlantic, in which the magazine’s editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, tells how he was somehow added to a communal chat on the commercially available messaging system Signal, labelled “Houthi PC small group.” Sitting in his car, in a Safeway parking lot, Goldberg watched incredulously on his phone as the leaders of the national-security establishment discussed the details of bombing Houthi strongholds in Yemen.
The comedy of Goldberg’s reports resides, at least in part, in the discovery that the Vice-President and the heads of the leading defense and intelligence bureaucracies deploy emojis with the same frequency as middle schoolers. More seriously, but not astonishingly, when prominent members of the Administration were confronted with their potentially lethal carelessness, they did as their President would have them do: they attacked the character and the integrity of the reporter (who proved far more concerned about national security than the national-security adviser), and then refused to give straight answers to Congress about their cock-up and the sensitivity of the communications. Everyone from Cabinet members to the President’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, followed principles inherited by the President from the late Roy Cohn: Never apologize. And be certain to slander the messenger.
This spectacle of breezy contempt regarding questions of process and policy was humiliating, for sure, but hardly an amazement. In the chat, Vice-President J. D. Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seem to compete in their denigrations of the Europeans. (“I fully share your loathing of European freeloading,” Hegseth tells Vance. “It’s PATHETIC.”) And yet much of what is so depressing about the chat is how familiar we are with the details and its spirit. Vance has, publicly and repeatedly, unburdened himself of his and the President’s disdain for Europe—most flagrantly in a speech in Munich, in February, when he lectured European leaders on their supposed failures in the realms of immigration and free speech.
This is an Administration that does not have to slip on a Signal banana peel to reveal its deepest-held prejudices and its painful incapacities. You get the sense that we would learn little if we were privy to a twenty-four-hour-a-day live stream of its every private utterance. Part of what was so appalling about Trump and Vance’s recent meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky was not just their penchant for channelling the world view and negotiating points of Vladimir Putin but their comfort in expressing them, barking them, at the Ukrainian President in front of reporters in the Oval Office.
Similarly, it does not require months of painstaking investigative reporting or a middle-aged tech fail to discover that another member of the group chat, Steven Witkoff, the President’s leading shuttle negotiator, is no more steeped in the granular details of diplomatic history and strategy than any other New York real-estate developer from the eighties in Trump’s circle. In a long interview with Tucker Carlson, following recent conversations in Moscow with Putin, Witkoff consistently parroted Russian talking points and relayed that the Russian dictator (“I don’t regard Putin as a bad guy”) had been “gracious” and gave him a “beautiful portrait” of Trump as a gift for the President. (Trump, in turn, “was clearly touched” by the painting, Witkoff reported.) Throughout, Witkoff’s grasp of the conflict was so wobbly, so Moscow-inflected, that one could almost hear the guffawing from the Kremlin. In a moment of contemplation, Witkoff admitted, “I underestimated the complications in the job, that’s for sure. I think I was a little bit quixotic in the way that I thought about it. Like, I’m going to roll in there on a white horse. And, no, it was anything but that, you know.”
Pete Hegseth is less prone to misty self-reflection. But his incompetence might have been predictable. Last December, after Trump nominated Hegseth, a weekend host on Fox News, to lead the Pentagon, Jane Mayer wrote a meticulously reported piece in this magazine on his florid background: his bouts of excessive drinking and profoundly sexist behavior on and off the job; his failures at managing enterprises somewhat larger than a dry cleaner but infinitely smaller than the Pentagon. No matter. Congressional Republicans were not inclined to deny Hegseth his appointment or to risk the President’s wrath. And they were similarly accommodating for another participant in the hapless Signal chat, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of National Intelligence.
And so the week’s scandal is rather like the ending of an O. Henry story, surprising yet inevitable. If a journalist is mistakenly dropped into a group text among the leaders of the American health bureaucracy, will we faint when Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., refuses to recommend proven vaccines?
It would be unwise to dismiss the importance of secrets in this or any other Administration, but the point is that Trump and his ideological and political planners have made no secret of their intentions. While Richard Nixon tended to save his darkest confidences and prejudices for private meetings with such aides as Henry Kissinger and H. R. Haldeman, Trump gives voice to his id almost daily at the microphone or on social media: the autocratic actions intended to undermine the law, academia, and the media; the disregard for democratic partners and the affection for all manner of authoritarians; the hostile designs on Greenland, Canada, Panama, Mexico, and Europe; the ongoing attempt to purge the Republican Party of any remaining dissenters; and the constant effort to intimidate his critics and perceived enemies.
The threat of autocracy advances each day under Donald Trump, and it is a process that hides in plain sight. Some will choose to deny it, to domesticate it, to treat the abnormal as mere politics, to wish it all away in the spirit of “this too shall pass.” But the threat is real and for all to see. No encryption can conceal it. ♦
OSMARCO VALLADÃO
"Both the substance and the style are pure mafia. Note the obsession with respect, demonstrated in last week’s Oval Office confrontation with Zelenskyy. Between them, JD Vance and Trump accused the Ukrainian leader three times of showing disrespect, sounding less like world leaders than touchy Tommy DeVito, the Joe Pesci character in Goodfellas.
It’s hard for aides and opponents alike to keep up because power is exercised arbitrarily and inconsistently. Tariffs are imposed, then suspended. Indeed, one reason why import taxes so appeal to Trump is that they can be enforced instantly and by presidential edict. That extends to the exemptions Trump can offer to favoured US industries. As MSNBC’s Chris Hayes observed: “This is very obviously going to be a protection racket, where Trump can at the stroke of a pen destroy or save your business depending on how compliant you are.”
read analysis by JOnathan Freedland
Donald Trump is turning America into a mafia state | Jonathan Freedland | The Guardian
read more>
"Stephen Graham’s new show about a boy arrested for murder is utterly chilling. Its team talk rage, panic attacks and being bowled over by a 15-year-old"
"
Claro que existe um trabalho sub-liminar de humanização
nesses personagens, permitindo-nos deduzir ou prever muitas de suas ações. São as
ações que nós, espectadores torcendo pelo seu sucesso, esperamos que eles
pratiquem. "
MAIS NA COLUNA DE BRAULIO TAVARES
Jeffrey St. Clair>>
+ A little after five in the evening on Tuesday, Runeysa Ozturk, a Ph D candidate at Tufts University, was accosted on the streets of Somerville, Mass., outside of Boston by hooded and masked agents, who initially refused to identify who they were and then falsely claimed they were “the police.” They were, in fact, ICE. Runeysa’s backpack, purse, and phone were seized. She was placed in cuffs, forced into a black van, and taken away. She was told her student visa had been revoked, and she was going to be deported. Ozturk, a Turkish citizen, was here legally, had committed no crimes, and wasn’t charged with a crime by ICE when they kidnapped her. Her sole offense? Co-writing an op-ed in the Tufts student paper opposing Israel’s mass killings of Palestinians. Even though a federal judge had ordered ICE to keep her in Massachusetts until a hearing on her status could take place, she was transported to an ICE detention jail in Louisiana.
+ On Thursday, Marco Rubio admitted that he’d personally revoked Runeysa’s visa and smeared her without evidence as being a terrorist sympathizer and a supporter of Hamas. “We do it every day,” Rubio boasted. “Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas.” Rubio said he’s already revoked 300 student visas and intends to revoke many more.
+ So, there is no due process, even for people who have committed no crimes, which is the vast majority of people ICE has detained and attempted to deport. Due process was, of course, designed for people suspected of crimes. Not even the most cynical of founders envisioned it would be needed for people arrested and deported merely for having a tattoo or the name José or who might have been glimpsed at a campus protest against genocide.
+ It’s surely not the case that the top law enforcement officers in the US don’t know the Constitution; they just don’t think it applies to them and that the Supreme Court will bail them out if needed.
Olha lá vai passando a procissão
Se arrastando que nem cobra pelo chão
As pessoas que nela vão passando
Acreditam nas coisas lá do céu
As mulheres cantando tiram versos
Os homens escutando tiram o chapéu
Eles vivem penando aqui na terra
Esperando o que Jesus prometeu
"The CBS News 60 Minutes report found that 75% of 238 migrants sent to the Salvadoran mega-prison known as the Center for Terrorism Confinement (CECOT) had no traces of a criminal record.
At least 22% of the men on the list have criminal records here in the United States or abroad, but the vast majority are for non-violent offenses like theft, shoplifting and trespassing, the 60 Minutes review found."
READ MORE>>
Report: Most migrants in mega-prison had no apparent criminal record
São João Da Ra Rão
Tem uma gaita-ra-rai-ta
Quando toca-ro-roca
Bate nela
Todos os anja-ra-ran-jos
Tocam gaita-ra-rai-ta
Tocam tanto-ra-ranto
Aqui na terra
A Machiavellian Playbook for Power: The Real Strategy Behind Trump’s Tariffs
Um ano sem o gênio de Caratinga
ADEUZ, COM Z DE ZIRALDO
por Ediel Ribeiro
“Nasci numa pequena cidade de Minas. Até aí nada demais. Muita gente nasce em cidades pequenas, distantes e quietas”.
Caratinga, a cidade ao qual Ziraldo se refere no primeiro parágrafo da crônica "Reminiscências", logo também ficou especialmente pequena para o cartunista.
Com pouco mais de 20 anos, como um D'Artagnan, Ziraldo deixou Caratinga com o desejo de conquistar o Rio de Janeiro e - quiçá - o mundo. Quando partiu, seu pai colocou em seu bolso algum dinheiro e um bilhete onde escreveu “Os Dez Mandamentos de Como Vencer na Vida”, conselhos que Ziraldo seguiu a risca e que, em 1954, foram publicados no jornal “Folha de Minas”.
Irônico, agil e incansável, Ziraldo Alves Pinto é um cartunista, chargista, pintor, escritor, dramaturgo, cartazista, caricaturista, poeta, cronista, desenhista, apresentador, humorista e jornalista (ufa!) brasileiro nascido no interior de Minas Gerais, no dia 24 de outubro de 1932. Desde pequeno, lia muito e era considerado um menino prodígio. O menino que desenhava em todos os lugares, na calçada, nas paredes e na sala de aula, aos sete anos, teve seu primeiro desenho publicado na “Folha da Manhã”.
"Em minha cidade chegava pouca coisa, mais eu lia os livros do meu pai e as revistas "Tico-Tico". Depois, ainda em Caratinga, descobri os gibis. Quando vi uma caricatura do Dutra, feita pelo Théo, disse pro meu pai - que queria que eu estudasse pintura com Mário Andena, um pintor italiano que morava em Caratinga: "Pai, é isso que eu quero fazer! Olha aí: é o Dutra e não é o Dutra!" - disse.
O cartunista começou profissionalmente em uma revista chamada "Coração". Aos 17 anos, publica histórias em quadrinhos nas revistas “Vida Infantil”, “Sesinho”, “Vida Juvenil” e colabora com charges nos últimos números de “O Malho”.
Em 1952, ingressa na Faculdade de Direito da UFMG e começa a publicar trabalhos mensais na revista “Era Uma Vez”. Dois anos depois, inicia a publicação de uma página de humor no jornal “Folha de Minas”.
Autodidata, Ziraldo se diz influenciado por grandes nomes do humor, como Ronald Searle, André François, Manzi e Steinberg. Nas artes plásticas, o artista cita como principais influências Picasso, Miró e Goya.
A partir de 1963, já no Rio de Janeiro, Ziraldo torna-se conhecido do público brasileiro por suas publicações nas revistas “Cigarra”, “O Cruzeiro” e "Jornal do Brasil", onde cria, entre outros personagens, “Os Zerois”.
O cartunista foi ainda diretor de arte da revista “Visão”, publicitário e coordenador gráfico do Festival de Filme do Rio de Janeiro. Publicou trabalhos nos EUA e Europa; editou a revista “Fairplay”; e o “Cartum JS”, no “Jornal dos Sports”; publicou “Flicts”, “Jeremias, O Bom”, “O Menino Maluquinho” e participou da criação do jornal “O Pasquim”.
No semanário carioca viveu bons e maus momentos: "Na noite do AI5, eu estava no bar Veloso, quando, de repente, alguém chegou com a notícia: "Deram o golpe!" E aí foi aquele corre-corre para esconder gente. No dia seguinte, a polícia invadiu a minha casa. Eu estava desenhando, quando eles chegaram. Fui levado para o Forte de Copacabana".
No final dos anos 60, com o sucesso de seu primeiro livro infantil “Flicts” - a história de uma cor que não encontrava seu lugar no mundo - Ziraldo se dedica a literatura infantil e lança, junto com Maurício de Souza, os livros “Menino Maluquinho”, “Turma da Mônica”, “Chico Bento” e “Astronauta”.
Entre os prêmios recebidos durante a carreira destacam-se o “Oscar Internacional de Humor”, de Bruxelas e o “Prêmio Merghantealler”, da Sociedade Interamericana de Imprensa, em Caracas, o “Prêmio Hans Cristian Andersen”, o “Prêmio Jabuti” e o “Prêmio Caran D`Ache”, o “Prêmio Ibero-americano de Humor Gráfico Quevedo” e o “Prêmio da Imprensa Livre da América Latina”.
Conheci Ziraldo em 1981, no lançamento do livro “O Pipoqueiro da Esquina”. Nos encontramos algumas vezes depois. Em 2003, no “Sindicato do Chopp”, no Leme, em um papo longo, conversamos sobre nosso primeiro encontro, sobre o livro em co-autoria com Carlos Drummond de Andrade, lançado pela Codecri e sobre a coincidência de nossos nomes terem sido inventados por nossos pais. O dele pelo seu Geraldo, que somou parte de seu nome ao nome da dona Zizinha, mãe do Ziraldo. E o meu pela minha mãe, dona Edith que somou o início de seu nome ao final do nome do meu pai Manoel, formando o Ediel.
Irmão do também cartunista Zélio Alves Pinto, Ziraldo foi casado por mais de quatro décadas com Vilma Gontijo Alves Pinto com quem teve três filhos: Daniela, Fabrizia e Antônio. Atualmente o cartunista é casado com Márcia Martins da Silva.
O menino Ziraldo estava predestinado a vencer na vida. Em Caratinga ou em qualquer outro lugar do mundo. “No dia que eu descobri que não queria vencer na vida, já era tarde demais: eu já tinha vencido”, disse.
Ziraldo faleceu no dia 6 de abril de 2024, no Rio de Janeiro, aos 91 anos.
*Ediel Ribeiro é jornalista, cartunista e escritor.
Arte: Ediel
Marcílio Godoi >>
Nos muitos anos em que passei escrevendo, meus narradores sempre se comportaram como pessoas de bom trato. Às vezes mais rústicas, noutras mais empoladas ou mesmo flagrantemente infantis ou saudosistas. Com estes narradores desenhados por mim pude erguer narrativas com conflitos mais ou menos controlados por mim. E os raros entraves que eventualmente surgiam, nas indisposições da trama, serviam até para emprestar uma dinâmica própria à voz do texto.
Sempre ouvi de escritores que admiro o mantra de que, na escrita, a certa altura, os personagens começam a ganhar vida própria e subvertem aquilo que projetamos como o seu destino na trama. Essa experiência sói ocorrer mesmo em contos e até em poemas, com o eu lírico ganhando surpreendente autonomia, mas é muito mais comum nos romances, quando principalmente os protagonistas nos conduzem para muito além das nossas próprias anotações iniciais de roteiro.
Mas a história que vou contar aqui ultrapassou qualquer limite do razoável. Espero que você, leitor, acredite que quem a está contando a você seja mesmo eu, e não o fantasma de um narrador de quem infelizmente, tive que tirar a vida, num lamentável episódio. Tento fazer deste relato o mais confiável possível, acredite.
O caso se passou durante uma das muitas tentativas em que eu ensaiava retomar a escrita de um romance já dado como perdido, pois que estava engavetado há mais de vinte anos. Nas oportunidades anteriores, invariavelmente eu o abandonava exatamente por não encontrar a voz de um narrador que o conduzisse a narrativa de forma convincente.
Eis que, numa tarde chuvosa dessas, meu time havia perdido, nem sei se foi exatamente por isso, mas eu me encontrava mesmo disposto a sumir do mundo. Então, distraído e insone puxei pela aba, como quem não quer nada, o meio de um segundo capítulo que estava travado e, em uma manobra bastante comum, trouxe o narrador para a primeira pessoa.
Na operação, pude perceber, de ouvido, não sem uma surpreendente satisfação, que o danado havia encontrado, digamos, o tom da sua fala, o ritmo das palavras, naquilo que chamamos intimamente de música do narrador, coisa que comporta, digamos, a sua ética propriamente dita.
Na desenvoltura que ele foi ganhando, percebi que os muito impasses que o texto carregava haviam sido soterrados e as soluções do enredo se apresentavam agora fluidas, íntimas, repleta dos trejeitos dele, é verdade, mas com inegável personalidade, o que deu toques de originalidade ao texto final.
Mais adiante, sem que eu pudesse sequer me contrapor ao seu discurso fácil, vi que ele se encaminhava com as próprias pernas, se apresentando inclusive como um novo protagonista, afirmando a sua versão de tudo o que ocorrera até ali na história. Como um Frankenstein, o meu narrador tinha virado uma nova criatura, um novo autor, para muito além de meu controle. Sem que eu me desse conta, passaram-se quase dez horas.
Era incrível como ele amarrava a linha do tempo e as entradas e saídas das outras personagens. E conduzia as vozes, ora solene, ora vulgar, como aedos, rapsodos e menestréis, maestros do teatro antigo. De narrador observador, lentamente foi se transformando em narrador onisciente, tomando conta de tudo e eu, tentando dar um freio naquela história toda, já com fome, ufa, parei a escrita e resolvi passear o cachorro, comer um sanduíche na calçada.
No caminho, agora é preciso que vocês me creiam, mesmo que eu já não estivesse mais escrevendo, o sujeito ainda se metia na minha vida real, inoportuno, como se tentando me convencer que a vida que deixamos lá no papel fosse mais importante. Como pode isso, eu me perguntava, essa voz agora me embalando, me acossando as ideias, me embrulhando o estômago e o pensamento aqui, totalmente fora do texto/contexto?
Enredado pela companhia infernal do narrador que eu mesmo criara, respirava virando o segundo chope, tentando manter a calma para não deixar que aquela criatura me enlouquecesse o pensamento. Suspeitava de que cada passo ou gesto meu, que cada palavra minha era determinada agora por aquele timbre sabe-tudo que, vindo de minhas entranhas, me capturava a consciência. Parodiando Maiakovski, em mim a narrativa ficou louca, eu era todo narrador!
Por sorte, pude perceber que havia ainda algumas partes de meu raciocínio que não atendiam exata e completamente aos seus comandos de narrador onipresente, onisciente, onipotente. Por algumas frinchas deixadas por ele, por essas pequenas brechas ou rachaduras da sua presença de inventor de mundos, consegui arquitetar uma reação, que dependia, claro, de voltar ao livro em que ele havia surgido. Eu ainda não sabia como, mas, de algum modo, eu deveria interditá-lo de continuar a (me) escrever.
Em pensamento, eu evitava usar a palavra morte, pois nesse ato falho a minha ação se auto revelaria. Mas inquietava-me um impasse: deveria eu realmente eliminar aquele que, em linhas gerais, prometia ser pra mim um ganha-pão? Como dispensar uma mente tão sagaz, aquele raciocínio poderoso que de mim se apossara?
Mas o inferno de ser conduzido pelo pensamento de uma outra pessoa já estava me fazendo dois: o esquizofrênico e o louco. Sinceramente, eu não sabia mais dizer quem era um, quem era outro. Hoje, depois do ocorrido, no entanto, quando já estou liberto dele, posso lhes garantir, eu fiz o que tinha de ser feito. Não havia outra saída, eu tinha que literal e literariamente matá-lo.
Já no computador, estava fazendo-me de distraído, quando, em uma manobra, modestamente falando, muito eficaz, abri um outro capítulo com um pequeno e insólito novo narrador. Era uma faca, isso mesmo, uma faca. Era ela quem narrava agora e, de modo nada inofensivo, descreveu os lancinantes golpes com que ela atingiu o narrador até ali. Em mínimos detalhes eu assisti a violência do embate e a forma com que o corpo dilacerado foi encontrado para a total surpresa das outras personagens.
Antes que ela, a faca, tomasse conta de toda a narrativa, precavido, voltei a controlar o texto com pulso firme. Com minha velha e pausada voz em terceira pessoa mesmo, com o habitual autor implícito com que costumo conduzir meus escritos pude, como um observador frio, controlar a situação. Deu certo. O livro chegou a termo com alguma decência. E o editor coçou o queixo na leitura, mas aceitou bem o resultado.
Hoje tomei o livro impresso depois de alguns anos e o reli. À medida que lia dava-me por vencido: aquela história até que parava de pé. Mas a melhor parte da obra, indiscutivelmente, foi minha incontrolável criatura quem escreveu.
(Foto: Daido Moriyama)
LEIA REPORTAGEM DE MAURICIO THUSWOHL
"During his session with Led Zeppelin, in a former theater, the Dead showed up unexpectedly. At one point, Pigpen took a .22-caliber revolver from its holster and started firing into the seats.
“It absolutely freaked Zeppelin out,” Mr. Greene said in a video interview with the Morrison Hotel Gallery in Manhattan, which exhibited his photographs in 2012. “They didn’t pay me. They were just like, ‘Those Westerners and their guns.’”
“This is my best story,” he added. “The day the Grateful Dead freaked out Led Zeppelin.”
Some of Mr. Greene’s photographs were used on album covers. One of the best known was a group portrait of Jefferson Airplane that became the cover of the band’s second album, “Surrealistic Pillow” (1967), which included the hits “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love.”"
As the second season of “Severance,” the lavishly surreal series on Apple TV+, comes to an end, faithful viewers may be left with an unshakable unease. The show is about many things — work, grief, elaborate cut-fruit buffets — but this season proved especially interested in the unsettling notion that you can never truly know the people you love the best and trust the most and that some of them may actually mean you harm.
Now is a time of great paranoia, and an ambient feeling of distrust is being manifested in the streets, at the polls and on our screens. Spy films and secret-identity thrillers have long been genre staples, but the recent crop, including “Severance,” is conspicuously concerned with a particular anxiety: the creeping fear that you can never truly know anyone, possibly including yourself.
“Severance” follows a quartet of employees at a mysterious company who’ve had their consciousness split into two identities: innies, the people they are at work, and outies, the people they are everywhere else. If its first season was an extended, absurdist riff on the notion of work-life balance — the outies carried on obliviously while their innies were consigned to a fluorescently lit, purgatorial office — the second season expanded the show’s concerns to explore the ways in which people often aren’t who they seem or profess to be.
Some innies were covert outies, while some outies were at war with their innies. In one story line, a woman cheated on her husband with his innie. One of the season’s great reveals — spoiler alert if you haven’t yet watched the whole thing — involved the emotional fallout when the main character, Mark S., realized he’d had an intimate encounter with a woman he thought was his office romance but was, in fact, the malevolent future head of the company. (Thanks to the mechanics of the show, those two people inhabit the same body.)
All this reflects our national dilemma, in which we’re experiencing our own kind of bifurcated daily reality. We seem fated to follow every election from now on by looking across the partisan divide and wondering: Who are you? And how could you? We don’t trust one another. We don’t even believe we know one another. Maybe you thought you knew your kindly next-door neighbors until one day they unfurled a MAGA flag on their front lawn. Or perhaps you thought you knew who President Trump was until he decided to gut the Department of Veterans Affairs or threaten to annex Canada.
It’s a destabilizing realization — that people who once thought they were involved in a common project, informed by common ideals, are living in different realities. And there don’t seem to be any ready political remedies. While we muddle through, there’s a fascination and perhaps even a comfort in seeing these anxieties reflected in the fun house mirror of our entertainment.
The 1970s were a similarly fertile period for paranoid thrillers, with movies like “The Parallax View,” “The Conversation” and “Three Days of the Condor” (recently remade as the limited series “Condor”). But those films pointed to the apprehensions of a different age, telling tales of vast, complicated conspiracies that played out at the highest levels of power — perhaps not surprising, given the real-life revelations of vast, complex conspiracies, whether Watergate or the efforts to cover up clandestine military actions in Cambodia.
In our mutually mistrustful moment, the enemy is not — or at least not only — a vast unseen conspiracy; it’s our office colleague, our neighbor, our spouse. In “Black Bag,” a new espionage film starring Michael Fassbender, a spy suspects that there’s a turncoat in the ranks and that it may be his beloved wife. In “The Agency,” an espionage series also starring Mr. Fassbender (a master of bloodless opacity), a C.I.A. operative becomes chillingly expert at ensuring that no one close to him knows who he truly is.
“Black Doves” delivers Keira Knightley as the seemingly benign wife of a government minister who has lethal weapons hidden in her clothes drawer and a lethal vocation hidden in her past. On “Special Ops: Lioness,” an operative goes undercover to become the best friend of (then falls in love with) the daughter of the person she must kill. The recent readaptation “Ripley” and the reboot of “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” reimagined their stories as parables about the perils of opening up to those closest to you — a mistake that can leave you distrustful, despondent or dead.
Perhaps we’ve become too culturally cynical to be titillated by whispers of official malfeasance in the halls of power (that familiar cry that the conspiracy goes “all the way to the top!”) given we’re busy screaming that idea at one another online. Or maybe we’ve been numbed to vast conspiracies by the sheer abundance of theories on offer — Kate Middleton’s body double, microchips in vaccines and the truth about the mysterious death of Jeffrey Epstein. Lacking a shared public reality, we’ve started to doubt our private ones.
The McCarthyite Communist scare of the 1950s was another time when paranoid thrillers turned their eyes on our fellow citizens — an era whose vibe, notably, is once again rearing its head. On the political stage, that era ended only when national figures stood up and decried Joseph McCarthy’s efforts to wield cultural distrust to political ends.
On “Severance,” reintegration is the painful but necessary process by which people restore their split personalities into one functioning consciousness. Such a resolution, no matter how painful or how necessary, is hard to envision for us in real life. For now, we’re left to eye one another suspiciously while we enjoy our weekend viewing and worry that, until now, maybe we haven’t been paranoid enough.
NEW YORK TIMES
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