Niklas Pivic > Recent Status Updates

"In January 1974, Dad murdered Joseph and Julie Otero and their two youngest children, Josie, age eleven, and Joey, age nine. The three older Otero children found their family’s bodies after walking home from school."

The start is far too belaboured, but the rest of the book is, so far, a ride, mainly into the bad bits of Bourdain; I don't mean that in the bad-boy way: he apparently was both a bully and belittling in very harsh ways. And there is the good, too, of course. Seems like having been part of Bourdain's road crew seems to have come with Stockholm syndrome (which Vitali flat out says).

This is—so far—a well-written gem of a graphic novel about being a bourgeoisie white male. Reminiscent of the film '(500) Days of Summer'.

So far, this book is 5/5 and horrendous: https://twitter.com/pivic/status/1293...

“And that’s when I knew! What other life could there be but that of an actor? They happily travelled and toured. They were classless, cheerful and carefree. They gaily laughed, lived and loved.”

'A man steps out from behind a doorway I hadn’t noticed before and offers me his hand in greeting, asking if I’d like a cup of coffee. He looks like the kind of guy who’d one day end up in an alcohol detox center studying snakes and insects. I turn away without a word; I’ll never shake the hand of someone I might be fighting against in wartime.'

This far into the book, I feel that Kaczynski was very intelligent but also transphobic and anti-left; his insanity bleeds a lot into his text.

'Perhaps I was realizing for the first time what this workaday world meant: having to do things which are no longer determined by the desire to do them.'

Disney's constant f-ups are interesting to read about. I wish there were more of Ghibli's to read of.

For example, where Disney are concerned: https://twitter.com/pivic/status/1262...

'Working at St James Press was continuing to stress Gen out and I found myself on the receiving end of one of his violent outbursts. Bruises weren’t a good thing, full stop, but any mark on me also meant I couldn’t model. There was no Photoshop then and only the high-end magazines like Playboy used airbrushing.'

I wish I could go back in time and slap the shit out of Genesis P. Orridge.

'When an older girl beat me, my dad sent me round to her house armed with a pair of garden shears. She was twice my age and size. Crazy. Nevertheless, I had no option but to go round under orders from Dad. [...] I knocked on the door, surprise-punched her when she answered, and screamed at her that if she ever touched me again I’d be back and have her with the garden shears. That’s Hull for you.'

'Ferdinand Porsche, head of the auto company, had been imprisoned for twenty months after World War II for war crimes (though never brought to trial), and in her Ms. article Andrea had deliberately called the firm out for its complicity in cooperating with the Nazis.'

Maheu also gave Beauvoir the nickname that would stick with her for her entire adult life: Castor – the French word for beaver. One day he wrote in her exercise book, in capital letters: ‘BEAUVOIR = BEAVER’. He explained his logic: like her, beavers ‘like company and have a constructive bent’.

'In ['The Soul of Man under Socialism'] Oscar Wilde makes many striking pronouncements, among them: “the form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all”; “there is no necessity to separate the monarch from the mob; all authority is equally bad”; and “all modes of government are failures.”'

'On the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of Israel, the hoopoe [...] was chosen as the national bird. During the vote, Shimon Peres, the Israeli president, said he was only sorry that the most Zionist of birds, the dove, had not made the final cut. It was, said Nurit, one of the most perverse lines she had heard in her life, although it was, she added, apt that the name Peres in Hebrew meant bearded vulture.'

https://twitter.com/pivic/status/1234...

'Both birds would, he knew, go undocumented. For a keepsake the teenager hung the original aluminum rings—with their sequential numbers—on a thin silver necklace. Tarek felt the rings bouncing at his throat two months later when he went down to Virgin Mary Street alongside his older brothers to sling stones.'

https://twitter.com/pivic/status/1234...

'Weinstein had begun a secret relationship with an Israeli firm [...]: “The black cube group from israel contacted me thru ehud Barack,” [...]“They r strategists and say your firm have used them.” Black Cube did far more than watch other people. It manipulated them as well, even using an actor who adopted a fake identity in order to dupe unsuspecting targets. Others were former military intelligence experts.'

GEORGE WICKES: When did you first know that you were going to be a writer?

URSULA K. LE GUIN: I don’t know. I sort of took it as an established fact.