Notes from the underground

Podcast Episode: One Battle After Another

/ Benn Bell / 1 Comment

Pip: Ghost Dog, the site where film criticism arrives like a weather report for the soul — and today the forecast calls for revolution.

Mara: Benn Bell has a new piece up, and it's a full-throated case for a Paul Thomas Anderson film as the movie this political moment demands. Let's start with that argument.

One Battle After Another

Pip: The question this review puts on the table is a big one: can a film actually speak to a political moment, not just reflect it, but demand to be seen because of it?

Mara: The review roots itself in history first. The film's title comes from a 1969 Weather Underground statement published in New Left Notes, and the review quotes it directly: "From here on out, it's one battle after another — with white youth joining in the fight and taking the necessary risks. Pig Amerika beware. There's an army growing in your guts and it's going to bring you down."

Pip: And the review notes that the first and last sentences of that statement both appear as dialogue in the film's first act — so Anderson isn't borrowing the phrase decoratively. He's staging the argument.

Mara: The stakes the review sets are explicit: "This is the film we need to see now. A revolution is coming to America, and it won't be pretty." That's not a recommendation buried in a star rating. That's a provocation up front.

Pip: The craft case follows. Anderson adapts Thomas Pynchon, which is not a light undertaking — Pynchon on the page resists adaptation almost as a matter of principle.

Mara: The review calls it "a masterpiece of the cinema" and credits the acting, writing, and direction as all superb. The cast includes Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, and Benicio Del Toro. And there's a specific formal comparison: a Tarantino-esque quality, and a deliberate homage to Bullitt — a Mustang chasing a Charger through California sunlight, elevation changes and all.

Pip: High praise, and the kind that actually tells you something — invoking Bullitt's chase is invoking a specific grammar of American tension on asphalt.

Mara: The review closes simply: "If you care about anything about movies or America, go see this movie now." No hedging. The film and the moment are treated as the same argument.

Pip: Revolution as film genre, Pynchon as screenwriter — the site is not playing it safe.

Mara: Next time, we'll see what other territory Ghost Dog decides to claim.

Podcast Episode: Philadelphia Neighborhood Stories

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Pip: Ghost Dog, the blog where Philadelphia is a city of neighborhoods, Kentucky is apparently a punchline, and the bar tab sorts itself out in the end.

Mara: Today we're covering Benn Bell's writing on city life — specifically what it means to belong to a place, and what happens when you come back to one after a long absence.

Pip: Let's start with the neighborhood itself.

Tony's Way and the Geography of Belonging

Mara: The question this piece is really asking is what it means to become a regular somewhere — and what that status is actually worth, in a city where neighborhoods have their own cultures and their own rules.

Pip: The post sets the scene directly: "In Kensington, where Tony's Way is located, it is mainly Spanish, as in Puerto Rican. Tony's Way is a little Puerto Rican bar nestled below the elevated Blue Line in Kensington."

Mara: So the bar isn't just a bar — it's embedded in a specific block, under a specific train line, in a neighborhood with a specific identity. The geography is doing real work here.

Pip: And the way you earn your place in that geography is incremental. You walk past enough times, you become a face, and eventually Tony himself comes over to introduce you to Ricardo and Edwardo — his cousins, his security arrangement, his welcome committee all at once.

Mara: That introduction is the piece's first marker of belonging. The second comes later, on a busy Friday night, when the bouncers are frisking every man at the door and they just wave him through.

Pip: Which he initially reads as an insult — not dangerous enough to bother with — until the guy next to him offers the obvious alternative: they probably just know you.

Mara: That's the hinge of the whole story. Being known in a place is the thing that looks, from the outside, like being overlooked.

Pip: Then he moves away. Trenton, then Kentucky. Ten years pass.

Mara: And when he returns, Tony recognizes him immediately — notes that his hair was shorter, asks where he went. When he says Kentucky, Tony calls the barmaid over, and the laughter spreads down the bar until the whole room is shouting "Kentucky!" A second version of this story, posted separately under the same title, revisits that same Philadelphia frame: a city of neighborhoods, a million stories.

Pip: The detail that he drank free that day and suffered for it the next morning is doing quiet, honest work — the city gives you something, and it costs you something, and you go home glad anyway.

Mara: Which is about as clean a definition of belonging as you're likely to find. The neighborhood keeps its own ledger.

Pip: And the ledger, it turns out, has a long memory.

Mara: What stays with me is that the geography and the community aren't separate things in these pieces — the bar under the El, the walk home, the cousins in the corner. Place and people are the same thing.

Pip: Kentucky never stood a chance.

Podcast Episode: THE FALL: BOOK REVIEW

/ Benn Bell / 1 Comment

Pip: There are books you read, books you reread, and then books that reread you — the ones that find new ways to indict you every time you open them.

Mara: Today on Ghost Dog, Benn Bell takes us deep into Albert Camus's The Fall — a novel about guilt, self-deception, and what it costs to finally see yourself clearly. Let's start with the book itself and what it does to a reader across three decades.

Camus, Clamence, and the Weight of Seeing Clearly

Pip: The question at the center of this segment is deceptively simple: what does it mean to reread a great book and discover you missed almost everything? The review isn't just about The Fall — it's about what changes in a reader over thirty-four years, and why some books only reveal themselves once you've lived enough to deserve them.

Mara: The review describes arriving at the novel for a third time and finding it transformed — "there on every page was an earthquake. In each sentence an incendiary device." That's not a description of a book changing. That's a description of the reader finally being ready.

Pip: And what the reader is now ready to receive is genuinely uncomfortable. Clamence, the novel's narrator — a former Parisian lawyer who presents himself as a man of pure virtue — turns out to be running a long, elaborate con, mostly on himself.

Mara: The plot mechanics matter here. Clamence is holding court in a dive bar in Amsterdam's red light district, telling stories to a stranger he addresses as "you" — which Camus makes literal. The "you" is the reader. You are the interlocutor. You are being confessed at.

Pip: The pivot from "successful humanitarian lawyer" to "man who walked away from a drowning woman" is where the novel earns its title. He hears the body hit the water. He hears the screaming go downstream. He goes home.

Mara: And that's not even the deepest charge against him. The review traces how Clamence eventually retreats into debauchery, framing it as philosophy. He quotes Camus directly: "True love is exceptional — two or three times a century, more or less. The rest of the time there is vanity or boredom."

Pip: Which is a beautiful sentence for a man to say while drinking himself to death in the red light district of Amsterdam. Not that I'm judging.

Mara: The review is careful to show that Clamence's self-awareness doesn't redeem him — it's actually the mechanism of his continued corruption. He invents the concept of the "judge-penitent": confess your own sins loudly enough, and you earn the right to condemn everyone else.

Pip: The novel's most devastating passage comes near the end, and the review lets it run long enough to land properly.

Mara: Camus writes: "Don't wait for the Last Judgement. It takes place every day." The little-ease passage that surrounds it — the medieval dungeon cell too small to stand in, too narrow to lie down in — is Camus's image for the condition of modern guilt. You can't stand up straight. You can't rest. You just crouch on the diagonal, indefinitely.

Pip: The review's conclusion is the part that stays with you. Guilt isn't only about what you do. It's about what you fail to do. Clamence didn't push anyone off a bridge. He just kept walking.

Mara: And the review closes with three spare lines that feel like Camus wrote them himself: no objective truth, the fall always occurs at dawn, and one sentence sufficient for modern man — "he fornicated and read the newspapers."

Pip: Right. On that note — the novel's Amsterdam setting isn't incidental. Those concentric canals, the circles of hell, the question of what it means to live at the bottom of them — that geography of guilt points somewhere.

Mara: What holds all of this together is the idea that clarity comes late, and costs something when it arrives.

Pip: Clamence saw himself perfectly clearly and used that clarity as a weapon. The question the novel leaves open is whether any of us would do differently.

Podcast Episode: Meet the Reverend!

/ Benn Bell / 1 Comment

Pip: Ghost Dog is the kind of site that makes you wonder if satire ever really went away, or if it just got a better costume.

Mara: Today we're covering a piece from Benn Bell — a mock television interview that puts a fictional former president in front of a televangelist host, complete with fake commercials and the full absurdist apparatus of late-night public access TV.

Pip: Let's start with the Reverend.

Meet the Reverend!

Mara: The setup here is a parody talk show — "MEET THE REVEREND!" — hosted by one Reverend Billy Bob Weatherspoon of the Space Chapel of Life, interviewing former president Jimmy Joe Starter from Monkey's Eyebrows, Kentucky. The comedy runs on the gap between the gravity of the format and the total vacancy of the content.

Pip: The show's host interrupts a question about nuclear proliferation to hawk his self-published book about angels. Which, honestly, tracks.

Mara: And the book pitch is specific: "just how many times have ya wondered how many angels could dance on the top of a Bic Butane Lighter?" That's the actual commercial copy — available in hard, soft, and leather-bound editions, the last one suspended from a chain, mailed to Box 666 in Anaheim.

Pip: The nuclear policy section is where the satire sharpens. Jimmy Joe proposes banning nuclear weapons for convicted felons and legally insane persons, and registering all warheads — a direct mirror of gun-control rhetoric applied to weapons of mass destruction.

Mara: His specific concern is what he calls the Saturday Night Special — a small, concealable radiation-enhanced device. He describes it as capable of "taking out single-family dwellings with little or no blast damage to the surrounding area" while spreading radiation across an area "the size of oh, say, Fort Knox." He delivers this with a big smile.

Pip: The upshot is that the satire isn't really about Jimmy Joe — it's about the format that would let someone that untethered discuss that subject with that much confidence.

Mara: The UFO sequence lands the same way. Jimmy Joe recounts an abduction in full detail — hovering craft, beam of light, waking up "as naked as a Jaybird" in his tobacco field singing — and Rev. Billy's response is simply "Yes, well isn't that special," before pivoting to ask whether Jimmy Joe has ever had lust in his heart.

Pip: The closing question is whether being a born-again Christian and having lust in your heart are mutually exclusive. Jimmy Joe says no — but clarifies it was lust for another Christian.

Mara: Rev. Billy wraps by teasing next week's guest: "that silly old buffoon and darling of the media, Attorney Michael Cohen." The show's fictional frame keeps slipping into commentary on real events — January 6th, the Big Lie, Ukraine — which is what gives the absurdism its edge.

Pip: The whole piece runs like a transcript, which means the humor lives entirely in the dialogue — no authorial winking, no stage directions beyond the big smiles.

Mara: The piece uses the talk-show form to ask what political discourse actually looks like when the format is stripped of its pretense.

Pip: Turns out it looks a lot like a man from Monkey's Eyebrows explaining nuclear physics while the Reverend sells chain-bound books to Box 666.

Podcast Episode: STALKER (1979)

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Pip: Ghost Dog is the kind of site that watches a film twice, still can't explain it, and considers that a recommendation.

Mara: Today we're covering Benn Bell's deep dive into Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker — the film, the zone, and what it means to stand at the threshold of your deepest wish and refuse to walk through.

Pip: Let's start with the zone itself.

STALKER (1979): A Room That Reveals Who You Are

Mara: The central tension here is deceptively simple: three men journey into a forbidden, possibly sentient landscape toward a room that grants your deepest desire — and when they finally arrive, none of them will enter.

Pip: The review quotes Tarkovsky directly from his book Sculpting in Time: "The zone is a mysterious place that was reportedly created by an asteroid and may contain other world forces. It doesn't symbolize anything. The zone is the zone. It is life. An allegory about human consciousness, the necessity of faith in an increasingly secular world, and the ugly, unpleasant dreams and desires that reside in the hearts of man."

Mara: So the upshot is that the zone isn't a puzzle to solve — it's a mirror. What you find there is yourself, which is precisely why nobody wants to go in.

Pip: The three travelers are Stalker, a dispirited Writer, and a hopeless Scientist — the last idealist guiding two members of the Russian intelligentsia into a place that's illegal to enter and possibly lethal to navigate.

Mara: The zone's geography carries real historical weight. It was inspired by a nuclear accident near Chelyabinsk in 1957, and the review notes it presages Chernobyl — the Zone of Alienation, thirty kilometers in every direction. Water everywhere, submerged ruins, ground that appears to breathe.

Pip: One hundred and forty-two shots across a hundred and sixty-one minutes. When Russian distributors asked Tarkovsky to speed it up, he said he'd sooner slow it down — to filter out the audience that shouldn't be watching in the first place. That is a filmmaker with opinions about his viewers.

Mara: The pacing is structural, not accidental. The film opens in sepia, shifts to color the moment the characters enter the zone, returns to sepia when they leave — then color again for Monkey, Stalker's daughter, who moves glasses telekinetically in the final scene.

Pip: Writer gets the film's bleakest line: "The world is ruled by cast-iron laws, and it's insufferably boring." Tarkovsky's answer to that is the room — and then, pointedly, the camera enters the room alone.

Mara: The review closes on a quieter Tarkovsky quote, one that steps back from allegory entirely: "In the end, everything can be reduced to the one simple element which is all a person can count upon in his existence: the capacity to love."

Pip: Which lands differently once you realize Stalker — the guide, the true believer — is the most educated and cultured figure in the film. The idealist outruns the intellectuals.

Mara: That's the film's real argument: faith as a form of knowledge the writer and scientist can't access, however much they theorize about it.

Pip: A haunted, slow, demanding film that apparently demands to be seen twice before it starts making sense — and still doesn't, exactly.

Mara: Faith, consciousness, the desires we won't admit to — Tarkovsky packs a lot into a hundred and sixty-one minutes of almost nothing happening.

Pip: Next time, whatever Bell watches, I hope it has slightly more conventional ideas about shot counts.

Is Irony Dead?

/ Benn Bell / Leave a comment

Is irony really dead? In his famous essay “E Unibus Pluram,” David Foster Wallace argued that irony had become so pervasive in American culture that it had lost much of its rebellious power.

Television and advertising could take any sincere statement, immediately put quotation marks around it, and turn it into a joke. Everything could be mocked, including the act of mocking itself.

And paradoxically, irony can begin as a weapon against bullshit and eventually become another form of bullshit.I don’t think irony is dead. It’s walking with a limp. It’s become harder to use well, and Wallace was diagnosing that problem rather than predicting the literal disappearance of irony.

He worried about a generation that had learned to protect itself from sincerity by making fun of everything. If you never say anything straightforwardly, you can never be embarrassed by being earnest. Irony becomes armor.

I wouldn’t want to live in a world without irony. Irony is one of the greatest tools of the intelligent. It allows us to hold two ideas simultaneously in our minds: what is said and what is actually meant. It exposes hypocrisy. It punctures pomposity. It creates distance between ourselves and our own certainty.

Think of the novel, The Fall. Camus uses irony almost like a scalpel. Clamence tells us one thing while gradually revealing something quite different about himself. The reader becomes complicit in discovering the deception. That’s philosophical irony.

And Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, Mark Twain, and Jonathan Swift all understood that irony can tell the truth precisely because it refuses to state the truth directly.

Wallace may have a point: Irony becomes destructive when it is the only voice we have. If everything is a joke, nothing matters. If everything is mocked, there is nothing left to stand for. And if the writer is perpetually winking at the reader, eventually the reader wants the writer to stop winking and say something that costs him something to say.

Hmm. Maybe so.

Wallace believed in sincerity. He wasn’t really calling for the death of irony. He wanted to recover something that irony had driven underground: earnestness, vulnerability, moral seriousness, even love.

So, I’d put it this way:

Irony isn’t dead. But irony without sincerity becomes sterile, just as sincerity without irony can become naïve.

Nevertheless, some of my favorite authors, Camus, Nietzsche, Sartre, Albee, and Steinbeck seem to employ it with great authority and sophistication. I am drawn to that uncomfortable territory where truth and illusion overlap. Irony is perfectly at home there, and so am I.

One shouldn’t abandon irony.  One should know when to put the mask on andwhen to take it off.

The moment you sincerely acknowledge that you’re being ironic, the irony changes again.

As long as you are sincere, you can be ironic. Isn’t that ironic?

Here we are getting closer to the truth. The place where a statement simultaneously means what it says and something beyond what it says.

Irony isn’t dead.

It just needs a reason to live.

Podcast Episode: The Curious Case of Dr. Benjamin Franklin Woolery

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Pip: Ghost Dog is a site where history shows up unannounced, sits down at the table, and refuses to leave quietly.

Mara: Today we're covering a piece by Benn Bell that reconstructs a single, devastating day in 1944 Louisville — a story where a house call ends in triple tragedy, and the world outside keeps turning anyway.

Pip: Let's start with the doctor, the family, and the November afternoon that became a newspaper headline.

The Curious Case of Dr. Benjamin Franklin Woolery

Pip: This segment is about what it looks like when a routine moment — a doctor attending a birth — collapses into catastrophe, and how a newspaper account from 1944 preserves the human wreckage in plain, unsparing language.

Mara: The post draws directly from the Louisville Courier Journal, November 3, 1944, and the dateline sets the scene: "Dr. Benjamin Franklin Woolery, age 64, of 815 Cecil Avenue, a general practitioner here for thirty-five years, was stricken by a heart attack and found slumped over the woman's body at 2:30 pm at her home at 3130 New High St."

Pip: So the physician dies mid-delivery. The patient, Bessie Ford, is under anesthesia — she doesn't know he's gone. Her ninth child is born dead. She dies that evening at St. Joseph Infirmary.

Mara: Three deaths in one afternoon. Jess Ford, Bessie's husband, describes the chaos in his own words: "After the doctor died, I was running around so much I don't know just what I did." He called the police, the hospital, the infirmary, and an ambulance service in rapid succession from a nearby grocery store.

Pip: That detail — running to a grocery store to make four phone calls — is the whole texture of 1944 in one sentence.

Mara: The ambulance made the run in four minutes. A crowd of children gathered in the dirt road outside. The post also notes Dr. Woolery had just met his son at the station — a Coast Guard musician home on furlough — before being called to the Ford home.

Pip: The post doesn't editorialize on that timing. It doesn't need to.

Mara: What gives the piece its full weight is the coda. After the local tragedy, the post lists what else was happening that week: the first bombing of Tokyo, the first open-heart surgery at Johns Hopkins, the Battle of the Bulge. And then the author's note — Dr. Woolery was his great-grandfather and namesake.

Pip: History as inheritance. The archive as a way of saying: this person existed, and here is the proof.

Mara: One newspaper clipping, one family name, and suddenly 1944 is not a history chapter — it's a Tuesday afternoon with a crowd of children in a dirt road.

Pip: Next time, whatever Ghost Dog surfaces, I suspect it will land the same way — quietly, and then all at once.

Podcast Episode: Fear and Loathing on the Way to Galveston

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Pip: Ghost Dog is back, and this time we're loading up the White Whale and pointing it south toward Galveston — which, as a destination for spiritual renewal, is either inspired or deeply suspicious.

Mara: Benn Bell takes us on a road trip through Arkansas, Texas, and the American Dream — or what's left of it. Let's start with the journey itself.

Fear and Loathing on the Way to Galveston

Pip: This piece sets up a classic road trip premise: two old friends, a cooling friendship, and a deliberate choice to drive toward something they've both lost. The question underneath all of it is whether you can actually recapture the past, or whether the road is just an excuse to try.

Mara: The destination is framed right at the top — "We were going to Galveston to recapture our past and rekindle a friendship that had cooled off over the years."

Pip: So this isn't a vacation. It's a repair job with a full tank of gas and a road trip playlist. The stakes are personal, even if the scenery is just highway.

Mara: The traveling companion is Daniel "Buddha" Hildenbrandt — a community college communications teacher with a philosophy he repeats to his students: "the main problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place." Which does raise a question about how the friendship cooling off actually happened.

Pip: A man who teaches communication and cannot communicate. That tracks.

Mara: The first night lands them in Hope, Arkansas — Best Western, no working TV, no working phone, and a maskless desk clerk who keeps asking whether they want one bed or two. The pizza takes an hour. The whiskey argument is brief but intense.

Pip: The whiskey standoff is the emotional center of the piece, honestly. Two men who drove hundreds of miles to reconnect, and they nearly come apart over whether Ezra Brooks is better than Jack Daniels. The post notes, dryly: "We drove the rest of the way in silence."

Mara: By the time they cross into Texas, the landscape opens up — wider roads, longer horizons — and the post turns outward. Trump signs line the highway. The narrator reflects on the 2020 election, the insurrection, Ukraine, and a million COVID dead. He writes: "If you look back and squint your eyes just right, you can almost see where the crest of the wave finally broke and rolled back."

Pip: The road trip is doing double duty. It's a friendship story and a reckoning with forty years of American decline, all moving at highway speed toward the Gulf.

Mara: And Galveston is still ahead.

Pip: Recapturing the past while the present is actively on fire — that's the tension the whole trip runs on.

Mara: Whether they find what they're looking for in Galveston is a question the road hasn't answered yet. More to come.

Podcast Episode: Book Review: Recessional by David Mamet

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Pip: Ghost Dog, where we read so you don't have to — though today's post makes a reasonable case that sometimes you shouldn't bother reading at all.

Mara: Today we're covering a book review from Benn Bell — one that sits at the intersection of craft, politics, and the particular disappointment of a writer you admire going badly off the rails.

Pip: Let's start with the book itself — David Mamet, Recessional, and the question of what happens when a genuinely talented writer loses the plot.

Book Review: Recessional by David Mamet

Mara: The tension here is real: Mamet wrote Glengarry Glen Ross. He wrote The Verdict. His dramatic work is undeniable. So what do you do with a collection of short essays that flatly contradicts the intelligence behind those plays?

Pip: The review doesn't bury the lead. The verdict on the essays is that they are, quote, "loaded with misinformation, lies, and incorrect conclusions."

Mara: And that framing matters, because the review isn't dismissing Mamet wholesale. It's making a distinction — the playwright versus the essayist. The craft that produced great drama is simply not present in these three-and-four-page pieces.

Pip: Which makes the moments of genuine agreement more interesting, not less. There are quotes in here worth sitting with. On screenwriting: "The script exists to describe to the cameraman what to shoot and to tell the actors what to say. Everything else is besides the point. The nature of a script is a recipe."

Mara: That's a clean, useful definition — and the review accepts it as very sensible. There's also real warmth for Mamet's line about Beckett being the greatest dramatist since Shakespeare, with the addition of Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee as possible company.

Pip: So the review is doing something careful: holding the good lines and the bad arguments at the same time rather than throwing the whole book out.

Mara: Right — and then the politics arrive. Mamet argues the left is the tyrannical force in American life, that the left tried to steal the election. The review pushes back directly: domestic terror attacks, January 6th, Bill Maher calling Mamet out on his own show, Mamet responding with "skip that page."

Pip: "Skip that page" is not a rebuttal. It is, however, an accidental summary of the review's final recommendation about the book as a whole.

Mara: The review lands there too — suggesting we might skip the entire book. But the craft observations survive. The Aristotle and Campbell references Mamet cites as essential drama reading even make the reviewer's own TBR list.

Pip: So what we're left with is a writer who can still identify the right tools — he just stopped using them.

Mara: The craft holds even when the argument doesn't — that's the tension the review keeps returning to.

Pip: Next time, more from Ghost Dog on whatever Benn Bell reads, watches, or decides to push back on. We'll be here.

Intestinal Morbidity

/ Benn Bell / 8 Comments

I have been reading Nietzsche again lately. He is sort of a guilty pleasure. I read him early of a morning with my coffee. This morning, I ran across this bon mot, “Intestinal morbidity.” He famously claimed at some point, “The spirit is like a stomach”. In his view, intestinal morbidity represents the failure to digest reality.

To Nietzsche, a healthy person can “swallow” even the most painful truths (the death of God, the cruelty of nature) and turn them into a strength. A morbid gut suffers from resentment. It’s a spirit that takes in experiences but can’t break them down. Instead of being converted into action, the experience sits and rots, poisoning the host with bitterness and envy. Here, I think, is the crux of the matter. Here is where I take my inspiration. It is better to live a life of gratitude than a life of resentment. But, to do this, it requires a life of intestinal fortitude.