Month: January 2021

I had my second Covid vaccination yesterday. Within the next week or so, I should achieve above 90% percent immunity. That doesn’t mean that I won’t catch the virus or transmit it, according to my understanding. It simply means that I will be spared the symptoms. That in itself is a huge relief.

While thankful to have come this far so quickly – hardly anyone I know outside Israel has received the vaccine – my satisfaction is tempered by the awareness that my good fortune is the result of something I have lamented and criticized for my entire adult life.

Israel’s uncanny stranglehold on sentiment in the West has again enabled it to profit over most other countries, without any real justification and despite the human rights abuses that should – and probably would, in the case of virtually any other country – condemn it to international pariahdom.

So Phil Spector is dead, then,
crazy fuck, musical magician,
engineer of walls
that Trump could never build.
To know him was to love him,
before he became an unhinged melody.
He was the Wagner of electric excess, the
little corporal of the recording studio.
Inducing hard-ons in teen jeans
and nipples standing to attention under polyester blouses.
But stoned and sodden,
flailing,
demented,
he played god one time too many.
Farewell, then, spectral Phil.
For a while all your stars were shining bright
and then you killed us.

Roy Isacowitz (with thanks to EJ Gordin, 12 ½)