在他的月刊中，Conspiracy,RichCohengets to the bottom of it all.

Do you ever feel like you are somewhere you’re not supposed to be? In a world that is not supposed to exist? Have you ever marveled at how long you have been alive, how old you feel, or how different the world has become than the world you once knew?

Have you ever woken in the dead of night, sat up in bed and said, as if from the depths of your being, No. This is a mistake. This is all wrong.

Is it the coronavirus that makes you feel this way, the quarantine, the deaths? Is it the fact that you currently spend twenty-four hours a day with your kids, the youngest of whom sounds like this, MAW, MAW, MAW?

Is it that you will be seventy if and when that child graduates from college, if you are alive, if there is college?

这是你在汉克威廉姆斯Jr.抒情的怪异新相关性，“传教士男子说这是时间结束，密西西比河正在干涸”？

Is it that you live in a flat-roofed house made of windows, that New Orleans was again destroyed by flood, that California was ravaged by fires, that the Chinese have sent a ship to the dark side of the moon, that giant pieces of the Greenland ice sheet routinely calve off and fall into the sea with a splash?Read More

Still from睁大眼睛

“Moloch, whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!”— Allen Ginsberg,Howl

If you are stuck at home, if a disease has begun to eat away the face of your nation, if illness has tinged even the once reliably boring moments of your life with terror, you might start to go a little batty, and, if that happens, you might start to watch the same few movies again and again, the passing hours registered only by the shade of light in the window, at which point you will begin to notice hidden patterns, secret meanings. You will finally hear what such films have been trying to tell you all along.

This is what happened to me in the last few weeks with the movies of Stanley Kubrick, which, on repeat viewing, have turned out to be lousy with portents. Even the most overlooked of the director’s films,E.是的宽度, which he was fiddling with when he died, sounds a clarion call through time, revealing the actual nature of a society now being swept aside by the virus.

Kubrick’s message is simple: you know nothing.

It’s a truth demonstrated via allegory, the story of a powerful man beset by demons. Of course, to many, the movie was always more than a parable. It was an exposé written in code. It revealed a dynamic that had long played out in sectors of elite society but was not glimpsed until our own age, an age of scandal, the most telling being the scandal of Jeffrey Epstein.

简而言之，睁大眼睛is not fiction. It’s documentary. It’s a great artist, at the end of a brilliant career, uncovering hidden evil.

艺术功能是什么？

Is it to show us something diverting, beautiful, new?

Or is it to tell us what we’ve always known but never admitted to ourselves?

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在他的月刊中，Conspiracy,RichCohengets to the bottom of it all.

When I was eleven, we lived in an English Tudor on Bluff Road in Glencoe, Illinois. One day, three strange men (two young, one old) knocked on the door. Their last name was Frank. They said they’d lived in this house before us, not for weeks but decades. For twenty years, this had been their house. They’d grown up here. Though I knew the house was old, it never occurred to me until then that someone else had lived in these rooms, that even my own room was not entirely my own. The youngest of the men, whose room would become mine, showed me the place on a brick wall hidden by ivy where he’d carved his name. “Bobby Frank, 1972.” It had been there all along. And I never even knew it.

That is the condition of the human race: we have woken to life with no idea how we got here, where that is or what happened before. Nor do we think much about it. Not because we are incurious, but because we do not know how much we don’t know.

什么是阴谋？

It’s a truth that’s been kept from us. It can be a secret but it can also be the answer to a question we’ve not yet asked.

现代人类已经发生了大约20万年，但生活在这个星球上存在35亿。这留下了3,495,888,000年的人类年度，未来几乎没有足够的时间来崛起和堕落，而不是几个人的工业文明。相同的屏幕，不同的秀。相同的领域，不同的团队。与外星技术，外星车辆，外星民间传说和外星人恐惧的外星人，在熟悉的天空下。没有证据表明这样的证据，建造了物品和行业持续不超过十万年。经过几百万，在工作中有板块构造，在地面上有什么，包括地球本身，将在海底，底部将成为山峰。地球表面的最古老的地方 - 一个以色列的Negev沙漠 - 刚刚超过一百万年，没有关于地质时钟。

The result of this is one of my favorite conspiracy theories, though it’s not a conspiracy in the conventional sense, a conspiracy usually being a secret kept by a nefarious elite. In this case, the secret, which belongs to the earth itself, has been kept from all of humanity, which believes it has done the only real thinking and the only real building on this planet, as it once believed the earth was at the center of the universe.

称为Silurian假设，该理论是在2018年由Gavin Schmidt提供的气候建模者编写的美国宇航局’s Goddard Institute, and Adam Frank, an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester. Schmidt had been studying distant planets for hints of climate change, “hyperthermals,” the sort of quick temperature rises that might indicate the moment a civilization industrialized. It would suggest the presence of a species advanced enough to turn on the lights. Such a jump, perhaps resulting from a release of carbon, might be the only evidence that any race, including our own, will leave behind. Not the pyramids, not the skyscrapers, not Styrofoam, not Shakespeare—in the end, we will be known only by a change in the rock that marked the start of the Anthropocene.

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在他的月刊中，Conspiracy,RichCohengets to the bottom of it all.

有一部十年前出现的电影。我在巴黎的一个剧院中看到它是一个罗伯特·米奇节的一部分，这是运气所在的一部分，在一个小街道的小街道的小街道上，在我的小街对面的一条小剧院，在一个小的孤独的季节我的生活。我不去博物馆，我在黑暗的观看时传递了日子cap,The Night of the Hunter,Out of the Past， 和Pursued，一个由Raoul Walsh执导的晦涩难看的电影。Martin Scorsese曾经将其描述为唯一的弗洛伊德西方。它涉及遮挡你存在隐藏起源的抑制记忆，迹象和象征，梦想和幻想。这是关于牛仔。他和他喜欢的母亲一起生活在新墨西哥州;与他的妹妹，他以不同的方式爱他;与他的兄弟，他讨厌谁，虽然他不明白为什么。晚上，他被一个奇怪的梦想困扰着它，他看到舞靴和马刺，总是笑声。在最后的行为中，我们了解靴子和笑声的意义，解释牛仔恐惧和不信任的秘密。梦想不仅仅是一个梦想。 It’s a memory of the day the man who’d been posing as Mitchum’s uncle killed Mitchum’s father, then danced over the body in spurred boots laughing as the woman Mitchum would accept as his mother scooped up the terrified child to be raised as her own.

那部电影已经困扰我至今。它的舞蹈spurs have become my dancing spurs, its story less a plot than a parable. It’s mankind reduced to symbols. It’s a secret encoded. It’s telling us that the truth about our past—as a species—has been hidden. It’s about the effort to keep it hidden, which constitutes a conspiracy. It’s a secret that remains just out of reach, though the existence of the secret is hinted at in all the ancient books. It’s in the Bible (Old Testament) and in its sequel (New Testament). It’s in Exodus when Moses climbs the trail to the peak of Sinai, the holy mountain, the Lord’s abode in the upside-down. God gives Moses the Ten Commandments, then something else, a secret teaching, whispered in the left ear. Moses shared it with his nephews, who either passed it on or were not listening. Some of it may have been recorded in Jubilees, a noncanonical book of the Bible. It’s in the Gospels, too, most clearly in Mark, when Jesus, explaining why much of his teaching is given in the form of parables (in ancient Israel, a parable was like a riddle) says he does it to obscure as much as to reveal:

You are permitted to understand the secrets of the Kingdom of Heaven, but others are not. To those who listen to my teaching, more understanding will be given, and they will have an abundance of knowledge. But for those who are not listening, even what little understanding they have will be taken away from them. That is why I use these parables, for they look, but they don’t really see. They hear, but they don’t really listen or understand.

对犹太人来说,这通过看似method-teaching点less stories—will be familiar. All our old-timers prefer anecdotes to instructions, questions to answers. Think of the Bob Dylan lyric: “I can tell you fancy, I can tell you plain.” Or think of my pop who, when asked why he answered every question with another question, responded, “Why do you ask?”

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在他的月刊中，Conspiracy,RichCohengets to the bottom of it all.

The best conspiracy theories make sense of what has always seemed senseless. They let you believe you are finally connecting the dots, finding the missing pieces, experiencing the world as it really is. The most powerful theories—the mind blowers—name something you’ve always known, even if you hadn’t known it consciously, or did not believe it could be named. There is no invention, just discovery. The best explain why you feel like you’re being watched, have lived all this before, knew what would happen before the film even started. That’s the case with what’s become my favorite conspiracy theory: the notion, argued by futurists and tech visionaries, that we live not in the real world but in a simulation, an intricately detailed game cooked up by a demigod, hacker, or AI mastermind, which, if true, explains the uncanny sense that this is not my real life, that these are not my real memories. Or, as my friend Mark, standing on Oak Street Beach at 2是。用芝加哥aglow落后于我们，说：“这个狗屎没有真正的，男人。我们都只是在一个疯狂的梦中。“

这一想法，这不是真正的世界比粉红色的弗洛伊德（“我们只是两个失落的灵魂/游泳碗里游泳”），而不是定义电影，The Matrix. You hear it in the Hasidic wisdom of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool”: “No doubt the world is an entirely imaginary world, but it is only once removed from the true world.” You hear it in the writing of the nineteenth-century naturalist Philip Henry Gosse, whose bookomphalos.据称，证明世界的化石比上帝的创世纪六千年的创世纪达到了地上，以测试男人的信仰。你在佛教民间故事中听到它，最着名的庄子“蝴蝶梦”，其中提交人不确定他是否是一个梦想他是一只蝴蝶的男人，或者是一只蝴蝶梦想他是一个男人。It’s the uncanniness you experience not when you are drunk and not when are you are high, but when you are drunk and high, the insight you stumble across the way you stumble across certain bars only when it’s very late and you are very lost and absolutely need them to exist. It’s not that the stimulant creates the dream, but that it opens your eyes to the big truth you’ve been trained not to see.

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在他的月刊中，Conspiracy,RichCohengets to the bottom of it all.本月，他探讨了第二次世界大战后不明飞行物瞄准的突然上升。

America had its head broken open during World War II, and out came the visions. Visions of global power, infinite markets, ideological struggle, and exotic flying machines. It’s not clear if the number of UFO sightings actually spiked in the years that followed or if it was just our imagination, but something changed. What had been a trickle of encounters dating back to the pioneering days of aviation became a torrent. Often described as saucers, these noiseless, shimmery machines were seen above highways and wheat fields and supermarkets in Forth Worth, Texas; Great Falls, Montana; Monmouth County, New Jersey; Salem, Massachusetts; Carson Sink, Nevada; Washington, D.C.; Miami, Florida; Norfolk, Virginia—the list goes on and on—in the late forties and early fifties. The timing makes it impossible to consider such phenomena without also considering the cataclysm that, more than any set of founding documents, gave birth to our colossal, unknowable, world-striding modern nation. In other words, before you can grapple with UFOs, you have to ask yourself: what the hell did that war do to America?

Dreamers have seen things in the heavens since time out of mind. You can go back to 228公元前, when the Roman historian Livy recognized portents of doom in the “phantom ships” he saw “gleaming in the sky.” Or when Pliny the Elder, an ancient scribe, recorded something that sounds like a Steven Spielberg UFO: a spark that “fell from a star and grew as it descended until it appeared to be the size of the Moon.” Such visions, which usually came in times of stress, were taken as a sign from God. Ezekiel’s fiery wheel, witnessed on the road to Babylon, was possibly a flying saucer. People have always had visions, but the language changed. In the religious age, it was angels and demons. In the scientific age, it’s intergalactic dream machines, hot rods cooked up by gearheads from across the inky vacuum. As the holy book says, “We see things not as they are, but as we are.”

The Germans put the first jet plane in the air in 1939. The first rocket that could touch space went up in 1942. Called the V2, its target was not space but London. Chuck Yeager, flying the bullet-shaped Bell X-1, broke the speed of sound (767 mph) in October 1947. Ten years later, the Soviet’s launched the first artificial satellite. That was followed by the first man in space, the first man in orbit, the first man on the moon. One result of the aerospace boom was UFO mania. If we could do it, it was only logical to think aliens could do it, too. Roswell, New Mexico, where the air force was said to have recovered a flying saucer and a crew of dead aliens in 1946, was just the most famous encounter—there were hundreds of others during the Cold War. In 1949, government officials were said to have captured the crew of an alien craft that set down, in the cool of a desert evening, on a plateau in Aztec, New Mexico.

是什么突然的间歇性交通解释了什么？

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