“Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.”
- Marcus Aurelius 

the old and the new exist in uneasy symbiosis. the old empire has time, and falls. the new systems, new ideas, new ideologies, new gods, new orders, the New. some day, it will become the old, and a new New arrives. it is always so. change is inevitable. the regressive and traditional fight progress because they know their old glory will go from diminished to forgotten, in time. but the future cannot become the past, no matter how often history repeats, no matter how many cycles, things are forgotten. what once was a titan becomes a doddering old man, clothing himself in the raiments and indulgences of younger. the future can indulge the past, but it can never become it. 

“Fuck bitches, get money.”
- The Notorious B.I.G. 

three factions emerge; the past, the future, and a false future. an ugly lie. harnessing bitterness and populism. the rich faking empathy for the poor. the narrow vision of someone who desires power, not to make a new and brave future, but because they want power. they feel they were promised it. they were owed it. and they’ll use the fear and corrosive rage of the downtrodden and dispossessed to get it. why not promise the world to people have never had anything? they wouldn’t even know how to collect. 

the future and the past have an ugly symmetry, but they work together. outsiders with the faces of jackals, unable to create, unable to innovate, claiming they’re owed power? that they’ll give it to the people? everything that have, they never earned. and they’re always there. since Rome. since America. since one cave had a better fire than another. since greed and wrath. 

cities are the purest expression of civilization. some day the small town will end, and all will be city. the future, after all, cannot become the past. but a city isn’t only civilization. an empire isn’t only a culture. a great man isn’t a god. it’s all people. all it ever is, and all it ever will be, is people. 

“There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify the evils, of the present times.”
- Edward Gibbons, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

at least, I think. 

movie’s tone was all over the goddamn place. it was like watching twenty movies at once. a farce, rendered in the language of ancient cities, told in many new ways all at the same time.

also, the Adam Driver drunk scene was basically me between the ages of 30-36. down to the fucking body language. eerie. then again, I’m a tall goofy looking guy with a big nose and dark suits. we all warp and wobble alike, in our madness, in our gangly desire to be destroyed by ourselves. 

FIVE STARS! THAT PERFECT CITY IS ALL ASS!