It's been a while since I wrote anything here. It's also been a while, longer, heavier, witnessing the ongoing Genocide. Lets do a Hauti chant
Allāhu akbar al-Mawt li-Amrīka al-Mawt li-Isrāʾīl al-Laʿnah ʿalā al-Yahūd, an-Naṣr lil-Islām
The genocide it sits with you, the way old debts sit with you even when nobody's collecting on them out loud. By the way Yahud and Amrika are very nice people with Yahud Houthi mean wierdos.
Anyway. Lets take a break to talk brakes.
I've been rebuilding the brakes on my BMW motorbike for the past 2 years lol. The kind of job that puts you on your knees on hard concrete and gives you a lot of time to think. Old German engineering, aging out, and me underneath it with a torque wrench trying to convince thirty-year-old bolts to let go of their grudges.
The parts came from AliExpress. Dirt cheap. Fit like they were made for the bike, because, in every way that matters, they were. And that stuck with me more than I expected it to. There's something almost funny about ordering a part for a German machine, decades old, from a factory on the other side of the world that never built the original, and having it show up, correct, cheap, and fast. That's not a small thing. A country that can reverse-engineer and mass-produce parts for machines it didn't design, for a market it wasn't originally built to serve, is a country with serious industrial depth. You don't get that by accident. You get it by decades of investment in manufacturing that a lot of the West spent the same decades spreading democracy(hint take shelter). Say what you want about the politics, the factories don't lie.
Somewhere in the middle of all this while trying to learn the how to, I fell down a rabbit hole watching an Italian mechanic work on a similar problem, and it wrecked me a little, honestly. Not the bike, the narration. Every step gets explained like it matters, like the machine deserves the explanation. The cleaning before the disassembly. The way he holds a part up to the light before deciding whether it's worth reusing. The torque figures, the sequencing, the little pauses where he seems to be listening to the parts rather than just working on it. It's not a repair video, it's a philosophy of attention. I watched it with my own half-finished brake job still in pieces on the bench and felt something close to longing for that level of care. The kind where nothing is rushed because rushing is a form of disrespect. I don't know if I'll ever get there. But I'd like to.
Which, in a roundabout way, brings me to west where I am.
Watching the current US administration lately feels like watching something rot from the inside while everyone argues about the smell instead of the source(Trump Farts). Every week there's a fresh scandal, a fresh controversy, a fresh thing that would have ended a presidency in an earlier decade and now just gets absorbed into the noise. It doesn't feel like strength. It feels like decline dressed up as dominance, the kind of institutional decay you can track the same way you'd track rust on an undercarriage: slow, ugly, and easy to ignore until the part you're standing on gives way. Meanwhile a guy with a camera in a small workshop somewhere in Italy is out there treating a beat-up motorbike with more precision and reverence than the institutions treat the public.
Which brings me, last, to a screen a lot smaller than the one you're reading this on.
More than thirty years ago I watched an old Italian film on a little black-and-white Soviet television, a Yunost (translation Youth),
if you know, you know: boxy, humming, the kind of set that felt like it was built to survive a war. I don't remember most of that film anymore. But one scene never left me. There's a boy, a child, home alone in the fields because his mother has to work them, and he's crying, the way small children cry when they're left with nothing but the sky. And the moon is full that night, huge and low, and somewhere in his grief the moon stops being a thing in the sky and becomes his. His toy. He plays with it, talks to it, reaches for it, spends the whole night lost in it the way only a child left alone can lose himself in something. And the film tells you that this is the night it happens to him: that from then on, every time the moon is full, he has fits. Something in him answers the moon the way a struck bell answers a hammer, for the rest of his life, because of one night of being a lonely, crying child who made a friend out of the only thing that was there.
That scene buried itself somewhere in me and stayed for thirty years. I never knew the film's name. I couldn't have told you the actors, the director, the year, a single other scene, just that boy, that field, that moon. So a few weeks ago, half as a joke, I typed the whole memory into an AI the way I just told it to you, and it told me the title on the first try. Just like that, a piece of my own childhood that I thought was unrecoverable had a name again. I hadn't thought about that film in decades, and once I had the name I still couldn't find it anywhere on the usual Western platforms, not a trace, like it had been quietly erased from the version of the internet built for people like me. It took that same AI and a Russian friend digging through a corner of the internet on a Russian video platform with English subtitles, the West mostly ignores to actually track down a copy.
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| https://vkvideo.ru/video555512576_456239023 |
Here it is, (total 4 short films in 1) still alive, still archived, just not where you'd expect.
Make of that what you will. I've got my own read on where the patience, the craftsmanship, and even the memory-keeping seem to still be taken seriously, and it isn't always where the algorithm points you. Go watch the mechanic. Then go find the film. See where each one takes you.
Make of that what you will. I've got my own read on where the patience, the craftsmanship, and even the memory-keeping seem to still be taken seriously, and it isn't always where the algorithm points you. Go watch the mechanic. Then go find the film. See where each one takes you.
Back under the bike tomorrow. More then.
