On any person who would have desired such queer prizes, the American political populist movements that began circa 2015, bestowed upon them the gifts of such media oddities as the Red Scare podcast, Alex Jones, Jordan Peterson, Tim Dillon, Chapo Traphouse, Cum Town and any number of other off-color, reactionary DIY shock-jocks. But this article is focusing on the idiosyncratic affect that comes with the auditory experience of Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova‘s podcast, and observing the fan base that surrounds them.

 

I did not chose to write this article. I was chosen to do so, as I hope Dasha Nekrasova would appreciate, by God himself. God passed down his command to me through the hierarchy of a strange communal practice found adjacent to The Last Estate. I had just trudged for miles through a dreadful mob, where hecklers, hysterics, and madmen were shouting about tradcaths, minanarchists, nuclear war, gas prices, the skin tone of the Little Mermaid, etc. I was quite tired and completely broke with absolutely nowhere else to go when I found this odd order of end users. Not quite a church, and not quite a sanatorium, but somewhere in between, I stumbled upon this unusual ritualistic gathering where people are drawn together by the singular human experience of Misery.

 

Being myself a man baptized Catholic of New Jersey Irish descent, with a handful of drunkles six-in-the-ground, and, furthermore, being not quite a drunk, but not quite a sober either, teetering on the edge of misery-inducing behavior at any given moment, I began to feel comfortable among this crowd. Then, one of the more soberminded and thoughtful group members stated something, which I felt inspired to respond to. He said,  I’ve never listened to red scare but she (dasha) must be really, really fucking funny on there to justify all this attention. Her. Is she funny?

 

Like you might imagine a member of the Religious Society of Friends at an unprogrammed Quaker Meeting, I suddenly rose to speak, as if gently struck in the ear by a little whisper from the heavens, and said the following:

 

I only listened to like 5 min of their interview with zizek, but what I got from that is there is a non-sexual libidinal draw that preys on the solitude and loneliness of being a New Yorker. Likely more than 90% of New Yorker’s lives are spent yearning for a meaningful and sincere interaction, while simultaneously needing to protect yourself from 8M interactions you absolutely do not want to have. It is a much different type of loneliness than being stuck in the sticks with no romantic or friendship prospects. The way those ladies mic themselves, their breathy Kathleen Hanna-esque cadence, coupled with the crap that everyone in their demographic is trying to figure out in their private thoughts, creates this kind of intimacy that everyone who moves to New York ends up desperately yearning for after working 60 hours and having to spend the night at home alone.

And then as an afterthought added: Sorry Jesus Christ I need to get a job. I don’t listen to red scare btw, and I don’t know why the whole world listens to it now but i get why it was a local fav.

 

For whatever reason, one of the elders present at the meeting deemed my short soliloquy to be in earnest the still small voice of God leading me from within, and he concluded themeeting with a request for me to further elaborate.

 

It should be noted, that I removed the phrase non-sexual from my original statement, and I have done so for two reasons. One, because I feel I misspoke and libidinal does not require the modifier non-sexual. Secondly, after observing the Red Scare fan Reddit forum, r/redscarepod, while simultaneously watching Todd Solondz’s entire oeuvre, I began imagining some of the r/redscarepod subscribers to be like Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s character in Happiness. As most who have watched the film likely recall, Hoffman’s character in Happiness has an habitual and uncontrollable practice of choosing womens’ phone numbers randomly out of a New Jersey phone book, and then blurting filthy things to whomever picks up the line, until some goo is splattered upon the wall, and the Hoffman character  uses that goo to plaster a note containing the woman’s name and phone number on the wall at his bedside.

 

This little association with the Solondz character may have something to do with why I don’t listen to the Red Scare podcast, despite findingthe ladies’ reported topics of conversation and interviewees intriguing. The reason why I listened for that five minutes of the Zizek interview was because of a job. Or, more precisely, the loss of a job.

 

Since 2013, I have been the on-again off-again assistant editor for a small publication that is as responsible as any other entity for introducing the critical theorist and media phenomenon that is Slavoj Zizek, to America. This particular magazine’s primary focus is strict lacanian psychoanalysis orthodoxy, which descends from the long-deceased so-called Master Himself, Jacques Lacan, through the word of his son-in-law, Jacques Alain Miller. A description of lacanian psychoanalysis could quickly spiral out into a whole cult-like world that surrounds an antiquated Jewish folk-science and supposed-mental-health treatment, but I will cut it short by explaining my relationship with Zizek alone, whom everybody knows as the lacanian hegelian-marxist with a thick eastern European accent, who sniffles a lot, and talks about American movies, and so on, and so on.

 

When I first came to work for the magazine, Zizek was on his way out the door. I believe I set the type for the final essay of his that lacanian ink will ever publish. There is a schism within the international lacanian community that would be boring and difficult to explain to anyone who is not somehow personally invested in the study of psychoanalysis, but it basically begins with Jacques Alain Miller being jealous because he was excluded from a journal edited by Alain Badiou, and concludes (for now) with Zizek slamming his fists on the table and declaring that  lacanian orthodoxy is unable to adapt to the trans-movement and other such issues of personal identity – a topic that Zizek had himself previously brushed aside, and often in a way that would infuriate critics in his field, leading them to slam their fists upon the table in turn and shout about how his work is not with the times . 

 

Really, most of the time, neither Miller nor Zizek seem to know what the hell they are talking about any more, let alone why they may be mad at one another, and one of the two even claims to experience bouts of psychosis, which he speaks openly about to explain away any rude behavior, and furthermore, he claims his particular type of “psychosis” is “ordinary,” and so perhaps we all might be psychotic in his ordinary way   

 

Anyway, I didn’t have much time with Zizek on a personal level, but I did spend many long hours in Manhattan prepping his old articles for online publication, packing up the physical journals he was published in and hauling them to the post office, or trawling the internet for anything he had published that might be reposted to bring in some attention and sell one or two more of the back issues that sat collecting dust next to my desk. 

 

I did, in fact, meet Zizek once during that time, early on in my tenure, when the two opposing sides of the schism were not as bitter as they are today. Zizek and I shared a room alone for about 45 minutes (this may sound scandalous, but two men sharing a room for 45 minutes is very common in psychoanalysis). He came in carrying an ancient and thoroughly marked up copy of Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit, which he allegedly carries everywhere, and he made a point of telling me that he was very tired from his flight. I brought him a diet coke and some cookies. We spoke briefly about medieval religion, and he suggested I watch a German film about Hildegard von Bingen titled Vision, for which I will be forever grateful, and then he fell asleep on the couch. I was, in all honesty, very shy around Zizek at that time. As one might expect, I was intimidated by his understanding of Hegel and Marx. Even the idea of bringing up psychoanalytic theory, which I was reading every day at that time, felt like it would lead me to nowhere but shame and embarrassment.  In any case, talking to Zizek about Zizek things was not my job. My job was to pack-up the books and bring them to the post-office, among other scrivener-like tasks. (At that time Zizek was making frequent media appearances wearing a shirt with I would prefer not to written across the chest.) In short, I was the scrivener and that’s all I was, and although I did work hard for many years – 60-70 hours a week during production sometimes – and learned many things that could have led to some career in the surrounding field, for now, I would prefer not to. 

 

That night, after I served the once-dubbed Most Dangerous Philosopher in the West his cookies and diet Coke, he slept in the office where I typically worked. When I checked the self-proclaimed pervert’s browser search history after he had left, I found a stream of about seven hours worth of Pornhub videos, mixed in between some philosophy related searches. The pornhub search history began with sensual lesbian kissing, and became progressively more hardcore, before arriving at something like tranny makes step-brother her slampig (alabama). Then, the record of the philosopher’s internet use came to an abrupt conclusion at around 4:30AM. 

 

There’s nothing to analyze about Zizek‘s alleged porn-habits. We’re all perverts now. Either that, or we’re all para-pornographic, and in any case porn is a dead-end no matter which way you analyze it. You know it when you see, and it is what is, and so on, and so on… 

 

I am being gratuitous by sharing this story, and in fact by pretending to be a pervert, while really just being histrionic, trying to get attention for my own loneliness and solitude in New York City, and how, perhaps, I relate to this type of late night internet use. Nonetheless, sitting in his computer chair that day, I did feel like I shared something intimate with Zizek. Through his browser search history, but also through a very close reading of an antiquated folk-science which is supposed to be a mental health treatment – a close reading that still continues to this day for both of us.

 

As a further aside, before my actual analysis of the five minutes of the Red Scare podcast I listened to two years previous to this writing, lacan dot com has a pretty wild internet history of its own and also played an integral part in New York City’s history circa 9/11, when the magazine’s editor acted like a trail blazing impresario to Zizek and Alain Badiou as she dragged the famous so-called Marxist philosophers through New York City, during a number of events with much fanfare surrounding them. Zizek and his editor spoke at one such event in 2003, occurring a few blocks from the rubble that was still being removed from the attacks, which was so well attended that the police were called and the audience forcibly removed, allegedly due to the venue being beyond capacity. But there was also an air of suspicion around  The New Yorker dubbed “Marx Brother” in Bloomberg’s New York. The day after the event, the police raid was written about in several of the cities media outlets, and everybody seemed to want to know why these self-proclaimed Marxists were speaking from atop the ruins of the greatest monument ever built in the name of modern world trade.¹ It was very much proto-Red Scare podcast kind of stuff.

 

After I spent many years really getting to know what E.B. White described as New York’s queer prizes of loneliness and privacy² – in all imaginable ways, and in ways which luckily I am not required to share because of the latter gift bestowed upon New Yorkers – I came to my five minute experience of the Red Scare podcast during a time of tremendous uncertainty and potential dread shared by not only all New Yorkers, but the entire world, during the start of the coronavirus pandemic. As the news came trickling in from the Eastern Hemisphere about a potentially devastating virus, I was in the process of returning to my Bartleby post in Lower Manhattan, and quite soberly, I might add. Since the return to my post had come after an extended absence, I seemed to gorge myself on my work documents, as if famished for setting type in Indesign. 

 

However, one day the pandemic arrived in the United States – in New Jersey, no less – and there was little hope that the virus would be contained. In what seemed like a matter of hours, all of the stalwart New York institutions that complement its gift of loneliness – the museums, the theaters, the bookshops, the bars, the sporting arenas, the bodegas on the corner – suddenly shuttered and we were all stuck inside. And then the door to my employment closed with a melancholic turn of a key.

 

Rent in New York is brutal. There are very strict laws. Compared to the rest of the country these laws are fair or even favorable to tenants, according to many.. However, the primary reason rent in New York is so brutal despite these strict laws is that many of the landlords are big-time investors, owning hundreds or even thousands of apartment units, which are connected to investment banks and hedge funds. Being that the landlords are so tremendously wealthy with a great deal of property to protect, they often have a lawyer on retainer to parse the complex and ever-changing New York rent laws. Whereas the tenants often do not even know a good portion of these laws exist, never mind leverage them on a daily basis. Being the duty-bound scrivener that I am, I got to know the rent laws quite well – well enough to be a formidable foe to my landlord’s hired guns in housing court for several eviction cases. So when my employment was disrupted, I knew exactly how many days I had to get some money together for rent before eviction proceedings could legally begin.  Since I was already behind on rent when the pandemic landed in New York, there were not many days remaining and I grew desperate. 

 

One of the other ways I had of making money in New York was journalism – culture journalism or local news. The former paid better, since I had more connections in the arts. So, during those first few weeks of the pandemic, when there was so much uncertainty, I was desperately scrolling through all media available on my phone to come up with something to pitch to a publication who could pay me a few bucks for a lede. I had a bit of success freelancing in the beginning of the pandemic, but when the pandemic-bucks started flowing in, I said fuck-all and put my writing life fully into the fiction and poetry that had been choking up my hard-drives and heart, while enduring all those queer gifts of New York City, ever so privately.

 

When there was a question about whether or not the pandemic-bucks would keep coming, I would habitually return to the arts and culture pages on my phone. So, in Nov of 2020, after a fairly disastrous summer that involved losing my rented quarantine home I shared with the love of my life to a house fire. And furthermore losing my cat, whom I had named Angel, because he protected me during periods when I was the most forlorn, and the most forsaken in the ways that are unique to the New York City experience. I was desperate for money, and I was, admittedly, a little too hung-up on my missing kitty. Furthermore, I was feeling superstitious about the adage that bad things come in threes, and that I could lose something else, such as the love of my life.

 

When I clicked on the button that would play the audio of Red Scare Podcast: The Pervert’s Guide to Podcasting, I did so knowing I was doing something that was, in some unforeseen way, forbidden. I excused myself of any shame or guilt, because I still felt some duty to the image of Zizek on the internet. And even more so, I was thinking, well, if these ladies can get all of this attention for having a hangout time with Zizek, then what the fuck have I been doing for the last seven years?

 

Here is why I didn’t listen for more than five minutes. (I’m probably exaggerating by the way, it was probably 20 minutes, and I was transfixed the entire time, but it makes no difference.) I don’t remember the content of the conversation between Anna, Dasha, and Zizek – something about anti-wokeness, something about the pandemic, something about Bernie Sanders, and so on, and so on. I better recall the general influence of the auditory experience on my nervous system: the ladies’ voices closely mic’d, breathy speech enlivening the libidinal energy, interspersed with the voice of Zizek, who, to me, was familiar, warm, and comforting, even if I did feel some contempt towards to him for various reasons at that time. 

At the moment when I clicked on the podcast link from my roach infested apartment at the end of the 4 line in Crown Heights, with neighbor’s children screaming as if they were being beaten, interspersed with what was either fireworks or gunshots, I was rolling the dice. I wanted to get lucky. And may all be sundry, when I heard those ladies’ voices, talking to the great living phallus of critical theory who had the strength to watch Pornhub for seven hours straight, it surely felt like I was getting lucky. I shut down the audio stream. Then, likely with steam coming off the top of my head, I paced between the lone corridor in my apartment, before sitting down to write an email to Zizek and ask him if he would acquiesce to an interview with me, in print.

 

There’s a lot for me to dissect about the mere audio of the Red Scare podcast. I have dabbled around with DIY audio for years. I loved punk rock women on the radio when I was I kid — I loved their tonal inflection, their soft, lilting cadences that makes everything seem a little sardonic, and these days, their Kardashian-esque vocal fry, or whatever – all-adding up to a sort-of dominance over the sexual arena that exists in spoken communication,  I know I have a libidinal draw to these types of feminine sounds, because the love of my life can do it, and so could most of the girlfriends presently fading from memory. However, I have done my roving, and now I am settled in my morals. By the time I first heard the Red Scare podcast, I had already undergone what was, in many ways, a productive psychoanalysis for several years. In lacanian terms, I had been castrated to the point where I could quickly get a sense how much libidinal energy I should be putting into any given phenomenon. 

 

What I do with my own libidinal energy is not the point. I don’t judge anyone if they chose to cash in their gifts of loneliness and privacy for some time with the Red Scare, or with Pornhub, or even with Zizek’s writing, (which, by the way, for the last twenty years has essentially been copy and pasted from the first ten years of his career, and that son-of-bitch should rejuvenate himself, perhaps by undergoing more psychoanalysis in a torturous environment, like with the person who appears, by his account, to be his mortal enemy, Jacques Alain Miller. Because his takes as of late have been getting further and further from whatever it was that made him anywhere near as exciting as seven hours of Pornhub). And so on, and so on.

 

I have a little bit of philosophy and media theory that I picked up along the way that I think fits here, and it helps me explain to myself why it is healthier for me to not listen to the Red Scare podcast when I desire to get information about bleeding-edge critical theory, art, dating etiquette, or whatever else the ladies talk about. The following is largely indebted to the Brazilian philosopher Villem Flusser.

 

There are two essential types of media that presently entangle each person with internet access in a global communications environment: there is linear writing, and there is the image. This fact has been true since around 1500 BC, when writing appears to have been first invented. The reason writing has had such enduring success is because with it you are able to create a history, one which can be checked against facts, and which is not prone to imaginative speculation. This argument goes quite deep, but I will summarize as such: before writing was invented, people in ancient Greece believed that there were giant immortal men and women living on top of a mountain. These gods would roil the seas, throw lightning through the sky, fuck swans, and so on. These stories were told over and over, in mimetic poetry form, and they became so embedded in the imagination that these myths became more dominant than any notion of actual history. When critics such as Plato started writing, they did so, in part, to dispel such myths, allowing for abstract thought that was not dependent on the imagination. Plato’s promulgation against the poets at the end of The Republic, is as informative a text about today’s media environment as can exist. 

 

Here is the tricky part of this media theory. You have to ask yourself, what is an image? It is not just a picture. It is not just a movie, a TV screen, or a pre-recorded podcast. It is many things and it is difficult to define. For me, the first step to experiencing an image begins in the head, much like a dream.  I would argue that almost all of the storytelling I did in the preceding paragraphs was dependent on images – images supposedly from my memory, which a reader will have no way of validating. I could very well be causing you to believe a lie. I am going inside my own theatrical performance, just as Shakspeare does in Hamlet and other plays, to make you aware that not everything put in front of you is a matter of fact. The way I am writing here, where I ask you to follow my linear logic, is linear writing.  This linear style of writing is among the most important methodologies of criticism to retain as a tradition – a tradition of criticism – that will prevent our entire global society from falling off the edge of reality, into a world of untruths, insanity, and war.

 

Flusser writes:

 

While wandering over the surface of the image, one’s gaze takes in one element after another and produces temporal relationships between them. It can return to an element of the image it has already seen, and ‘before’ can become ‘after’: The time reconstructed by scanning is an eternal recurrence of the same process. Simultaneously, however, one’s gaze also produces significant relationships between elements of the image. It can return again and again to a specific element of the image and elevate it to the level of a carrier of the image’s significance. Then complexes of significance arise in which one element bestows significance on another and from which the carrier derives its own significance: The space reconstructed by scanning is the space of mutual significance.

 

This space and time peculiar to the image is none other than the world of magic, a world in which everything is repeated and in which everything participates in a significant context. Such a world is structurally different from that of the linear world of history in which nothing is repeated and in which everything has causes and will have consequences. For example: In the historical world, sunrise is the cause of the cock’s crowing; in the magical one, sunrise signifies crowing and crowing signifies sunrise. The significance of images is magical.

 

In short, me listening to Red Scare Podcast: The Pervert’s Guide to Podcasting caused the cock to be crowing and the sun to be rising in my head at all times, from now until eternity. Is this a bad thing? No, absolutely not. I indulge in image-based communication all the time: I love painting, video art, movies, Tetris, and TV. I’ve made many audio recordings myself and attempted to market them as if they were some sacred vessels of communication containing apocryphal information that offers listeners the most fundamental truths of the human soul. And not only that, I consume garbage image-based media constantly that I do not even like. For instance, at the time of this writing I have been watching the proceedings surrounding Queen Elizabeth’s death, followed by four seasons of The Crown. There’s linear thinking about history contained within this media, but I do not trust it to be fact, as much as I trust it to be myth. And, as I said at the top, I am of New Jersey Irish decent, and not at all of the loyalist variety, so by default I despise the monarchy for the 800 years of oppression it has put upon my good peoples in New Jersey, and elsewhere. So much so, that I angrily disrupted the BBC broadcasts with a two-hour long IRA funded documentary about car bombs blowing up British people. 

 

I would much rather be listening to the Red Scare podcast than watching The Crown. I have heard about interviews they’ve conducted with Steve Bannon, Ariana Reines, Alex Jones, John Waters, Glenn Greenwald, and so on. And I am oh too sure the sounds and thoughts of the two ladies on their own would easily hold my attention as much as Olivia Coleman does when she plays Queen Mum.³ I would never discourage anyone else from indulging in the Red Scare Podcast. But on the other hand, I think I know why the Red Scare Reddit fan community has subdivided, and created an elite proxy forum exclusively for girls and gays. My libidinal energy, my rules. 

 

A few years before I had ever heard of the Red Scare Podcast, I had two girlfriends who did a podcast that was supposed to be based around the pop-musician Aaron Carter. While I was on good terms with these two ladies, I thought their project sounded cute and funny, but I never bothered to listen to it. Not because I didn’t think it would be worthwhile for whatever reason, but because I got to hear their vocal inflections and hot takes on the smart stuff they were thinking about live and in person. I was getting lucky in New York. 

 

After the three of us had a falling-out, I listened to the Aaron Carter podcast, and discovered their DIY production was not all that much about a b-list celebrity and little brother of a Backstreet Boy, but was actually about all the stuff we would talk about in private. And not only that, but even more things that the two of them would talk about without me: lady stuff about dating and the etiquette or morals they expected of their male partners. I listened to the Aaron Carter podcast weeping, until it was too much to bear, and my therapist told me to just stop. 

 

It was good I stopped, because soon after that I found my way to the love of my life. Now, with her, I binge watch a monarchist fairytale, while I hurl paper car-bombs at the telly. Alongside us is our stuffed bear Boris, who happens to be a retarded 47 year-old British man in disguise, and who can hardly hold a thought in his head that isn’t about his dear dead Queen Mum’s milkers. This is enough image-based media consumption to replace whatever I might imagine getting from the Red Scare Podcast. I hope the ladies would understand this, but I really could not care less, unless they end up reading my work and we could engage in another way that is courteous, professional, and perhaps have a little bit of naughty fun, like I have with my adopted 47 year old son. 

 

This actually goes for any ontological entity that primarily exists in pure Spectacle for me – except for perhaps Zizek, whom, for now, I would prefer not to. 

 

I will end this essay by returning to the Most Dangerous Philosopher in the West. When I wrote to him after hearing his interview on Red Scare, I thought I sent him a decent pitch for an article. I offered him placement in well-known American left journals. I told him it would be a Socratic dialog, but also humorous, because I would not only be his adoring pupil, but also his Bartleby during a time when all work had stopped. At that time, I was also reading Marx and Hegel with a group of well-regarded sociologists on skype every week, so I thought I could at last have a chance of keeping up with him enough to ask some decent questions. There was also the topic of populism, which I had recently published a paper on.  And to be perfectly frank, at that time,  after the unjust fall of Bernie Sanders turned the Red Scare Podcast and a good portion of the other quasi-democratic socialist media in America suddenly into transgressive anti-woke reactionaries, it could have done Zizek some good to be reminded that he once believed populism is inherently reformist, if not to say reactionary. Its fundamental fantasy is of an Intruder, or more usually a group of intruders, who have corrupted the system and so on, and so on, rather than doing things like the Red Scare Podcast and Jacobin, and image-based performances on lesser media outlets.

 

Eventually Zizek responded kindly that he was very sorry, but he was too busy. This response was familiar to me – I had seen him do it before.  It was not time that he lacked, but rather, he did not have the desire, as the lacanians might say. 

 

I was fine with Zizek’s rejection. Ten years of rolling the dice in New York has left me hardened to disappointments like these. And besides, the pandemic-bucks kept rolling in and I was having the time of my life doing writing that has nothing to do with all that Bartleby stuff.

 

However, I don’t wish to leave you feeling like things have been resolved. I think it is more appropriate that you feel melancholic about the failures that are ongoing – failures that the Red Scare Podcast, Zizek, and the wave of populism that lifted both of them to heights no one could have predicted, were supposed to be remedying. The Red Scare Podcast, from what I can tell, truly began when Dasha told some reporters working for Alex Jones that they, like, have worms for brains outside a Bernie Sanders rally. I don’t put faith in American electoralism, and even though Bernie was my elected Statesman as I grew-up in Vermont and I have always found him to be an agreeable fellow, even for a politician, I never truly believed his rhetoric was going to win.

 

So as the coronavirus fades into memory, and the American left returns to its clandestine hideaways and linear writing, I am left as I was: as a storyteller, who rarely gets paid, and a scrivener for hire who never makes enough money to go out to the party, even after working 60 hours a week. This will change. I will be paid soon, one way or another. God has ordained it and I have direct orders from above. 

 

But for now, any of the excitement around economics that may have come from a title such as Red Scare was more about something inherently reformist. And for this, even though I and many, many more people remain financially disadvantaged through no fault of their own, at least I can in-part thank the ladies for broadcasting – much like Saint Hildigarde did to the nuns surrounding her in the 12th Century Black Forest – a moral compass, for men and for women, about how we can be together and in love, without feeling like we are missing out on some pretty girls chatting on the radio — funny and charming as they may be.

 

1. Editor’s note: I asked Forrest to source his claims and got the following in response: “I can’t find the other news media about it rn, sorry. I believe it was either the Post or the NYDN that had the most explosive headline. not searching for the sake of your endnote.”
2. E.B. White describes New York’s dubious gifts as mysterious, and says they require luck to obtain. The essay is fantastic at describing the phenomenon of how the New York City social atmosphere functioned for at least a century, among an entire world’s worth of differing backgrounds and points-of-view, often at odds with one another, but the first paragraph is especially gripping. I’m quite sure the following two lines are one of the reasons why the essay has sustained its potency for 73 years and counting: New York can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill him, depending a good deal on luck. No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.
3. Editor’s note: I think the Queen Mum (Queen Mother) was actually Elizabeth II’s mother (played by Marion Bailey in the seasons in question), not Elizabeth herself (played by Olivia Coleman). Yes, Forrest, I’m a pervert too, and share your guilty pleasures.