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East Village, NYC 📍

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Alphabet City (1st Ave & 2nd St)

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① Train, Christopher St. NYC 📍

When you ordered ‘America First’ but didn’t read the fine print: now serving tariffs, tension, and a side of voter’s remorse.

While we play tariff chess, the rest of the world’s already moved on to 4D economics.

Tried to checkmate China, forgot the board was made in Shenzhen.

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Dead Presidents

🎥 Dir. Hughes Brothers (1995)

In Dead Presidents, the Hughes Brothers construct more than a crime saga, they offer a brutal meditation on moral erosion, lost idealism, and the psychic toll of empire on the Black American soul. Anthony Curtis is less a man than a vessel for national contradiction: a warrior forged in Vietnam, only to return to a homeland indifferent to his sacrifice. His descent into violence is not criminal, it’s mythic. A modern-day Odysseus, he returns to find his Ithaca gutted, his identity fractured, and his honor unredeemed. He is not corrupted by greed, but hollowed out by betrayal. The system that armed him to kill has no use for his survival.

Cutty, by contrast, is a man untouched by the trauma of war because he’s mastered the art of navigating its domestic equivalent. He is a quiet warlord of capitalist decay, thriving in the margins, cloaking exploitation beneath a veneer of stability. In him, we see the shadow of the “dead presidents” themselves, not the green bills, but the spiritual death they represent. Cutty is currency made flesh: morally sterile, transactional, and utterly without loyalty. Where Anthony is a relic of old codes, Cutty is the new normal, survival without principle.

But it is in the film’s subtle framing of Juanita and Delilah that the Hughes Brothers speak most esoterically to the nature of love, purpose, and awakened consciousness. Delilah, not Juanita, is the first to greet Anthony both when he is leaving for war and when he returns. These bookended moments are not incidental, they are ritualistic. She stands at the threshold each time like a quiet sentinel, a witness to his transformation. She sees him when the world turns its eyes away. It is Delilah, not Juanita, who is awake both literally and spiritually.

Juanita, by contrast, is often framed as emotionally aloof, her love transactional, like the checks Anthony sends home. She is asleep when he leaves. She is asleep when he returns. Her heart lies not with revolution or healing, but with survival in its most compliant form. In this way, she mirrors Cutty, seeking comfort, not confrontation.

Delilah, however, is the dream deferred, refusing to die quietly. She grows into radicalism, embracing militancy as both penance and protest. Her love for Anthony is unspoken, but present… perhaps unrealized, perhaps impossible. Yet, it is real in the way she sees him beyond his uniform, beyond his choices. In another life, one not haunted by the machinery of war and capitalism… Anthony and Delilah might have forged a bond not just of affection, but of shared purpose.

Together, they represent what could have been: the Marine and the revolutionary, united in their disillusionment but still dreaming of redemption. Juanita and Cutty, in contrast, are what survives: the compliant, the comfortable, the morally anesthetized.

In the end, Dead Presidents isn’t just about money. It’s about what dies in us in its pursuit and who we become when the war, both foreign and domestic, follows us home.

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