Like any man with a heart containing infinite feeling and love, the passing of Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl has thrown me into fits of despair.

We all remember her visionary work in Triumph of the Will -- a film that made attempts at the extermination of a race seem like nothing short of poetic justice. But her oevre is so much more than that. Perhaps you've never seen her comedies. Shylock the Moneylending Parasite of Krakow was particularly hilarious.

But let's be honest. This isn't about Leni. It's about me, my vanity, and my everpresent fear of death and its unrelenting instrument of torture, aging. Anyone who has seen Olympia is familiar with Leni's fetishization of youth. She was quite lovely in her day and supposedly incredibly vain, so I'd imagine becoming what's below must have been nothing short of torture.

I use "torture" here less literally than, say, how you might use it to describe enduring maniacal experiments for months on end in Auschwitz.

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Analogcabin @ 2:08 PM
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