Space age bachelor pad music

 

Couple of interesting facts about Van Dyke Parks, aside from his having auditioned for the Monkees, which I believe I dealt with in another post.

A little bit after that, he was a member of the Mothers of Invention. For, like, a couple of weeks. By the time they recorded Freak Out! he was gone. It seems to have been rather easy to fall out with Frank Zappa, and he did.

Also, at the time he recorded Song Cycle he was highly influenced by Mexican keyboardist and composer Juan Garcia Esquivel. The above song doesn't really sound like Esquivel, but there is a similar sense of playing around with the listener's stereo equipment and headspace.

Shelter from the storm

I remembered this week that the library would be closed tomorrow because they do a three day weekend thing for Labor Day. This is after forgetting the same thing for Victory Day, which is a weird Rhode Island only thing. Anyway, I had three things to pick up, so today was the day to do it. They included a movie I wanted to watch tonight anyway.

Weird thing is, we had three separate thunderstorms today. The first one ended before I left the house. The second one started while I was on the way. It only got me a little wet, though, and while I was in the library it ended. I'd say that Numero Trio, that started when I got home, was the doozie.

Gall

Ukraine continues to be the second most entitled national government with which America is involved. I'll just let you guess who #1 is, but second place is an achievement. 

They're condemning Woody Allen for attending―well, remotely attending―the Moscow International Film Festival. This despite him also speaking against Vladimir Putin. Their scolding probably doesn't really register with Allen after his experiences with the scorched earth tactics of the late 2010s social justice movement. Still, it's worth noting that what Stivers identifies as the "wholesale global shunning of all things Russian" was not something that everybody came up with on their own, but was in fact instructed by the Ukrainian powers that be.

Who, it should be noted, blew up the Nord Stream pipeline and blamed Russia for it. There are now mountains of evidence for this, but everyone lets it go. There is no way they should get to tell anyone where they can and can't go.

How many fingers?

"AI Slop" went from a canny bit of slang to a real official-like term in the space of a few months. And no wonder. It really is everywhere. 

Lately I've been seeing ads for a new image creation/editing tool that uses AI. I hope I don't slip up and reveal that I'm talking about Adobe Firefly. Anyway, given the images used in the ad as an example of what you can do with the software, I have to ask, "Okay, but why would you want to?" But if nothing else, the tools with which slop can be created are growing?

Most people spend so much time on their phones nowadays that this becomes a major part of their visual environment, even if the image they're looking at is about the size of their knuckles. But for software-generated content that seems to deny the very existence of beauty, how much can you take? When do you step away from the machine?

If you sole it they will come

You're probably familiar with the Mother Goose rhyme about the old woman who lived in a shoe. She gave them broth with no bread, whipped them soundly, put them to bed. So it appears that in the short term she actually did know what to do. 

This little ditty was printed in 1784 but existed in some form long before that. And it's had influence through the years. For one in an Ellery Queen novel called There Was an Old Woman, which does at least have something to do with shoes.

But also, and more to the point, someone actually built a house meant to look like the big shoe the lady moved into. It's on Bear Lake, which is on the border of Idaho and Utah. It looks to be a nice destination for families with children, especially if they live in or are already traveling through the West. What seems best about it is that it can tickle their imagination, and not in the sensory overload way that the most advertised places do.

Public service

Ambrose Bierce may always be condemned to...if not complete obscurity, then a kind of renown limited to literary hipsters. Everyone knows about his mysterious late-in-life disappearance. His fiction, much less so. While his stories are brilliant and quite readable, they're most often out of print. And unlike Poe's tales they're not well-suited to being spun out into 90 minute fantasias, so if they're adapted into anything it will likely be short films. Lucky break that one of those shorts got  a second run as a Twilight Zone.

Anyway, his witticisms are still available to all. Here are a couple I like. 

“There’s no free will,” says the philosopher

”To hang is most unjust.”

”There is no free will,” assents the officer

”We hang because we must.”

Meeting Merit on a street-crossing, Success stood still. Merit stepped off into the mud and went around him, bowing his apologies, which Success had the grace to accept.

In memoriam to anonymous

Out walking today, I almost stepped on a small body. It could have been a rat, but could conceivably been an opossum as well. Which mammal it was, exactly, I couldn't tell because it had been dried out and thoroughly picked clean. Weird that it stayed out there so long, but this street doesn't seem to get as much foot traffic as it does merging cars.

Anyway, going on the idea that it might be an opossum, I started looking them up. This is a nice short video. I didn't realize that possums were a different animal, native to Australia. It's thought that marsupials first evolved in South America, and migrated to Australia when they were closer together. The opossum is the one marsupial that migrated north to N. America instead.

They eat ticks? That is handy, especially in Lyme country.