Unknown indeed

Not too long ago I read Elmore Leonard's novel Unknown Man No. 89. I read it for a couple of reasons. For one, the times I've read Leonard he's generally been entertaining at least. Also I'd read that Alfred Hitchcock had bought the options to it and considered an adaptation in the late 70s before switching his plan to The Short Night and then dropping that for full retirement. So I was curious if it seemed like it would work as a Hitchcock movie. 

And...maybe? A movie that hit all the main beats of the book would have been a weird mix of The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Super Fly, and The Days of Wine and Roses. The last of those is because Leonard joined AA around the time he wrote the book. I could sort of rough out who might have been well cast in the main roles. The predatory ex-con Virgil Royal seems like a good fit for the late Yaphet Kotto, for instance.

The main problem is that the set pieces, the most visually arresting scenes, tend to happen when the two lead characters aren't around. These include a shooting in a hair salon and a crooked debt collector being dangled out a window. But again, the two main characters are elsewhere. The screenwriter would have had to do some patching to fix that.

Know when to fold 'em

If a town has a colorful story about its founding you can't really blame them for capitalizing on it. The Arizona town of Show Low has certainly done that. The detail that two candidates for mayor should settle the election with a deck of cards is...well, it's something you don't expect to see in these disenchanted times. It must be said that the monument with the two men at the card table is quite a beauty as well.

Really, though, just having a town father named "Corydon Cooley" puts them ahead of the pack.

Whack-a-mole

From the perspective of free speech and fairness, Project Esther is bad news. It aims to treat support of the Palestinian cause and opposition to Israel's as inherently invalid, if not criminal. And aggressive guppies like Marco Rubio are prepared to enforce it.

It is, however, almost certain to be ineffective at the shaping of public opinion. Trump can't enforce a pro-Israel public. Lyndon Johnson could have. Sixty years ago the ball was in Israel's court. Its people―or at least many of them―had just escaped a horrific attempt at extermination. Combined with Jewish contributions to global culture and the fact that few in the West knew or cared much about Arabs, that made for Israel looking like an inherently heroic nation. I don't think the government could have made that situation last forever, but with some judicious and subtle lawmaking they could have made it last a very long time.

The situation is different now. There are too many images of carnage, too many openly genocidal statements from Tel Aviv. And while a Florida district recently put an even more obese version of Itabar Ben Gvir in Congress, that's exactly the wrong move in terms of public opinion. Once a cause has gone this far in losing public failure, you can't boost it through force.

Even right-leaning security types may be weaning themselves off the obsession with Islam. Rising in public consciousness are nihilistic and/or cartoonishly evil groups like Zizians, 764, and Eflists. Of course the combined membership of these groups could get lost in your average Walmart. 

So I wouldn't be surprised if there are a lot of Satanic panics in the near future, with teenage delinquents joking and vandalizing their way into federal prison. That's not great. But panics are cyclical, and the cycle shows some signs of turning.

At the risk of TMI...

Mostly the only time I grow my beard out is when I have a fever blister. That's because the best treatment for that particular malady is just to leave it alone. (All the creams and lotions they sell for it are just growing cultures.) So rather than leave a small patch on the upper lip unshaved I just stop shaving everything above the neck.

The thing is, I don't really like having facial hair. It's itchy and distracting. I'm sure you get used to it. And maybe I'll give it another try one of these days, after the beard I briefly had in college. But at present it's one of those things I look forward to getting rid of, which I'll be able to do tomorrow.

In miniature

I've been perusing the Elizabeth Bishop's Complete Poems. Poetry enriches life. I've learned that trying to reproduce poems with fancy indentation leads to heartache. This one doesn't. Its title translates to "Winter Circus."

Cirque d'Hiver

Across the floor flits the mechanical toy, 

fit for a king of several centuries back.

A little circus horse with real white hair.

His eyes are glossy black. 

He bears a little dancer on his back.

She stands upon her toes and turns and turns. 

A slanting spray of artificial roses

is stitched across her skirt and tinsel bodice.

Above her head she poses

another spray of artificial roses.

His mane and tail are straight from Chirico.

He has a formal, melancholy soul. 

He feels her pink toes dangle toward his back

along the little pole

that pierces both her body and her soul

and goes through his, and reappears below,

under his belly, as a big tin key.

He canters three steps, then he makes a bow, 

canters again, bows on one knee,

canters, then clicks and stops, and looks at me.

The dancer, by this time, has turned her back.

He is the more intelligent by far.

Facing each other rather desperately―

his eye is like a star―

we stare and say, "Well, we have come this far."

I think the poem's rhythm quite suits living toys.

Deep down

 

You don't hear tubas that much anymore. Or at least you don't hear them in that many places. Jazz has gotten away from it, with a few exceptions. It's not often played in rock the way sax has made a kind of home there. For the most part it's exiled to the classical world and high school marching bands. But the tuba can definitely induce a mood.

"I'm from Silicon Valley and I'm here to help."

It's well-known that Ronald Reagan said that the nine most terrifying words in the English language were "I'm from the government and I'm here to help." It's less remembered that he said so in the context of announcing a drought assistance plan for farmers. But the idea that government plans can do more harm than good isn't an extremist one.

But beyond a certain point that applies to plans in general. There's a technocratic impulse in both the government and the private sector. It's the idea that as we get more and better data we can make better decisions, and if that "we" means only a small elite, it's incumbent on all the other schmoes to get with the program.

This article on the pitfalls of "smart cities" shows where that kind of haughtiness can lead. The great cities of the Northwest―Seattle and Portland―have turned unfriendly to their residents exactly by means of the scientific measures that were supposed to help them. 

Portland didn’t fail because it lacked intelligence. So far, it’s failed because it forgot to ask what the intelligence was for. The dream of a “New Atlantis” — a city run by science and data — turns dystopian not because of its technology, but because of its values. If citizens are assumed to be liabilities rather than moral agents, then urban design becomes an exercise in containment, not liberation.

Not to beat a dead horse, but the COVID reaction was the final boss of treating citizens as liabilities. For weeks turning to months turning to a couple of years, all unprotected and unmediated social interactions were held to be irresponsible. All because of experts who had convinced themselves they had the best information. 

This also means that it's past time smart people admitted that data isn't everything.