Sunday, December 30, 2018

Pepperland




Have I talked about Pepper? I might have.

Pepper is a cat, black with white paws and belly. She belongs to my downstairs neighbor.

With cats it can be hard to tell the difference between skittish and playful. When I enter the stairwell from outside she sometimes runs up or down the stairs away from me, but sometimes lingers. I do pet her when I get the chance, and tonight put my nose right up to hers. So maybe we're building trust.

I won't try to pick her up, though. I'm not suicidal.

Friday, December 28, 2018

Lost in the weeds

Looking at my neighborhood. Well, not so much the street I live on, but the extended area. The streets between here and the supermarket. I notice among the litter, there are these black plastic envelopes. The envelopes originally held medicinal marijuana, as you can tell by reading them.

Now it's true that there are oodles of liquor bottles on the sidewalks and in the streets too. Not like any particular substance has a monopoly on litter. It's just that you think of potheads as being one-with-the-earth types. Let's hear it for busting stereotypes, I guess.

Wednesday, December 26, 2018

Tackled

Okay, so that happened.

Monday night I noticed myself feeling a little under the weather. Tuesday, Christmas Day, I found myself in the grips of a full-fledged cold. It got old pretty fast. This morning I was feeling kind of nauseous, then after contact with the cold tiles of the bathroom floor I spontaneously got over it.

So that was the worst of it. Still finding my feet. Happy Christmas, all.

Monday, December 24, 2018

Table for two

Dogs Kitchen Dogs from Katelyn Costello on Vimeo.

This is about as expressive as I've ever seen those Wiggly Eyes craft pieces. Which you can apparently get a 120-pack for less than $2 at Target.

Getting dogs to eat sitting at the table is one thing, apparently. Getting them to use utensils? Well...

Saturday, December 22, 2018

Behind the mask

There is, it's safe to say, a lot going on with The Phantom of the Paradise. It's a collaboration between Brian De Palma, who as a director had just recently started going in the thriller direction he's best known for, and Paul Williams, who is best remembered for writing songs for Muppets and Karen Carpenter. Williams wrote all the songs for the movie, a musical/horror adaptation of Phantom of the Opera, which hadn't yet gotten the Andrew Lloyd Webber treatment. Williams wrote all the songs and also plays the chief villain, an evil reflection of Phil Spector. (The real Spector's murder conviction was quite a ways in the future.)

Things are primed for weirdness and De Palma delivers. The film starts with a voice-over from Rod Serling itself, leading into a doo-wop extravaganza that plays like if Sha Na Na were more death-obsessed. This is an introduction into the world of Swan (Williams), which is even more sordid than you might guess. At this point the antihero/secondary villain, Winslow Leach, is just a songwriter, a very naive songwriter who hands over originals of his work for Swan to critique, and three guesses how that works out. Before his lengthy but quick list of misfortunes and disfigurements, Leach looks like a wimpier Warren Zevon. He's played by frequent De Palma collaborator William Finley, who manages to keep much of his dopey innocence after the character has become a monster and a killer.

Are there flaws in the movie? Oh yes, yes indeedy. For one thing Leach's grand work is a rock opera about the Faust legend, but he doesn't balk at signing a contract in blood. And Swan's scheme unravels at the end due to what seems just a random discovery.

Still, there's fun to be had. De Palma has probably directed better movies, but this one has a go for broke spunk and absolute indifference to realism that keep it lively. He's never seemed to have more fun as a director.

Thursday, December 20, 2018

The abyss

Stellar encounters also make occasional fireworks, which are noteworthy because they're superimposed on such a cold and endless night. A pair of white dwarfs can collide or merge to make a supernova explosion if the combined mass exceeds the threshold for violent detonation.This time the math is: ember + ember = firework. An even rarer event sees a pair of neutron stars or a pair of black holes (or a neutron star and a black hole) colliding to emit an intense burst of high-energy radiation, the flash briefly outshining the rest of the universe. When these dense objects merge they also distort space-time and unleash a spasm of gravity waves.

The last fizz of stellar fusion is a slideshow in a circus completely run by gravity. In the era of stars, life was kept interesting by a battle of competing forces—radiation released from the creation of elements versus gravity. By 100 trillion years after the big bang, gravity may have lost some battles but it has won the war and has nobody left to play with but itself. Gravity playing solitaire turns out to be pretty interesting.

Been reading Chris Impey's How It Ends: From You to the Universe. The "you" part is only sporadically interesting, but speculating on how the galaxy and the universe will fizzle out holds a certain fascination. Call it a catastrophe or just the natural order of things, it's kind of galvanizing. Of course this isn't something any of us expect to see in our lifetimes.

Somehow perfect musical accompaniment by Joan as Police Woman playing the Reader's Digest version of David Bowie's song suite, and Bowie with the original.
 

Tuesday, December 18, 2018

Bar and button

My clock radio has a snooze bar and a sleep button. You know how these things work. Snooze means you get another few minutes of peace. Sleep means you turn the whole thing off until the next day.

So yes, sleep goes with button because it's just a little round thing, and the snooze bar is a long rectangle. Now I've had experiences when I've been woken up by the sounds of the radio and hit the sleep button, meaning that I didn't really wake up until well after I meant to. Anyway, now while I'm going to sleep I repeat to myself "bar, bar, bar," in order to remind morning me which one to press.

Could there be a danger of waking up and having the urge to hit a bar and get blotto? Maybe, but the bars around here aren't open that early. This city isn't that classy.

Sunday, December 16, 2018

Another preview of coming attractions

Should be in with a movie review at the end of the week. Well, not a review exactly, not probably. More a play across my brain. Not telling what the movie is now, because I want to hold onto at least some surprises. But the movie looks weird enough to be worthwhile, even though it comes from a hit-or-miss director.

Hopefully the library will have it ready for me in a couple of days. It better, I ordered it Monday.

Friday, December 14, 2018

One leaf to leave

Leaf blowers are a funny thing. That mechanical mixture of growl and whine. You hear one, and then another joins it. And then another. Stand there for twenty minutes and you'd swear that twenty of them have formed an army, declared a war on mulch. But really there might only be three, getting turned off and on again. They're just so loud your auditory system doesn't perceive when there's one less.

We're about at the end of leaf blower system. Soon the snow blowers will arrive, although we haven't gotten to that part of the year yet. For some reason they're not as tricky.

Wednesday, December 12, 2018

Man on a one way trip

In recent decades, the figure of Christopher Columbus has come in for a lot of scrutiny, especially as regards his relations with the native peoples of the Americas. What few understand is just how much worse he could have been if given the opportunity.
Working from an ancient Christian calculation that the world, from Creation to Judgment, would survive for 7,000 years, he concluded that "there are lacking about one hundred and fifty-five years for the completion of the seven thousand at which time the world will come to an end." Signing his name as Christoferens―Christ-bearer―Columbus saw his expedition as just a part of a final crusade that would destroy the Muslim empire and usher in the Day of Judgment. By sailing west, he planned to open China and the Orient to Catholic missionaries, who would seal off the Muslim empire of Gog from its rear.
That's a brief passage from Martin Ballard's The End-Timers: Three Thousand Years of Waiting for Judgment Day. The belief that we are in or near the End Times can make Christians and other religious people abandon their faith's morals, and indeed all ethics. Catholic St. Augustine and Protestant Jonathan Edwards both pushed back against apocalyptic thinking, perhaps for this very reason. They were moralists whether you agree with their lessons or not.

Every rule has its exception and no doubt some end timers are and have been ethical. Columbus wasn't really an exception, though.

Monday, December 10, 2018

Intermission

More news soon. For now I just want to pause and consider the strange combinations that arise in life, the seemingly unlikely justapositions.

One fun exercise with this clip is to watch David Crosby and ask yourself whether he's hallucinating or just thinks he is.

Saturday, December 8, 2018

As I've gotten older, I've become satisfied with holding fewer opinions. Less certainty. I still believe things, sure, everyone does. But I'm not invested in having opinions for the sake of having them. I've seen through example where that can lead.

Sure, this can make me appear wimpy. But that's not the truth. The truth is that my best survival strategy is to keep on looking and learning without unnecessary burdens.

Thursday, December 6, 2018

Radio it's a sound sensation

WBRU was never as bold as it wanted to consider itself. Switching from a standard rock format to an alternative one around the start of the 90s, it kept to a pretty predictable course.

Still, it wasn't a bad station. It was depressing earlier in the year when the station sold its place on the dial. The wavelength was bought by a network of Christian stations that are largely indistinguishable from city to city. I dropped that station immediately. A lot of religious programming seems to operate on the assumption that Christians have no taste or discernment, which could be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

'BRU has returned as an online only station. Actually that's not the whole story. It plays on the air too, but it's signal is fatally low for today's market. I can't play it on the radio, and probably only people who live within a few blocks of the transmitter can. It's now a collaboration between Brown and, I think, AS220.

I'm not sure I heard a DJ's voice when I surfed to its website today. If anything the selection has gotten a little broader. This was one of the songs I heard, which I approve.



Not sure I'll become a heavy listener. I would probably set my clock radio to it if I could

Tuesday, December 4, 2018

[citation needed]

So I like—need, really—to stay mentally sharp. Just to make sure everything is clicking.

Crosswords are a pretty routine way to do this. I tend to do one in the morning before class.

Deep-dive wiki editing is a pretty good exercise. I thought I'd be over Wikipedia by this point. I actually have wandered away from it many times. But the siren song of showing off calls me back.

Not stuff like adding a new category. That I do, but it's too easy in a way. Finding sources, now that's a trip. And creating a new article? There you have to provide a handful of sources to prove the subject's significance and make sure no one marks it for deletion as being "non-encyclopedic." It gets you thinking strategically.

Sunday, December 2, 2018

Break for black comedy



I'm sure I've stated my love for Gahan Wilson before, but just for the record, I love Gahan Wilson. This elderly couple, you may or may not like them, but you've got to believe them. They're just right.

And way to get maximum value out of a literalized metaphor.

Friday, November 30, 2018

Your goose isn't cooked

So tonight I'm making dinner. I put a couple of things in the oven and wait awhile, figuring when the time comes I'll open it up and they'll be done. But before I do open the oven I look at the dial. I never turned it on. Then on a whim I google "forgot to start oven." Some subreddit has used it as an archetypical example of stupidity. Thanks, guys.

Dinner was fine, by the way. Just late.

Wednesday, November 28, 2018

Tales of the Market

Sometimes I post here about books I've finished reading. Other times I share my thoughts early in the reading. This is one of those second times, so keep in mind we're talking about first impressions.

I've started reading William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, set in an undefined but seemingly very near future. It concerns a series of video clips, known as "the footage", which attracts an obsessive following.

Gibson adapted one of his stories into a movie back in the 1990's, although it wasn't successful. He also, I believe, wrote an unused script for Alien Resurrection. Point is, this feels like a book that wants to be a movie. The narration is present tense throughout, some characters are described as variations on celebrities, and products are all brand new and chic in ways that don't add much to the story but would look cool onscreen. Maybe it's the subject matter. He and Bruce Sterling were more literary in The Difference Engine, albeit not Victorian.

There are interesting ideas, though. Cayce, the protagonist, is a "coolhunter." In real life this tends to mean "market researcher who's rebranded themselves after extensive market research." For her it's a negative, allergy-like reaction. In a smaller detail, there's a Vietnamese restaurant called Charlie Don't Surf, which specializes less in Vietnamese food than in a theme park version of the Vietnam War experience. Little things like that keep me going.

Monday, November 26, 2018

+

I'm resistant/hostile to motivational speakers, which could be the INTP in me or my upbringing. Probably a combination. But I have no objection to a positive outlook. This song seems to be a good one to keep in your head as the day gets underway. Good on Peggy.

Saturday, November 24, 2018

What a card


This is, of course, an old Arsenio clip featuring sleight-of-hand man Ricky Jay, who just recently passed. Fascinating look at his personal style. The way he seems to teeter on the edge of bumbling before striking home with the trick is reminiscent of the wilier pool hustlers. As for how he tosses one card in the air and catches another, ???

I feel like I need to track down the book he's talking about too.

Thursday, November 22, 2018

Massive cold front

We've had a November cold snap in these parts. That essentially means that winter came a month or more early. More than that, we've seen arctic temperatures and windows that seem to shake the siding on your house. There's a good chance it's because a chunk of the Arctic in the form of its ice shield was set loose as a result of climate change.

As weather goes it might be less than ideal. I doubt many would choose it. Still, after you've been through this part the actual winter isn't intimidating. You know you can get through it.

Tuesday, November 20, 2018

Meta

This is something I swear is true. A couple of nights ago I had a dream wherein I had a bad dream. The contents of the dream within a dream aren't really clear to me right now. Some combination of possession and mistaken identity perhaps?

The thing is, I remember in the dream waking up and telling people about it and everyone being bored and disinterested. Seems my subconscious is having fun with me.

Sunday, November 18, 2018

Things you may or may not want to know

If you spit on the sidewalk it's a $50 fine. Vomiting is free.~George Carlin

Notes on getting violently ill on the sidewalk as a result of dehydration possibly combined with mild food poisoning:


  • People are understanding about it, and even kind. This might vary a little depending on the neighborhood, but there's not as much harsh judgment as you might fear.
  • You feel really good afterwards. Or just good, but good is better than usual. As forms of euphoria go, relief after nausea that's just definitively passed is up there.
  • Still wouldn't recommend doing it more than a couple of times a year. Save up. Treat yourself.


Friday, November 16, 2018

Inimitable

Lee Israel was a real person. She was a freelance writer who landed an interview with Katherine Hepburn in 1967 and spun from that into a career as a biographer. Sic transit gloria, though. Her books stopped selling, and in 1992 she embarked on another career as a forger of literary letters. Whether bold enough or desperate enough, she also stole letters from archives, hoping to substitute her own copies while selling the originals. A cunning and original plan, but not one she could carry off very long, as she was arrested and pleaded guilty to conspiracy to transport stolen property in 1993.

Can You Ever Forgive Me? is a film based on Israel's autobiography. It's a kind of caper movie, where the tools of the heist are typewriters and Israel's oven, which she uses to artificially age her forged documents. A caper with no physical violence and very little action. Really, though, it's a depiction of loneliness, desperation, self-destructiveness. As portrayed by Melissa McCarthy, Israel is a solitary alcoholic with a secondary addiction of burning bridges. Her forgery scheme is a necessary confidence booster as well as a moneymaker, but she can't completely suppress the suspicion she might be doing something wrong.

It's far from unrelieved misery, though. McCarthy is best known for comedy, and she's frequently funny here. So is Richard E. Grant as her petty criminal best friend, although his story turns tragic as well. Also among the movie's pleasures are a jazz-inflected score and a lived-in New York atmosphere, pre-gentrification.

If you're a cat lover, prepare for some sadness, though.

Wednesday, November 14, 2018

chop chop

Anil Ananthaswamy's The Man Who Wasn't There has nothing to do with the Coen brothers movie. It's a book on neuroscience, a topic that interests me. And the second chapter is interesting. It's just kind of hard to get through. The subject is body identity integrity disorder (BIID), and if you're curious about what that is, here, that should tie you over.

So there are descriptions of self-harm and some borderline surgical procedures. Nothing too graphic, but it still made me woozy.

Now I know transgender people. There's a Starbucks around here where at one time you might walk in and most of the staff on duty seemed to be trans. So is thinking you're an amputee wrongly placed in a body with all its limbs comparable? I would think it's different, but who knows? Maybe in a few years I'll be desperately denying ever having written this blog post.

Monday, November 12, 2018

Drowse

Regret to inform you that I am very sleepy now, as the hypnotist would say. Ergo, my blogging capabilities are limited right now.

But thinking about sleep leads to thinking about dreams. Literal dreams. But a lot of the time they seem to be assembled by the waking mind, which is more comfortable with narrative. A few disconnected images come, maybe accompanied by a feeling. Then we interpret, either to diminish its effect or to enhance it.

Saturday, November 10, 2018

In the aisles

Observations from a recent trip to the supermarket:

* The annual marketing of eggnog started, I think, a little before Halloween. There are now several brands gracing the shelves. This includes Southern Comfort. Now it's not an insane market move for them. Eggnog is best served cool but not ice cold (I've tried eggnog flavored ice cream and it leaves something to be desired) and many like to put a little nip of something in it. Brandy might be best but whiskey-flavored liqueur is workable. Still, that means there are SoCo dairy farms out there, which just seems weird.

* One of the potato companies—McCain, I think—is marketing fries shaped like emoji. Ah well, you knew it was inevitable. From the packaging it's mostly just happy faces and surprised faces. No vomiting face. And the ever popular "swirl of shit with a manic grin" has been left out, for some reason.

Thursday, November 8, 2018

Hours

Tomorrow I'll be otherwise occupied during the morning and early afternoon. After that, though, I have at least one thing to return to the library and a couple to pick up. This I have to do tomorrow because Monday is Veteran's Day (which I remember Howard Campbell, Jr. in Mother Night lamenting was no longer Armistice Day.) I usually pick things up on Saturday but with a lot of Monday holidays, this one included, they close Saturday to make it a three day weekend.

This is one of those things that used to confound me but now I just shrug off. As long as I can remind myself and not get caught up short, well, enjoy your day off.

Tuesday, November 6, 2018

AM

One thing I like about this time of year is that Standard Time comes back. I hear a lot of people say that they look forward to Daylight Savings Time, even that they want it to be DST year-round, so I'm probably weird on this one. So be it. We got an extra hour of sleep this past weekend, and now when I get up in the morning the sun's out even though it's still early. It's refreshing.

Sunday, November 4, 2018

New friend

Craven from Brianna McArthur on Vimeo.

Brief but sweet. This one may or may not be inspired by the recently passed Halloween season. Very definitely autumnal in its palette.

Yes, this is an unlikely seeming friendship, but one I can get behind.

Friday, November 2, 2018

I'm driving in my car

Before 1980 or so, the idea of a doorstopper horror novel—something longer than 500 pages or so—would barely even be thought about, much less attempted. The one who changed this, of course, was Stephen King. The Stand and IT were the vanguard. Others followed, but the whole phenomenon has a family resemblance.

Speaking of family, Joe Hill is the author of the nearly 700-page NOS4A2, and his full name is Joseph Hilstrom King. He was the kid with the voodoo doll in Creepshow. He's good at balancing things, with a scaled-up everydayness reminiscent of his father and a slithery Rolls-driving villain who has some Thomas Ligotti qualities.

The author photograph in back shows Hill posed on a motorbike, kind of like a young David Hasselhoff. A poster of Hasselhoff during his Knight Rider days is a recurring element in the heroine's life, so this could be a deliberate effect. Or Hill just has a dorky idea of what's badass. So, funny either way.

Wednesday, October 31, 2018

Word to your mother

Okay, so I've used Word 2019 a few times now. It's not that big a change from previous editions of Microsoft Word. Maybe a little smoother in some areas.

One thing I've noticed is that it recognizes "lightbulb" and "snowbank" now. Before, the spell checker would put wavy red lines under the word unless you separated them into "light bulb" and "snow bank." So that's a welcome change regardless of what prompted it. I do remember a few days after the 2008 election it started recognizing "Obama" and "Biden." So I look forward to seeing which election the Lightbulb/Snowbank ticket won.

Monday, October 29, 2018

Giant steps

A friend of mine invited me to see They Might Be Giants with him. (The band, not the movie, which too few people seem to remember.) His wife was going to go with him, but she's out of town for work reasons. While the show was last night and I had to get up somewhat early this morning, I jumped at the chance, I mean come on.

And it turned out to be a great show. They've lost none of their playfulness. John Flansbergh, the more thickly built one* is the more talkative of the two, but both relish playing for an audience.

This song was probably an inevitable play, given its current resonance.                       


This one is always nice to hear. They used a rather different arrangement, partly due to having a proper six piece band now.


They don't really seem to do the same show twice, or at least switch it up from tour to tour. I'm glad I caught this one.

*For a long time you could call him "the one with the glasses" but Linnell wears spex onstage now too.

Saturday, October 27, 2018

How many Friedrich Nietzsches does it take to change a light bulb?

But this is the wrong question, neither answerable nor in any way meaningful. It assumes a state of equilibrium where there is only struggle, the struggle for self-mastery. For when you change the light bulb, the light bulb also changes you in turn. Tomorrow a man will awaken with new lighting fixtures and a sense of mortal peril, and it is that very danger which shall be his only true friend.

Thursday, October 25, 2018

No white stuff

I heard a woman say today that she'd heard we were going to get three inches of snow tonight. Looking out the window and not seeing it. Oh, there are a few hours left in the nighttime, sure, and it's possible that we could get something. But something that's going to require the presence of snow plows? Doubt it highly. Sounds like the weatherman is having fun with his listeners.

Tuesday, October 23, 2018

Music for nighttime


Debussy is enrapturing in a quiet way. Often quiet, at least. A good companion for drifting off.

If there were any bombast to this piece it would sound like the Star Wars theme. But there isn't.

Sunday, October 21, 2018

That old familiar clank and hiss

My friend Peter drove me home tonight. He had the heat on in his car. When I told him the heat hadn't come on in my apartment yet he was shocked. It's actually a building-wide thing, and as it happened the furnace hadn't been fired up yet.

Anyway, when I got home tonight the radiator in my living room was warm, so that kind of made a liar out of me. Not that I mind. It's nice to be a little toastier. So there's another seasonal marker.

Saturday, October 20, 2018

Here's the story of a sinner

Hans Fallada, a nom de plume used by Rudolf Ditzen, is an author I've only just found out about. Mainly a novelist, he was a rough contemporary of Berthold Brecht and the Austrian-born Hermann Broch. Unlike them, he stayed in Germany all through the Third Reich and World War II. Despite his left-wing politics, he was never officially declared an enemy of the state. The politics of the era weren't good for him, though, and all sorts of self-destructive tendencies came to the fore.

There seems to at least be an element of autobiography in Fallada's novel The Drinker. A wholesaler who hardly even touches beer has a few reversals in his business life, deals with them through drinking, and soon cares for nothing else. While I don't know if Ray Davies ever read the book, the plot roughly parallels this song.


What's implied in the Kinks' song is fairly obvious in the book: that neither the wife nor the "floozy" can really be blamed. In fact while Sommer, the protagonist, quickly descends into alcoholism, drink seems more a symptom than anything else. His real problem seems to be a sense of worthlessness and impending failure, fears that he needs to hide from and deaden any way he can.

Add in encounters with unsavory characters he's not prepared to deal with and stays in both prison and an asylum and you've got pretty rough going. It's probably a good thing this is a fairly short book, between 250-300 pages.

Friday, October 19, 2018

Previews of coming attractions

Longer post coming tomorrow. Like, at least a few paragraphs, and maybe including a multimedia component as well. I want to make sure I have a clear head while writing it, and now I'm too much in the neighborhood of sleep.

Also it's on a book I'm reading, and I'll be closer to finished. But not closer to Finnish, because I could never handle that many diacritic.

Wednesday, October 17, 2018

Traces

I'm currently on a library computer. The guy who was on it before me―or maybe someone earlier in the day—logged into his Google account and never logged back out. His Google name is "________ the Magician" (redacted for privacy reasons). Avatar shows a pair of hands holding a pair of cards, so it's not just a name, I guess? Kind of exciting knowing there are magic doings afoot, somewhere in the area.

Monday, October 15, 2018

Ratites, man



Ratites are a special, peculiar kind of bird. Flightless, they've developed common strategies to compensate. Also all very strong. They include ostriches (from Africa), rheas (South America), emus (Australia), and the extinct moas (New Zealand).

New Zealand, because of its pre-human isolation, is rich in flightless birds. The other places aren't so much. Yet there they are, seemingly related and spread out over the globe. Scientists are torn over whether they have a common geographical origin, perhaps on the supercontinent of Gondwanaland, or if it's entirely a matter of convergent evolution.

They are enchanting to watch, I know.

Friday, October 12, 2018

💡

There are weird ideas and grand ideas and funny ideas, and some that have a bit of each quality. You can get them and find the results just don't add up. Or worse, there might be no results at all. Getting ideas is the relatively easy part. Then you have to see them through.

I recently had an idea and was able to work it into...something at least. It wasn't as drawn out and painful as the process can be. So hopefully I've done something right, hit upon a process that might be productive in the future. The experiment is ongoing.

Wednesday, October 10, 2018

PB&J


While the Punch and Judy show has roots in the Italian commedia dell'arte, where the traditional figure of Pulcinello first appeared, it's in practice one of those irreducibly British cultural practices. I kind of have a feeling that this was one of those things I tried talking to my friends about when I was a kid and pretty much got blank stares. I'm not British but I sort of had that background, and they didn't.

Notice that in this instance the puppeteer uses his natural, very masculine voice for Judy. This could be either to downplay the domestic violence which is surely in the offing or just to give his own larynx a break.

Monday, October 8, 2018

Blessed relief

Numerous times in the past I've gone out when it was overcast or drizzling, taking my umbrella along. Ah, but then it either stops raining or never starts. The day weather might even clear up, the bastard! Which if that happens I might clean forget to bring the umbrella home with me.

Tonight I thought that might have happened, but then I checked the bag I was carrying and found I'd placed the umbrella in there just to avoid that situation. So I've started thinking a step or two ahead, even if I momentarily forget doing so.

Saturday, October 6, 2018

Years past



From Bringing Up Father. The comical Irishman's dowdy ballbusting wife threatens to crowd into his workplace, so he sets to work covering up evidence that he spends his workday in a drunken stupor. I mean,  you could get offended by something like this, but it might be healthier to just stand back and marvel. 

Thursday, October 4, 2018

One for the books

There comes a time in every year where it becomes obvious that my allergic sniffles aren't just that, and that I've picked up an autumn cold. The good thing about this is that I find I'm somewhat "weatherized" by the time winter starts. Yesterday and especially today made for a clear starting point of that time this year.

It was inconvenient to me that this very day the local bus routes were delayed beyond all recognition, and for shady and apocalyptic reasons at that. Still, for me personally it's probably better that this happen today than tomorrow. For reasons.

Tuesday, October 2, 2018

But the dealer just stares...


The Clash's epic song "The Card Cheat" impresses me more and more as time goes by. At the time they recorded it I'm sure no one was expecting them to venture so far into Elton John territory, to the extent that doing so posed a real risk.

I've never considered the possibility of having stuffed animals act out the lyrics. It's a memorable effect. Kind of reminds me of Stepan Chapman's "Revenge of the Calico Cat".

Sunday, September 30, 2018

Outside the box (maybe)

I just took a look at these lateral thinking exercises. Some of them I got, some I didn't, and one is so hoary it wouldn't even be fair to score myself on it. But on a couple I didn't get I did come up with plausible alternatives, which seems like it should count. That's a criticism I've heard of these exercises in general: that they don't really encourage individual problem solving, but just guide you to a predetermined outcome. Which, who knows, maybe is just an inherent limitation on the form.

Friday, September 28, 2018

Not present

One of my downstairs neighbors hasn't been home in a while. I know this because there's been a package leaning against her door for well over a week. Which sounds nosy on my part, but I'd rather know there's nothing to worry about. I might be able to confirm this with my other downstairs neighbor, but I haven't seen her either, although with her I think it's a question of schedules.

I've looked it up out of curiosity, and it seems almost impossible for non-family members to file a missing persons report.

Wednesday, September 26, 2018

4-color conflicts

It's been a while since I read comic books on any kind of regular basis. (Newspaper comics are another story, and The Comics Curmudgeon is a big reason.) Still, I saw Sean Howe's Marvel Comics: The Untold Story on the shelves of my local library, and couldn't resist checking it out in both senses of the phrase.

When I was a kid I wouldn't have been very interested in the office politics that went into the creations of Marvel titles. I would have been wrong, because there's a lot of good material there. One edge that Marvel had over DC was the appearance of a cohesive creative team, the famed and largely mythical "Marvel Bullpen." It is true that at one point editor/writer/mascot Stan Lee and veteran artist Jack Kirby were responsible for the company's most popular characters and stories, along with prickly Steve Ditko. But that was more a product of the severely limited budget they had in the beginning than anything else. And it was never a happy marriage. Each of them saw themselves as the more important partner, and despite Lee's brother-in-law Martin Goodman being publisher, neither was ultimately happy with the deal he got. The pattern of clashing egos and hurt feeling would repeat itself in later years, the X-Men behind-the-scenes team of Chris Claremont and John Byrne being a somewhat surprising example.

Also a revelation is how many of the creators from the seventies were getting high for inspiration, albeit mostly on soft drugs. One exception is Howard the Duck creator Steve Gerber, drug free and by the sound of it mostly a homebody in general. Given the troubled humor and low-budget surrealism of his writing, this is both surprising and not.

Monday, September 24, 2018

Cherry season's been over for a while now

On a night like this it's comical that at the beginning of the month it was still the kind of weather where you sleep on top of the sheets at night with all the windows open. Not doing any of that tonight, and in fact switched to a heavier jacket tonight. It's still a little too warm for the radiator to have kicked on, but it hasn't been too warm to check.

Saturday, September 22, 2018

Everybody drink!


Do I recommend The Addiction? Yes, but with trepidation. Or at least with qualifications. If ever there were a movie where you'd say it's not for everyone, this is it.

It's a vampire movie centered on a philosophy grad student (Lili Taylor, demonstrating why she should have been huge and probably never will be.) So a certain amount of making subtext text is to be expected. Your mileage may vary on it.

It's got a very interesting look. Shot entirely in black and white, it's also in a narrower aspect ratio than most movies made after the fifties. But it doesn't look like an old Universal or Val Lewton horror movie. The camera takes everything in with the detachment of a Warhol screen test.

An unusual casting tidbit: The guru vampire Peina was written as a woman, but when Christopher Walken read the script he fixated on that role and Abel Ferrara agreed to cast him. Balancing the gender switch, Annabella Sciorra wound up playing the part Walken was supposed to get. She makes an impression, and not just with her teeth.

Thursday, September 20, 2018

Aye-aye, cap'n

Lemurs are primates, and have the prime primate traits in terms of hands and placement of eyes. They're related to us, but more distantly than monkeys and of course apes are. They're an interesting peak into earlier mammal evolution, being limited, at least in the wild, to the off-Africa island of Madagascar.

Relatedly the Denver Zoo has just seen the birth of a new aye-aye, which is a species of lemur. And a birth in captivity is still better than none. The parents are named Smeagol and Bellatrix, which is delightful. The baby is named Tonks, which is weird because Nymphadora Tonks was sorted into Hufflepuff House, even though she's Draco's cousin.

Tuesday, September 18, 2018

Beach scene



Stevie Smith reads her immortal poem inspired by a newspaper story of a man who drowned because  Phil Collins wouldn't save him.

Smith, it turns out, had a great voice, literally as well as figuratively. This musical lilt carries her through even when she's just explaining herself.

Sunday, September 16, 2018

composition & decomposition

I've been working on a short story. Never mind what it's about. (Well, at some point I may talk about it.) But my trouble, as happens so often, is that I tend to psych myself out. Put so much pressure on every little decision that it's easier to just avoid the whole subject and do something else. So I'm trying to un-psych myself. And who knows? I might even wind up with something presentable.

Friday, September 14, 2018

chirp chirp

Part of the environmental sound, along with the hum of the refrigerator, is the humming of crickets. You associate them with the country, but they're urban, too. The sound is soothing from a distance. Once, I think when I was in college, I came home and saw a big cricket in my room. That freaked me out. Probably because I'm always trying to keep my conscience at bay.

Wednesday, September 12, 2018

What's your beef?

MINOTAUR from Karlis Vitols on Vimeo.

Not sure exactly what medium was used on this short film, but it's pleasing to the eye. Reminiscent of watercolors, or even fingerpaint.

Then there's the content, which presents the Minotaur figure in perhaps a more sympathetic light than usual. And shows Sysiphus pushing a briefcase uphill. Natch.

Monday, September 10, 2018

Prepared

A lady on the bus today was asking around if anyone had any ibuprofen, because she had a toothache. She didn't ask me, but as it happened I had some acetaminophen. She was happy to take it but surprised. It was usually women who have things like that on them.

Which is true and I've noticed. It's just that sometimes without much warning I get headaches. It doesn't happen that often, but in those cases I'd rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it. So anyway it worked out for her.

Saturday, September 8, 2018

Nasal displacement

In one of those transitions that come a couple of times per year, it's allergy season again. The symptoms came upon me around dusk and haven't proven very amenable to medication. The one thing that does seem to work is lying down, so I'm about to take the hint.

Wonder if the frustration of waiting for a bus that skipped a whole route affected things. I could have gotten home quicker by walking, but I didn't know that at the time.

Thursday, September 6, 2018

Any port

We had a storm tonight. I could tell a little bit ahead of time. I was in the library a little after five and saw that it was dark out. Darker than it should have been at the juncture of afternoon and evening, unless we're talking about late fall when the clocks have been sent forward.

There were a few minutes of intense rain, then it trailed off into something mild to moderate. There was a fair amount of thunder and lightning, though. And here's where I'm going with this. I talked to a guy who said he liked thunder, liked the way it shook everything. It might have looked to him like I was just gawking at him. But I get it. Sometimes other people think you're judging them, or at least mocking them, when that isn't the case at all.

Tuesday, September 4, 2018

Understood

Shakespeare and Chaucer are both, by consensus, geniuses. And both of them lived in times now distant from us. Chaucer more so, but in human terms neither is recent. Shakespeare's language is much easier for us to parse, though, despite some words and usages that have fallen out of use. I think part of that is that while The Canterbury Tales is a lengthy work you have to read on your own, Shakespeare is best known for plays you can act in with other people, or see socially. But make no mistake, language is always changing.

Seen in that light, this list of new entries in Webster's dictionary is fairly tame. Heavy on abbreviations, most are pretty easy to grasp even on first contact. Although I might have guessed that "ribbie" was something ribbed for her pleasure. And "zoodles" baffle me, as to me zucchini is just a squash cruelly masquerading as a nice tangy cucumber.

Sunday, September 2, 2018

Please don't you be very long


As she says, blue jays do get a bad rap for being aggressive. Which, I mean, I guess is how they've evolved. I like the case she makes for them, though. Enough to look forward to seeing them again
.

I also like the way this lady talks. Seems pretty proudly Canadian.

Friday, August 31, 2018

Year 5

Just a couple of decades behind the rest of the world, I've started watching The Sopranos. The wrong way round, apparently. That is I didn't realize when I was making the order, but what I'm seeing is season 5, the final season. What I've heard is that the writers gradually made Tony worse over time. It shows. James Gandolfini is great in the part, but it's a little wearing. Lorraine Bracco as Melfi is equally great, painting in a cooler palette.

Steve Buscemi hasn't shown up in the first episode, but he's been shown on TV wearing a really bad mullet. I have a feeling his character's main issue is going to be the long-term effects of having that hair.

Wednesday, August 29, 2018

The red lands

Yesterday a lady I know saw me at the library. She was like, "I'm guessing you don't have air conditioning either." Which probably goes for a lot of people you see at the library. She was looking at one newspaper or another and there was a map on the back where parts of the country with heat wave temperatures were colored red. Huge amount of red territory there. So anyway, that's still going on.

Monday, August 27, 2018

Shh


"Four Yorkshiremen" is the best-known sketch from this show, and there's a reason for that. Still, it seems not to have been the only highlight.

Interesting fact: Eric Idle wasn't actually in the cast of ALT1948S. His appearance here was fortuitous for the future.

Saturday, August 25, 2018

Weird lack of weirdness

This article initially focuses on a fairly narrow issue ― the elimination of musical guests on Conan O'Brien's show and by extension the lessening importance of musical guests in general ― but goes to some interesting places with it.
Things are far too staid in late night, musically and otherwise — which is the opposite of how it should be, and yet reflective of how culture generally feels right now. We live in a time where there are more media outlets serving a wider range of people than ever in the history of human civilization. And yet, those outlets feel more homogenized, sanitized, centralized, and corporatized than ever. Whether the driver is ratings, web traffic, or algorithms, the pull of culture now is always toward the familiar, fatuous middle of franchise reboots, comic book adaptations, and pop music “perfection.” This inevitably influences how we see that world — the middle assumes outsized importance, and the margins are further, well, marginalized.
In a sense this is a trend that's been going on for some time. There doesn't seem to have been a major new subculture created since the 1980's, for instance. But the current atmosphere tends to exacerbate the problem. A combination of massive wealth inequality and sometimes violent nationalist movements rising all over the place can make music and other cultural expressions seem like a lower priority, and certainly doesn't foster trust. The question is when and where this course will reverse.

Thursday, August 23, 2018

Jackanapeses


Whence this fear, though. I don't really get it. I will grant that the first time I saw a clown up close, when I was 4 or 5, I got a little freaked. But I know a lot of people not otherwise subject to phobias who seem to have a paralyzing fear of them. You think these people are kidding but they're not.

If nothing else it shows people who take up the clowning profession must be pretty dedicated.

Tuesday, August 21, 2018

Briskly

Today's an unusual day in comparison to other days around here. When I got home I didn't feel any need to change into shorts. I thought about it, but with the windows open it was actually a little chilly. I'm currently wearing a cardigan, in fact, albeit over a sporty short-sleeved shirt. So yeah, we're getting a little taste of autumn here.

Sunday, August 19, 2018

The frame of contrast



One of the most vital things in art is the way the viewer's attention is directed. What is crucial? What does the artist need to get across?

The chiaroscuro effect is one of the best ways to highlight crucial details. The eye is directed to the light in a mostly dark canvas and vice versa. Above is Dutch painter Aert de Gelder's imagined portrait of Esther and Mordecai. Esther's determined posture and the paper she holds in her hand take center stage in this picture.

I saw this today at the Rhode Island School of Design museum and didn't want to tear myself away. de Gelder. de Gelder, one of Rembrandt's last pupils, was apparently not Jewish himself but his depiction of Jewish figures is both vivid and sympathetic, unusually so for the time. If you look closely even the writing appears to be Hebrew.

Friday, August 17, 2018

Every one of us has all we need

Got a chance to see the New England Aquarium in Boston today. It's sort of tempting to just stick by the entrance as long as you're in there. The penguins are that fascinating. But there were interesting sights all through. I hadn't known about hamlets practicing that unusual form of hermaphroditism. Puts a new spin on "playing Hamlet."

Their admission setup is weird, though. You get stamped on the wrist with ink that looks like it's going to run and fade in minutes, which it does. They also want everyone to pose for green screen photos, which I hope doesn't lead to a Parallax View situation.

Wednesday, August 15, 2018

August heat

Feels much warmer inside than it did when I walked home tonight. Maybe it's just one of those things. This will go down as a weird summer.

Been watching the first season of Mr. Robot. Some parts are missing because of library DVD issues, but what's come through is interesting. It's kind of funny. The hero is a mess: a compulsive drug user and general misfit who hallucinates the TV audience. But the main villain, however slick he seems at first, always manages to be even more of a mess. You just can't get good evil help these days. 

Of course the revelation of who the title character is doesn't surprise. I can't imagine it's supposed to. They telegraph that punch every chance they get. Still feels absolutely right for Christian Slater, though.

Monday, August 13, 2018

loops

Without getting into the politics of any particular plan, when I was a wee one cursive handwriting was still part of the core curriculum, so it was something they were teaching us in school. It's not a bad thing to learn. It gives you a chance to think about what makes particular letters themselves, rather than something else? What can you take away and what do you need to keep?

Of course results aren't guaranteed. Actually producing good-looking cursive letters? Not something I can be relied on to do. I mean, sometimes, but it takes concentration.

Saturday, August 11, 2018

Chiaroscuro

I come home tonight. It's dark outside. It's dark inside. There are overhead lights in the stairwell, of course, and sometimes we use them and sometimes we don't. Nobody has turned them on tonight.

But there's a sliver of light as one of my downstairs neighbors has her door ajar. I pass by the door and go up the stairs. At the top there's a swirl of shadow within the shadow. The neighbor's cat, small with a white belly.

The cat trots back down the stairs. Crossing between the dark red space—red because of the exit signs—and the more brightly lit spot.

It was a nice sight to come home to, to pass through.

Thursday, August 9, 2018

The key to comedy is

Not too long ago I woke up and saw that my clock radio said that it was 12 noon. Not that it was actually twelve noon, but somehow

Timing!

the time on the clock was way ahead of what it should have been. Like, I normally keep it running a little fast anyway, but not several hours fast. How this happened is something of a mystery. If it had lost power one way or another then I would think the display time would be slow, not fast. Did I get up in the middle of the night and work mischief against myself? Actually that would explain a lot.

Anyway, I've fixed it since then. The date is way off, but always has been and it doesn't seem to affect anything.

Tuesday, August 7, 2018

How to say it

No better example can be found than the controversial subject of how many words the Eskimo have for "snow." A Google search for "Eskimo snow words" yields more than 10,000 hits. Deriding this as an example of bad science run amok has become somewhat of a game among linguists. A leading academic in his book The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax stated unequivocally that the Inuit people of Alaska do not have many words for snow, and in fact have only about a dozen basic ones. The debunkers rely on this count to show that the Inuit snow words are neither prolific nor special. This stance feeds into a more general agenda of asserting that all languages are equal and equally interesting to science.

Proponents of this view became so intent on debunking it that they spawned a new term―"snow clones"―to mock all such statements that "The so-and-so people have x number of words for y." Entire Web pages are devoted to listing such mock Eskimo snow words that have imaginary meanings like "snow mixed with husky shit" or "snow burger." Even Steven Pinker took up the issue in his book The Language Instinct, stating: "Contrary to popular belief, the Eskimos do not have more words for snow than English. They do not have four hundred words for snow, as it has been claimed in print, or one hundred, or forty-eight, or even nine. One dictionary puts the figure at two. Counting generously, experts can come up with about a dozen, but by such standards English would not be far behind, with snow, sleet, slush, blizzard, avalanche, hail, hardpack, powder, flurry, dusting, and a coinage of Boston's meteorologist Bruce Schwoegler, snizzling."

Sadly, the snow-cloners have missed the point. They have grossly underestimated the number of words by relying on very limited modern accounts and thinking that just because the number was inflated in the past by people who should have known better, the true count must be unimpressively low. As we will see, the number of snow/ice/wind/weather terms in some Arctic languages is impressively vast, rich, and complex. Furthermore, they have missed the forest for the trees, failing to see the importance of how words encode knowledge. Beyond the sheer numbers of words for natural phenomena like snow and ice, these languages demonstrate the complex ways in which words package information efficiently. 
 The preceding passage is from K. David Harrison's The Last Speakers: The Quest to Save the World's Most Endangered Languages. Harrison is a linguist who puts his money where his mouth is. And if his writings contain a trace of J. Peterman-style cosmopolitan bragging, there's also a passionate insight into the speakers of endangered languages.

Some Arctic languages do indeed have a large number of snow-related words. It's natural that we outsiders don't really appreciate the nuances between these, although we could try harder. People such as the Yupik are better equipped to see changes small and large reflected in the kind of precipitation that falls in their homelands.

And that's the thing. Languages aren't just collections of words. They're methods of interacting with the surrounding environment and making sense of it. There's not one that's equally good for all circumstances.

Sunday, August 5, 2018

Pining for...


Wildlife isn't necessarily what Europe is known for, and especially Northern Europe. But it's there if you look for it. All those gulls and guillemots rising into the air must be a pretty wild sight when you're there.

Friday, August 3, 2018

It's the circle of life

Six people wake up floating in the middle of a gory crime scene. They are naked, newborn in adult bodies.

This makes more sense when you consider that all six are clones, the skeleton crew of an interstellar colony ship whose flight path would far outstrip any individual life. And they've been chosen as the crew because they have criminal records back on Earth, laboring for their freedom in a process with deep historical echoes. The ship's artificial intelligence has been crippled, along with its gravity. They are all missing 25 years.

The above is the premise of Mur Lafferty's novel Six Wakes. Some of the assumptions therein are challenged as the book goes on. It's clever and sneaky that way.

It's also old-fashioned, in what I'd say is a good way. Lafferty doesn't bend over backwards to be immersive about her world. The plot is strange enough, the characters are vivid. The world has changed in the centuries between our time and theirs, but this comes out at its own pace. In other respects, Lafferty appears satisfied to let you imagine things are like the present or recent past. That keeps her from getting bogged down in excessive detail.

There are recent influences. In an afterword Lafferty cites the video game FTL: Faster Than Light. Also the TV series Orphan Black and Lost, the latter for its core gimmick of running extensive flashbacks at an inflection point for the character depicted in them. The prose, though, is of older craftsmanship.

Wednesday, August 1, 2018

Soup-ready


Does being a surrealist just free you up to be goofy. I'm pretty certain this was a bone of contention for critics who opposed the movement. (And perhaps some within it. Andre Breton was notorious for excommunicating followers.) Anyway, Rene Magritte sometimes seems to have decided the answer was "yes" and that he'd lean into it.

The above painting seems to have only surfaced a few years ago, well after Magritte had left us. It's a funny image, and an unsettling one if you keep looking at it, due to the upsetting of scale.

Monday, July 30, 2018

Shakin' the Shirt

So, I have a thing tomorrow where I have to be dressed kind of formally. I think I'm going to go with this black dress shirt with a kind of plaid design. I know, I know, wearing black when it's hot can be bad. But this shirt is lightweight, but you also can't see through it, which can be a plus.

It feels good to have an occasion to dress up. Practice for all those cocktail parties coming up, perhaps.


Saturday, July 28, 2018

Q-bomb?

Last night I watched The Mouse that Roared. This is a political farce featuring a doomsday weapon and Peter Sellers in three separate roles, and almost certainly wouldn't be the first movie you think of based on that description. There's a reason for that, although in all fairness this one came first.

In brief summation, the Duchy of Fenwick's economy is based on the export of a distinctive kind of wine. California has started producing a knockoff, messing up the racket. The prime-minister has the idea of invading the US, starting a war, and losing it, in the belief that losing a war to America is the key to prosperity. (Based on a rather oversimplified history of postwar Germany, no doubt.) The plan is complicated by the fact that the US has evacuated the East Coast due to the testing of a new super-powerful bomb. When the invasion force arrives in New York there's no one to surrender to, and they inadvertently end up winning.

There are a few problems here. The nuclear scientist's daughter, played by Jean Seberg, has to fall in love with the invasion leader, one of the characters played by Sellers, when he takes her and her hostage as hostages. This romance is unmotivated at best, kind of unfortunate at worst. And while director Jack Arnold had quite a few films under his belt, including The Incredible Shrinking Man, let's just say he's no Stanley Kubrick. There's a lot of meandering in the movie, during which the comedy goes flat.

Still, points for being ahead of the curve in some ways. There's a good cast here too, including William Hartnell a few years before Doctor Who and Leo McKern a number of years before Rumpole of the Bailey.

Thursday, July 26, 2018

Feeling gravity's pull


Is there context here beyond what you can see? Oh yes. Watterson was doing something of a serial here, which owes a little to Little Nemo in Slumberland. But in a way you don't need that. Calvin's cycle of panic-inspiration-different "uh-oh" is, well...You do recognize the feeling, don't you?

Tuesday, July 24, 2018

Big Heads



One book I'm reading currently is The Enigmas of Easter Island by John Flenley and Paul Bahn. As you might guess, the presence on Easter Island of the imposing moai is a big reason for my interest.

Flenley and Bahn spend a lot of time discussing Thor Heyerdahl's theory that Easter Island was colonized from South America. They don't put a lot of stock in it, and if there's a consensus it seems to be that the Rapa Nui people are ultimately Polynesian.

Still, there's a lot of mystery about where their culture ultimately comes from. Due to the nature of the ocean currents surrounding it, Easter Island is difficult to get to by boat. The people had a lot of time on their own. They worked to survive in a place with a rather limited ecology, and they dreamed. Their myths became something new.

Sunday, July 22, 2018

Melodic

Today I was waiting for a bus with a woman and her daughter. The daughter, you could see if you looked closely, had Down syndrome. Does that have anything to do with this story? I'm not sure, which is why I'm just leaving that detail here.

The bus wasn't really late. If there's a day the bus is going to be late, Sunday ain't it. But they didn't necessarily know that. The daughter was getting antsy. The thing is, while she was impatient about it, she had a charming way of being impatient.She was rocking back and forth, singing something like "Bus please get here, bus please get here." There are lots of times when people vocally freaking about the bus being late annoys me, because obviously that's not going to help. But there was just something so disarming about this child, something sort of joyful. When the bus did make it self visible I turned to them and said, "Must have heard you."

Friday, July 20, 2018

The long and short of it

It might seem weird. At night during the summer it feels right to be wearing shorts. Part of that is heat and humidity, of course. But it can be hot and humid during the day. After all, heat comes from the sun. But earlier in the day it just feels like long pants time. Not so much at the end of the day.

Hey, I said weird, not interesting.

Wednesday, July 18, 2018

A fulfilling day

Candy shop / Stop motion short film from Nimble Puppets on Vimeo.

One thing I enjoy about stop motion animation is that I know it's based on something, built on something. The filmmakers slow down a little, interact with their creations in a tactile way.

That seems to be, at least in part, the theme of this short about a little gentleman confectioner. I enjoy his satisfied snooze at the end.

Monday, July 16, 2018

Biggest fan

This is a good night to have a ceiling fan. In my living room I have one. It's on at top speed now. I can tell it's quite hot still, but it doesn't affect me as much.

Both that and the box fan in my bedroom make soothing sounds. It's technically not white noise, but it can serve a similar purpose.

Saturday, July 14, 2018

Bear with me here...

The saying that "Tomorrow is another day," is meant to be hopeful. You can change, you can do something different tomorrow. And it is uplifting.

Of course by that time "tomorrow" is "today." And I don't think I'm alone in feeling more limited today.

I think it would be good to keep a "tomorrow" attitude "today" so that you can act freely, not be locked in. That's something I'd like to do.

Maybe tomorrow.

ETA: Will y'all be around Tuesday morning or Wednesday morning or afternoon? You know who you are. :)

Thursday, July 12, 2018

Cutthroat

From Bedside Book of Bad Girls: Outlaw Women of the American West by Michael Rutter
Sheriff Watson interviewed the vigilantes, all six of whom admitted to the lynching. Perhaps they thought it wouldn't be a problem; hanging a male rustler, after all, was something the law often forgave. The six cattlemen were, moreover, respected ranchers and businessmen, members of the powerful Wyoming Stock Growers Association (WSGA). What they didn't realize, though, was that hanging a woman - no matter what her crime - was almost unthinkable to most in the West. Each of the vigilantes was required to post a $5,000 bond, a hefty sum in that day.
For context, the woman hanged was small but successful rancher Ellen Watson, posthumously known as "Cattle Katie." Her husband Jim Averell was killed as well.

This was a lynching through and through. The cattlemen accused Watson and Averell of cattle rustling. She vehemently denied it. No evidence was presented either way. It's hard to tell if her rivals even believed their own accusations or if this was a thinly veiled power play on their part. If the latter, it was even more morally bankrupt than it sounds.

To make things worse, they got away with it. Thanks to witnesses being intimidated, none in the group were ever convicted. If this incident proved anything, it wasn't anything good.

Tuesday, July 10, 2018

Blue period

Such a time.

I'm at a time in my life when I'd like to do right by the people I love. But I know I'm not. And I'm hoping to change that, but I'm hoping to change a lot of things. I have to believe that things will get better, but they're taking their time.

Of course it also seems like it doesn't really matter what I want. So I don't know.

Sunday, July 8, 2018

Oenology

I have a friend.

No, it's not one of those "see, I have this friend who has this problem" stories. Nor is it entirely a story.

This friend has a few hobbies. Among them is wine making. As far as I know it's just a hobby, in that he hasn't tried making a living at it. It's a competitive field, I'm sure, and you need resources to do it on a certain scale, resources I'd guess he doesn't have.

He's cooked up something that mixes peppercorns and cinnamon into the ferment. I got a taste of it tonight. Tastes a little like a wine that a few Valentine's cinnamon heart candies have been melted into. Not too sweet, though. A tasty versatile drink.

Friday, July 6, 2018

Cocoa channel

I just watched Merci pour le Chocolat, a low-key but intense French/Swiss thriller that's called Nightcap in the English speaking world. Don't know why. "Thanks for the chocolate" sounds plenty catchy to me. It's directed by Claude Chabrol, known as the biggest Hitchcock fan among the French New Wave. It shows. He's actually influenced by Hitch, whereas Brian de Palma has always seemed more influenced by TV. Not that there's anything wrong with that, necessarily.

It's kind of a cat and mouse game played between a young conservatory student; an older musician who might be her father, which for reasons delineated in the film no one can quite know for sure; and his wife, an executive in her family's chocolate business. This last is played by Isabelle Huppert, who's worked in Hollywood and looks a little like a redheaded Jessica Lange.

The camera is always moving, and does so in a conscious, directed way. The color palette is muted, the way European and especially Francophile films tend to be. Even in the poshest scenes you want to check for water damage. But in one scene Huppert turns the light out at night, wide awake, and the space around her remains bright. This is a very Old Hollywood expressionist touch.

Wednesday, July 4, 2018

7/4

There were, of course, fireworks tonight. In the past, I've often gone down the hill to see them from a closer vantage point. But that requires putting on shoes and socks as well as doing the walking. Tonight that just wasn't going to happen. No, this heat was made for me hanging about barefoot in mangy shorts.

Still did see some of the fireworks. It's just they had to pass a higher threshold first. The ones I saw did look nice.

Monday, July 2, 2018

A tiger in your tank


Fred Rogers has not been forgotten, what with a new documentary out in theaters. This is a lovely little clip, revealing that the whole matter of using puppets - a defining feature of his show - was more or less a happy accident.

Daniel Striped Tiger was always a special character for me. It's hard to articulate exactly why. I think it has something to do with the juxtaposition of an archetypically fierce and fearsome animal with a bashful personality. We all contain multitudes.

Saturday, June 30, 2018

Taking the heat

Ah, summer!

Today was one of the first really sweaty days of the summer. Which is fine, these things come and go. You just have to make sure you stay hydrated. Probably run the fan some, too.

Of course insects are more active during the summer as well. There are bitey bugs, which you avoid as much as you can, but you probably can't completely. And there are noisy bugs. Beetles (to say nothing of Beatles) tend to make a lot of background noise at night. So if you want to stay focused on a task, it's good to play some music to cover them up. If you're like me, at any rate.

Thursday, June 28, 2018

Bad moon rising

So I borrowed the latest season of Fargo from the library. It just aired last year, so the DVD has to be pretty new. Nonetheless, a couple of discs already seem to have sustained some damage. Noticeable chunks of the penultimate episode are gone. Since DVDs are software, once they sustain damage, it's basically impossible to fix. That's what you lose when you move away from analog technology: the chance to fiddle with something until it's right again.

Ah, but the series itself, leaving aside those parts I haven't been able to see, is excellent. I lean toward saying it outdoes the first two seasons. I saw Wonder Woman last year so I knew David Thewlis could play a good villain, but he's really, really threatening in this with only the leavening agent of being kind of funny. Carrie Coon is also excellent as she represents the forces of good. So, I'm glad not to have to be disappointed.

Tuesday, June 26, 2018

Siblings and partners

It's pretty big news that these dudes are playing and recording together again. Dave, at least, has been through a few wringers. As has Ray, but that's old news. The fact that there might be some lingering bad blood between Dave and Mick sounds about right, although I don't know what it's about.

As for the other Mick, Ray reveals the reunion springs at least partly from competition with the still-touring, highly profitable Rolling Stones. Which, honestly, I could have guessed.

Sunday, June 24, 2018

Grooming decisions

Once in a while I decide to try growing a beard. Well, growing one again. I had one for a few weeks in college.

It tends not to last long. Facial hair is itchy in that middle period. Then you wonder if it's going to be high maintenance when it grows out.

Anyway, this one, still in its early stages, is probably going away tomorrow. It might have stood a better chance if we weren't getting into summer.

Friday, June 22, 2018

The domestic situation

Cultural works from the past carry the attitudes of the past. Sometimes this can be jarring. Different people have different levels of tolerance for this. But you also often find nuances if you look for them.

From my childhood I remember hearing stories about Fu Manchu, Sax Rohmer's Burmese mad scientist and conqueror, although the name sounds more Chinese. Manchu was most definitely a Yellow Peril villain of the sort the West has always projected. And yet the British Rohmer also regarded the character with a kind of admiration.

In most cases the mystery novels of Ellery Queen don't produce that much generational shock. The Scarlet Letters is something of an exception. Ellery and his secretary Nikki Porter find themselves in the middle of a domestic situation. The husband is a mostly failed writer Ellery has met before. The wife, a friend of Nikki's, is an heiress and theatrical producer. He's crazy jealous. She gives him some reason to be. He's followed her, assaulted men he's seen her with, and her.

Both the mystery writer hero and his secretary raise the possibility that maybe she should just leave, but relent when she asks them to help save her marriage. From a contemporary perspective he's an abuser and she should get far away from him. And yet the resulting novel is more interesting than the woman on the run melodrama that would probably get published today. There's substance to it, a dynamic.

Wednesday, June 20, 2018

Film stocking

HEAT WAVE from Jason Cooper on Vimeo.

I feel fortunate that thus far this year I haven't experienced heat as extreme as this is supposed to be. But then, technically, summer is just starting now.

This young filmmaker has an infectiously goofy sense of humor. Perhaps the first time we see Sock Cop will be far from the last time.

Monday, June 18, 2018

Hawking

As I was reminded today, it's really hard to take being near someone who's okay with spitting on the sidewalk. Because if they do it once, odds are they'll do it again. And you're reminded that other people do this too. Until you start to wonder what part of the street it's okay to stand on, leave your bag, etc.

Of course, as with the guy I saw at the bus stop today, the odds are pretty good they'll be doing 20 other obnoxious things too.

Saturday, June 16, 2018

Get a room!

Recently watched Don't Bother to Knock. It's a 1952 thriller in which a shy and fragile woman is hired to babysit a little girl in her parents' hotel room while the father is getting some kind of newspaper award. Then she turns out to be nuts and dangerous. This is a good one for a few reasons:
1. In what has to be considered a pretty high-quality cast in general (Richard Widmark, Anne Bancroft, Elisha Cook Jr., etc) Marilyn Monroe is a standout as the babysitter. Monroe was a more internalized actress than she was generally given credit for at the time, and I suspect her background in the foster care system helped inform her performance here.
2. There's a pretty bold jazz soundtrack by Lionel Newman, one of Randy's uncles. Bancroft's character sings several songs as well, and either he or whoever she was lipsyncing to had a good set of pipes.
3. Aside from the girls' parents attending the newspaper banquet, the action never leaves the hotel. It uses that setting to the fullest, setting up a varied dynamic between the major and minor characters who work there. Nothing is wasted.
The movie also has a sharp sense of humor about itself. From a certain point of view it's a comedy.

Thursday, June 14, 2018

Hear that train a-rumblin'

So yes, I've been reading this book edited by Marshall Berman and Brian Berger, New York Calling: From Blackout to Bloomberg. Partly for research, partly just because it interests me. The novelist and memoirist Jim Knipfel has a great essay on his experiences riding the subway. He has a funny observiation
(In fact, I've often suggested that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority - the corrupt and ill-managed agency responsible for keeping the whole system running - should use Walter Hill's 1979 low-budget street-gang fantasy The Warriors as a public relations tool. No other film in recent memory more loudly sings the praises of the near-Germanic efficiency and reliability of the New York subways. Whenever you want a train, the film promises, there'll be one waiting for you.)
I remember The Warriors, and I always thought of it as a science fiction movie, although no one else seemed to consider it one. It's about one of the most heavily populated cities in the world, but the gangs never run into shopkeepers or winos. Just other gangs. Oh, and there's a foxy black chick spinning records at a radio station. So are these people the only ones who were immune to radioactive fallout? Did aliens scoop up 90% of the city but left all the old-looking teenagers? What?

Tuesday, June 12, 2018

About buildings and food

I've been reading a book about New York and how it's changed since the blackouts and other things that happened in the city. More about that later, perhaps. But one of the changes, of course, is that so many of the kind of people who made the city what it is are being priced out. So this project certainly strikes me as interesting, and could perhaps provide a needed countertrend.

Providing housing for the formerly homeless isn't an easy task, though. Obviously money and rent are an issue, which maybe hopefully this modular housing can help resolve. But there's also the fact that a lot of people don't want to live with the homeless, or the obviously poor. You can factor in the fact that there are irritating people in any group, but I think a lot of Americans think the poor are immoral and so their suffering is God's will. That's at least a common interpretation of a lot of Protestant doctrine. So the HPD really needs to commit themselves to being firm.

Sunday, June 10, 2018

Emptied out

So yeah, this.

I passed by the location of the old Cable Car the other day and took a look inside. Not much to see. The counter where they served food and beverages is still there, for now. That's just until they can haul it away.

As my friend Gary says, RISD's kicking them out doesn't make sense. Nothing is likely to have the same draw, so do they think they'll be making more money?

Of course I also wonder why they never applied to be a historic site. Seems like they would have qualified.

Friday, June 8, 2018

Huh. Huh.

This evening while waiting for a bus I saw a kid - under 25, maybe a lot under - wearing a The The t-shirt. Which surprised me in a way that seeing young folks wearing Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin gear. I mean, The The never really broke through to the mainstream. But I respect those who go deep, so here's to 'em.

Wednesday, June 6, 2018

Skins

I saw a guy on the bus today with a leopard print walking cane. Needless to say I approve. It might be a medical necessity for you to have support when you're walking. No reason you can't have something that expresses your personality.

Of course one actually covered in leopard skin would be going a little far, but it would be so high-maintenance I doubt many get sold.

Monday, June 4, 2018

In the air

Today was cool, continuing a trend from yesterday. Not cool as in "Joe Cool." There's enough chill in the air that I checked the radiator when I got home to see if the heat had kicked on. It didn't quite go that far, although there was one night in late May when it came on for at least a few seconds.

Anyway, it won't be a night of tossing and turning and sweating. Well, not because of the heat, at least.

Saturday, June 2, 2018

Façade


Here's something fun if you're in the mood for it, which I admit I probably am more than the average person. Selections from Edith Sitwell's Façade, with their original musical setting by William Walton, and read by Sitwell herself and English opera singer Peter Pears. Sitwell was inspired, here and elsewhere, by music hall comedy. The poems are playful bordering on goofy, and their delivery matches. Walton gets into the spirit as well, his backing sounding like he's setting nursery rhymes. He would have made a great composer for the cartoon studios.

Thursday, May 31, 2018

Another era

A story I'm writing now is, among other things, a work of historical fiction. It's also set within my lifetime, because I'm at an age where that's possible.

While there is a market I'm considering, the guidelines don't say anything about setting the story in the past. That's my choice, made for a couple of different reasons. For one thing, the protagonist is a banker. A relatively sympathetic one, out of necessity for me. But the thing is, if it were set today, I'd have to answer questions like "what kind of phone does he use" and "does he use Slack to talk to coworkers" and "what is slack." This way I can limit my research to more fun topics.

Also it's set in New York, a city which seems to have a little more grandeur when you're talking about the seventies. Part of that is because of the movies that have imprinted me, I'm sure.

Tuesday, May 29, 2018

Apocalyptic uptick

Our experience on Earth is probably repeated endlessly in the cosmos. Life develops on planets but it is ultimately destroyed by the light of a slowly brightening star. It is a cruel fact of nature that life-giving stars always go bad.
Has anyone ever worked that last sentence into a country song?

This is from Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee's The Life and Death of Planet Earth: How the New Science of Astrobiology Charts the Ultimate Fate of Our World, which I just finished. There's something calming in these scientific prophesies of doom. The news isn't good, but things like the sun turning into a red giant are so far in the future we never expected to be around for them. Our children's children won't either. Of course there are threats now, some self-created. But the thing is, the goal is to just squeeze as many good years out of this world we have as we can.

Sunday, May 27, 2018

There is no bottom

I have a friend who took out his phone tonight and showed me the sign featured in this article. Well, I'm not too proud to say that I laughed. Thought I'd look it up when I got home. Something did tell me that the image was too good to be true. I mean, there has to be a lot of sets of eyes on a sign that prominent, people who review the text before it's made permanent. And lo, it turns out to be a hoax.

Not sure I'll tell my friend it's a fake, though. I mean, there are a lot of hoaxes going on out there, and most of them aren't as harmless as this one.

Friday, May 25, 2018

It's alive

I received a plant a few weeks ago. I don't think it's exactly a poinsettia, but the leaves have a similar shape and texture, but they're lighter, and maybe a little bigger in area. If this kind of plant has any special needs, I don't know about it. So I've just set it by a window and I've given it water once per week. While the plant has lost a few leaves, it still looks pretty healthy.



Exactly, Steve. So far, so good.

Wednesday, May 23, 2018

Double oh

I'm listening now to a show on WFMU where the DJ has compiled a solid hour's worth of versions of the song "Live and Let Die." A for effort to her, but man, it's a little hard to believe so many people have chosen to do that song. The original recording works because it's Paul and Wings, but as a song I don't think it exactly towers over Duran Duran's "View to a Kill". The song Chris Connell did for Casino Royale strikes me as much better and I'm not even that big a Soundgarden fan. I mean, McCartney seems to be going out of his way to be trite with that "you used to say live and let live" opening.

I don't know, maybe I'm being mean. But imagine what Lennon must have been saying at the time.