You'll have to spell it out for me

The "Letterman" feature from The Electric Company stands as an example of how lucky my generation was, in a way. This was children's entertainment mixed with education that someone had really expended some care on. While the animation was somewhat limited, the backgrounds had a fascinating quality, like etchings that had suddenly become stages.

Also, Letterman was voiced by Gene Wilder and the Spellbinder by Zero Mostel, so while I didn't have that context, it was a grand battle between Leo Bloom and Max Bialystock.

amnesia.com

Nothing lasts forever. Even on the internet.

Well, pictures might. Especially naughty ones. But after a while it becomes impossible to tell where they came from. That might be a good thing.

But I digress. You can look up phrases from day to day, month to month, year to year. Results you used to get you don't get anymore. Whole articles sometimes go dark, never to be seen again.

That's not so bad in itself. But as a race we've come to think of the web as the sum of all human knowledge. Which of course everyone is carrying around in their back pockets at all times. But it's not. It's a non-representative cross-section of thoughts, jokes, and abuse that can shrink as fast as it grew.

Arms race

This song was unknown to me. I just recently heard it when someone left it as a comment on a blog. (Not this one.)

This was a gift of Gil Scott-Heron. He could take topics that were tense and uncomfortable - and make no mistake, they still are - and make music out of them. Laid back music, yes. But the tension is still there, still felt.

Anyway, thought I'd share.

C&C Music Factory (sorry)

China Miéville's The City and the City is a truly eye-opening book. It's an urban detective story that works at the edges of plausibility: probably outside those edges, but that's up for debate. The author meant it to be thought-provoking and it is.

I was surprised to learn that there was a TV adaptation in the works. And yes, I'm a little behind the curve here, because it must be just about all in the can by now. Will it translate well to the small screen? It could. There's enough trippy material. I hope people continue to read the novel.

Truthfully I would have expected Kraken to be the first China M. book to be adapted for either the big or little screen. It's also both intelligent and entertaining, but hews somewhat closer to the thriller form.

Circles of life

Charcoal animation - AClockwork of Dreams from Alesh macak on Vimeo.

Trippy little piece, representing - perhaps - the places that life can go. Your life. Life in general. Charcoal seems to breathe, which makes it a good choice. Then there's the claymation, about which you could say the same thing.

I'm not sure I'd have picked such discordant music, but I can see what the animator was going for with it.

In too deep

I have a friend who says he wants to get into the Deep Web. Well, he says it. Not sure if he actually does want to. He hasn't done any more than talk about it.

It strikes me that most of it is probably boring as all hell. Long strings of numbers and impenetrable code that don't show up on search engines because no one would be searching for them in the first place. And the rare bits of salacious stuff would just be depressing in practice.

NC

At once it struck me what quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously — I mean negative capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.

This is a quote from John Keats, writing to his brothers George and Thomas. It struck me when I first heard about it in college. And the quality he's talking about is as necessary as ever, as rare as ever.  Fact and reason are important, of course, and too many make arguments bereft of them. But there's the sublime as well, which we're destitute without.

Flash

Threat. Blunt, unthinking menace. That's what's conveyed in the painting above. It's called "Is It True What They Say About Dixie?" And yes, I fear it is.

The painter is Rosalyn Drexler, part of the American pop art explosion of the sixties. But that's just a vague grouping, not who she is. Not all her work is as ominous as this one, but it's powerful. For the most part she keeps backgrounds simple. Maybe just a color, although it will be a dominant color. The emphasis is on the foreground. On the struggle.

Ritual? Rite? Something like that.

Barring holidays, Monday is garbage day in my neighborhood. Making Sunday garbage night. (Funny how that works.) It's a few trips. 2-4 for recyclables, one more for trash itself.

Which I kind of like. It gives me one more chance to give the street a once over before I go to sleep. Only during torrential downpours am I really eager to get it over with.

LIke Waugh

Right now I'm in the middle of reading Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies. I think it's the second thing I've read by him. I read The Loved One a long time ago, and was quite entertained by it.

Vile Bodies is a strange one. It's very dialogue heavy, and its tone suggests that everything happening is pure gossip fodder. But certain characters are given transparently metaphorical nicknames like Mrs. Ape and Mr. Outrage. There's a bit of Medieval allegory in that.

At the point this novel was written one world-spanning war had finished and another was on its way, although few predicted it at that point. (Hitler wasn't yet in power.) The world, and certainly England, is decompressing out of psychic necessity.

This is actually the world of early Agatha Christie as well. The difference isn't the murder, it's the somewhat older detectives able to make sense of the murder. Those are in Christie, not here.

Of the grey feathers

Perhaps it's the spiritual influence of the Muppet Bert, but pigeons fascinate me. Not in the same way as crows. Crows are intelligent birds that visit us now and then. Pigeons don't seem to be as smart, but they're a constant feature of city life. They fly low among us, walk on the street, eat what's available. You can't touch them unless they're domestic, but you can get very close. Somehow they've evolved to live amongst humans, who can be a very dangerous species, while maintaining they're own peculiar social life.

Book post coming soon. I just need to get a little further into the book.

New residents

This was actually something of an event. I was lucky enough to just be passing by it, so stuck around to watch.

A few people addressed the artwork and the artist, who was there in person and seemed very genial. Mayor Elorza was one of the speakers. Ccopacatty himself spoke, mostly in Spanish. There were also four men sitting around a drum, chanting and beating. Not beating the drum in unison. It was a little more intricate than that.

The sculptures themselves - or should I say "sculpture" singular? There's a kind of conceptual unity - have a grandeur you can feel close up. They do change the space, in interesting ways.

Unjuried

It's an odd experience to receive a summons for jury duty and get a "never mind" notice by phone at the end of the week before the court dates. One of the bailiffs at the court building did say to call 24 hours before to see if they still needed me. So I was ready to do that, and wasn't expecting to hear it had been canceled before then. It was a robocall, as you might expect, but that means that the first part of the message was cut off by my answering machine because the robot didn't know it had to wait for the tone. Of course it repeated everything anyway, I guess because that's happened lots of times before.

This was federal district court, by the way. They've got a nice building in Downtown Providence. Statuary and everything.

Green-eyed

I've seen the movie Amadeus. I also acted in the play in college. Not as a character with a name or lines, but I certainly got to know the action and dialogue of the play through osmosis.

So reading Drood, I got a definite feeling of Salieri coming through Wilkie Collins's narration. Was not surprised to find out through another source that it was intentional on Simmons's part. I would guess that he embellished as much as Shaffer and the Mozart/Salieri playwrights before him did. (Most records indicate that Salieri had a distant respect for Mozart's talent, not worship crossed with hatred.) Anyway, Collins's envy of Dickens in the story brings an interesting uncertainty to the bizarre events of the novel. That and the fact that he spends most of the story tripping balls.