NI

Seeing in the New Year with Neil Innes, who didn't quite make it to see it in with us. Great songster.

BTW, you just might be able to find a double meaning in the header here, as brief as it is.

Ambiguous anxiety

Had a dream the other night where I was talking to someone, making jokes and references that, as they came out of my mouth, I knew wouldn't be appreciated. Somehow I could detect the other person's negative reaction afterwards, as well. This sounds like a stress dream comedians might have. I'm not a stand-up, though. And in the dream I wasn't onstage.

In any case, I didn't really mind my bladder interrupting this one.

Mystery to me

I'd been interested in seeing Knives Out for a bit. This week I finally got around to going. And man, am I glad I did. Won't say too much―okay, I won't say anything―about the plot, except that the twist and turns fully occupy it's 2-hour-ish runtime. It never stalls.

Daniel Craig really seems to enjoy his "Hercule Poirot but from Mississippi" character too.

圣诞节快乐 (Shèngdàn jié kuàilè)

There's a fairly familiar trope about how Jews―although certainly not only Jews―dine out at or order in from Chinese restaurants on Christmas. Not a bad tradition, I'd say. On Hope Street in the Rochambeau area there's a Chinese place that was open today. There are also a couple of restaurants with a more general Asian cuisine, one of which leans Thai. Neither of them did business today, as far as I can tell. Maybe it only works for eateries that are Chinese per se. Maybe Orthodox Jews eat in more. If I find the answer I'll let you know.

Oh, I will be getting in touch personally very soon.

George M.

There's a statue of George M. Cohan on Wickenden St, in the Fox Point neighborhood. He's lifting a hat from his head, apparently in song, as you'd expect. There's an inscription on the base as well. I read a local magazine recently say that the statue in Providence is more fun than the one in Times Square. And how wonderfully crazy it is that the comparison is even there to be made. I mean, this is one of the quieter spots in town, about as far from Times Square as you could imagine. The old Times Square or the new one, for that matter.

Wheezy

I talked to a waitress today. Waitress and proprietor, she and her husband own the place. She told me she felt bad for not opening last Saturday, but her son had to go to the hospital. Well, in those circumstances guilt over closing up shop seems kind of silly.

Anyway, he's five and has asthma. Having had some experience with the condition myself, albeit not at so young an age, I assured her it's manageable when you know what you're dealing with. Which the doctors had already told her, of course, but I figured a little extra reassurance wouldn't hurt.

A Dick ted to love

Hadn't gone near it before, but a few days ago I figured I'd start reading Philip K. Dick's VALIS. His last three novels ―not counting revisions of old work―don't necessarily have the best reputation.

It's weird. And not weird in a recognizable Dickian sci-fi way. Nobody lives in a conapt or reads a homeopape. The fact that it's first person is different for him. Although that's not straightforward. The narrator says outright that he's also Horselover Fat, but treats him as a separate person as well.

Dick is definitely working through some real life stuff here. At times it feels like the reader is a therapist for a particularly drama queen-y patient. It does flow, though. Some combination of the voice and plot (of sorts) do grab me.

So if he'd lived longer what would his fiction of the 80's and 90's be like. It does make one curious.

Ambiguity

I saw something on the cold wet ground in Downtown Providence today. It looked like a snake. It wasn't moving. But I don't know if it was the remains of a real snake, some kind of joke prop, or just something that happened to have that shape and those contours.

I hope it wasn't a real snake, just because it doesn't seem like it would be a very dignified end for one.

Suspicions confirmed

In Control from Chiharu Lim on Vimeo.

Do you trust vending machines? I assume not. But here's a sprightly little film explaining their inner workings.

Triskadeka

When did Friday the 13th start being considered unlucky? And why? There's of course some speculation it's about Judas being the twelfth Apostle, and thus thirteenth member of Christ's cohort, plus Good Friday. Maybe, but there's no evidence of this convention being floated before the nineteenth century. Presumably by someone for whom everything else went great the rest of the year. Or at least that sound like it might cause some bias.

For the record the bus I was waiting for first thing this morning came 15 minutes late, and there were some funky delays after that. So I had to hustle and run after my connecting bus, but I did catch it. After that, the day went pretty well.

No time

I remember hearing and reading that department stores used trickery to keep you in the store. Tinted the windows and glass doors to obscure how light or dark it was outside. No clocks, of course, so you wouldn't know what time it was, how long you'd been there. It was some time ago. Most of those stores are either out of business or nestled into malls, many of which are also in trouble. But I remember thinking it all sounded fiendishly clever.

That last one has spread all over now. The number of places where the time of day isn't showing has exploded. That's not because society has stopped thinking time is important. It's just that where certain kinds of knowledge were considered common property, now you're on your own.

Spooky rain

It rained all day, and still is, which in itself is fine. This particular rain wasn't fun to get caught out in, though. It was one of those high wind, heavy rain storms which―as I've mentioned previously―mean that you can't win for losing as far as umbrellas go. My umbrella survives, but only because I benched it even when it meant getting wet.

On the bright side, I just heard a wind gust a few minutes ago that sounds like the musical saw on this song.
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Felt bad

It recently came to my attention while watching Evil (which I like so far), that the Muppets are appearing in ads for some-or-another new toy from Facebook. In fact these ads are the only time for now anyone is going to see them on a regular basis. This does not make me happy. I doubt very much it would make Jim Henson happy. If he's in a good place now I imagine their trying to keep it from him. Or failing that, keep his mind off of it.

Coppers

One of the less visible of my little quirks is my reaction to wheat pennies. Those are the one-cent coins with two sheaves of wheat on the obverse, surrounding some art nouveau text. They were minted from 1909 to 1958, so from early Taft to late Ike.

I tend to hold onto them for as long as I can, not using them to even out change until every other penny is gone. Is this because I like to maintain a physical link to the past? Or is it an experiment to see how long I can keep them jingling in my pocket? Probably a bit of both.

Winter hams it up

I guess this is what you'd call a nor'easter? The storm started sometime Sunday afternoon and ended sometime this afternoon (meaning Tuesday.) Snow sometimes turning to rain, but definitely with the accent on snow. It's a little bit of a hassle in that it's harder to get around, and certainly was yesterday. Mainly because the streets and sidewalks get slippery in unexpected places. But the good thing about the accumulation being slow is that places weren't forced to close.

Fully

From Irving Sandler's Art of the Postmodern Era on Philip Guston:

But the new pictures were "self-portraits...I perceive myself behind the hood...In this new dream of violence I feel...as if I were living with the Klan. What do they do afterwards? Or before? Smoke, drink, sit around their rooms (light bulbs, furniture, wooden floors), patrol empty streets, dumb, melancholy, guilty, fearful, remorseful, reassuring one another? Why couldn't some be artists and paint one another?" The Klansmen pictures are funny, but they possess a strong element of self-loathing. Guston's father, a Russian immigrant ragpicker, had committed suicide by hanging when Guston was ten years old―it was the boy who found him― a traumatic experience, which is when he most likely identified with the lynchings perpetrated by the KKK.

Obviously Guston, a Ukrainian-Jewish-American painter born in Canada, would not have gotten the warmest of welcomes from the real Klan. And if his sentimentalized portrait of them above was at all sincere, any amount of close observation would have disabused him of it. But the childhood trauma Sandler alludes to paid off in a later trauma. Guston had been a confirmed and successful abstract artist up until the late 1960s. The sudden need he felt to put real objects and real (if cartoonishly exaggerated) people into his pictures was just wrong by the theories he heard and subscribed to. It was, in a way, a painful break, but also something he needed to do. This difficulty lends an urgency to his work, a compelling one.

Crystal clarity

So yesterday I had Thanksgiving dinner at a friend's house. A good time was had by all, I think. Good food, relaxed conversation.

A few different things played on the TV set during the times that people were paying attention to it. I saw the early parts of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. What's freaky is that it's one of them newfangled plasma TV's, and seeing an old movie in such high definition was a little disorienting. Like, were all these people trapped behind glass? Still, from what I saw I can attest that the movie holds up pretty well even before Gene Wilder joins the fun. Although of course he always helps.

Pre-Turkey Day

Thanksgiving week tends to be an effectively short one, maybe even down to two days. That is, a lot of us work or "work" up until Wednesday, but Wednesday is pretty chill, without even much pressure to look busy. It's nice.

Then there's people who work in supermarkets, in which case forget everything I just said.

A song from 2019

The song of the year? Who knows? It got some play on what's left of alternative radio. But it'll stick with me. I appreciate the way that while it was always going to end up as a storm of psychedelic guitars, it plays coy getting there.

Canvassing

There's a painter who does portraits at the Rochambeau public library. Today was the second time I saw her at work there. The first time I guess I thought it was just a one-time thing. Which it apparently isn't.

It seems like a good setting. She's getting subjects with unique looks, not necessarily models or the people she'd be painting for paid commissions. (Unless these are paid commissions, but I don't think so.) The library also has big windows in front that go almost from ceiling to floor, for that whole light thing.

Segregreatness

Paul Beatty's The Sellout is the first novel by a US author to win Britain's prestigious Man Booker Prize. I haven't read the competition, but I would be hard pressed to say it didn't deserve the honor.

The unnamed narrator was raised by a renegade social scientist who treated him as a guinea pig, which reflects more detachment than malice. When the father dies, the narrator's hometown in Los Angeles County is also disappeared from the map. The narrator has a brainstorm to bring it back. Namely he intends to segregate the town, going as far as to found an entirely Potemkin prestigious white school with the windows papered over by images he's found on the internet. In this he's also supported by his slave, Hominy Jenkins, the Last Living Little Rascal, and thus a man with a lot of juicy stories about Our Gang.

Giving a partial summary of the plot is both insufficient as a descriptor and necessary to give you an idea of what the book is like. Beatty is a very funny writer, and seems to have blessedly little filter.

Another book I've been reading, The Accidental Mind by David J. Mandel goes into how dreams were once seen as messages from the gods or otherwise from another world. In those days you could tell someone your dreams and they'd have a reason to pay attention. Now everyone just seems to get bored and irritated.

I bring that up because the story in The Sellout isn't "all just a dream" but it does seem to move on the energies of the subconscious. In a real way it's about the processing of grief, especially if you're an outsider to begin with. A lot of us can relate to that. This book, however, would not have been written by a white author. Not in anything recognizable as its current form, anyway.

Thinking.

So, when I put that header up I had, yes, thoughts. I figured one of them might make at least a short blog post. Then I got distracted, and after that I got sleepy, so it wound up being a pure placeholder. Now at least it's a placeholder with a little more detail. Ironies.

Let's see, what else? Today I was at the library using the computers there. At the one I was on Google was set to the Korean language, which was also weird.

Be back soon, and best wishes.

Upstairs

The top floor apartment in my building has had a lot of people move in and out of it while I've been here. It just got two new tenants at the beginning of this month. That's November, not September or October. A lot of past tenants have been students, which has in practice meant that they're around till sometime in May and then depart forever.

This time we have a young family. I'm pretty sure, anyway, that I've heard toddler feet running around.

Tonight when I was coming in from taking out the trash, I saw the lady of the house locking her door. She was facing away so I figured I'd say "hello" in a soft voice. Which came out as a creepy stage whisper, but she didn't seem startled. Didn't get a chance to say anything else to her, though.

These are the eggmen

I know not how the Swedish impressionist painter came to wear the hat of Presidential portraitist in the United States by painting William Howard Taft. As Zorn's self portrait on the right demonstrates, he was a man of a certain size and shape himself, and even had a walrus mustache. Maybe Taft's people figured he'd bring a sympathetic eye.

Zorn did flesh well in general. His copious nudes tended to feature young women who were the definition of "pleasingly plump." But that's not all he did. His art catches certain bends in light, shadow, and color, bringing a heightened sense of the moment.

Game. Changed.

There's a little trick I've picked up. Sometimes you wake up a little later than usual. Or more than a little. Can be all sorts of reasons for this. The important point is that you're pressed for time.

I've learned that you can compress shaving time. If you don't shave at all - and you're a man, that is - you look like a bum. But if you only shave below the chin, you look like you're thinking of growing a beard. And the best thing is you're not committed. You can shave you're face the next day and, if asked, say, "It just wasn't me."

Sardines

For public transit users, autumn brings a culture shock. Suddenly there are a lot more riders on any given bus than there were during the summer. Today was Veteran's Day, a holiday, so I expected the density to abate somewhat. It very much did not. The first bus I took this morning was almost ten minutes late and barely had room for me. That was extreme, but everything from that point was pretty full.

Gonna go out on a limb and say there were two reasons for this. One, while RIPTA was on a lighter holiday schedule - the same schedule that they run on Sundays - a lot of people didn't have the day off. Also the mini-winter of the past three days broke, so more people were venturing out whether they had to or not.

And why not?

Preview of coming distraction

According to multiple reports, we were supposed to get rain Friday. It never came, but we did get a big temperature drop. So it's a foretaste of what winter will be like, I guess. No ice yet, though. At some point today I did dump someone's coffee that they had left behind outside so I could throw out the cup. Didn't have time to stick around and watch it freeze, thogh.

Sharper image

From Joe Nickell's Secrets of the Sideshows, a genial, anecdotal book:

When throwing knives to outline a spread-eagled person on a rotating wheel, Christ* prefers a smaller, lighter knive (about ten and a half inches long and approximately nine ounces). A heavier knife, he says, will "sing out of there." Hitting the proper spot on a rotating wheel requires timing, so that the knife's trajectory intersects that of the moving spot. :And it's got to be vertical to you when it meets up," he says (Christ 2001). One bit of showmanship in this regard is that, for safety, the knives are aimed a bit farther away from the target person than it appears. While the wheel is moving, it is difficult for the audience to see how far away the blades are, and as the wheel slows to a stop, the person unobtrusively extends his or her arms to make it look as if the knives came closer than they actually did.

Of course the target person―more often than not―has to make it look good, and for that they need to keep a cool head and keep their wits about them while being spun 360 degrees a bunch of times. There's more to the job of "lovely assistant" than there at first seems to be.

* That's sideshow entrepeneur Chris Christ of Hall & Christ, not the Other Guy.

Checking out for the night

This is one of those blog posts where I tell you there's no real blog post because I'm on drowsy-making cold medicine. The good news is that, knock on wood, I'll be getting a good restful sleep tonight. The better news is that soon I'll be back, refreshed, inspired. Look out, world.

Yells at cloud

I'm more than a little introverted. Still seeing kids/young adults glide through the day with phone in hand and earbuds always in strikes me as not right somehow. Maybe I was raised differently. There's a difference between shyness and rudeness, I like to think. Also you never know when you might need to ask for something.

'Cause the lights don't work, yeah nothing works, they say you don't mind

Thursday night: in the late PM/early AM we get a high windstorm. I don't mean a little whistling through the trees. I mean you look out the window and expect to see Elvira Gulch on her bike threatening Toto. Oddly it's not cold, and the rain from earlier in the day has stopped.

None of this stops me from getting to sleep, and when I get up in the morning I'm not thinking about it too much, although later in the day I'll see a downed bus stop sign. When I get to Central Falls I try stopping for coffee at Dunkin' Donuts, but they're closed because there's no power. And when I go in to work, the lights are off. Also closed because there's no juice. Which is one way to get the day off. The blackout's hit most of the city, I find out.

So Santa Ana type winds are disruptive when they come to the Northeast. That's one thing I found out. Also it kind of seems like the utilities de-prioritize poorer cities.

Suspense

Something happened Monday, at least for a certain definition of "happen." Anyway, I forgot to mention it before. I was on the bus, out shopping. The guy sitting a couple of seats behind me was on his phone, obviously not talking to a live human. He asked something like "if you don't answer does that mean it's over?" So it wasn't going well for him.

And, well, I'm certainly not calling myself an expert on l'amour, but I kind of wanted to tell him, "Just break up with her. Maybe it will impress her. If not, at least you'll save yourself some time. Maybe enough to pick up a hobby."

The sun'll come up tomorrow

Just recently realized that my laptop has a free calendar app. So I can schedule myself things for me to do the next, and set a time. When it gets to be close to the time, I get nagging reminders from myself via the computer. Which doesn't actually mean I'm going to do something. It is a fun new toy, though.

Black and green

This is a very pretty song, from the start of Nick Mason's woodblock beat. I'm sure you could draw a few meanings from it. The scarecrow, brainless and sad for a while, but then fine. Is he a rebuttal of the Scarecrow created by L. Frank Baum and embodied by Ray Bolger, who wants above all to be smart? It's hard not to make that association, at least for me.

Roadwork

A huge stretch of street is now semi-exposed near where I live. The top pavement has been removed, anyway, revealing a ridged, sort of corduroy-like element. This has its annoyances. There's more dust in the air, and I'm sure it's not much fun to drive on. Still, it's kind of educational. It's the equivalent of walking past buildings where the wiring and plumbing is exposed.

Story time

I'm Not Tired! from Birgit Rathsmann on Vimeo.

This short film―three stories and a frame in under 8 minutes―is just a brilliant combination of elements. There's the imaginative animation bringing darkly humorous stories to life. The child puppet is very expressive. I also like the dad, although the leather chair he sits in initially made me think he was a psychiatrist.

Knotty problem

I was having an issue. The laces on my sneakers were coming undone on a daily basis. Really multiple times per day, sometimes more than once on the same walk. Then I realized there were a couple more eyelets at the top of the shoes, not as wee marked as the others. Thread the laces all the way up to there and you'd get smaller bows, which almost always stay tied.

Anyway, I usually avoid the issue by getting shows you don't tie, but I couldn't swing that this time.

Up high

The way people are sentimentalized and idealized after they're gone, this may apply to other things and places as well. One good example is the Twin Towers. Before 9/11 they were always considered an engineering marvel, but not a good looking building.

The WTC's mystique was enhanced by Philippe Petit's tightrope crossing in the upper stories. The ultimate "don't try this at home trick", Petit's feat gave the buildings a fanciful aspect.

Colum McCann's novel Let the Great World Spin isn't necessarily about the towers,, but it couldn't exist without them. A big book with multiple points of view, it's tied together by Petit's crossing, which takes the same spot in a lot of ways as the Bobby Thomson "shot heard round the world" of the '51 World Series did in DeLillo's Underworld.

The characters depicted include graffiti taggers and early computer hackers, as well as a doomed inner city monk. This last one also connects to what for me has been the most compelling chapter as of yet, an artist from an Edie Sedgwick-ish upper class rebel background.

Johnny on the spot

I find this clip from the dawn of the seventies an irresistible mix of good music and high camp. Under the latter you can sort the Man in Black's lace ruffled outfit, which makes him look like a horror movie antagonist. Either "vampire noble" or "undertaker who doesn't always wait until the bodies are dead."

Brenda Lee's performance is quite soulful. I'm pretty sure the song is not about Johnny Cash. I wonder if any of the audience thought it was.

Oak-ay

There are a fair number of oak trees around here. Some rather big ones as well. The tree can get to an amazing reach. Anyway, you see a lot of acorns. They don't germinate to become new trees, but you could change careers to keep them able to do that. Well, someone could.

What you see

The Thematic apperception test is an odd one all right. Unlike the Rorschach test, it asks subjects to interpret objective, identifiable images.Those images were taken from illustrated magazines of the 1930s. That means that as time has gone on they've become somewhat more archaic.

And ripped out of context, they're fairly eerie in the first place. The one above could be interpreted as vampirism, resurrection, haunting, or just the guy on the bed having a very vivid dream. Among other possibilities.

None of which is to say this test can't work. In fact, the open-ended nature of the test could allow patients to access a more creative side than usually comes out.

The wrong arm of the law

There's a good line from an okay episode of The X-Files where Mulder finds out the small town sheriff in the case of the week has been carrying on numerous affairs with the town's women and says, "I gotta hand it to you, sheriff. You really put the service in 'Protect and serve.'"

So does Sheriff Nick Corey of Jim Thompson's Pop. 1280. He seems to have a big appetite in all senses. The meal he describes at the start of the book is staggering. Still, he's an unlikely casanova and would seem to be an unlikely murderer as well. Nevertheless...

This is the second Thompson I've read and it's an interesting compare/contrast with The Killer Inside Me. That was a somewhat claustrophobic thriller. Certainly it had moments of black humor, but it was primarily a nihilistic drama. Pop. 1280, though, is an all-out comedy, albeit one where the lead clown kills a bunch of people. I've laughed out loud at several points, mostly at variations on how Corey allows people to think he's slow and wimpy while craftily leading them to their doom. Anyway, it's great fun.

Nobody cares about the railroads anymore

El tren santafesino from Cristian Llamosas on Vimeo.

Mi español isn't strong enough to tell you exactly what's being said in the narration here. The stop motion animation is gorgeous, though. Animated white paper or cardboard? Something like that. minimalism (of form, not function) in action.

Heat lines rising

Not long ago every place was running air conditioning and fans. That's pretty much ended. Go into an office or a restaurant and if anything the air will be heated. Same if you get into someone's car or a bus. Although in the latter case that might just be from the other people.

I note this because it's one of the signs of the changing seasons. A secondary sign, cultural rather than natural.

The heat hasn't started in my apartment yet, as far as I know. Not far off, though.

Catch the buzz

Above is the trautonium, an early synthesizer which uses no keyboard, but rather something that looks like a thick tape measure without numbers. Associated with the composers Paul Hindemith and Oskar Sala, it was invented in 1929 in Germany. Kind of an awkward time, given the near future. The Nazis were (among other things) kind of sticks in the mud when it came to new art, which an instrument that ranged from plaintive caterwauling to harsh electronic noise certainly counted as.

The Beach Boys famously used a Theremin for "Good Vibrations" and Radiohead went through a whole Ondes Martenot phase, but I'm not aware of any rock artist incorporating the trautonium into their sound. Seems like a missed opportunity.

Get ready for magic realist humor 1

A woman walks into a hair salon. She says, "Give me feathers." The stylist slits open a pillow and gives her a handful of eiderdown.

Later, at home, she drops the feathers on a table. They spontaneously form a Proto-Elamite alphabet.

Peter Panning

Quick look at Natsumi Hayashi. It's an interesting area she's working in now. Her photos of herself in the air do make her look like she's floating. Not flying exactly, but for a spell immune from gravity. It's a dreamlike feeling, a transformation of full-color reality into a dream state.
 

My foreign language weekend

Friday night I watched Ingmar Bergman's Silence, a 1963 film about two sisters staying in a fictional country that may be moving toward civil war. So might they. The older sister, played by Ingrid Thulin, is a sickly translator and intellectual. The younger, played by Gunnel Lindblom, has a young son and is easily bored. In closed spaces their issues boil over.

There's more sex and nudity than I was prepared for based on the other Bergman works I've seen. I was going to say that Lindblom has a nice set of mams, and maybe she did, but it turns out Bergman used a body double for her character. The 1963 theatrical trailer plays up this aspect, which maybe was all they could do. But saying this movie is all SEX SEX SEX is no more true to it than saying that Bergman on the whole is just a miserable Nordic depressive. What this is actually is a stark psychological drama in a weird landscape.

The next night I went out to see a Spanish language play presented on a black box stage in the Elmwood neighborhood. It's about a wealthy woman—or at least one who remembers being wealthy—learning to appreciate her maid (played by a man.)

It was a very different work in a different medium. Also the play was an all ages affair, wit lots of kids in the audience. Still, in some ways they were covering similar ground.

Self defense

I recently came across Paul Muldoon in a September issue of The New Yorker. The poem appearing there actually had end-rhymes, which I wasn't sure was even legal anymore. The poem below, "The Hedgehog", doesn't rhyme. It is very clever, though. The last stanza is both funny and a little troubling.
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The snail moves like a
Hovercraft, held up by a
Rubber cushion of itself,
Sharing its secret

With the hedgehog. The hedgehog
Shares its secret with no one.
We say, Hedgehog, come out
Of yourself and we will love you.

We mean no harm. We want
Only to listen to what
You have to say. We want
Your answers to our questions.

The hedgehog gives nothing
Away, keeping itself to itself.
We wonder what a hedgehog
Has to hide, why it so distrusts.

We forget the god
Under this crown of thorns.
We forget that never again
Will a god trust in the world.

Deep Thoths

Interesting tidbit, and not just for the bird. Ibises were central to Ancient Egyptian religion, crucially in the person of the god Thoth. There's even a species called the African sacred ibis. And while it would be reductive to put this all down to one purpose the bird serves, the fact that they do seem to have improved the health of the Egyptian people does add context.

Because it's true

A stereotype of the old yankee—and old regional person in general—is that they'll give you directions using landmarks that used to be there but now aren't. How often this actually happens I don't know, but I feel confident in saying that it has happened.

And really, it's to be expected. If you've been around for some amount of time, you've seen changes, and you may feel that the new world surrounding you might have to earn its way into the same plane as the old one that's passing away.

Boing!

Timpani a.k.a. kettle drums are widely associated with classical music. Occasionally you'll hear them in a pop context. Ringo plays them in the Beatles' "Every Little Thing." Most of us don't think of them as jazz drums. But here they are.

Timpani tuned to some pitches sound hella cartoony.

Resemblances

They say everyone has a twin.

This is one of those things you never know when it's going to happen. Sometimes you see someone and you think you know them. Maybe you've already started to say something, or you're about to. But it turns out it's just a semi-close resemblance, and now they think it's weird you're staring at them.

Or is that just me?

Even farther

It is rather big news―if news it be―that Gary Larson might be bringing back his baby, The Far Side, in some form or other. It's an influential comic, and a timeless one, but up until now it was buried in the semi-recent past. Larson had fulfilled his promise by the time he hung up his hat in 1995, but I'm curious to see if he's done any brainstorming since then. Or piled up massive gambling debts.

The sound of...

I remember in a place I used to live the walls (+ ceilings and floors) were pretty thin. One neighbor chewed me out for my clock radio playing in the morning, which she really shouldn't have been able to hear. Also once I sneezed late at night and someone angrily thumped on my ceiling/their floor.

It's different here. Which is good, because allergy season is back.

I'm the wind, baby

The Carileon, by Sebastien Leon // Performed by Loup Barrow and the wind from Studio Sebastien Leon on Vimeo.

A percussionist is rather spoiled for choice in terms of things to strike. Nice problem to have. In addition there are sounds being made by the wind. It's kind of soothing.

Thunderdome

One weird adjustment that you have to make this time of year is the change in what it's like to take the bus. During the summer you get used to buses running somewhat close to the schedule, at least for most of the day. Certain peak-hour runs are later than others, of course. And you get used to having a reasonable amount of space, too. Then when kids go back to school you get routes that are so jammed up two buses that are supposed to be twenty minutes apart show up at the same time. There's also more of a sardine can effect a lot of the time. This happens every year but I always sort of forget.

They've commissioned new buses this year, though. Blue upholstery. At this point they still have the new car smell.

States of matter

Today I saw a smoothie being made out of spears of pineapple and fresh raspberries, blended together with orange juice. And, not to yuck anyone's yum, it's a subjective preferences, but given my druthers, I'd just eat the pineapple and berries and wash them down with OJ. And it should be just as healthy, since it's all the same stuff. Like I don't think any health benefits accrue specifically to not chewing.

An air

I've heard―and I know you've heard―about how "Ring Around the Rosie" was about the Black Plague. Given that, whatever "fair" Johnny went off to was probably an unimaginable human abattoir. Pretty song though, and nice performance.

Bring your appetite

Reading nonfiction, I don't generally have an agenda in the ideological sense. I just wander to what interests me. And sometimes I take an interest in the mundane things of this world and how they work. Recently that's led me to Fast Food: Roadside Restaurants in the Automobile Age by John A. Jakle and Keith A Sculle. There's some good stuff about the trial and error, the unexpected successes and educational failures of the fast food industry.

There is, as you might expect, a whole chapter on Ray Kroc and his wildly successful franchising of McDonald's. But it's not victories all the way through for him. Biographical notes on Kroc have to deal with the Hula Burger. The Hula Burger was...well, you can see it.

The thing is, I know people who are violently against pineapple on pizza. It's not something I'd get every time, but it's in the open air. That seems to work a little better for it than being squeezed between two halves of a hamburger bun, slathered in American cheese.

I'd guess it only lasted as long as it did because marijuana was coming into wider use.

Late summer

It's Labor Day, which is the end of the summer as far as the school year is concerned. In astronomical terms we've got three more weeks left. We're not in the middle of a heatwave now. It's just hot enough that one can wear shorts at home at night and have the ceiling fan going, and it doesn't make you chilly. It's a nice spot in the year.

1893

I happened to be in Columbus Square yesterday. For other business. I've been there a few times, enough to know the area, but I had passed by the statue of Christopher Columbus all those times. Just stopped to take a better look at it yesterday. Because I didn't yet know about it coming from the Columbian Exhibition in Chicago―the same World's Fair at which the Ferris wheel was introduced―the "1893" date on the base looked weird to me. After all, it wasn't like Columbus was doing a hell of a lot to commemorate by that time.

Crowd work

I'd read other books by China Miéville before, but am only now tackling Perdido Street Station, the first of his Bas Lag cycle and one of his earliest novels. Also somewhat epic in scope.

It's an overwhelmingly detailed world. I don't read all that much other world fantasy, but Miéville has a notably fresh approach to it. In truth the scars in his writing show. It's easy to spot things that had to be workshopped, places where ideas were discarded and replaced on the advice of honest readers, but his thought processes are interesting enough that that isn't a deal breaker

Have to say that in no scientific sense do the Khepri make sense. The fact of an entire beetle body being naturally grafted onto the neck of a full human body sans human head is wacky enough. But a species where one sex is sentient and the other isn't just isn't feasible in terms of evolution and reproduction. It's a fantasy race, and a symbolic one. I suspect Miéville likes the way they'd be susceptible to alienation. Also that he found the concept in his notes while smoking hash to come down from E and he just couldn't let it go.

The Garuda are the most fascinating, though. Well, specifically Yagharek. He's the client of scientist hero Isaac. The Garuda are bird people. Yagharek has been punished with lack of flight, and his determination to undo that flightlessness drive much of the action. He's a combination of hamminess, sullenness, and enlightened self interest. It's a magnetic brew, and I look forward to each new appearance of his even while I sometimes picture him looking like this.

Worth the wait?

I was just thinking about making a joke. Then I realized I had already made it. So obviously I can't now, because I'd just be repeating myself. I'll wait a few months or years. Then it will be like opening a fine vintage.

The California Project

Volume One of The Greenwood Guide to American Popular Culture, which I recently picked up at the library, covers a number of topics. Judith A. Adams-Volpe writes the chapter on "Amusement Parks and Fairs." Not too surprisingly, she writes in some detail about Walt Disney, the man. The next chapter is on animation, so he pops up there as well. And with ol' Walt there is a lot of interesting detail.

Disney and his crew developed the basic design elements for his amusement park: a single entrance; a coherent, sequenced layout; wide, leisurely walkways; extensive landscaping; plenty of food and entertainment; attractions unique to Disney; efficient, high capacity operations. The projected Santa Ana Freeway would make the Anaheim property a half-hour drive from Los Angeles, yet out of the range of mass public transportation, thus not accessible to the poorer population and unsupervised adolescents. In a truly inspired move, Disney turned to the television networks, specifically, the then-fledgling American Broadcast Company, to provide financial backing to build the park. He promised to produce a weekly hour-long television program, Disneyland, in return for ABC's financial investment. Thus, from the beginning, this amusement park was essentially linked with the new cultural giant, television. Together they would establish the dominant outdoor entertainment venue of the twentieth century.

Interestingly, as Disney and ABC were putting Disneyland on the air, another Hollywood figure was venturing into TV. It's not controversial at this point to say that Alfred Hitchcock was kind of a creep in his personal life. But he was also pretty much a pure artist. While he was interested in making money, and successful in doing so, his goal was always to make more films. Alfred Hitchcock Presents was another way of accomplishing this. Tell shorter stories, get them out in front of the public, and use the revenue to make more movies.

Disney was a different kind of figure. Most of the creative work in Disney movies was delegated, of course. Having grown up deprived, he wanted to create a new and better childhood, while casting himself as the benevolent father figure. Having grown up poor, he wanted to be richer and more powerful than anyone could imagine, creating a company more vast and powerful than many nations. And in this second goal he not only succeeded, but is still succeeding to this day. For better or worse.

Turnover

Something I mulled over today.

If I initially wake up in the morning and I don't want to get up right away but know that I need to get moving pretty soon, it's better that I turn to face the left. On the other hand if I feel like I can sleep until I'm good and ready to rise I turn so I'm facing right. Now the way my room and my bed are oriented, left is north and right is south. What's the significance? I don't know, but that fact may have one.

Also left is the direction my clock radio is in, but this all happens even if it's not playing and isn't due to anytime soon.

B is

WFMU has a kid-oriented show, Double Dip Recess, and I just heard the above song on this week's archive for the show. I'd heard the song before, but had forgotten how close the Children's Television Workshop people stuck to the original, both musically and lyrically.

Years ago, I remember a nice guy I was working with saying that he had always thought that the song was about the Virgin Mary―a not unreasonable conclusion―but that he'd recently found out it was about marijuana. I said I was pretty sure it was neither, that McCartney was writing about his own mother, who'd died when he was a tween. I think I was right, but didn't really push the matter because I've learned that there are off-putting ways of being right.

For the record, "Got to Get You Into My Life" actually is about weed.

Balmy

Well, the mercury has certainly crept back up. But it's not as bad as it was a couple of weeks ago. I'm not 100% on what the difference is. It's still humid, but maybe not as humid. If you keep the air moving you can still sort of act normal. Good thing for sleeping, as compared to the other time.

FADE IN:

Last night I spent some time reading and critiquing a screenplay. It's not really a regular activity for me. But I am in an informal writer's workshop. Another member has an idea for an animated TV series. While I'm a little more comfortable talking about fiction, he'd shared something in scenario format before, so I had a little more idea of how to proceed.

As to what this script was about, I shouldn't say because it's not mine and it's still in the pipeline. It has potential, though.

Ripples

This I just had to share because of the looks of the grass. Moving it looks like a river, or at least like this meadow has been flooded. But no, it's just the grass. Under which are, I assume, rabbits, moles, and all those things. I imagine that finding a prime spot on one of those hills, sitting and listening to the wind, watching the grass flow like liquid...Yes this could be a nice way to spend an afternoon.

Riding in public

Another bus story.

On a bus today that was pulling into Kennedy Plaza, the main hub for the public transit system. A lady was yelling at the bus driver because other riders had their feet out in the aisle, so an elderly person like herself could trip and fall. And she made the bizarre claim that she owned part of RIPTA, which is actually true of everyone who pays taxes and/or fares.

The thing is, it's a genuine problem, the kind of thing I've complained about myself, although I'm too lazy to link to it right now. But there's only so much the driver can do, since for most of the trip he's face forward with his eyes on the road. And, well, her tone was more than a little on the rude side.

It's possible to make a good point in a counterproductive way.

Out of stock

It's around the time of year, and this particular year, for remembrances of Woodstock to be in the air. The fiftieth anniversary, and the cancellation of the proposed anniversary festival, got me thinking about 1999.

The less-than-great results of Woodstock '99 are a matter of public record, and provoked a lot of hand-wringing about the differences between the generations. (For the record, the target audiences and a lot of the troublemakers were from the latter half of Gen X. I'm from the first half.) But the problem was more specific than that. The organizers of the first Woodstock festival wanted to make a profit, but were also trying to make a point. As a result the event came with a Utopian spin that was a little hyped but also gave attendees something to aspire to.

The marketing for Woodstock '99, by comparison, was fairly cynical, only promising a hedonistic getaway. Some people when they hear "no rules" also understand an implied "except for the Golden Rule" whether for them it's of religious or secular origin. Other people think "especially the Golden Rule." Throw them together and the latter group will wind up exploiting the former. That's why you need to build in defenses.

Another book post? Yes.

Right now I'm reading Shirley Jackson's The Sundial. Re-reading it, actually, but it's just as fresh the second time around. It's a story about the Hallorans, a wealthy and screwed up family, holed up in their house with cousins and servants after the untimely death of one of their scions. During a party game, one of them sees a vision of the end of the world. It takes hold in the form of a sort of inversion of Rapture Christianity. This group looks forward to inheriting a cleansed world after the unworthy have been purged. Some of them dissent, though.

Jackson's best known novel is The Haunting of Hill House, which was adopted into a classic horror movie, a dodgy remake, and more recently a TV series. I could note that it wasn't just about a haunted house, but a small scientific study to learn more about what haunts it. This is a specialty of Jackson's: people staring into the abyss, trying to make sense of it, and the abyss saying "nope." And it hasn't gotten any less relevant.

Also a miniature work of genius is a dream sequence where one of the Hallorans dreams that she's the witch who built the house of gingerbread in the woods. She reacts with pure chagrin to the little brats who come along and start eating it.

Paranoia fuel

Outland from Mystery Flavor Collective on Vimeo.

That's a TV Tropes-ism of course, but it fits this mixture of claymation and live action, the impression I get from it. Despite the absurdity of the ending, or maybe enhanced by it.

Outside we're having a cleansing storm, flooding in the gutters. Wonder if that has anything to do with my reaction.

Under the sea

I just finished reading Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Felt like getting some grounding on the author who may be the first commercially successful science fiction writer. Except that description might be a little off. Verne was a popular novelist and an adventure writer. Science fiction as we know it wasn't really on the menu.

Aronnax is an interesting choice of narrator. He's not detached by any means. His reaction to the Nautilus, being forced to live on it, and what Nemo does is naive in places, and this is a deliberate effect, one he questions himself.

While I haven't seen it, apparently the Disney live action movie cast Kirk Douglas as the Canadian whaler Ned Land. That seems to be a way of changing the focus from Aronnax to Land. The book's Land is very brave, of course, but is only the hero of the story in his own mind.

Sirkian rhythms

Bear with me a minute. I was just listening to a jazz singer being interviewed on the radio. She said there was a "scat virus" going around among vocalists. She meant it as a bad thing, but it's safe to say it came out sounding worse.

Anyway, last night I watched Douglas Sirk's 1959 film Imitation of Life. Here's a thumbnail: Aspiring actress Lora Meredith (Lana Turner) almost loses her daughter Susan at the beach. In the course of finding her she meets photographer Steve (John Gavin, pre-Psycho) who for better or worse falls in love with her. She also meets Annie (Juanita Moore), attending the beach with daughter Sarah Jane, whom Lora thinks Annie is paid to take care of. The confusion stems from the fact that Annie is black, but Sarah Jane doesn't look like she is. As Sarah Jane grows into a teenager (Susan Kohner) she more and more resents her heritage, determined to pass as white even as it takes her down the road of becoming a (G-rated because of the times) stripper and implied prostitute. At the same time Lora gains greater and greater success as an actress. All well and good, but she can't spend as much time as she likes with her own daughter Susan (Sandra Dee) who develops a crush on Steve.

If you read all that you might be thinking that it's a load of sheer nonsense. And yes, there are aspects of it which are ridiculous, possibly regressive. But Sirk is no dummy. The two main storylines are awkward in the joining together because they're meant to be. Whenever Lora tries to intervene in the issues between Annie and her daughter it becomes clear that while her intentions are good, she has no knowledge here and speaks with no authority. And while Sarah Jane is awful and bratty, she asserts that her life would be better if she were white. Well, she's right. The point is brought home in an upsetting scene where she sneaks out to meet her boyfriend, played by a cast-against-type Troy Donahue. He's heard rumors, asks if her mother is a nigger (yes, he uses the word) and beats her up.

It should also be noted that like all the Sirk films I've seen, this one is gorgeous, brightly colored, imaginatively lit. David Lynch tends to copy Sirk in the parts of his movies and TV shows that are supposed to look civilized. In fact Audrey Horne from Twin Peaks has a lot of Sarah Jane Johnson in her, just without the tragic mulatto baggage.

The runaround

I can only imagine what kind of effect these guys had in the early seventies when they first came along. This performance has the air of a goof, kind of, but how many of us are capable of goofing on this level.

It also strikes me that they preceded KISS in having each member take on a different theatrical look and persona, like they were a kabuki troupe or commedia dell arte troupe. They seem more committed to it at this stage, as well.

Seating arrangements

Pet peeve: forward facing seats on buses are made so that two people can share them. Well, they can if the first person to sit there will let someone else sit with them. But a lot of the time I see that someone will grab the aisle seat and make sure no one else can sit by the window. When the bus gets full, this becomes a pretty heavy aggravation.

I thought it might just be an American problem, but I've heard people say that riders on the Paris Metro can be even worse.

The roar of the greasepaint

One book I have out is Bad Clowns, by Benjamin Radford. It's from a university press (U of New Mexico) but Radford isn't an academic. He's just a writer with an interest in, well, bad clowns. So it's a pretty accessible run-through of the archetype, from origins in commedia dell arte and Punch and Judy shows to more recent exemplars like the Joker and Krusty the Klown (who's not evil but is a cynical user.)

I know that when I first met a clown up close I freaked a little, and ran at least to what seemed like a safe distance. As with a lot of kids it was an immediate response of "no sir, people don't look like that." But did I spend my childhood in fear of clowns? No. Within a fairly short span of time I'd incorporated the idea of zany people with white makeup and big shoes into my understanding of the world. They were a mildly cool break from routine, if anything. But some people never made that transition. For them, "afraid of clowns" seems to be a core part of their identity, so they play it up.

A while ago I tried writing a short story. It was about a nice guy, curious and well-meaning, who was also a clown, always in circus getup. The thing is, he'd still meet people with a phobia about clowns, and he'd deliberately trigger them, on the principle that they'd have to get over their fears somehow. Anyway, there were a lot of balls to keep in the air and this story didn't quite come off. I might like to try again, though.

Different surfaces

I just saw Leave No Trace. It's directed by Debra Granik, who also did Winter's Bone. While the film got great reviews, it hasn't had the same kind of impact as its earlier counterpart in terms of box office, awards, etc. Understandable, because it feels a little more elusive, but still a shame.

It's about a man named Will and his teenage daughter, Tom. Will's a veteran. Given the contemporary time frame I guess Afghanistan. Will and Tom live in a public park in Portland, Oregon. When they absolutely have to they head into the city for supplies. They live low to the ground, evading notice, since it's illegal to live on public land. But you can only keep this up for so long, and eventually they're discovered and taken in.

What follows is a series of encounters with government employees who truly mean well, a stint where they live and Will works on a Christmas tree farm, and a further escape. What exactly Will wants, where he thinks he's going, isn't clear, perhaps even to him. Every hint of society presents itself to him as a cage, and he's driven by a need to escape. Tom loves him more than anything, but is this, the life of a homeless fugitive, really what she wants? The whole story revolves around her choice.

It's not often you see a movie that can present a strong drama while hardly raising its voice above a whisper. This one does. And the beautiful camera work brings out the beauty in simple places you're sure you've seen up close, but maybe never on screen.

4

With stresses accruing from daily life, and with so many dire events in the news, it's more important than ever to keep a sense of humor. Which is why I periodically test myself to make sure I can still tell the difference between blood, bile, black bile, and phlegm. For example:

Phlegm, definitely phlegm.

Eunt domus

I've read that John Cleese initially wanted to play the title role in Life of Brian but the other Pythons convinced him he'd be better in the ensemble roles, leaving the lead role to Graham Chapman again. This scene certainly seems to work better with his imposing presence as a centurion. Ultimately hilarious, too.

I am a little surprised to hear Chapman's voice go that high.

H2Oh yes indeed

One nice thing about a brutal heat wave—one, say, like we're experiencing now—is that it's easy to stay hydrated. Or rather it's easy to remember to stay hydrated. In cooler temps drinking water can easily be dismissed with a "why bother?" Now, though, it always feels like everything you've ever wanted. Especially with water turning from ice cold to coolish in just a few minutes outside of the fridge. So, it goes down fast.

The end of an era (again)

This happens now and then. For whatever reason, I get a fever blister. Specifically on my upper lip. Since I know none of the ointments will make it better without making it a lot worse first, I just plan to not irritate it. Which means I stop shaving the upper lip for a while. And actually don't shave my face at all - just neck - so that the mustache growing under embarrassing circumstances isn't too conspicuous.

But the beard is an irritant in itself. I always wind up shaving within a week, at the first opportunity. The beard doesn't stick around long enough to become a look. Hasn't since college.

Israeli gears

I recently finished Unholy Land by Lavie Tidhar. The idea behind it is a doozy.

Lior Tirosh is a Palestinian pulp fiction writer. Which is to say he lives in Palestina, a Jewish homeland carved out of a section of Africa east of Uganda after an expedition and vision by Nahum Wilbusch, a figure who in real life sabotaged this same idea in favor of settlement in the Middle East. Unassuming, he still lies at the center of political intrigue. a policeman named Bloom keeps surveillance on him. Bloom has more on his plate than the standard issue murder, terrorism, and espionage. There's also a figure named Nur. She comes from further afield, a world that didn't have a Palestina.

My taste in science fiction is shaped in large part by writers originally from the mid-20th century like Philip K. Dick and Michael Moorcock. Tidhar, who I previously only knew by reputation, fits into this company even if his name doesn't contain a slang term for "penis." That I know of. One thing about placing your Israel analogue in Africa is that it lets you put African wildlife in the background, and African natives closer to the front. Tidhar also uses the trick―initially confusing but you get used to it―of using different persons in narrating the viewpoints of each protagonist: third for Tirosh, first for Bloom, second for Nur. This is something I could see the Brian Aldiss of Report on Probability A doing.

Weird and ambitious all around.

Creature cousins

I'd heard a while before that these guys were the closest living relatives to elephants. It's fun to find out what they do have in common, since their similarity isn't really on the surface.

Rock hyraxes are especially adapted to an intense environment. As their name indicates, they spend much of their life on rocks. Hot rocks in mostly the African sun. This doesn't allow them a lot of hiding places, and they are very much a prey species, so they have to get wily.

Out there a minute

I had to go get a criminal background check today. That's where you hand over $5 to someone standing next to a printer and a few seconds later you get a printout saying whether you have a criminal background. And did I?

Anyway, I'd done this once before. That time I'd gone to the Attorney General's office on South Main St. in Providence. The website said that you'd have to go to another office in Cranston starting on July 23. Which, reading the fine print, turned out to be July 23 of last year, so it was off to Cranston for me.

Specifically it was to the Pastore Center, which is the size of a small town in itself, made up of government buildings which include the DMV, law enforcement centers, and actual prisons. Because I'd never gone to this particular outpost of the AG's office before I got off a little early and had to poke around a little, but it's not that hard to find.

I did spend some time wondering, though, why the move had been made at all. Like I said, it's a very basic process, not something that requires a lot of space. When glasses stores and sandwich shops move out of Providence it's because the rent got too high or they think they can do better business elsewhere. Neither of these factors account for a government office that still owns or leases its old space sending consumers elsewhere.

But while the Pastore Center can be more inconvenient for some, it's got a parking lot right there. Some of the customers I can see complaining that the Providence location doesn't have parking, and I guess that's who they listened to.

A new principle

Because things break down, it's good to have a manual override. You know, at least as an option.

A building I've spent time in recently has automatic faucets that run on sensors. You run your hand underneath and water comes out.

Except sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes the sink can't read that there's a pair of hands in it that need to be washed. And the crazy thing is, if one sink goes on the fritz like this, you can tell that every sink in the building is doing the same thing.

That's why I think engineers should make sure all these clever automated devices have ways they can still be used in the event of power or other failure. Call it the Mitch Hedberg Escalator Principle.

The not-final problem

An unusual sequence of events.

In 1893, Arthur Conan Doyle published "The Final Problem", a story in which his beloved consulting detective Sherlock Holmes confronted the criminal mastermind James Moriarty. It was this story that cemented Professor Moriarty, who has very few appearances in canon, as Holmes's archnemesis. It also, to all appearances, killed off Holmes.

The story "The Adventure of the Empty House" reintroduced Holmes, his reappearance narrated by a joyful and incredulous Dr. Watson. "Empty House" was published in 1903. Holmes's apparent death lasted a decade in real time. That's because it wasn't intended to be a fakeout. Doyle thought the Holmes stories were holding him back and fully intended "The Final Problem" to be just that.

I can understand Doyle not wanting to be pigeonholed, certainly. And it's also plausible that the Holmes canon would only be lesser in number if it weren't for the post-1903 stories. Still, it's hard not to see this as an artist not appreciating their own work.

Least likely

It's always interesting when Johnny Sack shows up on The Sopranos.

Tony is a lot of fun to spend time with, as a character. (If you actually knew him, maybe not.) But his appearance, behavior, and lifestyle are pretty consistent with what you'd expect a mob boss to be like. The interesting character turns are buried under that.

Johnny's if anything a bigger boss, since he's a power player in New York, still basically the center of the universe. But he's got none of that Italian-style extroversion. From what we can tell, he's monogamous, faithful to his wife. His only apparent vice is cigarettes, which for a man in that position is pretty lame.

Overall the impression he gives off is a harried office manager. Someone this off-model has to be based on a real gangster.

Works of fire

Yes, of course, there were fireworks tonight. (Actually since tomorrow is technically a weekday, maybe it's not obvious.) They took place downtown, so for the most part I looked down the hill to see what was going on. But some were from a different direction, looked to be from behind the house next to the one I live in. They weren't directly behind, but you know. Anyway, I momentarily wondered if they were part of the show or were someone running off fireworks in their yard. But I don't think they'd be both as big and as symmetrical if that were the case. So neighborhood fingers are safe.

Reader's advisory

The other day I cut my finger, somehow. It was rainy and windy and I wrestled a bit with my umbrella, so it probably had something to do with that, but I don't remember feeling the actual cut. Just looking down and noticing the blood at some point.

The rest of the day and the next day I wore a band-aid, because the bleeding hadn't stopped, or was ready to start again with just a little provocation. While I was changing the bandage I noticed a flap of pale skin. Ick. Keep that out of sight. But now the flap has settled down as the wound has healed.

Anyway, I found it interesting. Not so interesting that I'm looking for it to happen again, though.

Trouble in Texas

I'm having fun with Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me. It's narrated by a deputy in a small town in Texas, a guy who it quickly transpires goes way beyond garden variety police corruption. This edition has a blurb by Stanley Kubrick, with whom Thompson worked on The Killing and Paths of Glory.Also Stephen King, demonstrating good taste.

American Psycho. I haven't read it, because I find Bret Easton Ellis's present-tense narration monotonous. But I have seen the movie. And Lou Ford reads like an ancestor of Patrick Bateman. Smarter than the vast majority of people around him, not as smart as he seems to think he is, and perhaps on some level wanting to be caught.

Everything you always wanted to know about hex

The Love Witch is pretty easy to summarize. A woman with a dark past, a dark secret, moves to a new town. She uses magic to make men fall in love with her, which never ends well. It doesn't work out well this time either, but she keeps going. Bodies pile up.

The effect of the movie is a different story. It's a high intensity effort to recreate the movies of the past, technically and otherwise. Anna Biller shot on 35mm, which is little used now, and made many of the props by hand.

Then there's the acting. To put it bluntly, nearly everyone in the cast acts badly. But they do so in a way that suggests that they've studied the technique of people who couldn't act 40-50 years ago. Not just dialogue either. At one point a detective "punches" his partner, knocking him to the floor, but it's obvious he just sort of lightly poked the guy with his fist.

But respect Biller for making exactly the movie she wanted to. And know that there's someone in the world who loves old exploitation movies more than Quentin Tarantino does.

Juggling

I've thought this was brilliant since I heard it a few years ago, when a friend gave me his Nilsson compilation. It's like an uncontrolled burst from a slightly disturbed Beatles-obsessed mind. Although obviously it can't really be uncontrolled.

The Beatles thought it was genius too. Both Lennon and McCartney became big Nilsson fans. As far as I know only Lennon worked with him, although you could definitely see him and Paul collaborating.

& the living is easy

If you define "summer" as "that time of the year when wearing shorts feels like an imperative when you're home for the day" - and who doesn't? - then summer has arrived. I do, somehow, have  fairly good pair of shorts in my possession. It's a good time of year to go barefoot as well, assuming your floor isn't splintery.

Ain't love, um, grand

I saw Bus Stop last night. It was kind of an impulse borrow at the library.

It's based on a play by William Inge, who also wrote Picnic. It doesn't really look like it was adapted from the stage. Like with Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf you can tell, because they barely leave those handful of rooms in George and Martha's house. Bus Stop, by contrast, is a widescreen technicolor flick with cows, a bus hurtling down the highway, a float parade...AND MORE! So it's been opened up.

I kind of wonder what the effects of adaptation on the script were. In the movie a cowboy who's barely left the ranch falls in love with a saloon entertainer, but his ideas of love are...Well, it's stated that he's hardly met any women before, and sometimes he doesn't seem like he's encountered civilization either. So he basically stalks and kidnaps her, and she resists until late in the film she doesn't. It's definitely entertaining, but don't look for anyone to make a sweet romantic comedy out of this plot today.

The girl, Cheri, is played by Marilyn Monroe. She's an absolute charmer, and really nails the broad Southern accent. Another standout performer is Arthur O'Connell, whom I'm not terribly familiar with. He's Beau's uncle, or something like that, a kindly older figure who tries to keep him out of trouble. You can feel the effort that must take.

Here come the waterworks

I came home today and made lunch for myself, but found there was a problem. No water. Among other things that meant I couldn't wash the dishes, although there weren't many.

Went out and came back. Still nothing. Although talking to a neighbor indicated that it was just the hot water that wouldn't run. You can heat up cold water other ways, although one hopes this is a short-term solution. Also a pipe had burst, the source of our troubles.

One of the supers eventually came by. It turned out a contractor fixing the leak hadn't reconnected a valve right. The hot water was back on. With some noise and discoloration at first. It was a relief, but felt somewhat awkward. It was like walking in at the moment someone made a breakthrough in primal scream therapy.

Origins

I recently finished The Bronze Age in Europe written by Jean-Pierre Mohen and Christiane Eluère. So I think it might be translated from the French. It's a very short illustrated book.

What's interesting about the Bronze Age is that it marks a transition in what got saved and passed down, and how things were remembered. Previous to it were the stone ages, most recently the Neolithic. All we know of those times are what we can piece together from bones, artifacts, a few cave paintings.The Iron Age, which followed the Bronze, gives us a well-documented history. History is written by the winners, of course, but things like battles and succession dates are well preserved. While when studying the Neolithic we still don't even know anybody's name. So the Bronze Age is the transitional time when oral history started to become written history. And also myth, of course.

Interestingly enough religion changed around this time as well. Previously there had been more worship of female fertility figures. In the Bronze Age pantheons of gods, dominated by male deities, became the norm in the Western world. Possibly due to more specialized professions: not everyone was a farmer or hunter/gatherer anymore.

The night before Monday

Sunday night marks the end of the weekend, of course. A melancholy time for some. Not for me in my current state, though. I'm quite ready for the week proper to begin. To maybe be able to do something that takes effect.

The end of civilization

How much did the transition from black and white to color in television doom anthology shows? I have this theory that up until 1966 or so you could pass off the same room as, say, a ballroom in a very old Italian palazzo and a modern dining room without changing it much. After that shows were broadcast in color, so if people had a color set they could see the walls were the same.

That's only tangentially related to Panic in the Year Zero, a 1962 disaster thriller directed by and starring Ray Milland. The tangent is this: It's an AIP movie, which pretty much by definition means it had a very low budget. Milland uses stock footage for things like nuclear explosions and large scale traffic. But because it's all monochrome the seams don't show too much.

It's tight and efficient. Milland and Jean Hagen (Lina Lamont from Singin' in the Rain) lead a family of four going on a road trip. While they're driving a news alert on the radio tells them that their hometown of Los Angeles has been hit by a nuclear attack. And sure enough, there's a mushroom cloud on the horizon. What they have to survive, though, isn't radiation or mutants. It's just people, and the desperation of the moment.

Son Rick Baldwin, played by Frankie of Frankie and Annette fame, sometimes seems a little too eager to start killing in the "every man for himself" phase. Daughter Karen (Mary Mitchel) doesn't have that much to do here except...Well, there's an emphasis on rape in the movie that's somewhat realistic, somewhat exploitative, and brings some relief that this movie was made when the production codes were still in place.

Ann, the mother, is the conscience. As for Harry Baldwin, the father, Milland is to be congratulated here. Directing himself in the lead, he shows no vanity. Harry might have good motives, but he doesn't seem to be better than the average man. His ethics are compromised early on, even if he doesn't descend to all out savagery.

I liked this movie. It knows what it wants to be.

Off with their heads

Frances Larson's Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found is a cultural study of decapitation in all its forms: beheading as capital punishment, heads taken as trophies from enemy soldiers, the heads that are taken and frozen in cryogenic suspension. Fun stuff. Well, for me, anyway. There's an anecdote about the British artist Damien Hirst. When Hirst was a teen he broke into a morgue and, along the way, had his picture taken with a severed head. The print would be released in the early 1990's under the title With Dead Head.

Hirst was acclimatizing to the dead. He did it with a teenage bravado that continues to colour his work: "The people aren't there. There's just these objects, which look fuck all like real people. And everybody's putting their hands in each other's pockets and messing about, going wheeeeeeyy! with the head...it just isn't there. It just removes it further." Had Hirst objectified the dead so successfully that he no longer thought of them as people at all? Or were the disrespectful jokes an attempt to hide his own emotional fragility? He said that he was terrified the severed head would come back to life, as though confirming that it was not just an object or a plaything after all. 

As a work of art, With Dead Head can be interpreted as an image of conquest, but as a photograph it also documents a moment of childish swagger in what was, ostensibly, an honourable pursuit for a sixteen-year-old boy. Hirst was at the morgue to learn how to draw. If he went back there again and again to draw the dead, there must have been quieter moments of contemplation during his work too. Drawing dead bodies necessitates a complicated emotional journey.

The picture is weird, and it's no surprise that it might be a little off-putting. Hirst looks like what he was, a suburban British teenage boy. His normalcy, with a touch of what could be giddiness and/or snottiness, makes you think the head must be a prop made of wax or clay. But evidently it was not.

As is covered in the book, surgeons desensitize themselves to working with dead bodies, and they do it in a much more systematic way. This is our species, one of the ways we try to make sense of things.

Conversational English

jack and betty forever from Janine Sun on Vimeo.

This is too weird, and weird in such a specific way, for me not to love. Apparently these two were in a kind of Dick and Jane style of book for Japanese kids learning English? I guess there would be such a thing. Anyway, there's a dark turn, but that's part of the whole...you just have to see it.

Sunshine

The Florida Project is as close to just walking around a place as a movie―as distinguished from a VR program―can get. Is it someplace you'd want to go? Complex question. Florida is a place of natural beauty, awesome skies, verdant trees. There is also, to put it mildly, a lot of poverty and dysfunction in this film. I had to step back a few times, but ultimately the characters are as vivid as the land. Director Sean Baker has said that the ending (the only part with non-diegetic music) is an admission that you can only find a happy ending through the eyes of a child.

It's also the only movie I've seen with Willem Dafoe clearing egrets off of a lot and telling them dad jokes.

Again, thinking

I've talked about this before, sometime. I don't think you can generalize and say that most people are good or bad. People are complex, in a way that some of us never get used to.

You can, perhaps, appeal to the better part of others through accessing the better part of yourself. That's the idea, anyway, a good one. I'm sure there's more to it.

Side mind

Lateral thinking, by definition, uses creative reasoning to solve a problem or mystery. So really, while some answers may be righter than others, there might not be a single right answer. It's best to approach these problems in a spirit of curiosity.

The introduction to these exercises says that they tend to be morbid. Which is true. Some of them sounded so much like depressing and quotidian police blotter items I had trouble figuring out what the mystery was supposed to be. A handful I managed to figure out the suggested answer. Some I liked my solution better, although in a few cases I fell short of finding anything that worked. And on the second page I swear there's one where the solution is a Tom Waits song.

God never closes a door

I have new windows now. Well, I don't, my eyes are the same as they've always been. My apartment does. Assistant super put them in today. One nice thing is that it meant replacing the screen windows, so when it gets really warm I can keep windows open that I didn't before, without flying insects getting free reign of the joint.

Of course while we've already had some hot days this season, today wasn't among them and tonight certainly isn't. If I actually had all these windows open I'd be uncomfortably chilly. So far they seem quieter in the wind. Wonder how far that goes.

Undercovers

Despite Woodward's grand metaphysical proclamations about future states of mind, he and his generation of medical men never gave up on the power of modern medicine to cure the most unusual of mental and physical maladies. Sleepwalkers did not constitute a large portion of the patients who passed through his asylum, or through other asylums run by the same principles of the moral treatment, but correcting problematic sleep remained a major concern of early psychiatry. Asylums were, as the great sociologist Erving Goffman put it, "total institutions"―enclosed spaces like ships and prisons (and, one might add, slave plantations)―in which a group of individuals led their lives cut off from society, and which had to be formally administered 24/7. Such spaces, wrote Goffman, break down a general rule of modern society: that individuals "sleep, play, and work in different places." There were individual bedrooms in insane asylums―Goffman's chief example of a total institution―but sleep was hardly private there. Bedroom doors typically had a window facing the corridor, and patients knew they were subject to being watched by the medical staff at all hours. As such, asylums like the one in which Jane Rider found herself served to enforce society's rules, including the one demanding that sleep must be done in an orderly way, straight through the night, in private: those who could not manage this fundamental expectation of civilization had to have their sleep tamed.

The above passage is from Benjamin Reiss's Wild Nights: How Taming Sleep Created Our Restless World. Reiss is an English professor rather than a doctor or a social scientist, but don't let that dissuade you. He really pursues the history of sleep in the modern world, from the increased structuring of sleep during the Industrial Revolution―and let's face it, everything got more regimented then―to the endemic loss of sleep in the age of social media. He's also lived and worked on a kibbutz, where young people become accustomed to sleeping with much less privacy.

There's an extensive chapter on Henry David Thoreau. Let me tell you, Thoreau seems to have been quite the scold, and even I might have had trouble getting along with him, despite certain similarities in personality and value. He was also a fascinating and perceptive thinker.

Sylvan/urban

Blackstone Boulevard is a long street, located in Providence, not far from the city line where you'd cross into Pawtucket. The narrow strip in the middle is a kind of park. Well, definitely a park at the end that abuts Hope Street, where you'll see a statue and a playground. The rest is grass, trees, dirt, with the occasional bench and a few shelters.

This is not what people usually think of as getting back to nature. Walking it you see traffic on either side of you. Houses as well. But in terms of getting you out of yourself, it does the job.

Shakey gave a party that lasted all night

Was just at the home of a friend of mine. He and his wife threw a Memorial Day cookout. Mostly we were indoors. Anyway they were there, their kids, the eldest son's girlfriend and her mother: the list of guest stars goes on. It was nice.

Along with good food there were also some fine spirits served. When I got home I drank a fair amount of water so I don't wake up dehydrated tomorrow. One learns.

Hung out with the dogs, too, one of which really liked to be scratched. As far as I know this does not carry a risk of hangover.