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.