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.