Take it to the limit one more time

Been watching the sixties Outer Limits lately. The old episodes are on Dailymotion, which is handy despite the randomly placed ads.

An inevitable point of comparison is The Twilight Zone. Their runs overlap, if only just. The Twilight Zone ran its last season the same year as The Outer Limits ran its first. Episodes of Rod Serling's show play like allegories that can take place any time, any place, and don't depend on each other. Outer Limits seems more to take place in a single universe, even though the episodes don't connect. (They sometimes did in the so-so nineties remake.) One's not a better approach than the other, they're just noticeably different. The intros are different too, less personal for the later show.

"The Man with the Power" is quite good. Donald Pleasence plays a man with a frightening degree of telekinetic power, who still manages to get bullied by nearly everyone. Strangely enough it's the first time I'd really noticed his piercing blue eyes, even though it's of course shot in black and white.

Beste hizkuntza bat (A different language)

I sometimes run Google Translate to see what various words and phrases are in Basque. It may be the closest I ever come to learning the language, unless I devote a lot of time. Really I'm just taking time to appreciate the difference. Different grammar, different sounds, mostly different words. Although there are cognates, especially with Romance languages. For instance "green" translates to "berdea", which sounds similar to Spanish "verde", which is itself related to French "vert."

It's sometimes theorized as the language―or at least a language―of the Cro-Magnons. This would be basically impossible to prove or disprove, since that period would have left no writing. But it does seem to be very old, predating the spread of Indo-European languages into Western Europe. Possibly even going back to the last ice age.

Bad

Well, it's not a secret that the government―and to be fair, many governments―dropped the ball on COVID-19. Nor that responsibility for it has been thrown back at us, the masses.

What's not so much acknowledged is that in tone the measures we're being told to take are more punitive than prophylactic. I mean, yes, it's good practice to wash your hands frequently, cough into your elbow rather than your hand, maybe keep a bottle of hand sanitizer handy. But if you do all that you find out that...it makes no difference. You still can't go anywhere, do anything, talk to anybody. Proximity within six feet is considered a borderline violent offense, and we're being conditioned to see ourselves and our neighbors as filthy disease vectors more than people.

So yes, I do worry about the effects that it's having.

Ready Freddie

Queen - Crazy Little Thing Called Love (Saturday Night Live, 1982) from Queen Poland on Vimeo.

I'll probably do a post addressing the elephant in the room in a couple of days. Said elephant has a  lot to unpack, though.

In the meantime there's this fine performance. Something I've never realized before is just how tall and skinny Brian May is. Like, I bet his body weight is 80% limb.

Expressing the inexpressible

There's never really a bad time to read A. E. Housman, but tonight felt like an especially good one.

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White in the moon the long road lies,

     The moon stands blank above;

White in the moon the long road lies

     That leads me from my love.

Still hangs the hedge without a gust,

    Still, still the shadows stay:

My feet upon the moonlit dust

     Pursue the ceaseless way.

The world is round, so travelers tell,

     And straight through the track,

Trudge on, trudge on, 'twill all be well,

     The way will guide one back.

But ere the circle homeward hies

    Far, far must it remove:

White in the mood the long road lies

   That leads me from my love.

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That's XXXVI (No. 36) from A Shropshire Lad. The circumstances under which he wrote it I don't know so well. It was kind of a long time ago, although that's a relative statement. But the lonesome, errant feeling stands like a marble monument.

By the way, some poems—man, to be honest—can be found on the internet and simply copy/pasted. But I prefer to type them fresh if they're going to be the center of a blog post. I get more of a feel that way. So it does kind of help that this particular poem is relatively short.

One side of the mutual admiration society

The work of Henri Matisse—seen above—doesn't seem to have all that much in common with Picasso. It's more concerned with the overall composition of the canvas, for one thing. But Matisse was one of the first artists to see what Picasso was doing. Picasso for his part remained loyal to Matisse after they became professional rivals. They were not only long-standing friends, but the perfect audience.

In the age of the whodunit

There's a neat little blog post looking at the reasons why murder mysteries got super popular about a quarter of the way into the twentieth century. The blogger, Brad,  points out that literature that sort of reduces murder and guilt to the level of puzzle has a certain appeal to people insecure about survival. And yes, there are parallels.

As to the books he recommends, a huge portion of them I haven't read as of yet. Some of them I can vouch for. Others I'm curious about.

Herrmanning

On the jazz radio station I'm listening to via the World Wide Web they just did a thumbnail biography of Bernard Herrmann. While he's associated in the public mind with Hitchcock, his debut movie score was for Orson Welles's Citizen Kane, which is a pretty auspicious start. This was his last movie, which was released several months after his death. Very definitely jazzy, and a defining element of the film. The nostalgic yet menacing melody is effectively a costar.

... ... ...

OK, so. If there's a dangerous new virus out there, you have to deal with it. If your containment plan is going to disrupt the economy and people's lives in general, you need a plan to get everything restarted. I will be keeping a watchful eye out for both.

It's the little things

The most important moments in life happen when almost no one is looking, go unrecorded. This may seem hard to believe in these times, between social media and big data surveillance. Nonetheless, I maintain that it is true. Cameras are always on, but they don't know what to look for.

In the shadows

Ruth Blake 'Baba Yaga' from chloe purcell on Vimeo.

I know nothing about Ruth Blake, the musical artist represented by this clip. It's a pretty catchy song. The animator has put together stop motion and silhouettes, two favorite things of mine, and credibly claims to be inspired by the German animator Lottie Reininger. Must note that Baba Yaga, a witch who lives in a house with chicken legs, is one of the most interesting figures in Eastern European folklore.

On the water

Jack London was a very successful and prolific writer during his lifetime. Some of his books are remembered better than others. His enduring classic is Call of the Wild. You know, the one whose most recent movie adaptation tanked because they replaced Buck with CGI and even in this digitally oriented world everyone knows what a dog looks like.

The Mutiny of the Elsinore is not so well remembered, even though it's been filmed three times, the most recent being a British adaptation from 1937. This is a shame, because it's a fascinating book. It's London taking the genre of high seas adventure and essentially deconstructing it.

Which is to say there's not much in the way of threat or thrills from the outside world, from the sea itself. The crew are misfits, many of them mean and unpleasable, and they start tearing themselves apart at the first opportunity. London doesn't say that you have to be a damaged person to voluntarily become a sailor, but he seems to imply it.

The narrator is a novelist and bookworm looking for a break from humanity, likely an author self-portrait. And he falls in love with the one woman on the Elsinore, the captain's daughter. There's that much convention. But while he at one point raves about his Viking heritage to impress her, he has little effect on what goes on around him.

An oceangoing "hell is other people" is probably not to everyone's taste. And the whole genre certainly doesn't need to be that. But London's artistic gamble pays off well overall.

Honk if you...

Saw this on TV recently. Look, nothing is going to stop me from missing Talking Heads. That being said, I'm glad Byrne is still keeping it fresh in terms of ways to present his music.

Other enjoyable things. In the mornings I take a bus to Pawtucket before taking a connecting bus to Central Falls. The Pawtucket bus stop is on the Blackstone River, which some mornings draws birds. The birds include seagulls. Once in a while you see geese as well.  Yes, Canada geese walking on the grass, just chilling. I don't get too close. You don't want to piss them off, if what I've heard is correct. But you can hang out in their vicinity, and they're beautiful birds.

Perspective

I've read someone saying that fish look at us like we're just big, weird fish. And that in a way they're right. Of course seeing the way someone else does is hard enough, much less members of a whole different species. Still, there's something to that. We have much of the same equipment, it's just that evolution has made us use it differently.

Thinking about something

Let me congratulate myself on the most boring header ever.

There's a story I'm kicking around. Not fiction, or at least I'm pretty sure it's not. It has to do with the days of the week. Don't know when, wear, or if this will see the light of day. But my brain's getting intermittently excited about it.