Never work with children or animals

Jonathan Lethem started strong. Has he continued strong? Definitely in some cases, maybe not in others. Well, that's most of us.

There are some books I'm looking forward to getting into in the coming weeks, but Gun, with Occasional Music was sitting on my shelf so I figured I'd revisit it. It's a mixture of hardboiled detective writing with science fiction of both the gosh-gee and dystopian variety. So in some ways following in the footsteps of Philip K. Dick, although the two authors are quite distinct.

I won't detail the case that lead character Conrad Metcalf works on in this book, because that would take all night and there'd be no point. But elements of the setting include "babyheads" who age into cynicism while keeping their infant bodies, evolved talking animals of numerous stripes, the legal abolition of the printed word, and deep freezing those who fall afoul of the law. "The law." Actually the last is connected to the eeriest aspect of this future, "karma", an artificial goodwill that can dip dangerously low if you step out of line in any amorphous way. Eerie because it resembles the idea of "social credit" that's taken hold in China and perhaps elsewhere.

Anyway, the book hangs together well, so I feel pretty good about liking it the first time.

NC

 

The above quote is indeed genuinely from Keats, which is not always the case with popular quotes. The idea of  negative capability is one that I first came across in college. It's stuck with me since. Fact and reason have their place, of course, and we do well to remember that. But in living a creative life, "uncertainties, mysteries, doubts" are the stuff of life. Best to learn to live with them, even appreciate them.

Dulcet tones

 

I was just reading about the celesta, a keyboard instrument that strikes plates rather than strings, as in the case of a piano. Okay, just go with it. I think I've heard something of the instrument before but felt like sampling it again. This is a piece by Debussy, a very affecting composer. I think it's more often played on the piano. But this woman's playing definitely works for me.

Jockeying

Tonight being Christmas Eve I spent the night watching a randomly selected movie that had nothing to do with Christmas. It's a 1952 sports/gambling movie called Boots Malone. William Holden plays a manager at a racetrack who takes a teenage runaway under his wing and trains him to be a jockey. Despite having Holden and some other interesting actors (Ed Begley, Harry Morgan) it didn't really work for me. But there are a couple of interesting aspects.

For one, give director William Dieterle credit. The jockeys in the movie look pretty much the way jockeys in real life do. Which means that Holden spends a good amount of time talking to guys who barely come up to his chest.

The kid is played by Johnny Stewart, who was only an actor for a few years. He is, not to put too fine a point on it, irritating. But the way he's irritating is revealing. At this point teenagers could be depicted as large children whose emotional tumult was pretty innocuous from an adult point of view. But it was 1952. That conceit wouldn't last much longer.

Vicious circle

There's a series of short ads that play before videos on YouTube. They're targeted to Rhode Island, and I assume there are equivalents for other states. They always end with an admonition to get vaccinated, get your kids vaccinated, mask up, and social distance. These steps are supposed to be meaningful in the aggregate, although it's self-evident that even proponents find them individually useless.

In related news we have an indoor mask mandate again. Which is especially fun because it's doubly removed from any kind of public input. Governor McKee gave the order yesterday without going through the legislature, and he was only elected to be Lieutenant Governor. Why should New York have all the fun? I guess.

Don't blow your top

I bought a new winter hat today. It's gotten to that part of the year where if your hat doesn't cover your ears, you'll be in for a fair amount of discomfort at minimum. The place where I got it sells stuff that the factories may have overproduced, so their prices are a lot lower than you'd expect. This hat is from a relative luxury brand, but only cost a few bucks. It also had a label on it, which I cut off when I got home. Just looked wrong.

What the Dickens?

I recently opted to fill in a hole in my reading history by taking on Charles Dickens's Great Expectations. He is one of the great voices of English-language literature, and I've enjoyed his books more than not. 

The library system has plenty of copies in various editions. And the "various" editions part is what tripped me up. The book I ordered turns out to be the "Great Illustrated Classics" version, greatly abridged and simplified in order to be read by grade schoolers.

But, well, when life gives you lemons (because you mistakenly asked for lemons) make lemonade. I'll read this version and go back for the real thing later on. The differences might be educational in themselves.

Have yourself a merry little class war

From an interview with Newsweek opinion editor Batya Ungar-Sargon:

This was made worse by the arrival of Donald Trump. Trump was what liberals imagine a working-class person would be like if they came into money. They would obviously get a golden toilet and buy a model wife. Trump rejected all of their liberal mores. He was a perfect aesthetic encapsulation of white, liberal-elite angst about what the working classes are imagined to want.

I have interviewed hundreds and hundreds of Trump voters. All of them, apart from one, said to me that Trump should stop tweeting and making racist comments, and should stop being so undignified. They wanted him to focus on governing. The idea that working-class people were in it for all that gross commentary was just wrong – they were not. But the media, of course, could not get enough of it. So liberals totally missed what Trump was about and what made him successful, which was the hunger for economic populism among the working classes.

From the latest post by White Hot Harlots:

Stressing difference is no way to build a coalition. It is, by definition, the opposite of what you need to do to build a coalition. There is no means of understanding race as deterministic and inalterable that does not result in privileging certain groups over others. That’s the obvious, undeniable fallacy of so-called “intersectionality.” All this can possibly accomplish–and what it’s accomplishing right now, right before our eyes in an objective and measurable manner–is the splintering of the Democratic base, supposed allies pitted against one another as they strive to reach the top of the pyramid of conceptual victimhood. If anyone else gets help, they’re evil. Everything should go to me. Decency is zero sum. I cannot be happy unless everyone else is miserable. Your success is my failure. The problem is not structural. The problem is that the other exists. 

Ungar-Sargon and the pseudonymous WHH approach the same truth from slightly different angles. Namely, that American liberalism has gradually become its own antithesis. The political team that you expect to side with the poor and working classes has become disgusted by them and now sees them as the enemy. But there's no way to come out and say, "We need to put the poors back in their place," without sounding like a Bourbon. The race angle, ugly as it is, is also the most plausible cover story. Spend enough time vilifying white trash and their white trash ways and you can convince your cohorts that these chuds deserve whatever they get. You can also distract from the fact that you're also screwing over lower class people of color, who--to take one example--don't actually want their neighborhoods de-policed. 

Is this a recipe for electoral success? I'm not sure anyone cares. The upper echelons of the Democratic Party appear to have given up on governing and put everything into fundraising. The refusal to pivot from COVID makes much more sense from this vantage point. Almost two years in, telling your subjects that of course triple-vaxxed five-year-olds should continue to mask as they attend Zoom kindergarten will leave most of them cold. But a few will believe it, and you can tap them pretty hard for funds.

Hat's all, folks

Another non-YouTube video incoming, with this being the link. It's from (pretty sure from the name) a Polish animator. It's a study in contrasts. The magician figure is, if not realistic, at least pretty well detailed. Other characters are stylized to the point of all-out abstraction, and sometimes past it.

Look for a brief but unmistakable Devo reference.

gjhthelhahttwljtbjebtewuytbvnt

There have been nights in the past when I've written in this blog after taking the kind of cold medicine that knocks you out, and been well on the way to unconsciousness. And the next day I'd look at what I'd posted, and found it to be gibberish, whatever I'd had in my mind while writing it. That's not what I'm doing now.

Or is it?

Suppose what you were reading right now were just a random jumble of words. Suppose you had interpreted it so intuitively that you couldn't even tell that it was basically nonsense.

Wouldn't that be WEIRD?

♞

Instinctively, we looked to the Democratic Party, the only home we and our parents and their parents before them had ever known or seriously considered. But what we saw there—and in the newspapers we used to read, and in the schools whose admission letters once made us so proud—was terrifying. However we tried to explain what was happening on “the left,” it was hard to convince ourselves that it was right, or that it was something we still truly believed in.

Those are the words of Liel Leibovitz, writing in Tablet. Dramatic but astute. 

I have my own arc, which has some things in common. First off, I've noticed over the past several years that new rules have been drawn up regarding who is allowed to say what. In some circles no one seems to talk about free speech unless it's dismissively. So my changing perspectives on that were gradual and mostly secret.

Then there are lockdowns, which are a total catastrophe. A catastrophe in which no one was prepared to address any tradeoffs, or even admit there were any. So that led to a quicker change for me.

Of course collapses and severe changes could make all this talk of ideology and allegiance moot. No one really knows and cares who was on the left and right in Fifth Century Rome, just before the sacking.

Tales from the ground

We live in an era where a cloak of obscurity is being drawn over science. Science is something that a few experts and institutions know about, and that the rest of us must accept when we're told about it.

We don't all have access to big numbers. But the essence of science is observation. Sometimes enhanced with experimentation, depending on the topic. The essential methods are in fact available to us all. 

Adrienne Mayor's 2005 book Fossil Legends of the First Americans gains a special relevance in this time. Mayor is a scholar of natural history folklore, a fascinating field that until just now I didn't even know existed. But the native tribes of the Americas have been finding and collecting fossils for centuries, well before the bulk of European settlement. And the stories that they came up with by way of explanation have in many cases been based on good, solid observation, leading to insights on the kinds of animals that lived in the Americas in the deep past. In general they haven't really gotten credit for this, as Mayor reports.

Yet much more historical and natural knowledge has been retained and for a longer time span than is generally appreciated. To find these nuggets of genuine knowledge, the Iroquois scholar Barbra Mann suggests that one should look for the "consistent elements" in the layered matrix of storytelling over the ages. Many scholars have questioned whether oral traditions are "real history." Anthropologist Robert Lowie, for example, who studied several Native American cultures in the 1930s, famously declared in 1915 that "oral traditions [have no] historical value whatsoever under any conditions whatsoever." But Lowie's grip is loosening: today many mythologists and historians would agree with Roger Echo-Hawk, a Pawnee historian, that oral histories should be treated as "respectable siblings of written documents," as valuable sources for reconstructing "ancient American history." The most recent analyses of the mythmaking process, drawing on modern linguistics with datable historical, astronomical, or geological events, are revealing that accurate geomythology can extend back over millennia.

The Americas have a rich natural history in terms of both dinosaurs and other large reptiles and--in more recent epochs--mammalian megafauna. As far as we know now, that doesn't much extend to paleoanthropology. There are no known humans or hominids before anatomically modern humans to have lived in the Americans. Of course if this state of knowledge changes, it will be a tremendous shock and will require large amounts of scrutiny. To understand it we'll need to look at all potential sources of knowledge.

D cell punk?

This past week I've been reading an anthology of Dieselpunk stories. Dieselpunk is analogous to Steampunk. Where on constructs a retro-futuristic view onto the Victorian Era, the other focuses a little later, mostly between WWI and WWII. This era had a very active science fiction field to begin with, so there might be some weird echoes. 

Anyway, some of the stories were better than others. I'd have to note that even in the very good ones, the science tends toward the soft. But the way I worded that previous sentence might seem to imply that that bothers me, which it doesn't.

зима

For all intents and purposes it's winter now. In fact winter seems to have started before November ended. There are still some days when I can get away with my spring/fall jacket, but they're few and far between.

Just a little earlier tonight I heard the wind howling outside. It's an evocative sound, one that I can appreciate it. Of course it's better hearing it from indoors.

In circles

Sigh. In a way I regret even exposing you to this. But apparently there's still a kerfuffle to be had over whether Susan Sarandon helped to elect Trump.

I mean, first of all, she probably didn't have that much of an effect, despite her high visibility. And also, it's 2021, so who cares? If Trump being President was the root of our problems then one would expect the quality of life to improve once he no longer was. Did I miss that part?

Anyway, just goes to show you that there's a big difference between talk and productive talk.

EDIT: Decided to sweeten this post with my belated hat-tip to Stephen Sondheim.

Made it, ma

I haven't seen Peter Jackson's documentary series on the Beatles' Get Back sessions, but do find some interesting analysis and question in this review. The big question that Snowdon tackles is why they broke up when they did. If they didn't actually hate each other, if the sessions weren't all misery and boredom, then why not stay together a while more?

I suspect it was the prospect of being in the shadow of their own legend that prompted them. The idea of hearing the sentence, "They're great, but they're not quite the Beatles" applied to themselves. Since their reputation and impact in the 60s got quite a bit beyond rock stardom, settling down to mere rock stardom would have diminished them. So best to go out on top, while they were relatively still on top.

Consider the Rolling Stones. In the Beatles' absence they could finally occupy the top slot in the seventies. So they had a hot few years, then came upon a period of diminishing returns. Their last essential album is probably Exile on Main Street from 1972. Their last interesting album is probably Undercover, from ten years later than that. 

So a defensible decision on the Fab Four's part.

Plus ça change

Karen Lucic's 1991 book Charles Sheeler and the Cult of the Machine contains some fascinating material on both sides of the title: the precisionist artist and the preoccupations of his time. 

His time was the early decades of the twentieth century, and the standardization of industrial production was having an effect in many areas of society. On Henry Ford Lucic has this to say:

Ford also embraced the emerging mechanistic attitude towards humanity; he even conceived of the body as consisting of interchangeable parts. "There is every reason to believe that we should be able to renew our human bodies in the same manner as we renew a defect in a boiler," he stated. He freely admitted that the principles of mass production limited personal freedom in the labour force and even claimed that most workers welcomed such a situation. "The average worker, I am sorry to say, wants a job in which he does not have to put forth much physical exertion - above all, he wants a job in which he does not have to think."

Is it a surprise that a titan of industry such as Ford held views that in a later era could be characterized as transhumanist? At least in part they could be. And maybe this shouldn't be a surprise. Technologists frequently seem to yearn for a human/machine marriage. In any case, he seems like he would be able to get rich now as well.

The work of Sheeler holds a lot of interest as well. The fact that he very rarely put human figures in is paintings makes him an ambivalent witness to his times.

Pants all folks! (Sorry, they can't all be good)

One typical guy thing that I tend to go is to wear and ignore clothes until they fall apart. Recently that happened with two pairs of jeans, which started to grow holes everywhere. Even in the warm months this would make me find kind of stupid, Ergo, time to buy new ones. 

One of the new pairs has narrow legs, somewhat elasticized. I think these are what are called "skinny jeans," and they're being sold at Burlington Coat Factory for about $15. So whether or not I bear any responsibility for killing that trend, it seems pretty dead.

The Harrington Files

The industrious British journalist Mary Harrington has two stories up today/yesterday. One of them hits a little more than the other.

In Unherd she examines reasons for very split reactions to the Rittenhouse verdict. There's something to be said--in general--about the conflict between Rousseauian and Hobbesian views on law enforcement. So begin the calls to abolish the police and replace them with social workers.

But Harrington misses or avoids the topic of race, which is really the elephant in the room. I don't know if I would say that racial politics have gotten worse--as compared to what? But they have gotten weirder. And high profile criminal cases tend to draw that weirdness in sharp relief, especially when the media subject whites to the full "those people" treatment. These kinds of takes are meant to divide, and they especially tickle white elites who get someone they can feel superior to without guilt.

Better is her story for The Critic regarding the trend of the upper professional echelons more and more being made up of women. For one thing, while I may have heard/read the term "elite overproduction" before, this article defines it in a very illuminating way. Also intriguing is her comparison of the differing ways that men and women compete. Of course these are broad tendencies not universal to each, but society does seem to be conforming more to one of these than it used to. Which means new challenges, still in the process of revealing themselves.

Something in common

On my bus route today I had Agatha Christie's The Pale Horse out, since I was in the home stretch of reading it. A woman noticed. She noticed a couple of times, since we ran into each other a couple of times She was tickled at seeing someone reading Christie. We had a nice chat about books and she recommended this used bookstore. Nice convo overall. Oh, she's married and there were no overtones or undertones or any of that, if you're wondering.

Woes

The header for this article on Saturday Night Live is a bit melodramatic, but the piece itself isn't bad. It gets some stuff wrong and some stuff right.

It's true that they're doing a lot of pandering to a small subset of terminally online liberals. Much of this can be put down to airing on NBC at a time when all the major broadcasters are committed to propping up the limp corpse of the Biden Administration. My caveat there is that politics as such has never been the show's strong suit. There have been some good impressions (i.e. Will Ferrell's George W. Bush) and the occasional winner of a political sketch, almost by accident. But the more interesting material has always lain in the weird concept stuff, the skits that run at 12:51 when only a few diehards in the audience are still fully awake. That the political humor is sucking more ass than usual is a problem, but not a fatal one.

A more serious problem is bloat. For most of the past decade Lorne Michaels had settled on 16 cast members as a maximum for what the 90 minute format could comfortably hold, and that sort of worked. But for the last couple of years the cast has been ballooning. Last season it had 20 performers. This season there are 21, everyone from last year except for two people, and with three more added. And this has happened because longtime veterans who should have moved on long ago get money thrown at them so they'll stay indefinitely. The result is that Season 47 frequently looks like DVD extras of Season 40.

Blog post that will inevitably be read at my treason trial

Man I just hope there's not another Civil War while I'm around. Because I'd be expected to fight for what will be considered the Union side. Okay, at this point it's more like I'd be expected to root for the Union side. And I just can't see myself working up any enthusiasm for that. Like the land and the climate. Fond of a lot of the people. The regime and its ethos, not so much. 

Anyway, by all means give peace a chance.

Wonder what Mick thought

 

Saw this a little while ago. It wowed me for reasons I have to explain a little.

Devo were one of the pivotal music video bands. They were doing film clips to go along with their songs about from when they started recording. And it was that generation of bands that convinced Viacom that a whole cable channel dedicated to music videos might be a viable enterprise.

The thing about videos is that it's easy to cheat. The band isn't really playing, the singer isn't really singing, and the whole thing can be edited for effect. 

Their signature robotic moves would at first blush appear to be a product of this process. But the above clip is from live TV. They really are doing the whole stiff limb thing, which I can't imagine is very comfortable while playing guitar, say. Yet playing guitar etc. they are.

It's also worth remembering that in 1978 there was no "geek chic" as we know it, so this was just coming out of left field.

Bugged

Richard Marsh's The Beetle was a wildly popular novel in its day, at the time overshadowing even Bram Stoker's Dracula, which is generically similar and was published the same year (1897). Somewhere in the early parts of the twentieth century it fell off the map, which means that it's ripe for rediscovery. An obscure not-so-little gem, at this point.

The title character is a sinister and androgynous figure from Egypt, who may or may not be able to turn into a large actual beetle but who definitely has scary mesmeric powers. He has set himself against Paul Lessingham, an orator and politician who has somehow offended the Cult of Isis. These two may be the key figures, but the four sections are narrated by four other figures. First up there's Robert Holt, a clerk reduced to vagrancy who has the additional misfortune of being controlled and used by the Beetle. Then there's Sydney Atherton, an inventor who hopes to take the Alfred Nobel career track of becoming a great humanitarian after developing a deadly weapon. He's Lessingham's rival for the affection of Marjorie Lindon, who follows him as narrator. Her love is so loud and sycophantic that it seems like it would become very tiresome to the object. And finally we have Augustus Champnell, Confidential Agent, a lesser Holmesian figure good for a sympathetic ear and not-so-reassuring reassurance. 

It's a solid Victorian entertainment, one that might have influenced Sax Rohmer and maybe even Edward Gorey. The overlapping narrators means there's also an interesting chance to see the same events from different perspectives.

Trying times

Premise #1: We have trials for a reason. The system is deliberative because deliberation is needed. When a person faces a judge and/or jury, matters of fact and law are in contention. Some standout cases might actually be easy, but more often they look easy to someone not involved in the process.

Premise #2: Politicized trials are bad. The "good trouble" rabblerousing, the quid pro quo of "convict or we riot"...That's all an industry, and a rent-seeking industry at that. We can all see that, right?

Truth to tell I only started paying attention to the case of Kyle Rittenhouse recently. What charges--if any--I'd find him guilty of aren't something I'm firm on. And that's okay. Only the jurors need to decide this. And--this here is an important point--they need to decide it in the course of the proceedings, not come in with a preconceived conclusion. But the way many in the media have been pushing for a particular endpoint and frequently distorting facts in the process strikes me as yet another failure of common humanity.

Wash/rinse/dry

I did some laundry today. Afterwards I walked up the hill to a bus stop and waited a few minutes before the bus picked me up. I could have just crossed the street to catch the bus, but then I'd be walking up the hill at the end. Overall I probably do more walking the way I do it, which is all fine and good. The view seems a little pleasanter this way.

I also started a new book today, which I read before, during, and a little after the laundry trip. It's a bit unusual. May get to blogging about it later on.

Mynah opus

 

I've been curious about what Mynah birds are like. There are a few birds that can mimic human speech, including some ravens. This Mynah is very distinct from parrots in terms of voice, appearance, and movement. Does have the skills, though. And seems to be a pretty good pet, for someone who's into it.

Hello Dali, you look swell, Dali

 

Salvador Dali is probably the artist who first comes to mind for most when they hear the word "surrealist." There's some irony to that. Andre Breton, the leader of the first Surrealist group, expelled him early on. And Dali himself considered himself more of a Classical artist. But his eccentricities have something to say about it. He couldn't help but be surreal regardless of what he called himself.

In the latter part of his career, from the 1950s onward, he spent an increasing amount of time exploring the medium of watercolor. It gave his work a lighter and looser feel.

Would it not be easier in that case for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?

I have heard some Biden skeptics compare him to Jimmy Carter while predicting failure on his behalf. The comparison doesn't really hold up, though. Carter was an outsider in Washington. He and Congress had clear differences. You could argue which side was more right/less wrong, but there were definitely sides.

The last thing Joe Biden is would be an outsider. He was elected to the Senate when the Vietnam War was still raging and stayed there until Obama swept him into the Vice Presidency. Nor is there much of a schism. The overwhelming majority of Democrats in Congress appear to be all in on what his administration--whoever is running that show--proposes. So is the political establishment in general and most of the media.

Which may not be a good thing. Tuesday's results hint at the large number of Americans who don't love the agenda behind "Build Back Better" (or alternately "Why Did You Make Me Hit You?") Some in the party may be catching on that they've bet the rent on a pair of threes. James Carville, while no deep thinker, does seem to see that something's amiss. They don't seem in a hurry to do anything about it, though.

The hills are alive...

Providence is a quite hilly city, of course. In large part it's a bunch of little mounds surrounding a river. While the steep factor can be a pain in the ass when you're carrying something heavy, it's not without its upsides. Does give you a fairly good workout, which is something of a turnabout from the previous sentence. Another nice thing is that it affords a variety of views within a fairly small area.

Up there

Interesting if brief article here on studies into echolocation in bats. Specifically the way certain sounds may be optimized for open or wooded environments. 

Bats are the only mammals with true flight, of course. The fossil record is spotty and we don't know all the steps that led to them being such. The question of why they can fly and no other animals can is as much philosophical as scientific. The way that they use echolocation seems to suggest that the mammalian approach to flight is quite different from the avian one.

Fulfilling

Today I learned that you can still walk into a drug store and buy cold medication--including the kind that puts you to sleep--and the workers won't freak out. Well, not this time out anyway. Kind of a relief.

(Edited to de-gibberish my second paragraph.)

In honor of it being Halloween weekend I also watched a horror movie. Picked a kind of strange example, which I'm still pondering. If we speak soon you'll be hearing about it.

Doesn't repeat but it rhymes

 Novelist Ann Bauer has published a piece that I think I really can call a must-read. It's both quite personal and historically informative. Takeaways:

1. Bruno Bettelheim, who I was a bit familiar with but not all the details, should have stuck with literary criticism. His attempts to heal children's souls almost certainly did more harm than good, especially to their families.

2. There are and have been more theories on what causes autism than there are stars in the sky. A shocking number have been used to punish parents and bring their families under outside control.

3. The manipulation, bullying, and gaslighting that Bauer experienced as the mother of an autistic child did seem to prepare her for life in the COVID era. Would I wish these experiences on anyone? Hell no. But she knows how to recognize patterns.

Cinderblock gothic

Ray Bradbury's "All Summer in a Day" is somewhat bittersweet. It's about kids huddled on Venus who only get to play outside one day per year, and the kind of behavior this ultimately provokes in them. Bradbury wrote it when Venus was thought to be gloomy and probably uninhabited, but before we found out that it was completely inimical to life. (Named after the goddess of love. Scores of poets are laughing in the great beyond.)

The short film above is billed as an adaptation. Literally it is no such thing. How can it be? There's no cast, and two minutes isn't long enough to tell the tale. Still, it does take advantage of the fact that even the most sterile and featureless environments can evoke a mood. Consciousness abhors a vacuum.

Moseying

 

That's Mose Allison on piano, of course. The album has a subdued Abstract Expressionist cover. Very fifties artifact, of a sort. It's unusual in that he only sings on a couple of tracks. But it works.

On the back cover of the CD he's quoted as saying that tenor saxophonist Lester Young "was more of an influence than any piano player." Kind of a show-offy statement, but he could afford to do that.

Unhappy in its own way

I've been quite taken with what I've read so far of Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer series. Archer is named after Sam Spade's dead partner but probably has more in common with Philip Marlowe. He's more of a subtle operator than you expect from a hardboiled detective, but he's also quite honest.

The one I'm reading now, The Chill, seems very much like a high point to me. It takes place in a Southern California college town. Archer is approached by a man desperate to find his bride, who's run out on him. As you might expect, it opens out into a murder case, or two, or three.

Won't go into the plot, really. It just has to be read. But Macdonald builds an almost Medieval world of clans and coteries. There are "good" families and "bad" families, but members of the former can be trapped as well as the latter. And where all sorts of safety nets fail, Archer has to act on behalf of a suspect who is out there on her own.

Ninety-something in the shade

My latest gig they have me taking my temperature every morning. Now of course this is a digital thermometer, which means you don't have to stick it in your mouth or...anywhere. Just pump this little lever while it's pointed at you and you're all set.

Strange thing is that it's shaped a little like a purse gun, so taking your temperature is like shooting yourself in the head. And then you get to walk away from the experience. Eerie.

Severe hay fever doesn't raise your temperature, evidently.

Home away from home

I'm currently reading The Great Good Place by Ray Oldenburg, published in 1989. Oldenburg's subject is the third place, a place distinct from the home (the first place) and the workplace (the second place) where people can gather socially on a somewhat equal footing and an informal setting. Oldenburg sees this kind of place as a necessity for civil society and democracy, and I'd be hard-pressed to deny it. Here's an excerpt:

Over many centuries, communities had refined and made highly effective those means of controlling local influences, but means of controlling the newer external ones were almost nonexistent. For example, an enormous amount of red tape might be thrown in the way of a pub owner wanting to stay open later than usual on Coronation Day. Meanwhile, a national newspaper could put a falsified, deliberately slanted and misleading story in the hands of millions and few would ever know. "The newer institutions," wrote the investigators, "are simply out for profits, and they have a pretty free hand."

The situation is familiar. In the United States, municipal officials can intimidate any tavern owner, close any park, declare establishments undesirable and put them off limits, and clean up their towns as election time approaches. Whether "for real" or "for show," local control over local influences can be effective. But the same officials and agencies who come down hard on local influences stand impotent in the face of mass media. Programming objectionable to millions of parents continues to be shown on television, while experts dryly and endlessly debate the effect--those experts, too, are remote from the life of the community.

Oldenburg is undoubtedly and old fuddy-duddy. In the very next paragraph he laments the effect that foul-mouthed comedians like George Carlin, Eddie Murphy and...Buddy Hackett are having on the nation's youth. But he does have a good sense of who holds the cards and who is allowed to do what. And if the whole idea of community and third places has been under assault for the past year-and-a-half plus, it's not something that Oldenburg would have been completely shocked over.

People say...

The Monkees were hugely popular in their day but also had a certain stigma against them because they were a prefab group and it wasn't a secret. For one thing they had auditioned at a Hollywood studio--other auditionees including Paul Williams, John Denver, Stephen Stills(!), and Van Dyke Parks(!!). And much of the music actually came from faceless session men. 

Their initial revival in popularity in the 1980s simplified their appeal. Perhaps for Gen X the idea of a prefabricated rock group wasn't so wrong. Although the New Monkees crashed and burned after a few months, so also perhaps there are limits.

Anyway, I like the above song. Partly because it provides a spotlight for Peter Tork, the most creatively frustrated member of the band, having been an actual gigging musician and a friend of Stills.

Short age

Monday I went to Aldi's. Mostly a routine grocery shopping trip. I did spend several minutes trying to find some kind of breaded fish cutlets, but alas my search was in vain. A woman was grabbing all the packages of ciabatta bread rolls, although she was kind enough to leave me one. Looked like panic buying, although buying more than you need of a highly perishable good is never good.

The next day I went to CVS. At the checkout the manager was grousing about Halloween products. Outside of some of the candy they have none. It was never delivered.

Little and not-so-little absences from store shelves have gotten a lot more common over the past few months. There are a number of reasons for it. How much the federal government is responsible is up for debate. Most of the media is unwilling to really interrogate the Biden administration on it, or anything else. If that's supposed to be a favor I suspect it's going to backfire eventually.

Krypto-nightlife

News from the DC Universe. Superman likes boys now. 

To catch you and myself up, the old Kal-El/Clark Kent Superman is in retirement for now. The Superman referred to above is his adult son. Yeah, it's been a while.

If I were still reading comics, this wouldn't make me stop, but it's not going to make me start again either. Diversity among the character roster makes sense from both a business and an artistic perspective, yes. But the Big Two have ridden that train pretty much as far as it will go. Both have had LGBT characters long before this. There comes a time to think less about who you're representing and more about how you're relating to your audience.

Also, judging from the art on display here and elsewhere the art has gotten really Uncanny Valley. How can two men kiss when they don't have mouths?

Abiding

Something just came back to me. It's about the filming of The Big Lebowski. Before any given scene, Jeff Bridges would ask the Coen Brothers whether his character had just smoked a joint. If they said yes he would rub his eyes until they were red.

What made me think of this? Just one of those associations that pop into your head when your allergies are mildly acting up. A hay fever flashback.

In-hand

I'm currently writing a story about a puppeteer. It took me a while to decide that she should be the main character. Anyway, I'm checking out puppet show videos by way of research.

The character has a background in doing more sophisticated puppetry than seen above. I do have to say that the voice work is very engaging.

note to self

As I think I've noted before, my library likes three day weekends, so that if Monday is a holiday they're apt to close for Saturday as well. Saturday is the day I'm most likely to go, but what're ya gonna do.

I had gotten pretty good about remembering this quirk, but what with the recent scheduling craziness in everything I'd lost the knack. There's another three day weekend coming in a few days. Since my need to use the place is a little more urgent than the standard "have to wait two days to pick up my book" thing, I wrote a note on my calendar to make sure I don't forget. This post might help me remember too.

Life's little ironies

It was raining when I took out the trash last night and when I went to bed. It was still raining when I had to get up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and when I somehow dragged my ass out of bed for real in the morning. It hasn't quite stopped raining yet. 

They're working on the plumbing, though, so none of us in this building have running water right now. Without, yet not within.

Do appreciate the weather system's protestant work ethic, though.

Degenerates

Just saw The Gambler tonight. James Caan in a very different role from Sonny Corleone. Well, self-destructive in a different way. Won't go into detail on the plot, as if you're reading this there's a good chance you've already seen it. But I was impressed. Lauren Hutton, for one, was a lot more naturalistic than I would have expected.

Will say that if you're a pimp and you get beaten half to death by an English professor, you may want to look into a different career.

In transit

One thing I have to do tomorrow is pick up a RIPTA "Wave" card. RIPTA, the public transit agency that covers most of Rhode Island, used to sell monthly passes. Now those are being replaced by a credit/gift card kind of deal, that you can add more money to online.

Will this turn out to be more convenient for the users? Maybe. That's certainly the line they're pushing.

While you could get the passes at the big supermarkets, they also used to be sold at the RIPTA center in downtown Providence. I used to like the lady who sold them to me. That building was shut down in March 2020, and while they've recently reopened the doors, the public can't do anything in there but use the bathroom. And now that they're not selling the passes anymore, it looks like they've eliminated some job. So I hope that lady was close to retirement already and that she's doing okay.

As vast as space and as timeless as infinity

This morning, sitting in a conference room in a building I had never been before. I was waiting for a couple of women who were going to orient me on my assignment. My attention flitted from thing to thing, but I couldn't help notice the wall clock. Functioning normally at first, but then the hands stopped moving. For an extended period the minute hand just stayed frozen after the 12. But at some point it started up again, and when I looked again it didn't even seem to be running behind.

Makes me wonder offhand how often things like this happen.

Don't bank on it

Robert Wise, the man who would later helm West Side Story and The Haunting, directed Odds Against Tomorrow, a heist movie based on a novel by William P. McGivern. Gorgeous and exciting, watching it feels something like being in love. And as with being in love, you know it's going to end badly. (With notably rare exceptions, of course.)

Dave Burke (Ed Begley, not Jr.) is an ex-cop, dirty, although he says he was just the one left holding the bag. He's a New Yorker, and he's been staking out a bank in a small town upstate, one that looks to him like easy pickings. He thinks he knows just the two guys to help him. 

Johnny Ingram (Harry Belafonte) dresses well, lives high, and is catnip to the ladies. One or two men seem to like what they see two. One extended scene shows him singing and playing vibes at a fun looking nightclub, although it's not clear whether performing there is a job or a hobby. His main problem is that he likes to play the horses and is bad at it. So on top of child support he owes money to people who could hurt him, his ex, his daughter, you get the idea.

Earl Slater (Robert Ryan) is trouble. He's haunted by the war and he's killed at least one man since then. He hasn't been able to get a job lately, leaving him dependent on his waitress girlfriend (Shelley Winters). Inconveniently, for a man who'll be expected to work with a fellow robber played by Harry Belafonte, he is also a massive racist. This is worth unpacking, though. He's pretty much an asshole to everyone, as shown by a scene where he fights and hurts a young soldier (future MASH-ie Wayne Rogers) demonstrating judo moves in a bar. It's just that as a Southerner he seems to feel obligated to add insult to injury with black people.

So obviously this is going to go great.

Odds Against Tomorrow was released in 1959, later than most classic film noir. The city scenes show the dreams of the jet age future already starting to fail. The more sylvan setting of the final act looks beautiful and bleak. Haunting overall.

The movie marches to its own drummer in other ways as well. Gloria Grahame, who plays Slater's neighbor, is almost as much of a vamp here as she was in real life. (Look up details of her divorce from Nicholas Ray sometime.) In most films in this genre she would be a siren calling him to his doom. Well, he's going nowhere good, but she's got nothing to do with that. All she can do, really, is get a taste while he's still here.

So yes, much better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

Life and limb

Yesterday I was down at the park near the Providence/Pawtucket border. Day was breezy but we weren't getting big winds. When I'd been there for a little bit I heard a huge crack. Imagine my surprise when I look up and see a giant severed branch laying on the ground.

If I'm right about the tree that it came from, the tree still had other strong branches and a lot of green leaves. So maybe this one limb had been damaged in an earlier storm or other event and had to be sacrificed. That's big. 

I did move the branch a little out of the footpath.

Absolutely eerie

The growing insularity of elites means, among other things, that political ideologies lose touch with the concerns of ordinary citizens. Since political debate is restricted, most of the time, to the "talking classes," as they have been aptly characterized, it becomes increasingly ingrown and formulaic. Ideas circulate and recirculate in the form of buzzwords and conditioned reflex. The old dispute between left and right has exhausted its capacity to clarify issues and to provide a reliable map of reality. In some quarters the very idea of reality has come into question, perhaps because the talking classes inhabit an artificial world in which simulations of reality replace the thing itself. 

Both left- and right-wing ideologies, in any case, are now so rigid that new ideas make little impression on their adherents. The faithful, having sealed themselves off from arguments and events that might call their own convictions into question, no longer attempt to engage their adversaries in debate. Their reading consists for the most part of works written from a point of view identical with their own. Instead of engaging unfamiliar arguments, they are content to classify them as either orthodox or heretical. The exposure of ideological deviation, on both sides, absorbs energy that might better be invested in self-criticism, the waning capacity for which is the surest sign of a waning intellectual tradition. 

The previous two paragraphs are from Christopher Lasch's The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy. The book was published in 1995, but the words had to have been written in 1993 or 1994, since he died in February of the latter year. This is stunning. Everything he saw then, it seems, has come into even sharper focus since. The biggest change is probably that the chattering classes are no longer satisfied to live in an artificial world themselves, but actively denigrate the lower orders who fail or refuse to join them. 

One long-term change that Lasch details is the replacement of an aristocratic elite with a meritocratic one. Of course no one--at least almost no one--likes having an aristocracy around, so meritocrats who've earned their place sound like an improvement. One problem with this is that realistically not everyone can rise to the top, so hard limits are still drawn around the classes. Another is that meritocratic elites fully believe that their own superior skills and efforts are responsible for their high placement in life. That belief doesn't encourage the sense of noblesse oblige that sometimes accompanied the old aristocrats. It may, in fact, encourage them to exclude themselves from rules they make for others.

In unrelated news, San Francisco's mayor really enjoyed that Tony! Toni! Toné! show.

boom

Fireworks went off on this street tonight. I could see them from right where I'm sitting now. In someone's backyard, I guess? Anyway, there was lots of noise and sparkles. Of course we're talking kind of late on a Sunday night. In September, after the kids are back in school. So I guess somebody had a little cache left that they hadn't been able to use up in the summer, so they chose to do so tonight. Hey, I can respect that.

Pest notes

I

Walking home today I saw something brownish greyish lying on the sidewalk. Obviously a mouse, dead and probably quite young. A little jarring but I didn't think that much more of it. Until I was about a block from my house and saw another mouse. Also dead, a little bigger.

Which made me start to think. Was it the same cat? And if so, was the cat working in some kind of pattern?

II

Tonight I had a housefly buzzing around my apartment. Not really a big deal, until it started crawling on my laptop. Swatted it away, but it returned a few minutes later. Annoying. Be more like the spider that will eventually eat you. Work under my radar. So this second time I caught it with an empty yogurt tin and an envelope and did a catch/release out to the hallway. Why not outside? Because hindsight is 20/20.

Let's all drink to the death of a clown

"A joke should catch someone by surprise--it should never pander."

That's a quote from the now late Norm MacDonald. Seems like wise words for someone wanting to make people laugh.

One thing that I've been thinking about lately is that while Johnny Carson almost certainly voted for Jimmy Carter when he was running for reelection in 1980, he didn't break a sweat trying to boost him. And for the host of The Tonight Show, that was the right choice. Similarly his protégé David Letterman stayed detached from politics, and probably had a better relationship with his audience because of it. You could look down on this as cowardice or lack of commitment, of course. But look at now. Kimmell, Colbert, mostly everyone on The Daily Show: they're taking a stand, but they've all taken the same stand. Activism is the new conformity. So MacDonald looks better for not chasing after votes.

I actually wasn't sold on him when he was doing the news on Saturday Night Live. Partly because the news was already all OJ all the time and I didn't need my comedy to follow suit. You know, the Simpson case, where the prosecution tried to out-grandstand the defense--with predictable results. But it might have been too hot a spotlight too. As it turns out he was funnier on a lower key. Meaning he was Canadian after all.

Warning, the following clip is not safe for work. If you're not canceled already you will be just for listening.

The man who went big rather than going home

 

Reading an autobiography by James Rosenquist has gotten me thinking about Pop Art, which officially started in Britain with Richard Hamilton (who later taught Bryan Ferry) among others, but really took off in the US. Rosenquist himself is an interesting example, using billboard scale to create enigmatic, surreal effects.

Claes Oldenburg, born in Rosenquist's ancestral land of Sweden, was also a big artist. His soft sculptures put common objects at giant scale in the public realm. That made him one of the most accessible Pop artists, and really among postmodern artists in general. Kids could get this, even if it wasn't made for them.

This video is a pretty good slideshow of his work. Strangely the narrator either wasn't familiar with ice bags or thought his audience wouldn't recognize them.

Sticking point

Okay, so let's assume. Let's assume that COVID is one of the most serious problems facing America right now, if not the most serious. Let's assume that the only way out is to get vaccines into the arms of, well, just about everyone. 

So the Motherfucking President of the United Goddamn States of America goes on TV and mutters darkly about how "patience is wearing thin." He promises to make vaccination a condition of employment in every area where he has the authority, and in some where he almost certainly does not. 

For those not sold on vaccines do the threats and the strongarming make them seem like a better option or a worse one? It seems like an aggressive hard sell for something that's supposed to be painless, good for you, good for the nation, doesn't it?

Biden hasn't convinced anyone. And there's a strong possibility that that isn't even the point. That he's only making noise on this because it's one of the few areas where he can look effective, regardless of the reality. Overall the media has been game to go along with it. 

Ah well, our tax dollars at work.

Chums

I'm currently reading The Devil Is Dead by R. A. Lafferty. Really rereading it. In fact I'm pretty sure I own a copy but I got this one from the library because I'm not sure exactly where I left it. 

Won't bother recapping the exact plot. But it's a novel of the sea, and a tall tale. It's been said that James Joyce was working on a maritime novel when he died. Lafferty may have been thinking of that. Like Joyce, he's writing a contemporary story but informed by myth, and specifically the myths of Odysseus. It's just that Lafferty is pushing the non-naturalistic elements a little further. Oh, and the protagonist is named Finnegan, which I don't think is a coincidence.

Regardless of sources Lafferty is writing his characters larger than life, with comic effects. That doesn't mean they can't be familiar. Observe:

Finnegan had never seen anything like her. She was Clotworthy's secretary, Marie Courtois, a magnificent young woman. That the girl was evil was insisted upon by Anastasia who had a better than average perception of good and evil. And Marie also had a distaste for Anastasia, more for what she stood for than herself. Believing that good and evil are superstitions, Marie could not ascribe evil to Anastasia: she ascribed instead ideological immaturity, chauvinistic disorientation, and neo-fascistic indoctrination. For that is one of the kinds of girl that Marie was.

Huh. Sounds eerily familiar. In fact while the novel was first published in 1971, a full fifty years ago, there are passages that could have been written this morning.

Cowboy up

The TV--excuse me; it's not TV, it's HBO--series Westworld takes off from basically the same premise as Michael Crichton's 1973 movie. Some entity has built a fantasy world with very human-looking robots/androids/whatever, and is charging the well-to-do to come in and live out their frontier dreams. Teh "hosts" rebel. The difference is that in this case the artificial "hosts" are supposed to be the sympathetic ones. I've only watched the first episode as of yet, so we'll see how that goes. 

What I can say so far is that it's very slick, looking like a big screen movie at a number of points. In different ways it carries big debts to Blade Runner and Dollhouse. There's a lot of sex and violence, or maybe I mean nudity and violence. It feels a bit too pleased with myself. Having an old saloon player piano play Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun" is a nifty joke. A few minutes later "Paint it Black" pops up in the score, and they're leaning pretty hard on the joke.

It has Jeffrey Wright and Anthony Hopkins in the cast, which is certainly an asset, although from what I understand Sir Tony is only in the first season. Ed Harris is in it as well, although at least in the pilot he can't project much more than psychopathy. I'll watch a few more eps to see what's what.

Another green world

They don't have a clue, God bless 'em.

In a way that hasn't been true in my lifetime, society has been locked up, answering to rules that make no sense. I don't think that civilization is ending, necessarily. But it is glitching.

Which is why a brief escape into nature is refreshing. Trees are still trees. Birds still hop the same way when they're not flying, still preen their feathers. Squirrels feel no pressure to adjust their behavior.

Mundane as it may sound, I'm comforted by nature's continuity, it's immunity from our panics and crazes.

Bra för dem

Apparently, Abba have gotten back together and are releasing a new album in just a couple of months. Will it be as good as their old stuff? Tall order, but even if not I approve. The timescale of the decision suggests a lack of trendiness. The strike-while-the-iron's-hot time for a reunion would have been about 25 years ago, when a couple of Aussie movie soundtracks brought them back into the mainstream. So their music was in--albeit sort of quaint even back then--then out, then back in, and has just been part of the woodwork for a bunch of years now. Who would suspect?

Rain dogs

I was out walking early this afternoon. The tail-end Ida rain was light enough so that I thought the storm might be ending. Not only did it turn out not to be ending then, but it's still going on now.

A woman was out walking her dog, also female. The dog strained at her leash, poking at me with evident curiosity. The woman apologized for her dog's rudeness. I assured her that it didn't see it that way. 

She was carefree and her dog was natural and energetic. This was definitely a human-pet combo. Which seems to me more actually therapeutic than a therapy animal.

Choose wisely

If power is going to corrupt, it stands to reason that it will flatter first. Which is to say that one might start out wanting to do good, and even actually doing it. But gradually the good that you were doing becomes a secondary priority. And thanks to a kind of tunnel vision you don't even notice it.

In a recent profile, Cecily Myart-Cruz shows signs of being in the advanced stages. She's the head of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), a powerful teacher's union in California. And one of her current top priorities is justifying the school closures that have kept so many children out of in-person learning for the past year.

Today, however, on a sunny May afternoon, Myart-Cruz is allowing a reporter inside her inner sanctum—or at least inside a glass-paneled conference room down the hall from her eleventh-floor office. And right away, she lives up to her reputation: after settling into in a swivel chair and slowly removing her zebra-print face mask, the 47-year-old lightning rod for controversy calmly sets her hands on the table and begins issuing a series of incendiary statements that almost seem aerodynamically designed to grab headlines and infuriate critics. Like this one: “There is no such thing as learning loss,” she responds when asked how her insistence on keeping L.A.’s schools mostly locked down over the last year and a half may have impacted the city’s 600,000 kindergarten through 12th-grade students. “Our kids didn’t lose anything. It’s OK that our babies may not have learned all their times tables. They learned resilience. They learned survival. They learned critical-thinking skills. They know the difference between a riot and a protest. They know the words insurrection and coup.” She even went so far as to suggest darkly that “learning loss” is a fake crisis marketed by shadowy purveyors of clinical and classroom assessments.

When an educator thinks it's a winning argument to say, "Maybe the kids don't know their ABCs but they know to think what we tell them to think," well, you can't lose the plot much more badly than that.

Of course the article mentions that Myart-Cruz barely ever speaks to the press. Maybe she would have been better advised to stick with that avoidance.

Salt of the earth

While heading home after grocery shopping, I walked on a short bridge. It spans a branch of the river, and apparently there's a bar/club on one side of the river. So from a point far above them I could hear this band outdoors playing Rolling Stones covers. It was a little poignant.

The Stones themselves have in some sense become their own cover band now. The two guys credited with writing the songs are still there, but it's just them. The larger organism responsible for putting the songs together has dissipated. And Ron Wood, a veteran of Rod Stewart's Faces, appears to have joined at about the last moment where newcomers had a chance of becoming official Rolling Stones someday.

L'chaim

Tonight I went out to dinner for a friend's birthday. It was a nice get-together. My current circumstances are different from the other people there. I'm also probably a little to the right of the rest now, although that's a very recent development. So maybe I started out with some trepidations. As the evening went on, though, we had some interesting discussions, maybe finding some unexpected common ground.

The dinner also included a bunch of different wines, so we also went through a lot of alcohol. When I stood up to leave I thought, "Oh God, am I gonna die?" Well, now I'm pretty sure I won't, so...

Quad life

The other night I dreamed that I still lived in a dorm. Not that I was still in college. I was implicitly quite beyond the school years. I just happened to be living in a space explicitly built for students.

Not exactly a nightmare, but I wasn't really wistful about waking up either. It's an okay place to live for a while. I made some friends while actually living in the dorms. But it's not an inherently charming way/place to live. And as far as friends go, I didn't actually seem to know any of these kids, which couldn't have helped.

Mobile maker at play

 

The above is Alexander Calder, an American sculptor who spent some time in Paris, which was basically the law for artists at one time. He's best remembered for inventing the mobile. This is a film of "Circus", which he performed in 1955 at the Whitney.

Or it's just a middle aged man playing with his favorite toys. That could be worth watching too.

Friday flix

Some months ago some college students moved out of their apartment on my street. They didn't want to schlep their TV with them so they offered it to me. I'd been keeping it in my living rom closet because I didn't have the remote. Recently, though, my DVD player crapped out. As I finally noticed, this TV has a DVD player built in, at the top behind the screen.

So I set that up. Finally ordered a replacement remote. Good thing, too, because I watched a movie tonight, and you wouldn't believe how many trailers and promos it had beforehand. If I didn't have access to a fast forward button I'd have to spend at least twenty minutes just watching them.

Okay, so, the movie. It's called Everything Must Go. It's based on a Raymond Carver short story I've actually read. Will Ferrell plays a high-powered salesman who's also a huge problem drinker. His wife kicks him out of the house and he has nowhere to go, so he takes to living on his lawn and eventually organizes a yard sale. The movie has a little more resolution and uplift than the short story, but it's still somewhat open-ended. Ferrell is definitely the biggest reason to see it. He's a comedian playing an alcoholic, but avoids playing a fun drunk. He's not particularly boisterous either. He just sucks down beers at an alarming rate, in quiet need.

Orwell that ends well

Here begins a story. Because the lady is right. Specifically, I tried it earlier this evening. I Googled the phrase "face time important for infants" and the top result was a link to an article on the website of the American Academy of Pediatrics saying that very thing. But if you followed the link, the article itself was no longer there. As of this moment if you Google the phrase the only result will be the tweet I just linked.

Now if you're just looking for articles in general on whether it's important for small children to see faces, you can find them, including a few from the COVID era. So the material is out there. But should I put an ominous "for now" at the end of that statement? In any case, at least one source is not contradicting its findings but simply disappearing them now that they're politically inconvenient.

Trust The Science? The Science is slinking down the road with your grandmother's fine silverware clinking in its pockets.

Creative couple

I was curious to see what Rasa Davies looked like. Lucked out as someone had posted a wedding portrait of her and Ray onto Pinterest. Quite charming, very 1964.

Her maiden name was Didzpetris and she was an Eastern European immigrant to the UK. Despite my using the past tense I believe she was still around.

Part of the reason I was thinking of her is that she sang backup and harmony on a lot of early Kinks records. Does add a certain something.

Dog days are very much not over

One of the recent Windows must have undone whichever update added the weather icon to the taskbar. No matter. According to Google it's 76 F in Providence now. Which is hot for nighttime, obviously. During the day the humidity has meant that if you're out for  long time your eyebrows will be dripping.

Have to keep in mind that it will eventually pass. Good. This kind of heat can disrupt your concentration. Which means that just because you start doing something, that doesn't mean you'l

Think on your feet

So, buses around here require you to wear a mask or cloth covering on your face as long as you're riding. For all I know they're going to require this until the end of time. And they're TSA related, which I guess the fed gov can get away with because RIPTA has a couple of buses that cross the line into Massachusetts and therefore it's engaged in interstate travel.

Anyway, today when I saw the bus I was waiting for in the distance I realized I didn't have a mask on me. I'd left it in the pocket of my shorts and at that point I was wearing jeans. The other day I'd seen a guy take off his shirt and put that over his face, but he'd been wearing a leather vest as well.

But building on that idea, I took off one of my socks. It was a longish sock so it tied in the back, and also big enough in the heel area to cover both my nose and my mouth. Further good news: I don't have overpowering foot odor.

As for the bad news, if you've read up to this point you know what that is.

Did I a$k?

One word pair I'm seeing online more and more is "net worth." At first I noticed it in clickbait headlines about the deceased, as in "Robin Williams's net worth when he died left his family stunned." (Guessing that was pretty low down on the list.)

But now if you look up the name of anyone famous you get all these stories about their "net worth." Which raises the question of how these internet tabloid reporters who never travel on assignment would know. And moreover, why would I care? I'm not a divorce lawyer.

Anyway, I'm sure this is all a good sign and not an omen of looming techno-feudalism.

Facets

 This video depicts a sculptor I'm not familiar with. She's very good, though. Her works share elements with both Greek and Hindu models, while being their own thing. It's enlightening to watch her in the studio.

The video is titled "Sculpture and Puppetry." Apparently she does make puppets as well. They look good, but I regret that there's no moving footage of them.

Run for the shadows in these golden years

 Based on Erskine Caldwell's 1933 novel of the same name, Anthony Mann's God's Little Acre is about gold fever. A man in Georgia dirt farming country thinks gold lies on his land, despite the fact that he's never found any in fifteen years of digging. He won't get a dowser for the task because his methods are scientific. Of course a dowser who happens to be an albino is a different story.

This is an extraordinarily weird movie to watch. It's well-cast and well-acted, from Robert Ryan's gold-crazed but decent paterfamilias on down. The cinematography is also quite good, establishing a solid Southern Gothic feel, although I don't know whether it was shot on location or in Hollywood. But it's rather nonsensical, repetitive in some aspects and undercooked in others. 

It's also bizarrely horny, straining at the edges of the production codes. Some of the results are questionable. Like, early on, a fledgling politician played by Buddy Hackett(!) finds his lady-friend lolling outside in a bathtub. She tells him to pump more water into her bath, and he handles the pump in a manner that's not so much suggestive as confessional. The scene is pure saltpeter. 

Isola

Yesterday I started reading Ian Tattersall's The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack. Tattersall is an accomplished paleoanthropologist and the title refers to the initial judgment on the identity of  the first discovered Neanderthal skeleton. He writes personally and personably here.

The introduction relates a trip he took to the Comoro Islands. Due to a historical quirk, the Comoros is the only place to see lemurs in the wild other than Madagascar. Just a couple of species, but if you can't get to Madagascar it's nice to have a backup.

As it happens, though, the islands were in the hands of a very ad hoc revolutionary group. Armed teenagers representing this group greeted him when he first got off the boat. Let's just say that you learn something new every day, and Tattersall's lesson was a little more vivid than mine.

They can't really be trained, but your expectations can be

 

Okay, this topic has been covered plenty of places, but still...

The above ad used to run in comic books everywhere. The illustration, of course, implied that you'd have a humanoid race living in your fish tank. If you looked more closely you were at least led to expect trainable animals. What they were really selling was brine shrimp. Brine shrimp that didn't always even come to life when you put them in water. 

How did this company never have their headquarters burned to the ground?

Democracy dies in darkness but who turned out the lights?

News media has been disinvesting in news reporting. It may seem perverse, but it's true. Reporting can mean a lot of money spent for accuracy and context, which is a big ask if that's not what your customers are paying for. So while you might think reporters are ubiquitous, they're more in the position of smiths who make horseshoes. The profession exists, but it's marginal. Most stories you see in the neverending news cycle are based on other stories, or nothing.

Pundits have held on quite well, though. Maybe because they tend to become recognizable brand names, which is valuable in a crowded field. But that may wind up being a case of diminishing returns, as it can be hard to tell one from another.

This story compiles a number of instances of journalists crossing over from factual reporting (to the extent they ever did that) and open advocacy. But what does it mean to take a stand when everybody takes the same stand? There's a large number of media figures who share the same opinions on what stories need to be shared and which can be swept under the rug. Pretty soon they're only talking to each other, plus a small cohort of "civilians" who agree. Which of course the voting base of the current President.

Then there are more florid examples. It's tempting to say that Siegel read the Rolling Stone "dominatrixes vs. vaccine hesitancy" story so you don't have to. But I did read it and found it painfully insipid. It's an attempt to make a familiar narrative sound new and exotic, maybe even erotic. Well, that last part really doesn't pan out.

Are “trans women of color” and “dommes” genuine authorities in America? No, but they are made into public idols that real power can hide behind. In theory, these totems of the marginalized are being “centered” by social justice movements that overturn historical power structures. In practice, the dominatrix, stripped of all authentic erotic power and allure, becomes a new kind of patriotic hero defending the civic virtues of the American middle class.

Perhaps a bit ironic, that.

Dig these hip sounds!

I can recall my introduction to Jimmy Smith, when Babs Gonzales phoned me from New York and blurted: "Hey, Brother 'B', are you hip to this organ playin' cat from Philly, named Jimmy Smith? He's a boss cat on the Hammond Organ." I would have merely listened politely, but when Babs Gonzales invested his hard-earned cash to call from New York, then I knew it was important. I immediately went over to the swingingest record shop in Chicago, the Met, and ear-checked some Jimmy Smith LP.'s.

That's Holmes Daylie, a DJ known to his listeners in Chi-town as "Daddio" Daylie, at the start of his liner notes essay for the Jimmy Smith album Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which also has a charmingly surreal cover of Smith--dapper in his tan trench coat--holding hands with a model in a hyena(?) mask.

These kinds of liner notes--hype, but an erudite kind of hype that respects the reader/listener--seem to have been a fairly common feature to music releases at one time. A sign that the distributors were making an investment of thought as well as money. I've seen this sort of text on old LP covers and a few CD reissues. Outside of best-of collections no one seems to bother anymore. Of course sales of music in physical media have cratered, but the fall-off seems to have preceded the rise of streaming and the web by some time.

Of shadows and shoes

Something that tickles me and might tickle you as well is a shadow puppet show based on one of the stories from 1,001 Nights. One of the lesser-known tales, it must be said. But the performers show an infectious enthusiasm for the material.

The image of an unlucky angler getting a shoe or boot on their fishing line is pretty widespread, at least enough to have its own TV Tropes page. I wonder if this tale was the origin.

Out there

May have talked about this before. It's late at night, about to go to bed. There seems to be a fair amount of activity on the road. Does make one wonder where the drivers are off to. Some, surely, are police and other emergency vehicles. But not all. So some of these drivers might be going to new places and have exciting mornings ahead of them. Others could have very restful mornings planned.

Let's get into character

 I just got finished watching Once Upon a Time...In Hollywood. I actually watched the first hour of it earlier in the week. In general I don't make a habit of splitting movies into two or more nights. But this one is pretty long--about two hours plus another three quarters--and I figured I could get more out of it if I were awake for the whole thing.

More openly than he ever has before, Quentin Tarantino returns to his childhood here. The pastiches, the music, the characters drawn from media of the late 1960s. They're all things that were in the air during his formative years. Which I recognize because much of it is mine as well. He's seven years older than I am, but that's just a few rounds of syndication for a show in reruns. But yeah, the yellow TV-style closing credits give it away.

Much of it is a hangout show featuring Leonard DiCaprio's fragile prima donna actor and Brad Pitt's self-possessed stuntman/chauffeur/companion. But there's tension here, because the movie also involves the Manson family. Their presence brings part of it into the realm of thriller, if not horror. In a move that's not too surprising coming from Tarantino, the Manson matter is resolved in a different manner from actual recorded history, but it's still pretty damn gory. Anyway, the extended mid-film sequence built around Cliff's visit to the Spahn ranch is a highlight.

There's a pretty good joke built onto the end of the end credits. Hate to think how many theatregoers missed that one because they didn't stick around.

Changing methods

If you've been around this blog for a while, you might remember this post. I've remembered it, chiefly because I was able to get it down in a fairly brief amount of time. And there it is.

Which led me to think. When writing fiction there might be something to the method of writing it down as a kind of Q&A dialogue like that. Not that the story will end up in that format. It probably won't. But this experience suggested that it's a way of getting the basics of a story down before the inner critic can put up roadblocks.

Currently I'm fleshing out ideas produced in a first draft in this style. It's going...well, it's going quicker than it often does, that's for sure. Which is a good thing. I needed a change. The old process wasn't working for me.

Case of the uh-oh's

 

(Above image by Mort Walker, new text by David Maliki)

Once more the populace--or at least minor intelligentsia--is acting like the end of the world is nigh. Obviously not for the first time. Maybe not the last either. Have all the previous apocalypses made people as humorless as this one has? Don't see how it would help in any case.

☂

So I was at home, doing whatever. Outside it didn't look particularly overcast. But then I heard thunder. Okay, a little ominous, considering that I was planning to walk to the supermarket in the near future. And indeed in short order it was raining heavily. Well, I figured I'd give it until about 4PM to clear up before I made any further decisions. 

Well in fact by four the rain had indeed cleared up, so the "down one hill, up another" foot trip went okay. I just had to make sure no car came through when I was walking past the big puddle. When I got out of the store it started raining again, but it was pretty light as I was walking home. Then when I'd been inside for a little bit it really opened up, so you could see rivers running by the curb. Then it stopped again.

So, maybe good planning on my part, but definitely good luck. Was that the tail end of the passing hurricane or what?

Diseducation

From White Hot Harlots, a Tumblr account of all things that I was put onto by a thread of other people I read, comes a bleak assessment of the current state and future of education in these here United States.

This, my friends, bodes very poorly for the future of education, regardless of whatever happens in the coming months. A movement that cannot articulate its own worth is not one that is long for this world. Teachers themselves are the only force that can resit the slow press toward the eventual elimination of public education, and they have embraced a worldview and comportment style that renders them absolutely unable to mount any worthwhile resistance. 

Part of what he talks about is the adoption of critical race theory (CRT) in the classroom. Some of the downsides of this approach are obvious to everyone except those who have power. CRT popularizer Ibram X. Kendi has said that discrimination that produces equity is antiracist. Well, I can't read his mind to tell you exactly what he has on it, but soldiers tend to take the general's orders at face value, which in the case of some ideologically minded teachers could justify all sorts of abuse. 

Then there's the question of whether CRT-based teaching really helps the kids it's supposed to. If it's even meant to do that, which, you have to wonder. One theory making the rounds now is that emphasizing the right answer in math class is whiteness in action. So the solution is to make math in schools fuzzier and more subjective? If that's the path schools take it's pretty easy to see what happens next. A few years down the road, jobs that require mathematical skill go to people who had tutors when they were school-age. No public schoolers need apply!

The idea of "social justice all day" in schools has been deeply endorsed by Randi Weingarten, current president of the American Federation of Teachers. She's also been instrumental in scaring schools off from in-person learning for the last year-plus. If your goal is to defund public education, you really have no better friend.

's heavy, man

 Just found this. The kettle drum has more sustain than most other kinds of drum, so it can be used in a different way. I know Ringo plays it on at least one Beatles song ("Every Little Thing"), maybe more.

Anyway, this is a neat little kettle drum composition. For most of it I didn't know if there was anyone else in the room besides whoever was holding the camera, so it was gratifying to hear the applause at the end.

A marriage made in hell

 "Is this the end of the world?" asks this essay by the Canadian novelist Douglas Coupland. Mercifully it's less literal and more philosophical than the header might make you believe. The end of the world lies somewhere in the future, but what space does it occupy in our consciousness.

And there's a crystal-clear passage.

The thing is, in the Seventies, the end of the world seemed much nearer than it does right now. Nothing worked back then, and everything was fading and imploding and being smothered in oil and soot. The Seventies with an internet would have been an utter pit of despair. Which reminds me: I was in Toronto in 2003 during SARS Classic, which had a 16% kill rate and, to be honest, the city didn’t feel even remotely as doomy as it does now during Covid, which has a pathetic kill rate of, what, 0.3%? That’s what happens with an internet everywhere around you: it’s this sleepless beast that roams everywhere, poking shit with a stick all along the way, and waking up every conceivable sleeping dog it finds with a clanging pair of concert cymbals.

Obvious facts, but not put together all that often. Of course the SARS virus of 2003 was objectively scarier than the COVID bug that came 16 or 17 years later. And obviously it didn't have the same kind of impact. SARS made it into some panicked headlines and gallows humor jokes, but national stay-at-home orders and universal masking that extends into the next year? No one was even thinking about it.

Yet Coupland is a little off. There was, of course, an Internet in 2003. I know, because I was on it. Different, more primitive and at the same time more variegated, but it was definitely there. 

People had cell phones at the time as well. Maybe not quite as many. But that's not the real difference. 2003 was still the flip phone era. If you had a cell phone, you used it for phone calls and not much else. Now millennials and zoomers have become acclimated to an etiquette where making a phone call when you don't absolutely have to is a faux pas.

Somewhere along the line phones became wired so that you could easily reach the Internet from them. For some it was more convenient. But that's the problem. When you can plug into the infosphere from anywhere you happen to be, then the Internet and all the people on it become the "it all" that you can't or won't get away from. That's how problems get blown up into 800 lb. gorillas.

The Devil is in the details

 Feeling in a John Carpenter mood again, I watched Prince of Darkness tonight. It has to be one of his weirder movies.

Carpenter wrote it under the pseudonym "Martin Quatermass." This gives a hint to his attentions, as elements of the plot do seem inspired by Nigel Kneale's British teleplays featuring the scientist hero, especially Quatermass and the Pit. The monster that menaces the church full of grad students and Donald Pleasence's priest is really cosmic entropy, although it may collaborate with/impersonate the Devil. Victor Wong's character basically is Professor Quatermass, except Asian-American.

While there's a small army of scary homeless people led by Alice Cooper, I don't know that I'd call this an actor-driven movie. Which might be why most of the cast have if anything gotten more obscure since the movie was released a quarter century ago, and is definitely why the leading man prompts the thought "preppie porn star" every time he's onscreen. 

But Carpenter is playing an interesting game here. The scenes are all very short, accompanied by a relentless electronic score. Seemingly calm at first, they come to evoke a creepy sense of things falling apart.

Yellow fellows

 Providence is just a biggish city, not an enormous one. Still, we do see things here.

The other day I was downtown (no one says "downcity.") There was a lady at the bus stop. She was pushing a wheelchair. The seat of the wheelchair was filled by a Minions plushie doll. She was yelling and swearing at the MInions doll.

Should I have talked to herr? I don't know.

All comes out in the wash

 I have a little cut on my thumb. I got it because there was a little shard of glass embedded in the sole of my shoe. I had to get it out in a hurry because a bus was coming and perhaps foolishly used my bare hands to do so.

This is not to complain. It hurts in a dull way, probably more annoying than anything else. The point I'm making is that I expect the pain to be less when I get up tomorrow morning, and a little less the day after that. Sleep truly is a miracle drug.

meow?

My downstairs neighbor has a cat. Tomcat, black, quite big for a housecat. All indoors, though.

That's something that makes me curious. How many cat keepers let their furry little friends go out. I've seen websites saying that it's just a bad idea. There are downsides to it, like predation of birds and the risk that they'll just take off and not come back. So can you lower the risk of those things to an acceptable level?

I mean, I'd say I'm more of a dog person, but I like cats and would like to think most cat owners are doing right by them.

Than curse the darkness

Do I like Wallace Stevens? No, I love him. He ranks at the top of my list of favorite poets, up there with Edith Sitwell and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Do I like dramatic poetry readings? Sometimes. Depends on what the reader brings to the poem. Even if they're also the poet, it varies.

Does this recitations of "Carlos Among the Candles" work for me? Actually yes. Mainly because it doesn't sound like a "recitation" at all. The woman performing it gets at the conversational tone Stevens often drops into. A tone that doesn't decrease the sharpness of the verse at all. And yeah, she makes the most of the props as well.