'o' Yeah

 

The 33 1/3 series from Continuum is made up of pretty short books about albums, short enough so that I figured I'd read two or three in succession. Michelangelo Matos wrote the one on Prince's Sign 'o' the Times. It's pretty good. Matos is a fairly witty writer, and his love for his subject is obvious.

And hard not to share. Prince was on a very short list of artists who at least gradually gained a kind of universal reach. Which allowed him to go to some pretty avant-garde places. As I'll tell anyone who can't get away fast enough, "When Doves Cry" strikes me as possibly the weirdest song ever to reach #1 on the charts.

Ghost, meet machine

Tonight I watched an old Tales from the Darkside where Justine Bateman has a twin brother who dies. He was a huge computer nerd when he was alive, which is sort of tied into the unnamed degenerative illness that killed him. Anyway, he leaves behind this big programming project for her which turns out to be bringing him back as...software I guess? Their parents are skeptical at first, dad especially, but they come around.

Mainly it's weird watching this now because the computer is so clunky and limited. In communicating, the dead brother is limited to glowing blue words on the screen, a primitive voice synthesizer, and a dot matrix printer. If he'd held on a few more years he could at least put a decent picture of himself on the monitor.

In a whirl

Weather is getting warmer. We could have another cold spell in April and it wouldn't be unprecedented, but the trend is obviously upwards.

Ah, but warmth fluctuates in the course of the day. One consequence of this is the fan. I have a ceiling fan in my living room. Today when I got back from grocery shopping I changed into shorts and a tee and turned the fan on full blast. Then I turned it down. And down further. Currently I have the window closed and I'm wearing long pants and a cardigan over my two shirts. 

You can go through this cycle a few times a day. And the thing about the ceiling fan is that it's also got a lighting fixture built in. Changing fan speeds seems to loosen whatever is holding the glass globe around the light in place, so that it's more likely to fall. I've lost two of them so far, plus another time it fell and shattered the glass I was drinking out of. Which is why I'm just leaving the light bulb naked now. I don't need the floor littered with glass shards.

Siege mentality

You may have seen this whatever it is and you may not. It's taken a few lumps already. I don't feel a need to lash out. Far be it from me to say that I've seen pictures of the author, who brags about turning his house into Wakanda, and he really shouldn't be inviting comparisons to Chadwick Boseman.

In its way it's honest. There is a lot of rudeness out there, although the idea that one race is behind it is dodgy at best. But it's revelatory of something else, which is becoming a hobbyhorse of mine. 

When across-the-board lockdowns in response to the COVID-19 pandemic started about a year ago, media support for it was unanimous in the way that seems to only happen with really bad ideas. And it took months for any kind of dissent to work its way into mainstream discussion, to the extent that many still seem unaware that there is any.

All this support comes from and through the media, of course. And it's no secret that you get a lot of media workers are better able to earn while working from home than the average fellow. But there's more to it than that. A lot of them are―or consider themselves to be―activists. And a certain kind of activist is apt to support quarantine for the express reason that it depersonalizes.

When people are free to congregate where they like, with whom they like, social groups mix. You are apt to be in proximity to people superficially unlike you, maybe even conversing. It promotes a sense of common humanity. But if your ideology rests on the absoluteness of group differences like, say, race, this can all seem intolerably reactionary. The more people only interact with each other as abstractions on a screen, the more chance you have to convert others.

A theory, yes, but backed up by experience. Are black people getting more hostile toward whites? Based on my daily interactions with people in 3D space, I'd say that's a pretty resounding "no." Most people are just trying to get by, and they know you're trying to do the same. It's only in looking at media, social and otherwise, that I might get the opposite impression. Which is why journalists coming up with pseudoscholarly ways to say "Fuck I hate crackers" wouldn't bother me in the context of a healthy and vibrant democratic society. Which we don't have.

And on that topic, here's something else I read today. The kind of institutions that need to function if the idea of democracy is going to be a bad joke are mainly local in nature, and it's these that have been most devastated over the past year. Along with the apparently irrelevant lives of children and other common folk.

Feel like I'm running a little long here but there's another article that suggests ways of fighting back, or at least holding out. See what you think.

Playful encounter

 

For a while I've thought of dogs as huggy wolves. Boozed up on civilization, embracing everyone at the party. You could turn that around and say that wolves are more aloof dogs. They don't know anyone, aren't sure where they fit, except for out in the wild, of course. But that just means that they're not as comfortable around humans, which is often mutual. There's another side to them, as seen here.

...on the other hand

 Sure it's nice to have spring back. I mean, let's do this every year.

Of course springtime means more people out. And we still have social distancing guidelines of six feet, even if the CDC is having trouble defending that measurement and more and more people are starting to ignore it. That means that there's going to be more waiting in line.

And hoo boy. Friday I stopped into DD to grab a coffee and donut. At the front of the line were three people, loosely together and two of them with their phones out. Because that means dawdling and calling their friends, asking "They don't have X, what else you want." It's Dunkin Donuts. Grab something and go.

So yes, I narrowly avoided turning into Michael Douglas from Falling Down on Friday.

Pile-on

These are supposed to be the years of reckoning. I mean, apparently. A time when old injustices that have been hidden or accepted for years are called out for what they are, addressed so that we can move onto a more just world. 

In practice a lot of the time this just means that people get mugged. So often, in fact, that you might wonder if that isn't the whole point. 

Jesse Singal is a prime example. If the name doesn't mean a whole lot to you, don't worry. Until recently I'd heard/read the name but it hadn't made much of an impression on me. He seems to have started writing for The Boston Globe while I had a subscription, and I also probably read some of his articles for New York. To his credit, he doesn't seem to be a latecomer to the free speech for all cause.

Singal still gets some outside work, but he's also one of the writers and journalists who have found Substack more their speed lately since you can be your own boss. In addition he co-hosts a podcast with Katie Herzog, a veteran of Seattle's The Stranger, although I haven't heard it. (Whenever I try listening to podcasts I wind up fast forwarding to get to the good stuff like a jaded porn addict.)

The point is that he's found his own corner. If you like what he does you can read/listen and maybe donate. If not, his work is easy enough to avoid. 

Which is apparently not good enough for everyone. He seems to have made some enemies over his covering trans issues from more than one angle, although it could be that if that weren't the triggering issue it would be something else. Some have called for him to lose his forum at Substack, although again, they're not his boss or at least they're not supposed to be. There's also been some rumormongering that would be comical in its ineptitude if it weren't so relentless. In response to one allegation, Herzog has taken up a large collection to be donated to the complainer's favorite charity if she can produce any evidence. Guess what?

As large swaths of it die off, the media industry seems to be getting more vicious. One question: which of these people are deluded enough to think that they're actually working for justice? Which ones, talking off the record, would admit they're just securing their own nest eggs?

Yet again, old man yells at cloud

There's a word that's been creeping up a lot lately in a way that bugs me: "ally." Whether someone's an ally, what you have to do to be an ally. Then there's "allyship", which I'm not even sure is  word.

Why does this bother me? A couple of reasons. First there's the unnecessary militarization of everyday life. Also, while the word is used in ever more contexts now, it's almost always the singular "ally" rather than the plural "allies." Is the relationship supposed to be one-sided? That's how it sounds. 

Luckily, you don't hear much of any of this in real life. Unluckily, there's not as much real life as there used to be.

Plus ça change

 One book I'm currently reading is The Fourth Turning, by William Strauss and Neil Howe. It's a history or meta-history book that came out in 1997 and has spawned a following. You might guess the publication date without looking, because it does contain some popular millennial themes. It may also be the source for the term "millennials" as in generation.

It's based on the number 4 in a lot of ways. In essence the premise is that there are four archetypes, and that history is a cycle of eras in which one of these archetypes is dominant. 

I can definitely buy the idea of history being cyclical, more than most Westerners will want to admit. And on a psychological level the authors make a good point about how people can become out of place when an era very different from the one they grew up and/or thrived in takes hold. 

You can see the US-centric perspective, not too surprisingly. Especially in the descriptions of the Lost Generation. In America that epithet was a moral judgment, the popular impression of them being wastrels whether young or old. And that image took hold in part because of the impression that they had only been dinged by World War I. In Europe and especially Britain, the "Lost" part was grimmer and more serious, directly because of the Great War. JRR Tolkien said that by the time he was 25, most of the people he'd grown up with were dead. Dying horribly and violently in your early 20's became the Norm, and it couldn't be too much of a surprise when the survivors chose to indulge themselves.

ADDENDUM: Could pick at a couple of other things. The authors assert that the two Eisenhower-Stevenson elections were the only time that the same Presidential nominees ran against each other twice, although William McKinley faced William Jennings Bryan both times. And there's a mention of a guitarist popular in the 60s named "Jimmy Hendrix". (Sounds wild. Any relation to Jimi?) The prose can be less than fresh, marking the fact that they're not primarily literary authors or essayists. What they do right is to suggest a large scale, one that takes enough time to play out that we're not usually aware of it.

Undetermined

 A few years ago I told a friend that I tried not to have too many unnecessary opinions. Won't go into the context, because it wouldn't mean much in this context, but it still goes. Keep in mind the word "unnecessary." Obviously I'm not entirely devoid of opinions, as anyone reading this can tell. But I've found that taking sides on every single thing is counterproductive. Especially if it's among friends or people you have to work with.

Dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria

Link to video here 

I've recently found that Blogger has an option for switching to bare HTML and thought maybe if I did that I could embed stuff from Vimeo again. No such luck.

Anyway, I think you might like this. It's a nice little tune and has a rather endearing visual.

It's a sunshine day

 Well, at the very least spring appears to be in sneak previews. The sun was out all day, for one thing. It's also getting warmer. I went out wearing a sweater and a jacket and I didn't need both. Whether I needed either is borderline, but definitely not both. Luckily I was carrying a bag I could store the sweater in.

Oui, Henri

Expertise has become a plague. On one topic after another, from public health to social justice, we're told to defer to the arbitrarily shifting opinions of our betters. Try to raise a contrary fact and it's, "Now, now, you'll only hurt yourself trying to think."

A generalization, perhaps. But it's also a reminder of why I find the philosophy of Henri Bergson so refreshing. One of his vital (to use one of his own favorite words) quotes is "Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought." In other words, his vision of philosophy is not an esoteric study best left to the elect. It's truly democratic, open to all who commit themselves to observing reality and sharing what they find. He wrote a good deal on a range of topics, and I wouldn't say that I agree with everything I've read. But he puts it all out there to grapple with.

It's interesting and a little funny that he raised a scandal by having groupies Or rather, he attracted large groups of female fans, and that's how it was interpreted at the time. If you see pictures of him he was, in Fargo terms, "funny lookin', more'n most people even." Although unlike Steve Buscemi's Carl Showalter, he was almost certainly circumcised. I don't think his draw for them was sex appeal, or at least not in any conventional sense. More that what he was saying was for them as much as for anyone else.

Parts

 

My upstairs neighbor is still fairly new to the building. I've barely seen him, really. But he does seem to receive the lion's share of packages. Hey, I'm not going to pry. But I do amuse myself thinking that maybe he's building an ark.

Showdown at Smith

 One downside of America's aspiration to be a classless society is that there is little if any sense of working class society. Being working class is seen as simply not earning enough, quite probably a personal failing, and in any case something that you should leave behind as soon as you're able. Widespread unionization after World War 2 might have mitigated this, but that state of affairs only lasted for 30-40 years.

It's also true that shit rolls downhill, and this goes for matters of wokeness as much as anything else. Whenever a corporation says that they "need to do better", "doing better" almost invariably means throwing an employee or two under the bus, putting the survivors in awkward encounter groups, and making sure none of it effects the way the CEO and other top executives live.

And of course the new digital realm of social media often seems dedicated to increasing the speed at which a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.

All three dynamics can be seen at play in the recent <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/24/us/smith-college-race.html">turmoil</a> at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. A student teacher aid was living in the dorms in the summertime, when they are otherwise closed. A janitor didn't know she had gotten special permission, only that someone was hanging out at the dorm which wasn't supposed to be open to Smith students. He'd been instructed to call security, which is what he did.

The student posted about the incident on Facebook. In the absence of any evidence she accused the workers of racism, including a couple of food service workers who had nothing to do with any of it. The result has been the sort of ugly witch hunt more associated with Salem than Northampton, and people have actually lost their jobs.

In the face of all this, the school's administration has been worse than useless in defending its employees' rights. And as has often seemed to be the case in recent years, whatever the ACLU's concern is, it's not civil liberties.

The name of the student who made the accusations is published in the NYT article. I'm not using it here because she's not the point. Young adults are raging narcissists, and probably always have been. And look at the examples they're given today. But adults, college presidents very much included, are supposed to act as a check on their narcissism. That's their job, and they're not doing it.

¢ and ab¢

 Went to Aldi's today. That's a supermarket chain, German company I believe, intended for the budget-conscious shopper. For the first time in months, I was able to get change there. There was a coin shortage for much of 2020, caused by a multiplicity of factors. While most of the businesses I frequent were generally able to keep coins in stock, Aldi for a long time would only accept cash if you had the exact amount on-hand. So it seems like a good sign that that policy has been changed.

On a tangential note, I did some online research before I wrote the above and websites in general seem to have gotten more obtrusive. Everyone and their brother wants to give you push notifications now. If you agreed to it it would never stop.