But alas

It would be nice if we could just take it for granted that censorship of ideas was a self-evidently bad idea and that no one would want to do it. However, that's not the world we live in. It's become less the world we live in. Part of that I think derives from social media and the growing intertwinement of technology and everyday life. Many a person born in or very near the 21st century can imagine doing anything with their life except being left alone to live it.

Anyway, this article does a pretty good job of disposing of arguments for limiting free speech. I especially appreciated the following passage: 

The ones who enforce the rules are, by definition, powerful. In a country with strong protections for freedom of speech, the powerful are barred from using the legal system to attack the powerless for their speech. If you empower the government to censor, you are giving the powerful more power. 

Oh, and that xkcd comic underneath is just wrong. People don't show you the door because they think you're an asshole. They think you're an asshole because they have the power to show you the door, they use it, and then they have to justify it to themselves. Projection makes the dirty business of oppression feel cleaner.

Baby you can drive my car

One strange phenomenon is when, without much forethought, you wind up watching two movies in the same week with bizarrely mirrored plots and themes.

For me, this week, it was two movies where the servant staff of a big fancy house is a little on the crooked side. I don't know that there's a ton of those.

In brief recap, Fitzwilly focuses on a butler played by Dick Van Dyke, who's smart enough not to play it as English, although the character does use his chimneysweep accent for a couple of scams. He's the majordomo for a nice elderly lady (Edith Evans) who thinks she's a wealthy eccentric, but since her father left her almost nothing she's actually a poor eccentric. Fitzwilly and his crew conduct burglaries in order to bring in the money that she'll be giving away to her pet charities, mostly robbing fully insured department stores. Unfortunately the lady's new secretary (Barbara "99" Feldon) doesn't know about any of this and threatens to throw a monkey into the wrench. Of course she and Van Dyke are falling in love as well.

The movie has a real brightness and charm to it, but it's also strange to watch. It's Hollywood bringing its old tricks into the sixties, where they wouldn't be so welcome in general. Within five years of its 1967 release date it would be the kind of movie "they just don't make anymore." Of course throw in a couple of swears and some early Rod Stewart and it's Wes Anderson, so you'd just need 30 or so years to wait.

Parasite is a different story altogether. The servants in this case are a family, and while they bend and break the law, it's for their own benefit. It kind of has to be, given their circumstances. Their brush with a much wealthier family begins when the son's friend recommends him as a substitute in his tutoring job for a girl he's carrying a torch for. He figures that the son--Kevin--will be safe to leave the girl with. Yeah, that sure works out. Anyway, one by one the family finds cunning and not a little amoral ways to make and fill openings in the household. The sister--Jessica--is terrifyingly brilliant at this. 

But there's another twist. After they've gotten the family's gotten the old housekeeper fired she comes back desperate and uncovers a passage to the basement that looks like it leads to a torture chamber. It doesn't, not quite, but this discovery does put the plot on the road to tragedy. 

I should also note that the fraud family's mother, the one who takes the now-vacant housekeeper job, looks like she'd speak in a Southern or at least Border State accent if this were an American movie. She is absolutely my type.

Ooze

There's a certain kind of heat that just makes you drowsy as all get out. There has to be a high humidity for one thing. Little air movement. Anyway, that's what we got today. Made it fun to be carrying a sack full of laundry home, that's for sure.

"Bob" is a palindrome

 

His laughter at the start is pretty infectious, actually.

Bob Dylan is in the news now due to hitting the big 8-0. Obviously there's a big retrospective aspect to that. Everyone seems to remember how he didn't show up to pick up his Nobel Prize in Literature. And I mean, can you blame him? Sure it's a great honor, but it doesn't exactly rock.

Let it Sno

The heads in this piece do have a certain bleak grandeur. They have expressive faces while remaining big rocks, thanks to their sculptor. The influence of the Moai can't really be missed. 

Incidentally, when I first read the header "Georgia's Easter Island" I thought it might be the other Georgia. Southern folk art has produced some wondrous things. But the Eurasian Georgia is quite interesting too. In modern times it might best be known as the home of Josef Stalin, who much preferred to speak Russian, although he did speak Georgian to his mother. (Everybody has a soft spot, I guess.) It was also on the Eastern edges of the Roman Empire, although it doesn't seem Romanized in most respects.

Although I know it's strictly taboo

Horror tends to work best as an offhand effect. Or so I've believed for a while. Hereditary doesn't go that route. Its story starts off as kind of a downer and quickly escalates to "are you fucking kidding me?" Which makes it harrowing, and then perversely funny.

Part of what makes it work nonetheless is that it just looks so good. The central character of Annie (Toni Collette continuing her quest to never again use her native Aussie accent onscreen) is a miniaturist, and one of the first edits juxtaposes one of her art projects with the house she and her family live in, giving the impression that they live all their lives in a dollhouse. Which they do, and it's kept by sadists.

So, memorable effect. I don't have kids. If I did I'm not sure how I would have reacted to some of the scenes in the movie.

You always loved short story form, The signs behind it, the hidden doors.

Edgar Allen Poe is remembered as one of the all-time masters of the short story form, and in fact one of the prime people to define it. There had always been short prose pieces of some kind, but Poe put forth an aesthetic for the form in his review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales. 

One of Poe's ideas is the single effect. As Poe puts it, "In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which thetendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design." There's actually some controversy about this one, with some theorists and critics arguing against Poe's unity and for multiple ideas.

I guess I come down somewhere in the middle. I do like the idea of―if not a single effect―then a singular one: something this story does that is unique to it. And in art there is value to having an overall unity, a distinct emphasis. But I'm nowhere near as much a planner as Poe...claimed to be. Sometimes there are happy accidents. Once they happen you can arrange things to emphasize them.

On the edge

One thing I've never really gotten is the whole thing of cutting the crust off kids' sandwiches. Do kids really hate bread crust? I certainly have had weird food taboos that my parents had to choose whether or not to indulge, and some of them have lasted into adulthood. That ain't one of them. It's the part of the bread that you knew was going to keep its texture and flavor regardless of what happened, so I think I trusted it more. My thing of going for the heel of very crusty bread―Italian and the like―is more recent, but that's pretty much an opportunity thing.

Sitting very well

 

Dame Edith Sitwell was certainly a colorful figure, in a way that almost certainly kept and keeps some people from taking her seriously as a poet. Ah well. You can take her or leave her. I choose to keep her. Her verse just clicks, even as gaudy as it may seem.

Clever interviewer in this excerpt. It's obvious in retrospect that the "some people say" setup to his question is something she would take as a compliment.

Sudsy water

Weird, frustrating experience at the laundromat today. The washer I was washing towels, sheets a few other things in got down to where it read "1 minute", and then it just stayed there for may minutes more.  Wouldn't stop. The attendant said that it was because I overloaded it, but that wasn't the reason at all. It was because I selected the hot wash cycle, which you can't do apparently. I had to keep at her until she agreed to go back and shut the power off, then I paid for another cycle so that it the clothes would rinse and drain.

Apparently the boiler for hot water broke. Seems like something the owner should take care of, but what do I know?

Yay priorities

This article touches on a perverse government initiative adopted this year. The Restaurant Revitalization Fund focuses aid on struggling eateries, which sounds good. But at least for the first 21 days, the government is prioritizing businesses on the basis of gender, race, and ethnicity.

There's an amusing aspect to this. Business owners who are married on opposite sex lines might just temporarily hand over a certain portion of the business to their wives in order to make the establishment eligible for the grant. But that's not an option for everyone.

But at bottom this is unjust and unhelpful. Restaurant owners who are in trouble are in trouble―in I think more cases than not―because of government policy. Biden supported that policy, and governors aligned  with him imposed it. You can't take away people's livelihood and only provide help in getting it back when it suits your social agenda.

Corrections

This is an interesting and thoughtful post about how people form hard and firm opinions about other people, usually on irrational bases, and how these become driving forces in their other opinions, on things that they allegedly find very important. I appreciate that deBoer includes information that could put himself in a negative light, and that he acknowledges this. Acknowledgment of flaws is challenging and healthy, although theatrical self-abasement is not.

Some of the people he talks about I'm more familiar with than others. As far as Glenn Greenwald goes I'm sure you could call him "abrasive." I've agreed and disagreed with him and in other cases haven't cared enough about the topic at hand to crawl through the verbiage. I've never felt personal hostility towards him, though. Rightly or wrongly I interpret a lot of his personal mannerisms as being medium-high functioning on the Autism Spectrum, which I identify with. So that might be a more complicated example.

No one is completely balanced in their judgment on other people, and I'm sure I'm not either. Some of my judgments have changed, though. For instance back in the 2000s I was a pretty keen supporter of Howard Dean. This meant deflecting a lot of criticism, some of which was genuinely stupid and shallow. (The Iowa scream? Really?) But as time has gone on I've been more disappointed, especially with his unfounded and hyperbolic speculations about Florida and COVID. Was I wrong all along? Or does trying to stay in good with Democratic elites eat away at your soul over time? Probably a little of both. There does come a time when politicians are better off calling it a day.

Queen Gertrude

 

The above is a painting by Gertrude Abercrombie. She was born in Austin but mostly lived in Chicago. Friends with jazz people like Sarah Vaughan and Dizzy Gillespie. I certainly wouldn't say she was the only American artist with surrealist tendencies. Obviously not. But she may have come up with the most American kind of surrealism. Homey while also being strange and dreamy.

Sub rosa

 If you want to keep a secret, the best way is to not say anything. If anyone asks you about it, say you don't know. Otherwise...

Years ago I was acting (well, pretty much an extra) in a school play. One of the women in the cast dropped out. A guy who knew her said that she was going through a lot but that he couldn't talk about it. I recognized this as a deliberate invocation of what would later be called the Streisand effect. He was hoping someone would badger him until he "had to" spill the beans. That someone wasn't going to be me.

It helped that I was pretty much indifferent.

Let me hear your segulharpas ringing out, come and keep your comrade warm

 

The Guthman Musical Instrument Competition is an annual event held at Georgia Tech. Musicians with an interest in music―or vice versa―show off their newly invented instruments and demonstrate the sounds they make. These can be acoustical or electronic.

The segulharpa, demonstrated in the video above, is a combination of both in that there are digital pickups on metal strings inside the metal casing. The talk about it being generative, in that the chords can be unpredictable, changing from one playing to the next.

To be frank the music thus far produced out of it sounds kind of...how you say? Ah, yes, boring. To a musical neophyte at least. But it may be that the instrument, only unveiled this year, hasn't found its players yet. 

In any case, the fact that musical instruments are still being invented is encouraging. How many will find places in orchestras and jazz combos of the future? It's fun to think about anyway.