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.