Dampening

I don't know how many people do big things on New Year's Eve. For me, along with my friends, it's gotten hard to make plans and stick to them. I'll be seeing some friends tomorrow, the first day of 2023.

It's been a rainy day, drizzling in the morning and early afternoon, with the rain getting steadier as the day and night went on. Not enough to flood the streets or anything, but enough to notice. 

So people who did make plans probably adjusted them downward. Still, the city or someone rang in the New Year with fireworks. Kind of a nice gesture, even if I basically just heard them and couldn't see them.

Ottoman tales

On something of a whim, I watched a couple of Dick Van Dyke show episodes Tuesday night. First season, so it had a different opening credit sequence from the one most people are familiar with, basically just a montage of photos. Definitely holds up as funny, though.

Made me think of something. Van Dyke has enough sweet midwestern charm to make you think he's playing an everyman. But that's not what he's doing here. The Petries are beautiful and talented, with an air of sophistication that suited the new Kennedy era. Every time Rob and Laura quarrel―which, to be fair, is a lot―it ends with a passionate kiss and the implication of mindblowing makeup sex. No, Rob Petrie and his family are aspirational figures for the audience.

Which isn't a bad thing. Most stars today are too distant in concerns and way of life now for the audience to even aspire to be them, in character or out. Inspiring cocktail party dreams like the Petries did seems quite benign.

Enforcers

Tablet recently reran this magnificent piece detailing what Ariel Pink has been through since Mexican Summer voided his contract immediately after he was seen at a Trump rally on January 6, 2021. (But emphatically not at the capitol during the riot.) Writer Armin Rosen is incisive on Pink (using his actual name, Ariel Rosenberg) but his analysis doesn't stop three.

In retrospect, 2010 was the tail-end of the height of the final era in which American indie rock still really mattered. According to the Puritan hindsight of the present day, it was a time when the wrong things were valued and the wrong people rewarded, many of them allegedly horrible men, agents of abuse and patriarchy whose awfulness was embedded in their very music. This increasingly common line betrays a revealing need to establish the present-day’s superiority over an era when the art, the parties, the drugs, and the creative environment were all much better than they are now. A misfit record like Before Today could still crack the 160s of the Billboard chart, helped along by music critics whose analysis wasn’t hamstrung by questions of social virtue. Pitchfork once called “Round and Round” “one of indiedom’s most unifying and memorable songs in 2010.” Today, no one talks about “indiedom.” Conde Nast owns Pitchfork.

But what's revealing, and somewhat troubling, is that I've hardly seen anyone else write sympathetically about Pink/Rosenberg. The standard line seems to be more "How did such a creature walk undetected in our midst?"

Nor is this an isolated case. Consider:

• Comedian Jay Johnston was fired as the voice of rival restaurateur Jimmy Pesto on Bob's Burgers, also for attending a Trump rally, and like Pink was never accused of violently demonstrating. He doesn't seem to have found work in comedy or acting since. In general I love Bob's Burgers but have started to suspect I wouldn't want to be on-set.
• Former Jeopardy producer Mike Richards was briefly promoted to host after Alex Trebek died. Very briefly. Then podcast clips surfaced of him making jokes that weren't far in tone from Leno's Tonight material, but got him fired before his single week as host had even aired. Then he lost the producer job too.

There are a couple of similarities between at least some of these events, and others. One is more evidence that activists and activists alone are being considered at many institutions. The average Bob's Burgers or Jeopardy viewer doesn't care about the talent's politics and isn't looking to punish anyone, but no one is asking the average viewer.

But there are also ramifications of people's careers being destroyed on a whim. If you're a journalist―yes, even an entertainment journalist―there are opportunities to step back and assess, question, criticize. But by and large no one in media is doing that. You won't object to corporate bosses throwing their employees under the bus if you're the bus.

Consider the sugar plums

 

I hesitated before posting this because I thought I might have already done so. Combing through the archives, it seems that I have not done so. Which is hard to believe. Four teens playing one of the highlights from The Nutcracker on marimbas? What's not to like?

Shivering into X-mas weekend

What is it that sailors say? "After the wind the rain"? Well, not today. The rain started last night, and went heavy all morning and into the afternoon. Then about 2:30 it stopped.

(Round the time I met the guy at the bus stop who looked a little like a slacker Rob Reiner and had apparently smoked whatever strain of weed makes you really chatty.)

The wind came afterwards, and a cold wind it is too. The weather widget on my computer says that it's 14 Fahrenheit. Good weather for sleeping if you can stay wrapped up.

New York stories

New York City has been a notorious basket case for longer than I've been alive. How much longer is up for debate. A symbol of American industriousness since around the time of independence, and the financial and cultural capital since the nineteenth century, yes. But for decades it's been beset by varying combinations of crumbling infrastructure, pervasive street crime, runaway expenses, and terrible leadership. 

Through all that, though, the city has maintained a kind of allure. In part it's the traffic accident rubbernecking thing. But aspects of it remain beautiful. It's a real place, and an instantly identifiable one.

I enjoyed the first season of Evil. It's a paranormal horror show that gets a lot of mileage out of keeping plausible deniability about its supernatural aspect. Having a drama about possession assessors from the Catholic Church where one of them is an atheist from a Muslim family is counterintuitive. Anyway, production went on hiatus when everything went on hiatus. When it came back it had switched from CBS to Paramount +. While there have been three seasons now I only recently started watching the second one now after purchasing it from Vudu. (Could have watched it on Amazon Prime but only by subscribing to their Paramount stream. No thanks.)

While the overall tone is consistent with season one, there are a few changes. For one, being out of FCC jurisdiction means characters can swear. What's weird about this is that in the first half of the season, every episode seems to have people shouting "fuck." Then in the back half it stops, like they'd filled their quota. More interestingly Andrea Martin has joined the cast on a recurring basis as a nun. A heroic nun. As a non-Catholic Catholic school attendee I'd rate her performance eerily accurate. 

Again, it's a very New York show. The New York of Rosemary's Baby, after all these years.

I've also started re-reading Don DeLillo's Great Jones Street, a novel set you can guess where. Freewheeling in a deadpan way, it's not one of the DeLillo books that has garnered a lot of mainstream praise. It probably won't join the two novels that have been made into movies. Yet it is one of my favorites.

The book centers on and is narrated by Bucky Wunderlick, a rock star taking an open-ended break after everything spins out of control. Which it continues to do. DeLillo clearly based Bucky on Bob Dylan, but kept a free hand by not doing so too closely. For one thing Bucky is actually a native New Yorker, while Dylan is an émigré from You Betcha country. There's a narrative motion of power slipping into unaccountable places, one which seems prophetic although I think the author was looking around rather than forward.

"Nobody knows me from shit," he said. "But I'm a two-time Laszlo Platakoff Murder Mystery Award nominee. My one-acters get produced without exception at a very hip agricultural college in Arkansas. I'm in my middle years but I'm going stronger than ever. I've been anthologized in hard cover, paperback, and goddamn vellum. I know the writer's market like few people know it. The market is a strange thing, almost a living organism. It changes, it palpitates, it grows, it excretes. It sucks things in and then spews them up. It's a living wheel that turns and crackles. The market accepts and rejects. It loves and kills."

Fancy footwear

For various reasons I've found myself wondering if any other creature aside from horses and donkeys has been fitted out with metal "shoes" the way we do with them. Reason being, equines have these single-toed hooves, and that's why the U-shaped shoes work for them. But the vast majority of hooved mammals are artiodactyls, meaning they have an even number of toes. Cloven hooves, in other words. How would that affect things?

Well, first of all, yes, there is such a thing. There have been shoes made for cattle, mainly oxen. How do you deal with them having two smaller toes instead of one big one? By making two shoes for each foot, natch. They wind up looking a little like quotations marks.

Hotdogs and grandstands

It seems to me that what this country needs more than any one person in the Oval Office is for everyone to chill about who the President is. And to bring a little less gang warfare to politics in general. Ah well, maybe someday.

Rhode Island's Rep. David Cicilline has been getting attention for introducing legislation that would bar former President Donald Trump from holding federal office in the future. Cicilline's statement reads, "Donald Trump very clearly engaged in an insurrection on January 6, 2021 with the intention of overturning the lawful and fair results of the 2020 election. You don’t get to lead a government you tried to destroy."

Of course what Cicilline says Trump "very clearly" did Congress failed to prove during the second impeachment. Hence this end-run. And I would really prefer that my Congressman, who has a law degree from Georgetown U., remember what a bill of attainder is and that the Constitution frowns on them.

Introductory blues

Some years ago, the Ramones played at my college. In the cafeteria, to be specific. It wasn't a big school, so this was a proportionally bigger deal.

Anyway, a guy I knew from the school paper got the assignment of covering the show. As well as hanging out with the band beforehand. I got to the show in time to hear the opening act. They must have been pretty good, because I asked this cub reporter who they were. 

He had no idea. I'm not sure he even knew there was a band opening up, never mind their name.

This is depressingly typical. When I used to read the Boston Globe they'd have music reviews, and it was 50-50 whether the name of the opening act would even make it into the article. And from musicians I've talked to I've gotten word that when you play first the headliner's manager will tell you that you have time to play three songs, don't do any between-song patter.

The Rolling Stones have generally maintained a habit of enlisting only known talent to open on their tours. I think this is the right move. It's only if there are people in town who already have some familiarity with you that you can profit from a gig like that. Someone trying to get their first exposure opening for the Stones won't get it.

Another big bird

 

Theories can change pretty quickly. I was reading a book today on a primate found from the Eocene. The author also talked a little about the diatryma, or gastornis. Very big, and you can see that it had quite a bit of dinosaur heritage. The author described them as a fierce predator, and the book isn't that old. The contemporary sources I've seen online have said it was probably an herbivore. Newer doesn't necessarily mean right, though.

Regardless of what it ate, I wouldn't want to go up against that beak.

Networks and systems

Since I just linked an article from UnHerd a couple of days ago, I'd ordinarily lay off them for a while. But Matthew Crawford doesn't publish very often, and this one is so good.

He starts off writing about things like "No Nut November", which present no great interest to me. My attitude on self-pleasuring is do or don't, but don't keep yapping about it.

But then there's a deep dive into history, specifically choices that were made in restructuring Germany after the war and how the lessons from that were applied to domestic policy. Simply put, once fascism was defeated on the battlefield, that led to a lot of chin stroking about what fascism was and what were its root causes. Not so surprisingly, a lot of theorists got trigger happy.

More surprisingly, rather hard left academics who had escaped from Europe worked in concert with the US government, although this usually wasn't explicit. This really is quite extraordinary. America's policy arms were rabidly anticommunist and pledged to protecting station wagons and ranch houses and other gems of American prosperity. None of this stopped German Marxists from gaining prominence. The Frankfurt School must have been better salesmen than they were given credit for.

So the marriage of the security state and what in general might be called critical theory was set up some time ago. Fully consummated now, of course. Just a hop, skip, and jump to gender theory and antifa. Well, you can see the results.

Poetics

A few centuries ago, “what came naturally” were the prejudices people picked up from their parents and their church; now, the prejudices in question mostly come from schools and the mass media, but the principle is the same.  That’s why the phrase “Just Do It” is a sleazy corporate slogan deployed to sell products.

John Michael Greer is in fine and thoughtful form discussing what happened to poetry over the last hundred years, or more to the point what was done to it. If he is right that the academy has intentionally destroyed its subjects' ability to appreciate and create poetry, well, that would fit a pattern.

I'd note that free verse first took a step toward popularity with Walt Whitman in the 19th century. Free verse predated Whitman by quite a bit, but he brought it into public acclaim. Other practitioners like T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and down the road, Allen Ginsberg followed in the 20th century. But in all these cases―and certainly with the British poet Edith Sitwell―form hadn't really been abandoned. It was there, but hidden. Sound and rhythm still mattered, along with imagery.

At some point―and I think it was a gradual process―a new standard emerged while you could be a poet while just shouting what's on your mind. And no, that just doesn't really work.

Nobody's idea

The idea of swarmism being the chief emergent form of government makes a lot of sense. "Swarmism" is a neologism of course, but can be summed up as technocratic government by no one in particular, or at least no one you can name. Which also means that there's no one to appeal to.

It would suggest that Joe Biden is the first of a kind that will recur in the future. I've held in my mind for a while now the notion that Biden's, ah, cognitive challenges were not an unfortunate eleventh hour surprise, but rather a big part of the reason he was selected. As recently as ten years ago it was a standard expectation that Presidents and major candidates would go out and sell their policies to the widest possible demographic. Take questions, interrogate themselves. But if everything has already been settled by non-democratic means, all this stumping just becomes awkward. There's little way to maintain the fiction that what you, the voter, believes, wants, or even needs has any significance at all.

The widespread school closings that began in 2020 and in some places extended beyond it are a case in point. They did harm to children, as it was obvious they would. The closings didn't stop infections or serve the overall cause of public health. No one really expected them to. But they were necessary in order to reinforce the conception that COVID-19 was an apocalyptic event requiring the cessation of public life. So blue districts closed schools and threw down obstacle courses of righteous sounding rhetoric about privilege and the marginalized.

The tech billionaire who was until recently married to pastel-haired transhumanist pop star Grimes is not necessarily a force for good in all or even most things. NeuraLink, for one, sounds like a horrible means to keep people from ever escaping the world of popup ads and propaganda. But if his governance of Twitter frustrates this kind of shifty technocratic rule, that's a silver lining. Just keep him in his box. (Gates too, obviously.)

Hear them wail

On an errand early this evening I was walking down the hill when I heard the siren of a fire engine. As they do, they leaned on the air horn at the same time. And then came another fire engine, And another. To be honest I lost count when I went inside a store, but there were a lot. Either it was a serious situation or the mother of all prank alarms.

Later on I heard a song playing on the internet that had firetruck sirens in it as well. As you might imagine that messed with my head.

On the keys

I  have a fondness for Debussy among classical composers. Why exactly this is, I'd have a hard time verbalizing, mainly because I enjoy music more than I appreciate it as such. But this piece vindicates me, I think. It has levels. Starts off very lively, gets more contemplative, finds a balance.

Oneiros

I've been writing about dreams. Working on a story about them, or one, or something. It's certainly an interesting topic for fiction. A difficult one, as well. Dreams follow their own logic, which is why they call it "dream logic." You have to adjust your narrative sights.

(guppy swims across tablecloth)

Too good for the average man

In 2021 the American Booksellers Association, a trade association that promotes independent bookstores, , sent out, among a number of other titles, promotional copies of Abigail Shrier's Irreversible Damage. While this is a routine practice, it drew immediate and scathing criticism from trans activists. Immediately, the ABA apologized for this violation, while admitting that "apologies are not enough." The form their penance should take was an ongoing discussion.

Just this past week, London's Wellcome Collection, a museum dedicated to the history of science and medicine, shuttered its longstanding Medicine Man exhibit on the grounds that it "told a global story of health and medicine in which disabled people, black people, indigenous peoples, and people of color were exoticised, marginalized, and exploited—or even missed out altogether.”

These are two separate incidents on different sides of the Atlantic in different fields. But what they and other recent events have in common is that decisions have been made with no input from the general public. Leaders of these institutions are in a private conversation with activists and no one else, regardless of who their decisions affect. Whether this is a matter of affinity or cowardice is up for debate. Except, of course, you know, debate is bad.

Cultural institutions like museums and bookstores are supposed to form the bedrock of civic culture. Civic culture is supposed to be for everyone. But one or both of these premises have been eroded. The institutions don't want to see or hear from anyone outside of their clique. So where does that leave us?

Dee & Dum

Coagulopath has a new post up dealing with two schools of thought known as rockism and poptimism. For the uninitiated, rockism can be attributed to any gasser who claims there's been no good music recorded since 1974. Poptimism holds that music is getting better all the time, just like everything else, but/and that the only worthwhile music is what adheres to current top 40 production standards, whatever they may be.

One problem with criticism in general is that critics often have agendas that don't serve―or in some cases, allow for―creative expression. This is especially true when they have some theory or manifesto to promote. Poptimism and rockism are both basically conformist ideologies with no patience for the strange and unexpected, i.e. where the action actually is. Take note that they exist, then carry on with your business.

Fluid motion

This animation is, per the creator, made out of monotype prints. Monotypes are single prints made from a liquid medium―usually watercolor or ink―being applied to glass or metal. Using them to make a moving image sounds tricky, and I'm sure it is. The animation here is fairly simple, just a bear walking. Could the process be used to do a full storyline? Interesting question. It's an attractive piece, anyway.

Pieces

 

On loan from the library now is The 21st Century Art Book from Phaidon. It's from 2014, so while some things have changed since then (some forever, none for better) it is deep enough into the new century to be somewhat representative. 

The format is simple. Each page has an artwork reproduced on it, along with biographical info about the artist and a description of their work.

I'm looking at the pictures, obviously. Some things don't really translate, in a way you can judge, like videos and performance pieces. And I'm reading the text. But then I'm disregarding it. Looking, thinking, feeling: this is where you get impressions that are worth something. There's subjectivity, some things that hit a responsive chord with you more than others. But that's how to find what things might make a workable aesthetic going forward. Prattle about how so-and-so "deals with issues of gender, exploitation, and performance" and the like doesn't really tell you anything.

(Above: Geoffrey Farmer, The Surgeon and the Photographer)

Open questions

Okay, so I have opinions. Anyone who glances at this blog could probably figure that out. Still, I think it's important to remember that three word sentence: "I don't know." Having a final judgment on everything isn't necessary, or even desirable. Just poring through can be enough.

The eyes, of course, have it

There's something I've noticed, although I'm sure I'm not the first. This is a closeup of a dog's eye.

And this is a closeup of a cat's eye.

Notice that the dog's eye is very similar to a human eye. Larger iris and less white, but the elements are all the same. The cat's eye is something else again. A field of color too big to even be called an iris, really, and a vertically elongated pupil. 

There are dog people and cat people, of course. But regardless of which, if either, they prefer, people tend to be familiar with dogs. They're more intimidated by cats. I wonder if the stranger albeit beautiful eyes have something to do with that.

It's also weird that they diverge like that. They are, of course, more related to each other than to us. (Fun fact: we're in the same superorder as rats and bunnies.) It would make a great story to say that dogs have evolved to look more like us in the longer time that they've been domesticated. But wolves have human-ish eyes as well, so that's not really it.

Herd and scene

Hopefully this essay by Matthew Gasda doesn't get paywalled before you have a chance to read it. Not that I'd necessarily begrudge them, because this one is quite good. 

Gasda is a playwright himself, somewhat avant-garde, so he knows whereof he speaks. Something has gone deeply wrong in the creative fields.

Regimes of biosurveillance, integrated into culture, destroy culture from within. I feel the way about many bookstores that I do about theaters. At least in New York, where I live, they have lost their magic, and are no longer worth lingering in. Covid gave cultural institutions license to act like institutions, to exercise control for the sake of control over whoever comes through the doors, charging more, providing less.

And I think it's worth unpacking exactly where and when things started to slip. So to take another example. McSweeney's Internet Tendency is a site/webzine I always used to enjoy. Filled with leftfield humor pieces and some thoughtful essays, some of which I believe I've linked on this blog. But the last couple of years the tone there has seemed more rigid, obsessed with being right-thinking.

As in so many places, COVID-19 had a deadening effect. But the problem started earlier. I think for a lot of artistic venues and ventures it was a perfect storm of Trump, COVID, and the post-Floyd racial reckoning, all of which exacerbated some kind of malaise that was already in the air. Certainly when Trump hatred went from an eccentric New York hobby―as it had been pretty much since the disco era―to a national mission we all got sucked into some horrible Manhattan vortex.

Beyond that...Well, from my personal perspective, I'm an appreciator of the strange, the quirky, the―to use the term again―avant-garde. And it would be nice to think that other people who appreciate these things, as well as all those who create them, also have an appreciation for the free, spontaneous side of human nature. But it's become ever more clear that artistic folk are quite capable of being conformist, even authoritarian. And when you bring administrators into the picture, well...

It's also bad, I think, to have a "no enemies to the left" policy, since you have no idea what will be considered "left" in five minutes.

Mired

The prestige-y thing to do in TV now is serialization. When you hear shows being talked about, it's almost always in the context of an ongoing plot. Doing something different every week is déclassé. Which is counterintuitive in a way because now we have a couple of generations whose attention span is taxed by a three minute YouTube video, but there are always exceptions. 

I think there are severe shortcomings to this approach. There's something appealing about, say, Columbo facing a new killer each week. If this week's episode appeals to you then you can see if the writers can match it next week. If not, at least there's a chance for something better. Heavily serialized TV, by contrast, says, "Is this working for you? Don't care, we're sticking with it."

That's one of the things I've thought about watching The Devil's Hour, a British thriller series that in some ways feels like an attempt to do True Detective: UK. I started watching because it features Peter Capaldi, who was Peter Riegert's boyish sidekick in Local Hero years ago and has more recently starred on Doctor Who. There's a certain sacrilegious frisson to his character, the concept basically being, "What if the Doctor was a violent drifter with some intense beliefs?" He doesn't show up that much, though.

The cast is overall good, but not enough to cover up the holes. Lead actress Jessica Raine, for example, plays a social worker who's also screwing her ex-husband in an attempt to make him love their autistic son. This doesn't work, and how could it? The fact that she seems to think it will if she keeps trying makes her look dense.

But the problem is really how the drama game is played now. You have to watch every episode just to find out what's going on, and if enough people sign on for this maybe you'll get another season to be baffled about something else.

Flying

 

Interesting story behind this song. Paul Simon has mostly written both the music and lyrics of his own songs. "El Condor Pasa" is a very rare case of his providing lyrics for a previously existing melody. He heard the Peruvian group Los Incas playing it and was taken with the melody, for good reason. He provided English lyrics in collaboration with them.

Later he got sued by the family of the original composer, Daniel Alomia Robles, for not crediting him. Simon had been under the impression that it was a traditional tune, the author lost in the mists of time. 

It all got settled amicably. It's good that he got the music to a wider audience, any which way.

Web sight

 

Now here's something I just saw tonight, and don't at all regret the time spent.

A lawyer (Edmond O'Brien) shows tenacity in a case against a wealthy businessman (Vincent Price.) The businessman, impressed, hires the lawyer. But not as a lawyer, as a bodyguard. Apparently there's a man out there who just got out of prison for stealing from the company and he blames poor widdle Vincent for ruining his life? Can you believe such a silly thing? Anyway, the lawyer finds himself killing this man in a shootout, which rouses the suspicion of his detective friend. (William Bendix). And he needs to pump the businessman's among-other-things secretary (Ella Raines) to get to the bottom of the case.

This is the basic plot of The Web, a 1947 Universal Pictures thriller. Price had already mastered the balancing act of being charming and nasty. The rest of the cast is quite good too. O'Brien is obviously pulling Bogart mannerisms, but it works for the part. It unfolds in a very tight, stylish way as well. Free on Archive.org. 

Can such things be?

For whatever reason―my thought processes are quirky―I Googled Arcade Fire today. After I put in the search I was reminded that their freakishly tall front man is under some scrutiny and, dare I say it, opprobrium right now. Over what? I may have read somewhere and forgotten exactly what it is, but I don't find it interesting enough to look into again.

But anyway, what it was that reminded me of this was seeing a headline that asked the question (wording as best as I can remember it) "Is it possible to be a poet and a scumbag?" 

Now, there's a lot you could say about this question. What I would say is that it sounds like something you'd ask if you could number all the poets you've heard of on one hand. Do any reading on the marriage of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes and it's impossible to route for either of them because they were both objectively awful. The world would have been a much poorer place without their work, though.

Winging it

Penguins are native not just to Antarctica but to the Southern Ocean as a whole. The  people Māori of New Zealand have long been familiar with them. Another interesting tidbit about them is that anatomically speaking, they're not flightless. Not airborne, but their motion in the water has more in common with flying than what we consider swimming. As Art Wolfe puts it in his book Penguins, Puffins, And Auks: 

The fact that penguins fly through the water, and do not just paddle, is easily confirmed by a glance at their skeletal structure and musculature. Flying birds are the most specialized of all invertebrates [sic]. To provide support for the wings, their backbones have been fused into nearly rigid rods, to anchor the large muscles needed to move those wings, and to keep the center of gravity low in the body, their breastbones have been provided with an immense, jutting, blade-shape addition to the sternum known as the keel. Truly flightless birds such as the ostrich and the emu have lost their keels, or at best have only rudimentary ones. Penguins' keels are large and solid.

Penguins are, of course, very well adapted to where they live―while not exclusively Antarctic, they do favor cooler climates―and to how they live. Their grace in the water demonstrates that.

Balmy

It's gotten above 60F during the day the last couple of days. If the weather widget on my laptop is to be believed it's 66F now. It feels cooler than that, but the real cool days of autumn are taking their time getting here.

One thing I can be pleased about is that the high-allergy period seems to have passed. Hope I didn't just jinx it.

How nice

This is an excellent article by Mary Harrington. The main topic is an Atlantic article proposing (cajoling?) amnesty for COVID maximalists. While I may have more to say on that subject later on, I currently want to direct your attention to the final sentence. 

"Kindness is everything" actually is one of the adages listed on those lawn signs that are ubiquitous in blue states and cities. And a lot of people dot their Instagram/Twitter bios and Facebook signatures with "Be kind" and instructions of that nature.

Adopting "kindness" as your guiding political principle seems unwise to me. If everything you believe in can be reduced to kindness, you're justified in doing just about anything, to promote it, right? Pretty soon your allegiance to kindness relieves you of the responsibility of actually being kind in your daily interactions. Bombs away.

So keep mum and do something.

Hats off to (Roy) G. Biv

 

Seen above are a representation of the visible light spectrum and the color wheel. They overlap, but there are a couple of telling differences.

For one thing, we pick up as children that the three primary colors are red, blue, and yellow. And when you're mixing finger paints or crayons, that certainly checks out. Then when you're older, at least if you take a physics class, you find out that green is the other primary color, and yellow is one of the secondary colors. It's kind of a shock.

But that's on top of what may be an even stranger phenomenon. The color wheel tells us that red and violet/purple are right next to each other, aptly enough since there's a red component to purple. But red and violet lie at opposite ends of the spectrum. How can this be?

The answer comes down to the difference between sensation and perception. The spectrum is an expression of the frequencies of visible light, which may be sensed by the cones in our eyes. But frequencies aren't something that affects us, at least not in a way we know about. So our perceptual brains modify the information in a way we find more useful and pleasing.

One interesting hypothetical: What if our vision were altered so that we could see a low-frequency color in the ultraviolet spectrum, but not red? I believe it would still fill that niche on the wheel between orange and violet, in place of the absent red. But would it be red? No. For one thing, because of where its higher place on the spectrum, it would present to us as a cool, receding color rather than a warm, advancing one.

Maxwell plays the fool again

I just...

Look, at this point, the Pelosis are millionaires many times over. She's the second in line to become President.  They don't just have a nice three-bedroom in a Tenderloin walk-up. Their home must have unfathomable amounts of security.

So if some peanut in his skivvies barged into their house toting a hammer, somebody's getting fired. A few somebodies, really. But I have major doubts that's what happened.

That's a lotta marinara

A couple of years ago I tried watching Dario Argento's The Bird With the Crystal Plumage and wound up bailing pretty early. Tonight I gave Argento another go, watching the original Suspiria. I don't know that giallo is my scene, but I'll give the movie this: It's nuts, and there's a kind of commitment in it being just this nuts.

Jessica Harper plays a new student at a ballet school in, I think, Germany. It's a (really gory) horror flick, so there's a killer and there are witches and some other awful stuff. But just getting around the town and dealing with the people feels like enough of an ordeal. I suspect the movie was sponsored by the Americans Stay The Fuck Out of Europe Council.

The Goblins' musical score is really hyperactive, with rinky-dink keyboards paired with proto-black metal vocals.

You know. For kids.

In recent years it's often seemed that left wing ideology has gained its greatest power―or at least institutional acceptance―just as it's lost touch with human values. And that's probably not a coincidence. It wouldn't be the first time those two traits have gone together.

As Matt Taibbi notes in the preamble to this interview, Tim Robbins has frequently drawn fire for his political outspokenness. And he was and remains a man of the left. But he has his own values above political fashion. I'd heard about his opposition to the vaccine requirements held by the big acting unions before, and this is an opportunity to find out more of where he's coming from. Quite refreshing.

The designer t-shirt gang

So protesting by destroying, damaging, or at least threatening art is definitely a thing now. For the Earth and the climate, sure. The relationship of protests to topic is rather Underpants Gnome, but there you go.

I've heard it suggested that the real purpose is to provide an excuse to pull these works of art out of public view. How surprising would this be, really? If there's one thing that unites CEOs, nonprofits, and the activist class it's the belief that regular people shouldn't have nice things. Now to do something about it.

The why of science

I came to this blog post through Tara Ann Thieke's Twitter feed. It raises some questions and provides some context that I've thought about and read about before, but puts it all together in an original and thoughtful way.

Essentially the question comes down to what science is now? Is anyone still practicing it? And if not, if they're doing something else and calling it science, what exactly is it they're doing?

The younger generation of scientists are like children who have been raised by wolves. They have learned the techniques but have no feel for the proper aims, attitudes and evaluations of science. What little culture they have comes not from science but from bureaucrats: they utterly lack scientific culture; they do not talk science, instead they spout procedures.

It has now become implicitly accepted among the mass of professional ‘scientists’ that the decisions which matter most in science are those imposed upon science by outside forces: by employers (who gets the jobs, who gets promotion), funders (who gets the big money), publishers (who gets their work in the big journals), bureaucratic regulators (who gets allowed to do work), and the law courts (whose ideas get backed-up, or criminalized, by the courts). It is these bureaucratic mechanisms that constitute ‘real life’ and the ‘bottom line’ for scientific practice. The tradition has been broken.

Viewed in this way, science is a microcosm of human thought in general. Society, or at least a big visible portion, has enshrined obedience as the prime value in a way not previously seen in modern times. Just the basic human ability to reason and create has been denigrated of late. The cargo cult worship of AI is sufficient evidence of that.

Anyway, many such cases.

No service

Web surfing recently I saw an article on Stephen King's Salem's Lot and the difficulties of adapting it (as the studio keeps shifting the release date of an upcoming movie). It's not a bad piece and I certainly don't want to pick on it given the paltry sums that online entertainment pieces tend to bring in. But a passage stuck out to me:

Salem’s Lot also, in the final analysis, needs to be a period piece like Scott Derrickson’s recent The Black Phone. In the current age of smartphones, GPS, internet, and social media, there’s no way that the population of an entire American town, no matter how small, could disappear into thin air without the outside world noticing.

How long have I been hearing variations on the argument that horror and thriller plots are obsolete because cell phones? If this observation were human it could vote, join the army, and―this is the good news―go into a bar for a drink. So I guess that's why nothing bad or weird ever happens anymore.

Salem's Lot is about an ancient vampire traveling with a fussy antique dealer as his Renfield and how they cause havoc in an already soapy Maine town. It's far-fetched by definition. I'm not sure how putting it in the present would strain your suspension of disbelief any further.

Deliverance

Recently my building got a new lock on the door, so we all got new keys to get in. Nice looking key, too. Only problem was, at least initially, the Post Office didn't get a copy of this key. Meaning there was more than a week that we got no mail.

This agitated me, although I didn't put it together at first. I thought it was just me and the PO somehow thought I had moved or died. Eventually I figured it out.

A very nice and savvy neighbor took care of things, so we have service again, hallelujah.

Sick of...

I'm now reading Ivan Illich's Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health. It's not the first book I've read by Illich, but it holds a special place, I think, in terms of his coming into his own as a writer and thinker. In a number of places you could even call it prophetic. A passage:

Diagnosis always intensifies stress, defines incapacity, imposes inactivity, and focuses apprehension on non-recovery, on uncertainty, and on one's dependence on future medical findings, all of which amounts to a loss of autonomy for self-definition. It also isolates a person in a special role, separates him from the normal and healthy, and requires submission to the authority of specialized personnel. Once a society organizes for a preventive disease hunt, it gives epidemic proportions to diagnosis. This ultimate triumph of therapeutic culture turns the independence of the average healthy person into an intolerable form of deviance.

In the long run the main activity of such an inner-directed systems society leads to the phantom production of life expectancy as a commodity. By equating statistical man with biologically unique men, an insatiable demand for finite resources is created. The individual is subordinated to the greater "needs" of the whole, preventive procedures become compulsory, and the right of the patient to withhold consent to his own treatment vanishes as the doctor argues that he must submit to diagnosis, since society cannot afford the burden of curative procedures that would be even more expensive.

In these two paragraphs you can see the root of some things that would grow to immense proportions. The ability of a single disease to dominate the entire public agenda as long as government favored scientists choose to make it the top priority, perhaps for more than two years. Countries with legalized euthanasia getting trigger happy with it. The driver of much of this is the increased power of the pharmaceutical industry, which in many cases becomes untouchable. This is a danger Illich saw coming as well.

2 animal matters

The topic of breed specific legislation (BSL) seems to come up a few times per year. Pit bulls are generally the target, and they're already banned in a few places. Up for debate, I guess. In my experience they're not the dogs with the shortest fuses. They just have strong jaws. There might be a few different ways of dealing with that.

Anyway, this is a clip of deer standing around, then running. I found it soothing.

Flying colors

This may seem like a weird thing for me to blog about―or not, it's kind of hard to tell from the inside. But I have to express a certain admiration for the Benjamin Moore. They sell paint. A lot of different colors of paint. The site allows you the chance to see what each color looks like on its own, and then in the context of a room. It's quite illustrative.

Granted, the décor of each room is more spare than anyone who isn't a serial-killing stockbroker is likely to keep in their home. But we're talking about Platonic ideals here.

Centerpiece

The area behind the skating rink was a developer's crown jewel. It's at the entrance to Waterplace Park, which can still be downright pretty. This little nook has the locations for 3-4 restaurants, which have been through various names/owners, but used to be pretty busy. The number being used now? A nice round zero.

But going through it today I found a nip bottle with a burn hole in it from being used as a freebasing pipe, so at least someone is making use of the area.

Ask us about our open hostility policy

What do you do or say when the masks come off, when the monster reveals itself? Don't they usually do this because they figure you can't escape? Isn't the premise that you're about to get eaten either way?

That seems to be the thinking of Adam Posen. Posen represents the Peterson Institute which, judging from its website, is one of those think tanks where thinking goes to die. Speaking at a recent CATO Institute gathering, Posen said that the concern a few souls have with keeping manufacturing on American soil is just a “fetish for keeping white males with low education in the powerful positions they are in.”

Now obviously white males aren't the only people engaged in American manufacturing, and at this point may not even make up the majority, but never mind that. Never mind also that the great power that comes with these "powerful positions" boils down to feeding your family and maybe being able to put away something for the future.

No, Posen knew that his words would spread around the globe, accompanied by however much disbelief. And to those listening he wanted to make clear―on behalf of capitalism's brain trust―that he could make his case using all the fashionable woke lingo. It seems rather a missed opportunity that he didn't say anything about incels, but I suppose he has to leave something for the encore.

All the people

To say the least, I was not fond of the COVID lockdowns, and am hoping that the past tense is appropriate here. But there was sort of an upside in that they cleared out the buses, meaning buses were also more likely to be on time. Now buses are back to being crowded, and also in some cases being twenty minutes behind schedule.

The good news, thanks to the federal courts, is that you don't have to wear masks on them anymore. Put that together with all the other stuff and it would be a capital ordeal.

Cubed

I have to admit not being a big fan of iced coffee. Iced caffeinated beverages in general, really. One of two things tend to happen. Either I drink the stuff with flavor and then have half a cup full of ice to get rid of. Or maybe I draw the drinking out long enough for the ice to melt, but then the beverage is watery. Drinking water is very good and important, but you don't have to spring for an ice latte to do it.

Only reason I bring this up is that the weather is getting cooler, and I still see a lot of people toting around iced coffee. And I'm sure I'll still see a lot in January. Are they trying to fool their bodies into thinking it's still summer? Fine if they want to do that, but I'll pass.

An idea whose tine has come

 

The world's second-largest fork resides in Springfield, Missouri. No idea what you'd eat with it. But I have to like it. There's no profound message to it. They just liked the idea of having a huge fork in the middle of town. They didn't give up on it when the restaurant it was part of went under. And they weren't discouraged when a city in Oregon built an even taller fork. Which I'm sure is quite a story in its own right.

"Utopia" is Greek for "no place"

If you watch enough old movies and TV shows you know how the office of a successful businessman was supposed to look. Wood paneling―perhaps mahogany―and heavy wood desk―perhaps teak. Shelves filled with Great Books, although he might be too much of a philistine to have actually read them. You almost always see a globe. There may be a replica statue as well, and certainly some serious art hanging on the wall. 

I could go on, but my points are these: This is obviously an aspirational image. And it's an obsolete one. It's impossible to imagine an executive in the year 2022 spinning a globe, stopping it with one finger and saying, "Our new franchise will be opening here, in Tanzania." 

The image of a successful go getter is now a man or sometimes a woman with a phone and a nice suit and a phone and not much else. They'll work on a plane flat surface, although that surface may be made of expensive stuff. The computer might just be a monitor, the CPU being carried in some case or bag. A corner office only means a better view of the dystopian landscape outside.

Our grand capitalist classes aren't preserving anything. They're nihilists.

Unwinding spool

As I have recently come to expect from Sam Kriss, this is a witty and well-written piece. And some of the ideas that are contained herein are things I had been thinking about for a bit.

You know, secretly, even if you’re pretending not to, that this thing is nearing exhaustion. There is simply nothing there online. All language has become rote, a halfarsed performance: even the outraged mobs are screaming on autopilot. Even genuine crises can’t interrupt the tedium of it all, the bad jokes and predictable thinkpieces, spat-out enzymes to digest the world. ‘Leopards break into the temple and drink all the sacrificial vessels dry; it keeps happening; in the end, it can be calculated in advance and is incorporated into the ritual.’ Online is not where people meaningfully express themselves; that still happens in the remaining scraps of the nonnetworked world. It’s a parcel of time you give over to the machine.

I've thought for a while that to the extent the web had any vitality to it was because it was inefficient and disorganized. No one had really taken charge, so the talking was done by people who felt like talking. The fact that it all seems to be running on a script now probably has pushed some people away, never to come back.

One might ask what we'll do when the Internet is no longer around to connect us. All I can say is I have severe doubts that that is what it's been doing. 

Just before

I have a strong feeling that I'll sleep well tonight. Mostly because of the powerful drowsiness coursing through my veins right now. Wait, that sounds like I'm on heroin, doesn't it? Well, a few times before I've blogged at or past the point of incoherence. This time it's just awkward metaphors.

אני אוהב תעלומה

Time for a good amateur sleuth novel! And when is it not?

I'd heard of Harry Kemelman's Rabbi David Small novels, but hadn't read any before. It's possible the somewhat gimmicky title format (____day the Rabbi Did X) put me off. But I eventually succumbed and have been reading the first of the Rabbi novels, Friday the Rabbi Slept Late.

It's interesting to compare and contrast with G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories. Judaism and Catholicism have different philosophies, of course. At one point Rabbi Small discusses the way the afterlife isn't central to Jews with Sgt. Lanigan, the Irish Catholic detective who's sort of the series' secondary protagonist. In addition Small is much younger than Fr. Brown here, and still sometimes prone to errors in judgment. And some differences may stem from Kemelman having grown up in the Jewish Faith, while from what I recall Chesterton was a later convert to Catholicism.

The story is gripping. A young maid (that's what they call her, although to me she seems more like a nanny) is murdered, and also happens to be pregnant. The fictional setting of Barnard's Crossing is a small town, but it's situated near Lynn, which is itself a suburb of Boston, so it feels like it could be a real place.

Pre and post

The downtown post office in Providence looks pretty cool. Don't know when it was built, but it has personality. One thing it's got going for it.

Only has service from 8-2 on weekdays, though. Go in after 2PM with an already stamped letter and you can send it, but if you need any packaging and/or additional postage you're out of luck. According to a sign this started in April 2020. So cuts and changes they made during the almighty pandemic? No apparent plans to change back.

Island living

Just a moment to appreciate the beauty and weirdness of nature. Tuataras are a holdover from a much older age of reptiles. How unusual they are in that context I don't know. Having a subcutaneous eye that no one ever sees seems pretty unique.

The zookeeper who addresses us does seem to have a nice gentle touch.

Pacifier

There's an ad that sometimes plays before YouTube videos. A bunch of people are boarding a plane. An announcement comes over the PA that there's a surcharge for wi-fi. Everybody in line melts down, saying that there's work they need to get into that only exists in the cloud, yadda yadda.

It seems like a prime opportunity to tell these people to breathe. You can survive a three hour flight without Internet service. But it's an ad for a telecom, so that's not the way they go.

Give me a country where I can be free

Earlier in this century I took a great deal of interest in the PBS documentary series Art:21.The makers profiled artists in the act of creating and let them talk about how and why they did what they did. It was illuminating and fun.

The show was (and remains) underwritten by a number of nonprofits and NGOs, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This foundation, as is not particularly surprising, had a lot to do with the international COVID-19 response, which is still reverberating. 

To be clear, I haven't started boycotting the show because of that. Since I was only watching on DVDs borrowed from the library it wouldn't be much of a boycott. And while I lost interest in it that's mainly because the later seasons got drier, doing away with the goofy celeb intros. Still, I wonder if at some level they were promoting some kind of Great Reset agenda. In the last set I borrowed an artist in Mexico City pureed a bunch of bugs and ate them on toast. (What else does he use that blender for?)

Still, this show did help familiarize me with the work of Ida Applebroog, Matthew Ritchie, John Baldessari, and Rackstraw Downes, so I can't really complain.

Odd tales

Right now I'm reading Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day, the first collection―of two, so far―by Ben Loory.

Loory's a new writer to me. I read a story by him in a horror anthology recently and was intrigued by it, so I figured I'd check out more. So is he a horror writer? Some of his stories go in that direction, but a lot don't. The book's cover features a tentacle holding a sign on which the latter half of the title is printed. An indicator of eldritch Lovecraftian terrors? No, the story it refers to is about an octopus―it's called "The Octopus"―but it's rather sweet. 

In this vein the stories vary from scary to funny to sentimental to just weird. Loory follows where the ideas take him. He's enviably unblocked.

Paws to reflect

Downtown today I saw a lady walking a cat on a leash. Nice looking grey cat. Not something you see every day. And obviously I wasn't the only one who noticed. The woman holding the leash let two others pet the cat. The cat's look could best be described as "grudging." I get it. 

My educated guess is that dog parks don't have a feline equivalent, though.

Rumblings

At breakfast today I sat near this group. Three tables pulled together to make one long Wayne Manor-ish table, filled with five nuclear families. The parents were millennials, and it may have been the first time in some time that they had all gotten together.

I didn't track all their conversations, of course, but I did notice when they started talking about school. One woman asked why, at this point, her kids have to wear masks in school when the teachers don't. It's a good question. If I were a teacher―and I have friends who teach at both elementary and secondary levels―I'd want to get in front of this question.

I'd also take from this exchange and a few others I've noticed that women aren't necessarily that taken in by safetyism. That may be women's role in institutions, but on their own they're just as likely to seek balance between safety and other values.

Issues

My local library keeps Rolling Stone in stock. I tend not to bother with it, though. Whatever glories lay in its past are truly past. 

One thing I noticed a couple of years ago. Turn to the record review section. There's the lead review, longish, but not out of control like when they had Lester Bangs writing for them. Then there's a second, shorter review. And that's it. Two reviews, the second rather perfunctory. But that's symptomatic. While as recently as ten years ago, culture was king, now it's a sideshow to politics. Which itself has been folded into the entertainment industry. "Show business for ugly people" indeed.

But man, at least The New Yorker still runs cartoons.

Faith misplaced

I'll be brief here, but this piece is fairly on-target about the deference afforded Black Lives Matter. BLM in the main acts as a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval for corporations, which seems to be a very lucrative business. Ali is also right that the policies they support in many cases harm the people they're (allegedly) supposed to help.

The writer River Page has referred to poor whites in America as "political dalits," and it's true that the establishment's hostility to low-status whites is so open as to lack plausible deniability. In the case of poor and working class blacks, things get weirder and more passive-aggressive. Black lives are so important that after George Floyd millions of Instagram influencers left black squares on their accounts for the day. (If you don't understand the previous sentence, count your blessings.) And yet look at something like the Pritzker-approved bail reform in Illinois. Running up the number of serious felonies for which the authorities have to let you go with just a wink and a promise you won't run, it only benefits black people if you equate them with felons. It's people in poor neighborhoods, yes a huge number of them non-white, who are going to suffer from decisions like this. And yes, they know.

Musing in four colors

I've read/heard a few famous men saying that they read a lot of comics as kids but stopped when they hit their teens and discovered girls. This is probably a dated concept now. Maybe in the 50s and early 60s reading comics hurt your chances with the opposite sex, but I doubt it's much of a factor now.

After weaving in and out a few times, I did pretty much give up on mainstream comic books. It wasn't because of girls. It was because comic companies by and large weren't producing work that really grabbed me. There are always talented people working in the field, but the companies―and if you need reminding, the two biggest companies are subdivisions of much larger conglomerates―set editorial policy. Since comic stories and big budget movie stories have merged, the emphasis is always on scale rather than doing anything interesting with plot and character. And the art winds up looking rushed and anonymous a lot of the time too.

At some point it's better to imagine from the next room.

今、私たちは料理をしています！

(tr: Now we're cooking!)

I watched Tampopo tonight. Not real heavy on plot, or at least the simple plot isn't the main attraction. There are some great setups, though. Like, the hero fights a bully, so the bully reforms and agrees to do interior decorating for the heroine. You don't see that in every movie.

Also a reminder on how in Japan ramen is treated as a real food. I know there are Asian restaurants here that do the same thing, but my experience of ramen is as 40-plastic-wrapped noodles that tasted good enough going down but which I often regretted around 2AM. 

There is a turtle snuff scene in the movie. If you have a pet turtle, proceed with caution on both your behalf.

Signal language

Today I dropped in at a bakery to buy a loaf of bread. I saw one on the shelf I figured I could use. Only problem was there was no one at the counter. In the kitchen, yes, but not out where they could see customers.

I tried making some noise. If I were more aggressive I would have made even more noise, the angry kind, although I'm not sure this would have helped. Were I more passive I would have left and tried to pick up bread somewhere else.

Which I started to do, but on the way out I flicked a light switch up and down. It didn't effect the lights out in the store, but it might have done something back in the kitchen. Which is why the story has a happy ending, maybe.

Yeah yeah yeah

This writer engages with the question of whether the Beatles can be considered high art. The way I see it there are two questions hiding within this one.

We do, I believe, need a concept of high art. It is nigh impossible to conceive of enduring values and a world that both precedes us and will outlast us if we do not appreciate cultural work from the past. And it makes sense to have high standards for this level of art.

But while high art matters, it's also necessary to have a living culture. Nothing great can come from a time and place if nothing is coming from it at all. So the great, the good, the ephemeral all have their place.

Where do the Beatles fit in? Well their work has, to a decent extent, already stood the test of time. They were ambitious as musicians and composers, but regardless of how high they aspired they always knew they were creating pop songs. So I feel confident that they'll continued to be remembered. As what? I'm not entirely sure.

Speaking of lasting, Gordon says that his students also pointed to Pink Floyd as something that could potentially be considered high art. Today I saw Pink Floyd graffiti at a bus stop. I'm curious in what context the tagger first encountered their work. 

I also often see graffiti of Achewood characters. Not sure where that fits in.

Had me going for a second

 

The other night I thought of the above song. Thought of it, but didn't know the name. I was pretty sure it was on Sandinista!, but that album has a lot of tracks. So I tried Googling by selected lyrics. No luck. Nothing at all. And as far fetched as it seems, I did idly wonder for a little bit if this was a false memory, something related to the Mandela effect.

As it turned out the reason I couldn't find it by the lyrics was that I was remembering a phrase as "don't pray for your life" when it's actually "don't beg for your life." Cutting out the "don't pray" part and putting quotes around what I could remember brought me the results.

Something this elaborate? If it were a fake memory that would make me a borderline schizophrenic who could write songs like Joe Strummer. Talk about good news/bad news!

Tough times

The Avon Cinema is a deco movie house on Providence's East Side. I hadn't seen a movie there for what has to be more than two years. They still give out rarish currency like $2 bills and Kennedy half-dollars as change. They still play Depression Era slow dance music before the previews start. It's both eerie and comforting to see how little has changed, even though I know it's more a matter of changing things back for appearance's sake.

What I saw today was Emily the Criminal. It's a movie about a woman who has the common millennial problems: student loan debt, dead-end job, having to live with roommates she barely knows. But on top of that you also have previous felony convictions for DUI and assault. And she's the kind of person who will agree to have one drink and wind up in a crowd in the john doing blow. So you have a protagonist who's in a bad spot because of past bad decisions, has the ability to keep on making bad decisions, but also enough determination to maybe make it anyway. If that sounds to you like a film noir hero, you win the kewpie doll. 

Emily works as a gig economy food delivery driver. She really wants to be an artist, and has some talent. She also has a friend who talks about getting her a job at her chic advertising agency. Her friend talks about a lot of things. But if that doesn't work, Emily is totally prepared to take part in a credit card scheme. Among other things. 

Aubrey Plaza, who plays Emily, has features that could have made her a movie star 100 years ago: big rolling eyes, bee-stung lips, nice hair. She's done well in comedy, playing sweetly rebellious characters. This isn't that, though. Regardless of what tough spot she's in, she never comes off as pathetic. She can be damned scary, when you get down to it.

Not so freethinkers

Theism and atheism are different ways of interpreting the same reality. Not necessarily a simple binary. Believing or not believing in God doesn't in itself make you smarter than someone who believes the opposite. But―and I'm sure I've said this before―the belief that atheism is in itself a mark of intelligence is a self-negating prophecy. Dummies lazily flock to it because aligning yourself with the smart set is easier than thinking for yourself.

That's something to think about when considering recent comments made by Sam Harris, the morality of covering up hypothetical child corpses being one of them.* Harris isn't stupid by any means, but neither is he immune from being misled by intellectual shortcuts. And that's true of other New Atheists as well. Christopher Hitchens―about whom we're just supposed to remember the good stuff―went from unofficial prosecutor of Bill Clinton to advocate for George W. Bush, apparently not noticing that the two men were the same product marketed to slightly different consumer blocs. And COVID-19 has revealed that Richard Dawkins is unable or unwilling to scrutinize scientific authorities the way he does religious ones. To the extent New Atheism was treated as a philosophical game changer, it reflects the myside bias of journalists.

*If the prospect of a second Trump term was like an asteroid hurtling towards Earth, does that make his first term half an asteroid? The dinosaurs were pussies.

Lovely Ludwig Van

 

I wonder when and how people first discovered that the rims of glasses could be tuned to play different musical notes. Okay, so probably a long time after we discovered that wolves could be trained to play fetch. Still, it's pretty cool. Saw a player at close range in New Orleans once.

That was Beethoven, so your inner Schroeder should dig it.

Stuff that dreams are made of

I just watched The Cheap Detective tonight. It's a whodunit parody written by Neil Simon, and Peter Falk plays a comedy amalgam of 2-3 Humphrey Bogart characters. 

The plot concerns...Nah, I'm not gonna go into that. Anyway, I laughed a few times, but I'm not sure it's really a success. In the early scenes, it's an off-kilter parody of The Maltese Falcon, and that works pretty well. But then after about twenty minutes it decides to send up Casablanca as well, and somehow it never recovers. I can't say it gets too silly, because it was maximally silly to begin with. Which is a shame, because Falk is a great lead, and Louise Fletcher is a surprisingly game comic actress.

The dance sensation that swept the nation (or not)

Every period has its fads. The frug. The Pet Rock. Fainting.

Go back about five years to 2017. What was the hot, hip, happening thing then? Apparently, Nazi Punching

There was an obvious problem here. While punching Nazis had historical precedent, at least in four-color comics, America didn't and doesn't have a large enough population of Nazis to make this really sporting. We had Milo Yiannopoulis, a gay guy with a jackboot fetish. Also Richard Spencer, an even gayer guy with a jackboot fetish, and one who got a highly publicized sock in the jaw. 

But serious, hard-core, unambiguous fascists? It's one of those areas where demand outstripped supply. And apparently still does. A large, clearly-marked enemy exists in the Twitter-Facebook fever dream, but not so much in real life.

Like cats and dogs

People speak of seals "barking." The comparison to dogs is obvious. There seems to be a reason for that. What taxonomists call the pinniped order is also part of the caniformia suborder of the carnivores. So they do actually bear a relation to dogs.

There's no corresponding class of semiaquatic feliforms, though. Guess you'd hear a lot of loud meows on the seashore if there were.

The M was a faux initial

Cyril M. Kornbluth was a member of the Futurians, a loose-knit group of science fiction creators that also included Isaac Asimov and Damon Knight. He lived from 1923 to 1958, but if his life was short his career was productive.

Listen to my sounding all knowledgeable, but I had never actually read Kornbluth before. Now I'm reading The Best of C.M. Kornbluth, edited by his friend Frederik Pohl, another Futurian. It includes "The Marching Morons", which is probably his best known story. It posits that over time stupid people swamp smart people because of their relative fertility rates. A little pat, but not a terrible fictional premise. It's often thought of as an inspiration for Mike Judge's Idiocracy, and contains a game show so similar to one in Robocop that I have to wonder if Paul Verhoeven had to pay royalties.

Some of the more obscure stories are quite worthy as well. "With These Hands" is a melancholy story about a sculptor in a future where his art is no longer appreciated. The story's dominant art form, stereopantograph, seems to combine three technologies undreamt of in Kornbluth's lifetime: AI, CAD, and 3D printing. A lighter work is "Gomez", about a teenage Puerto Rican dishwasher who's also an off the charts math genius. He and his brain become government property, and how he deals with that situation is heartening and entertaining.

Out for a walk

I like to highlight quirky works of animation now and then. If you're a regular reader you probably know this. I think this counts in a low key way. The movement of the simple figure along the somewhat more complex photographic background has a soothing effect, as does the somewhat Zen-ish narration.

Playing the pandemic to win

There's a review here of Deborah Birx's new book. I'm already fuzzy on the title, so I'll be thinking of it as If I Did It. Birx is probably the official most responsible for making COVID-era America look as much like China as she could make it, which was never enough to her satisfaction.

In an excerpt from Scott Atlas's own account of the same period Senger quotes Atlas as saying that Jared Kushner had been assured Birx was "100 percent MAGA." After that she had a free hand for an alarming length of time. That kind of gullibility is why I'd prefer Trump not be reelected or renominated, although Joe Biden and Merrick Garland seem determined to bring him back.

Just add...

Seasonal water intake is interesting. Probably most of us drink a little more during the summer. There's also the matter of at which temperature you drink it. It would be an exaggeration to say that I'll just let an ice cube melt in my throat, but I do tend during these dog days to drink it straight out of the fridge.

During the winter, by contrast, I can make a glass last for a couple of hours. There was a winter when I forewent putting my water pitcher in the fridge at all, but that turned out to be a bad idea.

QWERTY troubles

These might sound familiar.

You try to use the letter "A" and hit the wrong key, so everything thereafter is capitalized.

You try to use quotation marks and skip to the next line.

You make an attempt to backspace and erase some mistake, but the mistake is still there, followed by a string of equals signs=================

I'm prone to all of these and more, especially on a small keyboard. I tend to discover the error at some point, though.

For I am a jealous god

Today in "Authoritarian Mainstream Culture Killing the Counterculture and Dancing Around in Its Skin":

First Avenue, a storied Twin Cities nightclub, booked beloved comic and perennial cancellation target Dave Chappelle to do a set. Local wokesters, including some First Avenue employees, broke out into the usual hysterics. First Avenue cancelled the show with the kind of groveling apology that's also become familiar.

There's a kind of activist―really the dominant kind today, at least in terms of attention received―who's entire modus operandi can be boiled down to "me or him"? Do they actually conceive of life as a zero sum game? Their own portion of it, at least. So activism is geared towards making things more restrictive, punitive. What's old cannot be allowed to stand, especially if there are people who still enjoy it.

Liberal authority figures operate under the hilarious pretense that they're more open, so they'll try to placate extreme and unreasonable demands, at least from their own side of the aisle. Activists demand more punishment for the heretics, and so the dance continues.

But people notice. If you're outside of this dynamic you can't help but notice that your values are not only discarded, but actively demonized. So all First Things have succeeded in doing is alienate some who may have thought well of them before. If trouble arises, CBGB's fate of going broke and reopening as a clothing boutique may look enviable.

Go ghoti

One thing the English language is notorious for is not having any consistent pronunciation rules. French or Spanish might turn up an exception to a couple of their rules here and there. English is nothing but exceptions.

The common explanation is Britain's patchwork history: a once-Celtic land ruled by Romans, then Teutons, Norse, and finally the French-speaking Normans. This makes sense until you remember that being colonized by multiple other nations is actually the norm in European--and world--history. The historical explanations are a little more complex and interesting.

Yes, Virginia, Christmas in July

There's a strange aspect to slasher movies, one that may have more to do with audiences and even more to do with the state of criticism in general. What I mean is this: while they're basically horror movies of varying degrees of style and shock, they're expected to show their allegiance in terms of sexual politics. Is the heroine/"final girl" virginal, or the opposite of that? Who does the killer target and what are they doing with each other? All this is evaluated in terms of how feminist and sex-positive (a verbal🚩if ever there was one) they are.

That's one of the things that makes the 1974 chiller Black Christmas refreshing. The killer, who calls himself "Billy", isn't enforcing sexual conservatism, nor could you use him to subvert the patriarchy. He's just nuts. Part of this, you could say, is because the subgenre was still in its cradle at the time, four years before Halloween and five before Friday the 13th. But really it goes beyond that. The heroes of the movie―both the sorority girls and the police―make assumptions about the case that lead them so far astray, they still haven't figured things out at the end. And while the red herring for the killings is definitely an asshole, he's not bad in the way he's assumed to be. So in part it's about not seeing what's in front of your face because of what you believe should be there.

----

Another note about the movie. One of the sorority sisters is played by a pre-SCTV Andrea Martin. The movie's Wikipedia page claims that Gilda Radner was offered this same role but turned it down due to her commitment to Saturday Night Live. This seems very dubious to me, considering the movie came out before SNL―how you say?―existed. Radner wouldn't have had any real time commitments until the summer of '75, when it would be time to start promoting it. My conclusion here is that urban legends come easy and die hard.

...of a tale

The idea that whales evolved from ungulates is pretty wild. Their fins are pretty far from hooves. Also most ungulates are entirely or predominantly herbivorous, which whales and dolphins...aren't. 

It's a good idea to apply caveats. The relations are what's suggested by the evidence that we have now. Could change. Actually, that's how science is supposed to work. Still, there's a reminder in there that life will surprise you.

Maybe you do need a weatherman

Yesterday while I was buying a bottle of wine it started raining. Pretty hard in fact. So when I got out of the store, it was just a curtain of water outside. Home was just a few blocks up the hill. I figured that since I didn't know how long it would be raining I might as well start walking and hope I didn't get too wet.

By the time I reached my apartment my shoes and all my clothes were soaked through so that I had to change everything. The kicker? While I was toweling off the rain stopped and the sun came back out.

Oh well. At least the heat/humidity is a little more reasonable now.

The Dean & I

I first discovered Edith Sitwell's poetry in an old book at my grandmother's house, years ago. I didn't know that she was a cousin of Tilda Swinton, or for that matter who Tilda Swinton was, although now that I've learned both, sure. What I could tell is that this was bold verse, making up its own standards as it went along. Like nothing else. 

What the Goose-Girl Said About the Dean

Turn again, turn again,

Goose Clothilda, Goosie Jane.

Bright wooden waves of people creak

From houses built with coloured straws

Of heat; Dean Pasppus’ long nose snores

Harsh as a hautbois, marshy-weak.

The wooden waves of people creak

Through the fields all water-sleek.

And in among the straws of light

Those bumpkin hautbois-sounds take flight.

Whence he lies snoring like the moon

Clownish-white all afternoon.

Beneath the trees’ arsenical

Sharp woodwind tunes; heretical—

Blown like the wind’s mane

(Creaking woodenly again).

His wandering thoughts escape like geese

Till he, their gooseherd, sets up chase,

And clouds of wool join the bright race

For scattered old simplicities.

Modernist poetry that was a little doubtful of modernity. May or may not mean something that this was published in 1919, just a little after a multi-year event that scattered quite a few old simplicities. 

Just caws

The other day I saw a guy at a bus stop with pigeons crawling on him. Well, perching on him. He had seeds he was feeding them from a little packet. Well, you gotta love pigeon people.

Anyway, the following video isn't about pigeons, but it is avian in subject matter. The sounds made by corvids aren't always tuneful in the way you expect birds to be, but they bring me a peaceful feeling.

All go rithm

Also reading Justin E. H. Smith's The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, A Philosophy, A Warning. The title is a pretty fair indicator, although Smith is not a pessimist in all respects. 

He dates the idea of the Internet to the Enlightenment philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Liebniz. Leibniz lived and died long before the invention of machines that could store and send the data needed for the net. But he did formulate the idea that knowledge, divorced from the personal, could lead to a better and more peaceful world.

Whether or not he would approve, we've followed Leibniz's advice by outsourcing thinking to AI. Or what some have decided to define as thinking. The end result has been a broad depiction of humans as faulty pieces of this technological world. As viruses even. As Smith (the character, not the author( puts it in The Matrix: 

There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet.

Clear enough. But the consequences of regarding humans as viruses--or at least "spreaders"--is just starting to make itself known.

I'd be remiss in not pointing out that Smith (the author, not the character) brings a good deal of wit to his subject. To, uh, wit:

Spotify users were to have the option of integrating their DNA test results into their listener profile, which in turn was to direct the algorithm to bring songs to the playlist roughly reflecting the percentages of the listener's ethnic background. Thus, if the DNA test revealed that a person had 10 percent Irish origins, every tenth song might belong to the thoroughly commercialized genre known as "Celtic folk." An advertisement produced for this new service asked, "If you could listen to your DNA, what would it sound like?" The answer, it turned out, at least for the partially Irish among us, was that it sounds like Enya and Riverdance.

“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.”

Space adventures

 Might be in the middle of a spate of book posts here. Be forewarned.

I just finished reading CS Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet. It was quite satisfying. I could tell that Lewis had read Wells―especially The First Men in the Moon―and Gulliver's Travels, and I'm sure a bunch of things I'm not really familiar with. The finished product is all Lewis, though.

Professor Ransom is a linguist. Not too hard to guess that he's based on Lewis's friend Tolkien. I enjoy how the last two chapters are basically the two of them debating in Lewis's head.