Something to talk about

I'm reading Tom Wolfe's The Kingdom of Language now. It had to have been one of his last, if not his very last.

Wolfe built his reputation decades ago as a New Journalism nonfiction writer. Eventually he wanted to expand into novels. The problem with writing fiction while having strongly held political opinions is that you might be tempted to flatten the former in order to better serve the latter. Wolfe wasn't entirely innocent of this.

This book has little if anything to do with all that. It's essentially a look at how language helped make Homo sapiens the dominant species. His portrayal of early evolutionists like Darwin, Wallace, Lyell etc. is quite amusing.

Uneasy dreams

Edgar G. Ulmer's 1945 thriller Strange Illusion is...well, let's say that it lives up to its name. 

In truth, the opening isn't too promising. The protagonist, a young man whose recently deceased father was a prominent judge, has a disturbing dream. The nightmare reenacts his father's vehicular death in a special effect that looks shoddy even for its time. His mother and sister are drawn to an imposter, a seductive man they accept as the husband/father. Shrouded in thick fog, the whole dream feels corny and overdone.

Once the young man had awoken I was still skeptical. He and his friends are wholesome quasi-teens straight out of an Archie comic (although as Riverdale demonstrates, sexed-up hipster Archie characters aren't necessarily an improvement.) Will his Hamlet thing with his mother and her new boyfriend really make a compelling film?

But something happens in the course of the movie. A real sense of menace creeps in. The villains played by Warren William (best known as the first actor to play Perry Mason onscreen) and Charles Arnt are evil, and this is obvious to the audience, but they're savvy enough to cover their tracks. Hero Paul and his small circle of loyal friends really do have their work cut out for them.

Ulmer had earlier directed the Karloff-Lugosi horror film The Black Cat. He was generally adept at working with poverty row budgets. The same year as Strange Illusion he directed Detour, a tough noir that's become something of a cult classic. So Strange Illusion has been somewhat overshadowed. It's ultimately effective, though, and feels like it had to have been an influence on David Lynch.

Taking requests

There are obvious, shall we say, tensions in the world now. Maybe the entire international order is being rewritten. Who knows? Like you, all I can do is make my way through my little stretch of world.

So anyway, here's three different versions of a fun song.

The first is by its author, Charles Calhoun directing the orchestra, with Jesse Stone singing.

Ray Charles.

And Ry Cooder.

One thing I appreciate is the "bicarbonated soda by the pound." You're only human. All these festivities, you'll need something to recover.

Interiors

I overheard a conversation between two women today. It was between a café owner and a patron and they weren't trying to be quiet, so I wouldn't count it as eavesdropping. Anyway, it was about a cat. One of their friends had recently switched her cat from being and outdoor cat to being strictly indoors. The cat had taken to it, although they had to trim the cat's claws. They get scratchy when the claws grow wild, which isn't too surprising.

That's another difference between cats and dogs, in the domestic sphere. Is there such a thing as an indoor-only dog? At least without serious health problems?

Real/unreal

Somewhere in the depths of prehistory...

In the 1980s the Internet was...what? Unenet? Obscure proto-wikis by and for specialists? Physicists on opposite coasts playing modified chess on a screen over the course of five weeks? Above all it was slow, with still primitive graphics. Computers were the future, we heard at school, but in many ways the future seemed to be taking its sweet time.

As the centuries and millennia turned, the order began to change for real. High-speed internet and workable video dawned. And so everything started to go online, including things that had seemed entirely grounded in the physical world. Leftwing newsweeklies. Avid fan clubs. Underfunded museums of bizarre stuff. And why not? The 'net was open frontier. There was plenty of room for freaks and individualists.

Well, there was and then there wasn't. The Internet, once optimized, had the potential to be history's greatest sales medium. Eventually that potential was realized and a handful of giant businesses had established control. New rules were enacted, leaving a lot less room for spontaneity and eccentricity. But the really sad part was that the weirdos weren't driven out. With very few exceptions they just went along, becoming enforcers when a suitable occasion―pandemic, say―came along.

Sam Kriss gets at a lot of this in a penetrating essay I found through Twitter.

These days, the mantra of the good progressive types is not question everything, but in this house we believe. Believe the science, believe the experts, believe in our institutions, believe women. Liberals no longer think ordinary people should get to interrogate the big questions for themselves: your Google search is not the same as my medical degree. They don’t think corporate media is inherently propagandistic: it’s our last bulwark against online disinformation. They don’t even oppose the totalizing effect of mass culture: they just want culture-commodities to carry the right kind of didactic messaging. Along the way, an entire language has vanished, a whole stock of concepts has fallen out of use. Who, in 2022, bothers railing against conformity? Who wants to talk about alienation? Who is trying to shock us with their bold critiques of consumerism?

The immediate occasion for Kriss's piece is the release of a new Matrix movie. Now as to the original, I found Fight Club to be a more interesting distillation of end-of-millennium anomie. And since David Cronenberg was an old hand at spinning obscure critical theories into monster movies, eXistenZ had a certain home field advantage. Yet The Matrix had an undeniable impact, popularizing postmodern philosophy and a kind of tech savvy Gnosticism. But the party may be over now that another kind constantly runs in the background.

Business battlefront

The term "Karen", it must be admitted, has to suck for women actually named Karen. The definition also seems unnecessarily racialized to me. That said, having done a customer service stint recently, my experience is that the worst customers are women. And the best customers? Also women. Men aren't sufficiently invested in purchases to make as big of an impression either way.

Also after a week of a job where you're constantly answering the phone, you might spend a day or so hearing electronic telephone rings that aren't there.

Heading for a fall

Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong are reputed to be two of history's greatest monsters. This is a fair assessment. Nearly uncountable lives were destroyed under their watch for no good reason. 

They were, however, genuine hard men. They knew what they were doing and could see it through. By contrast, Justin Trudeau is a fading gigolo, one who's already in over his head. And no, Canada isn't Stalin's Soviet Union or Mao's China. But it's important to see what kind of games he's playing and who else has played them. 

Life isn't fair, but given time chickens have a habit of coming home to roost. Justin isn't prepared for their return. Even with a number of Canadians and others willing to  play the Stasi he's losing the plot. I only hope that his failure is quick and―for the rest of the country―painless.

Idea man

This is I think the shortest animation piece I've ever posted/linked to here. Just a little over half a minute. And that doesn't leave it time to do much except tell one joke. Tells it well, though. And with really good pencil art animation.

It's one thing, then another.

Motley

One of the things I've been doing this week is rereading Agatha Christie's The Mysterious Mr. Quin. It is said that Harley Quin―a pun-based name Christie came up with about six decades before the creation of the Joker's girlfriend―and Mr. Satterthwaite were her favorite of her own characters, in part because she only wrote about them when she wanted to. Which means that you have to take quality over quantity. There are no Quin and Satterthwaite novels, only this collection and a few other stories.

Satterthwaite, a rather Walter Mitty-ish old man even if he does hobnob with the upper crust, is the viewpoint character and effectively the protagonist. The enigmatic and ghostly Quin doesn't solve crimes himself, but rather listens and makes suggestions. In effect he is a suggestion. He'll appear somewhere in a the course of a story, provide a sounding board for Satterthwaite, and then disappear without warning.

I'm reading a copy borrowed from the library. It's barebones, perhaps disappointingly so. The book doesn't even have a table of contents. They used good paper, though.

No frillzzzzzzzz

Over the last couple of nights, I've watched the first two episodes of the two-season Falling Water, a large number of onetime USA Network shows being available for free on Amazon Prime. Despite a good cast and some visual flair, it's mostly boring pretentious nonsense. But it did get me thinking on my own.

The show is about...well, the fact that I still don't know how to finish that sentence is a big part of the problem. But there's a thread about sleep experiments and a lot of philosophizing about how we could all be connected through dreams.

The writers―like most people, I think―misunderstand what makes dreams interesting. Dreams are weird, yes. But there's no effort to make them weird. They're not scripted to take you really far out. On the contrary, they're almost always skeletal. Their interest comes from their careless minimalism.

A few weeks ago I dreamed that I was in this big dark theatre. Afterwards I was riding on some open-air streetcar through the countryside. How did I get from the theatre to the streetcar running on tracks where there is no street? I have no idea. My brain skipped over that segue. 

The odd things you remember from having to get up and pee.

Not with the program

The existence of COVID street art is heartening. Street art in general tends to face some aesthetic limits. But it can also express a certain vitality, a view of life beyond order and orders.

As the author of the article notes, the monoculture is taking root and genuine weirdness is not welcome. It seems like we're being conditioned to a world of diminishing possibilities even on the personal level. So I'm glad enough to see some people with screen printing gear saying, "No."

EDIT: No idea why this didn't post Tuesday night when I wrote it. Internet cooties?

Large creature down under

I was curious as to what kind of megafauna might have existed in Australia's past. Diprotodon is one of the answers, and an interesting one at that. Not quite on the scale of the larger mammoths and mastodons in North America, but imposing from the human perspective. The reconstructions make them look a little like a cross between a wombat and a moose.

They existed alongside humans for millennia after the latter arrived, so it's not like they were immediately hunted into extinction. The expansion of the continent's deserts might have had something to do with it. In any case, I wonder how they're reflected in Aboriginal folklore.

Slick

Getting ready to go out and face the world again. It snowed last night, but not nearly as much as last night. What happened during the day was that it continued to rain from Thursday, only with much lower temperatures. This led to some slightly treacherous sidewalks, and one intersection where I couldn't get a walk signal because the button was frozen solid. So that kind of thing is more of a concern for me.

Also, may be mailing out a story today. Basically just need to get the formatting done.

Tics

I watched the pilot episode of Monk tonight. That was a comedy/mystery show which ran 2002-2009. The lead character of Adrian Monk is a PI and former cop who's been an OCD-ridden mess since his wife was murdered. Sharona (as in "my my my my whoo") is a nurse who helps him deal with the world. 

The show's two-part premiere is from 2002, but feels a good 15 years older than that. The score that flips from mild jazz to orchestral movie music. The grainy look to all the nighttime scenes. The minder character's blaring Noo Yawk accent in a San Francisco that's obviously Toronto. It's all very late 1980s. 

Monk is a likeable character, and it's fun to watch Tony Shalhoub balance the neurotic and genius sides. Of course I kind of dread to see what he'd be like now, as germphobia is a big part of the character. Hell, I'm amazed he made it through the 2002-04 SARS scare.