Field day

Which of these scenarios sound more credible to you?

A: Joe Biden, a man who turns 80 later this year and has been a politician his entire adult life, got through the 2020 election while hardly broaching trans issues at all. Then, once elected, he realized they were the most pressing issue of our times and staked out the leftmost position.

B: Biden has no clue. "Affirmative care" and "gender identity" are just syllables to him. But he knows he has to say them right to make big Dem donors happy.

Given the choice I'd put my money on B. These people are in customer service, except that only a narrow group of Americans form their customer base. Actual radicals in the administration are probably few and far between. But they have the advantage because they just have to work around empty suits.

Big kids

I'm currently reading Jackie Wullschlãger's Inventing Wonderland, a biographical study of children's literature authors from the Victorian Era and early twentieth century. Solid read, so far. Inevitably she takes a post-Freudian perspective in tying biography, psychology, and literature. But she also shows an affinity for the works themselves. 

Not surprisingly, her first deep dive is into Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a.k.a. Lewis Carroll. And of course you don't have to get very Freudian to find something off about the man.

Carroll: I wonder if you'd let me take your daugh―

Any Responsible 21st Century Parent: No. Get out.

But whatever his issues, mainly what he did with them was create enchanting stories and indelible imagery.

All this dovetailed with the sense of fun and nonsense which had been part of his childhood, and with his love of mathematics and logic. Wonderland, therefore, took its character from the distorted, intellectual nonsense perspectives - the Cheshire Cat who leaves his grin behind, the Mock Turtle who was once a real turtle - unique to Carroll the poet-don, and it is thus at once an exciting, new, topsy-turvy world and an age-old, mythic place. It has, for example, the serpent of Eden - but only in the comic imagination of a hysterical character, the Pigeon, who mistakes Alice for a snake.

So the author does appreciate these books. I'm looking forward to reading about Lear, Barrie, Grahame, and Milne. 

Very big birds

 

The narration in this clip provides an account that's actually contested. Ratites seem to have evolved too recently for the Gondwana hypothesis. Which would leave parallel evolution, accounting for why there's no single ratite territory in the world.

The narrator is very right that the cassowary is not to be messed with, though. The birds bulk is more compact than the ostrich or emu. So it pays to tread carefully with them.

Teacher in trouble

I've written here before about Stuart Palmer's Hildegarde Withers books, a series of mysteries about a spinster schoolteacher who bickers with a police captain while also helping him solve crimes. Tonight I watched one of the movies based on them. I saw Murder on a Honeymoon not on Prime, YouTube, or Dailymotion (which has way too many popups now to enjoy a movie), but on the Internet Archive.

Most of it is set on Catalina Island, which means that it's close to Hollywood but feels a little exotic. The first scene takes place on a plane, in the early days of commercial air travel, where a passenger dies and of course turns out to have been murdered. Leo G. Carroll, who would be Mr. Waverly on <i>The Man from UNCLE</i> three decades later, plays a preening movie director who's one of the suspects. Not among the suspects is the bellhop played by Willie Best. It's the kind of role that would be regarded with embarrassment even ten years later, but nothing he does or says is as bad as being credited under his "Sleep 'n' Eat" stage name.

In all it's a pretty good mixture of style and immediacy. Edna May Oliver does a good job of conveying the central character's acerbic intelligence.

Pixel addiction

The dangers of relying too heavily on technological shortcuts.

A show called Grimm ran in the 2010s and acquired something of a cult following. I never watched it back then but I've tried giving it a chance these past few weeks. Some good guest stars show up and it was shot in Portland, Oregon, a beautiful city when nihilism tourists aren't setting it on fire. Nonetheless, I can't get into it. 

The premise is that there's a kind of enchanted aggregate race called the Wesen, who have mystical animal traits and can transform. Only a few people, called Grimms, can see the Wesen for what they are. The lead character is a Grimm and also a PPD detective. 

Every episode has a few sequences where Wesen characters exhibit their true animal faces. The show seems really proud of these scenes, considering them pivotal to the episode. And no, they just don't work for me. With very few exceptions these reveals are done purely with CGI, no practical effects involved. So my eyes tell my brain, "Nothing happened just now. The actors just stood there inert. Some guy at a computer fixed it up a week later." So it kills the whole effect for me.

Of course a lot of the facial designs are kind of silly, too.

Manifold

Language comes from the parts of the brain responsible for higher order thinking. It is complex and variable. This also means that it doubles back on itself. 

Occasionally there are proposals to make modern languages more regular, mathematical. Maybe get everyone speaking the same one. But I suspect this would reduce it to something other than human language.

Anyway, these are just things I"m musing as bedtime approaches.

How

For the past week-plus I've been working downtown. In the height of it, really. There's a few blocks in the center of Providence where...

Okay, there's yuppie and then there's this. Not the only part of the city where you'll see Black Lives Matter posters in the window, of course. But there's a craft store where they've spammed their display windows with notices on the evils of whiteness. A fucking craft store, okay? And a lily white one as far as I can tell. On the other side of the street is a tony liquor store where, in the middle of 2022, they still tell you that you need a mask to get in.

It's a funny feeling, walking through there. Like I'm looking at a theme park based on Blue America. Or perhaps better yet, a living museum telling future tourists what life in the early 2020s was like. Something in me tells me this is not a sustainable state of affairs.

Fellow Rhode Islander John Michael Greer has some ideas on the present and near future:

In becoming an empire, after all, the United States shed many of the things that Americans once took pride in. We gave up a decentralized federal system of government for a near-dictatorship of the executive branch; we gave up our regional cultures for a mass-produced pseudoculture wholly subservient to a corporate elite; we surrendered a galaxy of individual liberties in exchange for various scraps from the tables of power; we forgot about the culture of resilience that made “use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without” a matter of common sense in most American households, in order to fixate on the frantic quest to claim some of the goodies from the feed trough of empire. We’ve got a lot of work to do to recover some of what we lost, but it’s not as though we have many other options at this point.

And it wouldn't be too much of a surprise to find out that what we see around us is part of an empire on the brink. We'll see what develops from that.

Men in tights

 

Trigger warning: Light comic nerdery ahead.

The major superheroes in DC Comics―concentrating on the men now―have basic but distinct personalities. 

Superman is an alien god who's assumed the role of a good man. 

Batman is a dour defender for a hostile world. Everyone, including himself, pays lip service to how he wouldn't have to exist in a better world, but no one wants that better world that he's not part of.

Hal Jordan, the Silver Age Green Lantern, has a warrior/diplomat/ladies' man swagger similar to Jack Kennedy or Captain Kirk.

The Silver Age Flash, for his part, was a dedicated police scientist who tended to be late before a freak lab accident turned him into the fastest man alive. He needs to be trustworthy, likable, dependable. In a word, nice.

So there was always reason to be dubious when Ezra Miller was cast as the character in Justice League. He'd made an early splash playing creepy sociopathic teens in Afterschool and We Need to Talk About Kevin. Would he be able to make the casting against type work? Or, okay, they. We're getting to that.

Anyway, it's not looking so good. Miller is looking more and more like a sexual predator who embraced a non-binary identity and pronouns in order to stave off Me-Too-ing. And it must be said that this was depressingly effective for a while.

So why Miller as the Flash and why has Warner/DC been so slow to cut ties? Well, one could speculate on that. I'll leave it at that.

When life gives you...

So disturbingly enough, this is how I crack myself up. 

Decades ago I had the idea for a new Christmas Carol. Same basic outline as the old one, but now with lemons. Scrooge is visited by the Lemon of Christmas Past, the Lemon of Christmas Present, and of course the Lemon of Christmas Yet-to-Come. The last lemon might be less talkative than the other two. 

Maybe I should have developed this idea into something, which so far I haven't. Still serves as a welcome bit of (intentional) absurdity.

Or the fool who follows him

I'm a cultural moderate. It doesn't bother me if someone wants to do a gender reversed reboot of the Ghostbusters, or if Doctor Who is a woman (or, starting next year, a skinny young black Scottish dude). I may enjoy these things or not, taken on a case by case basis.

But if you have to do a hard sell, that's often a sign that you lack confidence in your work. And it's especially unfortunate if you wind up insulting your core audience.

And sad to say, this is where Disney has landed with its latest round of Star Wars promotions. Moses Ingram, who has a prominent part on the new Obi Wan Kenobi streaming show, has already been featured in The Queen's Gambit and played Lady Macduff in Joel Coen's The Tragedy of Macbeth. If you want to hype her, talent seems like a better basis to do so than saying that she drives the racists and haterz crazy. And sending her out to talk about having "talking droids and aliens but no people of colour" makes no sense to anyone who's seen a <i>Star Wars</i> movie from <i>The Empire Strikes Back</i> onward. 

But maybe the corporations who control these properties would rather have their fans freaked out about bigots under the bed than face scrutiny over their own business practices.

Future past

Dr. M is a 1990 update of Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse films, directed by Frenchman Claude Chabrol. Dystopian and pre-millennial, it's about a suicide epidemic in Berlin, and the mystery of who―or what―is causing it. Despite the director and the setting, the dialogue is in English, and the print I was watching on YouTube has Spanish subtitles. How's that for international?

While the premise is somewhat science fictional, everything in the movie looks beat up and used, the technology defiantly Watergate era. That's the most interesting aspect. The least interesting part of the movie is...almost everything else. It just doesn't work at all. The story is dull and the stubbly lead detective spends a ridiculous amount of time at suspect Jennifer Beals's apartment, just kvetching at her.

Ah well, happens to the best of us. I'd enjoyed the other two Chabrol films I'd seen, La Rupture and Merci Pour le Chocolat. The latter is excellent, and was made about a decade later than Dr. M. It's heartening to know that he didn't lose his touch, just got sidetracked.

Busy doing nothing

Today I started reading Ivan Goncharov's Oblomov. I'm between 60 and 70 pages through it, while the book is over 500 pages, which I think counts as a novelette in Russia. Nonetheless, I'm greatly enjoying it so far.

The title character is a fading member of Russia's aristocracy, or a Tsarist failson if you prefer. He's lazy and scatterbrained, his servant Zakhar has to take care of all his responsibilities, and some of his friends seem to mean him ill. But he's an engaging character, as well as a funny one. I wonder if John Kennedy Toole had him in mind when he wrote A Confederacy of Dunces.

This book feels like something I've been looking for, something I might learn from. Determination is good, but it's not the only subject. 

Convenient for some

Canadian philosopher Justin E. H. Smith has a piece in Harper's entitled "Permanent Pandemic" and it elaborates things I've been thinking about in a way that I probably couldn't have myself.

Here in the US it's becoming more apparent that the utility of COVID was neither to keep lockdowns and mask mandates in place permanently nor―as a number of cynics thought―to simply clear Donald Trump out of the White House. Rather, it's been a way to introduce a new order wherein everyone is meant to defer to unelected experts their data. Their conclusions and recommendations aren't meant to be subject to the usual―or formerly usual―quasi-democratic political process. 

Under the new regime, a significant portion of the decisions that, until recently, would have been considered subject to democratic procedure have instead been turned over to experts, or purported experts, who rely for the implementation of their decisions on private companies, particularly tech and pharmaceutical companies, which, in needing to turn profits for shareholders, have their own reasons for hoping that whatever crisis they have been given the task of managing does not end.

Once again, in an important sense, much of this is not new: it’s just capitalism doing its thing. What has seemed unprecedented is the eagerness with which self-styled progressives have rushed to the support of the new regime, and have sought to marginalize dissenting voices as belonging to fringe conspiracy theorists and unscrupulous reactionaries. Meanwhile, those pockets of resistance—places where we find at least some inchoate commitment to the principle of popular will as a counterbalance to elite expertise, and where unease about technological overreach may be honestly expressed—are often also, as progressives have rightly but superciliously noted, hot spots of bonkers conspiracism.

While you can raise philosophical objections or bring up practical problems from your own experience, the frustrating thing is that in both cases you're as likely as not to be talking to a wall.

Lot of shakin'

Two to three years back the Coen Brothers split off into different projects, with Joel working on his Macbeth movie while Ethan put together a play on the LA stage. Well, the COVID lockdowns only delayed The Tragedy of Macbeth for a few months, but they killed Ethan's play dead. He's been quite quiet since then. 

So it was nice to hear an update on his doings. He's releasing a documentary on Jerry Lee Lewis, and really you couldn't ask for a more fascinating subject. I remember him from the Chuck Berry: Hail, Hail Rock 'n' Roll documentary, even though he faced the handicap of not being Chuck Berry.

There's also talk that he and Joel will work together again. I hope so. I strongly suspect they're more than the sum of their parts when together. Although Ethan also seems like the funner one.

In whose domain

Just did a little surfing and I found out that YouTube has a bunch of old Burns & Allen clips between 20 and 30 minutes, which would seem to translate to entire episodes of their TV show. Not sure if this is a case of their being in the public domain or if it's some kind of guerilla uploading that will eventually be taken down on order of someone's lawyers. The latter is something I've seen a few times with Dailymotion.

For now it's a good break. These shows are from before I was born, and my earliest memories of George Burns were as a wry widower who sometimes played God. But I have seen him and Gracie together, and they had a spark.