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.

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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.

Remainders

I picked up a book from the library today. An anthology of ghost stories called Post Mortem. I ordered it because I knew there was a story in it by an author I've always liked, one who is no longer with us.

He's not the only such writer in the book. You can tell looking at it that it came out some years ago. To wit it was first published in 1989. The Second World was just starting to crumble. Almost all public buildings had pay phones. I could go on.

At a certain point growing older means becoming something of a ghost yourself: a remnant of a world that isn't there anymore.

Tale of a fan

Last summer I bought a big box fan. Three speeds, pretty powerful. I got it late in the summer, and the temperature dropped soon afterwards. Which means I didn't actually get that much use out of it.

Well, this year it's certainly getting a workout.

Embrace the suck

As 2022 wears on talk of Gavin Newsom is in the air. Part of the reason is that he wants it there, of course. But also because 2024 looks to be a tough year for Democrats, and he's at least sort of new. Hell, there are Americans who look at Justin Trudeau and wish we had one of those. 

Almost needless to say, this kind of speculation is built on the conviction that the problem with Biden is Biden. That they have a dandy product but that he's screwing up the sale.

And sure, he has well-known weaknesses as a candidate. His mind isn't the sharpest, he had a dumbass plagiarism scandal in 1988, and his requisite embarrassing relative is more felonious than most. But their problems are broader and deeper.

Whatever bad ideas have been embraced by the Biden administration have been embraced by all of his potential rivals, usually in more concentrated form. This has happened because there's no big tent anymore. Just desperate pols trying to stay current. A loss might clear the party's head, or not. It's hard to see a win doing the trick.

Having fun on canvas

 Who knows which artists will be remembered in the future? I mean, the people of the 22nd + centuries will probably have their hands full anyway, but beyond that it's a guessing game.

Still, the paintings of Canadian artist Marcel Dzama should continue to charm. Partly because he seems to enjoy making them so much. Dzama has done a number of record covers, including for Beck's Guero. He accesses comic-like imagery, and sometimes comic book characters appear in his work. They don't retain the slickness of comic books, though. The characters have stepped back into a folk art world that runs on dream logic.

Correlation

Sorry to be beating a dead horse here. But two years and several months after the COVID-19 crisis was announced, some people are still masking outside. Like, religiously. And one thing I've noticed about the majority, I think, is that their eyes are glued to their phones.

Correlation is not causation? Sure. But I get impressions. And it strikes me that for a certain subset of the population, what they read about on their phones is the truth and what's in front of their faces is a lie. A grim kind of Gnosticism.

roar

Okay, don't judge me too harshly. I surfed onto this TV Tropes page about the Wizard of Oz movie a few minutes ago. There's this tidbit:

Mervyn LeRoy and William Cannon wanted to do a dark, "realistic" retelling of the Oz tale. In their version, the Oz Scarecrow was a flesh-and-bone human who was so stupid that he could only get a job standing in a field and chasing off birds, while the Tin Man was a "heartless" man sentenced to be locked in a tin suit of armor for all eternity. Dorothy was only supposed to meet him many years into his sentence, after he had softened and become kind.

Interesting thought. I don't know if these guys actually put together a plan or not, much less a script. It makes me wonder how you'd do a nervous talking lion in a dark "realistic" way.

B(l)oom

The official fireworks show was a couple of hours ago. Some years I go out for a closer look. Tonight I was just too comfortable ensconced in my apartment with the ceiling fan going. I could see it from a particular window in my bedroom though. 

Now comes the afterparty. Several people in the neighborhood are still setting off fireworks. Could go on a while, but I'm not worried about getting to sleep. Not as long as its cool enough in my room, at least.

Displays

I watched a movie tonight. It was a thriller from the early 60s, with a conscious debt to Hitchcock. Not bad at all, especially considering it had a much lower budget than he would have been given. Anyway, just as the film takes from Hitchcock, the opening titles owe something to the work of Saul Bass. 

Bass, who worked with Hitchcock, Preminger, and in his later years, Scorsese, came around at the right time. In the silent era and the 30s, opening credit sequences tended toward the functional. Lists of names in a nice font, sometimes over someone's face. After the war the graphics departments had more technical ability, and it didn't hurt to have something different that could catch the audience's attention. 

Over the past twenty years or so opening titles have atrophied to the point where at the start of the movie you most often see the name of the production company, the title, and maybe the director. Streaming services have an option where you can skip titles and many people take it because they don't want to spend time on anything that doesn't advance the plot. We live in a philistine age where―to paraphrase Oscar Wilde―people know the price of everything and the value of nothing. But titles can set the mood and tone of a movie, and have been in many cases a crucial part of the aesthetic experience. Case in point above.