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)