It may have been inevitable that someone would film a documentary on bird behavior Hitchcock style. Crows are a perfect candidate, let's face it. And there's some beautiful corvid footage here. I have to say, though, that if you carry a taxidermied crow through the park while wearing a mask that suggests you want to go to Texas and get down to some chainsaw massacrin', it won't just be birds having a weird reaction.
Picture this. A young woman tears around the San Francisco Bay in a motorboat. When she's done she climbs out onto the pier to flirt with her boyfriend and then talk seriously with him. All this time she―including hair and clothes―is bone dry. And this makes sense, because when you look at the watery scene behind her, it's an obvious blue screen.
The movie I saw tonight wasn't at all bad. It was consistently entertaining, in fact. But there are numerous things you could goof on about it.
Here's a pretty fascinating interview on Sun Ra and the artwork from his albums. I've been impressed by his music for a while, but I didn't know much about the operation he was running. It's pretty cool that he and his associates got together and put these records together as a kind of kitchen table crafts project.
The interview is with Irwin Chusid, a coeditor of the book. I listen to Chusid's show on WFMU quite a lot. He's got impeccable taste in jazz, and plays some unpredictable stuff too (e.g. indie pop balanced with unknowns singing along with hold music.) He's also notable among their on-air talent for being resistant to current-thing ideologies, which is something I appreciate more than I used to.
Anyway, if you're curious as to what Sun Ra sounded like on the albums with this distinctive handmade art, here's an example. You might not expect to hear him and the Arkestra playing standards, but they hit it out of the park.
I was in line in the store today and the two women in front of me were chatting. One of them was wearing a mask, sort of. Which is to say she had it pulled down under her chin, so you could see her face.
Now look, these masks are pretty much useless for anything besides dusting stuff that you haven't dusted in a while, and mask mandates were a human rights crime that will never be punished. But as nice as it is to see people smiling again, I don't see why you'd wear a mask so that there's extra pressure pulling down on your ears. Just so you'll be ready if the government reimposes restrictions at the drop of a hat?
There used to be a website called "You Know, for Kids." Don't know if you've heard of it, you may have actually seen it. Wasn't too obscure. A big fan of the Coens ran it―the name, of course, comes from The Hudsucker Proxy―and it was a popular spot for others.
You Know, for Kids, folded up its tent at some point, I think between Burn After Reading and A Serious Man, although I could be off on the timing. The people behind it just didn't have the time for it anymore.
In some ways The Columbophile, which I've just discovered, reminds me of YKFK. It's a product of one guy's enthusiasm, and the intelligence he brings to his interests. There's no calculation behind it, and not a lot of apparent outside pressure.
This is what the Internet was supposed to be, and what it sort of was once. A series of clubhouses with open doors. At the point where we are now, most of the prime real estate has been bought up. Most websites are official organs of something or other. Which tends to lead to conformity and compelled speech. It's important to be on the same page as everyone else.
I think the web's current state was on some level the plan all along. People always wanted to be in control, and digital technology lends itself well to control. So I appreciate seeing someone just having fun doing their own thing, even if I'm not exactly bursting out of my skin to watch Poker Face.
Make sure there aren't a lot of bugs near you before watching this, cuz your jaw is likely to hang open.
Points:
I stopped in the CVS today to pick up some correcting fluid. You know, that magical substance created by a Monkee's mother. I'd looked for it before and not found it. And they still didn't have it. They had Wite-Out correcting tape, yes. But I don't really like that. You don't really know how much tape you'll end up using, and it can be both wasteful and ineffective. But because the only available alternative were white paint markers, which I already knew wouldn't suit my purposes, I wound up getting the correcting tape anyway.
This is not an isolated case. Manufacturers and retailers have made a habit of making products unavailable or difficult to find, even when there are many regular buyers. Is this to drive traffic to Amazon? Just to prove they can? Whatever the reason, it shows a willingness to jerk around their customer base.
Today I was just off Thayer St. A street which, incidentally or not, has had a small Japanese market for the last couple of years. There I found a glass soda bottle. While there was some English text on the label, the brand name was in Japanese. It tapered inwards at the bottom of the neck. And most unusual of all, a marble rolled around just above that tapered point.
It turns out this is a well-known Japanese soda brand called Ramune. The marble forms a seal with the glass bottle to keep it fizzy. Pretty cool process. So while littering isn't great, I was glad of the educational opportunity.
Okay, having finished the book, I can quit being coy and tell you that what I was actually reading was Deadstick, the 1991 debut novel by Terence Faherty. And my verdict is that it's quite good, especially for a an author's first time out.
The lead character, Owen Keane, is a former seminarian who didn't make it into the priesthood. In this book he's working as a researcher for his friend's law firm. The friend, Harry, assigns him the project of investigating a fatal plane crash from forty years earlier, at the behest of one victim's very wealthy recluse of a brother.
I've read enough detective novels to know that there are cliches, tropes, call them what you will. Things that make storytelling easier and which the audience doesn't mind, might even prefer. Faherty is good enough to avoid a lot of them and to play with them when he does use them.
For example, I was expecting there to be at least one scene where someone tries to scare Keane off by shooting at him or at least beating him up. (It's established that he's not really a fighter.) The greatest physical threat, though, comes when a Pine Barrens storyteller he's looking to for answers takes him out to the middle of the woods and just...leaves him there. Their scene together just before this may be the height of the novel.
There are a bunch more books in the series, last one so far being published in 2013. It seems to have been mostly overlooked. Faherty has won the Shamus Award but for a book in his other series, about former actor Scott Elliott. The Keane books seem ripe to be discovered, though.
English princes should not take American brides. The experiment has been tried twice now and the results are in: the princes become whiny and petulant, while the brides become arrogant and shrill. Since the Duke of Windsor and the Duke of Sussex had very little in common before their respective marriages, and their duchesses had even less, I don’t think the problem is one of personalities. Rather, it’s a matter of the way that divergent national characters collide with the peculiar psychological impacts of royal status.
That's from John Michael Greer's latest essay. It is in fact the sum total of what he says in it about the Sussexes, directly or indirectly. Pretty insightful, though. Greer has an engaging view of history, or histories perhaps histories plural*, and has an eye out for contemporary events as well. The meat is about René Guénon, a French intellectual with whom I was not previously familiar. Of course my pet French philosopher is Henri Bergson, but I'm not sure "intellectual" is the best word to describe him.
*Not naming any names, but I had an English professor back in college who asked why we're always talking about "history" and we don't call it "herstory." He said this repeatedly. I'm not in the habit of using the pejorative "midwit" but I suspect it was coined to describe him.
There's a book I'm reading now, a detective novel. I'm enjoying it, but I'm still a little less than halfway through it, so I can't really give much of a verdict on it, which is also why I haven't named it yet. May do both later.
I can comment on the author photo, though. It shows the author with a voluminous yet trim mustache, wearing a very vintage suit. It's probably an attempt to look like William Faulkner, but also makes me think of Jay Gatsby if he were played by a young Dennis Farina. Interesting and different, then.
Is there a word or term for a word or term that is reasonable or even euphemistic in some circumstances, but gets pulled into contexts where it's hyperbolic? Because that's one of the key issues with safetyism.
Say you hear someone who works in an office say, "Massive chunks of masonry are falling near my desk, so I don't feel safe." Well, obviously. It sounds like the whole building needs to be evacuated.
So then there's, "I don't feel safe because there aren't enough lights in the parking lot." Less of an immediate threat but yes, there is a threat.
Okay, so how about this? "I don't feel safe because I was in the parking lot and saw a bumper sticker that said 'I support my local police.' As someone with friends and family in several marginalized communities..." No. Your just looking for excuses now.
And you see a lot of that. Raising safety to a supreme deity, one that can never be satisfied.
A number of years ago, when Doctor Who was first being revived, there were some stories that ran in the American press describing the basic concept and the latest iteration. One aspect that made a few stories was the fact that the Doctor was now a Cockney.
Except that of course he wasn't. The Doctor at that point was played by Christopher Eccleston using something approaching his natural accent. Eccleston is from Manchester, in the Northwest of England. "Cockney" is a dialect used in part of London, which is in the country's South.
The source of the confusion is the shaky conception Americans tend to have about British English. The presumption is that British/English people will be highly educated and upper class, or at least sound like they are. Needless to say this has little to do with either reality or with Britons' conception of themselves. And it leaves you short when you hear a British person who's clearly working class but doesn't fit the narrow definition you have of a working class Brit.
