In darkest Florida

There seem to have been a few movies called The Chase. The one from 1946 is quite memorable. 

Bob Cummings, whom I've seen in a couple of things before, is a down-on-his-luck veteran. He finds a wallet full of cash in the street with an address in it. He returns it to its owner, who lives in a gaudy mansion outside Miami. The owner is played by Steve Cochran, who I didn't know at all. Said owner likes Bob Cummings and hires him as a chauffeur. Which is kind of bad news because Steve Cochran is a full-on psychopath who will kill you just for breathing his air. See the limo he's tricked out with a secret accelerator in the back seat. Or his browbeaten wife (Michèle Morgan) yearning for escape.

The Chase is adapted from a novel by Cornell Woolrich, who would also provide the basis of Hitchcock's Rear Window a few years later. Unlike some noir it's got very little patter or overt humor. The only actor who gets to be funny is Peter Lorre, who's also the second most evil character. But it's got an unnerving intensity. There's also a headspinning twist that happens not quite at the end.

🔴

Being a social animal isn't a bad thing, but there's an underside to it. If you can be shamed out of doing something that isn't bad, you can probably be shamed into doing something that is. Disturbing knowledge, but there it is. You may well be able to think of some examples from the recent past.

In any case it's better to be aware of the phenomenon, to be prepared in the future.

Claws out

Whenever I go to a video on YouTube now there are, as always, thumbnails of other videos running down the right side of the screen. And there's a particular class of video that's been cropping up lately. They'll be about musicians, with the format "X finally comes clean about Y." "Keith Richards finally tells the whole truth about Jeff Beck" or the like. The implication being that these rock stars have salacious gossip and harsh personal judgments about each other but have been holding them in for decades out of sheer politeness. Sure, buddy.

I'd ask what it is about me that they think I'd be interested, but it's all obviously just a mixture of AI and desperation.

Cool, man

 

I've only seen a little of Peter Gunn. Seemed like a setup with potential, so I may check it out again. Just haven't gotten around to it.

Definitely can't fault the music. Blake Edwards had already found Henry Mancini, who would go on to do the Pink Panther music, of course. He was doing some really atmospheric stuff.

Not as advertised

Check the headline. It reads "Florida Republican brings ‘America First’ bent to powerful Foreign Affairs Committee". But...the article is about Brian Mast, a Representative famous (or infamous) for wearing the military uniform of a foreign country around the Capitol. Does the word "first" not mean what it used to?

Of course you hear about Washington getting a "shakeup" every few years. They never seem to get rid of the ones who should be gotten rid of.

Tunnel vision

There's a sheltered stop at the lower end of the tunnel leading to the East Side, said tunnel only being used by buses. Twenty odd years ago a decoration project was done on it. Shells were pasted to the posts in front of it. The wall behind was covered with ceramic tiles personalized by Providence residents. You could sort of date it because there were some 9/11-related tiles: sentimental, not jingoistic.

For several months the tunnel was shut down and buses were rerouted around it. A renovation project. The inside of the tunnel itself got reflectors and yellow paint to make it brighter. The shelter was stripped down. No more shells or tiles. The wall is now bare brick.

To be honest, it looks better. Having an element of the city's infrastructure personalized by people living here was a nice idea but it didn't pan out. Dirt, graffiti, things breaking: these are all facts of life, and they make an already busy design look somewhat cruddy. The return to basics was probably the right move.

Something else.

 

In his 1980 book Shock of the New, Australian art critic Robert Hughes writes:

By 1979 the idea of the avant-garde had gone. This sudden metamorphosis of the popular clichés of art criticism into an unword took a great number of people by surprise. For those who still believed that art had some practical revolutionary function, it was as baffling as the evaporation of the American left after 1970. But ideas exist for as long as people use them, and by 1976 "avant-garde" was a useless concept: social reality and actual behaviour had rendered it obsolete.

The artists of The Pictures Generation probably wouldn't object too strongly to Hughes's judgment and might well share it. Still, the loose-knit group did seem to suggest a post-avant-garde avant-garde. Their work was like Pop Art in that it borrowed imagery from mass culture, but tended to be drier, more analytical, in some cases less material. 

John Baldessari, a 6'8 bear of a man from the rural part of Southern California, was an unlikely mentor figure. But his hybrid visual art―straddling photography, printmaking, painting, and collage―made him apt. There's a playful alienation to a lot of it, intentional mislabeling, figures whose faces are covered with absurd shapes. And his reputation would continue to grow, Baldessari eventually attaining the immortality that comes with voicing yourself on The Simpsons. (After it had started to suck, but still.)

"The Table Lamp and Its Shadows", seen above, comes from a 1994 series of monotypes. It serves as a traditional kind of art: the still life. There's something a little off-kilter about it, though. Maybe it's the way the cord glows yellow and disappears into the blank white background. It captures the paranoid feeling of being out of place in a hotel room.

14

Lo, even as I passed beside the booth

Of roses, and beheld them brightly twine

To damask heights, taking them as a sign

Of my own self still unconcerned with truth;

Even as I held up in hands uncouth

And drained with joy the golden-bodied wine,

Deeming it half-unworthy, half divine,

From out the sweet-rimmed goblet of my youth.

Even in that pure hour I heard the tone

Of grievous music stir in memory,

Telling me of the time already flown

From my first youth. It sounded like the rise

Of distant echo from dead melody,

Soft as a song heard far in Paradise.

The above is, of course, a sonnet. From one of my favorite poets, Wallace Stevens, who just called it "Sonnet." I guess he didn't write that many that he wanted to share with the world. But this one is worth sharing. He did an excellent job crafting something that has the elegance of formal poetry but still has the feel of conversational speech. On, of course, a change of perspective and of philosophy.

-fulness

Okay, so we're a little past Thanksgiving on the calendar. Still, it never hurts to be grateful, so I'll keep it going. I'm thankful that the rain coming down now didn't fall while I was doing my laundry, and especially not while I was coming home from doing my laundry. Now I get to hear it from indoors, which is much preferable. 

It is, by the way, 38 Fahrenheit. A few degrees lower and we'd be getting snow or sleet. As long as the sidewalks don't freeze, I'm happy.

It came from Argentina

As demonstrated in the contents page featuring The Showgirl Who Can Count to Four, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine was the first English language publication to publish the work of Jorge Luis Borges. And they certainly started something there. EQMM continues to print stories from abroad up through today. You can't expect that all of them will have that kind of impact, of course.

The story they chose, "The Garden of Forking Paths", is an effective crime thriller, among other things. So is another story, "Death and the Compass." I recently reread his brief landmark collection Ficciones. He could indeed be a crime writer, or a fantasist, or a literary writer. Primarily, though, he was Borges. He achieved an enviable level of thisness.

A suggestion

Earlier tonight I was looking up a song's lyrics on Genius.com. There was an interpretation at the bottom of the page, I think accompanied by some words from the songwriter himself. But when I scrolled down to read it, within a few seconds I'd be bounced back up to the top of the page and the scroll bar would disappear. After that everything was frozen.

This is not a great tale of woe. Before the page froze a third time I did a highlight all (Ctrl + A) and copied/pasted onto a blank unsaved word document. It turned out the material wasn't particularly earthshaking. 

But it is kind of a revealing picture of the state of the Web. The deep pockets are jabbering about how AI is going to change everything. Meanwhile the sites that people use are prone to becoming nonfunctional. Their priorities have little to do with ours.

to sum up

When I was a kid I had a book called Origins of Marvel Comics, and a bit later one called Son of Origins of Marvel Comics. That second one sounds a little tongue-in-cheek now that I think of it. As you might guess they were about the beginnings of the first popular Marvel Comics characters in the early-mid sixties.*

The thing I want to emphasize is that, yes, it featured reprints of the first and/or origin stories of the superheroes, as well as sometimes another reprint from slightly later in development. But on top of that there was Stan Lee's reminiscences about how the ideas came to him, and his collaborations with Marvel's art staff.

Lee is often accused of giving himself too much credit in the creation of the Marvel Universe. For diehard fans of Jack Kirby and sometimes Kirby himself, any credit given to Lee was too much. I wouldn't agree, but there's definitely an element of self-mythologizing in these books.

Around the same time I had another book, analogous, on the creation stories of DC Comics superheroes. It's similarly rich in the number of characters, and they're colorful characters. But this was more of a historical telling. No one person could give a firsthand account of all these creations and say, "Yeah, I had a hand in all of them." Not even fraudulently. It wouldn't have been credible. A couple of them hadn't even started at DC. **

To the extent I have a point here, it's not about whether Marvel or DC is/was better. It's that people have a tendency to be sucked in to big stories, not just about fictional characters but also their fictionalized idea about the real people behind them. That's why you hear a lot of things that are too "good", too simple, to be true.

*The company had been around since the thirties, and the characters Captain America and the Submariner predated American entry into WW2, so this was really more a highly successful rebranding than anything else.

** Plastic Man was one of the big successes at Quality Comics, a company that didn't long survive the industry downturn of the early fifties. The "Shazam!" version of Captain Marvel came from Fawcett Comics. DC had taken him out with a frivolous lawsuit and then revived him in their own pages about 20 years later.

In the making

It was the desire to improve both aesthetic standards and working conditions that generated a further article of faith shared by many active within the Arts and Crafts movement: the belief that the material and moral fabric of society had been infinitely better sometime in the past, be it in the England of the Middle Ages or the America of the pioneer age. The ethos of industrial capitalism demanded production for profit rather than need and had generated shoddily designed goods in the process at the expense of both their aesthetic appeal to consumers and the well-being of the workforce. These miserable conditions were in stark contrast to those of a pre-industrialized past in which, it was generally believed, production took place under far more wholesome conditions. The crafts of medieval society had none of the "engine-turned precision" of modern industry, but they retained the sense of humanity that [John] Ruskin so admired. Writing on "The Nature of the Gothic" in the second volume of The Stones of Venice, published in 1853, Ruskin insisted that: "You must either make a tool of the creature or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cog-wheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them."

(from The Arts and Crafts Movement by Steven Adams, 1996)

The more things change, the more they stay the same? We might not face exactly the same conditions as in the mid nineteenth century. But the process that Ruskin decried, wherein the industrialist's technological measurement becomes the standard for all activity, hasn't left us. 

The Arts and Crafts Movement itself is intriguing. In a way it was backward looking. Of course. If you're looking for ideals and ideas, you have to examine the past at least a little. You can't look exclusively at the future, because the future isn't here yet and hasn't revealed its intentions. 

Opponents

This column came out a little before the election, but I just read it a few minutes ago. It's not something I would have written myself, but I like it. The author, Andrew Napolitano, is a legal analyst at Fox News. Not the profile of someone I would have always listened to.

But antiwar voices from the right are out there. Tom Woods, the author of the Politically Incorrect Guide to series of books is another. Along with Ron Paul, the one most people probably know. 

I'm interested in these figures because opposition to wars of choice―especially in the Middle East―won't go anywhere if it involves only liberals and leftists. Who are often blinkered in some way anyway.

Bad from the beginning

Yes, H.R.9495 is awful. The claim is that it " terminates the tax-exempt status of terrorist supporting organization." But obviously the IRS isn't going to extend a tax exemption to anything they know to be a terrorist front now, and that's without this bill having passed. So the effect would be to cut off nonprofits with rumors against them, or ties to what aren't really terrorist organizations at all. Anyone opposing Israel's actions in Gaza and beyond will presumably be harassed.

It's also a really stupid bill for conservatives to support. Russiagate shows that Democrats are fully capable of playing this game. The next time they're in power, you don't think they'll hassle right wing groups for ties to Russia or the European far right? Please.

Nice what?

Good on the people of Zoo Tampa for trying to preserve the African painted dogs. I hope their efforts work out.

That being said, these creatures do not actually look like dogs. If you saw someone walking one down the street you'd spend at least a few seconds going "What is that?" rather than going straight to "Ah, dog."

Africa has produced a lot of animals that have weird and obvious patterns on their fur. I'd guess their extreme lighting conditions have something to do with that.

This'll be a short one folks

I was going to do a post on the new social media app Bluesky but man...As far as I can tell it is not interesting at all. Granted, that's basically on the basis of a few screenshots, but who has time? The main story is that where there was a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth eight years ago, now it's basically just an extended public sulk. 

Anyway, the best reason to leave a social media platform isn't to find another one that flatters your biases more. It's to stop staring at your phone so damn much.

Awaiting

 

Demeter, in Greek mythology, is the goddess of the harvest and of plant life. The most prominent part of her legend is that her daughter Persephone was abducted by Hades and forced to marry him. While Zeus ordered the underworld god to return Persephone to her mother, by that time she had eaten of the underworld's food. Thus she could not stay with Demeter always, but rather had to divide the year between husband and mother. Demeter would not allow plants to grow while her daughter was imprisoned, giving rise to the seasons.

The gods of Olympus could be grand, cruel, childish. Demeter's plight shows them at their most, well, human.

"Demeter" is also the title of the above painting by Patrick Procktor. Procktor's biography is easily summarized. He was a polymath likely headed for great things even before he became an artist. In the 1960s he became involved with London's gay demimonde, befriending Joe Orton (whose portrait he drew) and David Hockney. Hockney's still with us, but Procktor passed on in 2003.

It's his hand, eye, and judgment for which he'll be remembered, of course. The "Demeter" painting creates a contrast between lush green plant life in the upper rough half and austere white marble in the lower. A symbol of the daughter's absence, it seems. It's allegorical and more than a little melancholy, but above all alive.

Signs of the season

#1.

We had a lot of summery days in October, and a few even in early November. For whatever reason. That's not how it is now, though. We're getting overnight temperatures in the low 30s. Certainly some nice things about this. You can just snuggle into the blankets to get to sleep. And it's getting easier to go for a long walk in a jacket without overheating.

#2

The couple who live downstairs have a string of lights running around their doorframe. Colorful. Some of the lights are non-Christmas colors, so I don't think they're Christmas lights as such. Plus, strong chance the couple are Hindu. But it's certainly festive.

Character parts

Been reading The World Encyclopedia of Calligraphy, compiled and edited by Christopher Calderhead and Holly Cohen. Calderhead also writes the introduction to the chapter on Chinese calligraphy, and he says something striking:

Calligraphy holds a central role in the development of Chinese art and culture. The tools of the Chinese painter and calligrapher are one and the same, and there is no clean line of demarcation between the two arts as exists in the West.

This is another way of pointing out that in Chinese words are pictures to a greater extent than in the West. The Latin alphabet is descended, yes, from the Phoenician abjad, and through it Egyptian hieroglyphics. By necessity it still has graphic properties. But they're mostly incidental to the sounds that the letters make, much less the meanings of the words they form. This is in large part true of the other Western alphabets like Greek and Cyrillic.

Eastern scripts are made up of somewhat more complex images that are often stylized versions of the things they depict. You have to learn thousands of them before you know the language. These markings perform, to a greater extent, an actual depiction of what they're supposed to mean.

I don't think either of these systems is necessarily better. There are advantages to both an abstract writing system and one that's more embodied. It's just interesting to realize your own way isn't the only one.

To the lighthouse

I've actually seen Seven Foot Knoll Lighthouse up close. It's on the waterfront in Baltimore, which is a beautiful area. The lighthouse itself is quite fascinating as well. It's a screw-pile lighthouse, and thus looks quite a bit different from what we generally associate with the word "lighthouse." Different design for a different situation, I guess.

The Prequel Problem

Young Sherlock Holmes supports the general rule that if you want to see a really good Barry Levinson movie you should watch one set and shot in Baltimore. It's also an illustration of what might be called The Prequel Problem. 

What was Sherlock Holmes like before he applied his brain to ratiocination? What was his life like before he met Dr. John Watson and Inspector Lestrade, before he acquired Professor Moriarty as an enemy? Devotees of Doyle's books have speculated for years, and there may or may not be a movie in it. So of course in Sherlock Holmes he meets Watson, Lestrade, and Moriarty in boarding school, where he's already a fully formed amateur detective.

This is the Prequel Problem in a nutshell. You may make the pitch that there are great stories to be told before the story everyone knows. But you're not really interested in those Before stories, and/or you don't think your audience is. So you just wind up retelling the well known stories, but set earlier.

Smallville, a show that I never really got into, meant to be the story of young secret alien Clark Kent before he chose to become Superman. But as things dragged on the entire DC Universe formed while Clark was still dicking around in his everlasting gap year. I liked Gotham better but the same thing happened there. After the first season the idea of this being a prelude to Batman's career, rather than just a bunch of Batman stories where he's an adolescent twit without a costume, disappears.

It might just be that burrowing into the "deep" past of pop culture figures isn't very conducive to creativity.

Similarities and differences

There have been five Presidents who took office without winning the popular vote.

The first was John Quincy Adams, a second-generation President. His presidency ended with his rematch with Andrew Jackson. Afterwards he had a distinguished career as Congressman and abolitionist.

Rutherford B. Hayes didn't even with the Electoral College outright. Rather, Congress decided the winner in his race with Samuel Tilden. Not too surprisingly his reputation never recovered.

Benjamin Harrison did at least with the Electoral College, but like Hayes he was mostly forgotten after his single term.

More recent are the cases of George W. Bush and Donald Trump. And they both present a change from their predecessors in that they lost the popular vote the first time and came back to win it the next time. But even between them their stories are more different than alike.

Bush was reelected and improved his share of voters for a very straightforward reason: 9/11 made him a War President. His big war was neither particularly just nor particularly well-prosecuted, but most Americans weren't going to criticize him. Not in 2004 at least.

Trump's story takes a more circuitous path. He was impeached twice and then spent four years out of office before winning a nonconsecutive second term. What drives the story here is that Joe Biden successfully campaigned on a return to decency, for which you can substitute "establishment norms." But then during his Presidency and the campaign of Kamala Harris, voters got a look at what the 2020s political establishment was. Not too surprisingly they ran screaming in the opposite direction.

Aa is for...

Have you ever read an essay on a movie and think, "I'll probably never watch this movie, but the effect it has on people is fascinating"?

This is kind of my reaction to reading about Cerebus the Aardvark.

Cerebus the Aardvark is a barbarian fighter who also happens to be an aardvark. A very stylized and cartoony aardvark. He was created by Dave Sim, a Canadian artist who, a few years into his cult comic book series, had a personality breakdown and adopted a new philosophy that alienated huge numbers of his fans. The Frank Miller of Jordan Petersons, you could call him.

The big difference between comic book culture from the pre-War days through the 1970s and that which took hold in the 1980s was the spread of the comic book store. When comics were sold primarily through newsstands they encouraged a kind of casual engagement with narrative. If you had fun with the story involved you'd gotten your quarter's worth. 

Comic book stores enabled stronger content in terms of sex and violence, yes. But they also created a new audience who looked for longer, more involved, and in some cases more obscure narratives than had been available before. Heavy marijuana users, you might guess, and in a number of cases you'd be right.

Comic book stores always had Cerebus merchandise front and center, making him a mascot of the industry. Along with Omaha the Cat Dancer, whose title was basically furry erotica, but with a higher level of craft than the webcomics that would follow in her wake.

Anyway, I'm not really a big follower of epics, with some exceptions, which is why I never got into the Cerebus thing myself. Sim does seem to have been an accomplished artist, or at least gradually became one. And as I said before, the stories provoke interesting reactions from some other critics, like the ones I linked above. 

The public

The current Google doodle has buttons reading "Vote!" and "¡Vota!" It would be fun to respond by asking them, "For what?" Unfortunately, even though they're in a very public position, communications with Google are very one-way, so they'd never get or understand the message. Seems like there's a lot of that going around nowadays.

△

In cartoons about orchestras the triangle is played for absurdity. It's just what it's name says. A thick wire bent around a couple of times. You see someone stand up and play one note on it, then sit down again. Because what else can you do with it?

Apparently there are those who can do quite a lot. Hearty congratulations to them.

Just what we all wanted

Political discourse is no more real than old wrestling promos. The only difference is the “marks” aren’t wise to it. Liz Cheney can swear for years that Kamala the Radical Liberal will destroy the country, before turning babyface in order to team up with her against The Orange Miscreant at the next pay-per-view. Digby can spend several years telling us that Dick Cheney was the original election thief and a sociopath who orchestrated a phony war for the benefit of Halliburton stock prices, before gladly accepting this sociopath’s help to “protect democracy” from “fascism.” Words mean nothing, convictions mean nothing. It’s all bullshit. I’d rather watch old videos of Ric Flair and Dusty Rhodes screaming at each other. At least they were entertaining.

That's from this blog post, which presents a paper trail of what Liz Cheney has said about Kamala Harris over the years. What Niemand doesn't really go into is that Cheney never really wowed 'em as a conservative politician and was easily thrown over by voters in her own party. Despite the family name, although maybe "despite" isn't the right word. Yet her support is supposed to be a game changer.

It's really hard to see why Harris is up there most of the time, and what Tim Walz is supposed to be bringing to the party. While there's inevitably another teapot tempest I doubt Trump is very worried.

/songwriter

 

Tori Amos is not in the public eye as much as she was 30 years ago. She's a well-known and respected singer/songwriter, but things change and the top level of fame is fleeting.

What I take from this interview is that she largely is the person she appears to be in her songs. The mix of Christian and pagan ideas, the reflectiveness sometimes leading to self-consciousness. This could easily be an act, and there's always a little added in a performer's presentation. But from most signs she comes by her quirkiness naturally.

Anyway, if you're not familiar with her here's a nice song from her early stuff.

Ghost in the machine

An aviator demonstrates all the skills and knowledge that the space program is looking for in their astronauts. The catch is that he's crippled and dying. But there's a solution. There will be missions where they need someone who can adapt to unforeseen circumstances but who doesn't have the vulnerability of a human body. Ergo, the idea is to cut his brain out of his dying body and transfer it to a machine. You can probably guess how this is going to go.

It's the premise of "The Brain of Colonel Barham", an episode of the old Outer Limits series. It comes off quite well. One thing to note is that the titular colonel who's about to be cyborged is such an incredible asshole throughout that his story is more comical than depressing. You can look forward to him getting his comeuppance in the end. The medical professional on this project is played by Wesley Addy, a great character actor with a great Scandinavian face. (His parents were Danish.)

This is actually the third-to-last episode of the series. From what I've read the network had put The Outer Limits in a no-win timeslot, which resulted in creator Josef Stefano and much of the crew leaving. But it seems like the last ones to go and turn out the light were still doing some good work.

Forgive lack of clever header, there are no good rhymes for "cryptid."

There is indeed a certain charm in knowing that there's an annual Bigfoot convention. Is there actually a Bigfoot. Hell, I don't know. Certainly there are still species out there we haven't identified, although most are much smaller. 

But the attendees do seem to have an affecting faith in Bigfoot, and perhaps more importantly seem to like him. One says that mainstream science won't believe until there's a body, but that's not a trade he's willing to make.

As for " the sound you'd expect Bigfoot to make when blowing out birthday candles" I can't say I have much of a preconception on that.

The Swifts

This piece by Sam Kriss is sprawling and excellent, but the main thing to know about it is that he went to see Taylor Swift in Paris.

But the dollar is strong and the euro is weak, and since 2010 Europe has stagnated while America keeps getting richer, tickets for the Paris show, plus flights and accommodation, ended up costing them two grand. This city has finally found something new it can trade on: its poverty.

Swift is―and has for some time been―on what she calls the Eras Tour. As in all the previous eras of her career. And this is where it gets weird.

Doing a retrospective tour of the various aspects of your past is pretty standard. It's called nostalgia. In 1990 David Bowie took a break from Tin Machine to mount the Sound and Vision Tour, which wasn't supporting a new album but highlighting all his previous records and phases, with the theoretical idea of retiring his popular songs after that.

It's probably not even unheard of for a still young performer―thirties but still looks to be in her twenties―to mine nostalgia after a solo career of only about fifteen years. But it's been this fifteen years. Popular culture in the 21st century has been much more static than in the 20th. There's been no equivalent of "first there was flower power then Laurel Canyon then everybody got into disco." Which may account for the fact that only Swift obsessives (and to be fair there are a lot of them) would be able to put all these Taylors in chronological order.

In brief...

This Ted Rall column argues against strategic voting and really, he doesn't have to do much to convince me. At the start of the fourth paragraph he mentions the fact that 61% of the population opposes sending more weapons to Israel. Now of course polling is an inexact science, blah-blah-blah, but I don't think 61% is very wide of the mark. But of course our political system doesn't reflect that. The preference of the majority of people can't even get a hearing in Washington. And probably not just on that.

Whether or not we have a democracy now can be debated. But it's absolutely true that our politicians take us for granted. And increasingly they treat voters as unpaid staff with an obligation to keep them in business. Looking at you, Barack.

This is an abusive setup and voters are right to take a good look at their options.

Something colorful

Andy Ross is apparently the house cover artist at Penzler Publishers, the crime fiction publishing house started by famed bookseller Otto Penzler.

I don't know how much of this is drawing or painting by hand and how much is done on the computer. My educated guess is that there's some silkscreen involved. But he's got a distinctive sense of style, and that goes a long way. Especially when so many book covers lack any kind of art beyond stock photography. I like to see something tailored to the book.

RETVRN

35. The reasoning is as follows: "asserting one's freedom" in art makes sense only referentially ― it is an act of destroying traditional artistic methods. After these crises of freedom ― they are often creative and enriching in their opposition to the fossilized relics of tradition ― it finds sustenance only in a parrotlike repetition of the original gesture, a self-parody that immediately becomes irrelevant.  One then finds oneself confronted with an increasingly weak, sad, and bitter involvement with the unconscious leavings of tradition. 

This is from Jacque Roubaud's introduction to the Oulipo Compendium, edited by Harry Mathews and Alastair Brotchie. 

Oulipo, sometimes styled as OuLiPo, is short for Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle, "Society for Potential Literature." They attempted to get around the dilemma that Roubaud describes above by thinking of new restraints. The restraints were there to be overcome, to show that the artist wouldn't be defeated by them.

The group, with some obvious turnovers in membership, is still around. You don't hear as much about it. In the 20th century there was more of an appetite to play with and rearrange literary tradition, as demonstrated by Calvino (an Oulipian himself), Nabokov, and Borges. In the 21st the assumption seems to be that nobody reads anyway, so it will all fall on deaf ears.

I think this is too defeatist, though. Enrique Vila-Matas has continued. to play into the present. That's where the hope is.

Discrepancy

The weird thing is I'm not sure I laughed when I first read this Peanuts strip. But I did remember it. Now it's absolutely hilarious to me. 

Probably what cinches for me is that Lucy isn't just being mean. Well she is but she isn't. It's not like she's being deceitful when she asks Charlie Brown the question. She just sincerely doesn't get what constructive criticism is.

Shame about the big two

Pretty sure it's been years since I read mainstream comics. 

Not for the same reasons that a lot of others have. Many guys say that they gave up comics when they discovered girls. When I discovered girls I needed all the distractions I could get, so that's not me.

But at this point Marvel Comics is owned by the biggest media company in the western world. DC is owned by a company that would very much like to be that and is closer than most. And that creates a hierarchy. Writers and artists answer to editors. Editors are low on a chain of command that ultimately ends with executives and analysts. What they want is predictable product, so interesting ideas don't last long. 

Just bringing it up because I think a lot of things are like that now.

Surprise yapping

I was walking down a residential street today and all of a sudden heard this loud angry barking. Which startled me more than a little because I'd had no idea that there was even a dog nearby. The house had a fence in front, and shrubs growing in front of the fence. Which wouldn't have hidden a big dog, but this one was small. Had collie features but seemed about half the size. I'm thinking Sheltie. 

It always annoys me when dogs―whom I generally like―get territorial about the public sidewalk. But this one was nice to look at anyway.

The testing industrial complex

Have to admit to a certain ambivalence about the Bechdel test. Regarding its use as a serious metric, that is. It appears to have started as a one-off joke.

It's certainly not a bad thing to attempt a more multidimensional portrayal of women. Women are everywhere, and they behave in ways that media is generally not interested in.

The problem is that when you start giving credence to rules that are extrinsic to the work itself, where do you stop? One problem with the arts in general now is that so many decisions are made by people who may have good intentions (and certainly claim to) but are fundamentally uncreative. Overall we need less of that.

Wild zebras couldn't drag me away

It's a story I've only heard about in the past couple of years, and it's delightfully nutty. William Randolph Hearst imported a herd of zebras for his private zoo, because that's the kind of millionaire tycoon he was. Eventually he groaned "Rosebud!" for the last time and most of his animals went to legitimate zoos. But the zebras stayed. Eventually they got out and went wild. Now Southern California has wild zebras as part of its ecosystem, at least in a small stretch.

Introduced/invasive species can cause havoc, of course. But it seems like these zebras have kept in balance pretty well. It might be that they're filling a niche left by an insufficient number of wild horses and antelope.

That's how they getcha

You know those sad lost souls who combine the old bar of soap in the shower with the new one so they never have to throw out soap? Well I'm one of them. It just always drove me crazy to see soap dwindle down to a little sliver that either got thrown out or went down the drain. Hence the grafting.

The problem is that the manufacturers seem to have changed the formula. Now whether it's wet or dry soap just doesn't adhere to another bar of soap. I really doubt this is accidental. These people might force me to try body wash.

Drumsticks?

The first thing I remember hearing about Baba Yaga was that she lived in a house on chicken legs. That sounded to me like it had to be a gag. And it is pretty crazy. Still, having a house on legs that can move of their own volition―your own will presumably being in charge―has to be some kind of magical attribute.

Makes sense that in actual mythology Baba Yaga can be a monster, a nuisance, or a benefactor. When a myth has been in circulation for a while, different aspects will come to the fore. 

Also interesting that while we're used to thinking of her as a singular person, there is a version of the tale where there are three Baba Yagas. Influence from Classical myth would be my educated guess.

Good night, sweet prince

 

The Swedish artist Nils Dardel traveled a lot and painted a lot. Respect wasn't necessarily quick in coming. According to this biography:

I suspect that his character stood in the way of his artistic career – for many years, some critics considered him to be a superficial and trite artist. Even worse were the many attacks on him as a person, relating to his ambiguous sexuality. Dardel was deeply hurt by the criticism, even though he usually dismissed it with his sharp and witty tongue.

Now as far as his sexuality is concerned I just don't know. He was married to a woman. So was Elton John for a while. But that's not really what's key here. What we can tell is that he knew how to put a picture together and he didn't take himself too seriously.

The Dying Dandy, above, stands as a case in point. Both of the men within the frame―the dyer and the mourner―have a kind of Korean boy band prettiness. The women are quite pretty too; Dardel wasn't blind to female beauty, or incapable of depicting it. But they knew they're subordinate. And the young man in the bed certainly knows it. He's still clutching his hand mirror.

Between the clothes, the plants, and the blanket, the full Roy G. Biv is covered here, and in rich, gemlike shades. Oscar Wilde could only dream.

Ambiguous brass

I'm writing a mystery novel now, which has involved writing some characters on the police department. This has made me reflect on something: In fiction there doesn't seem to be much agreement on command structure and who does what. 

A number of shows have put forth a kind of factory system where you have a bunch of detectives working under a lieutenant, who's the highest ranking police personnel that most of them have regular contact with. That's the setup you see on NYPD Blue, Homicide: Life on the Street, and most of the Law & Order shows. Inevitably there's friction with people who are still higher up, but in the main the lieutenants are the unquestioned bosses.

On the other hand Columbo was a lieutenant and while he was ultimately brilliant, most of the murderers he nabbed started out with the impression that he was just a schlub that the department had sent to do busywork. Did the man even have an office? In a perhaps similar vein Lt. Randy Disher on Monk was mostly just a goofy sidekick to his captain, both of whom relied on their basket case consultant.

There are other variations. Barney Miller has basically the same job as the TV-average lieutenant, but he's a captain. Nash Bridges is an inspector―one down from commissioner―and he spends all his time doing regular action-cop stuff with Cheech Marin. Speaking of commissioners, in anything Bat-related Jim Gordon runs the whole Gotham PD but puts in personal appearances at crime scenes. 

These examples are all from American media because that's where I've noticed these discrepancies. British police forces have bureaucratic-sounding titles like DC and DI. It sounds more orderly but whether it solves all the ambiguity I don't know. Am interested in finding out.

Homeward bound

One hazard of using a laundromat is losing socks here and there. One from a pair, which means you can't help but notice. 

A few weeks ago I had the inverse happen. I got home and found someone else's sock tangled up in my sheets. Probably a kid, although I suppose there are adults with real tiny feet. Anyway, I took it back to the laundromat today. Don't know if they parents are still looking for it. Probably not. But if they are and held onto the other one they might be in luck.

SGRtR

This song has a convoluted history even by the standards of 1960s R&B, and seems to have come close to being discarded. Lucky thing that Lieber and Stoller showed interest in it, or who knows if we'd have heard it?

The article lists several interpretations that have been put forward about the song. They don't really get at its appeal, though. What really makes it is the eerie vocal arrangement. It's like an old nursery rhyme coming back to you, just hitting you again. Years ago I heard it while playing cards and thought, "Am I actually hearing this?" I'm not the only one who was affected by it either.

Repetition

It's been raining all day. Earlier tonight there was a car outside whose alarm kept going off. One of those alarms that sound like someone's leaning on the horn once every second. The rain was setting it off. The owner would keep resetting it so it went off again.

I've long questioned the utility of car alarms. There are so many false positives, I can't be the only one who ignores them, or tries to. Automated boys who cry "Wolf!"

Now I know my ABZs

Ah, Uncle Shelby's ABZ Book. My parents brought home a copy of this book when I was a kid. Couldn't tell you my exact age but we're not talking little kid. Not young enough to take all the entries at face value. I thought the book was funny, and I was right.

I didn't, at the time, know about Shel Silverstein's career as a singer-songwriter. But that's what a lot of people know him as primarily. In fact "A Boy Named Sue", one of Johnny Cash's best known songs, is technically a Shel Silverstein cover. You can see where they came from the same mind.

Product to move

In recent ads for Grammarly, a digital typing assistant that touts its AI components, an executive looks for some of her top employees in the office. Someone else who works there tells her that they're all lost in the composition of emails, sucked into a time-consuming task. Visually this is represented by their being sucked into literal space vortices, only their feet visible. 

This is not a thing that happens. Email is mostly used as an internal form of communication in the workplace. Workers only send each other the bare minimum. Nobody is spending upwards of an hour on an email.

Whether or not AI represents an innovation into actual artificial intelligence (it doesn't) there is something artificial about the process. That something is artificial demand. This is a product that was yoked together with no real concept of whether anyone actually wanted or needed it. Now there's a full court press to convince you that you asked for it.

Poetic Justice (not the movie)

The pantoum is a Malay poetic form, i.e. from the island nations of Southeast Asia. It seems difficult to do at all, and certainly to do well. Nevertheless, a few have.

Donald Justice was a poet mostly in the latter half of the twentieth century, and he has consistently wowed me. This is him reading his noted "Pantoum of the Great Depression." He's got a great delivery too.

Hello up there

One of the wildest manmade sights on Earth has to be the Nazca Lines (not to be confused with the NASCAR lines, which are better understood.) These are figures etched into the earth in Peru, in the Pampa Colorada. They depict a spider, a killer whale, a monkey, and other animals. These lines are estimated at about 2,000 years old, some perhaps older. And they can only be seen whole from the air. Who was expected to see them at the time? Makes you think.

It's worth thinking about them in the context of the average people of the Nazca tribe. The would see that something had been etched into the ground. They couldn't see what it looked like exactly. Nonetheless it was part of where they lived. A shared connection to...something.

Petting zoo

Is Donald Trump getting good advice? Maybe not. He managed an upset victory in 2016 while breaking all the apparent rules, so he might think another such victory is inevitable. But it is possible to screw this thing up, and he might be doing it.

The Haiti/duck/rabbit thing is a case in point. There was never even much natural smoke there, never mind a fire. It's an urban legend, and while you can see making an offhand joking reference to it at a rally, there's something suicidal about insisting this is really happening at a televised debate when you're surrounded by hostile fact checkers. 

Then there's the AI slop, which can make one regret having eyes. It's great for advertising the concept of virality, but not much else. This is the kind of thing that happens when you think Elon Musk is your bestest buddy. But Musk is like Israel in that he's got his no matter who's in office. What are his real incentives?

Turning yourself into a caricature does appeal to people who are already on your side and/or who like the caricature. But it doesn't broaden your appeal.

Inevitable September post

Allergy season has started up again, as we all knew it would. (If you're in the Southern Hemisphere I'm sure the spring hay fever scene is here or very close.) The good news for me is that the first time this month that I took antihistamine it worked right away. Relaxing. Now probably just have to hold out for a few weeks until they fade again.

It adds up

Grocery visits where you actually buy something take longer now. Specifically those where you're just getting one or two things, or not much more than that. This is because long term the COVID lockdowns ended up killing the whole idea of express lanes. The only (allegedly) faster and more convenient option are the self-checkout aisles, which I don't want to use for various reasons. It would be nice if the stores hired enough to replace the cashiers they know longer have, How to make this happen I don't quite know.

Such a split

I'm rereading a book that quite thrilled me the first time I read it, Haruki Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. It still works its magic. At this point Murakami will probably never win the Nobel Prize for Literature, but he doesn't need to. Name a recent winner outside of Bob Dylan anyway.

Among other things it's a great turn on the idea of the unreliable narrator. While the narrator―like the other characters, never given a name―may not be crazy or intentionally deceptive, his descriptions and introspection give the impression that he's leaving something out, perhaps without being aware of it. 

Another aspect I like―and in truth I'm not sure how much of this is Murakami and how much is translator Alfred Birnbaum―is the division of narrative tenses. The more cyberpunky half taking place in the scientific complex is told in past tense. The half taking place in the doomed fantastic arcadia is told in the present tense. It's kind of the opposite of what you'd expect, keeping the reader just a little off balance.

Polls apart

There's a lot you could say about Tablet, and the dismal swamp that is its current homepage. But Armin Rosen is genuinely one of the best writers on American electoral politics out there. His hard look at how elections currently work in this country as distinguished from many others in the world.

The thing is, we were told in 2020 that the election had to be changed to de-emphasize in-person voting because COVID presented an unprecedented risk to health and life. Never mind if that was actually true. The point is that back then nearly everyone with a profile said it was, and most people seemed to believe them. In 2024 COVID is a hobby for terminal worrywarts. Almost nobody anywhere on the political spectrum is treating it as a lifechanging crisis. So why do we need to keep what we were told were emergency measures in place when the emergency has passed?

That question can be answered with another: Cui bono? For the Biden Administration, currently trying to launch itself into the Harris Administration, the election of 2020 went exactly how they wanted it to. Naturally, it's being treated as a model.

The problem is that if one side openly optimizes election laws for their own sole benefit, it makes it hard to trust the system for those outside the party. That should concern you regardless of who you intend to vote for, if anyone.

[click]

 

"Don't Hang Up" is a bittersweet listen. It's the last song from How Dare You!, which was their last album with the original quartet. Which doesn't necessarily mean it's the last song they recorded, but combined with the lyrics it does carry an air of finality. Of course it's a gorgeous song of course.

The video above is interesting. It came out years before the premiere of MTV, which popularized the idea of concept videos. And since there's no concept, the initial impression is that it's a real or "realistic" performance by the band. But it's not quite. For instance, no one is seen playing the drums. In reality Kevin Godley, the hirsute lead vocalist on most of the song, was also the band's drummer. Given their Beatlish approach he almost certainly didn't do both at the same time, but it's kind of eerie to have snare sounds coming out of nowhere.

Hats off to Lol Creme, who seems to have a different interpretation of "She's got a rocky terrain" than what I always thought it meant.

Growing the Apple

It's interesting how borders change over time. When national borders do so it's usually big news. In other cases it might be forgotten.

Not universally forgotten but not known by everyone: Until 1898, New York City was officially only Manhattan. It was in 1898 that it unified with the then-independent towns of Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island. So Brooklyn wasn't part of NYC when Walt Whitman was growing up there.

Even stranger: Flatbush was another town, which had been a farming community for most of its existence. Brooklyn only annexed it in 1898. Which means that if you were a twelve-year-old living in Flatbush in 1900, you could have lived in three different cities while all the time remaining in one house. That had to be weird.

Getting premillennial

I see from my ventures online that there seems to be a lot of excitement over the upcoming reunion tour of England's Answer to The Black Crowes, But Not As Good. Of course this goes hand-in-hand with nostalgia for Cool Britannia, when the UK was awash in the previously unknown and unseen Union Jack and a radioactive ghoul managed to get elected Prime Minister. (The latter sounds cooler than it was.)

It's all part of the circle of life, of course. The 90s are back―or at least the most mainstream aspects of it are―because a sufficient number of people who were teenagers then have attained high status jobs. I'm a little different though. It's not that I'm immune to nostalgia, but I don't remember the time of my adolescence as being some great lost golden age.

Indie pop the vote

JD Vance is an Xennial. Seeing as how he's the first Presidential or Vice-Presidential nominee on a major party ticket to sport a beard, it wouldn't be too surprising to learn that he has at least elements of being a hipster somewhere in his history. This is panning out, but also getting him some blowback that is sadly typical of the times.

As soon as JD Vance was announced as the Republican vice-presidential candidate, political operatives dug up his Spotify playlists, which includes Death Cab for Cutie, One Direction and The Black Keys. Say whatever you will about JD Vance’s politics or his personality, but his curation of random songs before his fame as a bestselling author and National Conservative mascot has been the least interesting criticism of him. Death Cab for Cutie’s frontman Chris Walla wrote that the songs “centre on connection, and longing, and the fear or pain of loss”, but was baffled by why Vance “can’t – or wouldn’t – work to pay that empathy forward in policy terms, openly, to every person, as the artists do in song.”

To make a sidenote and partial correction of the linked article, Chris Walla is not the frontman of Death Cab for Cutie. Nor is he currently in the lineup. Ben Gibbard is the lead singer and lyricist, and as far as I know he hasn't weighed in on making Sen. Vance's playlist. Whether that's wisdom, caution, or just not finding his way to that particular mic yet I don't know.

The thing is, if you think that your music can actually help people understand "connection, and longing, and the fear or pain of loss”, why would you limit your fandom to one side of the political spectrum. All politicians are self-serving to some (great) extent, but to the extent that they're actually trying to do good for their constituents and the populace, they're going to have different ideas on what's best. Maybe your music (or movies, books, etc.) can help guide them, but it's stupid to demand capitulation.

En plein air

Today I gave a man directions. Or, to be more precise, I gave him information on the route the bus normally takes. When we were on the bus I caught a glance at the pad he was carrying. It appeared he had been painting a watercolor of the Baptist church we'd been standing in front of.

It's not the first time this summer I'd seen a guy doing that. In fact around town I've several times seen men―and they've all happened to be men―doing alfresco watercolors of some landmark or others. I don't know what exactly is behind this trend but I approve of it. Women are welcome too, of course.

Knocked out of contention

This convention overview gives a pretty good view of what I'm guessing Joe Biden must have been feeling at the convention in Chicago. When the summer began I was convinced that the Democrats were going to stick it out with him. If I thought so he must certainly have believed it. As it happens that weird pre-GOP convention debate did him in. He must have a pretty long list of people he trusted and who did him in.

Now the party is left with Kamala and her campaign of Joy. Of course constantly invoking joy during an election where you're insisting―again―that democracy itself is at risk makes you look like those grown-ups on The Twilight Zone who always smiled because they didn't want that kid to wish them into the cornfield. And Trump is a threat because for all his faults, he's still recognizably human. His opponents have had to dust off Bill Clinton because he does sincerity better than anyone else. As in "If you can fake that you can fake anything."

 

I have, on a couple of occasions at least, caught sight of moose in the wild. Just browsing in a green area. I know I've never seen one running up close. It's hard to think of an animal that looks more unhurried. They can certainly book it when they want to or have to, though.

Blindness, blindness and sight

The Scintillating Grid Illusion is visually simple. A black field crisscrossed with grey lines, white dots appearing where the lines intersect. And black dots too? They seem to flash in and out of existence. Of course they're never there at all. Your brain just projects them, for whatever reason.

Optical illusions are often cool, especially when you first notice what's going on. This one is as well. I can't look at it too long, though. It's a little too much like having a floating image in your retina after staring at a blinding light.

Idea!

What they say is that traditional incandescent and halogen bulbs use energy to heat a filament and that this makes them less efficient energy-wise. LED bulbs are more efficient. But where's the proof?

If LEDs are less wasteful then they should be able to take less energy and still produce the same quality of light. But they don't. Back when I had halogen bulbs in my living room's overhead light fixture the light was bright and crisp, reaching every corner, casting beautiful sharp shadows. Now everything is always dull and dingy.

Which makes me think that the efficiency angle is a con. I know, scientists and tech people never lie to us, but hear me out. The energy usage is less. But it would also be less with a lower watt bulb. But with lower watt bulbs you know you're getting lower wattage and probably lower quality. LED is still new territory to many, so it's easier to make people accept lower quality. 

is this

 

This one's short and sweet. You don't generally see magicians do card tricks with only two cards. Or at least only two cards that are readily apparent. It's a clever little switcheroo regardless of how she pulled it off.

Just fluttering by

Second consecutive blog post about insects, this one is a little more positive. Selectively, at least. 

I was waiting at the bus stop and something flew into the shelter. A butterfly, it had black wings with little orange spots. I'm not positive but it looked like it could be a dark morph of the eastern tiger swallowtail, which was kind of cool. Of course I'm sure it found someplace it wanted to be more than the bus shelter.

The fly days of summer

The Cicadapocalypse that they were predicting this year never really happened, at least around these parts. Maybe the birds took care of them. As far as general pest control goes having birds flying around is a system that works.

What we have gotten this year is a larger than usual number of flies and gnats, both inside and out. You can cut down on them by doing certain things, but unless you live in a climate-controlled space entirely cut off from the outdoors I don't think you can keep them out 100%.

In related news I now know what fruit fly pupae look like and that they can grow inside your garbage container. Not something I would have volunteered to learn but useful knowledge for the future nonetheless.

North to Alaska

I've been rewatching Northern Exposure lately. Or in some cases watching it for the first time. I'd never seen the pilot until recently. 

The show is about an overall eccentric small town called Cecily, Alaska. It wasn't actually filmed in Alaska, which I guess might be an inconvenient shoot. Instead they filmed in the Cascade Mountains of Washington State, which is a picturesque area in its own right. You do see totem poles here and there that look to be made by the Tlingit, a tribe with a great artistic tradition.

I have to say that watching it the second time around I have a greater liking for Joel Fleischman, the indentured town doctor played by Rob Morrow. He's certainly tetchy, but he has more nuances than I appreciated the first time. It probably helps that, like me, he has this weird style where he never looks entirely casual or completely formal. And his scenes with Native receptionist Marilyn are quite funny.

No-go

 Downtown Providence:

The tall building that houses my bank on the ground floor is one that you can actually walk through from one end to the other, at least during normal business hours. Cross the narrow side street, however...

This row of buildings has a couple of banks. The largest of these buildings you simply can't enter without security keying you in. That's not how it was a few years ago. Also you can't walk through any of the alleys because they're all fenced off with iron.

Do things always get more restrictive over time? It often seems that way.

Good shepherd

This short, created through stop motion, is really lovely. It's a work of brevity, simplicity, and just the right amount of tenderness. Always a nice surprise to see something like this has been made.

Turns out I can still post videos on the blog, although the way to do that has changed a little. Well, YouTube videos. Still rankles a little that I can't do the same with, say, Vimeo, but what can you do?

 

It builds up

I was just looking up why it feels hotter at night than during the day. Because it's definitely a real phenomenon. It's currently in the high 70s and feels muggier than it did during the day when it was in the high 80s. Apparently it's a matter of the ground absorbing heat during the day and releasing it into the atmosphere at night. Which feels like a reason to be glad days are getting shorter.

Kamala Komedy Klassic

Apparently the White Dudes for Harris Zoom calls have raked in a lot of money, as have the White Lady equivalents. Given the net worth of the participants, well, no shit. But it's hard to see them winning hearts and minds overall. It's pretty much impossible to appeal to a demographic by telling them that they've had it too good for too long. This fact has been obscured by the reality that, again, the individual guys involved here sort of have.

It was never going to be great, but it didn't have to be like this. Kamala Harris has ancestors from the Caribbean and, through there, Africa, Asia, and Europe. I'm not the Black Police, obviously, but it's safe to say that she's not she's not solely black. Barack Obama used his mixed heritage to point towards a post-racial future. If Harris has any native advantage it's that she could outdo Obama on that front. And ultimately "post-racial" is what the people want, Well, most of us do.

Journey through the day

A little bit ago I sent a manuscript to Melbourne via email. Interesting to think about. I sent it between midnight and 12:30. If the recipient had been in California (3 hours behind) they might or might not be paying attention to things like that. It would be night but not late night, so who knows? Sending it to London, on the other hand, would mean they're five hours ahead. Still in bed unless they're unfortunate insomniacs or hardcore morning people. 

Melbourne? That's 14 hours ahead of the Eastern Seaboard. Someone might have seen the email come in as it happened. I don't know how often they check.

In part

In the fiction of Philip K. Dick there are things called homeopapes. These are basically automata that assemble your daily newspaper for you based on the things you're interested in. Not a few have said that this was Dick's prediction of the algorithmic new media environment we live in. Well, sort of.

When I look up a particular video on YouTube, the platform shows thumbnails of videos that are "recommended" for me. Time after time these include a rant by former Labor Secretary Robert Reich on "why millions of Americans would follow a neofascist." Yeah, you can guess. Now there's nothing that would interest me less, but the fact that I repeatedly fail to click and watch it makes no difference to the recommendations.

You see this all over the web. The algorithms are there to help the Owners cater to various groups, but they have only very blunt and crude ideas about these groups, and no real interest in individuals.

Of course PKD put his characters through weird and traumatic events, after which they weren't as taken with things like homeopapes. As it turns out, it's easier than previously imagined to get to that point. Staying there is another matter.

Peek inside

 

Harriet Backer was the sister of concert pianist Agathe Backer Grøndahl, and she toured with her sister. Traveled with her, that is, Harriet wasn't an opening act. But she was an artist, a painter, and during their travels she continued to study, including some time with Jean-Léon Gérôme. It paid off.

Unlike Gérôme, though, she doesn't really come off as an academicist. This is perfectly imperfect. Looking at "Blue Interior" above I'd note that her dates are 1845-1932. Among other things this means that electric light became a regular household fixture during her life. And I'm sure that in her mature years that invention came in quite handy for her. But as seen here, there's nothing quite like early morning sunlight. Especially in the way that it doesn't cover everything.

The old switcheroo

One of the strangest things I've witnessed in American politics is the way Joe Biden's reelection campaign has turned on a dime and become Kamala Harris's reelection campaign. And it's definitely a reelection campaign. She's not reaching out and trying to convince voters to take a chance on her. She's running as the familiar, a fixture.

Does that mean that Kamala has been the real power behind the throne for the past 3 1/2 years? No. But Joe Biden isn't either. It's enough to make you wonder if POTUS is even still a real job.

Retrospect

I remember years ago I had this book on rock 'n' roll style. Written and published in the early 1980s, it covered the looks of various rock stars and fans from the rockabilly beginnings to the early New Wave/Post-Punk era. Not surprisingly, the book was British. 

What I especially remember is the chapter on glam rock. Or just glam, because the author used "rock" as a kind of pejorative. He loved Marc Bolan and Roxy Music and had more restrained admiration for Bowie, but thought glam rock was a vulgarization. Not all that fond of Elton John and absolutely loathed Queen.

Does all this sound idiotic? Well, that's kind of my point. There have always been gatekeepers, and they've always been pretty dense about what other people enjoy. Anyway...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvB2MnIIdMw

How long can disc go on

First time in a while I've done this, but tonight I tried watching a movie on DVD, which I'd gotten from the library. Wow. Before I'd even gotten to the menu there were fifteen minutes of previews I couldn't skip, hyping movies that have long since come and gone and in some cases been forgotten. Then there was a lengthy ad for Epix, which has since been branded as MGM+. I'm coming to the conclusion that DVDs are now put together for the purpose of punishing you for watching them.

Fantasyland

 Regarding the questions raised here:

The polar bears look very impressive, as they would. The fact that they're acting as a pack when they're not really pack animals I attribute to their driver being that much of a badass. Maybe the harnesses are very subtle and white so you can't see them? But I can't excuse the man's armor, which is eight awful ideas soldered together. And the sled looks like some unfortunate jeweled jet-ski dragooned into service on the snow.

I don't care if dragons use telepathy or speak English. What are they saying? That should be the focus, so minimize the setup.

Fantasy should always be moving towards what is affecting and/or interesting, away from that which is not. This is good advice for fiction in general.

With the picture turned down

I only recently found out that most new world monkeys are colorblind. To be slightly more precise in most species a good deal of females and all males are colorblind. You could do a lot of speculating on why that is. The author does, in fact, speculate that for these monkeys the lack of color vision is an adaptation that keeps them from being distracted by color.

Possible. Makes you wonder why this factor wasn't in play in Africa, with the adaptation only happening after the rafting. What was the big difference?

Butler

A lot of details on the events are still fuzzy, but the shooter is being reported as a 20-year-old local. That's just tragic. There were things he could have done with his life. He chose this, and for what?

Trump was nicked but otherwise seems to have gotten out all right. This is good. Sadly one person attending was apparently not so lucky.

In the long run this increases the already robust chances that he's going to be elected to a second non-consecutive term. Lots of liberals will be angsting over that. I'm not among them, but I do have a feeling that everything is about to become even dumber, if that's possible. Brace yourself.

Opacity - The opposite of transparency

Not sure if this is true of Macs, but with PCs they send out updates, and then you have to reboot to make sure the installation was complete. In the space of three days I've had to reboot four times. All on one update, I believe.

Now if I'm complaining I want to make sure that I limit the complaint. Everything is running okay now, as these things go. But it's weird that I don't even know what they changed or added. Microsoft feels no need to keep users up to date on what they're doing. An example of the arrogance of the tech industry. One of many.

Rescue

I like to read this interview now and then and I think this answer makes for a very good passage:

If it weren’t for crises, we humans would still be bacteria. Without crises there is no life, so literature, without crises, would be dead. Really, great literature needs constant crisis in order to thrive: this is an idea that I developed in some of my books, from Suicidios ejemplares and Bartleby & Co. through Dublinesque. For me, what each book pursues as the essence of what it loves and would be thrilled to discover is the “literature of No.” The best books are those that initiate expeditions to these unknown worlds of the literature of No, those that want to figure out what it essentially is. And what is it? For now I’m still on the expedition, still searching; my intuition is that literature only appears precisely where it is hidden and disappears, maybe because I haven’t been creative so much as critical.

The whole idea of human creativity and artistic expression has been receding in this century. How else could you describe a situation in which our betters are trying to convince us that art is something a robot can create in five seconds? And literature has definitely been relegated to that class of things that supposedly no one cares about. So I like the idea of literature appearing "where it is hidden and disappears." It gives us hope when we can't see it.

Swn y Gymraeg

A few months back I watched the final Columbo movie, Columbo Likes the Nightlife. From what I've seen of the show's post 1989-revival most of it had been disappointing, compared to its 70s heyday. But this one pleasantly surprised me. The writing was tight and Peter Falk was in good form at 75.

The reason I bring it up is because of something I've heard about it. Matthew Rhys plays the murderer of the piece, a rave impresario opening a new nightclub. He kills a paparazzo blackmailing him with something that would look bad to his Mafia backers. 

The character was apparently written as English, but Rhys is Welsh. After hearing Rhys's English accent, Falk had suggested he use his native accent. He took that as a vote of "no confidence" in his London accent. But I tend to think Falk just wanted something different, and they'd never had a guest star with a Welsh accent before. Ray Milland, born in Neath, had appeared in two episodes, but Milland had used that Transatlantic accent that actors from all over the place had used in Old Hollywood.

Taiga, taiga, burning bright

The word "taiga" comes to us from Russian, which may or may not have gotten it from Mongolian. It's a biome, also known as boreal forest, occurring in wintry environments, but more conducive to plant growth than the tundra is. This is where you see a lot of conifers, not as many trees that shed their leaves in the autumn. Furry predators like bears, wolves, and wildcats do well here.

Taiga covers a big part of both North America and Eurasia. There isn't really any to speak of in the Southern Hemisphere, because there's basically no land at the right latitudes for it. That could change with continental drift, but slow drift is slow.

As to why I was thinking about snow-covered taiga tonight, the heat and humidity probably have something to do with it.

What now?

Having studied―well, read about, mostly―the history of art in the twentieth century, I know about surrealism, cubism, abstract expressionism, etc. And I wondered if anything comparable had risen in the past few years. This article popped up.

It's hard not to notice that even though this is explicitly about contemporary movements, the newest one is the Young British Artists, a 1990s phenomenon. None of them are contemporary in the way we'd generally use the term.

Of course an artist doesn't have to be classified by an ism to do vital work. But the presence of these various schools of thought in the art of the last century does seem to have indicated a general interest in art and artists, one that seems to be lacking now.

Houseguest

Funny thing on a grocery run today. I was waiting for a bus and it started raining. Sun shower. By the time I got downtown it had stopped. But big dark clouds were still on the horizon. And by the time I was done with the errand it would start and stop raining twice more.

This mix of light and dark clouds, alongside blue sky, continued the whole time. Was this somehow connected with Hurricane Beryl? Certainly we in Rhode Island have nothing to complain about if it was, but it was weird.

Just enough light

 

It's called "Interior with a Lady." You could call it a portrait. For whatever reason the painter, John Koch, did not. Whistler called his famed painting of his mother "Arrangement in Grey and Black." You could also refer to this as an arrangement of colors, red near the top of the list. The lady takes center stage no matter how you slice it.

You can find evidence that Koch was painting in the mid twentieth century if you look closely. The compact electric lamp, for one thing. But he always has the feel of the late nineteenth, when Impressionism is just starting to have a broader influence. There's something to be said for holding onto the old ways, if in using them you're better able to create. That certainly looks to have been the case for him.

No late admission

I don't generally read books when I've already seen the movie, but there are exceptions. Recently my literary travels have brought me to Robert Bloch's Psycho.

The book is a good mixture of horror, thriller, and mystery. I don't think a scene-for-scene adaptation―the kind that Polanski would later do with Rosemary's Baby, for instance―would have been a hit. For one thing, Marian Crane (Mary in the book) meets her fate much quicker, and with less fanfare. So a lot of the familiar beats associated with her, like the frantic deal with the used car salesman and the tense traffic stop, aren't there. In fact the whole idea of starting the movie with Marian as the protagonist is the invention of Hitchcock and screenwriter Josef Stefano.

Norman is different too, of course. In the book he's older, fatter, wears cheap glasses, and his psychopathology is closer to the surface. Hitch knew that a handsome young man with a touch of shyness could get away with much more in the eyes of the audience.

✍

It does not, at this point, seem like you can really affect anything by voting, anymore than you can keep a beloved item on the market by continuing to buy it. Not that you're given much choice in voting anyway. Nations that are officially democracies are unofficially becoming "Here's what you're getting" propositions. For most of us politics is something that is done to us.

That's another reason why pursuing something creative―writing, painting, picking up a guitar and making a song―is a good thing. It's something that you actually can affect. And it might give you a chance to resist the onslaught.

To shroud my clothes, the black of night

This overview of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs* mentions one of the most memorable parts: the Queen's self-transformation into the Old Witch. It's scary and intense and even as a kid I knew it didn't actually make much sense.

The Queen, after all, is a ruler. Her word is law. Why would she turn herself into a hideous crone in order to get to Snow White, whom she could just have arrested and, if she so preferred, executed. Tudor Era queens Mary and Elizabeth both did in women and girls who got in their way. Neither one of them splashed their own faces with acid in order to do so.

I think it ultimately works because so much of the movie is based on dream logic. In a dream you can be getting chased through the woods by a bear who is also at the same time your high school algebra teacher. The character's terrifying forward impulse takes the lead, and the faces ultimately fade into the background.

For every dark hot cloud

We're diving right into summer with a heat wave. Actually I think it started the day before the Solstice. But yeah, it's been hot and humid all over the place.

On the plus side, I've made a discovery. If you're, say, at the computer and your arm is going to be resting on varnished wood for a while, you can lessen the unpleasant sweaty sensation by laying a washcloth underneath. A small but welcome comfort.

Unus non scit

Recently borrowed The Romans: From Village to Empire (Mary T. Boatwright, Daniel J. Gargola & Richard A. Talbert: Oxford Press). There is, of course, a pretty full plate of stuff to talk about where the Romans are concerned, especially if you start at a point before it was a real city, as is the case here.

One interesting topic involves the Romans themselves writing history:

Roman historians only rarely undertook what a modern historian might recognize as research. Undoubtedly, Romans of a later age had access to information regarding earlier centuries that was, in modern terms, reliable. Some documents did survive, although later Romans found them difficult to decipher and interpret...

However, few Roman historians seem to have consulted the old texts directly. Instead, they relied on interpretations of them (not always accurate) encountered in the work of earlier writers.

The history of Rome by the time it had reached its imperial phase was already quite long. Long enough for the Latin language to mutate and evolve. We understand Shakespeare because actors have worked to keep him contemporary and he's been quoted by thousands of other authors, but dropped in a sixteenth century English village we'd scarcely understand a word. anyone was speaking. Later Roman historians had a similar problem, running into a Latin that was already archaic. Not too surprising that they chose to copy what had already been written. Especially since originality wasn't really what was selling. (Is it ever?)

Crucial, verbal

I did a crossword today compiled by a guy from Brazil. Yes, it was an English-language puzzle. But that leads into an interesting point. I read him saying somewhere else that he creates puzzles in Portuguese and Spanish as well as English.

Writing a crossword in Spanish would be a special challenge, If you have "banana" crossing "El Niño" at the second "n" in English no one will really call you on it. The situation is different in Spanish, where they're considered to separate letters.

Call it a draw

One of my readymade Old Man complaints is the unwelcome standardization of the animated film. It's with some alarm that I realize that a generation or two has grown up with computer animation and virtually nothing else. And with a few exceptions the animation on offer has been ugly and unimaginative. Nonetheless, for kids now that's your first taste of cinema.

It's not necessarily like that everywhere, though. Disney helped destroy the artform in this country when Michael Eisner sold off all it's drawing equipment. Studio Ghibli has continued to champion hand-drawn animation, and has had great success with it, including in the US. Japan has no shortage of people expert in what we've come to call STEM, but they haven't tried to banish all their traditions.

In actuality

When the COVID thing first started I gradually started following some different publications. More right-aligned than I had read much of before, often labeled as "heterodox." The thing was, I sensed my previous sources were leaving out inconvenient bits of the story and perhaps couldn't be trusted, so I had to look outside of them.

What has become apparent since then is that a lot of the "heterodox" media aren't, really. They're not really independent, and their editorial stance is oriented to currying favor with power just as their rivals do. 

Generally I still do at least look at Spiked, Tablet and Quillette, but don't expect to find much of interest most days. UnHerd has a higher success rate, and Compact is interesting because it was founded by Trump fans who actually do favor a non-interventionist foreign policy (which for the most part The Donald himself doesn't.) But the ultimate lesson is that you need to continue taking things with a big grain of salt.