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.