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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.