S'now lie

The Scotia Arc is basically the connecting tissue between South America and Antarctica. A long underwater system, it has a number of islands appearing on the surface. South of Tierra del Fuego, most of them have never had native populations. This is the frosty part of the Southern Hemisphere, and what happens there is mostly out of our sight.

The Snowy Sheathbill lives there. It's the kind of cold weather bird you don't see much in these parts. The white fluffy feathers could almost pass for packed snow. Did kids build it? But you have to admit it also looks quite determined.

D'oh?

It has to be weird being one of the main voice actors on The Simpsons. Since the characters started in a mini-feature on The Tracey Ullman Show they've been at this for 38 years. The actresses who play the kids weren't really kids, of course, but they were young adults. 

These people have all gotten ridiculously wealthy from doing the show, so it's not like they're going to grouse in public. But it probably hasn't escaped their attention that it's gone from a vital show to a pleasant show in extra innings to background noise. I'm sure they thought they'd all be on to other things by now.

How it grows

 

Expressionist art has a reputation for being angsty. While this impression is helped along by the term's later association with cinema, certainly expressionism can go to some dark emotional places. Still, that's just one aspect of it.

August Macke's "Gartenbild" of "Garden Picture" shows a different side. On a sunny day, a mother works in the garden while her small daughter plays nearby. The town, represented by the houses in the background, is bright and colorful. Nature, represented by the green plants, is powerful, yes. But it's benign and cooperative as well. 

Macke's work often showed affection for his Westphalian home and excitement for the world at large. The outbreak of war darkened his mood noticeably. Sad to say, he was almost immediately killed in that war. One can only wonder what he might have painted otherwise.

Preview of coming attractions

It was the strangest thing. This afternoon I heard thunder. Not faint thunder, either. It sounded huge and explosive. But when I looked outside, not only wasn't it raining, but the bright sun was shining on all and sundry.

Now around midnight, the thunder returned. And this time there was a heavy rainstorm. Lightning too. So this afternoon was kind of like an actor showing up for a matinee performance when there was only an evening show scheduled.

Away from probing eyes

There are a number of programs on the market for creating art. And in fact digital is the favored medium of a number of artists now. But there's a catch.

Tech companies have their AI's "train" on existing materials, which basically means plagiarism. Digital artists might have trouble defending their works from outright theft. Those who work in oils, watercolor, charcoal etc. may also be vulnerable to plagiarism if they post their work online to sell it or just show it off, but they still have the originals, which exist in physical space.

Can we extrapolate from this? Should writers be using 1945 Smith-Coronas? Will musicians start recording on wax cylinders again? It's hard to say what lies in the future. The government seems disinclined to put more than fig leaf restrictions on Big Tech, and the tycoons object even to that. At some point it might be worthwhile to give up the instant gratification of going viral in order to have something of your own.

Warning: spoilers ahead for 53-year-old cop show episode

After playing Perry Mason for nine years, Raymond Burr starred in Ironside as a police chief deprived of the use of his legs by a would-be assassin's bullet. Ironside itself ran for eight years, serving as a guide to the transition from mod 60s aesthetics to wide tie/greasy sideburns 70s aesthetics.

In the episode "Down Two Roads", Ironside's assistant Mark graduates from law school. Making his rounds of places to start his law career, he observes at the DA's office. They happen to be prosecuting the janitor at the school Mark just graduated from for burglary. Mark doesn't think the janitor is guilty and he manages to prove it, at the cost of learning that the real guilty party was a friend from his graduating class.

What's notable from the perspective of the present is that both Mark and his friend who turns out to be the thief are both black, while the accused janitor is white. That should be mundane. Law and justice are rooted in truth, and guilt or innocence are independent of race. But in the post-George Floyd moment that hasn't entirely passed, race and other identity markers are always top concerns. Colorblindness is itself deemed regressive.

That's not a good change, and I hope it also passes. The idea that some races are inherently more virtuous than others is never helpful, and will always reappear in ways you didn't expect or want.

Somewhat related: the idea I've seen promoted on some recent TV shows that black people need to constantly record everything on their phones. Come on, kids, Big Brother is your friend!

Dry spell

I got word over the weekend that water would be shut off on Tuesday. Reason being, Providence Water has been working on this street for a couple of weeks now, replacing the pipes underground Tuesday was our day.

The heat of the summer isn't the best time to not have running water, but it's doable with some planning. Besides my water filter pitcher, I filled a couple of extra vessels with water on Monday night. Coffee jar and lemonade bottle, if you're wondering. That left me enough for the essentials on Tuesday morning, like coffee, brushing teeth, even washing dishes by heating up water on the stovetop. There was no way to take a shower, of course, but again by warming up water on the stovetop I came up with a better-than-nothing substitute.

By 2:30 in the PM the H2O was running again, which was a relief. The city workers left us all Brita pitchers as well, which was a nice gesture.

🐦

A word ending in "-mancy" will refer to some kind of divination. So is there such a thing as ornithomancy, divination by birds? Indeed. And it was probably inevitable that at least one method included therein would involve cutting the bird open. But most don't, and I'd guess the best methods don't. If there's a chance of a bird telling you something you want to know about the future, it will be in the guise of informing you about the present. And this will be through the bird's behavior. 

Elegy

In the last couple of days I've noticed two dead animals (mammals) by the side of the road. One was a rabbit and the other was a squirrel. The rabbit was an especially sad sight because it was barely larger than a mouse, so it must have been a kit.

I note this not to be morbid, but as a kind of companion to other observations. You often see animals running across the street in a city. Cats seem to be very adept at it. But there's no guarantee of safety with this action. As is often the case. Drivers can do you in without--in most cases--intending to or even knowing you're there.

Future not what it used to be

The following is an excerpt from Bernard Wolfe's afterword to his own story suite "Monitored Dreams and Strategic Cremations", from Again, Dangerous Visions (1972).

Science has been from the beginning what it most spectacularly is now, the handmaiden of capitalism. SF has all along been the handmaiden to, as well as the parasite on, science. This is a treason to the profession of writing, which in its serious forms can be a handmaiden of nothing but disdain for, and assault upon, that-which-is. 

They will, of course, improve their dream monitoring in order to make their cremations more strategic. With the technical assistance of the for-anybody's-hire scientists. And the gleeful sidelines cheers of their sf votaries.

If you detect pretension, you're not wrong. If you've seen Richard Linklater's Slacker you may remember the old anarchist who insists that he was fighting Franco in the civil war when really he visited Spain once, in the fifties. That's how Wolfe tends to come off. 

But consider Silicon Valley and AI accelerationism. The congressional moratorium on states regulating AI is plainly unconstitutional, for all anyone lets that stop them. But it's the kind of thing that organized science and technology demands. You might think of it as the aggressive counterpart to defensive COVID panic, which was equally based on scientism.

Where both science and science fiction have gone wrong is in imposing an eschatology on both the social and natural world. An inexorable progress, resisted only by fools. But it's incumbent on us to ask, "Whose progress? Whose goal? And why should it be inevitable?"

Summer pushes us into the deep end

I trust that when I post on the trusty blog again in a couple of days I'll have something more interesting to say than "It's hot." But for now, it's very, very hot. Hit 100F today, in fact.

One thing that changes for me when the mercury goes way up is the way I drink water. For much of the year I'll pour a glass of water and just let it sit for a while, because drinking it right away isn't necessary. Might even be painful in the winter. But on really hot days I'll probably down it right away.

Varying dimensions of mind

À propos of nothing I figured I'd share my impressions of the four shows that have aired under the title The Twilight Zone. Here goes.

The first (1959-64): This is the one that really makes it. If it hadn't been a success it's unlikely they would have tried to revive it at all, or turn it into a movie. Rod Serling was a great writer for the medium, as well as being a special presence as narrator, despite not being trained as an actor. The writer part also applies to Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont. The change to hourlong episodes in the fourth season was a bad move, with the exception of a few episodes. Still, that just proves that Serling had hit upon the right form to begin with.

The second (1985-89): Shakier. Like its predecessor, it had a heavyweight writing staff, led by Harlan Ellison. And some of the stories are very effective. Often seemed to think it was deeper than it actually was, although you could argue that too much ambition is better than not enough. Kind of wild that the Dead did the opening theme song.

The third (2002-03): Aired on UPN with Star Trek: Enterprise as its lead-in. One good thing it did was bring back the onscreen narrator, the position now being filled by Forrest Whitaker. Unfortunately, most of the stories were--what's the word?--bad. Good actors tended to be stranded. 

The fourth (2019-20): Created and narrated by Jordan Peele, it first showed on Netflix. Being a streaming show instead of a broadcast show meant they could throw in a lot of swears. It also meant they could pursue a narrower audience. Unfortunately--there's that word again--this meant in practice focusing on Resistance liberals and preaching to the choir. Which I guess is at least a new way to be bad.

So perhaps I'm biased but Serling's original seems to be the one to really hit it out of the park. I'd also note that the two better series--from the 50s and 80s--adapted short stories from print, while the next two didn't. Sometimes "original" ideas aren't.

Words to live by

 

It's a kind of retrofuturism. An image that calls up what they once thought the future would be like. 

When I was a kid anything science fictional or future-oriented was likely to be packaged with some kind of font that evoked a rounded-off square: no sharp points, but no actual circles either. The one on the right, now called Data 70, was especially popular. I think it got its futuristic image sometime in the sixties.

These were products of their time, and it seems especially of the daisy wheel printers used back then. The advent of the personal computer made it seem kind of old fashioned, although the prompts on the screens of early PCs and Macs weren't all that far off.

All the steps

Step 1: Put food in the oven.

Step 2: Close the oven door.

Step 3: Wait 30-40 minutes.

Step 4: Wonder why you still don't smell any food.

Step 5: Realize that it helps when you turn the heat on.

This is one of those things that's unbelievably aggravating in the moment but gets funny when you have a couple hours' distance.

Curveball

People can surprise you. Take Marjorie Taylor Greene. I never really got the liberal panic over her, but I didn't expect anything from her either. She'd spend one term in the house, maybe two, and spend all that time being ignorant and exhibitionistic. Then she'd get a commentator job at Fox or OAN or something like that, trading on her forgettable time in Washington.

Now she's doing as much as anyone in Congress to avert World War III. Not all by herself, but more than most, and very clearheaded about what's wrong with our foreign policy. Of course Congress has been abdicating its job on that front for so long that Presidents tend to get what they want by default. That deference started a long time before Trump, but it may not be sustainable anymore.

Pedigreed sitting ducks

Eric Ambler, a British author of thrillers and screenplays, was well-known for The Mask of Dimitrios, which I haven't read but probably will in the foreseeable future. He is not as well known for Send No More Roses, published in the US as The Siege of the Villa Lipp. That's probably because it's not one of his books adapted into a film or miniseries. One line from it is on his Wikiquote page, however: "What use is an honest lawyer when what you need is a dishonest one?" This is eerily similar to that line about Saul Goodman, "You don't want a criminal lawyer... you want a 'criminal' lawyer."

Anyway, Send No More Roses, or whatever you want to call it, is great. The narrator, Paul Firman, is a great rogue. Frits Krom, a man staying in his house with two younger colleagues, is a social scientist who believes Firman is one of the world's great unpunished criminals. Krom is very much an irritating fool, an Ahab who couldn't beat the Whale in a game of checkers. But he's not Firman's biggest problem. No, that would be Mat Williamson, a sometime business partner who finds it convenient to end his association with Firman in a very permanent way. Things get tense, but they never stop being funny. Ambler was 68 when he published it and I think it was his second-to-last. In top form, though.

Final blogger's note: Yes, this post should have gone up last night. I mostly had it written in my head, and only after going to bed did I realize I hadn't set it down on paper. Or whatever.

Avatar

If you're a politician, does it sound productive to constantly pepper your constituents with robocalls? I guess they should do some kind of outreach, but I have my doubts about this one. 

To be clear, yes, my Representative in the US House does this. And I'm never in the mood to listen to the whole message, so I pretty quickly erase it. And I'm a guy with a landline. Imagine all the youngsters and not-so-youngsters who are getting all those calls on their cell phones. Yeah, I don't think you're making any friends that way.

Empty booth

The title of the video above was sufficiently provocative that I was interested in hearing what Beato was talking about and listened to the whole thing. Death of memorable songs? Yes and no. He's identified part of the problem, at least.

Since he's a proudly whitehaired man in his sixties, it may need pointing out that Beato is not saying that there are no good musicians anymore. Far from it. And he's not saying that there are no good songs being written anymore. Rather that there's a near total break between what's interesting and what's popular. I wouldn't disagree.

My explanation for what happened might be a little different. Despite all the payola and hype, there used to be DJs who operated with a certain amount of freedom. And listeners trusted them enough to open themselves up to unfamiliar music. Britain's John Peel was the best known, but there were lower key exemplars here in the US. It wasn't a perfect system, but it had enough give so that there were pleasant surprises.

What went wrong didn't all go wrong at once. MTV was a double-edged sword. While it also introduced some unfamiliar artists, it effectively created a national playlist, taking oxygen from the locals. The 1996 Communications act was a disaster, opening the door to monopolies in radio who had zero interest in anything being unpredictable. Eventually DJs got sidelined where they existed at all. And now radio has been supplanted by Spotify. As Spotify is algorithm-driven, it basically guarantees that what you hear in the future will be an imitation of what you listened to in the recent past.

So what's needed to make good new songs popular again. Thinking humans in a position where they can recommend things again. Whatever genius figures out how to do that will have performed a great service.

Part of the deal

If you or I or any other human had a lower lip full of warts that would be considered a medical problem. We'd almost certainly want to get rid of it.

The Jamaican Fruit Bat, by contrast, has them as a matter of course. Many leaf nosed bats do. It's sometimes said to be a defense against toxins in the skins of amphibians they eat. Possibly, but the Jamaican is mostly frugivorous, so wouldn't really encounter that problem. But still, these are an adaptation to something, with origins coming from within the body. So they're not really warts, which are caused by viruses.

Must be said that the Jamaican Fruit Bat is also quite fetching, especially the babies.

HONK!

Mention Mother Goose and a lot of people will picture a plump middle aged woman with glasses and a bonnet, who may or may not have a pet goose. Then again, Mother Goose has been depicted as a goose herself, or at least an anthropomorphic one. There's a fairly marked difference there.

But where does the character come from? There are a few different schools of thought on that. Likely it's not a straightforward story. Charles Perrault, a French author who brought us Sleeping Beauty and Little Red Riding Hood, among others, seems to have had something to do with it. The character was then revised in both the US and the UK. And has proven quite flexible.

Grey cells

Playwright Matthew Gasda presents an interesting analysis of student literacy and lack thereof in the AI era. It's at the very least worth taking seriously in conjunction with other informed views.

If it's true that you can't expect kids raised with iPads and smartphones to make a sustained argument in print, or to follow one for that matter, then these devices should have never been introduced. I mean, now you tell us.

But then there's also the matter of education being a formality that everyone has to go through, which was supposed to be a step towards greater democracy but which hasn't turned to be that. As Gasda writes, "Because the American education system from kindergarten through graduate school has become about securing diplomas and employment, long-form writing has been transformed from a core demonstration of learning to an impediment."

That tendency precedes our current technological environment, although the phones aggravate the problem. With the disappearance of industrial and agricultural jobs, the emphasis has been on getting everyone through college, with a professional job presumed to be at the other end. In effect it's meant that jobs that don't require much in the way of thinking nonetheless can only be gotten by people with educational attainment. But if the demand is that all kids be book smart, then the easiest way is to define book smarts down.

His advice to treat children like they have a soul is a good and necessary one, of course. I don't expect to see it applied at large scale.

Art at home

 

Marcel Rieder's career as an artist started in the late nineteenth century but extended well into the twentieth, as he died during World War II. He'd have been among the first generation of painters to see the lightbulb come into common use. His usage of electric lighting was canny, as in "Kitchen Interior" above. These are shaded lights, bringing out color, leaving a healthy amount of ambient shadow. Not overpowering. To that he adds a lyric sense of what the domestic world is like in the evening and at night.

Which end?

"We need to bring back shunning." "We should crack down on X." "We should round up all the degenerates and..."

You hear these kinds of statement a lot. And it's not that they're always wrong. Sometimes more structure and discipline is needed in society.

But recognize that you're probably not part of the "we" in these sentences. I'm certainly not. If they start punishing something that wasn't punished before, you and I are more likely to be on the receiving end than the giving one. Crackee, rather than cracker. People tend to forget.

Looks like summer, anyway

 

This singer, Art d'Ecco, is somewhat enigmatic in terms of public biography. For example, that's a stage name, but he hasn't revealed his real name.

One thing I do know about him is that he's from Victoria, British Columbia. So I'm wondering if the locations in this video are identifiably Victoria. The houses glimpsed here are rather picturesque.

Neighbors in the north

Do polar bears actually take off their bear skin and become human when they reach their dens? That's not a literal truth. Or at least not so far as we've been able to observe (Of course more things in Heaven and on Earth and all that).

But the Inuit do perceive something real about polar bears. A kind of canniness. An almost-human way of going about things. This animal and these people live in fairly close quarters and have done so for a long time. In that time the Inuit have learned a little something about their white-furred neighbors.

Unknown indeed

Not too long ago I read Elmore Leonard's novel Unknown Man No. 89. I read it for a couple of reasons. For one, the times I've read Leonard he's generally been entertaining at least. Also I'd read that Alfred Hitchcock had bought the options to it and considered an adaptation in the late 70s before switching his plan to The Short Night and then dropping that for full retirement. So I was curious if it seemed like it would work as a Hitchcock movie. 

And...maybe? A movie that hit all the main beats of the book would have been a weird mix of The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Super Fly, and The Days of Wine and Roses. The last of those is because Leonard joined AA around the time he wrote the book. I could sort of rough out who might have been well cast in the main roles. The predatory ex-con Virgil Royal seems like a good fit for the late Yaphet Kotto, for instance.

The main problem is that the set pieces, the most visually arresting scenes, tend to happen when the two lead characters aren't around. These include a shooting in a hair salon and a crooked debt collector being dangled out a window. But again, the two main characters are elsewhere. The screenwriter would have had to do some patching to fix that.

Know when to fold 'em

If a town has a colorful story about its founding you can't really blame them for capitalizing on it. The Arizona town of Show Low has certainly done that. The detail that two candidates for mayor should settle the election with a deck of cards is...well, it's something you don't expect to see in these disenchanted times. It must be said that the monument with the two men at the card table is quite a beauty as well.

Really, though, just having a town father named "Corydon Cooley" puts them ahead of the pack.

Whack-a-mole

From the perspective of free speech and fairness, Project Esther is bad news. It aims to treat support of the Palestinian cause and opposition to Israel's as inherently invalid, if not criminal. And aggressive guppies like Marco Rubio are prepared to enforce it.

It is, however, almost certain to be ineffective at the shaping of public opinion. Trump can't enforce a pro-Israel public. Lyndon Johnson could have. Sixty years ago the ball was in Israel's court. Its people―or at least many of them―had just escaped a horrific attempt at extermination. Combined with Jewish contributions to global culture and the fact that few in the West knew or cared much about Arabs, that made for Israel looking like an inherently heroic nation. I don't think the government could have made that situation last forever, but with some judicious and subtle lawmaking they could have made it last a very long time.

The situation is different now. There are too many images of carnage, too many openly genocidal statements from Tel Aviv. And while a Florida district recently put an even more obese version of Itabar Ben Gvir in Congress, that's exactly the wrong move in terms of public opinion. Once a cause has gone this far in losing public failure, you can't boost it through force.

Even right-leaning security types may be weaning themselves off the obsession with Islam. Rising in public consciousness are nihilistic and/or cartoonishly evil groups like Zizians, 764, and Eflists. Of course the combined membership of these groups could get lost in your average Walmart. 

So I wouldn't be surprised if there are a lot of Satanic panics in the near future, with teenage delinquents joking and vandalizing their way into federal prison. That's not great. But panics are cyclical, and the cycle shows some signs of turning.

At the risk of TMI...

Mostly the only time I grow my beard out is when I have a fever blister. That's because the best treatment for that particular malady is just to leave it alone. (All the creams and lotions they sell for it are just growing cultures.) So rather than leave a small patch on the upper lip unshaved I just stop shaving everything above the neck.

The thing is, I don't really like having facial hair. It's itchy and distracting. I'm sure you get used to it. And maybe I'll give it another try one of these days, after the beard I briefly had in college. But at present it's one of those things I look forward to getting rid of, which I'll be able to do tomorrow.

In miniature

I've been perusing the Elizabeth Bishop's Complete Poems. Poetry enriches life. I've learned that trying to reproduce poems with fancy indentation leads to heartache. This one doesn't. Its title translates to "Winter Circus."

Cirque d'Hiver

Across the floor flits the mechanical toy, 

fit for a king of several centuries back.

A little circus horse with real white hair.

His eyes are glossy black. 

He bears a little dancer on his back.

She stands upon her toes and turns and turns. 

A slanting spray of artificial roses

is stitched across her skirt and tinsel bodice.

Above her head she poses

another spray of artificial roses.

His mane and tail are straight from Chirico.

He has a formal, melancholy soul. 

He feels her pink toes dangle toward his back

along the little pole

that pierces both her body and her soul

and goes through his, and reappears below,

under his belly, as a big tin key.

He canters three steps, then he makes a bow, 

canters again, bows on one knee,

canters, then clicks and stops, and looks at me.

The dancer, by this time, has turned her back.

He is the more intelligent by far.

Facing each other rather desperately―

his eye is like a star―

we stare and say, "Well, we have come this far."

I think the poem's rhythm quite suits living toys.

Deep down

 

You don't hear tubas that much anymore. Or at least you don't hear them in that many places. Jazz has gotten away from it, with a few exceptions. It's not often played in rock the way sax has made a kind of home there. For the most part it's exiled to the classical world and high school marching bands. But the tuba can definitely induce a mood.

"I'm from Silicon Valley and I'm here to help."

It's well-known that Ronald Reagan said that the nine most terrifying words in the English language were "I'm from the government and I'm here to help." It's less remembered that he said so in the context of announcing a drought assistance plan for farmers. But the idea that government plans can do more harm than good isn't an extremist one.

But beyond a certain point that applies to plans in general. There's a technocratic impulse in both the government and the private sector. It's the idea that as we get more and better data we can make better decisions, and if that "we" means only a small elite, it's incumbent on all the other schmoes to get with the program.

This article on the pitfalls of "smart cities" shows where that kind of haughtiness can lead. The great cities of the Northwest―Seattle and Portland―have turned unfriendly to their residents exactly by means of the scientific measures that were supposed to help them. 

Portland didn’t fail because it lacked intelligence. So far, it’s failed because it forgot to ask what the intelligence was for. The dream of a “New Atlantis” — a city run by science and data — turns dystopian not because of its technology, but because of its values. If citizens are assumed to be liabilities rather than moral agents, then urban design becomes an exercise in containment, not liberation.

Not to beat a dead horse, but the COVID reaction was the final boss of treating citizens as liabilities. For weeks turning to months turning to a couple of years, all unprotected and unmediated social interactions were held to be irresponsible. All because of experts who had convinced themselves they had the best information. 

This also means that it's past time smart people admitted that data isn't everything.

🗡sharp

Sometimes one might sit up late at night and ponder the big questions like: Knife throwing, is that for real? How does it work? What kind of nut would agree to be the throwee?

This first-person article pretty much confirms that it's a genuine thing. Bates apparently teaches it, or at least did back in 2015. He wisely doesn't give away too many trade secrets in the interview. The statement "I’ll also light the knives on fire and throw them while wearing a blindfold." must have been good for luring 'em in.

Windy City cats

I was just looking up stuff about Chicago, I guess out of curiosity over what puts it head and shoulders above other American cities in terms of creating Popes. And I came across this article on Chicago-specific slang. 

What struck me right away was the picture they had illustrating the word "gangway." It's very striking and the cats are beautiful, of course. But I doubt that there were just this many purely black cats hanging out together. I think there was a wrangler involved. Not a superstitious one, obbiously'

The ground under our feet

There's a certain class of Wikipedia edit I used to make. I don't anymore. I still remember how to log in, and I still make some edits, but smaller ones.

What I used to do was find an article that had been flagged for not having any sources. Then I'd find some official sources and include them in the article's bibliography. It's not really doable anymore.

Until fairly recently you could freely surf the websites of most magazines and newspapers. They might try to coax you to subscribe by offering some kind of premium content. Or they might have a limited number of articles you could read in a month, and once you had used them up you had to wait for a new month to begin. But increasingly we're in the "no freebies means no freebies" era. Everything is paywalled. 

You could say that this kind of crackdown was always inevitable. That publishers have to make money. You'd have a point. But some things rankle. For one thing this comes after years of online readers tolerating oftentimes intrusive ads. Also, are the revenues being used to pay writers and bring in more and better journalism? Doesn't seem like it. 

For better or worse the infrastructure of the internet was based on certain things being promised. Now they are quickly being unpromised. 

Odd shapes

As noted here, amoeba-like shapes had a huge upturn in the forties and fifties. It probably had something to do with their very abstractness. Amoebae themselves can only be seen under microscopes, and the similarity is just suggestive. So this shape belonged entirely to design, abstract art, kooky animation, etc. 

If you're about my age you've almost certainly seen amoeba patterns on Formica, and maybe porcelain as well. The actual practice of making them is long gone, but the artifacts themselves lasted a substantial amount of time after they were in vogue. Kind of like, if you look at the link, that little starburst shape behind the "k" in "Skylark."

Blondes have more fun

If you want to change the world, you have to have the courage to be an outsider. In other words, you have to take certain risks and do things a little bit differently; otherwise, if that were the case, everybody would be successful. Doesn't work that way. Progress never comes from those satisfied with the failures of a broken system; it comes from those who want to fix the broken system.

Remember those words from Donald Trump, delivered at the University of Alabama commencement. Years from now, when there have been more than fifty Presidents and he's just one or two of them, grade school level Presidential fact books will be published and that will be included as one of his grander, more presidential statements. 

More than that, though, it's a key to his appeal. For good reason, Americans have lost all trust in insiders. Trump presented the clearest available way to put someone besides them in charge. Different people have different opinions on him as a man and as a leader. I'd say that much and perhaps most of what he's done while in power has been not good. But it's important to understand how he got where he is.

You can't keep a good pie down

Good news from the neighborhood. While I don't want to jinx it, it appears that the pizza place near where I live may be coming back. That's according to a guy I talked to today who was working on renovating the insides.

Some background: A while ago they were told by their landlord that their rent would triple, or else they'd have to leave. The landlords apparently thought that they should be getting more rent because of the location. There was a change.org petition to allow them to stay. I signed it, even though those tend to be of limited use. As it happened, they got a few months' worth extension, but a few weeks ago they did close their doors.

The thing is, this is not really a posh location. It's nice enough, but the street at least on this side of the hill is a few modest homeowners and a lot of renters, plus a couple of small housing projects. People assume that all of the East Side is ritzy, but it's a little more heterogeneous than that. So any new business that came in paying the rent that it seems like they were asking for would have found out soon that the overhead was too high. Maybe the property owners realized that. I hope so, and I hope there are realizations like that everywhere.

Good time

I won't go into too much detail over how I came to hear this song, although WFMU is involved. And I'm always happy to listen to it.

Rachel Freund, as far as I can tell, doesn't have any of her music on YouTube. But there is an article up on her and her husband. It sounds like they're doing right by the musicians and aspiring musicians in their neck of the woods.

Funny, Sacramento certainly isn't the first city I think of in relation to polka.

Que Serra

Partly on someone's suggestion and partly out of my own instinct, I've been researching more on the late sculptor Richard Serra. He worked in metal for almost all his works, often at an overpowering scale. He claimed to be more influenced by architects like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe than other sculptors. As it happens I like Mies van der Rohe, although not his skyscrapers so much.

Unlike most of Serra's works, To Whom It May Concern was made to be shown indoors. The solid black walls make an interesting contrast with the scrubbed white walls and pearl colored carpet. I wonder what went through the heads of the patrons walking around those walls.

Yikes

The movie Woman of the Hour doesn't look all that good, although I could be wrong. I just found out about it today from a Quillette review that's since been paywalled. Again, not eager about the movie, but I can't judge it either.

The case Rodney Alcala is very weird, though. A serial killer, among other nasty things, going on The Dating Game? That show was huge in the seventies. I can only imagine that he wanted to get caught. Maybe all the evasions he had to do not to get caught wore him down. Maybe he figured on getting some kind of celebrity out of the trial. But it's definitely a "come and get me" kind of move.

Plethora of spectra

There's a term I just came across for the first time today: "on the asexual spectrum." Okay, so that's a spectrum too now. But wouldn't pretty much any non-priapic individual be somewhere on the asexual spectrum? Not many people are up for it all the time.

What I'm getting at this point is that anybody can identify as some kind of LGBTQ++++++ group if they want to. If you're a big fan of parades, say. And that's just super, since it means that maybe we can find something more interesting to talk about.

When time runs out

From across the pond more than one source is suggesting that Doctor Who is approaching the abyss, not to be confused with the Time Vortex. That sort of squares with the impressions I've been getting, and it's also to be expected. 

In its original incarnation Doctor Who started in 1963 and was a hit in Britain almost immediately. In terms of international audience―which hinges on America, for better or worse―it really took off in its second decade. That had to do with both Tom Baker's charisma and its discovery by public TV viewers. It's quite plausible that 1980s budget cuts at PBS were a factor in its demise in 1989. But there's also just the fact that what goes up must come down.

NuWho, as its generally called, started in 2005. That's also the year that David Tennant took over the lead role, and when it started peaking in popularity. So compared to its predecessor it appears to have been living an accelerated lifespan. It's not really a surprise that gravity is having its effect sooner this time around.

The question is whether Russell T. Davies, who was the prime mover in bringing DW back in 2005, was the right choice for showrunner again, whether his way is the most interesting way for the show to spend what may be its final years for a while. But from what I understand he was the only candidate considered once Disney got involved with the show's distribution and financing. Disney, yet again.

I tend to think that the Critic's Myke Bartlett is right to suggest that it would be good if they "Trade expensive faux cinematic scale for thrifty domestic folk horror." i.e., go simpler. It would leave them less reliant on MouseBucks, for one thing.

Analog-ies

I like this essay on the death of progress a lot, and find that it ties into another recent piece on Greer's own site. Progress is indeed the guiding faith of Western industrial society, and has been for quite some time. If one is falling, the other isn't too far behind, although he's also probably right that we're talking about a process that will play out over centuries.

I just wanted to add my 2 cents on the issue of music formats. Greer attributes the resurgence of vinyl records to their greater richness of sound as compared to digital formats. I'm sure that's a big part of it. Yet there's also the matter of the inherent unreliability of software. If a vinyl record skips you can see why it's skipping and do something about it. If a CD skips, it's just something you're stuck with. You can hope that it might start behaving again, and sometimes it does, but there's nothing you can do to effect that outcome. Of course more people now stream and/or download to avoid the awkwardness of physical media. But that doesn't necessarily solve the problem, and it leads to the possibility of having your music disappear altogether.

I remember reading an interview with Jay Leno where he said that he still collects new motorcycles, but not new cars, because when he opens them up they're all digital parts he can't do anything with. And if I recall correctly this was before he even took over The Tonight Show. Gives you some idea how long this kind of thing has been happening.

Fleshed out

Author bio from the back of the dust jacket on The Falling Man (1970) by Mark Sadler:

Mark Sadler writes of the rough side of our smooth world, of the criminal hidden under the "normal" surface. The son of a revolutionary politician turned actor, he has lived in New York, Los Angeles, Denver, San Francisco, Upstate New York, Chicago, Canada, London, Paris, and other cities too numerous to mention. Educated, with a B.A. and an M.A., through four colleges, he has been an actor, stage hand, farm worker, business editor, chemist, teacher, junior executive―and for twenty years a writer about the people and forces that shape our time. He has fought as an infantry soldier, lived in five countries, worked in stockroom and executive suite, observed at firsthand what makes men act for good or evil. Now he writes of the despair and violence behind all the eager faces. He is already at work on a series of stories, and his next novel. 

Certainly sounds like an action-packed life, no? What the bio leaves out is that Mark Sadler never existed, or at least he wasn't named Mark Sadler. Rather he was Dennis Lynds, who had already gotten some acclaim writing the Dan Fortune series under his main pseudonym of Michael Collins. Some of what's written about him is true. He did fight in the infantry in World War II. He did have two different degrees in two subjects, although I would have thought the one in chemistry would be a Bachelor of Science. And both his parents were actors, although I find nothing in either Wikipedia or the Santa Barbara library about his dad also being a revolutionary politician.

Whether it was Lynds himself who wrote the above or someone with a staff job at Random House, it appears to be an amalgam of fact and fancy. And why not? If you use a pseudonym you have the option of going all out.

Every accusation is a confession

Five years ago a number of events―in brief, the government's assertion of totalitarian powers on some fronts and complete abdication on others―made me question my political allegiances. I started looking to different sources for news and opinion, which is a good idea in general. And the heterodox right started making more sense to me. What I gradually found, though, was that many of the people I'd started paying more attention to were never really serious about opposing heavy-handed COVID rules, but were deadly serious when they said there are no innocent Palestinians. Perhaps more to the point, the rebel pose they'd taken for a while was just that: a pose.

On Tuesday I opened up the Tablet homepage and saw a piece entitled The Edgelords "inspired" by the Douglas Murray-Dave Smith debate on The Joe Rogan Experience. And as soon as I got the gist of it I found myself wondering, "Hey, I wonder if Spiked! is doing something like this today as well." And wouldn't you know... The latter article is by Brendan O'Neill, who may well be a dimmer British bulb than Murray himself. He believes people like Rogan and Smith (the only Jew among the three men in that room) are shepherding naive young conservatives and freethinkers into the "Israelphobia" of the mainstream media. The same media that's barely mumbled about the IDF killing and burying Gaza paramedics.

Beyond the Mideast―but always returning to it, by compulsion―there's a clear discrepancy here. A lot of consumers of alternative media have become weary of gatekeeping. But some of these outlets aren't against gatekeeping at all. They just want to slightly change the terms: who guards against whom. And it looks like they just expect to be obeyed.

Those who've left the party

It's interesting that―while one group is coldblooded and the other warm-blooded―reptiles and birds share a common lineage, since they're all sauropsids. What a lot of people don't realize is that as mammals we also used to have an analogous cousin class. We're all synapsids, and the surviving synapsids (i.e. mammals) have warm blood. But there used to be a whole slew of coldblooded synapsids. In fact, they pretty much dominated the land before the End-Permian extinction. Which was some extinction. 

If the non-mammalian synapsids were still around they'd be easily confused with reptiles, probably. They were put on the back foot during the Triassic period, and obviously never recovered. And here we are now. Life is full of odd reversals, some of which take place over a longer time than we can wrap our heads around.

My front pages

Up until very recently I was unlikely to read a book I'd already read. There were exceptions, of course. But my feeling was that there was a lot of stuff out there that I'd like if only I discovered it, and more was being published all the time.

I'm sure there are still undiscovered treasures out there, and some of them I'll get to, although I'm not in a hurry. As for new things coming out, there's probably some quality there too, but...Well, it seems to be an uphill battle to get something interesting and/or original out. So I'm selective on that front. 

As far as nonfiction goes I'm always trying to learn new things, whether for research or just something to think about. And I'm more open to rereading old favorites now. They let me focus on what's important to me.

The lack of the shock of

 

One conclusion I took from reading Robert Hughes's The Shock of the New is that avant-garde envelope pushing is not a sustainable phenomenon. The period from the late nineteenth century to the middle twentieth saw a lot of bold art movements, starting with Impressionism and winding up with Abstract Expressionism, with Pop Art being a kind of denouement. This was something of a result of historical circumstances. You had a conservative art establishment at the beginning, sure to take scandalous notice of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist innovations. At the same time it was an artistically literate crowd. The fact that the Bourbons' collections had been made public after the French Revolution helped a lot here. 

The art world wasn't as innocent as all that for long, but there was still enough pent-up energy to sustain itself for 80-100 years. But that couldn't go on forever. Successive generations couldn't have the same impact, even if they had brilliant artists among them, because it was already understood that they were free to do anything.

The above picture is by a young painter (born 1993) named Louis Fratino. It made enough of an impression on me that I looked him up. His Wiki page says that he's part of something called "New Queer Intimism" which is "a contemporary art movement inspired by the immediacy and colorwork of Impressionism paired with the intimacy of everyday queer life." And I like some of what I've seen of his painting, but...Fernand Leger and Henri Matisse would have been about as shocked by his style as by his being gay, which is to say not at all.

Which is to say that this "New Queer Intimism" has some talented people associated with it, but the term is by definition tied to aspects of identity more than the process or intent of the work itself. With or without labels, the most rewarded artists of our time have gone all the way back to being Neoclassical. Not, as Jerry and George would say, that there's anything wrong with that.

Hands down the most remarkable blog post you will read this year

Wikipedia's neutrality policies are Swiss cheese at this point, for reasons anyone could have predicted. Still, it's style guide does raise some interesting topic. One is the matter of puffery, which they also call "peacock terms." There are words and phrases whose only conceivable purpose is to insist on the greatness of their subject, bypassing the reader's or listener's judgment. 

Case in point: Before about 2015, I can't remember anyone using the word "iconic." Oh, sure, the word existed, but it was basically left in the box. Then at some point everything became iconic this and iconic that, adding exactly nothing to most of the sentences affected.

Vulpes

 

Foxes are even less imposing than your average dog. Oh, they're more feral, and their teeth are no joke. Still, they're quite small and squishy. And their natural sound is somewhere between a meow and a bleat.

They're not wolves, in other words. They're in the same general family, but worlds away. Somehow they've found a niche, though. Aside from being cute―which of course they are―they're well enough adapted to survive millennia upon millennia.

You & I

Apple introduced the iMac in 1998. According to Steve Jobs, the lowercase "i" stood for "individual" and "inspire", among other things. Unstated but obvious was its connection to the capital "I", as in my self. Anyway, that was the start of "i" being at the head of Apple products.

A few years later, in 2005, YouTube was launched. Here the personal pronoun was undisguised. It's a proverbial tube, like what we call the TV set, but it's all about you.

There was a certain kind of individualist idealism at play here. Phony and patronizing, to be sure. But the technology had to be marketed and sold with the promise that it would empower you, raise all its users to the level of tycoons and princes.

That seems a long time ago now. Tech barons have taken to making Bond villain-like threats about how much their creations are going to destroy and make obsolete. Underneath, the attitude has always been "I'm more important than you." Now it's "I matter. My Tamagotchi matters. You do not."

New under the sun

Funny how words and phrases can shift on you.

Merriam-Webster dates the term "new wave" to 1960. They don't seem to have a reason to lie about that. For now I'm not going to go into the question of when Merriam does have reason to lie about something. But assuming this point of etymology to be accurate, the phrase dates to the time of the French Nouvelle Vague, i.e. Truffaut, Godard, etc.

Then there's new wave music. New wave rock became a current term in 1977 when it became apparent that punk itself wasn't going to make commercial inroads, at least not in America. It remained in use until about halfway through the 80s. Not necessarily referring to the same thing, though. I love Talking Heads and Elvis Costello. Duran Duran and A Flock of Seagulls are also fun. But the latter two were not doing what the former two did. The culture had changed, with language hard pressed to catch up.

"New wave" was used up to 1984 to describe new music. After that it faded out. But currently a lot of people assume that any popular music from the decade that wasn't rap, hair metal, or heartland rock must be new wave. Time monkeys with words and concepts too.

Διαφορά

I was reading The Greek Conquerors by Lionel Casson today and was struck by something. Ancient Greek art has the reputation for a precise kind of beauty: the golden ratio and all that. Greece is where the "classical" in "neoclassical" comes from. 

It wasn't always like that, though. Mycenaean artifacts, whether painted, sculpted or carved, are quite different. In some cases they're gorgeous, but their perspective is quite naive. Case in point:

After a few centuries we see greater detail, more of an understanding of perspective.

What caused the change? Maybe it was a foreign influence. Maybe some people just had more leisure time. The only obvious conclusion is that things were in flux.

We want a rock

The Flintstones lived in a little bungalow with a flat roof. I had forgotten this. I thought they lived in a cave. The BC Characters live in caves but the Flintstones do not. 

Anyway, what sent me on that little dive was this short piece on the Stone House in Portugal. It's apparently rumored to be modeled on houses on The Flintstones. It doesn't really look like them, though. It doesn't look like anything else I've seen, really. Probably an interesting place to live.

23 and who?

There are a couple of people I know who sent away to get their genetic results from 23andMe. Basically for them it was just curiosity. Okay, whatever.

For some others it seems to have been a way to prove they weren't white, or at least not just white. The year 2020 and a few of the other years surrounding it saw a peak in the idea that being part of a "privileged" group was inherently shameful. Finding stray chromosomes that might belong to some other group was a way to ride the identity train without doing weird gender stuff.

Now the company is going bankrupt and erstwhile customers are worried about their data security. There's a lesson here. We're all better off just treating race as irrelevant rather than trying to litigate it.

Warning: umlauts ahead

I know little enough about Conrad Felixmüller's life story. That he was born Conrad Felix Müller and chose to combine his middle name and surname into one, yes. And of course that he was German. He was German and lived at just the right time to live under Nazi rule. This was a miserable circumstance, as you might guess. The Party deemed him a degenerate artist, something that no one of any artistic discernment would agree with, but who needs taste when you have power?

"Children's Carnival Bustle"―given the mouthful title of "Kinderfastnachtstreiben" in its original language―is a sprightly bit of nighttime color. There's also a bit of doubleness to it. While we're looking at them, the children are also looking out at us, at the adult world. Perhaps this is why the small boy in the lead is decked out in oversize grownup clothes, accessorized with clown nose.

Never bet against the house

Not to put too fine a point on it: capital is happy to grant your pronoun requests — and equally happy to throw Roman salutes — so long as wages and unions are kept down and antitrust regulators are brought to heel.

Sohrab Ahmari is very perceptive in this piece. I think it's true that conservatives in the recent past were starting to question whether unfettered corporate power was a good thing. At the very least they were realizing that CEOs and tech high rollers didn't share their values. But now everyone's gotten distracted and the suits have gotten away with just making some tacky gestures.

It's still possible and important for right and left populists to cross barriers and hash things out between themselves. But some people who seemed into that before now aren't.

Hard ride

Not sure if I've talked about this here before. A number of years back I was out on a corner waiting for the bus. The bus came and let some people off, and when they were done I started boarding. But the driver spaced out and didn't think about new passengers getting on, just those getting off. So he closed the door on my arm. 

I don't know if you've ever had the full force of a hydraulically operated door on one of your limbs, but I'm not ashamed to say that I screamed. The driver woke up and opened the door again.

But what sticks with me about that experience is that the girl standing behind me never took a break from the conversation she was having on her phone, or took any notice at all. I've held onto this because it supports some ideas I have about how technology can take some already present tendencies in society and make them worse.

Digs for another

Okay, so, Khalil Mahmoud.

Putting aside, for the moment, the specifics of the Israel/Palestine/Gaza issue, which is a lot to put aside...

And put aside as well the question of whether Green Card holders have First Amendment rights. It seems pretty clear to me that they do, and most reputable attorneys would agree, but never mind that.

The thing about this arrest and the serious attempt to deport Khalil is that it rests on the premise that publicly disagreeing with the government is itself grounds for legal punishment, even in the absence of an actual crime. Twitter randos are the only ones making any criminal accusations. The Departments of State and Justice are not.

Conservatives should be very wary of giving the government that kind of power. Do the last five years―COVID, January 6―really leave any doubt that Democrats would also use this kind of power to crush their enemies? Think ahead five minutes, please.

On a related note, Columbia University is continuing its record of being an absolute quisling. What do they have left to sell?

Exciting and new

Love hotels form part of the setting for Haruki Murakami's pretty cool, somewhat disturbing novel After Dark. I have to confess, though, that when I read the book I didn't really know what they looked like. 

Now I do, and I have to say it adds a certain something. These are absolutely kee-razy. Imagine meeting up with your honey in a building that looks like a giant pink whale.

Land of the mammoth

How did people in the Paleolithic live? We're getting a clearer picture on that, although it may never be entirely complete. Why did they do the things they did? To a great extent that's still a mystery.

The circular structure in Russia, built from the bones of at least sixty mammoths, is a case in point. Humans at the time hunted and ate woolly mammoths, which could feed an extended family or small tribe for quite some time. So the presence of the bones isn't a surprise. But their use in this structure is. What exactly was behind it?

It could well be an early religious impulse. An expression of gratitude to the beast for providing sustenance. Or to a higher power for providing the beast. Or perhaps both.

White dwarf star

Even if I saw it―which I won't―and it turned out to be really good―which it wouldn't―Disney's new Snow White would stand as an encapsulation of just about everything wrong with the movie industry today. Not because of what's made everyone freak out: lead actress Rachel Zegler's comments on the original and the fairy tale back in 2022. It doesn't matter that Zegler is a sorority pseudointellectual. She'll grow out of it.

But start with the phrase "Disney's new Snow White." The world does not need Disney to redo "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs." Walt nailed it during the Great Depression. But Disney, the world's richest and most powerful media company, has started on the project of rehashing all their old hits, and they're not going to stop now.

Then consider that the cast was being grilled on production in 2022, and it's just coming out now in 2025. Let's be real. It does not take three years to shoot a movie. Not even if you count postproduction. What takes multiple years is scheduling. Getting permission from corporate HQ to release the damn thing. Because where Hollywood was once run by tyrannical businessmen who liked and sometimes understood movies, now it's run by corporate drones who don't.

Finally there's the absurd business with the dwarves. By going from live little people to a diverse range of races and sizes to CGI they've pleased no one. It could be counted as a failure of nerve, had there ever been nerve to fail.

Lost and (eventually) found

Last week I emailed someone and they immediately replied. I didn't know about it―the reply part, I mean―until today. That's because they were apparently flagged as spam and thus caught in my spam filter. Not for any reason I can see.

Anyway, I moved the replay email from the spam folder to my regular inbox and I'm hoping that means any future replies will just show up as a regular email. But it just goes to show that the phenomenon  of letters being lost or delayed isn't a thing of the past.

Swells

I was at the library today and I took a look through their latest copy of  The New Yorker. It had an eye-catching cover by Christoph Niemann rather than one of the too-frequent Barry Blitt political caricatures, which was a plus. One article of interest was Anthony Lane's retrospective of Ross MacDonald's Lew Archer books. (The illustrator visualizes Archer as Leon Redbone in an Inspector Gadget coat.)

But there's something hard to overlook when reading both the magazine and something like the Arts section of The New York Times. They tend to pander to a certain social and political class.

It's not good for anyone when the arts and coverage/criticism of them is equated with the politics that get lumped together with liberalism. Liberals just buy into the illusion that their bubble is classy. Artists get hooked into an unhealthy patronage system. Conservatives are passively encouraged to become and stay philistines.

Anyway, the last thing we need is more sectarianism.

Orange beak life

 

Puffins, like auks, have really taken the subarctic zone and run with it. They've made their home at least as far north as Iceland and Greenland. So while Orkney, which has a lot of rocks and few trees, might seem an unlikely setting for a bird colony, it's not extreme for them. They've taken to it.

By the way, researching for this post I found out that at least one person has gone online to ask how puffins taste. I'm not hurrying to find out firsthand. 

Gagging order

Indeed.

During last year's Presidential campaign, the Democrats' artificial Regular Guy substitute Tim Walz publicly said that misinformation and hate speech were not protected speech. Walz was rightfully ridiculed on that matter, of course. But as time goes on it becomes clear how much of the political spectrum agrees with him, at least on some issues.

On First Amendment grounds these policies are dead in the water. But look at our establishment. Neither our Gaza policy nor Trump's curbing of free speech to protect same has caused as much weeping and gnashing of teeth as his actually quite rational disengagement from the Ukraine war. That's among the politicians and celebrities. How different are things on the grassroots/street level? Time will tell.

Translations

It's interesting hearing songs you know redone without vocals. Some people―those who are musicians themselves―can no doubt lay out the notes or otherwise tell you what the players are doing. I can only go on impressions but I recognize things. For example there's this Joni Mitchell song.

And then there's this jazz cover by pianist Leslie Pintchik, about whom I know very little.

A couple of things to point out: By For the Roses Mitchell had already started incorporating jazz elements, which she'd been building up since she was a teenage hepcat. The original of "Banquet" isn't particularly jazzy, though.

Both versions of the song have heavy doses of piano, of course. In Pintchik's version it takes some of what were vocal lines in Mitchell's original. Jazz musicians are often said to learn the lyrics of songs they play even if they don't sing them, just to get the feel. This seems to be a case where the leader and band did that.

Fashion report

I saw a guy on the bus today. He was wearing a dress shirt but no tie. Both his slim jacket and pants were brown, I guess you could say reddish or orangey brown. Shoes were read, high-polished leather. 

As I may have said before, I don't think the traditional suit and tie will fade into history until something replaces it as formal/business wear. Gargantuan John Fetterman gets away with hoodie and shorts on the Senate floor. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (RIP) favors a paramilitary look with fitted T-shirts. These aren't the future. 

The look of the guy I saw on the bus might be. I've seen it on other smartphone-toting young professionals. Basically it ditches most traditional forms of adornment but requires color coordination between top and bottom. Of course it could also be a fad, and in a few years might just scream "2020s."

What do you even want?

While there's a gratuitous Hamas mention that seems pretty much obligatory for all Tablet articles published since 10/7/23, this is still a pretty meaty article. Sasha Stone's scrappiness in establishing her own Oscar beat is rather impressive. She also has fun talking about the rise and fall of Emilia Perez, a multiple-award-nominated musical that―as far as I can tell―contains nothing I actually recognize as music.

But I think she undersells the financial aspect to this decline. Netflix has bigfooted its way into being considered a major film company even though it doesn't even really want to be anything other than a streamer. Amazon bought venerable MGM and recently bribed the Broccoli James Bond team to go away. All the other major studios either have or are trying to build their own streaming services.

This creates perverse incentives. Their traditional business is trying to get asses into the seats when movies play in the theaters. But in reality everything is geared towards getting you to watch at home. Or, God help us, on your phone while commuting. 

If you have a problem with wokeness and political grandstanding in general, that's all downstream from the money. Hollywood liberals can make works that move a large audience. They've been doing it for decades. But they're not likely to do so if the audience dematerializes, leaving them no one to play to except each other.

Corrections

There's a biggish manuscript that I wrote not too long ago. On the advice of a professional, I'm making some revisions to it now. She says that I didn't make as many mistakes as she expected, but there are still a bunch of little things to take care of. Some other suggestions, as well.

Overall, it's something I'm glad to be doing. It feels like a good step.

Give yourself a hand!

A number of years ago―by which I mean the year almost certainly started with "19"―I was reading a library copy of Writer's Digest. For some reason. And there was an article about company names. Some companies had been named after their founders, of course. Other times the founders had been going for a certain image or certain sound. There may have been mention of George Eastman getting the name "Kodak" from an Anagrams kit.

But what the author really wanted to get across was that if you were starting a business now, you couldn't use any of these principles or your own intuition to name it. You needed to go to a professional business name consultant. And hey, guess what his profession was?

Somehow this seems symbolic of a lot of things now.

Greetings

Today I was at a bus stop and I saw a bit of graffiti on the transparent covering they put on advertising sheets. It was just "Happy Valentine" in black magic marker. The final "s" was either missing or too small to read.

Now Valentines Day doesn't quite have the same level of general goodwill as, say, Christmas. And seeing it enshrined on a bus stop is a little puzzling six days later. Still, if taggers want to spread good cheer around it feels churlish to complain.

Duel

Bear with me here...

Leighton Woodhouse has some interesting things to say about the class war brewing between two elements of America's elite class.

Politics today is the struggle for supremacy between these two segments of the elite. The economically rich seek to convert their monetary riches into political power by bankrolling their favored candidates (or themselves) in elections and by extending the rules of the free market—the arena in which they are hegemonic—into every facet of human activity. The culturally affluent aim to consolidate political power by constraining the influence of the market to purely economic activity, thereby limiting their rivals’ domain of activities, while proselytizing a vision of government led by professional technocrats. Thus, the rich tend to gravitate toward economically libertarian political ideologies, while the credentialed embrace progressive politics that favor the power of government institutions run by experts.

The thing is that neither of these groups is what they used to be. Both have changed in ways that aren't for the better. The culturally affluent aren't for the most part fluent in Latin and Ancient Greek in the way you once could have assumed they were. Nor do they have a deep understanding of the history of art. Cultural elites have come to specialize in politicized forms of knowledge, and contentious presentation of same.

On the other hand the economically rich are no longer really in the business of physically producing products. Not in the vast majority of cases. They invest in stuff that is made elsewhere, or has no physical reality to begin with.

Steve Bannon is a likable guy, or at least one who grows on you. And when he says, "Musk is a parasitic illegal immigrant,. He wants to impose his freak experiment and play-act as God without any respect for the country’s history, tradition or values," he may be onto something. But that's a problem if he really wants to campaign for a third Trump term. Assuming that Trump is able to run for the presidency again and to serve, he's not going to become less vulnerable to being manipulated by scheming eunuchs. Someone will have to say up hered.

Way to go

Labyrinths are a very old theme, and there must be a reason for that. Educated guess? Our unconscious minds stylize the space we move through, emphasize things through repetition. The result is that we create mazes in our dreams, and respond to them when we find them elsewhere.

Meeting Slides looks to be a fun labyrinth. Swedish artist Carsten Holler codesigned it with American architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, and it was built in Kemi, Finland. It's made of snow, and also outfitted with windowlike apertures. For cluing me into this one I have to thank Francesca Tatarella's book Labyrinths & Mazes: A Journey Through Art, Architecture, and Landscape.

 

"The Christian Life" is one of the highlights of The Byrds' 1968 album Sweetheart of the Rodeo. But it was probably inevitable that it would be misunderstood. No, Gram Parsons wasn't trying to convert his listeners to Christianity. He had much eager sinning left to do in his short lifetime. On the other hand the song has nothing to do with peak-2020 "everything is about race" cultural politics. I don't know where you'd even get something like that.

No, the simple truth is that Parsons heard the Louvin Brothers' original and was moved by it. Therefore he covered it with the Byrds, and opted to treat the sentiment behind it respectfully, whether he shared it or not.

Tales of a short month

I only just found out that February is named after Februus. And who is Februus, you ask? The Roman god of purifications. Associated with Hades/Pluto and the Underworld. 

Tomorrow is the Ides of February, Ides being another idea that comes down to us from the Romans. To them ritual was very important, and is woven into the very fabric of time. And in some senses theirs wasn't that long ago.

Getting to Zzz

The old exercise about counting sheep to fall asleep sounds like a joke, especially now that it's been depicted in countless decades-old cartoons. But I'm pretty sure it's for real.

I say "pretty sure" because I've never gotten to sleep by counting sheep exactly. But the principle behind it is something I've found to be helpful. In essence you just mentally take part in something simple and repetitive. Not tedious, but not emotionally charged either. It's a good knockout drop.

Marooned

I just recently read The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares. It's an interesting novella (about 100 pages) which puts romantic frustration in a narrative with some science fiction trappings. Bioy Casares was a friend of Jorge Luis Borges and there are a couple of connections to the edition I read. For one thing JLB himself wrote a foreword to the story. Also his younger Sister Norah contributed some nice illustrations.

What really surprised me afterwards was finding out that former Police drummer Stewart Copeland had written an opera based on it. Nice to see he's keeping his hand in, though.

My God, what have you done?

 

This has bugged me since I first saw it and still does. Sorry if you're reading this and it's a treasured childhood memory. The Muppets should be doing their own―well, you know what I mean―interpretations of songs. If The Muppet Show were going to do a version of "Penny Lane" they'd never just restage the Beatles' promotional film. So why is Kermit just doing David Byrne moves in a David Byrne suit?

On balance I think it's good that Muppets Tonight existed, if only because it gave Prince a change to perform for children. But the mixture of Henson's absence and the meddling of American TV networks seems to have caused standards to slip.

Our old friends

It's only very recently that I learned about or even heard of Ludovic Slimak. He's a paleoanthropologist who studies Neanderthals, a perennial interest of mine, so I have to pay him at least some attention. 

Scientists have gone to extremes on the Neanderthal. Some have dismissed them as incapable of symbolic thought, inherently incapable of art or language. Others have posited them as an enlightened race with a deeper understanding of nature than our own. Both of these seem unlikely to me. But they were different from us. But different in what way?

Slimak has a lot to say. One of his ideas is that modern humans, Homo sapiens, are standardized and efficient. His vision of the Neanderthals, by contrast, were creative, making things that are irreproducible. For him this is why we survived and they didn't. 

To some extent it's always going to be up for debate. We know where they lived, for the most part. We know that they had much thicker bodies, more nose-heavy faces, etc. But alas, we can't speak with them. Even if it's possible to clone them from moribund DNA that would just be our creation. So we have to interpret and make educated guesses.

Weld done (sorry)

 

For reasons of my own I wanted to see what a sculptor does when their work involves welding metal. This is by far the best video I found on the subject. For one thing there's no narration, which I don't need and would only be a distraction.

The finished sculpture is pretty cool as well. There's a suggestion of the Easter Island Moai, sure. But the context makes it a bit unusual.

Disappearing quotes?

There's something I remember reading. It was a quote by Lou Reed on why Lester Bangs had turned on him so hard. Lou said something along the lines that when someone worships you as a god, it can be disappointing when they find out how human you are. It was rare enough for him to speak cordially to the press, much less saying something gracious about a journalist.

As for "something along the lines of" I have no choice but to paraphrase. The actual quote, or the context it came in, is nowhere to be found. Now I'm not sure whether I first read it online or offline, but it seems like something that should be on the internet somewhere or other. But apparently it isn't.

Untold wonders

Lamassu is a deity belonging to Assyrian mythology. As such the figure goes all the way back to the Bronze Age. Lamassu has the body of  a beast, most often depicted as a bull. But with a human head. The deity appears to be involved with the afterlife.

Now the name "Lamassu" also refers to a "Bitcoin ATM", which is apparently something that exists. Such an honor.

Weeks

I was going to write about the self-styled fascism experts who have started crawling out of the woodwork again, but there's no way I can even maintain the necessary interest in them to produce a couple of paragraphs. Here's something that is interesting.

Sunday              Sonntag            Domingo         duminică

Monday             Montag             Lunes              luni

Tuesday             Dienstag           Martes             marţi

Wednesday        Mittwoch          Miércoles        miercuri

Thursday           Donnerstag       Jueves              joi

Friday                Freitag              Viernes            vineri

Saturday            Samstag            Sábado            sâmbătă      

So that's the days of the week in four columns. The first two are from Germanic languages (English and German). The third and fourth are from Romantic languages (Spanish and Romanian.) Patterns largely hold across those subfamilies.

In English most names for weekdays are taken from Norse gods: Tuesday from Tyr/Tiw (war); Wednesday from Odin/Wotan (supreme god); Thursday from Thor (thunder); and Friday from Freya (love). German does the same mostly, although they dethrone Odin and just call Wednesday "midweek." 

Romance languages―and this would hold for French, Italian, etc.―substitute equivalent Roman gods, at least in theory. This is pretty straightforward for Tuesday and Friday. But Jupiter/Jove is honored on Thursday instead of Wednesday even though he's the supreme Roman god. Presumably the thunder connection has something to do with it. And Wednesday goes to the messenger/commerce/trickery god Mercury. On the surface very different from Odin.

Just a curious matter, that's all.

The secret

A little over a week ago I ordered a book through the interlibrary loan system. It hasn't arrived. Apparently it hasn't even moved from the library that has it. 

Yesterday I called my local branch and asked about it. All they could tell me was that it hadn't been sent out. Which I of course knew already. Today I was actually at the library and I talked to a nice and knowledgeable lady at the circulation desk. She didn't know why it hadn't been sent but said she'd call the owning library. No one else had done this.

This exact thing has happened before. What it proves is that the results you get if you know the right person to talk to are very different from those you get if you don't.

Let's bring some color to '25!

 

Henri Matisse drew from eclectic sources. Old enough to remember the first wave of Impressionism in the late nineteenth century, he also knew Greek pottery and statuary, as well as Islamic decoration. And of course he and the Spaniard Pablo Picasso had an ongoing artistic conversation, in spite of their very different temperaments. But in the final effect he was an original. He looked like no one else and there was no one like him.

"The Daisies" is Matisse all over. It's a mature painting, from 1939, and in a few years he'd mostly switch to cut paper. You could break it down into four rough quarters. In the upper left is the nude, a painting within a painting. To contemporary eyes she looks like she's scrolling on her phone, which is both funny and sad. The classical pitcher is also mostly in the upper left. Upper right gives us the flowers of the title, flower that's never too much. The pensive model in the lower left has taken on an entirely red hue, blending in with her chair. And in the lower right is the table that holds up the pitcher and flowers, as well as half a dozen lemons. The table has a very substantive base.

All of them make up a harmonious and inviting whole.

Oh Otmoor

This from Peter Hitchens is a lovely and thought-provoking essay about the mystery at the heart of natural occurrences. It also gave me a bit of new information. Otmoor in Oxford was so squared off by hedges and ditches that it helped inspire Lewis Carroll (or Charles Lutwidge Dodgson if you prefer) to write about the Red Queen's chessboard. That chess game took place in Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, of course.

Thus far I haven't found any pictures of the area at the time, which would be mid-nineteenth century. There are contemporary pictures, of course. It doesn't look anything like a chessboard now. It does look very beautiful and distinctive. Yes, Virginia, the English countryside does have a romance of its own.