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.

Nature's whiteboard

We're having a snowfall tonight. Best word for it. More than a flurry, less than a storm, certainly not a blizzard. But a noticeable amount of snow.

Which has an interesting effect. When it snows at night, it's night, so it's still dark. But the sky looks light, due to the snow clouds. Trees in the distance then look darker than they otherwise would. And in this contrast their little movements in the wind become more pronounced. They seem like shadow puppets, of a kind.

Back for more

The 1957 chiller Back from the Dead didn't get too many good reviews when it came out. Fast forward 67 years and look at the B-movie bloggers and unpaid review sites and...people still don't seem to like it much. This is frustrating, because the movie actually does achieve something. But it's perhaps understandable that its virtues would be missed. 

The basic plot is as follows: A married pregnant woman is spending time by the seaside with her husband and older sister. While her husband plays a record of avant-garde electronic music for her she suffers both an epileptic seizure and a miscarriage. When she comes to she is no longer herself, but the reembodied spirit of her husband's first wife. He'd never told the second wife about his first marriage, and there are likely Freudian concepts about repression at play in the script. The first wife was involved in a crypto-Satanic cult that practiced human sacrifice. She gets in touch with the cult leader, as well as her parents. Mom is totally on board with the whole evil thing. The husband, sister, and an architect friend have to try and frustrate her plans and, if possible, bring back the innocent second wife.

Most of the cast was not particularly familiar to me. The possessed wife is played by Peggie Castle, who was something of a sex symbol and looks like one. Marsha Hunt, who plays the older sister, would appear on The Outer Limits a few years later as a woman unfortunate enough to have a queen bee in human form put the moves on her husband. Here she initially seems like a stereotypical fifties fifth wheel, passive and helpless. But she shows surprising amounts of toughness and savvy as the film goes on.

That's the thing. It defies expectations. Back from the Dead has the makings of a bad movie, and a dull bad movie where nothing happens at that. But things do happen, and they happen in slightly offbeat ways that reward attention if you pay it. Also in rather striking California Modern settings. But it might be too subtle for B movie fans. There's very little cheese here, and more of it might have drawn more attention. 

ENDNOTE: If there is anything cheesy it's Otto Reichow's performance as cult leader Maitre Renault. Despite the name he doesn't sound like he's trying to be French. He does sound like he's doing a bad Schwarzenegger in all of his scenes. This would be uncanny since Ahnold was still a child, but stranger things...might have happened.

I live in the future and here's how it doesn't work

Consider Hanna-Barbera.

In The Jetsons all the houses are built atop impossibly tall poles, like off-brand Space Needles. Their residents can engage in FTL jaunts in personalized flying saucers anytime they want. The Jetsons have a robot maid.

Yet George Jetson also has a reassuringly mundane job doing some kind of management with Spacely Sprockets, a company that makes―you guessed it―sprockets. Just as Fred Flintstone was a construction worker who happened to use dinosaurs and mastodons as equipment. What Hanna-Barbera was doing, in essence, was to take a very mid-20th-century kind of prosperity and project it as far into both the future and the past as it could plausibly go. 

Of course from the point of view of the actual (to them) future this seems very quaint. Many markers of the 20th century economy―things like department stores and trains full of business computers―have disappeared with nothing much to replace them. The future has been depopulated of its onetime dreams.

Bach on...

 

Bach on vibraphone. Specifically, "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring." This gentleman whose hands are the only thing we see of him can play it. I suspect Milt Jackson could have as well, given the classical inclinations of the Modern Jazz Quartet. Of course maybe if Bach had lived a couple of centuries later he would have been a jazzman himself. "That cat with a wig can really lay down a groove."

Doggy night

Out the window I just saw a guy walking two dogs at the same time. They were pretty frisky. Seemed excited to be walking on the snowy sidewalk. Sometimes when a person is walking more than one dog you can gather that they're a professional dog walker. Doubt that's the case here since it's pretty deep into the night. An owner not walking the dogs themselves would likely be asleep.

But some people do walk their own dogs pretty late. Not too long ago I was taking out the trash late at night and this lady was walking her little dog down the sidewalk. Bad tempered thing, it yapped and snapped at me even though I was all the way on the side steps of my building. Now I'm doubly sure this lady wasn't a pro dog walker, since after she passed I could still smell weed in the air.

⭐🐍

It can be fun joining your Western Zodiac sign together with your Eastern Zodiac sign to see what kind of hybrid you get. Mine is "bull dog" which is easy to remember.

Anyway, soon starts the Chinese Year of the Snake. There's an anecdote about that.

A race was held to cross a great river, and the order of the animals in the cycle was based upon their order in finishing the race. In this story, the snake compensated for not being the best swimmer by hitching a hidden ride on the Horse's hoof. When the horse was about to cross the finish line, the snake jumped out, scaring the horse, and thus edging it out for sixth place.

I guess you could call this cheating. I probably would. But it's also kind of ballsy. If you're a snake there's a certain risk inherent in freaking out a horse.

Put off

Late last week I saw a flier pasted up at a bus shelter. For a political group. It talked about countering Trump, but that's not the big thing. At the end it said something like, "Please mask. Masks will be provided."

They'll be provided. That's nice.

Is the left suicidal? Because that's where this new model citizen―the kind of person who can't think of anything worse than spreading germs―comes from. And outside of that everyone else has moved on. It's as much of a drag on outreach and organizing as the whole idpol thing, of which it's probably an outgrowth.

D'oh!

Who was Homer? The question will almost certainly never be answered, and might in fact be unanswerable. It's hard to imagine any documents or remains turning up that will even provide a list of candidates. From our perspective Iron Age Greece was a long time ago. Long, long, loooooong time. If things weren't properly recorded there's not much we can do about it now.

Which in a way makes it even more incredible that the Iliad and Odyssey have survived all this time and inspired so many. Whoever he, she, or they (as in multiple people) were, the author could scarcely have dreamed that their work would survive multiple collapses and rebuildings of civilization.

It's been a long long gag

Due to a number of consolidations, nearly all newspaper syndicated comics can be found on one of two websites: Comics Kingdom and GoComics. GoComics is the online presence of the Andrews McMeel Universal syndicate. It posts the daily newspaper comics on the same page as all the syndicate's political cartoonists, as well as what are essentially webcomics never intended to be printed anywhere. 

Someone a while ago apparently decided to troll them on this. Thus comedy writer John Scully created The Comic Strip That Has a Finale Every Day. Yes, you can check the archives. No you won't see anything different.

Despite the "every day" in the title Scully apparently stopped adding technically new strips last January. Either he got tired of the joke or GoComics finally put their foot down on what they were willing to pay for.

Hello out there

Would not have guessed this. According to reports I keep hearing about, at least half of everybody―and maybe a good deal more than that―don't have an inner monologue. In the abstract I guess I can see how other ways of thinking make sense, could have advantages. But the thing about having an inner voice is that I didn't set out to develop it. As long as I can remember it's just been there. 

What's it sound like? Pretty much, you're looking at it. Or an edited version, at least.