Somewhere in there

 

Aside from Salvador Dali, the best known Surrealist artist is probably René Magritte. Magritte was born a few years before Dali, and he died much earlier, but his images―coolly off―have never been forgotten. The world has further changed since he last painted, but he still speaks to many.

In some ways, "The Reckless Sleeper" (above) is a pretty straightforward depiction of sleep and dreams. A man lies sleeping in some kind of bunk. Below him is the subconscious. The objects therein are randomly selected, but he will assemble them into the story of his dream tonight.

Well, sort of randomly selected. There's an apple and a bowler hat, both famous components of Magritte's other works. So there's an author's signature here.

...than to speak and remove all doubt

Something changed in the world of comics in the late eighties and early nineties, and it was not for the better (surprise, surprise). This was the explosion of first person narration.

Up until this point, superhero comics had mostly simple narration. If the characters were searching for someone on the docks at night, there would be a caption reading, "Later, on the docks..." and that would be it. But from this period onward, everyone had to share their point of view, such as it was.

It's not that this can never work. Frank Miller and Alan Moore had experimented with this format, and their successes were what fueled this change. But if you're depicting a guy, say, who can fire energy blasts from his hand, having him say in his mind, "I massage my knuckles, I do some deep breathing exercises," really doesn't add mcuh. 

In their shoes

Ox shoes are kind of fun to look at. The difference between them and horseshoes is easy to explain. Horses have a single middle toe on each foot, which is the hoof. Cattle, being artiodactyls rather than perissodactyls, have hooves that are cloven between two toes. Thus they require two shoes on each foot. Little commas rather than big U's. 

They aren't used as much now because cattle aren't used for hard labor or taken on long drives as much anymore. And we've never gotten into the habit of racing them. 

The fact that we don't shoe cows or bulls is a relief to animal professionals, even if these shoes do look cool. Unlike horses, they can't stand on three legs. Putting shoes on them is a pretty big task.

Musing

I like doing poetry posts here now and then. Partly because I like poetry, or at least some of it. There is kind of a problem with layout. The site puts a space between every paragraph by default (except when it doesn't.) And since it involves hitting "Enter" it registers each line of verse as a new paragraph. Or new stanza, as they sometimes appear to be with the added spaces.

Anyway, the heat came on tonight. Only the second time this fall, I believe. The first one was back at the beginning of the month. It's definitely not freezing tonight, but you could say it's a little chilly.

See? That's kind of poetic.

Outstanding Mr. O

Orpheus never seemed to belong there. Yet most traditions made him Thracian; and not merely that, but the king's heir, anticipated as the next ruler of his country. A fragment of Pindar called him "Orpheus of the golden sword", an epithet also used of Apollo, whatever it meant. Most Thracians fought from their stirrupless horses with javelins and spears; but curved swords like scimitars were given as presents and buried with them, the hilts chased with gold and silver mined in the hills. Perhaps such a sword belonged to Orpheus; perhaps he knew how to use it. But his whole persona suggested otherwise. Music alone was his weapon and his defense. The real Orpheus, say some Bulgarian historians, was a Thracian king who tried to make his warring peoples live together in peace, and was killed when he failed.

From Orpheus: The Song of Life, by Ann Wroe

Orpheus is one of the great tragic figures of Classical mythology. He's also enough to have inspired his own religion within yet separate from Greek polytheism. And the tale of Orpheus appears with variations in myths from all over: Italy, Anatolia, Northern Africa, the British Isles.

Was he ever a real person, i.e. a mortal? It's possible. Thracians were known to elevate kings and such to the level of godhood. For that matter, they were hardly alone on that score. But of course over the millennia it's become essentially impossible to trace. The uncertainty has become part of the myth. He's certainly attained a high stature in myths of all kind, as a formative musician and poet. Both Nietzsche and Jung were fascinated with him.

Something blue

Was just appreciating the pictures of these blue cats. A lot of them are essentially grey with just a hint of blue. The Chartreux cat, however, is strikingly blue, offset by these tangerine colored eyes.

Blue hair/fur doesn't turn up much in mammals. The evolutionary reasons why it's so rare are up for debate, as are the reasons why there are occasional exceptions. 

With these cats, they have unusual colors because of genetics: alleles and eumelanin. In the case of humans, well, it's just boredom.

Nobody home

Was thinking today of the Mike Flowers Pops. Mike Flowers is a British musical comedian, and at this point he's been around for some time. His schtick was/is doing hit rock songs in an upbeat, kind of Bacharach-y style. The Pops' big hit was 1995 a cover of Oasis's "Wonderwall."

It's cute, not epic, and relies on your familiarity with the original versions. But credit where credit is due: this is a matter of having a vision and seeing it through. 

The 90s also saw a fad for Dread Zeppelin (reggae covers of Led Zeppelin with an Elvis impersonator as lead singer.) Hayseed Dixie (bluegrass AC/DC cover band) came a few years ago, forming in 2000. 

Now on YouTube you'll see things like "Pink Floyd's The Wall as soul" and "Led Zeppelin as early 60s frat rock." The difference is that these are created through AI. Just feed the song and a suggestion into a chatbot. It's as legitimate a use of the technology as any, but it's sad to know that going through the trouble to actually produce these goofs is a thing of the past.

Anyway, for related reasons, I ignore music recommendations from YouTube.

Puzzling choice

This is bizarre, and as far as I can tell, nobody has addressed it up until now.

One long-running, almost eternal feature of The Onion is its "What Do You Think?" vox pop column. Back in the early days of the paper they took pictures of half-a-dozen people who wouldn't mind having their faces associated with what would often be some rather alarming sentiments. The original faces can be seen about halfway down this Substack article where it says "Gay Clergymen." Pretty basic, but it was a reliably funny feature.

In new issues they're still using those pictures. But in archive articles from decades ago they've replaced the models. While it's hard to explain why, these faces aren't as funny as the old ones. They're also too uniformly young to be a random sample outside of a college campus. 

The Onion isn't what it used to be. For a while The Babylon Bee appeared to be outcompeting it, although at this point both publications are run by political hacks, just of differing stripes. Still, it's got an august history. Why the Orwellian stuff?

Only a fiend

In 1925, when he was selected to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, George Bernard Shaw initially balked, stating, "I can forgive Nobel for inventing dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize." 

So, this year's Nobel Peace Prize winner is Maria Corina Machado, an opposition leader in Venezuela. Internal opposition, that is, at least officially. The external opposition is made up of the great world powers, led by the US. Any connection? One certainly does wonder.

It must be said that if Venezuela is undergoing a Color Revolution, Maduro's government isn't being that smart in their resistance to it. Still and all, the narrative building has been relentless. As Ron Paul puts it:

Is the Nobel Peace Prize just another deep state, soft-power tool intended to boost the US global military empire? The timing of the award going to the relatively unknown Machado is suspicious. President Trump has parked an armada of warships off the Venezuelan coast as his aides openly talk about “decapitation” strikes on the Venezuelan government. After the extrajudicial killing of some 20 civilians in his attacks on at least four boats off the Venezuelan coast, President Trump is openly bragging that no one dares launch a boat in the area.

The “Peace Prize” endows Machado with a new sense of moral authority and gives weight to any “green-light” she may again give to outside militaries to attack her own country.

It's probably not the first time the Nobel Prize has gone to a CIA asset, but they used to be better at laundering them.

Great minds think alike, I guess?

Saturday late morning/early afternoon I went to the library, where I needed to return a few things and pick up a couple of things. But the doors were locked, because it turned out they were closed a four day weekend for Indigenous People's Day. Usually I'm good about keeping up with stuff like this but there were extenuating circumstances. 

It got me to thinking, though, about Indigenous People's Day. It used to be Columbus Day. Now a lot of people feel a lot of different ways about Christopher Columbus. But the important thing is that he was an individual, and thus it's possible to feel affection or esteem for him. A faceless mass of Indigenous People, though? It's too bloodless to inspire positive or negative responses, really. And the substitution on what used to be Columbus's day just makes them look like objects of pity. 

I figured these were deep thoughts, and was still thinking about how to put them across, when I found something similar also expressed in, of all places, a Sunday Hi and Lois. Is it something in the water, or something in the air?

Ready or not

 

From what I gather, based on the superficial amount I know about his life, art was an escape for Carl Larsson. A private escape from the hardships of his early life, and eventually a means to leave them behind. 

So it makes sense that a lot of his work projects a peaceful domesticity. This isn't the easiest subject to make compelling, but he finds a way. In this painting, "Hide and Seek", it's an unusual angle. The girl hasn't found a good hiding place in most senses. That table is wide open. But it's not the first place you'd look, so the game can go on for a few minutes. Of course the high vantage point also allows for the display of the round vase and its shadow.

Down Under hounds

Interesting overview of dingoes. While they're not exactly dogs, or at least not the same species as domestic dogs, the difference is kind of subtle. They do resemble dogs more than other wild canids do. One might very well mistake them for such. It's only when you notice that they're traveling in packs and don't seem to have any humans in charge of them that the difference becomes glaring. What we seem to be looking at is a slightly earlier stage of canine evolution.

Ohne titel

From everything I've seen about Gretchen Felker-Martin, that author's literary career seems to be based on three things:

Being trans

Being a psycho

Really doubling down on that second one, in a keyboard warrior sense

Felker-Martin recently lost a comics writing gig at DC over some witless and, yes, psycho tweets about the murder of Charlie Kirk. Apparently you can only bluff your way so far with a pair of twos.

The incident made me think of someone else from the horror-fantasy field: Jessica Amanda Salmonson. Salmonson has been writing since Nixon was still in the White House. She also happens to be trans. But her much more low-key reputation is based on things like "finding a good story" and "writing well." Antediluvian stuff.

Din

My library has study booths for people who really need quiet. As seen here, they make the person using them look sort of like a contestant on a fifties game show. 

Why are these necessary? Because guests in the library are loud. Some talk on the phone. Some just blatantly rant to themselves. And the thing is that the library will just...let you. Shushing is a thing of the past. If you started screaming obscenities at other patrons, someone would probably tell you to stop. Probably, but I don't know for sure. Even then it would be awkward, and no one wants to be awkward. But as far as enforcing guidelines that mean you'll need to show consideration for everyone else, no, nobody does that.

Free Mason!

Since the Raymond Burr-led Perry Mason went off the air in 1966, at the end of the black-and-white TV era, there have been two attempts to revive the character with other actors. Neither really lasted. I haven't seen either, so take this all with a grain of salt. But I can sort of see why they haven't been successful. 

First there was The New Perry Mason in the early 70s. It starred Monte Markham, who's still with us at 90. Again, I haven't seen it, so I can't definitively speak to quality. But it was probably a little too soon. The old show had been filmed and preserved on video, and was now slipping into syndicated reruns. Viewers could be forgiven for doubting they needed a new one.

The HBO version is of course much more recent, about five years old now. Matthew Rhys is certainly a good actor, although by this point he was a little long in the tooth to play a Mason who hadn't even started practicing law yet. That last part seems to have been part of the problem. Moves like changing Paul Drake's race and making both Della and Burger gay/lesbian might have gone over, or at least one change like that could have. But anyone with a previous affection for the character wants to see Mason in the courtroom defending the innocent, not rooting around generalized corruption in interbellum America.

The character does have an enduring appeal, based on decency and an admirable commitment to justice. I wouldn't necessarily say that Burr is irreplaceable. But he would be very difficult to replace. History seems to show that.

Up on the roof

I saw this clip today. Not for the first time, but something struck me about it.

As far as the music goes, the song and performance proves that the Beatles were still the Beatles even as the whole thing was imploding. But look at them. John, George, and Ringo are all dressed for winter. As well they might be, as it's late January in London. Billy Preston's coat looks pretty well insulated as well.

But Paul? He's out there bundled up in nothing more than a suit jacket. No sweater, no scarf. Either he's trying to psych the other three out―which I wouldn't put past him―or he's got special bassist powers.

maps + math

In the history of Western cartography, a distinction was made between maps and charts. Charts referred to the depictions used by mariners that contained varied types of information based on their experience and specific to their purposes. Maps, however, were largely academic, concerned with the world as a whole. Early cartographers, such as Ptolemy of Alexandria, Greece (ca. 120 CE) defined what they did as geography―"a representation in pictures of the whole known world together with the phenomena that are contained therein." He distinguished that from chorography, which he deemed regional and selective, "even dealing with the smallest conceivable localities, such as harbors, farms, villages, river courses, and the like." Our broader definition of maps is in keeping with more modern writers who view world-wide maps and local maps simply as different streams, which have an underlying conceptual unity and which eventually merged. Differences in terminology, however, have persisted. Hence, maps specifically for mariners are still called charts, and so the unique objects created by Marshall Islanders are commonly referred to as stick charts.

That's an excerpt from Mathematics Elsewhere: An Exploration of Ideas Across Cultures by Marcia Ascher. Ascher is―or rather was, since she died in 2013―a Professor Emerita of Mathematics at Ithaca College. She's an accomplished mathematician. I'm really not, although I can add, subtract, multiply, and divide in my head. So when she goes into detail on some things, it can sail over my head. 

No matter. It's a great book. While mathematics is her academic subject, she also provides some interesting anthropological studies here. And what she realizes is that mathematics reaches in various forms across the globe, but it never exists in isolation. There are algorithms used in divination rituals. There are calendars. The Jewish, Gregorian, and Muslim calendars are respectively luni-solar, solar, and lunar. There are other calendars that are none of these things, and their purpose isn't to measure time in the natural world. And of course, maps. The purposes cause math to take different forms in different cultures.

Picture it

Does the Thematic Apperception Test work? That is, does it provide accurate diagnostic information about the patient's psychological state? I have no idea. I'm not in that business (i.e. headshrinking) nor am I in therapy. What the psychiatric/psychological field considers good therapy is beyond me.

But I do like the idea of the person under analysis engaged in a kind of storytelling process, being creative in the process of figuring the insides of their own heads. And many of the images are hauntingly beautiful, or at least hauntingly weird. 

Brother against brother

Romulus killed his brother Remus over who would get to name their city. The natives called it Rome from there on.

In an early episode of The Sopranos, Tony and his crew are working over a Hasidic guy at the behest of his former father-in-law. He speaks of his people outlasting the Roman Empire and says, "And the Romans, where are they now?" Tony responds, "You're lookin' at 'em, asshole."

On the surface, the Remus and Romulus story seems to prove Tony's point. It should be recognized, however, that this myth has always had numerous interpretations. Not a few felt all along that, even though they got Rome out of it, this was a tragic tale.

Bible study

Mike Huckabee, America's current Ambassador to Israel, has been on his current track for a long time. A brief piece from 2016 has him justifying support of Israel's settlement policies with a quote of Genesis 12:3, reading, "I will bless them that bless thee, and curse them that curseth thee." This is a promise made by God to Abraham, before even the ancient Kingdom of Israel has been founded. It's at least worth asking if it applies to all Abrahamic faiths.

More to the point, it seems like a lot of Christians approach the Bible less as an invitation to moral and spiritual growth and more as a potboiler novel with absolute good guys and purely evil bad guys. That's fine if you're writing a Netflix miniseries based on it. Not so much if you're basing your and, in fact, the nation's politics on it.

Spot of tea

 

I've heard it said that coffee is supercharged and tea is time-released. A kind of sprint vs. marathon effect. Truth to tell, I'm no expert. I tend to get my caffeine from coffee. When I drink tea, it's most often herbal.

Still, I love the way this song captures those qualities of tea. The first verse is gentle and a bit sleepy, but picks up speed. With the "Hallelujah, Rosa Lea" chorus, well, the caffeine hits full force.

Keychain creatures

I've heard of Labubu without thinking much about what they were. It just sounded like something Yogi Bear might say if French people visited Jellystone. Apparently they're these little toys reminiscent of Teletubbies and/or Troll dolls, which is not surprising. What might be a surprise is how they're being sold.

It’s easy to dismiss the Labubu Craze of 2025 as just the latest in the long line of tulip manias for toys. The fact that consumers are rushing to spend anywhere between $25 and $150,000 a pop on maniacally grinning monsters designed by Chinese-Dutch artist Kasing Lung is eyebrow-raising, but not unprecedented.

But in the 2020s, the script has flipped on who the dolls are actually designed for. Parents once bloodied each other to put the toy du jour under the Christmas tree for their children, as in the so-called Cabbage Patch Kids Riots of 1983, or later skirmishes over Beanie Babies or Furbies. Now men and women are eagerly lining up outside designer toy shops to secure Labubus for the only children in their family—themselves. Collectors, mostly in their twenties and thirties, post Labubu unboxing videos on TikTok with the reverence of a gender reveal party. Recently in Washington, DC, a crowd of Zoomers met up for espresso martinis and photo-ops with their fuzzy toys; in Los Angeles, hundreds packed into a club for a Labubu-inspired rave. 

Be careful out there. I can't think of many more embarrassing phrases to come up at your emergency room visit than "Labubu-inspired rave."

Fad toys that people who are―God help us!―old enough to vote and maybe run for office are bad bets for the collectibles market. If no one or almost no one is buying them for actual children, it's unlikely that kids will grow up to have nostalgic feelings toward them and seek them out when they get older. You could try selling your collection on eBay in fifteen years and find that it hasn't even kept up with the rate of inflation.

Of course at least you'll have something solid, something that actually exists in physical space. It's an edge over Bored Apes.

Pretty soon you're talking serious money

Apparently Larry Ellison recently became the richest person in the world, although they're also saying that Elon Musk rebounded after a few hours to keep the title. Still, they're both one of a very small elite. The wealthiest men who haven't paid to have their names removed from the public record. 

Will Ellison use his wealth more for good than evil. I wouldn't count on it, given that his son is looking to further merger the already thoroughly mergered Hollywood. 

But the weird thing from my perspective is how Ellison got there with Oracle. Don't get me wrong, Oracle seems from the outside like it would be quite profitable. But look at Microsoft. They took over the operating system business with MS-DOS in 1981, when the personal computing era was just getting underway. Windows came a few years later. I use Windows. Most people do in some way, whether they like it or not. And the Microsoft Office suite that includes Word and Excel is pretty much universally used. So I know how I've put money in Bill Gates's pocket. Anything I've done to make Ellison richer has been invisible.

Arcadia

Here's a nice little article about Lily Dale. Lily Dale is a hamlet in New York's Chautauqua County with an estimated population of about 275. It's been the home of the National Spiritualist Association of Churches since that organization's founding in 1893. Hence it's a real hub spiritual mediums' activity.

Do I believe in mediums? I guess it's a matter of degree. Supernatural phenomena are likely rare, which is why we can't tie them into the rules of nature. Still, there are things I don't expect to be explained in my lifetime.

But there's something to Lily Dale beyond whether its residents can get in touch with your departed grandmother. Despite its tiny size, it actually has an identity. From the look of the town, that's helped it escape the grip of hypermodernity. Considering where modernity is going and where it seems to be taking us, that's something other villages, small towns, and maybe even cities should study.

Visions of the Northwest

 

The Tlingit people are one of the major native tribes of Alaska. As such, the first Europeans to make contact with them were Russians. The Tlingit language has often been written in Cyrillic letters. 

Tlingit art is beautiful. It's dramatic. It speaks of a fascinating mythopoeia. 

Of course, cultures are complex. For a long time, the Tlingit were both a warlike and a slave-keeping society. Of course that's not who they are anymore. But it's a reminder that you have to take the bitter with the sweet. This is true across cultures.

What bugs you

Today marks the fourth time I've seen a lanternfly and the first time I've tried to kill one. They say that you should kill one every time you see it, because they're invasive and explosive and all that. But I have a different ethic. If an insect gets into my home its life is forfeit. If I encounter a bug in nature and it doesn't bite or otherwise molest me, I leave it alone. 

Lanternflies look kind of pitiful when they just walk on the ground. When they fly they're sort of pretty, in a way. It was one that had just landed that I tried to stomp on. Figured it had made a good show. But it leaped away before I could reach it. 

I'm not that bothered. Things have a way of balancing out. And a huge number of bird species eat insects, especially birds with pointy beaks. They seem to have put the kibosh on the cicada swarm we were supposed to get last year.

Case in point

 

Younger bands and musicians often have to license their songs to advertising in order to make money. I understand this. But more established players who have other options might want to think twice.

A few years back this song was used in a car ad. I don't remember the company. But I do remember that the music and vocals were turned down for most of it while the spiel guy did his 1000-word-per-minute spiel. Then when he was done with that "The best I ever had" blasted out. 

Pete Townshend said in essence that it was his song and if he wanted to put some extra money away from ad royalties that was his right. He wasn't wrong. But realize that some people in younger age brackets are hearing the song for the first time, in a context that's annoying enough that some will just tune it out. Then the question becomes whether it's worth it.

I'll tell you what the destructive force is

 Poetry Is a Destructive Force

That's what misery is,

Nothing to have at heart.

It is to have or nothing.

It is a thing to have,

A lion, an ox in his breast,

To feel it breathing there.

Corazón, stout dog,

Young ox, bow-legged bear,

He tastes its blood, not spit.

He is like a man

In the body of a violent beast.

Its muscles are his own . . .

The lion sleeps in the sun.

Its nose is on its paws.

It can kill a man.

That's a poem by Wallace Stevens, so don't think I'm taking credit for it. But it's stuck with me since I read it X years ago. In a way that I wouldn't be so arrogant as to try to explain it or pick it apart. So I'll just touch on a couple of things.

It's a bold statement that "poetry is a destructive force." One you might expect to hear from some insane crusader, not an actual poet. So what is it that poetry destroys? In some cases, the poet. Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath are notorious cases, although I believe this poem predates their final stages. But they weren't the first.

But this is not a dry exposé of poetic self-destructiveness. There's something else. If poetry works differently on the mind than do other things, you don't know what it's going to unleash.

Most of the lines are quite short. They don't tell, they just are.

The cool world

It's getting to be that time again. Sweater season. To specify a little, if you're up late at night, and the window is open, and you're wearing a short-sleeved shirt, it's nice to have a sweater on-hand. Unless and until there's another hot spell. 

I realized a while ago that if I'm going to wear sweaters, I prefer cardigans. They're considerably more flexible than other sweaters. The one I'm wearing now is sort of a mint green and made out of what they say is Scottish wool. It's got a nice aroma to it.

From the other side

 

The mechanized future of early pop art had become the present, and the liberation from the old values it promised had come to be seen as what it was: an emptying-out process of jumped-up consumer stimulation that left you with very little in the way of tangible values. If pop started out as a way of "liking things," as Andy said, probably quite sincerely, its legacy in the '70s and '80s was more complicated: you can like things all you want, but they will not like you back. In fact, when you're not looking, they will rob you. It's now more or less agreed that the great liberation that was supposed to flow from the new industrial society never actually took place, and even if it did, it ushered in another set of problems. The great leveling of social codes that followed the breakdown of the 1950s order only led to more anxiety. By the '70s, pop art started to look like an embrace of this new consumer-driven social order; it felt a touch corrupt and compromised, and integrated a little too easily into the middle-high strata of public taste.

The above passage is from David Salle's How to See: Looking, Talking, and Thinking about Art. Yes, bless him, Salle is a fellow adherent of the Oxford comma. Specifically, it's from Salle's overview on Roy Lichtenstein. Lichtenstein became famous in the '60s for his update of the pointillist method. He would take comic book panels, subtly alter their imagery and layout, enlarge them in the form of paintings, which also included enlarging the Ben-Day dots.

Lichtenstein eventually moved onto other subjects, derived from high art rather than pop ephemera. It was a necessary change. His old style had been (re)appropriated by the makers of ironic t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc. You could see it as the curse of the SubGenius. But while he changed subject matter, the dots stayed. One might look at them and wonder why he was doing it like that. Salle, a much sought-after painter in his own right, provides some explanation of why Lichtenstein was doing what he did the way he did it.

His insights extend a bit beyond the art world as well. The "emptying-out" he speaks of certainly reached a lot further, and has never ended. The past sixty years or so have seen a great deal of change on the social, economic, and political fronts. It's mostly been a discarding of the old where one waits in vain for the "in with the new" part. So how can you counteract that? It's an open question.

Space age bachelor pad music

 

Couple of interesting facts about Van Dyke Parks, aside from his having auditioned for the Monkees, which I believe I dealt with in another post.

A little bit after that, he was a member of the Mothers of Invention. For, like, a couple of weeks. By the time they recorded Freak Out! he was gone. It seems to have been rather easy to fall out with Frank Zappa, and he did.

Also, at the time he recorded Song Cycle he was highly influenced by Mexican keyboardist and composer Juan Garcia Esquivel. The above song doesn't really sound like Esquivel, but there is a similar sense of playing around with the listener's stereo equipment and headspace.

Shelter from the storm

I remembered this week that the library would be closed tomorrow because they do a three day weekend thing for Labor Day. This is after forgetting the same thing for Victory Day, which is a weird Rhode Island only thing. Anyway, I had three things to pick up, so today was the day to do it. They included a movie I wanted to watch tonight anyway.

Weird thing is, we had three separate thunderstorms today. The first one ended before I left the house. The second one started while I was on the way. It only got me a little wet, though, and while I was in the library it ended. I'd say that Numero Trio, that started when I got home, was the doozie.

Gall

Ukraine continues to be the second most entitled national government with which America is involved. I'll just let you guess who #1 is, but second place is an achievement. 

They're condemning Woody Allen for attending―well, remotely attending―the Moscow International Film Festival. This despite him also speaking against Vladimir Putin. Their scolding probably doesn't really register with Allen after his experiences with the scorched earth tactics of the late 2010s social justice movement. Still, it's worth noting that what Stivers identifies as the "wholesale global shunning of all things Russian" was not something that everybody came up with on their own, but was in fact instructed by the Ukrainian powers that be.

Who, it should be noted, blew up the Nord Stream pipeline and blamed Russia for it. There are now mountains of evidence for this, but everyone lets it go. There is no way they should get to tell anyone where they can and can't go.

How many fingers?

"AI Slop" went from a canny bit of slang to a real official-like term in the space of a few months. And no wonder. It really is everywhere. 

Lately I've been seeing ads for a new image creation/editing tool that uses AI. I hope I don't slip up and reveal that I'm talking about Adobe Firefly. Anyway, given the images used in the ad as an example of what you can do with the software, I have to ask, "Okay, but why would you want to?" But if nothing else, the tools with which slop can be created are growing?

Most people spend so much time on their phones nowadays that this becomes a major part of their visual environment, even if the image they're looking at is about the size of their knuckles. But for software-generated content that seems to deny the very existence of beauty, how much can you take? When do you step away from the machine?

If you sole it they will come

You're probably familiar with the Mother Goose rhyme about the old woman who lived in a shoe. She gave them broth with no bread, whipped them soundly, put them to bed. So it appears that in the short term she actually did know what to do. 

This little ditty was printed in 1784 but existed in some form long before that. And it's had influence through the years. For one in an Ellery Queen novel called There Was an Old Woman, which does at least have something to do with shoes.

But also, and more to the point, someone actually built a house meant to look like the big shoe the lady moved into. It's on Bear Lake, which is on the border of Idaho and Utah. It looks to be a nice destination for families with children, especially if they live in or are already traveling through the West. What seems best about it is that it can tickle their imagination, and not in the sensory overload way that the most advertised places do.

Public service

Ambrose Bierce may always be condemned to...if not complete obscurity, then a kind of renown limited to literary hipsters. Everyone knows about his mysterious late-in-life disappearance. His fiction, much less so. While his stories are brilliant and quite readable, they're most often out of print. And unlike Poe's tales they're not well-suited to being spun out into 90 minute fantasias, so if they're adapted into anything it will likely be short films. Lucky break that one of those shorts got  a second run as a Twilight Zone.

Anyway, his witticisms are still available to all. Here are a couple I like. 

“There’s no free will,” says the philosopher

”To hang is most unjust.”

”There is no free will,” assents the officer

”We hang because we must.”

Meeting Merit on a street-crossing, Success stood still. Merit stepped off into the mud and went around him, bowing his apologies, which Success had the grace to accept.

In memoriam to anonymous

Out walking today, I almost stepped on a small body. It could have been a rat, but could conceivably been an opossum as well. Which mammal it was, exactly, I couldn't tell because it had been dried out and thoroughly picked clean. Weird that it stayed out there so long, but this street doesn't seem to get as much foot traffic as it does merging cars.

Anyway, going on the idea that it might be an opossum, I started looking them up. This is a nice short video. I didn't realize that possums were a different animal, native to Australia. It's thought that marsupials first evolved in South America, and migrated to Australia when they were closer together. The opossum is the one marsupial that migrated north to N. America instead.

They eat ticks? That is handy, especially in Lyme country.

Vote early, vote often

I was at a bookstore recently and, while I was browsing, I figured I'd take a look at their mystery section. Two of the bylines I noticed were two-time Georgia Governor nominee Stacey Abrams and former FBI director James Comey.

This has made me wonder. When did it first happen that a political thriller was written by an actual politician? From the 80s I remember Double Man, by Senators Gary Hart and William S. Cohen, making it at least technically bipartisan. And while I read it, I couldn't really tell you what it's about without looking it up.

Most politicians can't really stop running, stop stumping, even when there are no more offices for them to seek. That's a fatal flaw with this kind of book. But they do likely keep a certain number of ghostwriters employed.

Whoosh

I was just looking at this list of onomatopoeias, which are of course words that sound like the sound they describe. It occurred to me that different languages must have their own varying lists of onomatopoeias. In fact I've seen accounts of different languages having different words for the noises made by, say, roosters. (They apparently don't say cock-a-doodle-do everywhere). So that would be a kind of language barrier, but if you have a little patience it would be a fun one to get over.

Makes sense that "murmur" is on the list. I've heard that REM chose it as an album title because it's the easiest word in the English language to speak.

Get on the good foot

On visits to my grandparents I used to notice that my grandfather had a shoehorn as well as something called a shoetree. The shoehorn was self-explanatory. I really didn't understand the shoetree, though. For one thing it didn't look like a tree. It just looked like a wooden foot you left in the shoe. And what was the purpose of that?

Well, I've learned. Something I've noticed is that a pair of shoes might be my size in theory while in practice they don't fit my feet. A good shoetree helps with that, especially providing more space in the toe area.

Hair splitters united

According to Wikipedia, Roko's basilisk is "a thought experiment which states that there could be an artificial superintelligence in the future that, while otherwise benevolent, would punish anyone who knew of its potential existence but did not directly contribute to its advancement or development, in order to incentivize said advancement." Whew. Of course the phrase "otherwise benevolent" is entirely vitiated by everything else in that sentence. Assume that instead of an "artificial superintelligence" this is just a guy and he would be considered a psychopath, but probably a stupid one. You wouldn't create ethical thought experiments over the ramifications of his potential existence. You'd just resolve to smack him in the head if you ever met him. Somehow, though, Roko's basilisk has become a topic of debate among untold thousands of nerds.

I myself have a longstanding taste for what-ifs and abstractions that most people aren't thinking about. But there's a difference between thinking about weird mutations for your own amusement and maybe to get somewhere on another personal front; and forming your intellectual quirks into an all-encompassing ethic you believe everyone should obey. It's why I've never gotten behind utilitarianism, extreme rationalism, and the other markers of the San Francisco elite. Sam Kriss says that these philosophies are not for us--humans, that is--and he's probably right.

Kriss also traces the development of modern rationalism from Eliezer Yudkowksy's extensive fanfic Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Which made me consider. There's another famed Harry Potter fanfiction from early in Web 2.0. My Immortal soaps up the Hogwarts gang in the context of the now semi-forgotten Hot Topic goth-emo scene of the time. It's bad to a legendary degree, but it doesn't pretend to be anything but silly. There's no philosophy based around it. The author isn't a major figure in tech culture or any other culture. We don't even really know who she is.

There's a lesson here somewhere.

Gossip column stuff

Few things are drearier than when a relatively high-profile actor makes the news for having opinions about Donald Trump.

Because first of all, it's not news. We're talking about someone who started running for President about a decade ago, after having made noise on other fronts for years before that. Nobody has really been holding their tongue about him up till now. And in all likelihood it's going to be someone else running for the Oval Office in three years.

Furthermore Trump is not substantially that different from other recent Presidents, or the political class in general. He's made some adjustments, to be sure. But the majority of big changes have been in style and presentation.

There are plenty of things to talk about in terms of what the government does and doesn't spend money on, and the kind of foreign policy we support and promote. And so on. But anyone trying to be serious about those topics winds up on page A23 of the newspaper, or whatever the internet equivalent is.

Needled

I have a friend who's drawn a line in the sand against tattoos. He's told his nieces, for one thing, that he'll disinherit them if they ever get tattoos. I don't know how much they stand to inherit from them. It's mostly about sending a message, although he doesn't think they're likely to get them anyway.

I'm not as fundamentalist about it, but I'm an ink-skeptic. You see a lot of young people getting them because they're bored and a lot of older people getting them to stay relevant. The latter is especially endemic among rock stars. And as you keep getting more and more you just wind up with an incoherent mass of images, most of which end up the same color as a blue ballpoint. And I just have to wonder, what was the intention here?

You say goodbye, and I say hello

Okay, I guess, for some, spoilers ahead. Again.

But you may know this already. After a number of adventures with his friend Dr. John Watson fought directly with his most formidable foe, Professor Moriarty. Both went over the Reichenbach Falls. This battle, depicted in "The Final Problem", meant the end of Sherlock Holmes.

Except! Years later, Holmes reentered Watson's life, alive and well, with an explanation of how he'd survived and what he'd been doing in the time since. See "The Empty House." It may have been the first retcon. While there were mythical figures with contradictory stories, it was almost unheard of for a single author to publicly change his depiction of what had happened.*

Arthur Conan Doyle hoped for an august literary career and he intended for Sherlock Holmes to be but a small part of it. That's why he attempted to kill his own creation to begin with. Obviously, he couldn't quite pull it off. Holmes was just too big. Although some speculate that he kept some ambiguity from the outset so that he'd still have his options open. It's a plausible idea.

*At the start of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck says that Twain "stretched some things" in Tom Sawyer, but as far as I can recall nothing in the later book specifically contradicts anything in the earlier one.

So long ago, not long ago at all

 

The pillars, at least 200 in total, were raised into sockets and linked by walls of rough stone. Each is a unique work of sculpture, carved with images from the world of dangerous carnivores and poisonous reptiles, as well as game species, waterfowl, and small scavengers. Animal forms project from the rock in varying depths of relief: some hover coyly on the surface, others emerge boldly into three dimensions. These often nightmarish creatures follow divergent orientations, some marching to the horizon, others working their way down into the earth. In places, the pillar itself becomes a sort of standing body, with human-like limbs and clothing.

The above passage is from The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by the now-late David Graeber and the not-late David Wengrow. It's a thick book, with a lot going on in the endnotes as well. I'm not taking the book as gospel, but it's chock full of interesting stuff and brings up some interesting questions about how humanity's social organization came to be what it is. 

Göbekli Tepe really is an eye-opening site, as well. This is when people were still using flint tools, or something very like them. And they managed to erect a collection of pillars like this? It almost looks like a postmodern art installation, but the animal world must have been very immediate to its builders. Graeber and Wengrow note that the population around this site shows no signs of being agricultural. Whatever lifestyle they had, it didn't dim their imagination.

Defeated

I don't like to run up the white flag on reading a book, but sometimes it must be done.

I liked Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves. It was spooky and about the right level of challenging.

But his next novel, Only Revolutions, I don't know. It's about two young lovers who take off in a car and after that you're guess is as good as mine. The book is two-sided, with each of the main characters starting their narrative at one end and finishing up at the other. That is, I guess, supposed to provide alternating perspectives on the same events. Unfortunately almost nothing either character says makes sense, so that's kind of a bust.

What happened here? Did Danielewski take a heavy dose of acid, ramble into a tape recorder, and then say, "Fuck it, that's my new book"? Was he told that he could be the next James Joyce, and interpret that as "Be less coherent"? Maybe the film rights negotiations for House of Leaves bored him so he responded by a book no sane film studio would want to adapt?

Still, I'm glad it was published. Better too much leeway than too little.

...but not too much tomfoolery

Tom Lehrer finally slipped this mortal coil this past weekend, aged 97. It was a fairly lowkey news item, in part because this was at the end of the week when we also lost Ozzy, the Hulkster, and Theo Huxtable. 

But there's another reason, implicit in Harry Briggs's memorial piece. Which, as a side note, mentions Lehrer having "no interest" in Stephen Sondheim, which is a little strange since Sondheim introduced him in what may have been his last live performance. But never mind. No, as Briggs notes, Lehrer "effectively vanished from the public eye half a century ago."

The idea that satire became obsolete the day that Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize makes a good cover for Lehrer's retirement from songwriting. But it's more that satire is a limited resource. Mark Russell spent decades doing concerts, crafting parody songs for every political occasion. On one level you have to admire his persistence, but how much of this stuff lasted?

Lehrer recorded four albums, with his first live album being basically just the second studio album plus an audience. Then two more songs in the 70s for The Electric Company. But the best of these songs struck at the heart of basic situations to reveal what was appalling and funny about them. He had no need to keep up with the political Joneses. 

Outrival of the fittest

I have a vague but persistent memory from about forty years ago. It was a commercial with a song―too pompous to accept the designation "jingle"―whose lyrics went something like "You're the first to come in in the morning/The last to leave at night." I think it might have been a beer commercial, in which case it could have been a tribute to those hearty executives who clock in at 7:30, already buzzed.

But I feel like that marked a turning point in the culture. Advertising up until that point had mostly focused on the question of "What can we do for you?" The "you" was conceptualized as a general man in the street, or woman, depending on the product.

But then the "you" started becoming more specified, and more grandiose. If you were watching a commercial for a running shoe, you had to be an elite athlete. If it was a car ad, you had to have the most important places to go. How much of this was actually true? Well, the business was never about truth. But it's weird, the extent to which one of the products you were now expected to buy was yourself.

 

Schoolhouse Rock generally had little to do with rock music, but it had its charm. At this point it's kind of a window into a bygone media world. That kind of loose animation would only be seen at a film festival now, or at least would be unable to make it to TV.

Bob Dorough and Blossom Dearie, two hip jazz icons from the midcentury period, both got exposure to very young listeners this way. Above are a Dearie song from Schoolhouse Rock and one from an early album of hers. I don't know how many of us 70s kids became fans of hers, but she was still recording and touring into the 2000s. Must have been doing something right.

Roll with it

The blogroll at the bottom of this blog is a little on the antiquated side. A lot of the other blogs have either been taken offline entirely or have been static with no updates since, like, 2011. When I click on one it tells me that the blog is invitation only and I'm not invited, which seems rude at first but it's also apparent the author abandoned Blogspot for Substack. Also, if we're being honest, my interests have changed since I started.

But changing it over isn't much of a priority. If I prune a few, what do I replace them with? Who are the new faces in the game? Blogging has become a minority interest, and I'm one of the last standing.

Sparky & Co.

Of comic strips still running new (or at least "new") installments, a huge number are now legacy affairs. That is to say, carried on by someone other than their creator. Dennis the Menace, Family Circus, Beetle Bailey, Hagar the Horrible, Blondie, Shoe, and Gasoline Alley all continue while their original cartoonists are no longer with us. And that's a very partial list. It's not inherently wrong, and some successors do better than others, but ultimately it's a business thing.

However long we make this list, Peanuts would not be on it. Charles M. Schulz continued to work on it until he died in 2000. While you could argue that in later years he spent too much time on Snoopy and off-Snoopy characters like Spike, he never phoned it in. All along, he wrote and drew with care, introducing new characters here and there even in the late nineties. By the point where he would have had to be replaced, he had become irreplaceable. 

Speaking of...

 

It feels like a bit of a cheat to do another video post right away, but I couldn't resist. This is a brief excerpt from an interview between Jorge Luis Borges and William F. Buckley. Borges talks about why English is his favorite language to read. Was he biased by being part English himself? Well that was on his father's side, and in his papa's case that was mixed in with a lot of Spanish and Portuguese. So I don't think it's necessarily the deciding factor. Of course he wrote in Spanish, which is the most logical way to go about things when you kick off your career in Argentina. But he had a feel for English, and in this clip he's got a beautiful accent.

of note

Perhaps because I'm from the first half of Gen X, two TV theme songs are a part of my conscious or unconscious mind. One is Jack Elliott and Allyn Ferguson's music for Barney Miller. 

The other is Bob James's theme for Taxi.

Both are at least jazz adjacent. James was in fact a well known jazz musician and composer from the early 60s onward. Taxi's theme was really an excerpt from a song called "Angela" from one of his own albums.

It's also noticeably the softer of the pieces, compared to the brash, bass-driven Barney Miller. Could be that it was a sign that the national mood or at least aesthetics was changing. Or it could have just been an in-studio choice.

Am I blue?

What is the color indigo? On the spectrum as we see it, the area made up of colors that look more or less blue is quite broad. Shades known as "indigo" are darker and in some cases verge on purple. But there's no hard boundary.

There's an interesting backstory. Isaac Newton codified the spectrum as it's known to modern people. He wanted seven colors because he had a surprising yen for numerology, and indigo dye was a well-known reference point for his contemporaries. And there are various reasons to maintain the concept of indigo. Not least because otherwise Roy G. Biv loses a needed vowel.

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.