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.

Deep down

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

🗡sharp

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

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

Windy City cats

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

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

The ground under our feet

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

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

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

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

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

Odd shapes

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

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

Blondes have more fun

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

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

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

You can't keep a good pie down

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

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

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

Good time

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

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

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

Que Serra

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

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

Yikes

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

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

Plethora of spectra

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

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

When time runs out

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

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

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

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

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

Analog-ies

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

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

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

Fleshed out

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

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

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

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

Every accusation is a confession

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

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

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

Those who've left the party

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

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

My front pages

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

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

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

The lack of the shock of

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vulpes

 

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

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

You & I

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

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

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

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

New under the sun

Funny how words and phrases can shift on you.

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

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

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

Διαφορά

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

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

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

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

We want a rock

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

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

23 and who?

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

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

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

Warning: umlauts ahead

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

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

Never bet against the house

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

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

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

Hard ride

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

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

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

Digs for another

Okay, so, Khalil Mahmoud.

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

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

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

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

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

Exciting and new

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

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

Land of the mammoth

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

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

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