Fashion report

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

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

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

What do you even want?

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

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

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

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

Corrections

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

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

Give yourself a hand!

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

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

Somehow this seems symbolic of a lot of things now.

Greetings

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

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

Duel

Bear with me here...

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

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

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

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

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

Way to go

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

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

 

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

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

Tales of a short month

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

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

Getting to Zzz

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

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

Marooned

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

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

My God, what have you done?

 

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

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

Our old friends

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

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

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

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

Weld done (sorry)

 

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

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