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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
