Somewhere in there

 

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

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

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

...than to speak and remove all doubt

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

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

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

In their shoes

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

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

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

Musing

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

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

See? That's kind of poetic.

Outstanding Mr. O

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

From Orpheus: The Song of Life, by Ann Wroe

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

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

Something blue

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

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

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

Nobody home

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

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

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

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

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

Puzzling choice

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

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

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

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

Only a fiend

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

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

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

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

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

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

Great minds think alike, I guess?

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

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

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

Ready or not

 

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

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

Down Under hounds

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

Ohne titel

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

Being trans

Being a psycho

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

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

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

Din

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

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

Free Mason!

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

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

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

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