In transit

One thing I have to do tomorrow is pick up a RIPTA "Wave" card. RIPTA, the public transit agency that covers most of Rhode Island, used to sell monthly passes. Now those are being replaced by a credit/gift card kind of deal, that you can add more money to online.

Will this turn out to be more convenient for the users? Maybe. That's certainly the line they're pushing.

While you could get the passes at the big supermarkets, they also used to be sold at the RIPTA center in downtown Providence. I used to like the lady who sold them to me. That building was shut down in March 2020, and while they've recently reopened the doors, the public can't do anything in there but use the bathroom. And now that they're not selling the passes anymore, it looks like they've eliminated some job. So I hope that lady was close to retirement already and that she's doing okay.

As vast as space and as timeless as infinity

This morning, sitting in a conference room in a building I had never been before. I was waiting for a couple of women who were going to orient me on my assignment. My attention flitted from thing to thing, but I couldn't help notice the wall clock. Functioning normally at first, but then the hands stopped moving. For an extended period the minute hand just stayed frozen after the 12. But at some point it started up again, and when I looked again it didn't even seem to be running behind.

Makes me wonder offhand how often things like this happen.

Don't bank on it

Robert Wise, the man who would later helm West Side Story and The Haunting, directed Odds Against Tomorrow, a heist movie based on a novel by William P. McGivern. Gorgeous and exciting, watching it feels something like being in love. And as with being in love, you know it's going to end badly. (With notably rare exceptions, of course.)

Dave Burke (Ed Begley, not Jr.) is an ex-cop, dirty, although he says he was just the one left holding the bag. He's a New Yorker, and he's been staking out a bank in a small town upstate, one that looks to him like easy pickings. He thinks he knows just the two guys to help him. 

Johnny Ingram (Harry Belafonte) dresses well, lives high, and is catnip to the ladies. One or two men seem to like what they see two. One extended scene shows him singing and playing vibes at a fun looking nightclub, although it's not clear whether performing there is a job or a hobby. His main problem is that he likes to play the horses and is bad at it. So on top of child support he owes money to people who could hurt him, his ex, his daughter, you get the idea.

Earl Slater (Robert Ryan) is trouble. He's haunted by the war and he's killed at least one man since then. He hasn't been able to get a job lately, leaving him dependent on his waitress girlfriend (Shelley Winters). Inconveniently, for a man who'll be expected to work with a fellow robber played by Harry Belafonte, he is also a massive racist. This is worth unpacking, though. He's pretty much an asshole to everyone, as shown by a scene where he fights and hurts a young soldier (future MASH-ie Wayne Rogers) demonstrating judo moves in a bar. It's just that as a Southerner he seems to feel obligated to add insult to injury with black people.

So obviously this is going to go great.

Odds Against Tomorrow was released in 1959, later than most classic film noir. The city scenes show the dreams of the jet age future already starting to fail. The more sylvan setting of the final act looks beautiful and bleak. Haunting overall.

The movie marches to its own drummer in other ways as well. Gloria Grahame, who plays Slater's neighbor, is almost as much of a vamp here as she was in real life. (Look up details of her divorce from Nicholas Ray sometime.) In most films in this genre she would be a siren calling him to his doom. Well, he's going nowhere good, but she's got nothing to do with that. All she can do, really, is get a taste while he's still here.

So yes, much better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

Life and limb

Yesterday I was down at the park near the Providence/Pawtucket border. Day was breezy but we weren't getting big winds. When I'd been there for a little bit I heard a huge crack. Imagine my surprise when I look up and see a giant severed branch laying on the ground.

If I'm right about the tree that it came from, the tree still had other strong branches and a lot of green leaves. So maybe this one limb had been damaged in an earlier storm or other event and had to be sacrificed. That's big. 

I did move the branch a little out of the footpath.

Absolutely eerie

The growing insularity of elites means, among other things, that political ideologies lose touch with the concerns of ordinary citizens. Since political debate is restricted, most of the time, to the "talking classes," as they have been aptly characterized, it becomes increasingly ingrown and formulaic. Ideas circulate and recirculate in the form of buzzwords and conditioned reflex. The old dispute between left and right has exhausted its capacity to clarify issues and to provide a reliable map of reality. In some quarters the very idea of reality has come into question, perhaps because the talking classes inhabit an artificial world in which simulations of reality replace the thing itself. 

Both left- and right-wing ideologies, in any case, are now so rigid that new ideas make little impression on their adherents. The faithful, having sealed themselves off from arguments and events that might call their own convictions into question, no longer attempt to engage their adversaries in debate. Their reading consists for the most part of works written from a point of view identical with their own. Instead of engaging unfamiliar arguments, they are content to classify them as either orthodox or heretical. The exposure of ideological deviation, on both sides, absorbs energy that might better be invested in self-criticism, the waning capacity for which is the surest sign of a waning intellectual tradition. 

The previous two paragraphs are from Christopher Lasch's The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy. The book was published in 1995, but the words had to have been written in 1993 or 1994, since he died in February of the latter year. This is stunning. Everything he saw then, it seems, has come into even sharper focus since. The biggest change is probably that the chattering classes are no longer satisfied to live in an artificial world themselves, but actively denigrate the lower orders who fail or refuse to join them. 

One long-term change that Lasch details is the replacement of an aristocratic elite with a meritocratic one. Of course no one--at least almost no one--likes having an aristocracy around, so meritocrats who've earned their place sound like an improvement. One problem with this is that realistically not everyone can rise to the top, so hard limits are still drawn around the classes. Another is that meritocratic elites fully believe that their own superior skills and efforts are responsible for their high placement in life. That belief doesn't encourage the sense of noblesse oblige that sometimes accompanied the old aristocrats. It may, in fact, encourage them to exclude themselves from rules they make for others.

In unrelated news, San Francisco's mayor really enjoyed that Tony! Toni! Toné! show.

boom

Fireworks went off on this street tonight. I could see them from right where I'm sitting now. In someone's backyard, I guess? Anyway, there was lots of noise and sparkles. Of course we're talking kind of late on a Sunday night. In September, after the kids are back in school. So I guess somebody had a little cache left that they hadn't been able to use up in the summer, so they chose to do so tonight. Hey, I can respect that.

Pest notes

I

Walking home today I saw something brownish greyish lying on the sidewalk. Obviously a mouse, dead and probably quite young. A little jarring but I didn't think that much more of it. Until I was about a block from my house and saw another mouse. Also dead, a little bigger.

Which made me start to think. Was it the same cat? And if so, was the cat working in some kind of pattern?

II

Tonight I had a housefly buzzing around my apartment. Not really a big deal, until it started crawling on my laptop. Swatted it away, but it returned a few minutes later. Annoying. Be more like the spider that will eventually eat you. Work under my radar. So this second time I caught it with an empty yogurt tin and an envelope and did a catch/release out to the hallway. Why not outside? Because hindsight is 20/20.