Louped

I don't know Victor Brauner's art that well, in general. From one telling of his life story, I know that he got in the middle of a fight between two other artists and lost an eye, which is an awful thing to happen to anyone, much less an artist. But depth perception or no, he kept painting throughout his life, which you have to respect.

The sculpture above, Wolf Table, is a well-known piece by him. It's also very good. It captures a twoness that can happen in dreams. Also, note that one of the table legs is bent and has a paw. What phase of the moon is it, anway?

Ears up

Seeing as we're on the eve of a holiday with a bunny mascot, I just searched for "rabbits playing jazz." The idea popped into my head. Funny bunny rabbits playing sax and standup bass and the like. I don't know what I was thinking. Jim Henson could have done something with the idea, but he's long gone. In 2026, you can imagine what a video answering to that description would probably be like.

The silver lining is that the search term indirectly led me to this subreddit of people posting their pet rabbits. Which I'm guessing have been more accommodated than domesticated. In any event, everyone looks to be happy.

True North

Mr. and Mrs. North comes from the early days of American TV, starting when Harry Truman was still technically president. It ran a couple of seasons and was largely forgotten after that. You can tell by watching old episodes on YouTube or Dailymotion, because they almost all have scratches and blotches. 

It still tends to be a diverting show, though. The lead characters are adapted from a then popular series of mystery novels by Richard and Frances Lockridge. The plots are fairly simple so as to fit in a half hour running time, but they're varied. Whodunits predominate, but they also did other kinds of thriller plots. Leads Richard Denning and Barbara Britton also showed a notable amount of chemistry.

Not the world's most physical guy

Something that recently penetrated my headspace, somehow, is the tiff between Moby and the Davies brothers, caused by the former Richard Melville Hall calling "Lola" (deep weary sigh here) "a gross and transphobic song."

Now it must be said that this characterization was part of a Guardian feature, and one of their prompts was "The song I can no longer listen to." If you give it some thought, it should be fairly obvious that at least some of their interview subjects were going to use that part as an opportunity to virtue signal. And here we are.

Dave Davies has jumped in to defend his big brother, and there have been other rebuttals. But justifications for "Lola" aren't what's needed. What is needed is for more people to tell the HR regime to take a hike. Ray Davies's songs reflect the thoughts and emotions of a human being, which is what music should do. Take it or leave it, but don't try to hector it over Zoom.

Q as in question

I just found this interview with Chuck Palahniuk where he reminisces about a youthful enthusiasm for Ellery Queen, both in the books (he slightly exaggerates their number) and the Jim Hutton-led TV series. It's interesting to see how they might have shaped his own identity as an author, particularly as both the Queen series and The Big Valley―with which I'm not really familiar―depicted single-parent families.

I just reread Double, Double. This is a good mystery but an oddity in the series of Ellery Queen books. A young woman hires him to investigate the death of her father, which seems a little off considering that he's a novelist and not really a PI. His father, Inspector Richard Queen, only makes a one-paragraph cameo despite his importance in the series overall. The new client also briefly works as Ellery's secretary, so Nikki Porter seems to have been forgotten for the time being. I sort of suspect that Danny and Lee roughed this out for another character and added Ellery later. The bare bones of his personality do appear, though.

Ten Days' Wonder, by contrast, could only be about Ellery Queen. It might be the most psychological book its authors ever wrote. The amateur sleuth's wit and background give him hints, but also cause him to have blind spots about the other characters, leading to tragedy. Claude Chabrol filmed this one, although for some reason he replaced Ellery Queen with an alternate fictional character.

A trip to 1960

 

I watched this out of curiosity last night. It's the first ever appearance of the character of Columbo. The episode's story would later be expanded as Levinson and Link adapted it into a stage play, and that play itself would be adapted into Prescription: Murder, the 1968 TV movie that introduced Peter Falk in the role.

It's interesting to note that "Enough Rope" is in color. NBC was in business with RCA, which made color TVs, and while the majority of their lineup was black-and-white until 1966, they always had a few exceptions. It's a dainty use of color, quite different from the garishness of a lot of later 1960s TV, or the deserty look of the 70s. 

The $64,000 is how Bert Freed does as the Lieutenant. Well, it's weird to see a guy who looks so much like a thumb in the role. But he does pretty well. He's kind of sneaky, which is good. Peter Falk didn't really catch fire in the role until the second pile, Ransom for a Dead Man.

Definitely more of a curiosity than anything else, though.

Human persons

Not going to really go into it right now but suffice it to say that Jacques Maritain had quite an interesting life. It probably helps that―for a time, at least―he was a pupil of one of my favorite philosophers, Henri Bergson. 

I've been reading a collection of Maritain's works, The Social and Political Philosophy of... and several bits of it wow me. Here's one.

The end of society is the good of the community, the good of the social body. But if this good of the body is not understood to be a common good of human persons, just as the social body itself is a whole of human persons, this conception would lead in turn to errors of a totalitarian type. The common good of the body politic is neither the mere collection of private goods, nor the good of the whole which, like the species with respect to its individuals or the hive with respect to its bees, draws the parts to itself alone and sacrifices them to itself. It is the good human life of the multitude, It is the good human life of the multitude, of a multitude of persons; it is their communion in good living. It is therefore common to the whole and to the parts; it flows back to the parts, and the parts must benefit from it.

Dense stuff, perhaps. But the central theme―that the good of the people can only be applied to that which respects their life as humans, with all that includes―is as relevant as ever.