Choose wisely

If power is going to corrupt, it stands to reason that it will flatter first. Which is to say that one might start out wanting to do good, and even actually doing it. But gradually the good that you were doing becomes a secondary priority. And thanks to a kind of tunnel vision you don't even notice it.

In a recent profile, Cecily Myart-Cruz shows signs of being in the advanced stages. She's the head of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), a powerful teacher's union in California. And one of her current top priorities is justifying the school closures that have kept so many children out of in-person learning for the past year.

Today, however, on a sunny May afternoon, Myart-Cruz is allowing a reporter inside her inner sanctum—or at least inside a glass-paneled conference room down the hall from her eleventh-floor office. And right away, she lives up to her reputation: after settling into in a swivel chair and slowly removing her zebra-print face mask, the 47-year-old lightning rod for controversy calmly sets her hands on the table and begins issuing a series of incendiary statements that almost seem aerodynamically designed to grab headlines and infuriate critics. Like this one: “There is no such thing as learning loss,” she responds when asked how her insistence on keeping L.A.’s schools mostly locked down over the last year and a half may have impacted the city’s 600,000 kindergarten through 12th-grade students. “Our kids didn’t lose anything. It’s OK that our babies may not have learned all their times tables. They learned resilience. They learned survival. They learned critical-thinking skills. They know the difference between a riot and a protest. They know the words insurrection and coup.” She even went so far as to suggest darkly that “learning loss” is a fake crisis marketed by shadowy purveyors of clinical and classroom assessments.

When an educator thinks it's a winning argument to say, "Maybe the kids don't know their ABCs but they know to think what we tell them to think," well, you can't lose the plot much more badly than that.

Of course the article mentions that Myart-Cruz barely ever speaks to the press. Maybe she would have been better advised to stick with that avoidance.

Salt of the earth

While heading home after grocery shopping, I walked on a short bridge. It spans a branch of the river, and apparently there's a bar/club on one side of the river. So from a point far above them I could hear this band outdoors playing Rolling Stones covers. It was a little poignant.

The Stones themselves have in some sense become their own cover band now. The two guys credited with writing the songs are still there, but it's just them. The larger organism responsible for putting the songs together has dissipated. And Ron Wood, a veteran of Rod Stewart's Faces, appears to have joined at about the last moment where newcomers had a chance of becoming official Rolling Stones someday.

L'chaim

Tonight I went out to dinner for a friend's birthday. It was a nice get-together. My current circumstances are different from the other people there. I'm also probably a little to the right of the rest now, although that's a very recent development. So maybe I started out with some trepidations. As the evening went on, though, we had some interesting discussions, maybe finding some unexpected common ground.

The dinner also included a bunch of different wines, so we also went through a lot of alcohol. When I stood up to leave I thought, "Oh God, am I gonna die?" Well, now I'm pretty sure I won't, so...

Quad life

The other night I dreamed that I still lived in a dorm. Not that I was still in college. I was implicitly quite beyond the school years. I just happened to be living in a space explicitly built for students.

Not exactly a nightmare, but I wasn't really wistful about waking up either. It's an okay place to live for a while. I made some friends while actually living in the dorms. But it's not an inherently charming way/place to live. And as far as friends go, I didn't actually seem to know any of these kids, which couldn't have helped.

Mobile maker at play

 

The above is Alexander Calder, an American sculptor who spent some time in Paris, which was basically the law for artists at one time. He's best remembered for inventing the mobile. This is a film of "Circus", which he performed in 1955 at the Whitney.

Or it's just a middle aged man playing with his favorite toys. That could be worth watching too.

Friday flix

Some months ago some college students moved out of their apartment on my street. They didn't want to schlep their TV with them so they offered it to me. I'd been keeping it in my living rom closet because I didn't have the remote. Recently, though, my DVD player crapped out. As I finally noticed, this TV has a DVD player built in, at the top behind the screen.

So I set that up. Finally ordered a replacement remote. Good thing, too, because I watched a movie tonight, and you wouldn't believe how many trailers and promos it had beforehand. If I didn't have access to a fast forward button I'd have to spend at least twenty minutes just watching them.

Okay, so, the movie. It's called Everything Must Go. It's based on a Raymond Carver short story I've actually read. Will Ferrell plays a high-powered salesman who's also a huge problem drinker. His wife kicks him out of the house and he has nowhere to go, so he takes to living on his lawn and eventually organizes a yard sale. The movie has a little more resolution and uplift than the short story, but it's still somewhat open-ended. Ferrell is definitely the biggest reason to see it. He's a comedian playing an alcoholic, but avoids playing a fun drunk. He's not particularly boisterous either. He just sucks down beers at an alarming rate, in quiet need.

Orwell that ends well

Here begins a story. Because the lady is right. Specifically, I tried it earlier this evening. I Googled the phrase "face time important for infants" and the top result was a link to an article on the website of the American Academy of Pediatrics saying that very thing. But if you followed the link, the article itself was no longer there. As of this moment if you Google the phrase the only result will be the tweet I just linked.

Now if you're just looking for articles in general on whether it's important for small children to see faces, you can find them, including a few from the COVID era. So the material is out there. But should I put an ominous "for now" at the end of that statement? In any case, at least one source is not contradicting its findings but simply disappearing them now that they're politically inconvenient.

Trust The Science? The Science is slinking down the road with your grandmother's fine silverware clinking in its pockets.

Creative couple

I was curious to see what Rasa Davies looked like. Lucked out as someone had posted a wedding portrait of her and Ray onto Pinterest. Quite charming, very 1964.

Her maiden name was Didzpetris and she was an Eastern European immigrant to the UK. Despite my using the past tense I believe she was still around.

Part of the reason I was thinking of her is that she sang backup and harmony on a lot of early Kinks records. Does add a certain something.

Dog days are very much not over

One of the recent Windows must have undone whichever update added the weather icon to the taskbar. No matter. According to Google it's 76 F in Providence now. Which is hot for nighttime, obviously. During the day the humidity has meant that if you're out for  long time your eyebrows will be dripping.

Have to keep in mind that it will eventually pass. Good. This kind of heat can disrupt your concentration. Which means that just because you start doing something, that doesn't mean you'l

Think on your feet

So, buses around here require you to wear a mask or cloth covering on your face as long as you're riding. For all I know they're going to require this until the end of time. And they're TSA related, which I guess the fed gov can get away with because RIPTA has a couple of buses that cross the line into Massachusetts and therefore it's engaged in interstate travel.

Anyway, today when I saw the bus I was waiting for in the distance I realized I didn't have a mask on me. I'd left it in the pocket of my shorts and at that point I was wearing jeans. The other day I'd seen a guy take off his shirt and put that over his face, but he'd been wearing a leather vest as well.

But building on that idea, I took off one of my socks. It was a longish sock so it tied in the back, and also big enough in the heel area to cover both my nose and my mouth. Further good news: I don't have overpowering foot odor.

As for the bad news, if you've read up to this point you know what that is.

Did I a$k?

One word pair I'm seeing online more and more is "net worth." At first I noticed it in clickbait headlines about the deceased, as in "Robin Williams's net worth when he died left his family stunned." (Guessing that was pretty low down on the list.)

But now if you look up the name of anyone famous you get all these stories about their "net worth." Which raises the question of how these internet tabloid reporters who never travel on assignment would know. And moreover, why would I care? I'm not a divorce lawyer.

Anyway, I'm sure this is all a good sign and not an omen of looming techno-feudalism.

Facets

 This video depicts a sculptor I'm not familiar with. She's very good, though. Her works share elements with both Greek and Hindu models, while being their own thing. It's enlightening to watch her in the studio.

The video is titled "Sculpture and Puppetry." Apparently she does make puppets as well. They look good, but I regret that there's no moving footage of them.

Run for the shadows in these golden years

 Based on Erskine Caldwell's 1933 novel of the same name, Anthony Mann's God's Little Acre is about gold fever. A man in Georgia dirt farming country thinks gold lies on his land, despite the fact that he's never found any in fifteen years of digging. He won't get a dowser for the task because his methods are scientific. Of course a dowser who happens to be an albino is a different story.

This is an extraordinarily weird movie to watch. It's well-cast and well-acted, from Robert Ryan's gold-crazed but decent paterfamilias on down. The cinematography is also quite good, establishing a solid Southern Gothic feel, although I don't know whether it was shot on location or in Hollywood. But it's rather nonsensical, repetitive in some aspects and undercooked in others. 

It's also bizarrely horny, straining at the edges of the production codes. Some of the results are questionable. Like, early on, a fledgling politician played by Buddy Hackett(!) finds his lady-friend lolling outside in a bathtub. She tells him to pump more water into her bath, and he handles the pump in a manner that's not so much suggestive as confessional. The scene is pure saltpeter. 

Isola

Yesterday I started reading Ian Tattersall's The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack. Tattersall is an accomplished paleoanthropologist and the title refers to the initial judgment on the identity of  the first discovered Neanderthal skeleton. He writes personally and personably here.

The introduction relates a trip he took to the Comoro Islands. Due to a historical quirk, the Comoros is the only place to see lemurs in the wild other than Madagascar. Just a couple of species, but if you can't get to Madagascar it's nice to have a backup.

As it happens, though, the islands were in the hands of a very ad hoc revolutionary group. Armed teenagers representing this group greeted him when he first got off the boat. Let's just say that you learn something new every day, and Tattersall's lesson was a little more vivid than mine.

They can't really be trained, but your expectations can be

 

Okay, this topic has been covered plenty of places, but still...

The above ad used to run in comic books everywhere. The illustration, of course, implied that you'd have a humanoid race living in your fish tank. If you looked more closely you were at least led to expect trainable animals. What they were really selling was brine shrimp. Brine shrimp that didn't always even come to life when you put them in water. 

How did this company never have their headquarters burned to the ground?