Signal language

Today I dropped in at a bakery to buy a loaf of bread. I saw one on the shelf I figured I could use. Only problem was there was no one at the counter. In the kitchen, yes, but not out where they could see customers.

I tried making some noise. If I were more aggressive I would have made even more noise, the angry kind, although I'm not sure this would have helped. Were I more passive I would have left and tried to pick up bread somewhere else.

Which I started to do, but on the way out I flicked a light switch up and down. It didn't effect the lights out in the store, but it might have done something back in the kitchen. Which is why the story has a happy ending, maybe.

Yeah yeah yeah

This writer engages with the question of whether the Beatles can be considered high art. The way I see it there are two questions hiding within this one.

We do, I believe, need a concept of high art. It is nigh impossible to conceive of enduring values and a world that both precedes us and will outlast us if we do not appreciate cultural work from the past. And it makes sense to have high standards for this level of art.

But while high art matters, it's also necessary to have a living culture. Nothing great can come from a time and place if nothing is coming from it at all. So the great, the good, the ephemeral all have their place.

Where do the Beatles fit in? Well their work has, to a decent extent, already stood the test of time. They were ambitious as musicians and composers, but regardless of how high they aspired they always knew they were creating pop songs. So I feel confident that they'll continued to be remembered. As what? I'm not entirely sure.

Speaking of lasting, Gordon says that his students also pointed to Pink Floyd as something that could potentially be considered high art. Today I saw Pink Floyd graffiti at a bus stop. I'm curious in what context the tagger first encountered their work. 

I also often see graffiti of Achewood characters. Not sure where that fits in.

Had me going for a second

 

The other night I thought of the above song. Thought of it, but didn't know the name. I was pretty sure it was on Sandinista!, but that album has a lot of tracks. So I tried Googling by selected lyrics. No luck. Nothing at all. And as far fetched as it seems, I did idly wonder for a little bit if this was a false memory, something related to the Mandela effect.

As it turned out the reason I couldn't find it by the lyrics was that I was remembering a phrase as "don't pray for your life" when it's actually "don't beg for your life." Cutting out the "don't pray" part and putting quotes around what I could remember brought me the results.

Something this elaborate? If it were a fake memory that would make me a borderline schizophrenic who could write songs like Joe Strummer. Talk about good news/bad news!

Tough times

The Avon Cinema is a deco movie house on Providence's East Side. I hadn't seen a movie there for what has to be more than two years. They still give out rarish currency like $2 bills and Kennedy half-dollars as change. They still play Depression Era slow dance music before the previews start. It's both eerie and comforting to see how little has changed, even though I know it's more a matter of changing things back for appearance's sake.

What I saw today was Emily the Criminal. It's a movie about a woman who has the common millennial problems: student loan debt, dead-end job, having to live with roommates she barely knows. But on top of that you also have previous felony convictions for DUI and assault. And she's the kind of person who will agree to have one drink and wind up in a crowd in the john doing blow. So you have a protagonist who's in a bad spot because of past bad decisions, has the ability to keep on making bad decisions, but also enough determination to maybe make it anyway. If that sounds to you like a film noir hero, you win the kewpie doll. 

Emily works as a gig economy food delivery driver. She really wants to be an artist, and has some talent. She also has a friend who talks about getting her a job at her chic advertising agency. Her friend talks about a lot of things. But if that doesn't work, Emily is totally prepared to take part in a credit card scheme. Among other things. 

Aubrey Plaza, who plays Emily, has features that could have made her a movie star 100 years ago: big rolling eyes, bee-stung lips, nice hair. She's done well in comedy, playing sweetly rebellious characters. This isn't that, though. Regardless of what tough spot she's in, she never comes off as pathetic. She can be damned scary, when you get down to it.

Not so freethinkers

Theism and atheism are different ways of interpreting the same reality. Not necessarily a simple binary. Believing or not believing in God doesn't in itself make you smarter than someone who believes the opposite. But―and I'm sure I've said this before―the belief that atheism is in itself a mark of intelligence is a self-negating prophecy. Dummies lazily flock to it because aligning yourself with the smart set is easier than thinking for yourself.

That's something to think about when considering recent comments made by Sam Harris, the morality of covering up hypothetical child corpses being one of them.* Harris isn't stupid by any means, but neither is he immune from being misled by intellectual shortcuts. And that's true of other New Atheists as well. Christopher Hitchens―about whom we're just supposed to remember the good stuff―went from unofficial prosecutor of Bill Clinton to advocate for George W. Bush, apparently not noticing that the two men were the same product marketed to slightly different consumer blocs. And COVID-19 has revealed that Richard Dawkins is unable or unwilling to scrutinize scientific authorities the way he does religious ones. To the extent New Atheism was treated as a philosophical game changer, it reflects the myside bias of journalists.

*If the prospect of a second Trump term was like an asteroid hurtling towards Earth, does that make his first term half an asteroid? The dinosaurs were pussies.

Lovely Ludwig Van

 

I wonder when and how people first discovered that the rims of glasses could be tuned to play different musical notes. Okay, so probably a long time after we discovered that wolves could be trained to play fetch. Still, it's pretty cool. Saw a player at close range in New Orleans once.

That was Beethoven, so your inner Schroeder should dig it.

Stuff that dreams are made of

I just watched The Cheap Detective tonight. It's a whodunit parody written by Neil Simon, and Peter Falk plays a comedy amalgam of 2-3 Humphrey Bogart characters. 

The plot concerns...Nah, I'm not gonna go into that. Anyway, I laughed a few times, but I'm not sure it's really a success. In the early scenes, it's an off-kilter parody of The Maltese Falcon, and that works pretty well. But then after about twenty minutes it decides to send up Casablanca as well, and somehow it never recovers. I can't say it gets too silly, because it was maximally silly to begin with. Which is a shame, because Falk is a great lead, and Louise Fletcher is a surprisingly game comic actress.

The dance sensation that swept the nation (or not)

Every period has its fads. The frug. The Pet Rock. Fainting.

Go back about five years to 2017. What was the hot, hip, happening thing then? Apparently, Nazi Punching

There was an obvious problem here. While punching Nazis had historical precedent, at least in four-color comics, America didn't and doesn't have a large enough population of Nazis to make this really sporting. We had Milo Yiannopoulis, a gay guy with a jackboot fetish. Also Richard Spencer, an even gayer guy with a jackboot fetish, and one who got a highly publicized sock in the jaw. 

But serious, hard-core, unambiguous fascists? It's one of those areas where demand outstripped supply. And apparently still does. A large, clearly-marked enemy exists in the Twitter-Facebook fever dream, but not so much in real life.

Like cats and dogs

People speak of seals "barking." The comparison to dogs is obvious. There seems to be a reason for that. What taxonomists call the pinniped order is also part of the caniformia suborder of the carnivores. So they do actually bear a relation to dogs.

There's no corresponding class of semiaquatic feliforms, though. Guess you'd hear a lot of loud meows on the seashore if there were.

The M was a faux initial

Cyril M. Kornbluth was a member of the Futurians, a loose-knit group of science fiction creators that also included Isaac Asimov and Damon Knight. He lived from 1923 to 1958, but if his life was short his career was productive.

Listen to my sounding all knowledgeable, but I had never actually read Kornbluth before. Now I'm reading The Best of C.M. Kornbluth, edited by his friend Frederik Pohl, another Futurian. It includes "The Marching Morons", which is probably his best known story. It posits that over time stupid people swamp smart people because of their relative fertility rates. A little pat, but not a terrible fictional premise. It's often thought of as an inspiration for Mike Judge's Idiocracy, and contains a game show so similar to one in Robocop that I have to wonder if Paul Verhoeven had to pay royalties.

Some of the more obscure stories are quite worthy as well. "With These Hands" is a melancholy story about a sculptor in a future where his art is no longer appreciated. The story's dominant art form, stereopantograph, seems to combine three technologies undreamt of in Kornbluth's lifetime: AI, CAD, and 3D printing. A lighter work is "Gomez", about a teenage Puerto Rican dishwasher who's also an off the charts math genius. He and his brain become government property, and how he deals with that situation is heartening and entertaining.

Out for a walk

I like to highlight quirky works of animation now and then. If you're a regular reader you probably know this. I think this counts in a low key way. The movement of the simple figure along the somewhat more complex photographic background has a soothing effect, as does the somewhat Zen-ish narration.

Playing the pandemic to win

There's a review here of Deborah Birx's new book. I'm already fuzzy on the title, so I'll be thinking of it as If I Did It. Birx is probably the official most responsible for making COVID-era America look as much like China as she could make it, which was never enough to her satisfaction.

In an excerpt from Scott Atlas's own account of the same period Senger quotes Atlas as saying that Jared Kushner had been assured Birx was "100 percent MAGA." After that she had a free hand for an alarming length of time. That kind of gullibility is why I'd prefer Trump not be reelected or renominated, although Joe Biden and Merrick Garland seem determined to bring him back.

Just add...

Seasonal water intake is interesting. Probably most of us drink a little more during the summer. There's also the matter of at which temperature you drink it. It would be an exaggeration to say that I'll just let an ice cube melt in my throat, but I do tend during these dog days to drink it straight out of the fridge.

During the winter, by contrast, I can make a glass last for a couple of hours. There was a winter when I forewent putting my water pitcher in the fridge at all, but that turned out to be a bad idea.

QWERTY troubles

These might sound familiar.

You try to use the letter "A" and hit the wrong key, so everything thereafter is capitalized.

You try to use quotation marks and skip to the next line.

You make an attempt to backspace and erase some mistake, but the mistake is still there, followed by a string of equals signs=================

I'm prone to all of these and more, especially on a small keyboard. I tend to discover the error at some point, though.

For I am a jealous god

Today in "Authoritarian Mainstream Culture Killing the Counterculture and Dancing Around in Its Skin":

First Avenue, a storied Twin Cities nightclub, booked beloved comic and perennial cancellation target Dave Chappelle to do a set. Local wokesters, including some First Avenue employees, broke out into the usual hysterics. First Avenue cancelled the show with the kind of groveling apology that's also become familiar.

There's a kind of activist―really the dominant kind today, at least in terms of attention received―who's entire modus operandi can be boiled down to "me or him"? Do they actually conceive of life as a zero sum game? Their own portion of it, at least. So activism is geared towards making things more restrictive, punitive. What's old cannot be allowed to stand, especially if there are people who still enjoy it.

Liberal authority figures operate under the hilarious pretense that they're more open, so they'll try to placate extreme and unreasonable demands, at least from their own side of the aisle. Activists demand more punishment for the heretics, and so the dance continues.

But people notice. If you're outside of this dynamic you can't help but notice that your values are not only discarded, but actively demonized. So all First Things have succeeded in doing is alienate some who may have thought well of them before. If trouble arises, CBGB's fate of going broke and reopening as a clothing boutique may look enviable.

Go ghoti

One thing the English language is notorious for is not having any consistent pronunciation rules. French or Spanish might turn up an exception to a couple of their rules here and there. English is nothing but exceptions.

The common explanation is Britain's patchwork history: a once-Celtic land ruled by Romans, then Teutons, Norse, and finally the French-speaking Normans. This makes sense until you remember that being colonized by multiple other nations is actually the norm in European--and world--history. The historical explanations are a little more complex and interesting.