"Utopia" is Greek for "no place"

If you watch enough old movies and TV shows you know how the office of a successful businessman was supposed to look. Wood paneling―perhaps mahogany―and heavy wood desk―perhaps teak. Shelves filled with Great Books, although he might be too much of a philistine to have actually read them. You almost always see a globe. There may be a replica statue as well, and certainly some serious art hanging on the wall. 

I could go on, but my points are these: This is obviously an aspirational image. And it's an obsolete one. It's impossible to imagine an executive in the year 2022 spinning a globe, stopping it with one finger and saying, "Our new franchise will be opening here, in Tanzania." 

The image of a successful go getter is now a man or sometimes a woman with a phone and a nice suit and a phone and not much else. They'll work on a plane flat surface, although that surface may be made of expensive stuff. The computer might just be a monitor, the CPU being carried in some case or bag. A corner office only means a better view of the dystopian landscape outside.

Our grand capitalist classes aren't preserving anything. They're nihilists.

Unwinding spool

As I have recently come to expect from Sam Kriss, this is a witty and well-written piece. And some of the ideas that are contained herein are things I had been thinking about for a bit.

You know, secretly, even if you’re pretending not to, that this thing is nearing exhaustion. There is simply nothing there online. All language has become rote, a halfarsed performance: even the outraged mobs are screaming on autopilot. Even genuine crises can’t interrupt the tedium of it all, the bad jokes and predictable thinkpieces, spat-out enzymes to digest the world. ‘Leopards break into the temple and drink all the sacrificial vessels dry; it keeps happening; in the end, it can be calculated in advance and is incorporated into the ritual.’ Online is not where people meaningfully express themselves; that still happens in the remaining scraps of the nonnetworked world. It’s a parcel of time you give over to the machine.

I've thought for a while that to the extent the web had any vitality to it was because it was inefficient and disorganized. No one had really taken charge, so the talking was done by people who felt like talking. The fact that it all seems to be running on a script now probably has pushed some people away, never to come back.

One might ask what we'll do when the Internet is no longer around to connect us. All I can say is I have severe doubts that that is what it's been doing. 

Just before

I have a strong feeling that I'll sleep well tonight. Mostly because of the powerful drowsiness coursing through my veins right now. Wait, that sounds like I'm on heroin, doesn't it? Well, a few times before I've blogged at or past the point of incoherence. This time it's just awkward metaphors.

אני אוהב תעלומה

Time for a good amateur sleuth novel! And when is it not?

I'd heard of Harry Kemelman's Rabbi David Small novels, but hadn't read any before. It's possible the somewhat gimmicky title format (____day the Rabbi Did X) put me off. But I eventually succumbed and have been reading the first of the Rabbi novels, Friday the Rabbi Slept Late.

It's interesting to compare and contrast with G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories. Judaism and Catholicism have different philosophies, of course. At one point Rabbi Small discusses the way the afterlife isn't central to Jews with Sgt. Lanigan, the Irish Catholic detective who's sort of the series' secondary protagonist. In addition Small is much younger than Fr. Brown here, and still sometimes prone to errors in judgment. And some differences may stem from Kemelman having grown up in the Jewish Faith, while from what I recall Chesterton was a later convert to Catholicism.

The story is gripping. A young maid (that's what they call her, although to me she seems more like a nanny) is murdered, and also happens to be pregnant. The fictional setting of Barnard's Crossing is a small town, but it's situated near Lynn, which is itself a suburb of Boston, so it feels like it could be a real place.

Pre and post

The downtown post office in Providence looks pretty cool. Don't know when it was built, but it has personality. One thing it's got going for it.

Only has service from 8-2 on weekdays, though. Go in after 2PM with an already stamped letter and you can send it, but if you need any packaging and/or additional postage you're out of luck. According to a sign this started in April 2020. So cuts and changes they made during the almighty pandemic? No apparent plans to change back.

Island living

Just a moment to appreciate the beauty and weirdness of nature. Tuataras are a holdover from a much older age of reptiles. How unusual they are in that context I don't know. Having a subcutaneous eye that no one ever sees seems pretty unique.

The zookeeper who addresses us does seem to have a nice gentle touch.

Pacifier

There's an ad that sometimes plays before YouTube videos. A bunch of people are boarding a plane. An announcement comes over the PA that there's a surcharge for wi-fi. Everybody in line melts down, saying that there's work they need to get into that only exists in the cloud, yadda yadda.

It seems like a prime opportunity to tell these people to breathe. You can survive a three hour flight without Internet service. But it's an ad for a telecom, so that's not the way they go.

Give me a country where I can be free

Earlier in this century I took a great deal of interest in the PBS documentary series Art:21.The makers profiled artists in the act of creating and let them talk about how and why they did what they did. It was illuminating and fun.

The show was (and remains) underwritten by a number of nonprofits and NGOs, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This foundation, as is not particularly surprising, had a lot to do with the international COVID-19 response, which is still reverberating. 

To be clear, I haven't started boycotting the show because of that. Since I was only watching on DVDs borrowed from the library it wouldn't be much of a boycott. And while I lost interest in it that's mainly because the later seasons got drier, doing away with the goofy celeb intros. Still, I wonder if at some level they were promoting some kind of Great Reset agenda. In the last set I borrowed an artist in Mexico City pureed a bunch of bugs and ate them on toast. (What else does he use that blender for?)

Still, this show did help familiarize me with the work of Ida Applebroog, Matthew Ritchie, John Baldessari, and Rackstraw Downes, so I can't really complain.

Odd tales

Right now I'm reading Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day, the first collection―of two, so far―by Ben Loory.

Loory's a new writer to me. I read a story by him in a horror anthology recently and was intrigued by it, so I figured I'd check out more. So is he a horror writer? Some of his stories go in that direction, but a lot don't. The book's cover features a tentacle holding a sign on which the latter half of the title is printed. An indicator of eldritch Lovecraftian terrors? No, the story it refers to is about an octopus―it's called "The Octopus"―but it's rather sweet. 

In this vein the stories vary from scary to funny to sentimental to just weird. Loory follows where the ideas take him. He's enviably unblocked.

Paws to reflect

Downtown today I saw a lady walking a cat on a leash. Nice looking grey cat. Not something you see every day. And obviously I wasn't the only one who noticed. The woman holding the leash let two others pet the cat. The cat's look could best be described as "grudging." I get it. 

My educated guess is that dog parks don't have a feline equivalent, though.

Rumblings

At breakfast today I sat near this group. Three tables pulled together to make one long Wayne Manor-ish table, filled with five nuclear families. The parents were millennials, and it may have been the first time in some time that they had all gotten together.

I didn't track all their conversations, of course, but I did notice when they started talking about school. One woman asked why, at this point, her kids have to wear masks in school when the teachers don't. It's a good question. If I were a teacher―and I have friends who teach at both elementary and secondary levels―I'd want to get in front of this question.

I'd also take from this exchange and a few others I've noticed that women aren't necessarily that taken in by safetyism. That may be women's role in institutions, but on their own they're just as likely to seek balance between safety and other values.

Issues

My local library keeps Rolling Stone in stock. I tend not to bother with it, though. Whatever glories lay in its past are truly past. 

One thing I noticed a couple of years ago. Turn to the record review section. There's the lead review, longish, but not out of control like when they had Lester Bangs writing for them. Then there's a second, shorter review. And that's it. Two reviews, the second rather perfunctory. But that's symptomatic. While as recently as ten years ago, culture was king, now it's a sideshow to politics. Which itself has been folded into the entertainment industry. "Show business for ugly people" indeed.

But man, at least The New Yorker still runs cartoons.

Faith misplaced

I'll be brief here, but this piece is fairly on-target about the deference afforded Black Lives Matter. BLM in the main acts as a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval for corporations, which seems to be a very lucrative business. Ali is also right that the policies they support in many cases harm the people they're (allegedly) supposed to help.

The writer River Page has referred to poor whites in America as "political dalits," and it's true that the establishment's hostility to low-status whites is so open as to lack plausible deniability. In the case of poor and working class blacks, things get weirder and more passive-aggressive. Black lives are so important that after George Floyd millions of Instagram influencers left black squares on their accounts for the day. (If you don't understand the previous sentence, count your blessings.) And yet look at something like the Pritzker-approved bail reform in Illinois. Running up the number of serious felonies for which the authorities have to let you go with just a wink and a promise you won't run, it only benefits black people if you equate them with felons. It's people in poor neighborhoods, yes a huge number of them non-white, who are going to suffer from decisions like this. And yes, they know.

Musing in four colors

I've read/heard a few famous men saying that they read a lot of comics as kids but stopped when they hit their teens and discovered girls. This is probably a dated concept now. Maybe in the 50s and early 60s reading comics hurt your chances with the opposite sex, but I doubt it's much of a factor now.

After weaving in and out a few times, I did pretty much give up on mainstream comic books. It wasn't because of girls. It was because comic companies by and large weren't producing work that really grabbed me. There are always talented people working in the field, but the companies―and if you need reminding, the two biggest companies are subdivisions of much larger conglomerates―set editorial policy. Since comic stories and big budget movie stories have merged, the emphasis is always on scale rather than doing anything interesting with plot and character. And the art winds up looking rushed and anonymous a lot of the time too.

At some point it's better to imagine from the next room.

今、私たちは料理をしています！

(tr: Now we're cooking!)

I watched Tampopo tonight. Not real heavy on plot, or at least the simple plot isn't the main attraction. There are some great setups, though. Like, the hero fights a bully, so the bully reforms and agrees to do interior decorating for the heroine. You don't see that in every movie.

Also a reminder on how in Japan ramen is treated as a real food. I know there are Asian restaurants here that do the same thing, but my experience of ramen is as 40-plastic-wrapped noodles that tasted good enough going down but which I often regretted around 2AM. 

There is a turtle snuff scene in the movie. If you have a pet turtle, proceed with caution on both your behalf.