Additional bird business

I was in Downtown Providence―officially called "Downcity" but I'm not calling it that―and I had kind of a lucky vantage point. Pigeons were mulling around on the ground and then all of a sudden, they all took off together. And in this great orderly curved shape as well. They landed, and then a few seconds later they took off again, once more lighting about where they'd started. 

This is something they do, I'm given to understand. But watching them it's hard to believe this isn't choreographed. Weird and cool at the same time.

Murder most feathery

As I first set out today on a grocery shopping expedition afternoon was turning into evening. Dusk, then. And in the lot behind a house a couple down from my apartment building, the crows were gathering together.

There's a little bit of explanation for these great corvid jamborees here. 

Wave after wave of crows will swarm together in tree tops, on the roofs of buildings, or on the ground until there are thousands of crows all gathered in one place, before finally moving into their nightly roost location to sleep.

One primary reason is apparently protection from predators. You don't see serious birds of prey around here all that often, but I know they're about.

In any case, I'm not complaining. The sight of all these crows gathered together is awesome to behold, and their caws have a comforting beauty if you're willing to hear it.

And incurably ill

One thing that kind of knocks me out is that there are still college radio DJs. I know because I sometimes listen to college radio on the web. Some are better than others, but a bunch of school-level stations have them.

The reason this seems crazy to me is that disc jockeys barely exist in American radio as a whole now. The 1996 Communications Act led to a round of consolidation, at the end of which you saw formats and playlists become nationalized, where once they'd at least nominally been decided on a local level. It's only gotten worse since then. The idea of a flesh-and-blood human being sharing music that's just made an impression on them and expecting to be paid for doing so must strike executives as madness.

But hey, if that situation ever changes at least there's a reserve army of record spinners.

...and to all a jazzy night

 

San Francisco pianist had a full career during his too-short life. As well as―for much of his adult life―an even fuller mustache. So how would he have felt about everyone remembering him for Peanuts Christmas music?

Well, I can't speak for him. But his compositions and interpretations for A Charlie Brown Christmas show an inventiveness and love that you don't achieve without putting some of your soul into the work. This riff on a 19th century German carol very much included. So yeah, I think he'd be cool with this being his legacy.

Merry Christmas, friends.

So let us not talk falsely now

This brought a smile to my lips and it might yours as well. A couple of guys have done a series of pulp covers inspired by Bob Dylan songs. They look pretty authentic, too.

I never thought of "Just Like a Woman" being about a dishy android girl from out of Philip K. Dick. Major oversight on my part.

In darkest Florida

There seem to have been a few movies called The Chase. The one from 1946 is quite memorable. 

Bob Cummings, whom I've seen in a couple of things before, is a down-on-his-luck veteran. He finds a wallet full of cash in the street with an address in it. He returns it to its owner, who lives in a gaudy mansion outside Miami. The owner is played by Steve Cochran, who I didn't know at all. Said owner likes Bob Cummings and hires him as a chauffeur. Which is kind of bad news because Steve Cochran is a full-on psychopath who will kill you just for breathing his air. See the limo he's tricked out with a secret accelerator in the back seat. Or his browbeaten wife (Michèle Morgan) yearning for escape.

The Chase is adapted from a novel by Cornell Woolrich, who would also provide the basis of Hitchcock's Rear Window a few years later. Unlike some noir it's got very little patter or overt humor. The only actor who gets to be funny is Peter Lorre, who's also the second most evil character. But it's got an unnerving intensity. There's also a headspinning twist that happens not quite at the end.

🔴

Being a social animal isn't a bad thing, but there's an underside to it. If you can be shamed out of doing something that isn't bad, you can probably be shamed into doing something that is. Disturbing knowledge, but there it is. You may well be able to think of some examples from the recent past.

In any case it's better to be aware of the phenomenon, to be prepared in the future.

Claws out

Whenever I go to a video on YouTube now there are, as always, thumbnails of other videos running down the right side of the screen. And there's a particular class of video that's been cropping up lately. They'll be about musicians, with the format "X finally comes clean about Y." "Keith Richards finally tells the whole truth about Jeff Beck" or the like. The implication being that these rock stars have salacious gossip and harsh personal judgments about each other but have been holding them in for decades out of sheer politeness. Sure, buddy.

I'd ask what it is about me that they think I'd be interested, but it's all obviously just a mixture of AI and desperation.

Cool, man

 

I've only seen a little of Peter Gunn. Seemed like a setup with potential, so I may check it out again. Just haven't gotten around to it.

Definitely can't fault the music. Blake Edwards had already found Henry Mancini, who would go on to do the Pink Panther music, of course. He was doing some really atmospheric stuff.

Not as advertised

Check the headline. It reads "Florida Republican brings ‘America First’ bent to powerful Foreign Affairs Committee". But...the article is about Brian Mast, a Representative famous (or infamous) for wearing the military uniform of a foreign country around the Capitol. Does the word "first" not mean what it used to?

Of course you hear about Washington getting a "shakeup" every few years. They never seem to get rid of the ones who should be gotten rid of.

Tunnel vision

There's a sheltered stop at the lower end of the tunnel leading to the East Side, said tunnel only being used by buses. Twenty odd years ago a decoration project was done on it. Shells were pasted to the posts in front of it. The wall behind was covered with ceramic tiles personalized by Providence residents. You could sort of date it because there were some 9/11-related tiles: sentimental, not jingoistic.

For several months the tunnel was shut down and buses were rerouted around it. A renovation project. The inside of the tunnel itself got reflectors and yellow paint to make it brighter. The shelter was stripped down. No more shells or tiles. The wall is now bare brick.

To be honest, it looks better. Having an element of the city's infrastructure personalized by people living here was a nice idea but it didn't pan out. Dirt, graffiti, things breaking: these are all facts of life, and they make an already busy design look somewhat cruddy. The return to basics was probably the right move.

Something else.

 

In his 1980 book Shock of the New, Australian art critic Robert Hughes writes:

By 1979 the idea of the avant-garde had gone. This sudden metamorphosis of the popular clichés of art criticism into an unword took a great number of people by surprise. For those who still believed that art had some practical revolutionary function, it was as baffling as the evaporation of the American left after 1970. But ideas exist for as long as people use them, and by 1976 "avant-garde" was a useless concept: social reality and actual behaviour had rendered it obsolete.

The artists of The Pictures Generation probably wouldn't object too strongly to Hughes's judgment and might well share it. Still, the loose-knit group did seem to suggest a post-avant-garde avant-garde. Their work was like Pop Art in that it borrowed imagery from mass culture, but tended to be drier, more analytical, in some cases less material. 

John Baldessari, a 6'8 bear of a man from the rural part of Southern California, was an unlikely mentor figure. But his hybrid visual art―straddling photography, printmaking, painting, and collage―made him apt. There's a playful alienation to a lot of it, intentional mislabeling, figures whose faces are covered with absurd shapes. And his reputation would continue to grow, Baldessari eventually attaining the immortality that comes with voicing yourself on The Simpsons. (After it had started to suck, but still.)

"The Table Lamp and Its Shadows", seen above, comes from a 1994 series of monotypes. It serves as a traditional kind of art: the still life. There's something a little off-kilter about it, though. Maybe it's the way the cord glows yellow and disappears into the blank white background. It captures the paranoid feeling of being out of place in a hotel room.

14

Lo, even as I passed beside the booth

Of roses, and beheld them brightly twine

To damask heights, taking them as a sign

Of my own self still unconcerned with truth;

Even as I held up in hands uncouth

And drained with joy the golden-bodied wine,

Deeming it half-unworthy, half divine,

From out the sweet-rimmed goblet of my youth.

Even in that pure hour I heard the tone

Of grievous music stir in memory,

Telling me of the time already flown

From my first youth. It sounded like the rise

Of distant echo from dead melody,

Soft as a song heard far in Paradise.

The above is, of course, a sonnet. From one of my favorite poets, Wallace Stevens, who just called it "Sonnet." I guess he didn't write that many that he wanted to share with the world. But this one is worth sharing. He did an excellent job crafting something that has the elegance of formal poetry but still has the feel of conversational speech. On, of course, a change of perspective and of philosophy.

-fulness

Okay, so we're a little past Thanksgiving on the calendar. Still, it never hurts to be grateful, so I'll keep it going. I'm thankful that the rain coming down now didn't fall while I was doing my laundry, and especially not while I was coming home from doing my laundry. Now I get to hear it from indoors, which is much preferable. 

It is, by the way, 38 Fahrenheit. A few degrees lower and we'd be getting snow or sleet. As long as the sidewalks don't freeze, I'm happy.

It came from Argentina

As demonstrated in the contents page featuring The Showgirl Who Can Count to Four, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine was the first English language publication to publish the work of Jorge Luis Borges. And they certainly started something there. EQMM continues to print stories from abroad up through today. You can't expect that all of them will have that kind of impact, of course.

The story they chose, "The Garden of Forking Paths", is an effective crime thriller, among other things. So is another story, "Death and the Compass." I recently reread his brief landmark collection Ficciones. He could indeed be a crime writer, or a fantasist, or a literary writer. Primarily, though, he was Borges. He achieved an enviable level of thisness.