Tale of a fan

Last summer I bought a big box fan. Three speeds, pretty powerful. I got it late in the summer, and the temperature dropped soon afterwards. Which means I didn't actually get that much use out of it.

Well, this year it's certainly getting a workout.

Embrace the suck

As 2022 wears on talk of Gavin Newsom is in the air. Part of the reason is that he wants it there, of course. But also because 2024 looks to be a tough year for Democrats, and he's at least sort of new. Hell, there are Americans who look at Justin Trudeau and wish we had one of those. 

Almost needless to say, this kind of speculation is built on the conviction that the problem with Biden is Biden. That they have a dandy product but that he's screwing up the sale.

And sure, he has well-known weaknesses as a candidate. His mind isn't the sharpest, he had a dumbass plagiarism scandal in 1988, and his requisite embarrassing relative is more felonious than most. But their problems are broader and deeper.

Whatever bad ideas have been embraced by the Biden administration have been embraced by all of his potential rivals, usually in more concentrated form. This has happened because there's no big tent anymore. Just desperate pols trying to stay current. A loss might clear the party's head, or not. It's hard to see a win doing the trick.

Having fun on canvas

 Who knows which artists will be remembered in the future? I mean, the people of the 22nd + centuries will probably have their hands full anyway, but beyond that it's a guessing game.

Still, the paintings of Canadian artist Marcel Dzama should continue to charm. Partly because he seems to enjoy making them so much. Dzama has done a number of record covers, including for Beck's Guero. He accesses comic-like imagery, and sometimes comic book characters appear in his work. They don't retain the slickness of comic books, though. The characters have stepped back into a folk art world that runs on dream logic.

Correlation

Sorry to be beating a dead horse here. But two years and several months after the COVID-19 crisis was announced, some people are still masking outside. Like, religiously. And one thing I've noticed about the majority, I think, is that their eyes are glued to their phones.

Correlation is not causation? Sure. But I get impressions. And it strikes me that for a certain subset of the population, what they read about on their phones is the truth and what's in front of their faces is a lie. A grim kind of Gnosticism.

roar

Okay, don't judge me too harshly. I surfed onto this TV Tropes page about the Wizard of Oz movie a few minutes ago. There's this tidbit:

Mervyn LeRoy and William Cannon wanted to do a dark, "realistic" retelling of the Oz tale. In their version, the Oz Scarecrow was a flesh-and-bone human who was so stupid that he could only get a job standing in a field and chasing off birds, while the Tin Man was a "heartless" man sentenced to be locked in a tin suit of armor for all eternity. Dorothy was only supposed to meet him many years into his sentence, after he had softened and become kind.

Interesting thought. I don't know if these guys actually put together a plan or not, much less a script. It makes me wonder how you'd do a nervous talking lion in a dark "realistic" way.

B(l)oom

The official fireworks show was a couple of hours ago. Some years I go out for a closer look. Tonight I was just too comfortable ensconced in my apartment with the ceiling fan going. I could see it from a particular window in my bedroom though. 

Now comes the afterparty. Several people in the neighborhood are still setting off fireworks. Could go on a while, but I'm not worried about getting to sleep. Not as long as its cool enough in my room, at least.

Displays

I watched a movie tonight. It was a thriller from the early 60s, with a conscious debt to Hitchcock. Not bad at all, especially considering it had a much lower budget than he would have been given. Anyway, just as the film takes from Hitchcock, the opening titles owe something to the work of Saul Bass. 

Bass, who worked with Hitchcock, Preminger, and in his later years, Scorsese, came around at the right time. In the silent era and the 30s, opening credit sequences tended toward the functional. Lists of names in a nice font, sometimes over someone's face. After the war the graphics departments had more technical ability, and it didn't hurt to have something different that could catch the audience's attention. 

Over the past twenty years or so opening titles have atrophied to the point where at the start of the movie you most often see the name of the production company, the title, and maybe the director. Streaming services have an option where you can skip titles and many people take it because they don't want to spend time on anything that doesn't advance the plot. We live in a philistine age where―to paraphrase Oscar Wilde―people know the price of everything and the value of nothing. But titles can set the mood and tone of a movie, and have been in many cases a crucial part of the aesthetic experience. Case in point above.