Land of the mammoth

How did people in the Paleolithic live? We're getting a clearer picture on that, although it may never be entirely complete. Why did they do the things they did? To a great extent that's still a mystery.

The circular structure in Russia, built from the bones of at least sixty mammoths, is a case in point. Humans at the time hunted and ate woolly mammoths, which could feed an extended family or small tribe for quite some time. So the presence of the bones isn't a surprise. But their use in this structure is. What exactly was behind it?

It could well be an early religious impulse. An expression of gratitude to the beast for providing sustenance. Or to a higher power for providing the beast. Or perhaps both.

White dwarf star

Even if I saw it―which I won't―and it turned out to be really good―which it wouldn't―Disney's new Snow White would stand as an encapsulation of just about everything wrong with the movie industry today. Not because of what's made everyone freak out: lead actress Rachel Zegler's comments on the original and the fairy tale back in 2022. It doesn't matter that Zegler is a sorority pseudointellectual. She'll grow out of it.

But start with the phrase "Disney's new Snow White." The world does not need Disney to redo "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs." Walt nailed it during the Great Depression. But Disney, the world's richest and most powerful media company, has started on the project of rehashing all their old hits, and they're not going to stop now.

Then consider that the cast was being grilled on production in 2022, and it's just coming out now in 2025. Let's be real. It does not take three years to shoot a movie. Not even if you count postproduction. What takes multiple years is scheduling. Getting permission from corporate HQ to release the damn thing. Because where Hollywood was once run by tyrannical businessmen who liked and sometimes understood movies, now it's run by corporate drones who don't.

Finally there's the absurd business with the dwarves. By going from live little people to a diverse range of races and sizes to CGI they've pleased no one. It could be counted as a failure of nerve, had there ever been nerve to fail.

Lost and (eventually) found

Last week I emailed someone and they immediately replied. I didn't know about it―the reply part, I mean―until today. That's because they were apparently flagged as spam and thus caught in my spam filter. Not for any reason I can see.

Anyway, I moved the replay email from the spam folder to my regular inbox and I'm hoping that means any future replies will just show up as a regular email. But it just goes to show that the phenomenon  of letters being lost or delayed isn't a thing of the past.

Swells

I was at the library today and I took a look through their latest copy of  The New Yorker. It had an eye-catching cover by Christoph Niemann rather than one of the too-frequent Barry Blitt political caricatures, which was a plus. One article of interest was Anthony Lane's retrospective of Ross MacDonald's Lew Archer books. (The illustrator visualizes Archer as Leon Redbone in an Inspector Gadget coat.)

But there's something hard to overlook when reading both the magazine and something like the Arts section of The New York Times. They tend to pander to a certain social and political class.

It's not good for anyone when the arts and coverage/criticism of them is equated with the politics that get lumped together with liberalism. Liberals just buy into the illusion that their bubble is classy. Artists get hooked into an unhealthy patronage system. Conservatives are passively encouraged to become and stay philistines.

Anyway, the last thing we need is more sectarianism.

Orange beak life

 

Puffins, like auks, have really taken the subarctic zone and run with it. They've made their home at least as far north as Iceland and Greenland. So while Orkney, which has a lot of rocks and few trees, might seem an unlikely setting for a bird colony, it's not extreme for them. They've taken to it.

By the way, researching for this post I found out that at least one person has gone online to ask how puffins taste. I'm not hurrying to find out firsthand. 

Gagging order

Indeed.

During last year's Presidential campaign, the Democrats' artificial Regular Guy substitute Tim Walz publicly said that misinformation and hate speech were not protected speech. Walz was rightfully ridiculed on that matter, of course. But as time goes on it becomes clear how much of the political spectrum agrees with him, at least on some issues.

On First Amendment grounds these policies are dead in the water. But look at our establishment. Neither our Gaza policy nor Trump's curbing of free speech to protect same has caused as much weeping and gnashing of teeth as his actually quite rational disengagement from the Ukraine war. That's among the politicians and celebrities. How different are things on the grassroots/street level? Time will tell.

Translations

It's interesting hearing songs you know redone without vocals. Some people―those who are musicians themselves―can no doubt lay out the notes or otherwise tell you what the players are doing. I can only go on impressions but I recognize things. For example there's this Joni Mitchell song.

And then there's this jazz cover by pianist Leslie Pintchik, about whom I know very little.

A couple of things to point out: By For the Roses Mitchell had already started incorporating jazz elements, which she'd been building up since she was a teenage hepcat. The original of "Banquet" isn't particularly jazzy, though.

Both versions of the song have heavy doses of piano, of course. In Pintchik's version it takes some of what were vocal lines in Mitchell's original. Jazz musicians are often said to learn the lyrics of songs they play even if they don't sing them, just to get the feel. This seems to be a case where the leader and band did that.