If you're Jung at heart

Went to Starbucks tonight for a little refreshment--Shut up, there's an indie coffee shop in my neighborhood, but they close early during the Summer. Anyway, I also went to work on a little project I have going. Saw a friend of mine reading Man and His Symbols.

He talked a little about how artists are very grateful to the unconscious. Solutions you would never have thought about arrive in dreams or daydreams.

This is only part of the story, of course. You can't just sit around waiting for the cavalry to show up from the dark side of your brain. But it is a significant part of the story.

Jung may not be a scientist, or at least a physical scientist. There are certainly things about neurology that you're not going to learn from meditating on archetypes. But CGJ did have a good sense of the mind, and where it wants to go.

From the mouths of conservatives

Praise be, someone said it.

William Kristol of The Weekly Standard said Sunday a U.S. attack on Iran after the election is more likely should Barack Obama win. Presumably, Bush would trust John McCain to keep Iran nuclear free.

Yet, to start a third war in the Middle East against a nation three times as large as Iraq, and leave it to a new president to fight, would be a daylight hijacking of the congressional war power and a criminally irresponsible act. For Congress alone has the power to authorize war.

It's embarassing to remember that in the early nineties, I'd rip Buchanan for being a total goosestepper. And he does have some nutty beliefs. But in recent years he's often appeared as a Cassandra of sanity.

The first official Friday Random Ten of the official Summer

1. Sonic Youth--Brave Men Run (In My Family)
2. Roxy Music--Trash
3. Arcade Fire--Keep the Car Running
4. Laurie Anderson--Sweaters
5. Pink Floyd--Flaming
6. Cibo Matto--Sugar Water
7. Thomas Adès--Arcadiana:mv IV (tango mortale)
8. Aaron Goldberg--OAM's Blues
9. The White Stripes--I Can Learn
10. Belle & Sebastian--The Model

#8 actually came bundled with the computer, so I can't claim credit for purchasing it on any level. It's a nice jazz tune, though.

Accessible humor

So William Butler Yeats visits the much talked-about artist Pablo Picasso in his studio. He sees the young Spaniard painting a young woman nude from the waist up. The model holds a sausage between her hands. As Picasso finishes the figure, he asks the poet what he thinks of the new work.
"Can't say I approve."
"Oh?" Picasso says with one eyebrow raised.
"No, it lacks balance."
"Lacks balance? How do you mean?"
"Well, my friend, the breasts lack all conviction, while the worst is filled with passionate intensity."

Something just weird, something surreal

I'd say that three times in the past three days, we've had torrential downpours, when looking out the window you might think you were on a submarine. (I know, submarines don't have windows. Shut up.) But they've been very brief, so that the gathering clouds, burst of thunder, heavy rain and dispersal all happen in the space of an hour. One storm lasted today from after one until around two. By five the ground was dry. Strange, when you're used to a sort of chunkier version of England's fine mist.

And for a guy who had a talent for painting turbulent skies: This is an interesting review of a Dali show. I'm nowhere near Florida, but if anyone reading this has been to the exhibit they;re talking about, let me know. The focus seems to be on his relationship with Gala, which I didn't know much about. The way she showed up in so much of his work, I've always figured that if they weren't married, she would have had him arrested. But by quite a few lights, it was a constructive influence she had.

Cue Irish wake

Damn! If ever I figured someone was too pissed off to die, that someone is George Carlin. He will be missed. It's a lucky thing that he ran his mouth as much as he did when he was alive.

Pointing out the holes

In today's Boston Globe magazine, Charles Pierce--a regular correspondent on Eric Alterman's site--brings some much-needed sanity to the Dunkin Donuts Scarf of Terror kerfluffle. As far as I can tell the short piece isn't online, so this is me typing it in.

Dear Will Kussell:
I don't understand it. You folks beat Krispy Kreme, for pity's sake. They're the best donuts in the world, and oyou and the rest of the Dunkin' Donuts empire of which you are the president ran them out of Massachusetts like they wre Edgar Renteria. You produce sharp postmodern ads--"Freezing at Peewee Hockey" was the best--and you've become cool again even in the face of the Starbucks Borg. And with all those triumphs, you still go and surrender to the flying monkeys of the intertubes over a Rachael Ray ad? They yell, and you fold? This is what those people believe, OK? That a black-and-white checkered scarf worn by Ray in one of your Internet ads was an attempt by fashion designers to mainstream Yasser Arafat's old headgear into American society in preparation for our eventual absorption into a worldwide caliphate. (By this logic, the end of every NASCAR race is designated by the waving of a subliminal signal for worldwide jihad.) This is the "possibility of misperception" referred to in the statement through which your company pulled the ad. Be honest, Will. If I wandered into one of your hundreds of stores and started saying that stuff, you'd have me locked up. That this particular spasm of hysterical bedwetting was inspired by the likes of Michelle Malkin, who is to the political dialogue what E. coli is to a holiday barbecue, makes your capitulation all the more inexplicable. It is never a good thing to give the crazy people anything they might perceive as a victory. It never ends well. Give them a trophy, and they'll spike it onto their own heads.

Charles P. Pierce

Is it that bad? Worse. Besides Malkin--who seems to have married into every fucked-up delusion ever suffered by white people anywhere--the other forces putting pressure on Dunkin' D included Charles Johnson's Little Green Footballs and Pamela "Atlas Passed Out" Geller. LGF is the site of choice for people who want to see most of Western Asia vaporized. Geller seems to have destroyed most parts of her brain not used for Arab-hating.

In other words, this is the worst kind of political correctness: fanatical haters putting an end to tolerance that offends them. It's like the Klan demanding that the local easy listening station stop playing Teresa Brewer because she sounds too much like Ella Fitzgerald. The company waved the white flag when faced with the nastiest kind of ignorance, and may need some pressure from the other side.