Monastic Saturday Random Ten

The Beautiful Mystery is the second Inspector Gamache novel I've read. Based on the evidence I've seen, Louise Penny is quite a good crime writer. She has another virtue, though, especially evident in this. The entire book is set in a Gilbertine monastery in Quebec province. The Gilbertine Order was dissolved with Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1536. In addition, they were an English order, so placing them in the traditionally French part of Canada is a leap.

I like that.  Popular fiction is always throwing in little cheats that the author hopes no one will notice.  But creating a murder mystery - an unusual one in itself - in the confines of a religious order almost 500 years gone?  To invoke Martin Luther, that's sinning boldly
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1. Elvis Costello & the Attractions - White Knuckles
2. Paul Simon - Outrageous
3. Broadcast - Michael A Grammar
4. The Velvet Underground - Here She Comes Now
5. Neko Case - Lion's Jaws
6. Fairport Convention - Crazy Man Michael
7. Nancy Wilson & Cannonball Adderley - Happy Talk
8. Reading Rainbow - Must Be Dreaming
9. New Order - Leave Me Alone
10. Lambert, Hendricks & Ross - Farmer's Market

The illuminating meeting of Drs Seuss and Freud

The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T is a Dr. Seuss movie.  You can tell.  You really can tell.  That's one of the things that makes it unique.  Seuss worked in two dimensions, masterfully.  This was the one venture he made into rendering his visual world in live action.  The effect is somewhat dizzying.

The plot is simple, when you get down to basics.  Bart Collins is a boy prone to fantasizing.  In order to teach him discipline, his mother has signed him up for piano lessons with Dr. Terwiliger, a perfectionist who demands extensive hours of practice.  (All children raised by tiger mothers are playing the world's smallest violin, and playing it more beautifully than you ever could.)  He's more drawn to the kindly, commonsensical plumber, Mr. Zabladowski. 

So he falls into another dream, one where he's kept prisoner in Dr. T's sprawling surreal academy.  His mother is under hypnosis, forced to do Dr. T's bidding.  Seuss and director Roy Rowland don't get too gross with it, but Dr. T does intend to marry pretty mommy, and she doesn't object to him locking her in a gilded cage.  Zabladowski is in the dream too, installing sinks so the school can open on time.  Bart wins the wary plumber to his side, becoming blood brothers with him and in nearly the same breath exacting a promise to become his new father.  Together they set out to bring down Dr. T and his evil musical schemes.

Wow.

What this movie gets right about dreams is that they're not a reflection of reality.  They're a reflection of us, and elements of reality make a cameo here and there.  In what we see of Dr. Terwiliger (played by Hans Conried, probably best known as the voice of Captain Hook in Peter Pan) in real life, he shows no sign of being anything more sinister than a humor-challenged martinet teacher.  Since that's bad enough for boy like Bart, in dreams he becomes a Flash Gordon villain.  Similarly his mother Heloise shows no attraction to this somewhat asexual piano geek in the real life scenes.  The battle of good father vs. bad father is going on only in the boy's head.

But that's the thing.  Children learn quickly that life isn't fair.  They're slower to find out that they themselves aren't fair.  But that unfairness is buried deep in the subconscious, of grownups too.  In certain doses it can be therapeutic.

Songs of summer

I've bitched before about how lots of songs have disappeared even from oldies radio, meaning that they gradually fade from cultural memory altogether. And honestly I'm not sure if this makes me sound like Proust or like Abe Simpson. (There's probably some hubris in even asking.) Still, enough barbarities from the past survive that you want to see the good, gentle things survive, if they can.

It's a little hard to believe that this group was produced by Kim Fowley, who later put together the Runaways, the jailbait hard rock group that introduced Joan Jett. Or maybe not unbelievable, just weird. The choruses are almost supernaturally sweet. The lead vocal is also sweet, but in a very human way. While the song may be kitschy, it's not impersonal.

Give it up

After being waylaid by some kind of stomach ailment yesterday - either it was dehydration or something I ate really didn't agree with me - I came to the conclusion that throwing up isn't the worst thing in the world.  Waiting to throw up is.  You could call it Vomlet.  The Danish Prince of your stomach can't make up its mind, and until it does you can't go anywhere or do anything because you're trying not to upset it.

So why not take the opposite tack and force things to a head?  I decided that the next time I'd at least want to have the knowledge on how to do so, and I don't like forcing things down my own throat.  So there was this page on the World Wide Web, and one particular item.

7. Watch Someone Else Throw Up
Seeing someone else throw up can often trigger the same response in your body. Though watching someone else throw up can be disgusting, that’s the point – you need to trigger that feeling in order to do it yourself. You can find videos of people throwing up online and use this if necessary. It might not work, but if it does, it will work very quickly.

Can see the practical applications, but making it work seems awkward.  I live alone.  If I had a roommate, even a friendly one, I can't see being comfortable enough to ask him to yak in front of me.  If I had a live-in girlfriend... well, same thing, really.  There are almost certainly websites you can go to, but I'm not sure I want them in my browser history.  So it's probably ipecac or one of the other options for me.

Seriously, a Friday Random Ten

Some people including some at work, think I never tell a joke or say anything funny.  Which isn't quite accurate, but it's proof that you only know what you see.  I'm sure I've misjudged my friendss at some point, which is pretty much a universal.

1. Nancy Wilson & Cannonball Adderley - A Sleepin' Bee
2. The Cramps - Voodoo Idol
3. Neko Case - Dirty Knife
4. Fats Domino - My Girl Josephine
5. Fairport Convention - Percy's Song
6. Pink Martini - Pana Cand ne tu Iubeam
7. Beck - Don't Let It Go
8. Velvet Underground - Sister Ray
9. St. Vincent - Psychopath
10. Nat King Cole - Tenderly

The OC

If my girlfriend were a former child prostitute I'd first seen on a kiddie porn site, and if she were an annoying person in general, I probably wouldn't stay with her that long.  But that's me.

In case you're wondering where the hell the previous sentence came from, I'm reading Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake,  It's a very successful novel, overall.  The near future dystopia is depressing in part because of how credible it is in light of the present.  A little beyond that is the post-apocalyptic part.  That's weird, very weird.  It is, at the same time, a doubling down on the pessimistic parts of the chronologically earlier parts, while also being a relief from it. 

Also weird is the way this thing just zips right by.

Silicon Valium

There would seem to be two wildly different, even opposite reactions to technological change in the popular media.  "Seem to be", yes, but this is an illusion.  For the most part there's only one.  But it wears two faces.

The first face is frown of resigned worry.  It's going to take all our jobs.  There's no stopping now.  The momentum is too great.  The machines want what they want.

What these jeremiads miss is that technology doesn't want your job.  It doesn't think or wish.  Despite some recent manias , we haven't developed artificial intelligence.  If we do I have to assume it will be intelligent enough to know that it doesn't need to pay for food or shelter, and thus doesn't need a shitty job washing dishes at TGI Fridays.

No, technology doesn't want your job.  Your boss wants to not pay you.  And yes, lots of people's bosses have the tools to make that decision or are in the process of acquiring them.  But we in America - and not only America, really - make it easier for them by valuing capital so much higher than labor.

That's the deflated, pessimistic side.  The face of desperate optimism is something that Maria Bustillos Maria Bustillos and Andrew Leonard deal with in recent articles.  Bustillos, always one of my favorite writers to link to, sees the way that Silicon Valley magnates such as Marc Andreessen promise that Big Tech development and startup money will revolutionize that society and points out what a blinkered revolution it is.

The classification of human inquiry into the Sciences and the Humanities is a rough but useful one. In essence, the part that concerns itself with what can be measured, we call "science," and that concerned with what cannot be measured, we call "the humanities”. The former field of study provides us with the means to operate more effectively in the material world. The latter (and the latter alone) grants us the ability to judge what goes on out there. This is a question of balance. The study of the humanities is for judgement, and it’s judgement that our age is sorely lacking. We seem to have forgotten that we even need it.