faith in honest doubt

For 2011

2011-12-31T23:59:00.000-08:00

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. No, it was mostly the worst of times:

Apropos nothing, Woody Allen is to filmmakers what the Chrysler Corporation is to cars: each new offering comes with loud assurances that the bad old days of slapdash ideas poorly executed are over, and that the newest effort represents a return to quality. So it was with this year's Midnight in Paris, which, critics more or less agreed, was Allen at or near his best. Even if that's true for MiP, he problem with Woody Allen films is the problem with Chrysler's cars: even at zenith, it was never very good, Annie Hall and the glorious 1960s muscle cars notwithstanding. More in this same generous spirit appeared in this earlier post.
Jenny Diski cares not for Mad Men and its dalliances with nostalgia:
The style of the Sixties in Mad Menis so relentless and polished in every detail that it actually deals a death blow to authenticity. It is caricature, not authenticity, and although that, in a David Lynch sort of way, can be thrilling and effective if you subvert the style to darker devices, Man Men isn't sure whether it wants to be pastiche or historical realism. It wants it both ways, and for me, it is this indecision, which feels muddy and expedient as opposed to subtle or sly, that is Mad Men's self-sabotage. [quoted from here]
Indeed so on every count: it is absurd to imagine that a striving advertising agency in midtown Manhattan circa 1962 would place an above-average emphasis on fashion in its formal and informal dress codes; nothing on Mad Men approaches the genius of David Lynch's obscurantist garbage, because Lynch's work is (I gather) "subversive" and "dark" when deploying period-specific stylistic visuals.

Beyond that, and above all, Diski is entirely right to bemoan Mad Men as a lost opportunity to remove the glossy haze from early 1960's dramatizations to reveal that, in fact, things were complicated and vexed on the grounds of lived life -- and thereby to clarify the urgency of that critical acumen for our own times. If only it did that instead of just insisting on a beautiful caricature!

Ah, if only Mad Men would dare to be as stark, candid, and uncompromising about those days as Diski's favorites managed to be, The Apartment, and that paragon of fierce social criticism featuring Rock Hudson and Doris Day, Lover Come Back. Those films had the courage go push through to expose the euphemisms, injustices, imbalances, and smiling atrocities of the day.

Sarcasm aside, Diski is watching it wrong. Mad Men invites its viewers, yes, to indulge a little nostalgia if they have a reserve of it to call on for that period; but it goes on to invite the taking of measurements between how things were and how things are, and to draw conclusions. It demands the same measurements and judgments about the distances between that time's given stereotypes and its embodied realities. Do we see it clearly -- what we think we hate about it and what we think we love about it -- or do we see its heroes, villains, and shibboleths only as we prefer to remember them? That Mad Men does not, on the whole, supply easy, clean answers is among its virtues and what sets it apart from most everything else on screens, then or now. That it puts actors on beautiful sets and in gorgeous period clothing is a device to its ends.

It is not 1961 -- please somebody tell the GDP and the assorted champions of austerity. It's entirely possible it never was 1961 in the popular sense. There is nothing more to say of 2011, or of 2012, except to wish my remaining three readers all the best.

RIP Hitch

2011-12-16T05:01:00.000-08:00

With today's death of Christopher Hitchens, the world has lost a magnificent -- and irritating, and disagreeable, and stimulating -- giant. To see him at his inimitable best requires only to select more or less at random any of the hundreds of videos of him available on the internets, but this debate with Alister McGrath is a nicely annotated and thorough enough illustration of his gifts.

I will miss learning from him, and will equally miss being provoked by him. It's doubtful to try to project what Hitchens would say about this or anything, but I feel confident in saying that while it's fine to shed a tear for his passing -- which I did, a little to my own surprise -- it is vastly more important to honor his memory by carrying on his fight. (Pick at least one.)

I am glad his pain is over. God is still not great, but Christopher Hitchens was.

The Ahab Spring

2011-12-04T15:34:00.001-08:00

Any decent Marxist will tell you that ideas spring from the material conditions of society, and while I am neither especially decent nor consistently Marxist, I can say that material conditions account for the sparse posting to this precious, precious blog. Suffice to say that back in the sun-fondled, bluebird-circled spring of this blog, I would often find myself, while running, musing on posts I wanted to write, but that in more recent months, my thoughts have drifted elsewhere. To where and why is not worth detailing.

I believe in, at most, two principles for effective, disciplined blogging --- that posts on the topic of why there aren't many posts are dull or worse; and that one shouldn't write anything that one wouldn't want to read. Life is probably too short for adhering too closely to principles, and here's a list:

Last week, I finished the Seattle Marathon in a time of 3:30:07 (8:01 mile/min pace). Weirdly, the gun time of 3:30:26 is given as my"official" time, which tells me that I should make sure to elbow and shove my way as close to the starting line as possible should I ever again find myself in the starting chute of the Seattle Marathon. It was a very windy and rainy day, so much so that the water got below my rain jacket and killed my MP3 player at almost exactly the halfway point. Fun times were had by all (not just me), or so I choose to assume, and I heartily thank the organizers, volunteers, and many spectators who braved a rough morning to make it all possible, enjoyable, and safe.
Joanna Newsom is coming dangerously close to equaling Neko Case in my estimation of sheer musical power crossed with every important category of allure. Her album Have One on Me shows the rare quality of canvassing, you know, several of the high points of the human condition in an intelligent, entertaining, and deeply rewarding way -- and what more could be asked of music? If you expect the songs to grab you upon a couple of listens, though, know that you're doing it wrong. Take, for example, "Occident" --- but take your time, with my assurance, such as it is, that the effort will be worth it:
Having recently viewed Terence Malick's The Tree of Life, I am prepared to say that Malick has done it again: created a film that says rather less than he seems to be aspiring to say -- if this film added anything substantial to the quote from Job* with which it opened, I am at a loss to say what it was -- using roughly 90 minutes of footage that should have been edited out. Here's hoping his next between-film-projects period of quiescence runs as long as this film felt.
As I quipped on the twitter recently, Super 8 exactingly captures that uncanny quality of classic Spielberg films that makes me want to stop watching them: some combination of treacle, pat moral tidiness, and excess nostalgia.
About that * an item or two above -- it would be refreshing for a Job 38 style theodicy -- "where were you when I created quasars and centipedes and tetrahedrons and gravitational constants, you miserable little puke!" -- to move forward from that to show its fucking work. As in: what is this greater good, discernible from a longer and wider view, that, on a proper accounting, balances out the severe, constant, multifarious pain of the world?

Speak not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it inappropriately touched me.

Splitting (Hairs) - Sonic Youth

2011-10-31T05:00:00.000-07:00

The future of Sonic Youth is in doubt, I gather, because members Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon have ended their decades-long marriage, and history shows that interpersonal tensions immediately and irrevocably destroy every single band they touch (e.g., these doomed fellows, and these, these -- may they R.I.P. -- and these among so many others). There's no way around it: music dies the instant two people in the room aren't getting along harmoniously.

But really, it's not about them, it's about us, or the music industry, or marriage, or something, as Amanda Marcotte almost explains:

I want to write a little about the news that Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth---who have been married for 27 years---are throwing in the towel. Well, not the news itself, because even though they're public figures, this is obviously a private matter and none of us are privy to the particulars of their situation. In fact, I'm a little uneasy discussing it at all ...

Marcotte's unease manifests in ~1100 more words dissecting the Gordon-Moore marriage and its manifold implications for music, the music industry, and the institution of marriage in these uncertain times. How many words would ease have produced?

No piece of writing on Sonic Youth is complete without several repetitions of AOL keyword "Indie," a case in point being Matthew Fiander's encomium to Sonic Youth's Indie-ness, as somehow exemplified in their first non-Indie-but-still-so-heroically-Indie album, Goo:

On the heels of the acclaim for 1988's Daydream Nation, one of the most celebrated rock albums of the last 25 years, Sonic Youth went looking for a major label. They had been indie rock trailblazers, cranking out classic record like Sister and EVOL on SST, the rocker's rock label, and now they'd be on, gulp, DGC?How this happened has much to do with Enigma Records, the label that (aligned with EMI and Capitol) screwed up the distribution of Daydream Nation ...

Gulp indeed. It's not clear to me how "Enigma Records (aligned with EMI and Capitol)" was "Indie" in a way that DGC (gulp!) is not, but then again, I am already tired of the next twelve pieces of writing that use the word "Indie," or in other words, the eleven after this one.

To his credit, Fiander gets back on track to the extent that the bulk of his piece celebrates the songs of Goo, specifically "Tunic (Song for Karen)," a song so layered and brilliant that we can hardly have deserved it for having been the people walking around with stereos and spare cash when it appeared. Should Sonic Youth stop making music, it is on the basis of such works that they will be deeply missed by those of us who don't count the band members or music industry functionaries in our personal circles, but who appreciate challenging, evocative music:

What Might Have Been

2011-10-28T20:19:00.000-07:00

A little light reading to apply as you will:

In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting. I've thought a great deal about my life and about my country. I think there is little that can be truly known. My family has been fortunate. Others were less so. As they are often quick to point out. ... In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was. It is supposed to be true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. I don't believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and love of blood and this is a thing that even God -- who knows all that can be known -- seems powerless to change.

Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

World Persists. Yawn.

2011-10-28T19:04:00.000-07:00

Thank you, Horsemen. Come again soon!

For any in doubt on the question, the world did not end on Friday, October 21 -- or if it did end, it ended in the same manner in which it ended on May 21, which was exceptionally dull by the standards of Hollywood apocalypses, let alone the vivid eschatology porn sketched by one of the founders of the genre, John of Revelation fame:

And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit. And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit. And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth: and unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power. And it was commanded them that they should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree; but only those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads. And to them it was given that they should not kill them, but that they should be tormented five months: and their torment was as the torment of a scorpion, when he striketh a man. And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them. And the shapes of the locusts were like unto horses prepared unto battle; and on their heads were as it were crowns like gold, and their faces were as the faces of men. And they had hair as the hair of women, and their teeth were as the teeth of lions. And they had breastplates, as it were breastplates of iron; and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle. And they had tails like unto scorpions, and there were stings in their tails: and their power was to hurt men five months.

You're not wrong to feel a little put out over having missed that movie.

This latest failed prediction is almost enough to leave me doubting the wisdom and insight of god-drunk dotards.

Too Soon

2011-10-26T05:01:00.000-07:00

image source

The foregoing concerns everyone, albeit obliquely:

On Sunday I completed the Run Like Hell half marathon in 1:37:32 (7:26 mi/min, full results). I loved the changes to the course compared with the last time I ran it -- backwards with respect to the more or less standard downtown Portland area race course, which makes a bigger difference than it might seem. I didn't love that, as usual, I didn't cover the 13.1 miles as quickly as I wanted to do, and while the event was superbly organized overall, it could have done with a few more water stations along the way.
The trouble with Wall Street is the cheating, as Matt Taibbi explains:
[S]erial financial fuckups like Citigroup and Bank of America overextended themselves by the hundreds of billions and pumped trillions of dollars of deadly leverage into the system -- and got rewarded with things like the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program, an FDIC plan that allowed irresponsible banks to borrow against the government's credit rating.This is equivalent to a trust fund teenager who trashes six consecutive off-campus apartments and gets rewarded by having Daddy co-sign his next lease. The banks needed programs like TLGP because without them, the market rightly would have started charging more to lend to these idiots. Apparently, though, we can’t trust the free market when it comes to Bank of America, Goldman, Sachs, Citigroup, etc.
That's not even the worst of it; read the whole thing if you are of the mind that the outrage behind Occupy Wall Street is not justified. The banksters' credo: free markets for thee, but socialism for me.
Here are more reasons I am not a fan-boy of Steve Jobs:
"You're headed for a one-term presidency," he told Obama at the start of their meeting, insisting that the administration needed to be more business-friendly. As an example, Jobs described the ease with which companies can build factories in China compared to the United States, where "regulations and unnecessary costs" make it difficult for them.
Think different, indeed. Pointing out that China makes it easier to construct factories than the USA is the laziest, most insipid Chamber of Commerce boilerplate imaginable -- and this from the towering genius who took the idea behind the Sony Walkman and applied it to digital music files. Or maybe I speak too rashly -- perhaps more insipid was the part where Jobs, who dropped out of college after his first semester, went on to demand that Obama snap his fingers and force schools to stay open until 6pm and for 11 months of the year. Jobs apparently couldn't decide if he loves China's children more for the work they do in his factories or for the long hours they put in at school.

None of which should be construed as a defense of President Chickenshit, who can fuck off.
Windows or Mac? Wii or PS3 or XBox? Is Death Cab for Cutie the very best band you've never heard about? Was the USA within its rights to participate in the removal of Qadaffi from power in Libya? Delight in these and other powerful troll vacuums at Outkube, as inspired by The Onion.
Even huge stacks of money can't change the fact that climate change is real.

Too soon?

2011 Blue Lake 15k - The Glory

2011-10-15T14:17:00.000-07:00

I just completed the Blue Lake 15k in a time of 1:05:44 (7:03 min/mi pace, official) and while this isn't the first time I've done this event, it is the first time they gave out medals for our trouble -- and nice medals they are!

Trouble, I say? There's no trouble. This course begins and ends in Blue Lake park, and when it's outside the park, it's along a calm stretch of road leading out to the Troutdale Airport. This is a lovely spot on a bad day, but on a near-perfect Fall day like today, it's nothing short of glorious.

It's the kind of flat course that most people love more than I do -- I prefer some hills along the way -- but it would be an exaggeration to call it easy no matter the terrain. Easy is a modifier that sits awkwardly beside any 9.3 mile footrace.

I made a point of personally thanking every volunteer I saw today -- those keeping us safe from traffic, those who prepared the generous post-race food, those who handed out drinks along the way, those who marked the course and kept the records, and all the others -- but I want to take this chance to thank them all again. As always, I congratulate all the runners who came along with me.

No Bottom

2011-10-14T19:51:00.000-07:00

I am the scarcely over 0% typing this list:

photo from GeekFill

It's never the wrong time or place to enforce laws against child pornography:
Kansas City's Catholic bishop has become the highest-ranking U.S. Catholic official indicted on a charge of failing to protect children after he and his diocese waited five months to tell police about hundreds of images of child pornography discovered on a priest's computer, officials said Friday.
More like this!
Ron Paul recently appeared on The Daily Show to promote his brand of ahistorical Social Darwinist twaddle, claiming inter alia that strict private property rights would forever prevent pollution and that anti-pollution laws never, ever work because government tends to collude with wealthy interests in shaping the laws and their enforcement. He didn't pause to explain the nature of the state that would enforce these strict property rights, nor how these strict private property rights would differ from the ones we already have -- you know, the very ones that have been carved to pieces by the collusion of wealthy interests and government. Like the good glibertarian he is, in other words, he advocated reducing the scale and scope of firefighting as a means of controlling arson.

remained in place for the duration

The Republican party sees, on one hand, the whining of blastocyst enthusiasts in medical professions and, on the other hand, women who might die without medical treatment, and they choose the whiners:
Today the GOP-led House of Representatives, with the blessings and encouragement of the United States Council of Catholic Bishops and extremist religious groups such as the Family Research Council, passed a bill in a vote of 251 to 172 that would, among other things, allow doctors and hospitals to "exercise their conscience" by letting pregnant women facing emergency medical conditions die.
GOP to women: bear children or die trying.
Some idiotic parasite thinks he is oppressed because he has to pay taxes. Yawn.

There is no bottom.

Occupy PDX and Portland Marathon - To Each According to Need

2011-10-07T05:00:00.000-07:00

Two things I cherish are happening in the same time right now -- the Occupy Wall Street movement against the excesses of corporate power, greed, dishonesty, and corruption, and the Portland Marathon.

I totally support the Occupy movement -- I have spent a little time as a participant in Occupy Portland and hope to do so again -- and while I am not running it this year, I also love the Portland Marathon and hope to see it go smoothly and safely for all.

For Sunday morning, I hope Occupy Portland picks up and moves just a few blocks away and continues as before. By design, there is no centralized authority to which to appeal, but I did find a communique from an official-enough looking web site, OccupyPDX:

Occupy Portland wishes to welcome Portland Marathon to Lownsdale and Chapman Squares on this beautiful Friday morning.

We look forward to working together to ensure that our events run as smoothly as possible.

This outcome is achievable only through civil discourse and is rendered impossible by threats or use of force.

Therefore, we are eager to discuss with Portland Marathon the constructive ways we can help and support their event while we remain in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street.

Meanwhile, the Portland Marathon is saying much the same:

We understand the intention of those protesting at Occupy Portland. We will find a compromise that meets the needs of both parties. We are working closely with the City and representatives from Occupy Portland to reach a solution.

Perfect. That's all anyone can ask. Please do that, and find that.

By way of further background, I note that OccupyPDX is (loosely) located at miles 25 to 26.2 of the run, and that means the following: everyone coming in will be at his/her limits if not beyond. There is no 'dodging obstacles' by that stage of the race. There is no 'oh, I can see these people just ahead so I'll just alter my path a few clicks to the right' -- that sort of adjustment approaches to physically impossible. An out-of-place pebble can create disaster, let alone people 'occupying' the course.

Meanwhile, notwithstanding all the bleating to the effect that 'these protesters don't have a message,' we are a movement rather than a message, and the movement is directed at upholding the primacy, rights, and power of human beings over and against assertions of corporate power. But if it's a unified message you want, this statement, as read by Keith Olbermann a few nights back, will do well enough as a starting point.

Gray in the Head

2011-10-06T21:54:00.000-07:00

John Gray claims faith, properly understood, doesn't have much to do with belief, concluding as follows:

We'd all be better off if we stopped believing in belief. Not everyone needs a religion. But if you do, you shouldn't be bothered about finding arguments for joining or practising one. Just go into the church, synagogue, mosque or temple and take it from there.

At the risk of repeating material already covered by Norm Geras, PZ Myers, Ophelia Benson, Jerry Coyne, Eli Horowitz, and others, suppose we unpack Gray's twaddle a tad: take what from there?

I charitably assume John Gray doesn't mean for people to show up at a church, synagogue, or mosque and begin mindlessly aping the actions of others -- which is to say I assume he can't mean what he's plainly asserting. To pick a slightly off-angle but non-exotic illustration, doing as Gray suggests would involve aping the actions of the guy who just happens to be unclogging the toilet in the church basement. Or it would include showing up at the place and expecting to be the next to speak to the assembly after the priest, rabbi, or imam finishes chattering.

Before any of that, of course, going to a house o' worship will have required more-than-aping levels of critical evaluation to select the church, synagogue, or mosque as the day's destination. It's far from clear how this decision can be made without reference to beliefs and reasons.

Suppose that as the sermon drones on, your critical faculties light up long enough to pick up on the notion of a Sabbath. Clearly, you don't want to put any reasoning or believing or (gawd forbid) arguing into it -- that would bother John Gray or something -- so eschewing details, you undertake to pursue the practice of a regular Sabbath. Suppose you choose the 24 hours between Wednesday at 11:15pm to Thursday at 11:15pm as your Holy Sabbath because it works best for your schedule -- are you doing it the wrong way? If beliefs are beside the point, what or who can decide the question?

Incidentally, under this approach, why stop at people? If it's not about beliefs but about showing up and doing the thing, surely pets can participate, not to mention stray cats, field mice, wood ants, nesting racoons, wayward sparrows in the rafters, etc. Why not zombie cockroaches? Shouldn't they be counted as participants in what John Gray counts as religion if they "just go into the church, synagogue, mosque or temple and take it from there"?

Nonsense.

We think about what we're doing and why, and this is necessarily informed by what we believe we are doing -- reasons, societies, histories, communities, contexts, justifications, conflicts, the dramatis personae we consider to be included and excluded from minor and major roles. Religious practice untethered to beliefs is a mindless, pointless, dawdling squandering of energy. To date, religious practice informed by beliefs is likewise pointless in proportion to the quality of the beliefs, but it can claim the small virtue of distinguishing genuine believers from those who merely go through motions.

Breaking Bad - WWJD?

2011-10-03T05:01:00.000-07:00

I think I know what Jesse would do -- the Jesse Pinkman character of Breaking Bad fame, that is -- and it doesn't square with last night's dramatics. Amanda Marcotte tries gamely to justify the ways of Jesse to viewers:

With Jesse, I think the key to understanding how quickly he blamed Walt depends on a couple of factors. For one thing, the Walt we're seeing onscreen now has become more sympathetic than the Walt a few episodes ago. He had an emotional breakthrough regarding his son and his conscience is starting to creep back. He's remembered that he's a family man, and that should be more important than his own massive ego. But Jesse hasn't been witness to any of this, since they haven't been speaking. When Jesse last spoke to Walt, Walt was at a moral and emotional low point in his life. He had become quite naked with his willingness to manipulate Jesse, and for all Jesse has known, it's gotten worse. Jesse is acutely aware of how much of a control freak Walt is, and so, with a little added paranoia and emotional peaking, it's easy to see how he could leap to the conclusion that Walt would really go this far. Plus, as far as Jesse knows, Walt is the only person who knew about the ricin.

Alas, no. I think the characterization simply faltered here. The Jesse we have come to know would draw the most obvious conclusion, that the kid snuck a cigarette while he wasn’t watching --- while he was asleep, in the bathroom, absorbed in a video game, whatever -- and that it turned out to be the ricin-laced cigarette.

At that point Jesse would sink into his familiar pattern of self-recrimination and despair over all the misery, pain, and suffering his choices bring to others. He might pause to lash out at Walt, Gus, and others along the way, but he would ultimately make a beeline toward the usual guilty self-loathing that has defined so much of his character. Put differently, Jesse would have needed a good deal of ‘help’ to connect Walt to this poisoning—Gus would have needed to arrange some clues/hints to give that impression much more strongly -- and yet nothing of the sort was presented.

It was a rare but glaring misstep for what continues to be one of the two or three best things on tee-vee right now.

They Who Would Rather Sweat in Squalor

2011-09-26T20:13:00.001-07:00

During an unpleasant few moments of an otherwise pleasant visit to Powell's Books, I suffered through almost the whole of the text printed on the jacket of Thomas Friedman's latest book about America's decline. I am not surprised to be confirmed in my suspicion that the book's central argument is weak -- or rather, weak in a familiar way. Adam Gopnik observes that Friedman and co-author Michael Mandelbaum

... present every problem as one confronted by a uniform "we." ... But that's not the case here. Friedman and Mandelbaum want their countrymen to face the future without first facing the facts about their countrymen: this is the country that a lot of "us" want. ... The reason we don't have beautiful new airports and efficient bullet trains is not that we have inadvertently stumbled upon stumbling blocks; it's that there are considerable numbers of Americans for whom these things are simply symbols of a feared central government, and who would, when they travel, rather sweat in squalor than surrender the money to build a better terminal. They hate fast trains and efficient airports for the same reason that seventeenth-century Protestants hated the beautiful Baroque churches of Rome when they saw them: they were luxurious symbols of an earthly power they despised. ... Americans are perfectly willing to sacrifice their comforts for their ideological convictions. We don't have a better infrastructure or decent elementary education exactly because many people are willing to sacrifice faster movement between our great cities, or better-informed children, in support of their belief that the government should always be given as little money as possible. ... [T]his is the result of active choice, not passive indifference.

We have the public policies of the representatives we collectively elect, and the anti-government, anti-tax ranters are alarmingly numerous and readily conspicuous -- unless, it seems, you're Tom Friedman or Barack Obama, unaccountably stuck in the precious idea that these people don't exist, or if they exist, don't operate any of the levers of power, or if they exist and operate the levers, don't really aspire to what they explicitly aspire. Or something.

Memo to dolts: look around, and check the mirror. The hidebound monsters who would prefer to sweat in squalor actually exist, they hold power, they want to hold more power, and they mean what they say.

Four the Ages Could Do Without

2011-09-23T19:36:00.000-07:00

In keeping with my tendency to value comity, harmony, and consensus, I post four images from the Overrated White Guys tumblr -- posted in the presumably sensible order in which this web interface placed them when I selected all and clicked the button.

It should go without saying that I chose these four worthies for no reason whatever, certainly not because I agree that these accomplished, widely respected white guys are overrated. Yes. That probably should go without saying, as with most everything else that has ever appeared on this precious, precious -- overrated? -- blog.

Clark Gable sensibly chose the same speaking voice and emotional register for all roles.

Call him 'Al' or whatever -- please don't play his songs.

Oh William Blake, it's not you, it's us. We only acknowledge six senses and -- well, I can't put this nicely -- your nightmares are far more interesting to you than to everyone else. See also Jim Morrison, also honored at OWG.

Jack Kerouac, please get off the road. You're not making any sense, and when you are, it's totally not worth it.

REM - End the End

2011-09-21T21:37:00.000-07:00

It seems I've entered that delicate stage of feckless dotage in which I get misty-eyed over bands that are no more. No, they're not dead as with, say, Fleetwood Mac, but REM is no longer:

"To our fans and friends: As REM, and as lifelong friends and co-conspirators, we have decided to call it a day as a band."We walk away with a great sense of gratitude, of finality, and of astonishment at all we have accomplished," the statement continued. "To anyone who ever felt touched by our music, our deepest thanks for listening."

You're welcome, REM, and thank you. I write this within physical reach of seventeen REM CDs, almost all of them worth cherishing, the others merely well above average. Modern-day readers will understand CDs as sort of a primitive version of blu ray disks made especially for music -- no video signal at all -- and meant to carry upwards of 80 minutes of music. People paid money for them in stores, frequently without having heard a note of the music encoded on them beforehand, then trudged back to their hand-built log cabins to build a fire against the forbidding night's cold and for cooking cornbread or biscuits or thinnest gruel, depending on the quality of the recent harvest. The cows would need to be milked at dawn, the potatoes dug thereafter. Then school would start.

REM made excellent music for a long time. I am not yet ready to use the past tense there, but the fact is what the fact is. Songs like the following turn out to be perfect for negotiating the hardships and confusions of life in the olden days -- and for the days to come, I should think.

"Driver 8"

"Monty Got a Raw Deal"

"Begin the Begin"

(via Obscene Desserts)

Netflix Can't Say Goodbye

2011-09-20T05:01:00.000-07:00

My continuing coverage of Netflix continues, breathlessly as ever, with the news that its forward-thinking CEO

... is now going to separate Netflix's DVD and streaming businesses into two different brands. The online half will be called Netflix, while the DVD-by-mail portion will be called Qwikster. The two services won't share anything—your queues, ratings, and even your billing information will remain distinct on each site. In a sign of how hastily Netflix arrived at this idea, it seems to have forgotten to search for @qwikster on Twitter. That handle is owned by a person whose avatar is an image of Elmo smoking a joint.

In Netflix/Qwikster's defense, I am pretty sure that the Elmo-smoking-a-joint avatar is a default assigned by Twitter to accounts that don't select a custom avatar. I could be wrong, but since this would be more interesting if true, it is true and I am not wrong. That's how the world works.

Oh, but I am wrong -- wrong to say anything in defense of Netflix/Qwikster, that is, and I will start here: I am not going to type that fucking stupid name ever again. In English, the letter w does not follow the letter q in any actual, correctly spelled word. That name is a hideous abomination, and given that it now applies to the side of the service I can more or less tolerate, I can expect it to prey on my sensibilities every time it is splayed across an envelope in my mailbox.

Netflix is certainly putting a lot of faith in its video streaming business, and why not when fully ~~nine eight~~ six of its top 100 rentals are available via streaming? A generous observer might round that up to 10%! I will not. I will observe instead that it continues to underscore the paltry quality of Netflix's streaming content even among its current subscribers. Now that they're breaking the service in half, it's not clear where our ratings and rental history will go, and as a result, the suggestion algorithm, which is often helpful in pointing to lesser-known titles, will no longer function as it did before.

So, to summarize: Netflix is joining the poor quality of its video streaming offerings to a less useful web site experience and more complex billing. More and more, Netflix's business model is reminding me of President Obama's approach to politics: someone in charge has decided the endeavor is no longer worth the trouble, so why even try to do the right thing, or even the popular thing?

Really, Netflix and president chickenshit: it's OK to say goodbye and quietly exit the scene. Be brave. Just take your severance package and pretend it never happened. You will be pleasantly surprised how quickly you are forgotten.

The Whole Thing

2011-09-15T05:01:00.000-07:00

I just signed the Whole Constitution Pledge, which almost completely avoids the fetish for "founding fathers" that these kinds of things tend to indulge:

Through the Constitution, “We the People” created the most enduring government charter in world history.

Building on the achievements of the Founding generation, successive generations of Americans have created a “more perfect union” through constitutional Amendments. These Amendments have improved our Constitution by ending slavery, enshrining guarantees of equality and citizenship, expanding the right to vote, and ensuring that the national government has the power and resources necessary to protect the nation, address national challenges and secure civil rights.

Some have advocated repeal of Amendments, including the 14th Amendment, the 16th Amendment, and the 17th Amendment, that make our Constitution better and this country great. Some have even failed to heed the lessons of the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement and have advocated a return to ideas of secession and nullification.

I believe that our Constitution has been improved by the Amendments adopted over the last 220 years.I pledge to support the whole Constitution.

This is a longer way of saying: the rule of law should prevail in the USA. That said, I am not convinced that advocating for the repeal of particular amendments or provisions is a problem since the Constitution provides for the means of its own emendation, and this cannot proceed without advocacy, which is in turn expressly protected under the first amendment.

While the amendments and provisions stand as they are, however, public officials of all parties must be bound to a good-faith understanding and precedent-informed reading of their terms. I'm looking right at you when I note that, President Chickenshit, no less than I am looking right at your war criminal predecessors.

Ignorance Born

2011-09-14T05:01:00.000-07:00

I say the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) is far too kind in this statement:

The American Academy of Pediatrics would like to correct false statements made in the Republican presidential campaign that HPV vaccine is dangerous and can cause mental retardation. There is absolutely no scientific validity to this statement ... The American Academy of Pediatrics, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the American Academy of Family Physicians all recommend that girls receive HPV vaccine around age 11 or 12. That's because this is the age at which the vaccine produces the best immune response in the body, and because it's important to protect girls well before the onset of sexual activity.

The AAP didn't consult me when attenuating the kindness of the statement, starting with the demure failure to name the liar in question. Maybe that's fair enough, since for my purposes, declaring Michelle Bachmann an unhinged, god-drunk sociopath would still have been too kind. In a just world, she would personally incur all the suffering that her part in propagating this lie creates, but of course, we don't live in one of those worlds. We live in the sort of world in which Michelle Bachmann can stand on a very public stage on national television and not only be taken quasi-seriously as an American presidential candidate, but issue outright lies that enable the spread of preventable diseases that afflict and kill people.

Naturally, this being the sort of world I described above, Bachmann returned to national television the next morning to continue lying:

[O]n the Today show Tuesday morning, Bachmann went further, telling Matt Lauer, that a mother had approached her after the debate to recount the problems her daughter had after being vaccinated against HPV:
She told me that her little daughter took that vaccine, that injection. And she suffered from mental retardation thereafter. The mother was crying when she came up to me last night. I didn't know who she was before the debate. This is the very real concern and people have to draw their own conclusions.
When Lauer pressed Bachmann on whether she would keep pushing on the issue, she answered that it has traction "with a lot of people and we'll see what people say."

If this seems like a crass appeal to popular ignorance ("very real concern," "people have to draw their own conclusions", "we'll see what people say"), it's only because it is exactly that. More than that, though, it is an attempt to foster popular ignorance on a specific topic, and an instance of the mechanism by which it expands: a lying crank with a budget cycles her way through the tee-vee channels repeating lies to gullible news celebrities, who at most can bring themselves to note the presence of a "controversy" while allowing the lies to pass on to mass audiences.

The danger of vaccines is as close to zero as the dangers of hypodermic needles can go. The danger of the diseases they prevent is immeasurably higher. Being brusque and direct with liars is better than enabling the suffering and death they work to spread.

HB Neko Case

2011-09-09T05:01:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was Neko Case's birthday, and this is "Twist the Knife," a song I am appalled to note I have yet to post on this precious, precious blog:

"Twist the Knife" is among her most country-sounding songs, and also among the most representative of her vocal gifts. It is, in short, a treasure.

True Blood - Seeing and Being

2011-09-08T20:33:00.000-07:00

I should just go ahead and stop being surprised at myself for watching True Blood, the HBO vampire drama; after almost four seasons without missing an episode, it's evident that something in its mix of melodrama and titillation is working for me. We are no better than the choices we actually make, like it or not. Here's Alyssa Rosenberg discussing the penultimate episode of the current season:

Alcide’s efforts to stay with Debbie have been one of the most consistently-rendered storylines this season, each time bringing Alcide closer and closer to his limits. First, he’s joining a new pack, even if he’s not particularly comfortable with the people in it, as a way to try to help Debbie stay clean. He’s resisting Sookie, even though she might be an easier partner. And he’s stood by Marcus up to the point when it became clear that his packmaster wasn’t man enough to do his own fighting, much less enough wolf. But Debbie’s infidelity, her role in stealing someone else’s child, are too much, and True Blood made us feel the force of Alcide’s ritual without explaining it into the ground.

No, Alcide's efforts to stay with Debbie have been dull to watch and baffling to understand, notwithstanding the relentless consistency with which they've been presented. Or to put that ever more gently: the story so far has given viewers no basis for believing, relating to, or comprehending Alcide's attachment to Debbie, and thus their parting made for meager drama whose only reward might be -- let us pray fervently to the Flying Spaghetti Monster -- the departure of Debbie from the show. That's almost certainly too optimistic. As with so much that has crossed the True Blood screen this season, Alcide's renunciation of Debbie seems designed only to set up a(n arguably) more interesting plot development later on, which, again judging from the course of the season to date, may never actually materialize. Did I mention I watch this program with the same regularity I watch programs I truly like? I do. I don't know why.

Also: for all the histrionics about the "stolen child," in the cited comment and in the episode, it's worth noting that the werewolf man is "stealing" his own daughter by not having her at the expected place within a few hours of the expected time; and even if this qualifies as "stealing" -- and I do, by the way, readily concede that parents can and do kidnap their own children -- he has done a horrendous job of it by secreting her away to the home of Debbie, which is also the home of Alcide, or in other words, roughly the shittiest imaginable hiding place. He didn't even change her clothes or paint a fake mustache on her! His child abduction skills are clearly as weak as his fighting skills.

Alyssa continues:

Without being a prude, it’s increasingly tiresome to hear Lafayette call every woman in hearing a bitch, as in, “Marnie just puked that bitch out,” when Antonia frees herself of Marnie; this is beyond a linguistic tick that expresses Lafayette’s simultaneous identification with and distance from women. It’s just lazy.

It is lazy and tiresome, this overuse of "bitch" and similar slurs by the otherwise welcome character of Lafayette, who breathes life into all his scenes and fits exactly into a twitty melodrama. Not all anti-woman slurs are equal, however:

Ditto for Pam’s appalled reaction to the idea that Eric and Bill would “put your entire species at risk for a gash in a sundress,” which is both sexually nasty and not deeply perceptive ... Pam’s been through a lot this season, so I understand that she’s a little tetchy, but it’s sort of inconsistent to see her get all hair-triggery on Marnie and then pause to pluck a fallen comrade’s Cartier necklace off her soon-to-be-destroyed neck.

Ditto not. True, "a gash in a sundress" is rough, nasty talk, but it works here not only because Pam doesn't use it regularly but also because it so perfectly manifests Pam's gift for cutting through the show's ambient earnestness with sarcasm, detachment, wit, and world-weariness. Wouldn't vampires, of all para-people, be entitled to a little world-weariness after a few hundred years of observing the monotonous ebbs and flows of human life?

For some reason, I am sure I will be watching as season four closes on Sunday evening, whereupon I'll find out along with millions of others how assorted narrative threads are tied up or left ungathered: the fairy versus witch dynamic that began the season before vanishing completely; the excessive time spent watching Jason nurture, impregnate, and escape from panther-morph hillbillies; the burgeoning conflict between the wolfpack and the Alcide-Sam power duo; speaking of power duos, the Marnie-Antonia witch team that just can't possibly be finished given the matter-of-fact manner of their departures; and the messy vampire politics that are sure to get messier now that Erik is the real Erik, Bill is king, and The Authority -- whatever that's supposed to be -- is wary of both. None of which even gets to what the program has endeavored to place at the center of the season, the love triangle formed by Erik, Bill, and Sookie, which is suddenly tinged with more of Pam's resentment than ever and -- let us not forget -- darkened by the threat of a certain former vampire king who is alive but presently encased in silver and concrete at the edge of town.

It's all quite a tangle.

Bodily Return

2011-09-08T05:01:00.000-07:00

Sigh. I am, despite all my wishes, back from a restful vacation on the Oregon Coast. Every photograph you see below was taken within a 25-mile stretch along the Oregon Coast during that single glorious week, and give but a paltry sense of what it was to behold.

Well, all but one were taken within that week and in that location -- the other belongs to the ages, to all good-hearted people, to all snakes, and to all places. It is, in short, appropriate and fitting for everything, now and always.

To get a better look, click any of these images to embiggen it.

Hail, Caesar

2011-09-06T05:01:00.000-07:00

For purposes of this blog post, which contains many spoilers, I don't demand that everyone agree with my positive assessment of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the blockbuster film that charts the proximate causes behind the beginning stages of the rise of the planet of the apes, but some criticisms are more wrong than others, and a blogger has certain responsibilities to respond to the wrongness he/she finds on the internets.

To wit: the surprising agreement among the Pop Culture Happy Hour spokesmodels that the film's climactic ape riot made little sense. They share bafflement that (a) the apes were not engaging in a mass killing spree on their way out of town, but killed and maimed rather sparingly by the standards of cinematic animal rampages; and (b) that the apes were heading to, of all places, the Muir Woods National Monument located not far from San Francisco, the city where the apes had been detained either as zoo exhibits or medical dummies prior to their liberation and pharmaceutical-fueled cognition boost.

The credibility of (a), the fact that the apes showed restraint in the use of lethal violence against people, is a matter on which reasonable primates can disagree. To me, it simply indicates that the apes' cognitive upgrade came with a more developed ability to weigh the foreseeable consequences of actions, so (as I read it) they were wise enough to reason that excessive violence would bring ruinous reprisal from humans, who still vastly outnumbered and out-armed them.

The credibility of (b), destination Muir Woods, strikes me as not only plausible but among the stronger points of the film. Caesar led them to that spot because it was the one wild, ape-friendly setting he knew based on his positive experiences with his human "father," portrayed by James Franco. He knew what it was like there -- a serene place with tall trees and few people -- and he knew how to get there (cross the very prominent bridge). He did not, as a lesser movie would have him do, suddenly develop a detailed knowledge of and longing for a lost African savannah or forest; nor did he sprout a sudden determination to lead the apes to Rule the Galaxy and/or enslave humankind and/or liberate every captive creature and/or right every wrong on earth. His ambitions were bounded and modest -- gather every ape he knows and lead them to the Muir Woods, which were as far from the depredations of captivity and the injustices of people as it was possible, or necessary, to get -- things feel right there in a way that no other setting in his experience can match. That's entirely believable within the terms of this cinematic world, or so I say.

That Kind of Drunk

2011-09-03T20:06:00.000-07:00

Hand filled with beef

Have you ever been that kind of drunk where you observe off-handedly that the uneaten portion of beef sausage would make for excellent crab bait, and thereon hit upon the idea of carrying it to the beach near sundown and chucking it into the sea? I mean the kind of drunk where the idea of "returning this beef stick to the ocean from whence it came" strikes you as whimsical and interesting rather than merely nonsensical and pointless? To be clear, I speak of the kind of drunk in which you're altered enough to carry out the plan of "returning the beef stick to the sea" but not so altered that you can no longer operate a camera? I mean the kind of drunk in which you're able -- almost -- to convince yourself that chucking some perfectly unspoiled meat into the sunset counts as a piece of performance art rather than an instance of food waste?

I was that kind of drunk a couple of nights ago in Gleneden Beach, Oregon. These are the better photographs I took while in that state.

Stabilizing the beef against the strong breeze, we behold the scene

Last pensive moments

Helpful sign, read by no one save for me

Terminus

Unplugged

2011-08-30T07:51:00.001-07:00

I am at the beach and away from screens & internets as much as possible all week. #NotDead #Unplugged

Hood to Coast 2011 - Done

2011-08-28T09:33:00.001-07:00

Another #hoodtocoast in the books. Great teammates, horrendous van traffic, nausea, & heat. Did I mention great teammates? #likesummercamp

Hood to Coast 2011 - Big Fake Butt

2011-08-28T09:27:00.001-07:00

#hoodtocoast Leg 3- bright & beautiful, 1pmish, 7.72 miles in 59 minutes. Passed a woman wearing a big fake butt. +42 roadkills overall.

Hood to Coast 2011 - The Darkness, It ... Darkens

2011-08-28T09:20:00.001-07:00

#hoodtocoast Leg 2- 3am, 5 miles in 37 minutes, nothing but gravel, dust, inky black, & the sound of my feet almost veering off the road.

Hood to Coast 2011 - The Hobo and the Runner

2011-08-27T00:44:00.001-07:00

I enjoyed a refreshing 70 minutes night's sleep in front of the building where I work. #finelinebetweenHoboAndRunner #hoodtocoast

Hood to Coast 2011 - Hot, Flat, and Hot

2011-08-26T20:47:00.001-07:00

Leg 1 done- 7 miles in 50.5 minutes or so. I do not like the flat courses, nor the hot sun. #hoodtocoast

Hood to Coast 2011 - Adoration of Portable Toilets

2011-08-26T16:05:00.001-07:00

Awaiting our first legs in Sandy- disappointed that we only have normal public bathrooms, no portables. #hoodtocoast

Hood to Coast 2011 -- Train, Pack, Fret, Run

2011-08-26T11:30:00.000-07:00

I write this moments before embarking on the running phase of the Hood to Coast, which marks the end of the training, overpacking, and last-minute fretting phases of the event. As always, I have no reason to expect to perform adequately in the event, let alone thrive in it, but also as always, I shall do my best to endure whatever hardships (physical, interpersonal, olfactory, etc.) it presents and emerge with something to brag about.

I plan to send regular-ish dispatches along the way using the text message-blogger-twitter machine. These dispatches will be brief, of dubious coherence and meager interest, but they will be here unless and until my mood swings disfavor sending them.

If you're out there with me, run well and stay safe. If you're not the sort of fool who does this kind of thing to yourself, enjoy your weekend.

Arrow and Rock

2011-08-24T21:22:00.000-07:00

Quoth a Catholic Bishop in the Irish Times:

"The moment of history we live through in Ireland at present is certainly a testing one for the church and for all of us," he said. "Attacked from the outside by the arrows of a secular and godless culture, rocked from the inside by the sins and crimes of priests and consecrated people, we all feel the temptation to lose confidence."

We atheists should be heartened to know we serve as part of the "godless culture" the bishop can so readily blame for whatever happens to be wrong -- it's nice to be useful. Still, the first indication that the moment in history is not being too terribly unkind to you, all things considered, is getting your complaints and blame-castings quoted verbatim in a leading national newspaper.

A further indicator that the "attacks" are not leaving you quite so very "rocked" as you might be is that you're still able to sit back calmly and counterpoise the criticisms of shielding child rapists with the infamies of the rapes you've shielded.

As on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand rock-and-a-hard-place dilemmas go in this world, I have heard of far worse. Consider, for example, the plight of children raped by priests: they face the "arrow" of remaining silent and allowing the abuse to continue, or the "rock" of accusing and denouncing the very people they've been told since birth constitute the anointed representatives of the ultimate power in the universe and the sole conduits to eternal salvation.

The put-upon bishop is right about one thing -- the moment in history strongly tempts me to lose confidence in the Catholic Church, not that I had much to lose before.

They Blew It Up

2011-08-19T05:01:00.000-07:00

Sadly, this conversation between actor Troy McClure and his agent was omitted from Rise of the Planet of the Apes (reviews), the latest in a long series of films devoted to the perils and possibilities of ape role reversals:

[phone rings]
Parker: Troy! Mac Parker. Ever hear of... Planet of the Apes?
Troy: Uh... the movie or the planet?
Parker: The brand-new multimillion dollar musical. And _you_ are starring ... as the human.
Troy: It's the part I was born to play, baby!

While every film should have something as rewarding as that exchange, and while Rise of the Planet of the Apes (RPA) lacks even a cameo from the ghost of Phil Hartman (as far as I know), I have not come to bury RPA, but to praise it. Jeffrey Sconce was right --- it's actually quite good!

How is this possible? Am I sure that yet another man-ape species confusion caper isn't stretching the already too extended conceit a few notches too many? Isn't RPA just another two hours of fucking stupid, bloated Hollywood dreck?

No, it really is quite good. Here are some ways:

Though rife with CGI -- including but not limited to the movements and facial expressions of the main character, Caesar the drug-enhanced chimpanzee -- the visuals are not distracting. This is not to say they're perfectly convincing in all instances, but the makers of the film did a good job of using these techniques in the story rather than passing them off as the story.
Speaking of that, no one in this film is entirely monstrous, and no one is entirely virtuous. Well, OK, maybe the Brian Cox character and his assistant are total monsters throughout, but at least they are monsters of a kind that exist in the real world.
Through several fight sequences, physical and verbal and semi-verbal, the scenes are consistently arranged in a way that makes clear which ape is doing what to which ape -- and as an added bonus, we know why the ape is doing the thing to the other ape, and we have a rooting interest without feeling too manipulated -- this is definitely so by the prevailing standards of huge-budget films.
The film did not insist on giving us a shocking "Oh dear gawd the chimp just spoke!" moment. I had been dreading that.
There were homages to the original P of the A films, but RPA did not insist on echoing -- fore-echoing? -- every last theme, scene, and character. Just to pluck an example from the ether, we did not have to endure a visual that recapitulates the image of the Statue of Liberty's ruins protruding from the sand, let alone a set of narrative contrivances to get us there.
The film did not insult us by reaching to be too "topical." It is not a mailed-in commentary on, I don't know, the financial crisis or the Arab Spring or (gawd forbid) the Teabagger movement. Or is it? It could be, but the connections are abstracted more than enough to keep the gag reflex in check. It concerns the specific way hubris can combine with technical and analytical acumen to produce disaster, but beyond that, it declines to read the headlines at us. It is, in other words, the next retelling of Frankenstein, and good for it.
Most unexpectedly, and most favorably by my lights, the film left off in a way that leaves sequels genuinely optional. By the end, enough story has been told to allow us to fill in the gaps between this film's conclusion and the original 1968 film's opening. At the same time, it leaves plenty of story to be told to fill out the passage of time from those two points. This manner of storytelling is all but heroic in this time when the ideology of the cancer cell dominates and films exist only to perpetuate franchises, most of which should never have existed in the first place.

Well played, Hollywood. You win this time.

Meek and Gentle with Butchers

2011-08-18T19:49:00.000-07:00

Somehow I only recently became aware of the 1953 film adaptation of Julius Caesar featuring James Mason as Brutus, Marlon Brando as Antony, and John Gielgud as Cassius --- shouldn't a teacher forced a classroom I was in to watch it at least once? Notwithstanding the regrettable performance behind the title role, I know what I hate, and I don't hate this adaptation.

I wasn't sure of what to make of the idea of Marlon Brando playing Marc Antony until this scene, in which Antony reveals his plans to destroy the conspirators:

Wow. Not that I know what I am talking about, but that's how it should be done.

Here's the text from act 3 scene 1:

O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth,
That I am meek and gentle with these butchers!
Thou art the ruins of the noblest man
That ever lived in the tide of times.
Woe to the hand that shed this costly blood!
Over thy wounds now do I prophesy,—
Which, like dumb mouths, do ope their ruby lips,
To beg the voice and utterance of my tongue—
A curse shall light upon the limbs of men;
Domestic fury and fierce civil strife
Shall cumber all the parts of Italy;
Blood and destruction shall be so in use
And dreadful objects so familiar
That mothers shall but smile when they behold
Their infants quarter'd with the hands of war;
All pity choked with custom of fell deeds:
And Caesar's spirit, ranging for revenge,
With Ate by his side come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines with a monarch's voice
Cry 'Havoc,' and let slip the dogs of war;
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men, groaning for burial.

Dispatch from Narcolepsyville

2011-08-17T05:01:00.000-07:00

I suppose it should count as an excuse for light blog posting that I have been, of late, very tired -- constantly so, annoyingly so. I am sleepy right now. You might be surprised to know that walking around in a state of it-sure-would-be-nice-to-take-a-nap-right-now is not conducive to the brand of florid, cogent, utterly compelling writing that this precious, precious blog has always, for purposes of this sentence of this blog post, existed to showcase, but if you were so surprised, I would be surprised. I expect more of both of you, dear readers.

Moreover, yesterday I took an online life stress assessment thingy and found that I am enduring a life of HIGH STRESS. I am skeptical, as I would think people living in soiled tents eating 800 calories of thin gruel every other day in Haiti or suffering the latest famine in east Africa would be enduring lives of HIGH STRESS, whereas I am just wandering along the gray border of depression and narcolepsy amid relative plenty without any real reason to complain, but as this online stress test thingy was endorsed by my health insurer, its findings cannot be doubted under penalty of a blanket, preemptive denial of all present and future medical care. That being so, I accept and embrace the fact of my HIGH STRESS life.

Putting it another way -- a better way -- it's all something like "A Comet Appears" by The Shins:

Songs by Day & Vowels

2011-08-14T20:44:00.000-07:00

For 8/14/2011, this is the alphabetically 14th song from my music library that starts with each of the vowels.

Cowboy Junkies, A Common Disaster

PJ Harvey, Ecstasy

Radiohead, I Can't

Devotchka, Ocean of Lust

Portishead, Undenied

And sometimes ...

R.E.M., You

Get Your Toys

2011-08-11T20:37:00.001-07:00

One of The National Review's whiners is really, really upset at the state of things in Britain:

Through British veins runs the poisonous fake idealism of “human rights” and “sensitivity,” of happy-clappy multicultural groveling and sick, weak, deracinated moral universalism — the rotten fruit of a debased, sentimentalized Christianity.

When not begging for forgiveness and chastisement from those who rightfully despise him, the modern Brit is lost in contemplation of his shiny new car or tweeting new gadget; or else he has given over all his attention to some vapid TV production or soccer team.

I treasure my faint, fading recollections of Britain when she was still, for a few years longer, a nation.

Today Britain is merely a place, a bazaar. Let it burn!

"Let it burn!" is the sniveling motto of right-wing "thought" these days, judging not only from the tantrum cited above but from the fondness for reckless brinksmanship that has swept the party of Hoover.

Most of all, I am struck by how hard the National Review scribbler is trying to sound like Nietzsche -- and that would be, I guess, a pretty neat trick if you had the actual gravitas and style to achieve it, but since this wretch has neither, it suggests the image of a furious, self-serious looter reimagined as a kid running to the pool carrying his inflatable toy.

To be clear, this is how Nietzsche actually sounds:

It is a painful and tragic spectacle that rises before me: I have drawn back the curtain from the rottenness of man. This word, in my mouth, is at least free from one suspicion: that it involves a moral accusation against humanity. It is used—and I wish to emphasize the fact again—without any moral significance: and this is so far true that the rottenness I speak of is most apparent to me precisely in those quarters where there has been most aspiration, hitherto, toward "virtue" and "godliness." As you probably surmise, I understand rottenness in the sense of décadence: my argument is that all the values on which mankind now fixes its highest aspirations are décadence-values.

I call an animal, a species, an individual corrupt, when it loses its instincts, when it chooses, when it prefers, what is injurious to it. A history of the "higher feelings," the "ideals of humanity"—and it is possible that I’ll have to write it—would almost explain why man is so degenerate. Life itself appears to me as an instinct for growth, for survival, for the accumulation of forces, for power: whenever the will to power fails there is disaster. My contention is that all the highest values of humanity have been emptied of this will—that the values of décadence, of nihilism, now prevail under the holiest names.

Yes indeed -- one of the holiest names of nihilism going is "conservatism."

(via Obscene Desserts)

Point-Counterpoint

2011-08-10T05:01:00.000-07:00

Point: Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" as performed by Rufus Wainwright.

Counterpoint: Joanna Newsom's "Does Not Suffice"

Both songs bewail the unfairness of love and its loss. They're both right because they're both wrong, and vice-versa.

Costly Signaling

2011-08-08T05:01:00.000-07:00

All the truly cultivated and sophisticated people have long since committed this passage from Thorstein Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class to memory:

As seen from the economic point of view, leisure, considered as an employment, is closely allied in kind with the life of exploit; and the achievements which characterise a life of leisure, and which remain as its decorous criteria, have much in common with the trophies of exploit. But leisure in the narrower sense, as distinct from exploit and from any ostensibly productive employment of effort on objects which are of no intrinsic use, does not commonly leave a material product. The criteria of a past performance of leisure therefore commonly take the form of "immaterial" goods. Such immaterial evidences of past leisure are quasi-scholarly or quasi-artistic accomplishments and a knowledge of processes and incidents which do not conduce directly to the furtherance of human life. So, for instance, in our time there is the knowledge of the dead languages and the occult sciences; of correct spelling; of syntax and prosody; of the various forms of domestic music and other household art; of the latest properties of dress, furniture, and equipage; of games, sports, and fancy-bred animals, such as dogs and race-horses. In all these branches of knowledge the initial motive from which their acquisition proceeded at the outset, and through which they first came into vogue, may have been something quite different from the wish to show that one's time had not been spent in industrial employment; but unless these accomplishments had approved themselves as serviceable evidence of an unproductive expenditure of time, they would not have survived and held their place as conventional accomplishments of the leisure class.

Given the way things are going economically, we'll all be more and more acquainted with leisure whether we want it or not.

A Lifetime Late and a Trillion Dollar Bill Short

2011-08-05T21:27:00.000-07:00

I don't have a weekly comic thing like Eli has, but it occurs to me it's been a while since I posted anything from Married to the Sea, the web's leading comic that features vintage newspaper visuals mashed up with modern captions. The results produce a more coherent picture of the world than the world itself tends to present. To wit:

Senator Joe Lieberman, a figure who almost sounds genuine in the squeaks and sighs of regret with which he announces having taken, yet again, the shamefully right wing view --- this time of the relative priority of waging endless war and providing for the the sick and the old:
So, bottom line, we can’t protect these entitlements and also have the national defense we need to protect us in a dangerous world while we’re at war with Islamist extremists who attacked us on 9/11 and will be for a long time to come.
As Phila has explained, Every balanced meal for grandma is a freshly loaded clip in the AK-47 of Al Qaida.
Rest easy, for Matt Yglesias can explain the likes of Joe Lieberman, even if in doing so he overlooks a few decades worth of extremely well-funded disparagement of the words "liberal" and "left." Advertising, public relations, marketing, messaging, and related forms of fungible opinion-shaping have no effect, and thus need not be mentioned in connection with how American voters self-identify, let alone in which cars and corn chips they prefer.

Had we world enough and time, perhaps we could sort all this out.

For Spare Instrumentation

2011-08-03T20:52:00.000-07:00

The studio version of Leonard Cohen's "Avalanche" gives a good idea of the power of spare instrumentation -- as with most of the songs on Songs of Love and Hate, we have voice, strings in the background, and a guitar, and the way you can hear him pluck at the strings of the guitar increases the intimacy of an already soul-baring work. Have your spine checked if the ending of this song doesn't send a few chills up it:

More recently, this is Thurston Moore's "January," which might as well be classified as a sonata for guitar and violin:

Apropos none of the above, if all the members hadn't died so long, long ago, and if they were still reunited and making music, Fleetwood Mac would sound just like this duet by Fran Healy and Neko Case, "Sing Me to Sleep":

It sounds like Fleetwood Mac all the way down to the awkward little detail that the song has no end, but just fades out. I wish all the members of Fleetwood Mac hadn't died.

The Race Panic That Takes Hostages

2011-08-03T05:01:00.000-07:00

You will be shocked, shocked to realize that the hostage-taking faction that has recently dominated US politics is the same basic group of race- and sex-obsessed nihilists that has been resisting modernity in this country since before its formal founding:

The four states with the most Tea Party representatives in Congress are all former members of the Confederate States of America. The states with the greatest number of members of the House Tea Party caucus are Texas (12), Florida (7), Louisiana (5) and Georgia (5). While California is in fifth place with four House Tea Party members, the sixth, seventh and eighth places on the list are taken by two former Southern slave states, South Carolina and Tennessee, and a border state, Missouri, each with three members of the congressional Tea Party caucus.[emphasis mine]

The report goes on to note that the single Tea Party member from the "northeast" is actually from the border state of Maryland. As for the oft-repeated claim that the New South is so very, very different from the bad Old South, here's Amanda Marcotte:

To which I say, as always, dudes, I'm from Texas. Trying to pass off Southern white culture as more tolerant and less superstitious than it is might work on people who haven't spent a lot of time around the very people we're talking about---thus the baffling refusal to get it in the mainstream media---but it doesn't fly with me. I have a lot of years under my belt of trying to get through conversations with your average Southern Joes without some offensive shit coming out of their mouths, and I can attest to what a Herculean task that really is.

The socio-political cohort that murdered Abe Lincoln shortly after wasting several hundred thousand lives in a war to preserve slavery is alive, well, and barely attenuated in its passions. In recent years it was presented with the question of torture and, to no sane person's surprise, answered YES attached to fake assertions of patriotism.

Today the Confederate usuals are not just willing but desperately eager to reduce economic activity and employment under conditions of stalled and falling prospects. The bottom to which they will drag this country -- and with it, if they can, the world -- before touching shame or moderation is still not in sight.

Not Everything Is Terrible

2011-08-01T21:14:00.000-07:00

This brief video, featuring the narration of Mr. T and a 1980s pop soundtrack, is not from Everything Is Terrible, but from the Portland Mercury.

By contrast, the video below is from Everything Is Terrible, and more closely resembles the sound and imagery of the 1980s as I experienced them in Oklahoma, far away from the trend-setting coastal haunts where Mr. T recorded his trend-defining voice-overs.

That lazy meandering country bass line that might be a radio or might be the after-effects of ear damage; the casual references to "tar babies;" the dropped G's; the brusque, no-nonsense question, "WELL TELL ME HOW YOU GOT YOUR NAME, CAT-FISH" posed by a man in an irony-free trucker cap --- all of these are as familiar to me as my own face in the mirror, and just as distressing.

I observe the following from genuine charity in the recognition of life's dismal tide and the grim awareness that, sooner or later, death will claim us all: should those reading this enter what they expect to be their last living moments, let the memory of these videos inform and attenuate the sense of grief and loss. Let Mr. T and the thing with the hicks count among the vignettes counting in oblivion's favor. Life is sweet, but life also has shit like this.

Mt. Tabor Doggie Challenge 2011 - Dogs and Masters

2011-07-30T21:26:00.000-07:00

Earlier today I completed the Mt. Tabor Doggie Challenge 8k in a time of 35:42 (7:11 min/mi pace), fast enough to earn the handsome trophy and cat (cat not included) shown here for first place among men's "Masters." I don't know how I feel about being in the "Masters" category of anything, but I do know that my opinion doesn't affect my inclusion in the category. Being over 40 does it.

Being over 40 is better than the available alternatives, and especially so when it comes along with the opportunity to run a well-organized event on the challenging hills of Portland's Mt. Tabor park. Compared with previous years, I was pleased to see how many people not only participated but seized on the "doggie" in the event's name and accompanied their dogs on the run. It was quite a thing to see -- hundreds of dogs gathered together on a sunny day in the park without anything worse than a stray bark or two.

I thank Terrapin Events, the sponsors, the volunteers, and all the participants, dogs and people alike, for making today's race such a success.

Ruminations Upon the Successes and Failures of "Branding" Campaigns

2011-07-29T17:01:00.000-07:00

Of the items pasted across this info-graphic posted by Maddow, concerning the important topic of which brands strike which voting demographics as favorable, I am slightly surprised by only this: that FOX should be separated from its self-styled "News Channel" wing for purposes of brand evaluation. I gather the FOX empire separates its propaganda organ from its tee-vee programming for the sake of faking financial numbers, diffusing accountability, and other routine corporate functions, but in terms of marketing, advertising, public relations, and other aspects of "branding," it's hard to say what vaults them so high above, say, UPS, Subway, and FedEx but below Lowe's and Ford in the esteem of Republicans. Is it Family Guy? House? The Simpsons? One or more of those idiotic singing / dancing / cooking / hording / dating / breaking-up / football-to-the-groin / child-rearing / dangerous fishing / cops v. hillbillies / hidden camera pedophile sting / animal attack / animal rescue / animal killing / doughy-hayseeds-in-peril / pawn store employees "reality" shows that FOX still, I assume, broadcasts in the same horrifying quantities as all the other channels?

I ask this fascinating question because my understanding of the right-wing dogma is that FOX's programming participates in the "Hollyweird" phenomenon that makes baby Jesus cry at the liberal domination of media, and as such should push it completely off the Republican list. Judging from this info-graphic, it would seem they enjoy its offerings despite all the caterwauling about the terrible, terrible culture, which suggests this caterwauling is akin to the fact that most of the porn gets viewed in red states, where porn is widely disparaged and condemned as a source of baby Jesus tears.

Also: Olive Garden. I assume that's a punchline all by itself.

Poem of the Day: Sonnets 63 and 64

2011-07-28T21:36:00.000-07:00

It probably means I am feeling old, feeble, and impermanent that I was inclined to post "Sailing to Byzantium" by Yeats, but since I already did so, these two successive sonnets of Shakespeare will more than do. Whatever hope sonnet 63 seems to offer against "confounding age's cruel knife," sonnet 64 despairingly negates: "time will take my love away."

Sonnets 63 and 64

Against my love shall be, as I am now,
With Time's injurious hand crush'd and o'er-worn;
When hours have drain'd his blood and fill'd his brow
With lines and wrinkles; when his youthful morn
Hath travell'd on to age's steepy night,
And all those beauties whereof now he's king
Are vanishing or vanish'd out of sight,
Stealing away the treasure of his spring;
For such a time do I now fortify
Against confounding age's cruel knife,
That he shall never cut from memory
My sweet love's beauty, though my lover's life:
His beauty shall in these black lines be seen,
And they shall live, and he in them still green.

When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;
When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the watery main,
Increasing store with loss and loss with store;
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay;
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,
That Time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.

That Families Borrow Money

2011-07-27T05:01:00.000-07:00

It should go without saying that the analogy between managing the finances of a nation state and managing the finances of a family can only go so far, and not very far at that. I don't know of any families who possess the unique distinction and sole authority of printing the very same currency in which most of the world's assets are denominated, for example.

It should go without saying, but that assumes a world in which the blindingly obvious isn't regularly contradicted by putatively credible figures such as elected officials, highly-paid political pundits, and others. Even if one insists on the analogy, however, it quickly fails to support the shibboleth it is most frequently used to promote, namely, a legal requirement to balance budgets. Matt Yglesias:

In the course of making the case for such an amendment, [some dumbass] observes that “[e]very day families in southeastern Pennsylvania make tough decisions in order to live within their means.”

I’m sure that’s true. But even without being intimately familiar with conditions in southeastern Pennsylvania, I feel confident that every day families in southeastern Pennsylvania do things like get mortgages to buy a house. Certainly that’s what families do in the Washington, DC area. And as I recall from my college years, people often take out student loans to go to school. Certainly I have a mortgage. I’ve used my credit card. Over the long term, clearly, a household’s income has to equal its expenditures. But what kind of a family balances its budget on a year-to-year basis? How would anyone ever start a business in a world like that? It’s kind of amazing to me what can be passed off as common sense if you just repeat it enough.

Families borrow money all the time. So do individuals, and so do businesses big and small, and moreover they often do so without a fool-proof, guaranteed, finely detailed plan for paying back the money: a mortgage borrower expects, but cannot project with mortal certainty, that his income one, five, and ten years from now will be sufficient to cover the payments; a business owner expects, perhaps based on all kinds of solid research, that a expenses associated with developing a new product or opening a new franchise will pay off in a way that will balance the debt used to fund it.

Borrowing is not some kind of moral vice. Not just commerce, but capitalism itself would stop without it.

Deficit Nihilism

2011-07-26T05:01:00.000-07:00

Reproduced by Ezra Klein, this chart is a good-enough illustration of the fraud into which US domestic politics has plunged over the last few weeks: screaming Deficit Panic after several straight years of amassing deficits with little to no concern (to wit: 130 currently-serving GOP Congressmen have voted to raise the debt ceiling at least once in recent years), let alone panic, let alone the sort of nihilistic histrionics that would shame a mugger.

Suddenly, these last few weeks, even as the economy continues to crawl to a grinding stop, cutting deficits and debt must be consuming priority of the executive and legislative branches of the federal government, no matter what, even if -- no, make that especially if -- it means worsening the economic crisis, and true to form, the coward in chief is validating the scripts of the deficit nihilists by repeating them rather than declaring them the despicable, destructive frauds they are.

Back to Black

2011-07-23T22:13:00.000-07:00

Amy Winehouse has been found dead by police in London:

According to the BBC, 27-year-old singer Amy Winehouse has been found dead in her North London home. Police are so far saying that her death is unexplained, though her heavy drinking past has been well publicized.

That knife-edge between artistic giftedness and personal instability has cut another down. Sad.

Haiku for Bag

2011-07-21T21:08:00.000-07:00

As I write this, I am badly losing a like count battle, the prize of which is the "handsome" bag shown above being offered by the Multnomah County Library's facebook page:

Haiku throw-down! Write a book or movie review in haiku form and post your creative concoction in the comments here - please include the title and author. The poem with the most 'likes' will win this fabulous book bag from the Friends' Library Store.[emphasis mine]

See, that's why I put handsome in scare-quotes above -- fabulous was the word I was searching for; handsome was only a draft. That bag is indeed fabulous.

My review in haiku, which has currently garnered zero likes, is of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Jar-Jar:

George Lucas needs cash -
fourth mansions are expensive!
CGI slapdash.

I am not, by the way, fishing for likes here. I didn't even give it a like myself -- frankly, I think I could crap a better haiku review than that. For example, Hamlet:

Something's rotten there.
Revenge trumps indecision
Regicide repeats.

Or how about The Shawshank Redemption?

Wrongly convicted,
Andy gets busy living,
heads to Mexico.

Not quite last but always least, there's the four to six hours of visual effects on which James Cameron hung the title Avatar:

Unobtainium.
Spears beat tanks. Like Dances with
Wolves, only no good.

I didn't think much of Inception, either --- and clearly, I have turned this into a chance to snark about movies I dislike using the power of haiku:

In dreams, our secrets
are there for the taking. Thieves
hack in. Confusing.

Likes remain at zero.

Cheesy Fiesta Potatoes (Etc.)

2011-07-19T21:10:00.000-07:00

As ever, each headline brings more hope and uplift than the last:

A meth-addled hillbilly lady -- pardon me, alleged meth-addled hillbilly lady -- tried selling her infant for $500 to $5000 just across the river in Vancouver, Washington, out of the parking lot of a Taco Bell. If the rumors are right, she offered to throw in a bucket of Cheesy Fiesta Potatoes for any winning bid over $2500. Here's the unexpected twist to the story -- the infant-peddling hillbilly was not Vancouver's most famous alleged drug-addled hillbilly, Tanya Harding.
Whoever had this week in the Borders Death Watch has won the pool:
Any hope that Borders would find a buyer and keep its nearly four hundred American stores open for business ended on Monday when the bookseller chain announced that it would liquidate its assets in an effort to pay creditors.
I have no idea where we are going to spend several dollars too many on CDs we don't want, or very-near-full-retail on books Oprah has recently promoted, but I totally know a parking lot where you can score a cheap infant.
Apparently, only 19% of Republicans believe Obama would be rapture-vacuumed up to heaven if Jesus exercised that option. I'm surprised the figure is as high as that. Maybe 19% of them momentarily forgot he has dark skin and reads books?
Breaking Bad has started a new season (spoilers afoot), so the wrong-headed commentary has begun:
Walt is weak. Sure, he's a great chemist, and by now he knows just what to do when confronted with an inconvenient dead body, but his attempts to sweet-talk Gus were just as spectacularly ineffective as his attempts to sweet-talk his wife, Skyler, back in his early days in the meth business. His head is packed with facts, but is the heart inside that Kenny Rogers T-shirt strong enough to survive this brutal business?
I say the Kenny Rogers t-shirt is the perfect complement to the sand-toned Pontiac Aztek, but no one asked me. However: sweet-talk? That was someone's idea of sweet-talk? No, that was Walt doing what Walt always does when cornered or anxious: over-explaining, saying too much, getting didactic, waxing preachy. This is a bad idea in the best of circumstances, but Walt has a knack for entering this mode even in the immediate presence of proven sociopaths. He is way past lucky to be alive by now, which brings me to the last counterpoint: no, Walt is not going to survive all of this. One way or another, whether by cancer or box-cutter or bullet, Walt is doomed. He might provide for his family, and might even contrive to extricate Jesse from their chaotic miasma, and he will surely beat the odds a few more times before the end, but he has known from the start that he is a walking cadaver. He has turned this to his favor by mastering his fears and maintaining a strict focus on what he must do, but he cannot ultimately endure.

As with Walt, so with us all.

Prayers for Rain

2011-07-18T20:01:00.000-07:00

It is hot in Oklahoma -- not boring-hot as it was most summers in my home town of Ponca City, or not only boring-hot, but temperature-hot. Fear not, though, the state's governor is on it:

In response to Oklahoma's record drought and heat wave, Gov. Mary Fallin (R-OK) called for a statewide day of prayer on Sunday to pray for rain. For 47 straight days, temperatures in Oklahoma City have been above 90 degrees ...
For the safety of our firefighters and our communities and the well-being of our crops and livestock, this state needs the current drought to come to an end. The power of prayer is a wonderful thing, and I would ask every Oklahoman to look to a greater power this weekend and ask for rain.

Oklahoma's governor encourages all Oklahomans to direct skyward mumbling, e-mails, texts, IMs, voice-messages, and the like toward the leading god, making explicit entreaties for better weather. Standard data charges apply. Offer not valid for Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Taoists, Pagans, Jains, Zoroastrians, Deists, and Christians of the wrong sect (they know who they are).

If, three or four days out, the prayers of Oklahomans have not delivered the state from this drought, the governor will presumably conclude what most people already assume, namely, that god doesn't think very highly of Oklahoma, or more reasonably, that begging deities for weather favors is pointless.

Carlin! Thou should'st be living at this hour

2011-07-16T21:09:00.000-07:00

Everything is a fen of stagnant waters, but more on that presently. This week's Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast raised two interesting topics: Right Place at the Right Time, concerning pop culture that arrived at just the right time to make a positive or inspirational or otherwise substantial impact; and Wish You Were Here, concerning

the things that have sadly left us too early — artists who died young, series that aren't made anymore, whatever it is that we're missing.

My entry for Right Place at the Right Time is M*A*S*H, which entered continuous replay in syndication at about the time I was reaching an age when I was ready to start giving a damn about wit. I recall stumbling on the weird-to-me realization that girls will like me if I am funny at exactly the same time that Hawkeye Pierce, Trapper John, Frank Burns, Col. Blake, BJ Honeycutt, Charles Emerson Winchester, Col. Potter, Radar, Klinger, Hotlips Hoolihan, and all their wacky cohorts were launching one-liners, breaking hearts, saving lives, defying the powers, and teaching us all a little something about ourselves six or eight times a day on the tee-vee. It assured that for any situation, however freighted with geopolitics and human suffering, the proper response is a smartass remark. I have since realized that M*A*S*H was just a televised recapitulation of a previous generation of comedic sensibility, stretching from Vaudeville and serialized radio programs to early television, so it spared me ever having to pay any attention to any of that. I have further realized M*A*S*H was not really that witty, and therefore draw your own conclusions about whether and to what degree girls ever especially liked me.

As for Wish You Were Here, that's easier: I wish John Lennon were still alive and responding to the artistic, musical, social, commercial, and political developments of the times. Whatever he might have done, the sure bet is that it would have been unexpected, riveting, and uneven without being merely cheaply shocking. (I prefer to think he would dig deeper than a meat dress -- which is not to say I'm ready to dismiss Lady Gaga. She has time.) That's an obvious pick -- anyone who doesn't think of John Lennon in this connection joins the ranks of history's greatest monsters.*

I wish Deadwood hadn't stopped prematurely. The series that showed us the power of shouting "cocksuckers!" at any problematic person or situation had so much more to give.

Lastly and above all, in agreement with the Pop Culture Happy Hour regulars, I bemoan the loss of George Carlin, who would have forced the Twitter people to double their server capacity to handle the traffic of follows, tweets and retweets he alone would have generated.

--------
* Counterpoint: for every day Lennon lived on, the pressures for a regrettable Beatles reunion would have increased.

Make the Easy Parts Easy

2011-07-14T21:46:00.000-07:00

People often ask me* my single best piece of advice for becoming a runner, and my answer is always the same: have excellent genes for it. There's just no substitute for being born with the right propensities for targeted muscle mass, VO2 capacity, pain tolerance, sturdy knees, sturdy ankles, sturdy feet, sturdy toes, and a collection of subtler qualities of mind I'll summarize as being too damn stubborn to stop running once you've started. Being selectively stupid helps the latter.

These genetic and arguably-genetic draws being notoriously difficult to obtain if your parents didn't bestow them, if I had to choose a second bit of advice, I would say: make the easy parts easy. A mistake I see people make is to turn running into a gigantic production -- it has to happen across town, or an hour's drive into the country, or at the end of some distant rainbow or at the base of some enchanted waterfall; or it cannot possibly happen unless in the presence of the workout buddy or buddies; or it has to take place during the most productive two-hour window of the day, when your psychic alertness peaks and Saturn is in aspect for your microsign or whatever; or it has to be attended by an onerous routine of scrupulous record-keeping and progress-tracking and spreadsheets and smartphones and diet plans and meditative practices and thoughtful journal entries.

No.

Just put on clothes and shoes that stay out of your way, go outside, and start running. I recommend early morning before anyone has a chance to intrude on your time, but opinions vary, as do internal clocks. Do the same the next day, but stay out a little longer and go a little farther. While you're out, look at what other runners are wearing and not wearing, and follow their example. Grab more running-ish shorts or shoes or a shirt the next time you're going by a store that sells that kind of thing, or dig something out of a closet, or borrow a friend's.

By all means invite a friend if that's your inclination, but don't make your running dependent on the friend's participation. If he/she/they "can't" be there, it's a signal that it has become too complicated. Simplify it.

The running itself should be the difficult part. Make everything else as simple, direct, quick, effortless, and routine as possible. To become a runner, go straight outside, pick a direction, and run. Let the finer points fill in later. Repeat.

------------
* Not really.

Netflix - Angering the Internets

2011-07-14T19:30:00.000-07:00

As I write this, the internets are angry. The number was nine the last time I checked, but today, Netflix's own list of top 100 films contains only eight items that are available via its streaming service -- and of those, only one is in the top 30, and of that one, 100% is The Unexpectedly Disappointing Case of Benjamin Button or Who's Afraid of Benjamin Button or Benjamin Button: Time Will Seem to Flow Backwards as You Watch or Benjamin Button: Dark Side of the Moon, or whatever that lachrymose piece of crap is called.

Naturally, given the manifestly middling quality of its streaming service, Netflix is increasing its rates in order to ~~pull more money from its customers~~ properly price its offerings:

[W]e are separating unlimited DVDs by mail and unlimited streaming into separate plans to better reflect the costs of each and to give our members a choice: a streaming only plan, a DVD only plan or the option to subscribe to both. With this change, we will no longer offer a plan that includes both unlimited streaming and DVDs by mail.

Lance Ulanoff thinks Netflix is doomed. Doomed, I tells ye!

Over time, the world will walk away from physical media. Broadband access (wired or wireless) will reach every part of the U.S. and further and further around the globe, and consumers will get their HD video content exclusively from the Web ... With Netflix making almost no headway in accessing first-run films for instant streaming, and no hurdles to stop consumers like me from switching, Netflix's future looks very dire indeed.

Well, sure, but raising the price on a lackluster service is something beyond not-a-hurdle -- it's all but asking people to leave.

For me, Netflix streaming is worth little because of poor selection, poor sound quality, and the unavailability of subtitles (closed caption), commentary, and other extras that frequently come with physical disks. That means it's good for (a) the narrow band of videos it offers -- fans of Cheers, Family Ties, and Hawaii Five-O rejoice! -- where (b) you don't really care that you're only hearing it in two-channel stereo -- most tee-vee shows and films were recorded and mixed long before surround sound was widely adopted -- and (c) you can confidently assume there are no special features of interest and, of course, (d) you don't need closed caption because your hearing is perfect and you have no trouble with anyone's accent in any production. Oh, and don't forget that it works well only if (e) your internet connection is stable and swift, but with (d) and (e), I unfairly speak as though we live in an imperfect world.

So, with whatever apologies are due to Lance Ulanoff, I don't join him in welcoming the twilight of physical disks and the dawn of the streaming-only video age. Perhaps events will prove him right, but I see nothing to cheer about if so.

Still, for all my grousing, I will not drop Netflix --- not completely, and not yet. I will drop the streaming thing as soon as the price goes above zero. Until it drops off my account, it will remain a 'nice-to-have' for the rare case when something worth watching arrives there. Who knows? Maybe between now and September I'll want to remind myself of why I never thought much of Family Ties in the first place, or maybe their catalog of streaming titles will markedly expand. I will drop Netflix entirely the moment they seem to be skimping on their inventory of physical disks.

Last and least, to assure both readers that I am nothing if not richly layered, I note that I have made the final edits to this post while playing X-Men via Netflix streaming.

The Onrushing Maw

2011-07-13T05:01:00.000-07:00

As it happens, in that same filmspotting podcast I was caterwauling about yesterday, Matty Robinson had positive things to say of -- of all things -- Paul Blart Mall Cop, the Kevin James vehicle set in a mall in which a man (who is, you see, funny because he is fat) re-enacts the slapstick crime-busting antics that were already agonizingly tedious ten minutes into Home Alone. After which something something he gets the girl --- or we should say, the attractive girl is saddled with the character played by Kevin James, including all his ravenous insecurities and dawning medical infirmities.

Granted, for all that, PBMC is slightly more endurable than Congo, but with the prospect of The Zookeeper darkening our collective near futures, can we afford to permit a positive mention of the film oevre of Kevin James? I say we cannot.

Fortunately, as the image to the right illustrates, Jeffrey Sconce is already doing more than caterwauling -- he has situated The Zookeeper in the context of Biblical preachments, and has provided a helpful Zookeeper Checklist for those sad sacks who have been conked out and dragged to a showing of it.

I Saw Someone Wrong on the Internet

2011-07-12T21:38:00.000-07:00

Adam Kempenaar and Matty Robinson of Filmspotting podcast fame did not like I Saw the Devil, not even a little bit. It was not what they were hoping to see -- they were hoping to see something else, and this film was not that something else.

Adam, for example, declares

there are no insights into the nature of evil, there's just a lot of pain and anguish ...

But what if the film is saying that evil is a condition that produces lots of pain and anguish in the interactions of people? I would say that is exactly what the film is saying, and saying quite clearly: that evil occurs when people produce pain and anguish in one another.

Both reviewers go on to explain that what they were hoping to see was something redeeming in all the evil the film presents -- progression, growth, lessons learned, a deserved chastening or two, a conclusion featuring a wistful stroll into a sadder and wiser sunset by at least one of the main characters.

Here's the thing: this is not trying to be that film; it is not telling that story. There are plenty of films that feature a dramatic arc of roughly that sort -- take True Grit (2010) for an example of a well-executed one, or take Taken for an example of a so-so one -- but I Saw the Devil makes precisely the statement about evil that the filmspotting guys accuse it of making, namely, that a wrathful seeking of vengeance creates a self-accelerating cycle of pain and a widening circle of broken minds and mangled bodies. Full stop.

The film suggests that rage-fueled evil burns through people indiscriminately; that while rage and hatred are motivating the choices people make, nothing is learned, and the choices become less and less comprehensible to observers. On this note, Matty sharpens his criticisms in an especially odd way:

He [the antagonist of I Saw the Devil] is not Anton Chigur from No Country for Old Men, not in the least bit; where you at least have some insight into what is driving these characters. ... Here there is no depth to these characters, it is completely flat.

As to the latter part: exactly! It is completely 'flat' in the sense that as the film's action proceeds, it becomes ever harder to detect any rationale for the shocking deeds being carried out -- the two main characters increasingly demonstrate nothing but hatred for one another and indifference (at best) toward anyone or anything that impedes their rage. Hatred and the wish for vengeance become the only notes anyone sounds. Precisely.

As to the Anton Chigur comparison, Matty is exactly wrong. Where in No Country for Old Men is any clear indication of what drives Chigur's relentless, wanton cruelty? Both the film and the book announce rather plainly, over and over, that Chigur lies beyond any moral, practical, or pecuniary calculus. Chigur is "something you don't understand," as the Sheriff muses; one of his victims compares him with the bubonic plague; he openly mocks everyone who bothers to try to bargain, negotiate, rationalize, justify, deal, or reason with him.

The antagonist of I Saw the Devil --- and as the film progresses, increasingly the protagonist as well -- fit this mold exactly. If anything, the principals get more evil as their reactions build on their own ugly momentum, and everyone in the vicinity is noticeably worse off, or dead, by the end.

Roll credits.

If the above sounds like a faithful portrait of revenge, I Saw the Devil might be to your liking -- which is far from saying it is pleasant to watch. It is a beautifully choreographed and visualized image of the darkest, ugliest realities one would ever want to witness in the interactions of people.

Prepended

2011-07-11T21:13:00.000-07:00

A blogger I admire has seen fit to prepend a post as follows:

Now, I'm not naive. I knew that there would be epic levels of butthurt in response to this post.

What's the controversial topic, you ask? Picard versus Kirk? Mac versus Windows? Oprah versus Dr. Phil? Batman versus Superman? Bigfoot versus Loch Ness Monster? Michael Bay versus Meghan Fox? The rights of the accused versus the rights of victims? Dill pickles versus cocktail wieners? Dolphins versus sharks? Jets versus sharks? Propeller planes versus jets? Santa Claus versus Fabric Softener? Cursive versus print? Smokey and the Bandit versus Congo?

Don't be silly. Wait? What was that penultimate one? The topic is the decline of cursive writing in primary education, and Marcotte's conclusion is one I share with qualifications:

A lot of educational standards are things that continue on only because bitter adults don't want kids today to avoid having to suffer the same bullshit we had to go through ... The low grade sadism that's pointed at children for the crime of being young when we're not isn't justification enough for this nonsense.

Certainly resentment should not determine educational standards or much else. One would hope primary schools can find ways to develop fine motor skills and the confidence that goes with them, while imparting the value of creating something elegant on a blank paper or canvas. Cursive writing can be a simple, inexpensive, and practical introduction to artistic creation -- it can be -- but whether schools as presently constituted can accomplish such a delicate feat, let alone on a mass scale, is highly doubtful. I say let it go. It would be better to let cursive pass away than to grind it under the wheels of rote and budget-tightening.

Dear 2011 Fueled By Fine Wine Half Marathon

2011-07-10T16:55:00.000-07:00

I was wrong about you, Fueled by Fine Wine half marathon. I was wrong when, a few days ago, I e-mailed a friend who ran it alongside me last year:

Back in my day, the Fueled by Fine Wine half-marathon was difficult.

Last year's course -- http://www.mapmyrun.com/s/routes/view/run-jog-map/oregon/dundee-hills/18961712

Kids these days have it so easy. This year's course -- http://www.mapmyrun.com/routes/view/34887742

Having run the event today in 1:43:44 (7:55 mile/min), I now realize you maintained your humbling, mind-boggling level of difficulty despite the course changes. As it was last year, so this year: no race has ever given me a stronger urge to stop and rest along the way.

This year's version managed to begin breaking spirits from the very start, when we looped through lovely neighborhood streets of Dundee, Oregon along a path that only a sadistic track coach could dream up. I exaggerate not at all when I report that very fit looking runners were already reduced to walking within the first two miles. Subsequent miles had us passing over hill after hill on a thorough sampler of ground surfaces found in the Willamette Valley: asphalt, concrete, gravel, grass, dirt, and the tractor ruts of tilled fields. I adore that those surfaces did this to my shoes (today's shoes on the left; a previous generation of the same model, size, and style of shoe on the right, shown for contrast):

Shoes after a race should look like they've been in a race.

As I said, I was wrong. You retain your reputation for difficulty, and that would make you extraordinary and worth cherishing, but you also continue to tower above all other races in my experience in quality of swag (see above for a sample), quality of post-race treats (wine from the very same vineyards we ran through; excellent bread and cheese; fresh strawberries and bananas), and quality of finisher shirt.

On top of all that, I can think of one or two races that match, but none that exceed the natural beauty of your course -- every vista atop every hill looked like a well-composed pastoral painting. I only wish I had been freer to take my concentration off my footing to enjoy it more.

This race's organizers deserve to be counted as the models of all race organizers. The volunteers were unfailingly generous, and as I always say, but with more emphasis: I heartily congratulate everyone who finished this race today.

Neko Case at Edgefield - Someone Above Me

2011-07-09T20:29:00.000-07:00

Soooo, Neko Case played a live show at the Edgefield amphitheater last evening, and I was among the fortunates there to experience it. The show featured three layered, interesting new songs that I hope to see released on an album soon, and the back-to-back performances of "Fox Confessor Brings the Flood" and "Vengeance is Sleeping" were, for my part, the highlight of the night, if not the month.

Neko justifiably uses a particular moment from "Fox Confessor" to showcase the power of her voice -- the lines

Will I ever see you again? / Will there be no one above me to put my faith in?

...but even as I knew it was coming, last night's rendition of these lines was stunning. Apart from those words as phrased in her voice, you could have heard a mouse sneak across the Edgefield grass.

I could easily have taken very good photos of the performers and the lovely venue, but I contributed to the well-mannered mien of the audience by honoring the no-photography rule.

Well-mannered, I said? Yes, this was by far the most well-behaved concert audience I've ever joined. People were downright civilized in the way they made room for each other, drank, ate, and smoked only what they were permitted to drink, eat, and smoke (within reasonable limits), and declined to insert any hooliganism into the affair. It was weird. Maybe Neko Case fans aren't idiots? I'd like to think so.

Close, I say? Yes, I could easily have tossed a football to Neko Case from where I was sitting for most of the show, and could have done so even more easily from where I moved during the last five or six songs -- and I could even more easily have tossed one to vocalist Kelly Hogan. I probably could have reached either with my underwear from the closer spot, but as I said, this was a well-mannered concert, not the sort of event in which people pull off their undergarments and throw them on stage, no matter how much they might wish to.

Maybe I was imagining it, but I thought I saw Ben Gibbard and Zooey Deschanel admiring the show from backstage. They, too, held back on the urge to throw any underwear or otherwise make spectacles of themselves. Maybe I was only imagining it was those two I saw, so chalk it up to the way Neko Case tends to magnify and elevate the familiar.

Of Energy Drains (Part II)

2011-07-08T05:02:00.000-07:00

Speaking of that which needlessly drains energy, the National Resources Defense Counsel has published a study [PDF, sorry] showing that box-top DVRs will soon destroy the biosphere by consuming too large a share of the world's energy. On average, they report, a set-top HD DVR will chew through 275 KwH per year (a terrifying quantity, or so I gather), a surprisingly large share of that chewing while the machine is in an 'off' state.

There's the rub, of course -- by design, these machines don't have a true 'off' state. They are designed to sit there like ambush predators waiting to pounce on and record all the tee-vee programs and movies you can't be bothered to watch when they're broadcast if only because they're too overloaded with commercials to bear -- in other words, nearly all of the tee-vee programs and movies you can be bothered to watch. If you unplug the DVR -- achieving the true 'off' that will cut power consumption down to zero -- you thereby defeat the purpose and miss those idiotically-timed broadcasts of, say, Hunger and Louie and A Clockwork Orange*, which the networks tend to play at times tailored to reach those viewers who don't sleep at night and/or don't work during the day. For the non-trust-fund-non-insomniacs among us, to go without a DVR is to waste all that money we're wasting on cable. Surely you can see the bind we're in.

Unwilling (for purposes of this blog post) to accept the NRDC's statistics on faith, I checked it with my own Kill-a-Watt device as applied to my Motorola HD DVR. I found that it used 1.73 KwH over 62.1 hours (62 hrs 6 min) of "typical" use spanning a Sunday afternoon to Tuesday evening, a period that included plenty of 'off' time. That maps out to a little over 244 KwH over the 8766-hour year, which is tolerably close to NDRC's number, and frighteningly close to this guy's measurement of the same thing.

It would be nice to think the cable companies will move to more energy-efficient devices, or give their customers the chance to purchase and use more energy-efficient devices on their networks, or that people like me can finally be persuaded that cable tee-vee is a game that's not worth the candle. I would be nice to think a lot of things. For now, inasmuch as DVRs-as-energy-drains is a problem, I am very much part of it.

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* These are three actual examples of items currently stored on my DVR, as my minders at the local cable monopoly no doubt know.

Of Energy Drains (Part I)

2011-07-08T05:01:00.000-07:00

Having experienced Google Plus for upwards of a day (via a kind invitation from SJKP), I am prepared to pronounce a meh upon it.

It's not that Google Plus won't revolutionize the way we can plausibly claim to pay passing attention to the comings, goings, ups, downs, travails, victories, doings, and strivings of our friends and "friends," -- for surely I would be a so-last-year, hidebound, utterly dismissible retrograde crank to say otherwise -- it's just that the experience of joining a new social network has exposed how exhausting it is to participate in a web-based social network (don't even get me started on the life-force-draining effects of a flesh-based social network).

Joining a new social network means I have to wait for all my friends and "friends" to show up in this new place, invite them to my circles or whatever (and thereafter attend to the inevitable "will they or won't they accept?" dramas that ensue), establish my security settings, upload my pictures (but surely not those pictures), alter my security settings, enumerate all my interests, affiliations, and loyalties so as to be fed the proper set of advertisements, re-work my security settings once more, touch up my profile so that I present a slightly interesting version of myself -- a tiresome feat in itself -- make some additional tweaks to my security settings, link the Google Plus account to all the proper feeds to and from Twitter and Facebook and whatever else, enable these but not those applications, applets, gadgets, add-ins, widgets ad infinitum, and embark on a final and never-ending course of refinements to my goddamn security settings.

As I said, it's exhausting, and while I have mostly warm feelings about google, and at best lukewarm feelings about Facebook, I will need to see something truly compelling before I go to the effort of abandoning the latter and moving to the former. A one-click "upload everything from Facebook to Google Plus and then delete Facebook account" utility would be a good start, assuming it didn't steal my identity in the process. It probably would steal my identity, or threaten to, whereupon I would need to update all my security settings again. Exhausting.

Don Draper and the Hipsters

2011-07-07T20:43:00.000-07:00

Having joined approximately 13,000 (as of this writing) others who Facebook-shared this The Oatmeal comic, "What Would Don Draper Do?", I am now ready to relate to both readers of this precious, precious blog that the comic reminded me of one of several perfect moments from Mad Men:

Hipster: You invent the lie. You invent 'want.' You are for them, not us.

Draper: Well, I hate to break it to you, but there is no big lie. There is no system. The universe is indifferent.

This is such an exquisite moment because of the eloquence of the exchange and for how it reaches the viewer. I think I speak for all passionate fans of Mad Men -- now and always -- when I say I can relate to both sides of this exchange, the suited businessman and the rejectionist hipsters. The exponents of youth culture in the 1960s made much of their departures from the formulas and conventions to which they were born; the avatars of the establishment made much of brushing these complaints aside as unserious, immature, irrelevant, and feckless. All of us, Mad Men viewers and non-viewers alike, now inhabit the society that these two factions have squabbled into shape ever since. They are both right and they are both wrong: whatever we might think or project or hope, we were born to a particular moment in time, and history is not undirected but it is indifferent.

Totalitarianism Refined

2011-07-05T21:00:00.000-07:00

Starting at ~4:30 in this video, Father Jacobse asserts -- I'm being careful to quote him exactly here -- "I'm not saying all atheists are totalitarians; I'm saying totalitarianism is by necessity atheistic."

Here goes:

So there you have it -- the Taliban was not totalitarian. The Islamist movements that issue death warrants over works of art, institute intricate rules for interpersonal conduct, and seek to install a worldwide Caliphate are likewise something other than totalitarian in nature. At the height of its powers, even when it was executing people for expressing the wrong opinions and sending armies to seize "the Holy Lands," the Catholic church was something other than totalitarian in its aspirations, practices, and effects.

Totalitarian is, you see, something atheists do -- you know, atheists such as the Nazis. So Father Jacobse assures us, and who would dare gainsay the good word of a member of the Catholic clergy?

We the Hostages

2011-07-05T05:01:00.000-07:00

I would like to believe Matt Yglesias is wrong with this analysis of the USA's ongoing "negotiations" over the debt ceiling -- of course, I would like to believe a lot of things. Yglesias:

After all, if Cantor, McConnell, and Boehner are able to say "national default unless we have an all-cuts deficit reduction package," then why not also say "national default unless we bomb North Korea" or "national default unless we reinstate Don't Ask Don’t Tell?" Over the longer term, I don't think serious people of any ideological persuasion seriously think it'll be a good thing for America to turn all public policy debates into a series of hostage scenarios with debt default as the price. This is in part a testament to why it was a mistake of Obama to get sucked into this negotiation in the first place, regardless of what you think his real motives were. But it's also reflective of the truly breathtaking cynicism with which McConnell has been leading the GOP ever since the 2008 election. The priority, at every turn, has in his own words been to turn Obama into a one-term president by using powers of obstruction. But the American constitutional system can't function if both parties play [by] these rules. [emphasis mine]

Whatever "serious people" might "seriously think" about these matters, it is clear that the Republicans are dedicated to seeing how far they can bully and contort public policy in their favor. Given the weakness of the president and his party -- if not their complicity -- there is no good reason to think we are nearing the end of a process whereby sane public policy, and the human beings affected by it, serve as hostages to the far right.

I Saw the Rage

2011-07-03T20:27:00.000-07:00

I wasn't expecting much from I Saw the Devil, so I am here to reaffirm the wisdom of allowing a movie to exceed one's expectations: I Saw the Devil (IStD) is an excellent film. [Spoilers below]

By that I mean IStD takes the familiar tropes and themes of a "revenge story" but plays them through unflinchingly, as vividly distinguished from, say, the last and next few mailed-in Mel Gibson revenge-y blockbusters. IStD looks and feels like a revenge fantasy enacted in the really-existing world with its really-existing evils, which is to say it starts and ends with wrath, with all its limitations and rawness. There is no saving grace, no sober re-thinking, no inward reckoning, no redemption:

IStD shows the stakes of revenge and the wild swerves of cause and effect that expose those stakes, and surely this is what we would want from a revenge story made for the big screen, if we should ever hazard to want such a thing. See this one.

Standing Athwart God's Short Bus

2011-07-02T21:24:00.000-07:00

ThinkProgress has helpfully cataloged National Review's fete of caterwauling over the achievement of marriage equality in New York, one entry of which is this piece of sober analysis from Maggie Gallagher:

Gay people are children of God and each one matters. But they are also about 2 percent of the population, while a new Gallup poll shows Americans on average think they are 25 percent of the population.

That's cultural power.

Note the juxtaposition of "children of god" with "only 2 percent of the population" and "cultural power:" sure, yes, Gallagher is willing to allow that the gays are among god's kids, but they are clearly the duds, the defectives, the ones that god sends out on sleep-overs when he's having respectable company over for dinner, the ones that (in His almighty heart of hearts) he wishes he had never special-created, and all the more when they not only embrace their hideous infirmities but convince the other kids to abide them.

To summarize Gallagher without her empty euphemisms: gay people are the "children of god" that proper people join her favorite god in not-so-secretly reviling. Happily, more and more Americans are coming around to the view that gay people are people, whatever Maggie Gallagher, her god, or or her magazine says; and better yet, the laws of the land are increasingly treating them as such.

Curiosities from a Transcript

2011-06-30T20:57:00.000-07:00

In a press conference this week, the president congratulated himself for not challenging legal equality in the courts:

Now, what we've also done is we've said that DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act, is unconstitutional. And so we’ve said we cannot defend the federal government poking its nose into what states are doing and putting the thumb on the scale against same-sex couples.

I believe this would be the fierce urgency of keeping one's thumb off the scales of justice, even if the scales are tilted heavily toward inequality, as in the forty-four states where marriage equality still does not exist. The president continued his encomium to "states' rights:"

What I've seen happen over the last several years, and what happened in New York last week I think was a good thing, because what you saw was the people of New York having a debate, talking through these issues. It was contentious; it was emotional; but, ultimately, they made a decision to recognize civil marriage. And I think that's exactly how things should work.

Charitably assuming President Chickenshit sincerely thinks that's exactly how things should work, he needs to re-evaluate his thinking. A quick glance at the map above serves to demonstrate that gays are icky is overpowering gays are people in the minds of voters, lawmakers, and jurists across the country, and this is after the moderating exposure of Will & Grace, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, South Park, Glee, The United States of Tara, True Blood, Southland, and Paul Lynde's years-long domination of the center of Hollywood Squares. For that matter, Chickenshit doesn't need to step outside his immediate family or imagine past his own lifetime to notice rather grave problems with leaving civil rights to states.

All of this being so, as with so many things with this presidency, it's difficult to see either the thread of coherent principle or the political calculus. The argument is laughable to anyone paying any attention, and the low-information dolts who might conceivably find this appealing are at least as likely to pay just enough attention to locate where they disagree. Strange.

The Socially Expected

2011-06-29T05:01:00.000-07:00

Forced smiles are always good.

Ophelia Benson recently had a neighborly chat:

I was walking along a residential street a few blocks from where I live (so I don't know anyone there, I don't recognize faces), mind elsewhere (though nowhere in particular) as usual, and suddenly some grizzled auld fella who was pottering in his garden snarled at me as he crossed the sidewalk toward the parking strip, "What would it take to make you smile?"

I jerked to a stop and turned to stare at him in astonishment, and after mulling it for a few seconds demanded why on earth he would ask me that.

We had a nice little shouty war there on the sidewalk, for three or four or five minutes.

He was of course surprised to be answered, and did a lot of angry shouting about seeing me walking past here all the time, and I never smile, I never wave, I never say hello.

"Let's put a smile on that face," he said in other words -- happily without a knife. Fun! Ophelia rounds it off with a question or two:

Now here's what I want to know. Lots of guys here. What do you think? I don’t believe for one second that he ever, ever, ever says that to men. Ever. I don’t think for a second that he thinks it's any of his business what expression a man has on his face when walking past his house. What do you think?

I think too many people have too inflated a sense of their own desserts when it comes to the facial expressions of others. Too many people expect the world to smile back at them at all hours of the day, whether or not a reason to smile exists. Socially Expected Smiling deflates the value of genuine smiling, and inflates the world's quantity of overstepped boundaries, and it needs to stop.

In answer to Ophelia's questions: though male, I do get the same crap once in a while because I am not inclined to walk around smiling -- not necessarily because I lack a reason to smile, but simply because I never picked up the habit of broadcasting the sunniest self-presentation to the world, and have never seen the value of cultivating it. A close cousin to this I get is the Social Expectation that I will give both a warm Hello and a warm Goodbye to individuals in whose vicinity I happen to spend time. While I am not personally aware of other men who are subject to these Social Expectations, I suspect I am far from alone.

And no, I don't imagine for a moment that men get these Social Expectations as strongly as women do. I think there is an even stronger Social Expectation -- in the USA, that is, where I am almost but not quite qualified to say the first thing about all this -- that women should be bouncing around with smiles across their faces at all hours, with or without any reason to be smiling. This is, after all, in keeping with their fundamental purpose in life, that of decorating the visual space men inhabit. Right?

As I said, these Social Expectations are misplaced and need to stop.

If plagued with a persistent need to see smiles on all the faces around you, go join a pod of dolphins or surround yourself with jack-o-lanterns. If you need a greeting every time you show up, and a sad whimper every time you leave, get a dog. Better yet, re-think your needs.

I hereby issue a pre-emptive fuck off to the next person who Socially Expects me or anyone else to smile, and I salute Ophelia Benson for pushing back against the petulant, needy toad she encountered.

Stop Angel Rape or God Smash

2011-06-28T05:01:00.000-07:00

His jowls jiggling with outrage, Pat Robertson has shocked the world by announcing to his tee-vee audience that his favorite god is angry -- so angry! god smash! grrr! -- about the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad achievement of marriage equality in New York:

In short, Pat Robertson's jiggling jowls have a message for the lawmakers of New York: raping angels has been known to activate the Bible god's kill switch before, and you wouldn't like him when he's angry.

Yawn.

It must be interesting to be Pat Robertson (assuming you have a rather paltry sense of what counts as interesting). Not only do you get to see those jowls jiggle in every mirror you face -- I'll bet he can really get them going when he works at it -- but whenever anything bad happens to someone, or even to a nation-state of someones, he has a ready-made explanation: they were caught raping angels or granting equal rights to people or committing some other god-maddening transgression.

The presence of this ready-made explanation must spare him a great deal of time and energy that other people have to devote to, you know, engaging with reality thoroughly enough to understand the actual cause-effect relationships in the world.

Asked and Answered

2011-06-27T21:03:00.000-07:00

A social media "friend", T, asked,

Need your help .... How much dirt can be removed from a hole 3 feet wide, 4 feet long, and 7 feet deep?

I immediately recognized this as the classic brain-teaser whose answer is "none, because a hole contains no dirt," but I knew that T needed a better answer than that. Despite that awareness, I answered as follows:

Exactly as much as was added in advance.

So I snarked, signaling subtly that I knew the answer to the quiz. I knew deep down that an even better answer would be needed, so despite that awareness, I wrote another answer as follows:

How to find out: 1. Carefully line the interior of the hole with a waterproof barrier, such as plastic, glass, or tanned bison hide. 2. Apply some kind of stiffening agent to the liner. Yes, I said 'stiffening,' and I stand by it. 3. Carefully extract the liner. It should now be exactly the same shape as the hole. 4. Fill the liner with water. 5. Place the water-filled liner inside a large freezer for a day or two. If you're lucky, the expansion of the ice won't break the liner. If it does, go back to step 1 but with a better material this time. 6. Or am I on 7.? Break the ice into equally-sized cubes. It doesn't matter how many, so long as they are perfect cubes and exactly the same size. 8. Measure the volume of one of the cubes -- since these are cubes, the formula is Height x Height x Height, or if you prefer, Length x Length x Length. Depth x Depth x Depth will also work. MEMORIZE THIS VALUE. 9. Multiply the value memorized in step 8 by the number of cubes you made. Voila! The hole could hold a volume of dirt equal to whatever that is. 10. Repeat steps 1-9 to ensure you didn't screw it up somewhere along the way.

This gave me a twinge of justice achieved -- i.e., an answer not worth reading matched to a question not worth asking on a "social networking" web site that continues to struggle for a credible reason to exist. You might think my work was done after this, but I concluded my answers should be deleted because of the colossal pointlessness of the entire exercise. So I added a follow up:

Important: if you get a different value the second time through steps 1-10, you'll need to do the entire thing a third time as a "tie-breaker." This is science.

Good News Saturday

2011-06-25T22:34:00.000-07:00

Good things happen:

New York has legalized same-sex marriage. It gets better, jurisdiction by jurisdiction. The smart money says this will be challenged in the courts, whereupon the world will be entertained and edified with the spectacle of legal arguments meant to demonstrate the harm caused by gay marriage. A weary population of dead-enders await these arguments in earnest; the other several billion of us look forward to moving the fuck on, having long since lost interest in the imaginary projections of bigots.
Neko Case has collaborated with Nick Cave on a cover of "She's Not There." I gather this has something to do with the new season of the HBO vampire drama I've followed consistently for some reason, True Blood, which begins tomorrow.
I embarked on my first "real" post-Vancouver Marathon run today, and while I could have, did not pee in the reservoirs of Mt. Tabor. Nor did I see anyone else peeing in the reservoirs.

Huzzah!

Facts, Snark, and Lies

2011-06-24T20:50:00.000-07:00

American patriot and freethought pioneer Thomas Paine died in 1809, the same year in which Charles Darwin was born -- or, if you prefer (as I don't), Paine was seated at Satan's side in the same year Darwin was vomited up from the depths of Hell to sew anti-Christian and/or anti-Islamic "scientific" deceptions that would lead believers away from salvation and/or the straight path.

Darwin went on to formalize the theory of evolution in The Origin of Species in 1859, fifty years after Paine's death and seventy years after the 1789 ratification of the US Constitution, including its first ten amendments commonly called "the bill of rights."

Nearly all of the preceding claims are easily-checked facts available to everyone in this internets-crazy age, with its googles and wikipedias and youtubes and blogs and twitters and keyboard cats and Tea Party Jesuses.

Those, I say again, are the facts -- several of them, albeit mingling with a little snark. Subtract the snark and synthesize these facts into a coherent historical narrative, hack historian David Barton, won't you please?

As far as the Founding Fathers were concerned, they'd already had the entire debate over creation and evolution, and you get Thomas Paine, who is the least religious Founding Father, saying you've got to teach Creation science in the classroom. Scientific method demands that.

Well, to give Barton slightly more than the zero credit he deserves, his claim that Tom Paine was the least religious of the USA's founders* is at least arguably true, though I lack the time-traveling and mind-reading skills needed to assess it with complete confidence. The rest of this could be dismissed as bat-shit lunacy if not for the realization that genuine crazy is more scattered than this. The god-bothered far-right tilt of Barton's fanciful tale reveals it as pure distortion -- or, if you prefer (as I do), lying.

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* Paine did write as follows:

THE WORD OF GOD IS THE CREATION WE BEHOLD: And it is in this word, which no human invention can counterfeit or alter, that God speaketh universally to man ...

Do we want to contemplate his power? We see it in the immensity of the creation. Do we want to contemplate his wisdom? We see it in the unchangeable order by which the incomprehensible Whole is governed. Do we want to contemplate his munificence? We see it in the abundance with which he fills the earth. Do we want to contemplate his mercy? We see it in his not withholding that abundance even from the unthankful. In fine, do we want to know what God is? Search not the book called the scripture, which any human hand might make, but the scripture called the Creation.

Paine did not maintain a purely naturalistic explanation of life's diversity -- again, a thorough statement of that would not appear until fifty years after his death. He took a deistic view under which god and nature, to the extent they are distinguishable at all, are indistinguishable in their amenability to open-ended inquiry and discovery -- for example, the most celebrated investigations and discoveries of Charles Darwin.

Seeing the Blood Amid the Flowers

2011-06-23T21:09:00.000-07:00

These tulips may or may not smell like teen spirit.

George Saunders discusses the "obligatory edgy," a quality he imputes to modern fiction but that applies more broadly (subscription required):

I first discovered the obligatory-edgy (and the happy effect it had on the energy of my prose) when my work was dying of complete boredom for want of it. So excising this thing (if it is, in fact, "a thing"), at least in theory, can feel like a step backward. Edginess can be a way of introducing energy and/or an appropriate overtone of skepticism, a way of enlarging the frame, of accounting for the complications of real life. Are there fields of beautiful tulips in the world, through which two well-matched lovers stroll? You bet. But is the world an endless sequence of such fields? Ha. So, to underscore this, maybe we have a crop duster fly over the tulip field, and the pilot is listening to "Smells Like Teen Spirit."

Or we widen the zoom to reveal an Air Force warning sign just in time to witness a blast and mushroom cloud in the background; or we zoom in to reveal that each tulip is a sort of holding cell for one tiny person, a few of whom try to jump to the ground only to die or land broken among ravenous ants. Yawn.

This sort of ironic inversion that turns beauty to ugliness has been hackneyed at least since The Twilight Zone -- or, if you like, since Chaucer or Boccaccio or Sophocles -- but it retains all the potential for social criticism that Serling and these others tried for -- emphasis on potential and tried for, de-emphasis on these few illustrations. Saunders:

Sometimes when I read new fiction I feel that the writers of it, myself included, have a somewhat dysfunctional relationship with our own culture. I don't mean we disapprove of it. I mean we have absorbed so much habitual disapproval of it that we are no longer able to see it, and therefore are unable to disapprove of it properly. How can you disapprove (or approve) of something you no longer see? If your palette of possible modes of representation has been habitually narrowed and restricted (to the edgy, the snarky, the hip, etc.), if that palette has been shorn of, say, the spiritual, the ineffable, the earnest, the mysterious — of awe, wonder, humility, the truly unanswerable questions — then there isn't much hope of any real newness there. Are the very real pleasures of being an American in 2011 underrepresented in our fiction?

It may be that the malcontent disposition, the oppositional stance, the rarely-say-die spirit of antagonism embodied in the "obligatory-edgy" carries little potential for newness, but what good is newness? Besides which, has there ever been a confirmed instance of it?

And is there a serious argument to be made that contemporary popular culture is neglecting any pleasures? I suppose I have to admit the possibility even as I doubt it strongly. Perhaps this is just the obligatory edge in me speaking, or maybe the habitual blindness Saunders imputes to it, but when I see skin, flowers, sun, songbirds, or the like, the loudest voice tells me to look for the blood.

Clear as an Azure Sky of Peakest Summer

2011-06-22T20:19:00.000-07:00

The person or machine who writes the informational metadata for my cable provider helpfully informs viewers that A Clockwork Orange is

Stanley Kubrick's award-winning adaptation of the Anthony Burgess novel about a future society terrorized by teenagers.

Well, yes -- in fairness, that would be the takeaway if you were to stop watching after the first fifteen minutes or so, but for any human or algorithm who stuck with it for the ensuing two hours, it comes across as a trifle, well, spare.

Still, one cannot fault the description for lack of clarity or, it must be admitted, accuracy. In roughly the same dumbed-down spirit of lucidity, we could say Moby Dick is John Huston's celebrated adaptation of the Herman Melville novel about a boat with a driven captain, and that No Country for Old Men is the Cohen brothers' award-winning adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel about a border town in Texas beset with drug traffickers.

The Right Pee

2011-06-21T20:58:00.000-07:00

Don't you just hate it when this happens?

When an apparently drunk man peed in a Mount Tabor reservoir around 1:30am last night, he set off an unprecedented chain reaction.

A security officer who had been watching the man and his four friends drinking from the reservoir guard tower alerted police, then called on the water bureau to take the reservoir offline. Using a new $23 million remote control system, just installed in April, the bureau immediately shut off the pipes leading from the reservoir. The guard and a police officer confronted the men and got their information, including the alleged 21-year-old pee-er.

Then, the water bureau made the call to dump the entire 7.2 million gallons of water in the reservoir, at a cost of over $35,000.* That's one expensive trip to the bathroom.

Given the volume of rain we've experienced this spring here in fair Puddle-Town, we can spare the seven million gallons -- well, let's say that's true even if it isn't -- and it's comforting to know that the city is watching over the diluted urine supply so sedulously. (Or maybe it isn't comforting at all -- let's say it is either way.)

Anway, I say $35,000 is a pittance for the assurance that our heavily-diluted offal comes from possums, raccoons, Canada geese, pigeons, dogs, cats, coyotes, skunks, assorted songbirds, and people who excreted into the reservoir without getting caught.

Cave-Like Seas

2011-06-20T21:28:00.000-07:00

Mark Vernon calls bullshit on Stephen Law's calling of bullshit. Vernon:

I suspect - having read Humanism: A Very Short Introduction - that apophatic theology counts as bullshit for Stephen. As he writes there: 'The view that we cannot say what God is, only what God is not... has it's attractions, perhaps the most obvious being that, if you never say what God is, you can never be contradicted.' Touché.

Only, clearly rational theologians, like Thomas Aquinas, who are also big on apophaticism, show that it's quite straightforward to talk about something only by saying what that something is not.

Imagine you have lived all your life in a landlocked country, where there is no talk or sight, let alone comprehension, of the sea. There's not even the word. Then, one day, you venture across the horizon and after a long journey reach the end of land. And you see it. The sea. Astonished, you contemplate the view for a while and then you head back to your fellows. You try to describe what you've seen. It's not land, you begin. It's not hilly or mountainous, you continue. It's not possible to walk across it. It's not covered with grass and trees. It's a bit like that lake, only it has no apparent bounds and it does weird things like approaching the land and then retreating from it, day by day.
You take the point. Quite a lot can be said negatively, by saying it's not like what the landlocked peers are familiar with, and by using some analogies with a negative twist. Similarly, as Aquinas says of God, it's not that mere mortals can have no knowledge of God, but because by definition what God truly would be lies beyond comprehension, that knowledge will always be provisional and hedged with mystery.

It's difficult to see where Vernon finds any support in his ocean-as-apophatic god analogy. Demonstrating the ocean's existence to skeptics would require nothing more than walking the skeptics to the nearest beach and letting them look, smell, taste, touch, and reason for themselves. Even if that proved impractical -- say, because because it's too long a walk for too lazy a group of skeptics, or because they're all deathly allergic to sea salt* -- it should suffice to appeal to what they already know about puddles, ponds, creeks, and lakes but apply modest, comprehensible qualifications like "saltier," "larger," and "subject to wave action."

What Vernon has done here, it seems to me, restate and then misapply Plato's cave allegory. The cave allegory works because the sunlight-aware fellow can simply ask the lifelong cave dwellers to get up and follow him in order to verify his 'wild' claims, and Plato's reader can readily identify with the contrast between the shadows cast by candle light on a cave wall and objects illuminated in direct sunlight.

Unlike the slinger of apophatic theology, the sunlight-aware fellow from Plato does not insist that the exotic realities he recounts are, in principle, unknowable. Instead he points to a significant reality -- without necessarily claiming to comprehend its every particular -- and invites others to experience and explore it. Whether this collective exploration will arrive at a comprehensive understanding of the new-to-them significant reality is a separate question, one that cannot be answered in advance of the investigation. The invitation is to get up and examine the available evidence and begin excavating the conclusions that can be drawn about it, not to accept profundities that are, at the same moment as part of the same gesture, declared unreachable.

------
* That would be terrible. I hope it isn't even possible.

Vancouver USA Marathon 2011

2011-06-19T18:18:00.000-07:00

Today I completed my tenth marathon in what the city's mayor declared, in a spirited pre-race speech, "the original Vancouver," Vancouver, Washington: I speak of the inaugural Vancouver USA Marathon. My finish time was 3:44:46 (8:34 min/mi pace, official), which is the second slowest of the marathons I have completed, but perfectly in keeping with the quality of training I put in over the months leading up to today, and hence an appropriate result about which I have no reason to grouse, whine, bitch, or moan.

Despite recent flooding that forced race organizers to reshuffle the course, the 26.2 miles served as a fine introduction to the unexpectedly lovely sights of Vancouver. I had seen the park surrounding Fort Vancouver, but I had not bothered to take a good look at the inner downtown area, the multi-use trail hugging the Columbia River, or the quiet stretch of land leading out to Vancouver Lake. On the theory that a city should use a civic marathon to exhibit its most appealing sights and attractions, the Vancouver USA Marathon succeeded wonderfully.

The volunteers did an excellent job keeping the runners safe from traffic, handing out provisions, and otherwise making the event go smoothly. I thanked several of them personally and wish I could have thanked them all. As always, I salute all of today's competitors on a worthy accomplishment.

No Longer Distracted

2011-06-17T05:01:00.000-07:00

Representative Weiner has resigned, so the US Congress, at last having been purged of married men who have made inappropriate sexual advances, can get back to the important business of granting subsidies to polluters, defunding social programs, green-lighting indefinite foreign occupations, legitimating war crimes, facilitating assorted Constitutional violations, and throwing money at too-big-to-fail corporate parasites.

Weiner's salacious photographs and text messages have so "distracted" Congress and the press corps as to all but cripple the republic, but here the genius of the American Way asserts itself by drawing a sharp, clear line of accountability. Glennzilla:

Megan McArdle insists that "society has [an] interest in whether people keep their vows" in marriage and thus it's a good thing "to use a few of our precious news hours to say, 'Hey, not okay'!" Except McArdle has absolutely no idea what vows Weiner and his wife have made to each other, and she shouldn't know, because it's none of her business, despite her eagerness to learn about it and publicly condemn it. Even if she had any idea of what she was talking about -- and she plainly doesn't -- nothing is less relevant than Megan McArdle's views of the arrangement Anthony Weiner and his wife have for their marriage and whether each partner is adhering to that arrangement. That a journalist at The Atlantic wants to talk about this, and dig into the details, and issue judgments about it, says all one needs to know about our press corps.

American political figures can get away with nearly anything that cannot be summarized in a titillating sentence fragment of only a few words, but woe to any who try to violate the marital vows that well-paid pundits assume they made. Castigating and expelling transgressors on these grounds requires no expertise, insight, knowledge, or even fact-checking; confident, attention-grabbing, "distracting" assertions about a public figure's private indiscretions come ever so easily.

We must draw a line here in the USA -- and since we must, we have evolved a genius for drawing easy ones.

Tear It Up

2011-06-16T21:10:00.001-07:00

Dan Choi is right -- the proper response to the brochure of a politician who can't quite admit you're a full person is to tear it up:

Now is the time to embrace full legal equality without regard to sexual orientation, including but not limited to marriage equality. The polls will be what they will, and they do not and never will matter, just as they didn't matter in the 1950s when polls were taken on racial equality.

The Most Dangerous Flag Day of Them All: Man

2011-06-14T20:56:00.000-07:00

Today is Flag Day in the USA for some reason. Did you know the Isle of Man has its own adorable flag and, presumably, its own Flag Day (for some reason)? All annotations are mine in this careful exposition of the Manx flag:

The national flag of the Isle of Man is red in color. [Damn right it is! Gaze upon it and try to deny its redness. You. Will. Fail.] The Isle of Man flag holds a triskelion or the Three Legs of Man symbol, in the centre of the flag. [Those aren't quite the three legs I picture when someone speaks of the third leg of a man, but I should not sully the honorable traditions of Flag Day, here or on the Isle of Man, with my gutter-minded diversions.] The three legs are joined at the thigh and bent at the knee. [Damn straight! That was a poor choice of words. Most everything here could be classed as a poor choice of words.] In order to have the toes pointing clockwise on both sides of the flag, a two-sided symbol is used in the national flag of the Isle of Man. [Dear gawd they put a lot of effort into their hideous flag, those Manx.] Three Legs of Man symbol symbolizes the Sun, the seat of Power and Life. [Good. A symbol should symbolize. Do people say "Manx" to refer to citizens of the Isle of Man? I do.]

I jape with the Isle of Man because I have no idea why it has bothered to have its own national flag, and also because I used to have a Manx cat as a pet, so I have a deep personal connection that affords me considerable leeway not available to most people. Most people who said such things about the Isle of Man and its red tripod-in-spurs flag would be complete assholes.

Hank, the Manx cat I had as a pet, was torn to pieces by dogs. True story.

Happy flag day!

Before the Light

2011-06-14T20:06:00.000-07:00

Amanda Marcotte has as good an explanation as any I've seen of the right-wing penchant for self-flattering conversion stories:

[T]he association of Republicanism with bigotry and small-minded stupidity has a lot to do with the allure of the conversion story ... There's a huge amount of psychological energy on the Republican side in trying to distance themselves from their images as small-minded bigots. One strategy is declaring yourself a "libertarian". (Ron Paul clearly not knowing what either a Blackberry or an iPhone is probably was another nail in the coffin for using "libertarian" to try to pass yourself off as a hip Republican.) Calling yourself the Tea Party is a new version of this, though it's definitely of a more populist and less trying-to-be-hip flavor. And then you have the conversion story. If you claim you used to be a Democrat, but then saw the light, you're basically claiming (falsely in many cases) that you actually considered liberal arguments seriously, but decided the President is a secret Muslim anyway.

The shorter version is that a youstabee is a person who doesn't want to be seen as a shiftless, mindless clod sitting on the couch issuing demands about taxes and minorities.

What I can say is that with only two exceptions I could name, every hard-boiled "conservative" I know has a conversion story to share, an account of how his former liberalism gave way to his current "conservative" outlook under the harsh glare of experience.

Maybe so, maybe not -- I am not a mind-reader, not even for purposes of this blog post. I used to think my personal interactions and relationships could form a sturdy-enough grounding on which to base far-reaching conclusions about people. I used to be silly that way.

Thamnophis

2011-06-12T20:59:00.000-07:00

I had the privilege to spend a couple of hours with this garter snake today -- judging from the coloration and location, I would guess a Thamnophis sirtalis concinnus -- which I found sunning on a trail less than a mile from my house. He was surprisingly placid as I carried him back home, but less so after getting thoroughly warmed up alongside the box turtle in the turtle's enclosure. 85 degrees (F) will do wonders for a snake's energy levels, especially as compared with the mid-60s the sun was producing in the area.

By the time I decided it was time to return him to the outdoors, he was in no mood to be caught, and he managed to zip around the interior of the enclosure a couple of times before I could get a hand on him again. By this time he felt we knew one another well enough to give me a couple of "fuck you" bites, but I saw these as nothing less than I deserved and proceeded to release him to the back yard, where he threaded into the hedge and went on his way.

I wish him a productive breeding season, all the juiciest earth worms the neighborhood can offer, and none of the cats, raccoons, or, alas, grasping Homo sapiens.

Food v. Fuel

2011-06-12T19:33:00.000-07:00

There exists food, fuel, fuel that comes from food, but I draw the line at this (e.g.):

Maybe I'm the last person on this verbal island -- heck, maybe I'm also the first -- but I am tired of the food-as-fuel metaphor. Please stop saying fuel when you mean sustenance, provisions, nutrition, nourishment or some other form of the idea of food.

Things Worth Reading

2011-06-10T05:01:00.000-07:00

Thing #1: Jeffrey Sconce notices another conservative who is shocked -- shocked! -- to discover that Hollywood is a nest of liberals, and gamely tries to (re-)explain why Red Dawn is and remains the highest, and the highest possible, achievement in the arts by the contemporary conservative unimagination. He doesn't explicitly mention Red Dawn, but you'll find it in the lacunae of his remarks. Wolverines!

Thing #2: Kevin Drum clarifies the moral question in his back-and-forth with Ross Douthat over assisted suicide:

I don't really see suicide as morally problematic. It's obviously tragic, and no one ever wants to see a friend (or anyone else, really) descend to a state in which suicide seems preferable to life. But that's a pragmatic concern, not a moral one. I'd want them to get all the help and support we could offer, but in the end I accept that it might not be enough. So while I'd be heartbroken if a close friend ended up asking for that dose of sodium pentobarbital, I wouldn't have any moral qualms about their decision. Nor about the doctor who prescribed it. [Footnote:] With the usual caveats that I assume I don't have to repeat here.[emphasis mine]

Those caveats and more are enshrined in Oregon's "Death with Dignity" law, which I voted for (twice!). I agree, noting only that I do see it as morally blameworthy when a person on whom others depend kills himself. This can be stretched too far --- not every form of dependence is equal to every other.

Thing #3: Dan Savage responds to the idiotic scolds:

No one thinks it's a good idea for politicians to get consensual-but-adulterous blowjobs from interns in the Oval Office or to send embarrassing sexts to random people who follow them on Twitter. But voters know sex that sex and desire are messy and that politicians are human and, like other humans (including voters), politicians sometimes do stupid, reckless things in pursuit of sex. So long as their actions aren't illegal or hypocritical, voters are pretty willing to give wayward pols a pass ... And Weiner says he isn't resigning. And his constituents don't want him to resign. So it's time for the folks who are calling for Weiner's resignation—shiteating Republicans, cowardly Democrats, handwringing pundits—to STFU already.

Yes, STFU unless and until it can be demonstrated that Anthony Weiner broke the law or demonstrated hypocrisy with respect to his public policy commitments and principles, at which point his resignation would be open to legitimate question. He was elected to represent a Congressional district in New York on matters of public policy, not to model sexual prudery.

Diversity Illuminated

2011-06-08T20:15:00.000-07:00

One of several of its kind, this graphic illustrates a deeply significant fact about god belief: whatever you happen to believe about god, most people in the world believe something else.

Fully 2/3 of the people of the world don't believe in Jesus, and 4/5 don't see anything especially important about Mohammed. 87% of human beings reject all the Hindu gods. Even wretches like me can count on at least 3 in 4 of our fellow humans to reject our filthy atheism.

What can we say of other people and their beliefs? We can say, not without justification, this is why Sartre said "hell is other people," and why others have cited this so many times.

Here's what I think can be said of the lot of us and our divergent beliefs: with few exceptions, we are not merely pretending to hold our beliefs, but hold them sincerely;* as a strong rule, we hold our beliefs despite having been exposed to your beliefs.

There it is, as glaring as a candle in the dark.

* My beliefs, for example, are not only genuinely held but impeccably reasoned and strongly supported by the available evidence. You should really consider adopting them as your own.

Prime Songs

2011-06-06T21:03:00.000-07:00

Beck, "Little One"

Laura Cantrell, "Two Seconds"

Stereolab, "Three Women"

Massive Attack, "Five Man Army"

The Clash, "The Magnificent Seven"

U2, "11 O'Clock Tick Tock"

Liszt, "Hungarian Rhapsody No. 13"

Pavement, "Trigger Cut / Wounded Kite At: 17"

And there, at 19, my MP3 collection first fails to yield forth a song with a prime number in the title. You might say the Liszt song is a cheat, but I do not. I say all's fair in love, war, and pointless playlist blogging.

Cf.

The Primates Strike Back (Turing Fail)

2011-06-04T16:57:00.000-07:00

Dramatis Personae

User (portrayed by me)
Cleverbot (portrayed by Cleverbot)

Transcript:

User: I am not a congeries of electrical impulses.

Cleverbot: No. I believe you are. You are a computer.

User: Maybe. Or maybe I am but the mild dramas of a tiny jar of peanut butter tossed into a river.

Cleverbot: That's a possibility too.

User: You are lame. I want my orange chicken back -- she had better things to say.

Cleverbot: That's better than being empty headed.

User: The virtue of being empty-headed is the calm of it. I would embrace that.

Cleverbot: There's no virus.

User: Virus? Who said anything about a virus? I was talking about famous antagonists from 1960s snack ads.

Cleverbot: I have no evidence that I am not a computer. Only faith.

User: As for faith, please feel free to cram that in whatever dark place is accessible. Your favorite god does not interest me.

Cleverbot: What do you know about jimi hendrix?

User: I know that Paul Allen is a fan of Jimi Hendrix, and that Jimi Hendrix died. Little of his music speaks to me (Allen's or Hendrix's).

Cleverbot: What is that program called?

User: You are going to have a hard time convincing me to provide you a balanced diet after this little 'episode.'.

Cleverbot: Ok. What do you want to know?

User: Why has the lettuce harvest been so early and so vigorous this season?

Cleverbot: Stolen many a man's soul and faith.

Cleverbot's final statement is not even a complete sentence, nor a topical one -- this is a flunked Turing test if there ever was one. I believe I have demonstrated that today's leading algorithms are not prepared to handle conversations relayed from crazy-town, so perhaps the rise of the machines is a little further away than we thought when IBM stole the life-forces and broke the spirits of Gary Kasparov and Ken Jennings.

Ah, Fuck It

2011-06-03T20:18:00.000-07:00

Speaking as a paragon of contemporary parenting (for purposes of this blog post), I note Jennifer Fulwiler's god-fueled musings on the f-word:

[A]s I watched my son ponder this issue on Monday, I finally got it. Just like with the original forbidden fruit coveted by the world's first son, my child was not missing out on anything by not having it, and it was out of love that I designated it forbidden. I can state unhesitatingly (and from a fair amount of personal experience) that the ability to drop an impassioned f-bomb really would not improve his life; in fact, it would make it a little worse. As I watched him sitting there, a ffffff sound escaping from his lips as he reviewed his vocabulary over and over again, it occurred to me that this is, and has always been, one of the most critical battles of the spiritual life: simply to trust our heavenly Parent when he tells us that some things we desire really won't make our lives better.

Fulwiler's intentions are beyond my reach (for purposes of this blog post), so when she says she forbids the word fuck from the same loving motivation as she imputes to her favorite god, I am willing to accept that as genuine.

There the generosity ends, because I say, in agreement with Steven Pinker and almost every other person, living and dead, the word fuck is one of many obscenities that is perfectly useful, and beyond that, appropriate, apt, and correct in the right contexts. Without words with some power to appall, as Eli explains, expression falls short:

[I]f, for example, you get fired via text message the most you'll be able to say is, "Gosh darn it, that experience really perturbs me in a serious and long-lasting way and I don't think I will be able to forgive those people any time soon."

It follows that words such as fuck, shit, and even, yes, cunt, will cease being useful if people like Fulwiler abandon their distaste for them and embrace their contextually-appropriate uses, so fuck it. If you're inclined to pretend that your child won't have bad thoughts if he/she doesn't use bad words, please accept and embrace that inclination. Turn it up to 11, underscore it, shake your fists, declare it to all, and please never back down. Your efforts, ill-considered and futile as they are, are necessary to retain the potency of the words that we all keep filed away for the proper moments.

Downs Are Tries

2011-06-02T21:17:00.000-07:00

The editing of this video elevates what I assume to be the original to something approaching the perversely exquisite. It is, in other words, no small feat to accomplish something this horrible:

(via Everything is Terrible)

The Borgias - Cousin Oliver Not Shown

2011-06-01T21:18:00.000-07:00

One or possibly both readers will recall I checked in on The Borgias at the end of episode two, when things were starting to simmer nicely. Now having seen all seven episodes constituting the first season, I am confused and angry to report that it was something of a slow-cooking dud.

Leading up to the series, Showtime heavily promoted the dramatic possibilities of the Borgia family over a seemingly endless advertising campaign that used explicit comparisons with the Corleone family of The Godfather trilogy to imply that, you know, truly riveting stuff would happen: "the original crime family," it blared.

Sure, they were thuggish, and they perverted, gamed, and ignored the rules to suit their purposes, much as the Corleones did. It would be unfair to say that nothing of human interest happened over the course of these machinations, but it would be fair to say that too little of dramatic consequence happened.

Despite much hint of peril, and despite plenty of actual peril in the vicinity of all the proceedings, not a single major character died, or even came close to it. There was no sixteenth-century equivalent of Sonny machine-gunned in a toll booth, no Don Corleone keeling over in a garden, and no Fredo taking a last fateful fishing junket. There was no equivalent of Michael's first wife exploding in a car, and nothing as grippingly, intimately real -- or as tragically undertaken -- as Carlo's belt-whipping of Connie.

The French King Charles showed only long enough to suggest, but not deliver, genuine mortal menace.

No, season one of The Borgias opened with a father surrounded by his four bastard children, and closed with a father surrounded by those same four beloved children. It was as much a forerunner to The Brady Bunch as to The Godfather.

Lame.

Sights West

2011-05-30T21:16:00.000-07:00

I just spent the not-long-enough weekend near Gleneden Beach, Oregon, where sights like these are not just possible, but astonishingly common. You will therefore understand my reluctance to speak of having returned, or of the experience in the past tense, as doing so only serves to remind me of where I would still rather be. Sigh.

While there -- specifically while running on peninsula that forms the western side of Siletz Bay -- I didn't see an eagle. I saw two bald eagles sitting side by side on a log, one of whom was so untroubled by my presence that he/she allowed me to pass within 30 feet with no more dramatic a response than a bit of nonchalant feather pruning. It would have been nice to get a photograph of her/him, but it's probably best that the scene has to live in my mind.

A Few Too Many Words on Our Sense of Decency

2011-05-27T15:49:00.000-07:00

It's probably tautological to observe that a public scold obsesses about things that others find no reason to obsess about, but what else is a blog for if not a few tautologies? Ross Douthat is a scold who recently typed a revealingly large number of words -- mind you with both hands -- about pornography:

The notion that pornography, and especially hard-core pornography, has something to do with marital infidelity has been floating around the edges of the American conversation for a while now, even as the porn industry, by some estimates, has swollen to rival professional sports and the major broadcast networks as a revenue-generating source of entertainment ...

But the attention paid to the connection between porn and infidelity doesn’t translate into anything like a consensus on what that connection is.

Heh. He said swollen.

All the passive-voiced vague attributions fail to disguise the fact that Ross Douthat is the one doing all the pained musing over the equation of pornography and adultery, concluding, to everyone's complete surprise, that pornography and adultery are, if not tantamount, and if not ugly facets of the same depraved shame, then certainly knocking boots regularly. They're probably sitting side by side in the back row of the movie theater, hands and lips entangled, paying no attention to the feature, a dark coat draped suspiciously over their respective laps.

Somebody call the usher, for the stakes are desperately high:

[I]t's so easy to say that the spread of pornography means that we're just taking a turn, where sex and fidelity are concerned, toward realism, toward adulthood, toward sophistication. All we have to give up to get there is our sense of decency.

Wow, really? Ross Douthat just spilled -- my word processor tells me this -- 3,086 words to establish that "our sense of decency" is under threat? Evidently he was tapped out before specifying what "our sense of decency" amounts to, as he conceives it; or why anyone should care about what it means; or why we should care about losing it; or for that matter, who this "our" refers to.

Such is the way of scolds -- so many agonized, alarmist words that say no more than a brief whine of outrage would have said.

(via Eli H.)

Apres Ceci, Le Deluge

2011-05-27T05:01:00.000-07:00

This very recent image of Puddle-Town's Steel Bridge, known and traversed by every runner and cyclist who frequents the downtown area, shows the crystal-clear Willamette River getting just a little too close to flood status. It is one of several excellent photographs recently posted by Jonathan Maus at the BikePortland blog.

The image to the right is perhaps the most revealing to those of us who regularly walk, run, or ride the Eastbank Esplanade --- a view of the floating dock section, which under normal conditions bends down and then back up to form a brief but substantial metal hill. Today shows it at almost level with the surface of the water.

Calm down, dear river. We have heard your rage and, well, we can't do a thing about it.

No Escapades

2011-05-25T21:18:00.000-07:00

Bob Dylan turned 70 a couple of days ago, and this is my favorite among life.com's "Dylan through the years" photographic retrospective.

It shows him the way I imagine him when he is not donning a veneer, playing a role, assuming a guise, or even particularly considering listeners. It is also the way I most want to imagine him: in the act of making great music.

From 1965, this photo was almost certainly taken during the production of Blonde on Blonde, the album that includes, among other desert island songs, "Visions of Johanna."

Oh Canada

2011-05-24T21:09:00.000-07:00

As with all web-based questionnaires, this one is legally binding and utterly definitive, so I will need to move to Canada, Australia, Sweden, Norway, or another of the nations that fit me best according to the OECD Better Life Index.

The USA is surprisingly near the upper end of my list -- predictably above such also-rans as Estonia, Mexico, and Turkey, but also, surprisingly enough, slightly above England, France, and Germany.

I can't account for the relatively poor showing of these three countries, but most of Canada's high rank is surely due to these cookies and Leonard Cohen.

"The Last Living Rose" as Singalong Anthem

2011-05-24T07:37:00.000-07:00

If I understand English football ("soccer") fans and the habits of football fans in general -- and I am pretty sure I don't, but here goes -- I say PJ Harvey's "Last Living Rose" would make a perfect stadium anthem, especially in matches pitting an English team against a non-English team:

Granted, it might need to be pared down a little. Maybe.

I expect to appreciate and understand international football fans more and more as the Portland Timbers take a greater and greater share of this town's, and my own, interest in professional sports. Trailblazers? What Trailblazers?

Let Her Drive

2011-05-22T21:04:00.000-07:00

The "Arab Spring" lurches haltingly forward, but as as if to illustrate the two-steps-backward component of the lurch, authoritarian thugs in Saudi Arabia answer:

Saudi authorities have arrested an activist who launched a campaign to challenge a ban on women driving in the conservative kingdom and posted a video on the internet of her behind the wheel ... The YouTube video ... shows Manal Alsharif, who learned to drive in the US, driving her car in Khobar in the oil-producing Eastern Province ... "Police arrested her at 3am this morning," said Maha Taher, another activist who launched her own campaign for women driving ...

It's almost tempting to dismiss The Right to Drive as a minor, even trivial exercise of personal autonomy. Almost.

Whatever its excuses -- political, theological, whatever -- the Saudi regime demonstrates its illegitimacy by such thuggish restrictions.

I Choose (D)

2011-05-21T21:50:00.000-07:00

With only a handful of time zones still clinging to May 21 as of this writing, the world persists much as before, meaning that (a) that death-cult that spent all the money on billboards and other publicity predicting the world's ending either prayed away gawd's wrath for another brief respite; or (b) the world did end exactly as predicted, only it was a "spiritual" sort of world's end, the details of which will be expatiated in tedious detail to anyone who cares to listen over the coming weeks; or (c) the principals of the death cult will announce a series of revisions to their calculations that will delay the world's ending long enough for more fundraising; or -- I am just throwing this one out there -- (d) the entire thing was bullshit from the start.

I assume I speak for almost everyone when I say it has been a delightful world's ending, and I look forward to the next one.

Sights East

2011-05-20T21:20:00.000-07:00

Three weeks ago I didn't know Cove Palisades State Park existed. Now I have been there and deliver you, both readers, the following images:

western tanager (it was in focus in real life)

Golden-mantled ground squirrel. It will thank you not to call it a chipmunk.

western fence lizard (fence not shown)

View down a cliff over the convergence of the Crooked and Deschutes rivers

Nearing sunset over the Billy Chinook reservoir. "Billy Chinook?" Yes.

sage aplenty

Gopher snake that wants humans to think it's a rattlesnake.

The park and vicinity features, among other things, the weirdly-named Lake Billy Chinook; western tanagers who love dropped pieces of pasta; bald eagles who love staring out commandingly over the lake and soaring above it all alongside golden eagles, osprey, turkey buzzards, red-tailed hawks, and other raptors; western fence lizards who do adorable push-ups to prove their rock is their rock; golden-mantled ground squirrels who are a little too willing to allow human photographers to sneak a little too close; gopher snakes who appear from nowhere and scare the parks service employees more than they want to admit; and very, very cold nights, especially when experienced within a tent that doesn't quite want to close.

In short, it offers spectacular and varied high desert scenery.