The Serviceberry – Robin Wall Kimmerer

Charles Eisenstein expresses that we have created a grotesque economy that grinds what is beautiful and unique into money, a currency that enables us to purchase things we don’t really need while destroying what we do.

The Serviceberry – Robin Wall Kimmerer

In a gift economy, wealth is understood as having enough to share, and the practice for dealing with abundance is to give it away.

An interesting Thanksgiving story… www.themarginalian.org

Books Read: Faith, Hope and Carnage by Nick Cave 📚

Just finished reading. I have become a fan of Nick Cave in the last few years. This book is a deep dive into his faith, music and philosophy of life. Often moving, filled with insight. Highly recommended.

Nick Cave - The Red Hand Files - Issue #212 - Is it better to keep quiet, or to speak one’s mind? : The Red Hand Files

… Nick Cave’s description of what a good faith conversation is and is not is useful…

What If… Listicles Are Actually an Ancient Form of Writing and Narrative? ‹ Literary Hub

… this book excerpt is really fascinating… ideas are exploding in my head…

Made fish stock over the weekend… think i may be heading for a bouillabaisse in the near future…

A filibuster proof bipartisan group of Senators set to pass protections for same sex marriage…

reason.com/volokh/20…

Nature Is Always Listening: The Science of Mushrooms, Music, and How Sound Waves Stimulate Mycelial Growth – The Marginalian

… mushrooms can perceive sound?..

Really enjoying this book. Full of recipes and stories. The recipes are interesting. Presented in narrative form, they are more a guide than a recipe. They give you guidance but you have to deploy your cooking spidy sense to make them. Some experience helps.

Maybe I am old fashioned but I find it really offensive when someone decides to conduct a business call in the middle of a quiet cafe early on a Sunday morning…

Illinois Is Poised to Pass a Huge Win For Workers – Mother Jones

A constitutional amendment that bans “right-to-work” laws within the state, among other things, is set to pass. This is major!

“As far as I can see, social media makes you sick.”

Nick Cave

About two weeks ago I put a fresh pencil in my bag thinking this one would soon need replacement. It’s still waiting…

Leaf Shadows

November hues.

… re-read my notes from yesterday… good notes… even though my morning process has been interrupted somewhat by the need to give medication to one of our dogs… today is the last day of that…

Letters from an American, November 02, 2022

… President Biden addressed the nation last night… he told the people, Democracy is on the ballot… yes it is… this morning’s HCR post is largely quotes from that speech… Biden urges voters to assess not the economy, not inflation, but whether the candidate they might vote for believes in Democracy… have they said they will abide by the vote, win or loose?… if not, if they are election deniers, then we need to turn our backs on them and vote for the person who will abide by the vote, by the will of the people… she quotes Joseph Nye Welch, who famously confronted Joseph McCarthy:

“Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness…. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

… i am feeling hopeful about the election… early voting has been enormous… in my mind, that favors Democrats… but we will see… we have voted… i voted a straight Democratic ticket… there is no other choice in my mind… Republicans need to be turned back… i will be more discriminating when i feel Democracy is secure and the lunatic MAGA people are no longer an issue…

… the work of artist Crystal Liu, a strong Chinese landscape feeling… i like them…

… i have been photographing with my Nikon lately… i get better quality color images from it… i don’t particularly like the 2x3 frame of the 35MM format… i have been cropping them to 4x5 which is quite a crop… still, if you are thinking about that crop when you shoot, you include more on the sides than you than the picture you are taking warrants… so you can crop… at any rate… i have been making some landscape photos in the vertical and was tempted to leave them in the 2x3 format… i didn’t… i can’t stand that proportion these days…

Reclaiming Our Human Potential in the Age of Technological “Progress”

… Maria Popova writes about and quotes Dervla Murphy, an Irish woman who rode her bicycle from Ireland to Afghanistan… it was a feat for a woman to do such a thing in the times she did it… i am not sure it would be possible in today’s political and social climate… it wasn’t really safe back then… it’s less so now… the point of the quotes shared though is about how technology has succeeded in separating us from nature and deprived us of the full use of our powers…

The more I see of unmechanised places and people the more convinced I become that machines have done incalculable damage by unbalancing the relationship between Man and Nature. The mere fact that we think and talk as we do about Nature is symptomatic. For us to refer to Nature as a separate entity — something we admire or avoid or study or paint — shows how far we’ve removed ourselves from it.

… there was a time, when i was young, that i believed in the promise of technology and science… i still do to some degree… i suppose it’s the combination of science, technology and capitalism that is the problem, and one cannot have any of these things separately, it seems to me… i wish i could somehow envision a society without capitalist greed… Buddhist Economics is what i would aspire to… would it work?… what is so good about all this science and technology anyway?… longer lives?… better health?… for what?… at this critical moment in the world, much is being challenged and challenging… what will the next few years bring?…

How to Be Un-Dead: Anais Nin and D.H. Lawrence on the Key to Living Fully

… embrace the wild and wonderful process of life… embrace it’s trials and tribulations… embrace the process and move through it without regret… do the best you can… accept the unfolding… be in the midst of it… whatever it is…

Bern and Hilla Becher’s Misunderstood Oeuvre

… the article, written by Julia Curl, takes issue with the idea that the Becher’s were aloof, emotionally disconnected from the work… from the world… how else could they produce such clinically sterile work?… i am with JC… no artist is emotionally disconnected from their work… they make art because they feel… i can’t think of an exception to that statement unless we are talking about AI generated artwork… am i aloof because i make photographs without people?… some might think so, but i feel the photographs… at least the ones that are most important to me…

Letters from an American, October 28, 2022

… Paul Pelosi, husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi attacked… all indications are that while the attacker may have been a little off his nut, he was steeped in right wing hatred and had been radicalized by conspiracy theories promulgated by the right… this puts me in mind of this quote from Don Quixote by Cervantes:

When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies?

… HCR goes on to discuss the ratcheted landscape where violence ideation is running rampant… national security departments are all warning of a heightened threat environment surrounding the midterm elections…

… and then she turns to Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter… Musk has promised, threatened?, to allow 45 back on Twitter… pundits speculate that a content moderation free environment on Twitter isn’t likely as advertisers would run from the platform… General Motors has already paused its advertising until it sees what things look like under new management… right wingers seem to be testing the new management as there has been a significant uptick in antisemitic and racist posts on the platform…

‘Bros’ and ‘Ticket to Paradise’ Reviews

… Bros came to our local theater and i contemplated going to it… thought i should go to it just to take in a gay romantic comedy, but at the end of the day i really didn’t have much interest in watching guys get it on, romantically or otherwise… turns out i am not alone as the movie has been a box office failure… perhaps rom coms are not the best format for exploring LGBTQ+ love… still, i am aware that there are love comedies that i might enjoy, such as two women falling in love and getting it on… or, possibly a transvestite falling in love with a straight man… my kinky proclivities run in the direction of cross dressing, though i never have but in the most minimal way… sounds like i would enjoy Ticket to Paradise… hopefully that too will come to my local theater…

Everyone Agrees Democracy Is in Danger. No One Agrees Why.

… according to a recently released New York Times/Siena survey—that 59 percent of respondents in that category believe it’s the mainstream media that poses a “major threat.” That compares with 45 percent who say Trump is a major threat, and 38 percent who say Biden is.

… butchered as that first sentence is, its a bit astonishing that a far greater majority point to the mainstream media as a problem than in any other direction… as a liberal, i immediately think that this would be because moderates and liberals think Fox and (if they know a thing or two about media markets across the country), Clear Channel are the problem and there are more of them in general… i do think media and social media are a problem… even on the left, it is easy to get a bit siloed into looking at things through one lens only and all media does what it needs to do to gather peoples attention and this often means playing up the threat levels of the other side…

• 28 percent say Democrats pose a major threat

• 33 percent say Republicans pose a major threat
• 27 percent say the Supreme Court poses a major threat
• 33 percent say the federal government poses a major threat
• And 27 percent say the Electoral College while 20 percent say electronic voting machines and 33 percent say voting by mail pose major threats

In short, a whole lot of Americans—71 percent in total—think that our democracy itself is in peril, but there’s no consensus as to the source of the danger.

… although i had no idea of the diversity of options for democratic failure blame, i was very certain that when MSNBC cited polls suggesting that the preservation of Democracy was a top concern for voters across the country, that did not represent a consensus on what the problem was… right wingers are being told democracy is threatened and believe it, just as much as left wingers are and do… personally, i think the case left wingers make is more substantial at the present moment… even so, there is not national clarity on this issue…

Imagine back in 1941, on the eve of Pearl Harbor, if roughly equal percentages of Americans had been as worried about at attack from Britain as they were an attack from Imperial Japan.

… how does one find a way forward when there is no consensus?… in this regard, my plan has been to refuse to talk about my side vs your side, my guy vs your guy… i instead want to focus on particular issues and discuss feelings and ideas about them… our politicians and the media have pressed us into being team players… we need to resist that…

Ruben Östlund on the Realism and Black Humour of Triangle of Sadness

… this movie actually sounds pretty interesting… it makes the to-watch list…

Daily Notes

I’m Jewish and I Don’t Want to Leave Again

… that an American Jew felt the need to write this post is itself disturbing…

When to leave? That’s the question every Jew has embedded in our DNA. When did people know to leave Germany? Russia? Where do you go? What do you take? What do you leave behind? How will you live, if you live?

We are waiting for the midterms and then we will decide. 

They say antisemitism is the oldest hatred. But it is hard to know who is historically more hated: Jews, women, or homosexuals. There is the problem of human nature and the question: Why do things never really change? But having those three giant targets on my back, the time might be now.

… i worry about the midterms too…

The Art World Reacts to Ye’s Hateful Comments

… what the fuck is Ye up to?… a black man hating jews, selling “White Lives Matter” t-shirts, purchasing Parler and just being an all round shit?…

It’s been a long October in the realm of Ye’s erratic, attention-seeking behavior. In the last three weeks, Ye has had his “White Lives Matter” t-shirts delivered to Los Angeles’s homeless population in Skid Row, made moves to purchase the conservative social media app Parler, and made a series of antisemitic comments and theories publicized on social media (on now blocked accounts), and the Drink Champs podcast interview that has since been deleted. Several companies affiliated with Ye and his projects have woken up from their daze and severed ties with the disgruntled artist at last.

… i am just as baffled with black people becoming 45 supporters and election conspiracy hawks… do they understand that any Christian Nationalist government is not going to hold them in high esteem?… already doesn’t hold them in high esteem…

“I’d Read Her Grocery Lists.” On Cooking with Sylvia Plath

We know, from the dates on her entries, that she made lemon pudding cake on the day she wrote “Lady Lazarus”—in which she grapples with her own repeated, unsuccessful suicide attempts. “Dying / Is an art, like everything else / I do it exceptionally well” she wrote, while beaten egg whites stiffened in the oven. In the process of drafting “Death & Co”—a poem as cutting and nihilistic as its title suggests—she prepped tomato soup cake, blood red and bittersweet. A signature recipe of hers, it requires, among other things, two cups of butter and one can of condensed tomato soup.

… tomato soup cake?… i wonder if i can find a recipe for that… and there is…

The kitchen was the axis on which her whole world spun. It was where she wrote, stood, boiled, diced, longed, mourned, revised.

… i think of my own kitchen existence… right along side the photography work and my writing…

It’s not lost on me that looking for cooking inspiration from a woman whose last great baking project was, well, her final act, is a questionable project (whether or not we can joke about the matter is another complicated question). But for Plath, the stovetop was an altar of a kind, the kitchen, a chapel—the whole room wreaked of guilt, shame, wickedness, tomato soup—as restrictive as it was holy.

… i seem to be on a food binge this morning… on making a map of Toronto identifying all the various places one can get dumplings…

Versatile, Universal, and Delicious: Karon Liu on the Magic of Dumplings

Toronto is the perfect city to create such a map: a metropolis that has evolved to be one of the most diverse culinary destinations in the world, thanks to waves of migration resulting in cuisines from disparate parts of the world commingling with each other. This place is a mix of cooks practicing centuries-old techniques learned from previous generations, innovators sharing new creations in the age of TikTok, and cooks embracing their third-culture cooking—combining what they learned from their parents with the new flavors and methods that come from living in a city where a roti spot, a sushi restaurant, and a souvlaki joint can all be found in a single plaza.

Letters from an American, October 23, 2022 #american-history #voting-rights #voter-intimidation

… HCR offers a history lesson about how white southerners intimidated the vote in the aftermath of the Civil War and managed to establish one party (Democratic) rule across the south… she tells us the same thing is happening again, except more broadly…

Over the weekend, the Maricopa County Elections Department announced that two people, both armed and dressed in tactical gear, stationed themselves near a ballot drop box in Mesa, Arizona. They left when law enforcement officers arrived. At least two voters later filed complaints of voter intimidation, both complaining that they were filmed dropping off ballots. One complained of being accused of “being a mule,” a reference to people who are allegedly paid to gather ballots and stuff drop boxes for Democratic candidates.

The great triumph of Movement Conservatives in the 1980s was to convince Republican voters to ditch the ideology of their founding and instead embrace the ideology of the old Confederacy.

And now, we are in the next stage of that pattern: Republicans are using intimidation to keep Democrats from voting.

If we continue in this direction, we already know how it turns out: with a corrupt one-party government that favors an elite few and mires the rest of us in a world without recourse to legal equality or economic security.

… i don’t know that i will encounter voter intimidation when i go to vote, but, if i do i will walk right past it and cast my ballot…

This Close-Up of an ant’s Face Will Scar You Forever… indeed… #nature #macro-photography #photography

Eugenijus Kavaliauskas’s terrifyingly close-up photo of an ant (all images courtesy the artists and Nikon Small World)

… fabulous images from Nikon Small World competition… they are not all so scary, mostly beautiful…

Rare 2,700-ear-Old Stone Carvings Discovered in Iraq… #art #archaeology #cultural-heritage #iraq #isis #mashki-gate #nineveh #middle-east

Eight marble slabs were excavated underneath the Mashki Gate, partially destroyed by the Islamic State in 2016. (all photos via Iraqi State Board of Antiquities & Heritage on Facebook)

… the slabs were found at Mosul’s Mashki Gate (Gate of God)… part of the effort to conquer and subjugate peoples is to destroy their history by destroying their cultural artifacts which is what ISIS militants did in 2016… the slabs were buried which saved them from damage…

In total, eight stone slabs were uncovered by a team of scholars and researchers affiliated with the University of Mosul and the University of Pennsylvania’s Iraq Heritage Stabilization Program. The excavation is being undertaken as part of a collaboration with antiquities authorities in Iraq, with the end goal of converting the vandalized Mashki Gate monument into an educational center exploring the history of Nineveh. The slabs will stay in Iraq.

Since 2014, the Islamic State has ravaged Iraq and Syria’s museums, libraries, and cultural heritage sites.

[The Most Important Poem of the 20th Century: On T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” at 100] #literature #poetry #ts-eliot #the-waste-land #to-read

… this article is a long read, but very illuminating of Eliot and the poem…

It’s as if this poem can give anything—a cry, a list of place-names, a snatch of conversation, a Sanskrit word, a nursery rhyme, an echo—an almost infinite and carrying resonance that brings with it unforgettable intensity.

Certainly, poetry was not the same after _The Waste Land_; at the same time, it’s perhaps more difficult to trace the influence of the poem than it is with Pound’s experimentations.

_The Waste Land_ has seeped into culture as a moving set of referents to describe urban alienation, fracture, cultural collapse. It also has a striking ability, inherent in its form I suppose, to speak across cultures.

I think Jahan’s recent lecture on “Burying the Dead: The Waste Land, Eco-Critique and World Elegy,” which I was lucky enough to hear in London at the International T. S. Eliot Summer School, and which, I gather, is available to read free in volume 4 of the _T. S. Eliot Studies Annual,_ is the most brilliant recent piece of Eliot criticism. It shows strikingly just how relevant the poem is to a great range of contemporary poets.

Me and my shadow move through the landscape…

… there was no Heather Cox Richardson this AM so i will start with my other favorite woman purveyor of good information and inspiration, Maria Popova… i have been reading Brain Pickings and now The Marginalian for a long time and have encountered her list of life learnings from time to time and have been struck by them… this morning, this Sunday morning i sat down to read the latest edition (she adds one life learning every year) and was moved to tears, so profoundly good it is…

16 Life-Learnings from 16 Years of the Marginalian

… and here is a sweet tradition that, but for the pandemic, i might try to emmulate myself… maybe in the spring, when we can gather outdoors…

A waffle Maker Seemed Unnecessary–Until I shared It With Others

… because i am deeply into the feminine, and all aspects of being woman, even though i myself am a man, and a heterosexual one at that… this article on feminist books got my attention…

Top 10 experimental feminist books

… on to the daily seriousness of life in the world…

An Appeals Court Has Temporarily Paused Biden’s Student Debt Relief Plan

Republicans have turned the student loan relief program into a flashpoint ahead of the midterms. Celebrating the Eighth Circuit ruling, Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge tweeted that “hardworking Americans who did not take on this debt should not be forced to shoulder this burden.” And on Friday, President Biden called out GOP lawmakers including Sen. Ted Cruz from Texas and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) on their “hypocritical’ outrage over the program. “Who the hell do they think they are?” he said during remarks at Delaware State. “I don’t want to hear it from MAGA Republican officials who had hundreds of thousands of dollars of debts, even millions of dollars, in pandemic relief loans forgiven, who now are attacking me for helping working- and middle-class Americans.”

… and here is the same story told through a libertarian lens…

Federal Court Temporarily Halts Biden’s Student Loan Forgiveness Plan

But the Biden student loan forgiveness scheme is going to cost taxpayers an estimated $400 billion in order to transfer a staggering amount of wealth to people who in most cases are already quite well off. The whole thing is based on a legally dubious reading of a post-9/11 law that allowed the president to forgive student loans for first responders—and rest on Biden’s pandemic emergency powers, despite his own admission that the pandemic is over. Surely, someone must have standing to sue over this.

… i tend to support the position of the Biden Administration on this but have to confess that i don’t have a complete grasp of the issues…

… this article on sustaining determination in Ukraine seems important…

The Words About Ukraine That Americans Need to Hear

A good speech on Ukraine will not invoke the phrase “rules-based international order,” which might resonate in a freshman introduction to international relations, but not with an audience of normal people. Rather, Americans and Europeans need to hear about the consequences if Russia were to crush Ukraine; about the invasions and depredations that would surely come next in the Baltic states, and quite likely beyond; about the conclusions a no less ruthless Chinese government would draw; and about how a failure to take a stand here would mean something much bigger and more dangerous in a few years’ time. They need to hear how staunchness now, even in the face of nuclear threats, is infinitely better than a large-scale, possibly global war in a decade. They need to hear that world war is not just the stuff of history books or their grandparents’ or great-grandparents’ lives, but a possibility for us if we are not prudent now.

… this piece in The Bulwark about patriotism, what it is, what it isn’t, is a preaching to the choir sort of piece, but i thought a good reminder for the choir of what is important…

Why Are You a Patriot

Minority Leader and would-be House speaker Kevin McCarthy is saying that a Republican-majority Congress would not “write a blank check” to Ukraine. That’s a red herring, of course, because Ukraine is not asking for a blank check, nor has it ever asked for a single American to risk his life for Ukraine’s freedom. They are merely asking for the means to defend themselves. But more than that, with their courage and sacrifice they are redeeming the idea of liberty at a time when many around the world were losing faith in democracy. Ukrainians are demonstrating that contrary to the propaganda of autocrats everywhere, democracies are actually stronger than dictatorships. And they are showing that some things, like the right to live free—to think what you want, read what you want, worship as you wish, and say what you think—are worth fighting and dying for.

Fro this morning’s walk…

… the Chinese have a curse, so it is said, “may you live in interesting times”… boy are we living in interesting and unsettling times… Heather Cox Richardson, reviews Joe Biden’s speech from the Roosevelt room in which he made his case to the American people that his economic policies really are better for the country and the nations’s economic performance demonstrates that… unemployment at all time lows; infrastructure getting repaired and improved; the deficit coming down (which it has also done during the last three Democratic presidencies, while going up under every Republican president since Reagan)… Steve Bannon received a sentence at the upper range of guidelines for his refusal to respond to a subpeona from the 1/6 committee… former President Trump received his own subpoena which made a detailed case for his being at the center of the the January 6 insurrection… news also broke that some of the documents that Trump took with him to Mar-a-Lago…

… contained highly sensitive material about Iran and China, including information about Iran’s missile program.

… HCR’s post ends on an ominous note…

Finally, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin today called his Russian counterpart Sergei Shoigu for the first time since May 13. The Pentagon says it wants to keep the lines of communication open.

Decision to Leave is a Stirring Hitchcockian Neo-Noir… another glowing review of the movie…

Technically speaking, _Decision to Leave_ might be the best-made film of the year. It is nothing short of breathtaking, with glowing cinematography from Ji-yong Kim and pitch-perfect editing from Park’s frequent collaborator Sang-beom Kim.

Imani Perry: To Understand America, We Have to Understand the South… a look at Perry’s latest book, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation… this book sounds really interesting… the premise… uncomfortably… has the ring of truth to me… another one to add to my long list… i wish i could find more time to read… more time to understand…

How to Outsmart Election Disinformation… every U. S. citizen should read this… full of resources for making sure you get to vote and that you are not being snookered by misinformation…

A Disturbing Number of Americans Endorse Violence to “Top Voter Fraud” and Return Trump to Power…

In the final weeks before the 2022 midterms, faced with multiple government investigations, Donald Trump has tripled down on a disturbing pattern of incitement. He continues to stoke grievance and fear and use inflammatory rhetoric that is likely to instigate random followers to violence, a technique experts call stochastic terrorism.

… and…

Now, a new study published by the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California-Davis reveals a growing acceptance in the United States of political violence, particularly among Americans who identify as partisan Republicans.

Christian Nationalists Are Closer Than You Think to Running America… Mother Jones can be given to hyperbole in its article titles… click bait… they are a pretty liberal take on the news and politics… still, i think we need to pay attention to Christian Nationalists… i think Roe v. Wade is more than the canary in the coal mine…

They, Borowicz says, _hate the Bible_: Democrats, COVID-conscious governors, librarians letting “pornography”—read: queer-friendly literature—into schools, trans people, pastors who didn’t fight lockdown orders, and Barack Obama, “the opposite of light.” (COVID, by the way, is “punishment for our sins.”)

… no, i don’t hate the bible, i simply can’t tolerate any idiot who wishes to push it on me as the only meaningful source of information in the world…

… on a lighter note…

Weirdly, Taylor Swift Is Extremely Close to Creating a True Metaverse… according to this article the only thing missing from Swift’s launch of her new album, Midnights, is a “3-D space to hang out in.”

To call what Swift is doing with this album release “online savvy” or “audience engagement” or “marketing” is to undersell it. She has, in a way, created a virtual universe in which fans can experience the launch. As _The__Washington Post_’s Emily Yahr recounts, Swift has left puzzles and secret messages for fans for more than 15 years, embedding them in her album liner notes, music videos, and social-media posts, and even (if the theories are right) in the clothing she wears. The result is a near-year-round ecosystem that’s pretty much constantly bubbling away online.

… i wonder if “weirdly” isn’t a bit of disrespect to a woman creator… weirdly, as in unexpectedly, as in surprising from a woman… hmmm…

… wow, so much attention to a movie most people are disturbed by… America’s Favorite Marilyn Monroe Cliché…

Let’s be clear: She was not Norma Jeane. She Chose to be Marilyn.

Heather Cox Richardson is a doozy today… she covers the resignation of Liz Truss, after only 44 days in office… Liz Truss was trying to pursue a Thatcheresque agenda, the center feature of which were big tax cuts, aka supply side economics, an idea which seems increasingly proven to be ineffective at its stated goals (but not perhaps at its intended goals in the US, shrinking government and putting absolute control in the hands of the wealthy)… because there was no way of paying for the tax cuts proposed, the markets swooned and chaos ensued… to be sure, economic problems have been on the horizon for Britain since at least 2008, but it became clear that isolationism (Brexit) and supply side economics are not a winning formula… she goes on to talk about MAGA conservative reaction to the British debacle as nothing less than extreme to the point of facism… she talks about statements from John Daniel Davidson, senior editor of The Federalist…

Davidson embraces using the power of the government to enforce the principles of the right wing, bending corporations to their will, starving universities that spread “poisonous ideologies,” getting rid of no-fault divorce, and subsidizing families with children. “Wielding government power,” he writes, “will mean a dramatic expansion of the criminal code.” Abortion is murder and should be treated as such, parents who take their children to drag shows “should be arrested and charged with child abuse,” doctors who engage in gender-affirming interventions “should be thrown in prison and have their medical licenses revoked,” “teachers who expose their students to sexually explicit material should not just be fired but be criminally prosecuted.”

… HCR concludes with the hopeful note that…

in Oklahoma, for the first time in decades, the _Tulsa World_ endorsed a Democrat, U.S. Representative Kendra Horn, rather than extremist Republican Markwayne Mullin, for the U.S. Senate.

… lets hope that more endorsements of sane candidates for office become the norm and that the November elections, just weeks away, are a turning of the tide away from MAGA conservatives…

Park Chan-wook on His “Obsessive” New Noir, Decision to Leave

It’s a film about obsession sculpted with a care that frequently skirts the obsessive, from a director whose past proclivity for outlandish sex and violence (Oldboy, _The Handmaiden_) has sometimes been allowed to obscure what an absolute master of his craft he is.

… i watched The Handmaiden (not to be confused with The Handmaid’s Tale) a while back… as i recall, it was a gratifying movie to watch, suspensful plot, non-gratuitous but satisfying sex scenes (hey, i’ve got a libido and i am not afraid to feed it), outstanding acting… adding Decision to Leave to my to-see list…

… really like Tess Roby’s photographs…

… see more here…

… as an aside, i have been making an unofficial study of how often sex is the clickbait for articles… the article on the above photographer led with this image…

… it’s really ubiquitous, but then we all should know that… as uptight about sex as we can be as a people in this country, mass culture is constantly using it as a lure… it’s hard to say if this is a disservice to this woman’s work… getting people to look at it is the point here, but it’s a kind of bait and switch… have a look at the full presentation and see what you think…

… bind boggling, thought provoking, dare i say profound?, quote from James Baldwin via Maria Popova…

It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one’s own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one’s strength. This fight begins, however, in the heart and it now had been laid to my charge to keep my own heart free of hatred and despair.

… wow, just wow… and this moves me on to a new post in The Red Hand Files, a blog site where Musician and Artist Nick Cave answers the questions of his fans… this morning, a man wrote in with some despair that a musician he adored was also a favorite of a sitting supreme court justice he loathed… he was having a great deal of trouble reconciling that fact… he felt “his” music defiled…

… from his answer…

I have racked my brains to think of someone who is undeserving of my music, but no matter how hard I try, I can’t bring anyone to mind. Perhaps I’ve just grown old and fuzzy and can no longer summon that flaming energy of outrage I remember from my youth. These days I’m not sure what position I can rightfully occupy where I can make those kinds of judgements.

In regard to ownership, I don’t feel I personally have any real claim over my songs. I feel they belong equally to those who love them. These songs have urgent work to do. I send them out into the world, bright emissaries of the spirit, to travel where they are needed, collecting souls as they go – to the joyful and the disheartened, the sick and the well, the grievers and those yet to grieve, the lost and the found, the good and the bad and the somewhere in-between. They become a great whirling conga-line of souls, in all their despicable beauty, frugging to Stagger Lee or shedding a tear to Ghosteen, all the way into the sun. Justin, I’m very glad you are one of them. It’s good to have you with us.

… read more here, and subscribe to The Red Hand Files here…

… and OMG!… when i look at an image like this i wonder what the hell we are all fighting about down here…

The Pillars of Creation photographed by NASA’s James Webb Telescope