… 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

Today’s beach treasure.

It seems to me that the technology to draw circles must have been known from the very early days of wo/mankind…

… Letters From an American… today’s letter covers debt relief for farmers, the DOJ moves to enforce antitrust laws causing seven directors of corporate boards to resign… U.S. District Court Judge David O. Carter for the Central District of California forced the release of emails Trump lawyer John Eastmen had been trying to hold back… these emails appear to confirm:a that:

Trump appears knowingly to have lied, in writing, under oath, to a court.

… and in Ukraine war news…

… Russian president Vladimir Putin declared martial law in the four regions of Ukraine he has claimed illegally to annex, undermining his argument for annexing them: the idea that their inhabitants want to join Russia. He has also given Russian regional governors emergency powers.

… the debt relief for farmers sounds as though it is needed but also timed and intended to help Democrats in the midterm elections and undermine Repbulican arguments against student loan debt relief… farmers are a Republican constituency and it seems unlikely that Republican legislators would howl over the farmer relief the way they have over student debt relief… rock and a hard place on that one…

… Maria Popova offers encouraging words from C. S. Lewis… do not procrastinate, the past is tumultuous, the present is tumultuous, and from that we can gather, the future is tumultuous… make as you feel compelled to make…

There are always plenty of rivals to our work. We are always falling in love or quarrelling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavourable. Favourable conditions never come. (C. S. Lewis via Maria Popova)

… an article on two curious works, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Tractatus Philosophico-Poeticus by Signe Gjessing, a poem based on Whittgenstein’s Tractatus… as described in this article, Tractatus is a rather austere view of organizing the world, the basics of which were worked out in the trenches of WWI… interestingly he kept, in the same journal he was working out the Tractatus a private journal, written in code, which revealed his reactions to the actual messiness of himself and the war torn world he was deeply imbedded in… it strikes me as a valiant effort to make sense, order, out of the absolute chaos of world and self…

All that Wittgenstein sought to expunge from philosophy in the _Tractatus_ — ethics, aesthetics, the “mystical” — appears in abundance in the agonized pages of the _Personal Notebooks_.

… Signe Gjessing’s Tractatus Philosophico-Poeticus strikes me as a response work that is free of the tumult of war and, consequently, able to be in awe of the beauty of an unpredictable universe, rather than needing to cope with a viciously wild and unruly one… i wish i had more time to read… i build up books on my wishlist that are far more than i can read in my available life time…

… and on the book banning, censorship front… Nora Roberts has Pitched in $25,000 to save another library at risk… citizens in some states and cities have taken to defunding the library as a tactic to force them to remove objectionable (to them) materials or displays… while book banning and censorship of content does cut both liberal and conservative ways, it is more prevalent from the conservative end of the spectrum right now… a new battlefront of the culture wars…

… and in Georgia, citizens are voting in record numbers during the first two days of early voting…

As of Wednesday morning, more than 268,000 Georgians had cast their ballots during early, in-person voting—a 75.3 percent increase from the day two totals for the 2018 midterms, and a 3.3 percent increase from those for the 2020 presidential election, according to the Georgia Secretary of State’s office. The turnout is especially impressive in light of a 2021 law aimed at restricting the right to vote in Georgia.

… there is no opinion in the article about which side might be favored in such a turnout, but my impression is that early voting favors Dems, as Republicans like to vote on election day… fingers crossed…

… David Corn on the whimpering conclusion of the Durham investigation into the “deep state Russia hoax”… spoiler alert, it was a largely legitimate investigation that had some flaws, but overall, not sinister… there were real concerns and those concerns appear to have been justified as demonstrated by a bi-partisan Senate investigation and the Mueller investigation…

Durham has not been Trump’s savior. He lost both cases that he brought to trial, and he ended up showing that Trump has been conning the American public about one of the most serious events of recent years: a foreign adversary’s attack on the United States. Acting as Barr’s henchman, Durham, though, has helped to divert attention from how Trump betrayed the United States. That has been a grand service for Dear Leader. Nevertheless, in the Danchenko case, Durham demonstrated that Trump’s claim of a hoax has itself been a hoax. That’s a far bigger story than the small-fry cases Durham prosecuted and botched.

… that Trump lied?… of course he did… and does… and always will…

… on the climate change front… protestors toss cans of tomato soup over Van Gogh’s sunflower painting (which was protected by glass, so no harm was done to any art in the making of the protest), and then glued themselves to the wall beneath the painting… the article tells us we can expect more in the weeks to come in countries around the world… art museums are the high temples of capitalism, so it makes sense as a place to call attention to the climate crisis facing the world… as long as art is not actually harmed…

… as i do most mornings, i start with reading the latest from Heather Cox Richardson…

as of yesterday, drug prices got cheaper, especially for seniors, and hearing aids are now an over the counter item, saving consumers as much as $3000/pair… and a historic peace agreement between Israel and Lebanon has been brought to a conclusion with the assistance of the Biden administration…

But all that news got drowned out by the continuing drama coming from the Republican Party. As Republican political strategist Sarah Longwell wrote in _The Bulwark_ today, the Republican Party is facing an “extinction event,” having been taken over by former president Trump to become the right-wing MAGA Party. As Longwell wrote, “In the Republican party as it is currently constituted, political power emanates completely and totally from Donald Trump.”

… i linked the Bulwark article yesterday…

… a really fascinating article on the bōsōzoku, motorcycle gangs of Japan and their portrayal in film and animation…

Wearing boots, boiler suits and bandanas – dubbed _tokkō-fuku,_ meaning “special attack uniform” – they roamed the streets wielding baseball bats and Molotov cocktails on weekends, causing public nuisances and engaging in violent turf wars. Their association with Japan’s notorious crime syndicate, the _yakuza_, reportedly became so pronounced at one point that up to one-third of yakuza recruits were coming from bōsōzoku gangs. In a 2015 documentary by Vice, meanwhile, one former gang member recalled that being a _bōsōzoku_ member was “like being in the military. It was like being drafted into war.”

… the gangs were a post WWII phenomenon now in substantial decline (though juveniles behaving badly is not)… two films, Crazy Thunder Road and the more sympathetic to bōsōzoku His Motorbike, Her Island, have been released for the first time ever outside of Japan by Third Window Films…

… another great article on director Sean Baker and his breakout masterpiece, Take Out. It is worth reading about the process of making the low budget film…

Almost two decades later, amid zero-hour contracts, feverish debates around immigration, and a pandemic that has only served to inflame rhetoric (and highlight our ever-increasing reliance on delivery riders), the questions _Take Out_ raises feel as urgent as they ever did.

… i have seen his film The Florida Project, some years ago now… i remember it, which means i liked it… sad slice of life movie… i haven’t seen Take Out… It’s been restored and re-released by Criterion Collection Blu-ray…

… from Maria Popova this morning… How to Stop Waiting and Start Living: A Jolt from Henry James

When the possibilities themselves had accordingly turned stale, when the secret of the gods had grown faint, had perhaps even quite evaporated, that, and that only, was failure. It wouldn’t have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything.

… about the Henry James novella, The Beast in the Jungle… a man spends his life waiting for the thing the universe, he believes, has prepared him for… waiting, never acting… the results are predictable… it hits home too, because sometimes i find myself waiting for the beast to appear, which it never does as i imagine it… still i have tried, as most of us have, to be something, as most of us have…

… this article on Gowanus artsts' neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY caught my attention because i had a studio for my architecture practice there… it was short lived, lasting a year or two… we moved upstate soon after i got it and it became untenable to get to and from it without consuming large amounts of travel time… i loved it though… i loved the industrial messiness of it, the scrap metal yards with their claw bucket beasts moving the metal from truck to yard and from yard to barge…

This year’s Gowanus Open Studios, the 26th and perhaps largest yet, finds the neighborhood at a crossroads. While new attention to the area brings welcome exposure, imminent rezoningalong the waterfront is leadingresidents and local organizations to fear their little corner of the city may soon go the way of Dumbo, Williamsburg, and Hudson Yards. Amid a citywide housing crisis, Brooklyn artists are also realizing the connections between art-world buzz and luxury real estate.

… also…

Six Artists I discovered at Gowanus Open Studios

Inside the studio of artist Ella Hepner in Gowanus, New York (all photos Elaine Velie/Hyperallergic)

… apparently, the new artist “it” neighborhood is Sunset Park… Affordable for Now, Sunset Park Rises as a Buzzing NYC Arts Hub… where the artists go, the creative wannabe’s with money follow… and the artists are, most of them, forced to move on… as are the not wealthy they live amongst… gentrification, over and over and over again… #art #sunset-park #gentrification

… from a post on Singer Distance by Ethan Chatagnier:

Longing is the ferment of loneliness, the wine that comes from letting it age properly. It’s the bitters in the cocktail, the acid in the marinade, a reason to look up at the stars and make a wish, and it can be the source of wonders. “All planetary exploration to me is a story about longing. It’s a longing to know ourselves. It’s a longing to understand the significance of our own existence. It’s a longing to communicate, to say to the universe ‘We’re here. Know us. Where are you?’”

Letters from an American, October 16, 2022

… Republicans doubling down on Voter Fraud and willingness to accept the results of any election they don’t win…

In an interview this morning with _CNN’s_ Dana Bash, Arizona Republican nominee for governor Kari Lake refused to say that she would accept the results of the upcoming election– unless she wins. Former president Trump said the same in 2020, and now more than half of the Republican nominees in the midterm elections have refused to say that President Joe Biden won the 2020 election because, they allege, there was voter fraud. This position is an astonishing rejection of the whole premise on which this nation was founded: that voters have the right to choose their leaders.

Maria Popova takes a look at Nick Cave’s new book with collaborator Sean O’Hagan, Faith, Hope and Courage.

… i have a copy of this book on my Kindle… i haven’t read it yet, but i may cue it up next… i could do with a little uplifting… i love Nick Cave, though a recent entry on The Read Hand Files, claiming Blonde as his all time favorite movie shook me a little… still… there is so much that seems good in him…

Anyone who says they don’t have any regrets is simply living an unconsidered life. Not only that, but by doing so they are denying themselves the obvious benefits of self-forgiveness. Though, of course, the hardest thing of all is to forgive oneself… One sure path to self-forgiveness is to arrive at a place where you can see that your day-to-day actions are making the world a measurably better place, rather than a worse place — that is pretty simple stuff, available to all — and to arrive at this place with a certain amount of humility.

Nick Cave, Via Maria Popova

!Ay! by Lucrecia Dalt gets an 8.6 as best new music… i will have to listen to this one when i get home as the internet is so abysmal out here…

The Colombian musician sketches a sci-fi vision of bolero, son, and other classic genres she grew up with. It’s philosophically daring, technically ambitious, and a joy to experience.

The Unheeded Warning… Walter Rosenberg/Rudolf Vrba escapes Auschwitz and tries to tell the world what is going on… several hundred thousand jews are saved, but many more could have been if the world had believed what he and his fellow escapee were saying… we humans have a tendency to doubt reports of the horrific and then turning away when the truth of it becomes hard to escape… i know this feeling… it’s the “I do’t want to get involved feeling,” a kind of security that whatever evil it may be is not going to reach into my life… but if i do something, it might…

Information, Vrba learned, is not knowledge. Before humans will act, they not only have to have the facts; they must also believe them. “I knew, but I didn’t believe it,” said the French Jewish philosopher Raymond Aron, when asked about the Holocaust. “And because I didn’t believe it, I didn’t know.”

… and, in shades of “Facts don’t matter, what people belive matters”…

Rudolf Vrba fought that impulse, with only partial success. Today, his story has something profound to tell us: The first line of defense against evil and catastrophe is truth, but the truth alone is not enough. It needs believers who will not look away.

A tribute to Robbie Coltrane… we named our cat after Rubeus Hagrid… our cat is a gentle giant channeling Hagrid in so many ways… Ruby, as we call him is constantly mistaken to be a girl cat when people hear his name, until we explain… i had suspected that would be a problem when my wife hit upon the name… but the name fit, once you understood it, so it stuck…

The End of the Good Republicans

Just look at the Good Republican governors (several of whom I’ve been championing for years): Chris Sununu, Doug Ducey, Brian Kemp, and Glenn Youngkin. None of them were overtly opposed to Donald Trump. But they didn’t jump on the election denial bandwagon and, for the most part, still sounded like the decent conservatives of yore—just with an extra side of red meat.

But now every single one of them is campaigning either for or with an election-denying lunatic. Ducey, along with the Republican Governors Association, has thrown in with Kari Lake. Sununu has embraced election conspiracist Don Bolduc in New Hampshire. Kemp is campaigning with the pro-coup GOP nominee for lieutenant governor and supporting the supremely unqualified and scandal-ridden Herschel Walker.

… this has strange echos with the Auschwitz escapee link above… i feel the gloom descending and not enough alarm bells going off…

Over time, the whole mutually reinforcing, mutually radicalizing process creates the conditions necessary for 70 percent of the Republican party to sincerely believe that Joe Biden is an illegitimate president due to a rigged election. It’s hard to blame voters for believing a lie when every politician they see and media personality they trust is repeating it.

But The Republican Triangle of Doom™ runs in the other direction. And the reality is that these supposedly Good Republicans aren’t going to drag the party toward them. They’re the ones who are going to move. After all, the hard-right MAGA types aren’t the ones compromising.

… the article at the end laments, “The Good Republicans are gone. Probably for good.”… and, so, what is the answer… current Republicans who can’t stomach it have to move to the independent lane and campaign to get Democrats elected and possibly to build a new party free of the rancid ideas and behaviors of the far right…

Heavy sea…

Water reflections…

… blazing through lots of news articles this AM, reading a few of them… not being sure why any of them were written… is this information i really need to know?…

… ok, this Bulwark article is a good summary of what 45 is definitely guilty of and could be convicted of should the DOJ decide to prosecute, the decision hinging on whether they can indict, try and convict before a new president is elected in 2024… from my point of view, he must be prosecuted… not prosecuting will be as bad for the faith of the people and another four years would be with him as president… failing to do the former might indeed clear the way for the latter… the man should go to jail and demonstrate that no one is above the law…

… this article, also in Bulwark, talks about how the rules of the budget process in Congress are exacerbating a winner takes all attitude…

Instead of seeing the rules as facilitating approval of a fiscal blueprint that allows for orderly decisions (its original purpose), Congress now assumes that passing a budget only makes sense if it helps the party in control advance its agenda without having to compromise with the other side. Recent history confirms this logic, and the parties now plan accordingly.

… i think this may be a chicken or egg sort of question… did partisan acrimony use the rules to deepen the divisions or did the rules lead to deepening partisan acrimony… i rather think it the former than the later… but then i read more and discover that the current budgeting process came into being in the 1970’s to make congress more efficient and adress a perceived power imbalance in the budgeting process between the executive branch and Congress… reconciliation seems to be the main culprit…

The reconciliation process also was used to pass significant bipartisan budget deals in 1987, 1990, and 1997.

However, during the latter part of this era, the political climate was beginning to shift. In 1993, the Clinton administration, with Democrats controlling both the House and Senate, successfully pushed through a budget reconciliation measure that passed without any Republican support. In 1995, after Republicans took over Congress, reconciliation was used again to pass an entirely one-sided budget plan, which President Clinton vetoed. Then, in 2001, the George W. Bush administration secured tax cuts via the reconciliation process, with only a small percentage of Democrats voting in favor.

… the problem stems from the limit to 20 hours of debate on a budget moving through Congress under the reconciliation process… no filibuster is possible… the minority party cannot force compromise… one does wonder if anything could get done if the filibuster was available…

The stripping away from the congressional budget process of all purposes other than advancement of one party’s schemes has transformed political calculations. In general terms, the parties’ ideological ambitions are now soaring because they both believe they are one election away from epoch-defining victories.

The norm now is to use the budget process for strictly partisan ends.

… and it appears that the reconciliation process is being used to pass “shell” budgets…

Their only purpose was to authorize approval of expedited reconciliation procedures. As such there was no effort to lay out more comprehensive budget plans, or to specify, even in broad terms, the tax and spending changes they were designed to set in motion.

… while one party celebrates, the other is planning how to reverse what the one party has done and send the trend in the other direction, which is a kind of wobble back and forth, one way then the next… not so good for long term stable governing…

Eve Arnold’s Photographs Capture the Vulnerabilithy of Marilyn Monroe

… with Blonde, a whole bunch of renewed interest in Marilyn Monroe… i almost skipped past this article as more in the chain of exploitation, but it is interesting and did add some depth to my knowledge of MM…

One of the few photographers who captured Monroe in the months leading up to this crisis was Eve Arnold (1912–2012) – the first female member of Magnum Photographs and arguably one of the most successful photographers of the 20th century.

… and this…

Unlike other photographers (especially male ones), Arnold prioritised a compassionate approach, reflecting the real intimacy between the two women.

… and this…

Although Arnold’s career continually focused on women and overlapped with the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, she resisted the ‘feminist’ label. “She was reluctant to even describe herself as a female photographer,” Michael says. “She found the need to distinguish _male_ and _female_ photographers quite artificial and frustrating, even though she certainly experienced some of the challenges of being one of the few women in her field.”

“Free speech” networks and anti-semitism… Ben Werdmuller spends some time on alternative social networks which have “free speech” policies, i.e., they don’t moderate content…

Mainstream social networks, particularly Facebook, are not off the hook here: banning anti-semitism does not absolve you of complicity in genocide elsewhere. Twitter also has its fair share of discoverable posts that espouse anti-semitic tropes. But these other networks are remarkable for their concentration: whereas these ideas are a tiny fringe on Facebook and Twitter, they’re how these other networks support themselves. You go to an alt network because you’ve been banned - or you’re worried you will be banned - from a traditional one. This concentration of extremists is why much of the insurrection was able to be openly organized on networks like Gab.

A Simple Guide to the Radical Art of Cecilia Vicuna

La Vicuña, 1977, oil on cotton canvas, by Cecilia Vicuña. Courtesy Cecilia Vicuña; Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London

… i like the mythological quality of this painting…

Born in 1948, the Chilean artist has been a pioneering voice on climate change, decolonisation and ecofeminism for decades. A poet, author, artist and activist, her work exists at the meeting point between art forms and means of communication. “My work dwells in the not yet, the future potential of the unformed, where sound, weaving, and language interact to create new meanings,” she says.

… more and more stories about Nazi Germany and how misinformation and propaganda fueled its rise…

How Hate-Fueled Misinformationa nd Propaganda Grew in Nazi Germany

… much of what is described below can be seen in nascent form in the United States Today… see my link to Ben Werdmueler’s post above…

Early in her reporting trip Thompson mailed a letter to Lewis, eager to share with her husband what she’d been witnessing in Germany. “It is really as bad as the most sensational papers report. . . . It’s an outbreak of sadistic and almost pathological hatred,” she wrote. “Most discouraging of all is not only the defenselessness of the liberals but their incredible (to me) docility. There are no martyrs for the cause of democracy.”

She said that Hitler’s Brownshirts were “perfectly mad” in their hounding of Jews and other quarry. “They beat them with steel rods, knock their teeth out with revolver butts, break their arms . . . urinate on them, make them kneel and kiss the _Hakenkreuz_ [the Nazi swastika]. . . . I feel myself starting to hate Germany. And already the world is rotten with hate.”

In May, books were burned. All thirty of Germany’s universities held pep rally-like events. In Berlin some forty thousand Nazis gathered in the public square near the opera house, where a bonfire worthy of a Viking funeral lit up the night sky. A band played martial music. A student wearing a Nazi uniform told the crowd “un‑German” works needed to be incinerated before they corrupted any more pristine minds.

… and this sounds familiar…

Through the Nazi rallies, boycotts, and book burnings, the world watched and waited. Did Hitler mean all the provocative things he’d said before taking office? Would he act upon them now, or would the responsibility of governing tame his tongue and temper his politics?

Two days after the April boycott of Jewish businesses, George Messersmith, the American consul general in Berlin, wrote to Hull about the accelerating climate of repression. “The point has been reached where it is really dangerous for the average individual to express an opinion which would not be favorable to the present regime. Even with his best friend the average German is unable to have free expression of opinion.”

… hmmm… i had not expected this… Nick Cave answering the question of what his favorite film of all time was, replies, Blonde

… my wife and i watched this movie on Netflix… H didn’t like it very much… i was so-so about it… noting that it had an NC17 rating, i had hoped there would be some juicy sex in it, yes, i like to watch, in a manner of speaking… i was disappointed on that score… not because there wasn’t any sex, but because when there was it was mostly a brutal sort that i didn’t find at all appealing… my wife thought the film one more exploitation of the woman and the myth that she didn’t deserve… but it’s based on the novel by Joyce Carole Oats and wasn’t intended to be a real representation of her life (a number of critical scenes in the book and movie never happened to the real MM as far as anyone knows)… it’s more an indictment of the patriarchy and it does a good job of portraying the absurd nature of male lust and misogyny… i set out to read a number of reviews of the movie and they were mostly unfavorable… this one in particular was a thorough critique of both the movie and the novel it is based on… to sum… both failed to paint the picture of a rather intelligent and successful young woman who was also a very good actress… both indulged in fictions that were not flattering (a dumb blonde who got what dumb blondes get) and therefore harmful to her and women in general… both failed to give the woman the credit she was due and traded on her mythology and dumb blonde myth for their own purposes… so, circling back to Nick Cave, i have huge admiration for him and especially for Red Hand Files, in which he is so often a comforting, sage and empathic responder to questions from his fans… he could almost be my spiritual leader… and then this… so… do i stop loving Nick Cave?… do i reassess my thinking about the movie because Nick Cave loves it?… do i take it as evidence that no human being is right all the time and resolve to be questioning of his answers when appropriate?… i think the last response would be the right one… still, i would love to know why he loves the movie… and so… i just posed the question to the man himself… why?… i am sure i won’t be the only one… let’s see if he answers one of us…

What caught my attention…

Letters from an American, October 10, 2022

… Russia is loosing the Ukraine war… badly…

According to Deborah Haynes, a security and defense editor at _Sky News_ in the United Kingdom, Sir Jeremy Fleming, who is the director of the U.K.’s intelligence and security agency, will say in a speech tomorrow that the Ukrainian forces are “turning the tide” against Russia. “The costs to Russia…in people and equipment are staggering. We know—and Russian commanders on the ground know—that their supplies and munitions are running out…. Russia’s forces are exhausted. The use of prisoners to reinforce, and now the mobilisation of tens of thousands of inexperienced conscripts, speaks of a desperate situation.”

… two things to consider…

… what will happen to the House and Senate in November is a question and Putin is surely waiting to see, probably also planning to try to put his finger on the scales…

… and…

… what is the end game?… what is Russia’s off ramp short of nuclear war?… it may be clear to intelligence officials but it certainly isn’t clear to me…

Tschabalala Self’s Poetic New Paintings Explore the Meaning of Home

… i love this painting…

Red Room, 2022

With this playful, poetic simplicity, Self explores a plethora of social implications. What does a home symbolise? What is the role of the home in our collective consciousness? What does it mean to take a seat at the table, or to bring the domestic setting into the public sphere? “The home has two realities,” says Self. “An aspirational reality – a place of comfort, interiority and true self-expression. Then in reality it’s a place full of expectations, where people have to take on roles.”

20 new books to get you through the week.

… i stop on this one… initially i was going to blow by it because the thought of 20 books i should read in this week was ridiculously impossible… but then i stopped… because the idea was ridiculously impossible… i have so many books to read and i am not at all making progress on reading them…

On Affirmative Action, Clarence Thomas Took a Page From Malcolm X

… i looked at the headline and photograph of Justice Thomas for this article… thought about clicking on it… scrolled by… clicked… read a little… scrolled some more… returned… read the full article… the author is white… hmmm… white man explaining black man… in a favorable way in this case… still… can he be trusted?… i don’t know… at any rate… affirmative-action vs. meritocracy… well, we all know racism isn’t dead and that it informs admissions decisions and hiring practices… we all should know that racism is endemic to our culture and has systematically suppressed people of color in all kinds of ways… how do we compensate?… if not affirmative action, what other mechanism?… i understand the argument that it stigmatizes the success of an individual for it to be thought that there but for the grace of affirmative action go they… the implication being who ever they were did not deserve the success… they didn’t merit it but for the color of their skin… how do we train institutions and corporations to be color blind?… i understand the arguments against affirmative action… but… what is the better solution?… then there is the whole thing about Justice Thomas himself… even if you explain to me that he comes by his views on AA honestly, through Malcom X, how am i to overlook the anger i have with this man and his wife Ginny and the whole Roe v. Wade thing?… and the threat to undo gay marriage, the right to birth control, etc. etc. etc.?… is this a man i can look up to?… can i entertain the thought that he might be right on AA?…

Pop Goes the Weasel?

… Nick Catoggio, writing for The Dispatch, ponders the question of Putin deploying nukes… will he or won’t he… there is no rational basis to… Russia will loose far more than it will gain… the question is… will this reach the point of being an existential threat to Putin in which he and his fellow countrymen who agree with him decide that if they can’t have empire the world can’t have life… or will someone in Russia take him out?… and if they did, would the world be safe in the chaos that followed?… so… it remains a question of the end game… how do we get to checkmate and the toppling of the king without Armageddon?…

The Inevitable Indictment of Donald Trump

… as bad as i know it will be if 45 is indicted, i simply can’t imaging having any faith in the system if he isn’t… sadly, a large part of the country will have their loss of faith confirmed if he is… according to the article, we should know by next spring… fasten your seatbelts…

There’s a date on the calendar when excessive meticulousness potentially precludes holding Trump to account. On January 20, 2025, Merrick Garland might not have a job. His post could be occupied by an avatar of the hard right. And any plausible Republican president will drop the case against Donald Trump on their first day in office.

The excruciating conundrum that Garland faces is also a liberating one. He can’t win politically. He will either antagonize the right or disappoint the left. Whatever he decides, he will become deeply unpopular. He will unavoidably damage the reputation of the institution he loves so dearly with a significant portion of the populace.

Faced with so unpalatable a choice, he doesn’t really have one. Because he can’t avoid tearing America further apart, he’ll decide based on the evidence—and on whether that evidence can persuade a jury. As someone who has an almost metaphysical belief in the rule book, he can allow himself to apply his canonical texts.

Some new additions to my Industrial Mandala series…

Braised crispy skin duck legs… my new favorite way to cook duck legs!

Signs along the way…📷

What caught my attention…

In Times Square and Sunset Strip, “American Gurl” Subverts Femininity… as i have stated before, i have an interest in all things feminine…

In contrast to a “singular idea,” the artists in “American Gurl” offer myriad depictions of women in America. Ayanna Dozier’s “Softer” (2020) critiques the societal demands that African-American women “soften” themselves, specifically through their appearance. Christine Yuan’s “Hoyeon as the International Woman of Mystery” (2022), originally commissioned by Vogue, casts Korean model and _Squid Game_ star Jung Ho-Yeon as an Irma Vep-style vamp who remakes herself for international (read American) consumption. “iGurl” (2022) by Sarah Nicole François is a disturbing digital vision of endless surgical enhancements in search of bodily perfection. “Can we keep up with the aesthetic pushed onto us?” questions Ahmed. “Can these surgeries actually work on us as fast as we can change ourselves online?” Other participating artists include Christelle de Castro, Kasey Elise Walker, Kitty Ca$h, and Leila Jarman.

Art Writing as an Extension of Life

As an arts writer, I am always envious when I find that someone has articulated not only art theory itself, but the way it is a natural part of life for someone who takes joy in the consideration of art. Chris Kraus did this brilliantly in _I Love Dick_(Semiotext(e), 1997); Morgan Meis does this with equal (and completely different) brilliance in _The Drunken Silenus_ (Slant Books, 2020). Randall manages this feat, as the title suggests, by contemplating 12 female artists who are important to her life.

With analysis that is either deeply intuitive or directly informed by personal experience or encounters, Randall presents the life of an artist as both subject and narrator. _Artists in My Life_dissolves the fourth wall between artist, art object, and viewer, offering a welcome approach to arts writing as an extension of how artists live.

The US Could Get Its First National LGBTQ+ History Museum… i only wonder how it will get through congress with so much anit-LGBTQ+ sentiment among conservatives…

A national museum dedicated to American LGBTQ+ history and culture could be coming to Washington, DC. United States Representative Mark Pocan introduced a bill on September 29 to establish the National Museum of American LGBTQ+ History and Culture, potentially as part of Washington, DC’s Smithsonian Institutions. Pocan is a Wisconsin Democrat who co-chairs the Congressional LGBTQ+ Equality Caucus.

The bill establishes an eight-person committee to conduct research into the potential museum, including how much its collection would cost and whether it should in fact be part of the Smithsonian. If the bill passes, the committee will have 18 months before presenting their findings to the House of Representatives, who will then vote on a second bill to establish the museum.

Nevada GOP Secretary of State Candidate Promises to Make Trump President in 2024

At a rally for Nevada Republican candidates on Saturday, Republican nominee for secretary of state Jim Marchant promised that he and his fellow GOP nominees, if elected next month, would reinstall Donald Trump in the White House in 2024.

“We’re gonna fix the whole country and President Trump is gonna be president again,” Marchant promised as Trump stood beside him.

Judge Blocks State Abortion Ban As Attempt “To Completely Eliminate The Rights of Ohio Women”…

… who thought Gilead couldn’t happen…

According to affidavits submitted in the lawsuit, two additional minors who suffered sexual assault also had to leave the state for abortions. Cancer patients and other women with severe complications were also denied abortions. The Ohio Capital Journal summarized the evidence last month:

• The descriptions include those of three women who threatened suicide. They also include two women with cancer who couldn’t terminate their pregnancies and also couldn’t get cancer treatment while they were pregnant. 

• Another three examples were of women whose fetuses had severe abnormalities or other conditions that made a successful pregnancy impossible. Even so, they couldn’t get abortions in Ohio. 
• And in three cases, debilitating vomiting was caused by pregnancy—so bad in one case that a woman couldn’t get off the clinic floor. But neither could these women get abortions in Ohio, the affidavits said.

National Constitution Center Project Offers Constitutional Amendment Proposals with Broad Cross-Ideological Support

In 2020, the National Constitution Center sponsored a constitution-drafting project in which   it named three groups to produce their own revised versions of the Constitution: a conservative team, a libertarian team, and a progressive one—each composed of prominent academics and other experts on constitutional law issues. The exercised revealed some important points of agreement between the three teams (even though they also predictably  differed on other issues). This year, NCC reconvened the three teams and asked them to come up with a list of constitutional amendments they could jointly agree on.

… and these were…

• Term limits for Supreme Court justices
• Making impeachment easier (would actually make starting impeachment harder, convicting easier)
• Legislative Veto (wherein the legislature could veto executive action)
• Eliminating the requirement that the president be a natural-born citizen
• Making the Constitution easier to amend in the future

… most make sense on the face of it… the rest make sense upon reading the explanations…

Letters from an American… the appalling history of racism and anti-labor sentiments…

… from a very long time conservatives have fanned the flames of fear of socialism and black and brown men… we have lived in a society of patriarchal white supremacy for the entire history of the country… we have reached a critical point in which minorities will soon overtake the patriarchal white majority in numbers… we are experiencing and existential reaction to that fact…

Beginning in 1871, they argued that they had no objection to their Black neighbors on racial grounds. What they objected to, they said, was that these folks, newly out of enslavement, were poor. White leaders claimed that the South remained in a recession not because India and Egypt had taken over the cotton market during the war, but because Black southerners were lazy and hoped to use their new political power to redistribute the wealth of white landowners into their own pockets.

Republicans’ fear of workers grew. Organized laborers “are agrarians, levelers, revolutionists, inciters of anarchy, and, in fact, promoters of indiscriminate pillage and murder,” the _Boston Evening Transcript_ charged. The _Philadelphia Inquirer_ insisted the redistribution of wealth through law appealed to poor, lazy, vicious men who would rather steal from the nation’s small farmers and mechanics than work themselves. _Scribner’s Monthly_warned in italics: “_the interference of ignorant labor with politics is dangerous to society_.”

Stephen King on What Authentic Maine Cuisine Means to Him

• Castle Rock Kitchen: Wicked Good Recipes from the World of Stephen King.
• Also of interest, Outlander Kitchen: To the New World and Back Again

When people think of Maine cuisine, they tend to think first of clams and lobster. Never cared for clams myself; they always looked to me like snot in a shell. Lobster is tasty, but I ate too much of it as a kid. My mom was on a perpetual budget, and she’d buy day-old (or two-day-old) lobster at the IGA in Lisbon Falls. Some of those bugs were still moving, but not that many. She made lobster rolls, and there was often a pot of lobster stew simmering on the stove. She’d hide it in the oven if someone came visiting because, in those days, lobster stew was “poor food.”

Eric Adams declares state of emergency amid migrant arrivals… mayor of NYC Eric Adams declaring a state of emergency over the influx of asylum seekers being bused up from border states… pleads with congress and state lawmakers to act and provide assistance… is the political theater of bussing asylum seekers north working?…

How Hitler’s Enablers Undid Democracy in Germany #nazism #fascism… this article about Hitler’s rise to power and how it compares to the current political situation in the U.S. is a must read…

… the big lie…

During its first four years, Weimar was under constant attack—above all, from the Big Lie that the republic was a totally illegitimate government because it owed its genesis to a “stab in the back” delivered on the home front.

… exploitation of the masses through the big lie…

Not just Hitler and the Nazis but the entire German right latched on to this message and promoted it. Two factors distinguished Hitler from the rest of the German right. First was his self-awareness and cool calculation in deploying the Big Lie. In _Mein Kampf_, published in 1925–26, he explained that “the masses _…_more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a little one,” and that even a propaganda claim “so impudent that people thought it insane” could ultimately prevail.

… failure to impose the appropriate consequences…

Most important, what both conservative politicians and a conservative judiciary in Bavaria failed to do was rid themselves of this dangerous agitator by expelling him from the country as an unwelcome convicted felon of Austrian citizenship. Instead, they—and eventually the old-guard establishment right throughout Germany—enabled his improbable political comeback.

… doesn’t that sound familiar?…

Hitler’s lesson from the failed putsch was that he needed to pursue revolution through “the politics of legality” rather than storm Munich City Hall. The Nazis would use the electoral process of democracy to destroy democracy.

… hmmmm…

By January 1933, Germany’s old guard saw that they were not remotely competitive in any election without the Nazi base, and opted to have Hitler legally appointed chancellor (or first minister). But because non-Nazi conservatives still held eight of 11 cabinet positions in the new government, they persisted in their delusion that they could control him—or, as some might say in today’s parlance, that they could preserve the “guardrails” that would contain him.

… double hmmmm…

Within five months, Germany was a one-party dictatorship and a police state.

… what author Christopher R. Browning goes on to say is that what the U.S. is most likely heading for, if the effort succeeds, is a managed democracy, an illiberal democracy ala Viktor Orban… he points to built-in vlunerabilities of the American political system… the Electoral College and the Senate both favor parts of the country where conservatives are strong… sophisticated gerrymandering, ruthlessly deployed, has given Republicans advantage in key states… and Trump plots revenge…

… and then there is this…

The GOP has now embraced an accelerated strategy of legal revolution to control the outcome of future elections. This fall, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear _Moore v. Harper_, which concerns the power of the judicial branch in North Carolina to protect the state constitution’s guarantee of free and fair elections by overturning a gerrymandered congressional redistricting map. The state-court ruling was stayed so that the Supreme Court could hear arguments and rule on the claims of the “independent state legislature doctrine,” according to which the elections and electors clauses of the Constitution vest sole authority in state legislatures to determine the manner in which federal elections are held and presidential electors selected (absent any specific mandate of federal law passed by Congress). A ruling in favor of the independent state legislature doctrine would leave gerrymandered state legislatures in total control over federal elections, unchecked by any other branch of state government.

Just as von Hindenburg and the rest of Weimar’s old guard chose complicity with Hitler’s Big Lie, dooming Germany’s interwar democracy, today’s Republican faithful are going along with Trump’s Big Lie, which casts Biden’s Democrats as the November criminals of 2020 and Trump himself as the patriotic defender of American freedom. America is not Weimar, Trump is not Hitler, Republicans are not Nazis, yet the fate of this republic hangs in the balance.

I will be awash with chickens soon… I needed some inspiration…

Finally settling into a good written journal habit. My tools… moleskin journal book… palomino blackwing 602 pencil… blackwing pencil sharpener… blackwing pencil cap…

Long corridor…

Streetscape…

Jack Davidson’s Alchemical Photographic Etchings

“I’ve never been a darkroom kid,” says British photographer Jack Davison. “I tried, [but] it just didn’t appeal to me.” With a new solo exhibition, Photographic Etchings, opening in north London’s Cob Gallery, Davison is instead reflecting on the tactile wonders and alchemical magic of photogravure, a labour-intensive, high-cost alternative to the darkroom that lies at the heart of this exhibition.

Jack Davison, Untitled (JD-08), 2022© the artist, courtesy of Cob Gallery

… what is it about snarling or perhaps just snapping or perhaps just skulking in a menacing way?… and depicted in a shadowy, high contrast way… see Daido Moriyama’s stray dog…

Somaya Critchlow, the Artist Reconfiguring the Black Female Nude

12 of Critchlow’s new paintings and drawings are now on display at Maximillian William gallery in London, in an exhibition called Afternoon’s Darkness. A sense of the macabre lingers across these new works, in which Black women are depicted revelling in their solitude – nude, semi-nude or in costume – backdropped by dimly-lit, domestic interiors.

Count Me Out, 2022© Somaya Critchlow. Image courtesy the artist and Maximillian William, London. Photography: Prudence Cuming Associates.

… increasingly, women artists are portraying women in ways that do invite the male gaze… the male gaze is such a convoluted gaze… is it appropriate or not in this “hashtag me too” era?… at the end of the day, we feel what we feel when we look at images of beautiful women partially or fully undressed… it’s what we do with those feelings that matters… do we treat such images as gateway invitations to the abuse of womanhood or do we simply appreciate the beauty of the female body?… have we matured as a culture?… patriarchy is alive and well… there are risks to trying to break through to a new attitude…

Henry Miller on Friendship and the Relationship Between Creativity and Community

This vital relationship between creativity and connection has been tensed and twisted in the era of Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, where self-marketing so readily masquerades as “friend”-ship.

… i have all but abandoned FB and Instagram, using the former to check in with “friends” now and again and the latter to post an image here and there… i never did have much use of twitter… these days i can be found on Vero (@smbk) and Micro.blog (@mbkriegh)…

“Usually the artist has two life-long companions, neither of his own choosing… — poverty and loneliness. To have a friend who understands and appreciates your work, one who never lets you down but who becomes more devoted, more reverent, as the years go by, that is a rare experience. It takes only one friend… to work miracles.” Henry Miller

Disgruntled American Tourist Smashes Roman Busts at the Vatican

An American man visiting the Vatican threw two Ancient Roman busts to the ground in a fit of rage after being informed that he could not see the Pope, Italian newspapers report.

… ok, the headline, “Disgruntled American”?… click bait really… when i first read it, it seemed unfortunately natural to think of any American as being an angry child…

The man who vandalized the sculptures, aged 65 and apparently “psychologically distressed,” seemed to have been visiting the Vatican alone and was turned over to Italian authorities the same day. He received an aggravated property damage charge and was subsequently released.

… and then i read the bit about “psychologically distressed” and wondered why not this headline… “Psychologically Distressed Tourist Smashes Roman Busts at the Vatican”?… then we would discover the tourist was American… which fact is more important?… “American” if you think or want people to think all Americans are childish rage-holics, and “psychologically distressed” if we are talking about the general propensity in humanity for there to be people not in their right mind…

Find My Friends… an app that tells you where your friends are at any given moment in time?… beyond the obvious serendipitous being in close by places at the same time… meet up!… there are the also obvious ways this might not be a good idea…

I feel so unispired. Inspiration. Can I have some of yours?

… my wife is a huge fan of David Bowie, me, not so much, but i love Nick Cave!… and i love his Red Hand Files in which he answers questions sent to him by his fans… that he seems to have his head on really straight helps too…

In my experience, inspiration is not something that finds you, or offers itself to you, nor for that matter is faith. Inspiration and faith are similar in so far as they both ask something of us. They each require real and constant practical application. For me, inspiration comes only when I practice certain things regularly and rigorously. I must commit fully to the task in hand, sit down each day, pick up my pencil (actually it is a medium black or blue Bic Biro) and get to work. It is not exactly toiling down the coal mines, but it is labour enough, and I undertake it through the good times and the bad, through the dry periods and the periods of abundance, and I keep on going regardless of my successes or failures. Inspiration comes because I put in the work.

Blue Rev, Alvvays

The Toronto band’s third album is a triumph of power pop, a densely layered, witty, blithe, and beautiful record that sets a new benchmark for the genre.

Nick Cave - The Red Hand Files - Issue #207 - I feel so uninspired. Inspiration. Can I have some of yours? : The Red Hand Files

His answer to this question just blew me away. The man is amazing.

October 07, 2022

Heather Cox Richardson, October 06, 2022

Trump’s continuing insistence that he won the 2020 election, and the Republican Party’s embrace of that lie despite the fact that Biden won by more than 7 million votes in the popular vote and by 306 to 232 in the Electoral College, says that they will never again consider the election of a Democrat legitimate.

“If you care about democracy and you care about the survival of our republic, then you need to understand—we all have to understand—that we cannot give people power who have told us that they will not honor elections,” Cheney said.

… the next two elections will be determinative about which way the country is going… democracy or authoritarianism… conservatives, don’t believe in democracy, haven’t believed in democracy for some time now… why?… because conservatism in this country is presently focused on the preservation of the power of the mostly white patriarchy and they can’t preserve their power if elections are free and fair… they are in desperate survival mode where any means justifies the end… thus, scandals like those of Herschel Walker, which would have taken down any politician just 10 years ago are no longer disqualifying… there is an absolute abasement in this desperation… the trouble is, it may prevail…

Want Lipstick That Actually Lasts? Rouge Dior Forever is the Answer

… i have a deep love of the feminine and what is more feminine than lipstick, or more important to lipstick than it be lasting?…

1. Who should use it? Anyone who wants intense, pigment-rich matte lipstick that actually stays where it’s supposed to – there are no smears, smudges or fading here

2. How long until I love it? Probably 16 hours after you first put it on, as one application promises to last that long
3. How planet-/people-friendly is it? As part of Dior Beauty’s Responsible Formulation Charter, the brand aims to source all ingredients in the most socially and environmentally responsible way possible
4. How do I use it? Make sure your lips are primed and moisturised with a good balm, then add a slick of Rouge Dior Forever and leave to dry for three minutes

Mushrooms: Cellist Zoe Keating Brings to Life Sylvia Plath’s Poem About the Tenacity of the Creative Spirit

They were the first to colonize the Earth. They will inherit it long after we are gone as a species. And when we go as individuals, it is they who return our borrowed stardust to the universe, feasting on our mortal flesh to turn it into oak and blackbird, grass and grasshopper. Fungi are the mightiest kingdom of life, and the least understood by our science, and the most everlasting. Without them, this planet would not be a world. Like everything vast and various, they shimmer with metaphors for life itself.

Viruses Are More Like Cone Snails Than Hijackers

… as i read this article, there is this growing sense of interconnectedness… that all things are connected to all other things and that the universe can only be understood as an incredibly wondrous tapestry of matter and energy and a byproduct, life… we can’t understand the parts without some comprehension of the whole… and we can never think that anything can be understood in isolation…

Viruses, like cone snails, evolve to be more like what sustains them. It is an uncomfortable form of relatedness, this predatory metabolic convergence, but it cannot be denied that it generates amazing patterns of likeness across biological kingdoms without everything having to be descended from the same line of direct genetic inheritance.

Even if something has evolved to get away from its mimic, it holds the imprint of that entity’s influence in its difference, like a shadow.

Immersing Yourself in the Works of Gustav Klimt #art #gustav-klimt #exhibitions

In the unlikely setting of the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank in Manhattan, seeping into the ceilings, floors, walls, and recesses of the hall, projections of Gustav Klimt’s paintings are now set on an hour-long loop. Built between 1909 and 1912, the bank’s interior retains many of its original decorative elements, which include elegant glass panels, patterned limestone carvings, and brass detailing. Contrary to what its facade seems to convey about what happens inside — mysterious and important affairs of the economy and the state — people inside are huddled and seated in clusters on the ground and on chairs in darkness, hushed and sedated by a carousing Johann Strauss waltz.

Wrightwood 659 Hosts Exhibitions on the “First Homosexuals” and Michiko Itatani

Roberto Montenegro, “Retrato de un anticuario o Retrato de Chucho Reyes y autorretrato” (detail) (1926), oil on canvas, 102.5 x 102.5 cm, Colección Pérez Simón, Mexico

The First Homosexuals: Global Depictions of a New Identity, 1869-1930 starts with the year 1869, when the word “homosexual” was first coined in Europe, inaugurating the idea of same-sex desire as the basis for a new identity category. More than 100 paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, and film clips from public and private collections around the world are on view, including works that have never before been allowed to travel outside their respective countries. This groundbreaking exhibition is the first multi-medium survey of early, determinedly queer art that explored what the “first homosexuals” understood themselves to be — and how the dominant culture, in turn, understood them. This is part one of a two-part exhibition (the second is planned for 2025 and will feature 250 masterworks) developed by a team of 23 international scholars led by distinguished art historian Jonathan D. Katz with associate curator Johnny Willis.

French author Annie Ernaux has won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature

Annie Ernaux is the author of some twenty works of fiction and memoir, winner of the Prix Renaudot for _A Man’s Place_, and of the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her body of work, and recently the winner of the International Strega Prize and the French-American Translation Prize and shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize for The Years.

Annie Ernaux on the “Infinite Lack” in Our Search for Love

Anyway, what does this sign really mean, the phone call from the Latin Quarter? That he’s thinking of me? But in what way? There’s nothing more impossible to imagine than the desire, the emotion, of the Other. And yet, only that is beautiful. All I dream of is this perfection, without yet being sure of attaining it—of being the “last woman,” the one who erases all the others, with her attentiveness, her skilled knowledge of his body: the “sublime affair.”

10-04-2022

… HCR this morning mostly about the mounting trouble for various actors on the far right and the challenge to democracy… the noose closing around 45’s neck and the violence he seeks to sponsor to distract and prevent… it is a race to see if he becomes president before he is jailed, in which case he would never be jailed… the Oath Keepers go on trial… Moore v Harper was heard by SCOTUS… the conservative judges are flirting with giving states absolute rights to determine elections… the so called “independent state legislature” doctrine is being determined… 45 has been definitively tied to withholding documents from the government by a witness… Herschel Walker continues to melt down…

In an interview tonight, Trump accused the FBI or the archivists from the National Archives and Records Administration of planting or removing documents in order to frame him, saying that NARA is “largely radical-left run.”

… read with interest Zeba Blay’s review of Blonde… her main complaint is that it fetishize Monroe’s pain to no good purpose and that the movie was boring… H agreed with that assessment… i did not… i thought it effectively showed the appalling behavior of patriarchal males while not pandering to that behavior with highly erotic (to most people) scenes… to the extent that nudity and sex were in the film, and there was lots of both, it wasn’t very titillating, at least not to me… still, one needs to pay attention to women on the subject because they know things men will never know about being a woman in a patriarchal society…

… Sidelined No More: Reading List of Fiercely Political Women… so many books one could read… so little time… the article makes an extensive argument that women still are not taken seriously when they write about politics seriously and offers up a selection of books by women authors past and present…

Among the Washington Post’s columnists, who mostly cover politics, 57 are men and 26 are women. In the last two months, the New York Times’s opinion pages published 77 political analyses by men and only 29 by women. Half of those women-authored pieces had a male co-author.

Male domination of writing on politics in America is most extreme in the conservative press. In the National Review, 90% of the recent political analyses were by men, and the quarterly Claremont Review of Books—which prides itself on being the intellectual heart of the American right—has gone two and a half entire years without publishing a single feature essay written by a woman.

The problem isn’t, or isn’t only, a moral one. Readers are denied something by this exclusion. Sometimes women have an especially intimate way of writing about politics that’s both close-up—examining the psychology and the erotics of power—and carries an interesting objectivity and distance, thanks, perhaps, to their own history of being distanced from the political sphere.

… relative to HCR’s post above is J. Michael Luttig’s piece in The Atlantic arguing that the “Independent State Legislature” theory is bunk…

If the Court concludes that there is such a doctrine, it would confer on state legislatures plenary, exclusive, and judicially unreviewable power both to redraw congressional districts for federal elections and to appoint state electors who quadrennially cast the votes for president and vice president on behalf of the voters of the states. It would mean that the partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts by state legislatures would not be reviewable by the state courts—including the states’ highest court—under their state constitutions.

That as many as six justices on the Supreme Court have flirted with the independent-state-legislature theory over the past 20 years is baffling. There is literally no support in the Constitution, the pre-ratification debates, or the history from the time of our nation’s founding or the Constitution’s framing for a theory of an independent state legislature that would foreclose state judicial review of state legislatures’ redistricting decisions.

The state supreme court’s decision under the North Carolina constitution is conclusive under that constitution, and it is only reviewable by the federal courts and the Supreme Court of the United States thereafter for a determination of whether that decision violates the federal Constitution.

All of which goes to confirm that the Constitution neither contemplates nor permits federal constitutional commandeering of the states’ constitutions and their judicial processes. Rather, it contemplates and provides only for federal judicial review of the state supreme courts’ state constitutional decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court for consistency with the United States Constitution.

… we will know next summer how bad the current iteration of SCOTUS is… there is, unfortunately, reason to be concerned…