“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

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!