For 24 hours…
our internet connection, at the house, has been off. It just came back on 20 minutes ago. I’m FULL of shit to share. (Well, sort of full.) I feel like I lost the feeling in both my arms and got it back.
Artifice and foam rubber
In fact, so much artifice and foam rubber is often used to create the sexually alluring woman that it’s sometimes difficult to know where the lady ends and the foam rubber begins.
Via dangerous minds by way of Roger Ebert.
On the redemption of physical reality
“This is, of course, what (film theorist) Siegfried Kracauer meant when he spoke of the ‘redemption of physical reality.’ It’s also at the heart of Werner Herzog’s new documentary, The Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2011), in which he attempts to retrieve the ‘now’ of prehistoric cave painters flickering into life – the analogy often used to explain the psychological power of film.”
In the same way that cutting ourselves off from any older aspect of our culture diminishes us by dimming our awareness of who we were and how that made us who we are, there is something lost when we turn away from the gray ones.
It’s quite a long piece, but it is worth reading. Bill Mesce’s The “Gray Ones” Fade To Black, brought to attention by Ebert.
Dear Clusterflock
86-ed?
Las Reinas Chulas: “Que Suave Patria”
Please don’t turn aside take a look even if no hablas español (not even dumbass texan spanish).
¡Las Reinas Chulas reglan!
Dozens of plastic foam heads rain onto the stage. Four drug traffickers in fringed jackets and sparkly pink cowboy hats bat them into the audience with toy AK-47s. All the while, the cast croons, “Let them slit our throats, let them pack us up . . . let them not ask any questions, let them not investigate.”
This is cabaret, Mexico style. Las Reinas Chulas, or the Beautiful Queens, parody drug violence in a show the women first produced in 2005 and that still fills nightclubs around Mexico, including a performance in the tourist town of Taxco this weekend.
Peter Falk || Gena Rowlands || “A Woman Under the Influence” || (1974) || d. John Cassavetes
There is a Criterion version available.
What goes around
About 8 months ago, a 7-11 that I pass each day on my way to work got bulldozed. It was on a prime corner, and I wondered at the decision, since the store seemed always to be packed. A For Sale sign went up, “Will Build to Suit.”
About a month ago, construction began on a new building. Today it finally became recognizable.
Another 7-11.
This week, on My Drunk Kitchen
Morning Wood
I’m rebuilding our deck. I thought it was going to be a simple re-surface job, then saw that the base needs to be redone as well. Yesterday two tons of wood and concrete mix were delivered. I had to bring it all into the back yard from the alley. I haven’t started yet this morning and it is already hot.
like feeding dollar bills to a paper shredder
In California, where gas routinely goes for $4.50 or more these days, a trip to the pump means watching $70 slip through your fingers in three minutes or so. Unless you’re extremely wealthy or a problem gambler, paying for gas is the fastest way you routinely part with your money.
Precession of the Equinoxes
The thing that caused everyone to freak out because their astrological signs had changed is one of the more fascinating stories in the history of intellectual evolution. That thing is called precession of the equinoxes, and precession is one of those phenomena that is simultaneously invisible and obvious, observable and hidden.
Let’s start with the technicalities and move to the history of it.
In astronomy, axial precession is a gravity-induced, slow and continuous change in the orientation of an astronomical body’s rotational axis. In particular, it refers to the gradual shift in the orientation of Earth’s axis of rotation, which, like a wobbling top, traces out a pair of cones joined at their apices in a cycle of approximately 26,000 years. The term “precession” typically refers only to this largest secular motion; other changes in the alignment of Earth’s axis — nutation and polar motion — are much smaller in magnitude.
So, precession is essentially the planetary equivalent of the wobble in a top as it spins.
If you carve the horizon into twelve roughly equivalent sections, each year, at the equinoxes, the sun will appear to rise in one and set in its opposite. Because of the wobble in the axis of the earth, the section of the sky the sun appears to rise and set in will shift very slowly over a period of roughly 2,160 years. This is the basis of astrology, as various civilizations applied meaning to the constellations they saw in each section. More interestingly, I think, our tracking of it appears to be the basis of astronomy.
To begin to notice that tracking takes time. To fully understand the cycle, and be able to project it forwards and backwards, to mark the passage of time in the relative movement of the stars, would take hundreds, if not thousands, of years — observation, measurement, notation. Once a culture had an awareness of that pattern, no matter on what scale, it could begin to find a place for itself, and make a story out of it, and because we are human, of course, that is what we did.
If you are interested in this subject, and are comfortable with an approach equal parts academic and poetic, you might enjoy Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechen’s Hamlet’s Mill. It shows glimpses of precession’s possible influence throughout the history of art, an astronomical code for our place in the universe embedded in language.
Why It’s a Bad Idea to Regulate Computers
“This film is dedicated to the brave Mujahideen fighters gallant people of Afghanistan.”
It’s not clear from this trailer for Rambo III (1988), but when Rambo goes into Afghanistan to rescue his buddy Colonel Sam Trautman from sadistic Soviets . . .
he allies himself with the Mujahideen, the brave “freedom fighters” extolled by Ronald Reagan and saluted in the film’s original closing credits.
I can’t imagine what brought this to mind today.
I’d buy that app.
Fuck it I’ve heard enough, I’m going to make some killer android app that listens to every word you hear and uses Google’s voice recognition shit and some semantic networks and logistic regression crap and fucking starts chirping at you whenever it detects someone is hitting on you, make it look like an incoming call from captain obvious or something. It make take a while to accumulate enough training data to detect every subtle hint but it should pick this one up pretty easily. #
One of the 5,661 comments on From Male Redditors: What are some hints females gave you, but you didn’t get them until after you had your chance?
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dear clusterflock
When you get to a point at which you say, “Well, it can’t get any worse,” but then it does — and then it gets even worse, what do you do?
I know, I know. Go Dao. And I’m trying to get down with the Dao. I always do.
As my friend Steve used to say, “People won’t believe it.”
Think of me as Bruce Lee sitting in the pit in the scene beginning around 4:17 of this clip (from Enter the Dragon). It shows exactly how I feel tonight.
‘Here are some quotes I find challenging and beautiful’
Ken Baumann has a list of quotes he contends with:
It occurred to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain.
Don DeLillo
We do not think our way to right action. We act our way to right thinking.
David Milch
We’re trying to build birds, not birdhouses.
Dean Young
Unfinished London
The second video, about the London highway system, was just posted:
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dear clusterflock
What if a treasured long-time friend, someone only fifteen years older than yourself, had (a year or more ago) begun to manifest signs of premature dementia, and it was finally apparent to you that she is only about sixty per cent there and never going to get any better?
Save celluloid, for art’s sake
When Tacita Dean went to make a 16mm film for Tate Modern she was shocked to find the lab had stopped using it. Why can’t digital and celluloid coexist?, she asks.
Inspired
by Amanda Mae’s assertion of her well-attested gift for concocting unrelated alternate realities when under the gun of a deadline,
and by the joy I have this day derived from emailing and Facebook-posting about: Cold War civil defense PSAs featuring clumsy marionettes endeavoring to convey dubious information to America’s farmers; the wonder of wieners: their inclusion in bento boxes and the variety of their presentation to customers of Danish wienie wagons; the oddity of Little Oscar, the world’s smallest chef and spokesman for Oscar-Mayer; and countless other curiosities,
I extend my heartfelt thanks to all the friends who have contributed to my delinquency and enabled my avoidance of work for yet another day.
You know, the mid-twentieth-century American humorist Robert Benchley wrote a delicious essay on this topic. It would appear (at least in his case) that the late-1920s version of fooling around online was apparently leafing through back issues of the National Geographic and clipping odd and arresting images. In the essay he writes about his efforts to avoid tackling a theater review or other assigned piece, saying, “I have a picture of a viper fish I wish you could see. You would die laughing.”
My Nice Nice Day
It’s like he is in my head.
Farewell, Army & Lou’s
Shifting residential patterns and a tough economy forced the closing last Sunday of Army & Lou’s, a Chicago restaurant that opened its doors in 1945. For 65 years (at a couple of South Side locations) it was frequented by Chicago families and by celebrities and was the favored restaurant of Mayor Harold Washington.
Supporters are rallying to help the restaurant reopen, but I fear the support may be too little and that it will be proven to have come too late.
How’s your weather?
Shovelled ten minutes ago, the patio, path from the garage to the kitchen door. I’m going over to the office in a couple hours to see to the shift-change of plowers and shovellers.
I know this isn’t anything like what others are experiencing in the soon-to-be eighteen-hundred mile stretch of storm. KC is at the upper edge of snow, everything going on is further south. (We seem to have 12″.) Looks like it’ll peter-out here by 9:00 or so. We’ve dodged the bullet of iced power lines and power loss. Otherwise, we would be firing up the gas fireplace and camping by its cool heat until the power came back on. Hope all y’all are well and surviving, whether by virtue of your own capabilities or by friends nearby who aren’t without.
Best erotic dream ever
Encounter with Patrick McGoohan. Woke up just after we entered his hotel room, but that was all right. It was sweet enough for me.
