"disintegrate in the sun's mist"

"The old man is still.  On his old thatch hat with its round crown there is a stain where in earlier days he had worn some sort of band, but the collar of his khaki shirt is clean.  In the low sun of late afternoon, the silver hair over his ears dissolves in filaments of light against the sparkle of the water, and the ear lobes seem illumined from within, as if his skin had gone transparent.

From the companionway behind comes the faint sweet smell of manure.  The green turtles lie belly up, each with a neat turd pile by its tail.  One breathes its hollow gasp, and Buddy sinks beside it, on his knees.

    You watchin us?  Dat what Athens say.  He say dat you watchin us die.

The turtle watches him, unblinking.

Dark noddies cross the swift colors of the coral bank, toward the cays.  The cays astern disintegrate in the sun's mist."

-- Peter Matthiessen, Far Tortuga

"Dreamin' is Free"

RIP to Blondie drummer Clem Burke, an underrated drummer in a very underrated band.

Mickey 17 -- What I Thunk

Hey, it shares a major plot point with Keanu Reeves' and China Mieville's The Book of Elsewhere!  What if you could live forever?  Scratch that, what if you could die forever, as in over and over and over again?

The first half of Bong Joon-Ho's film is pretty great.  When the titular Mickey finally meets a copy of himself, things fall apart.

Robert Pattinson is good but never does seem to get his working class American accent consistent.  New characters show up out of the blue.  Mark Ruffalo as the villainous president is actually not that great.  I'm willing to be a nickel that Bong told him to "do his best Trump," and it's not a very good Trump.  The animal rights stuff isn't unwelcome, but not really integrated the way it should be either.

The ending does manage to tie the important stuff together in spite of the sloppy second half.  I liked it.  I could have waited to watch on DVD too, nothing lost.

The Book of Elsewhere by China Mieville and Keanu Reeves (Minor Spoilers)

 

I was honestly a bit trepidatious going into this one.  Mieville is one of my favorite science fiction writers, scratch that, favorite writers.  Keanu is -- one of my favorite people, not necessarily one of my favorite actors?

And right off the bat I was looking to figure out which passages where written by which dude.  There are a lot of interesting, if not great, moments, and the use of certain high-falutin' language makes me think they are Mieville's, but who knows.  A collaborative project can bring things out of you you never expected, so maybe I should give Reeves more credit.

But at the end of the day, we have a pretty good, not great, "chosen one" story (which screams Reeves) met with some philosophical ruminations as to the implications (spoiler!) of immortality, or rather quite cleverly, "infinite mortalities."

If you're really desperate to read something new by Mieville, you could do worse.  But it's never going to rank among his best work -- Perdido Street Station, The City and the City, Embassytown.  The overall focus just isn't there.

Still, I liked it just fine.  Thank you, Ted.

"The ghosts of everything"

"'What I have found,' he said, 'is that most journeys take you back to where you left from.  But not all.  A very long time ago I learned that at the end of some journeys, you start again somewhere new.  They don't happen very often.  Such journeys as those.  So when they do it's worth taking note.'  He gestured at the book.  'In any case recalling has never been a difficulty.  But there are ways of seeing.  See too many and it's overwhelming.  If you're looking for patterns, there is a line between too little information and too much.  So this is data.'

'And this,' I said, holding it up, 'is enough?  The perfect amount of information?'

'No,' he said.  'Not nearly enough.  It might be enough in a long time.  And when I write in it, as when anyone writes in any book, what I record is accompanied by the infinite ghosts of that which is not recorded.'

'The ghosts of everything,' I said."

-- China Mieville and Keanu Reeves, The Book of Elsewhere

Sad Sad News

It looks like Gene Hackman spent a week wandering around his house after his wife died.  Then he also died.

Me and my sister know all too much about this dementia stuff.  If you have an elderly relative, please check in daily!

Downtown Frederick, Not Quite Spring

 

Frederick, Maryland.

Only You

 

Gambrill State Park, west of Frederick, Maryland.  Lots of nice hiking trails yet to be discovered.

"It's a big black sky over my town"

 

Robyn and David Byrne, "Dancing On My Own"

A musical bright spot in an otherwise dismal 2025. 

"I wanna ride on the Ferris wheel"

Kim Deal, "Disobedience"

I'm really enjoying the new Kim Deal solo album.  More Breeders than Pixies, with some nice curveballs thrown in (Latin horns, anyone?)

Now it's Kelly's turn?

Feel The Spirit

 

Browsed at the always amazing Wonderbooks in Frederick, Maryland.

Blue Apple

Frederick, Maryland.

Job Stuff

I started a new job last week and it's going really well.  After 12 years teaching ESL in South Korea, and various other things along the way (substituting, tutoring, composition teaching in graduate school) I think part of me will always think of myself as a teacher, or an ex-teacher.

I'm also certain that thousands of years ago, sitting around the in-cave fire, the cave-people elders were complaining about the young folks.  But something really does seem to have changed -- so much unnecessary drama, the occasional death threat from a second grader, the addiction to cell phones -- in terms of what a teacher's job is supposed to be now.

I'll say more soon but it's nice to go into work and not have to hear any screaming, or any n- or f-bombs.

"one way out of an unhappy marriage in cultures where divorce was unavailable to wives"

I didn't realize that in a former life the great sci-fi novelist Charless Stross was a pharmacist, ahem, aher, a chemist since he's British.  And he took the time to write a really nifty piece on literary poisoning:

"Poisoning somebody is a violent assault, but a stealthy one: unlike shooting, stabbing, or punching it may not be obvious who's responsible, or even that an attack has taken place until much later. Historically it's often been a tool used by the weak against the overbearingly strong: one way out of an unhappy marriage in cultures where divorce was unavailable to wives. But, despite being stealthy, poisoning is also risky. Many legal systems punish poisoners more harshly than other murderers, either because it's the preferred tool of the oppressed against their privileged oppressor, or because it levels the playing field of violence between the weak and the well-armed and the latter don't like the taste of their own medicine.

So, before using poison in fiction, you need to be very clear about the motivation and expectancy of survival of the poisoner."

Absolutely do read the whole thing. 

Ichiro!

Ichiro Suzuki makes it to the hall of fame on his first ballot.

Like the recently departed Rickey Henderson, you could watch any game of any importance and they elevated the skill, the passion, and the joy.

"social techniques to match the situation"

"A firework he called it -- well, that was accurate enough.  It was a virtuoso display of paradoxes: opposing arguments brilliantly set forth so that one could hardly question the logic on either side.  He presented, among other things, a picture of the free democratic state as the high point of the social evolution of man; then, with shattering precision, he proceeded to demonstrate that the free democratic state was far too unstable to endure and therefore guaranteed its citizens misery and destruction.  He presented totalitarian systems as stable, enduring, reliable -- and then mercilessly exposed one by one the factors which rendered their eventual downfall inevitable.  By the time the reader was dizzy, Mayor was tossing out provocative suggestions for remedying these defects, and the total impression left on students like myself -- who went through college faced with what seemed like equally appalling alternative futures: nuclear war or a population explosion that would pass the six billion mark by the end of the century -- was that for the first time the West had produced a man capable of forging social techniques to match the situation."

-- John Brunner, The Squares of the City

Fur Puddle

 

In my deeply held scientific opinion, Chingu is a very good boy except when he's being a very bad boy.

Play 'The Candy Colored Clown!'

David Lynch has died, and the world is less strange and colorful now.

Blue Velvet is a stone cold classic.  Inland Empire may be my favorite film of his, but I can't watch it again because it left me shaken and spooked for about a week after I saw it.  And his Dune is certainly better than how it was critically reviewed on release.

Not a shabby musician either.

Rest Well, Jimmy

 

My sister and I braved the cold to pay our respects to President Carter.  May we all have second acts in life that involved serving others.

A Complete Unknown -- What I Thunk

The film makes some bold choices -- Alan Lomax and Peter Seeger as villains, or at least antagonists.  Joan Baez doesn't come off that well either.  But focusing on the early career of Dylan, these choices make sense by the end.

I also like how smart the film is musically.  There's a minor but great scene that explains to non-guitar players what playing in an open tuning means.

Like all biopics, the film lives or dies on whether you believe in Chalamet's depiction -- I did!

Basically, I thought it was great but I can see where others might differ.