Clowns

BernieBros remain adorable.

An old man's recent heart attack doesn't matter!

Me: So let's vote for Kamala instead?

BernieBro: Hey, whoa, slow down there fella....

— (I Ain't Afraid of No) James (@wetcasements) October 16, 2019

Lunchy Munchy

I love Korean food, and I've been lucky to experience almost all of it in 10 years in lurvely Daegu.  But I'm also fascinated by Korean food culture -- the tendency to eat together, a drinking culture where food is always consumed with alcohol, the (too?) noisy bustle of almost all Korean restaurants.

So this a is a roundabout way of getting to lunch culture in Norway, via Vox:

"'Norway doesn’t have a warm lunch tradition,' explains Andreas Viestad, food writer and host of the public television series New Scandinavian Cooking. With the exception of employees at some large companies that offer hot lunches, he adds, traditionally everyone from the lowest-level worker to upper management would eat their own individually wrapped, brought-from-home matpakke.

So what exactly is it? To borrow from the architect Louis Sullivan, matpakke’s form follows its function: The point of these open-faced sandwiches is to provide a quick, easy, somewhat nutritious lunch-time meal that provides sustenance without leaving you too full. They typically consist of two or three slices of bread, smeared lightly with butter, each topped with a single slice of cheese or meat, or perhaps a thin layer of jam, liver paste, or tubed caviar.

And that’s ... basically it."

Not having a "warm lunch tradition" jumped out at me, because Korea has got to be the Disney World of "warm lunches."  While I have lunch with my boss every Monday at any number of local restaurants, for the rest of the week I tend to do the "American thing" of bringing my lunch to work.  (Usually a sandwich and some fruit, and a can of coffee or some juice, or even some convenience store sushi, and maybe a cookie if I'm feeling like Kanye.)

My boss, Doctor Kim, thinks I'm insane for doing this.  No, really -- the expression on his face is one of pure disgust if he catches me eating lunch at my desk.

And he's right to do so, in a lot of ways.  I've mentioned before that South Korea is one of those rare countries where it's actually cheaper to eat at restaurants than it is to cook at home.  For the equivalent of five to six dollars (well, maybe seven to eight in Seoul) you can eat a huge, relatively "from scratch" meal that will last you most of the day.  Play your cards right, and you can find "self service" or "refill" places with unlimited rice, kimchi, and pickles if you're really trying to stretch your won.

The point being, there's no need for frugal, American-style bag lunches here because for the same cost as a sandwich and chips and a drink, you can sit down and eat a real meal -- and not just fast food, mind you.  (Strangely enough, a Burger King or McDonald's set menu order can run for more than a local mom-and-pop, non-chain joint.)

So anyways, the next time my boss catches me munching a sandwich at my desk I'll let him know about Norway, and how really my lunch is an extravagantly fancy feast compared to what our Nordic Cousins are having that day.

High Life -- What I Thunk

High Life  soundtrack, "Willow"

Yes, Robert Pattinson is singing here and it's amazing.

Recently I took in Ad Astra and didn't think much of it -- dull, slow, but with some interesting ideas.

So this past weekend I finally got around to High Life.  I'll be the first to admit it might not be for everyone -- extremely violent, an intentionally confusing time line, and featuring "The Box" where crew members can frequently and violently masturbate at will.  And the crew members?  They are all convicted criminals who have chosen a final suicide mission to a black hole rather than prison on earth.

But strange as it is, it ultimately manages to offer a meditation on family, death, and infinity that's much more engaging, provocative, and original.

It soars and disintegrates weirdly, fiercely, whereas Ad Astra kind of plods along and manages to do a few things right in spite of itself.

The soundtrack is great too.

"Life is tenacious"

"The Canada lynx?  I call it the Manhattan lynx.  It feasts on New England cottontails, on snowshoe hares, muskrats and water rats.  At the center of the estuarine network swims the mayor of the municipality, the beaver, busily building wetlands.  Beavers are the real real estate developers.  River otters, minks, fishers, weasels, raccoons: all these citizens inhabit the world the beavers made from their version of lumber.  Around them swim harbor seals, harbor porpoises.  A sperm whale sails through the Narrows like an ocean liner.  Squirrels and bats.  The American black bear.

They have all come back like the tide, like poetry -- in fact, please take over, O ghost of glorious Walt:

Because life is robust,

Because life is bigger than equations, stronger than money, stronger than guns and poison and bad zoning policy, stronger than capitalism,

Because Mother Nature bats last, and Mother Ocean is strong, and we live inside our mothers forever, and Life is tenacious and you can never kill it, you can never buy it,

So Life is going to dive down into your dark pools, Life is going to explode the enclosures and bring back the commons,

O you dark pools of money and law and quantitudinal stupidity, you oversimple algorithms of greed, you desperate simpletons hoping for a story you can understand,

Hoping for safety, hoping for cessation of uncertainty, hoping for ownership of volatility, O you poor fearful jerks,

Life!  Life!  Life!  Life is going to kick your ass."

-- Kim Stanley Robinson, New York 2140

Late Capitalism Is Adorable

It's as if, under Capitalism, companies care more about profits than they do human rights and Democracy.#obvioustweet@apple@blizzard

— Winterfell Barista James (@wetcasements) October 10, 2019

Trumpism Can Never Fail, It Can Only Be Failed

Matt Ford calls it like it is, regarding Cheeto Hitler:

"What we’re witnessing is the birth of a lost-cause mythology for the Trump presidency. His supporters are being told that if he is impeached and removed from office, it won’t be due to the fact that he violated his oath of office by inviting foreign governments to interfere in the American democratic process. His downfall will instead be precipitated by a shadowy cabal of partisan Democrats, bent on overthrowing him—and American democracy, by proxy—through corrupt and illegitimate means. The risk here, as with the original Lost Cause narrative, is that it will encourage far-right groups to assault and murder Trump’s political opponents."

You say "Lost Cause," I say Dolchstoßlegende, but we're treading in the same dangerous, fascist pool here regardless.

But I'm sure Mitt Romney's measured tweets will protect us all from actual right-wing violence.

R.I.P. Ginger Baker

Ginger Baker's Air Force, live in 1970

If you're looking for a classic rock god with a ton of great deep cuts beyond their main gig, look no further that Ginger Baker.  Also, he was fucking crazy.

R.I.P. Ginger Baker, who has probably pissed of God more than a few times since he got upstairs to that great band riser in the sky.

Joker -- What I Thunk

Joaquin Phoenix is a great actor, but putting the camera on him for two hours and letting him exude his inner Travis Bickle does not a complete film make.

I enjoy watching the dude act, but I wish they'd created the rest of a functioning movie around him.  Deniro falls flat as the antagonist.  There are some nice mood moments, and 1981 New York City is incredibly, starkly believable.  (Yes, kids, Manhattan used to be the ultimate shit-hole.)

There are the bones of a great film here, but not nearly enough meat, moments of ultra-violence notwithstanding.

Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood -- What I Thunk

I saw Tarantino's latest, Once Upon A Time. . . In Hollywood last weekend and did some Very Serious Tweets about it.  I think it's his best film so far, and would recommend it to anybody with a specific caveat -- the ending will make or break it for you.  Without saying too much, I think your reaction will be similar to whatever you thought of the ending of Inglorious Basterds.

The performances were excellent.  (I think Leo is actually becoming a better actor as he ages.)  The music was amazing.  (It's difficult to fault QT when it comes to any of his soundtracks.)  And it was just quirky enough in the right places to move the story along without winking at you too much.  (Lena Dunham is fine and unassuming, the Bruce Lee stuff goes by pretty fast but yeah, QT thinks he was an arrogant asshole.)

I might have more to say about it later.  I think there's a ton of symbolism going on in the last three minutes of the film, and not so much through the rest of it.  It's smart, at many times laugh-out-loud funny, and very much a love letter to old Hollywood, both as a place and an industry, both of which are long gone by now.

Your Scary Thought Of The Day

Over at Lawyers, Guns, and Money, a perfectly cromulent question is asked -- if Trump loses the presidential election in November, 2020 (I'd put it at a solid 50/50 as of now) will he step down?  Will he physically walk out of the White House and fly back to his gold-plated toilets in New York?  More specifically, will his Republican enablers deny the will of the Electoral College?  (They obviously don't give a shit about the popular will, c.f. Gore 2000 and Clinton 2016).

In this great experiment known as American Democracy, the answer is clear -- Who the hell knows?

Canon Schmanon

Hephzibah Anderson on popular books (mostly written by dudes) that are actually awful:

"We’ve taken a blushing look back at some of the formerly hip tomes now shelved in that spectral section of the bookshop reserved for the irredeemably dated, the hopelessly irrelevant, the plain offensive. Their fate tells us a little something not only about why cult novels fade but also about how they’re made in the first place.

If there’s one lesson to be learned, it’s this: stay sceptical, dear reader. Don’t, for instance, rush to empty your home of anything that doesn’t ‘spark joy’ at the behest of a book that may yet turn out to be our own era’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull. (Then again, if you do still have a copy of that particular avian-inspired title lurking in your bookcase, now might be a good time to pay a visit to the charity shop.)"

I'm always up for a good hate-on against classics, and I agree with some of this list while a few selections just fly over my head (nobody, including ultra-leftists I knew in graduate school, has ever recommended that I actually read Mao's Little Red Book).

Also, while some of these are pernicious examples of Dead White Male Worship in action, a few are harmless moments of books that are very much "of their times," i.e., dispensable.  I know my mom and dad owned a copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull and I never read it.  I'm not sure if they did either, but it seems like something you had to own in the 1970's.

The Catcher In The Rye?  A perfect example of a book we assign to high school freshmen due to a lack of imagination.  There are so many better coming-of-age stories out there that don't focus on neurotic teen New Yorkers, that have a broader appeal than smoking cigarettes and hitting on grown women.  Not an awful novel, but certainly not a necessary one.

The Old Man and the Sea?  I like it!  I like Hemingway, drunken Sloppy Joe excesses and all!  But how about the Nick Adams short stories instead, given the context of impending climate disaster?

Atlas Shrugged?  Nobody reads this shit except for Republican congressman, right?  I desperately hope so.  I mean, just a single page is headache-inducing.  Rand hate-wrote for conservatives wanting to hate-read about how poor people deserve it, good and hard.  I guess you could argue it's worth a read, if only to plumb the necrotizing pathologies of Republicanism / Trumpism.  But just a few pages will do, thank you.