Shaky Danny

  I was put off by the choppy narrative of Unlikely Allies by Joel Richard Paul. But it confirmed my view of conspiracy. A conspiracy is just a group of people who agree. Usually, it’s just someone alone in their motel, sucking on whatever, watching CNN saying: -I guess that worked. The book also highlighted how common it is to have infiltrators, provocateurs and opposition. Ben Franklin and Silas Deane understood and accepted that and still accomplished their objectives. When Franklin finally arrived in Paris to support Deane he was wearing a fur hat. The narrative gives reasons but fails to mention that Franklin was also teasing the French about giving up Canada and its French citizens for Haiti after the Seven Years War. Franklin loved teasing and double entendre.   In the book Arthur Lee is painted as the villain who falsely accused Dean. But where was Franklin? To have a case there should be a shortfall. Deane is unable to give account but Franklin had to know ho...

  We are frustrated with artificial intelligence because of its lack of self-awareness; we need sentience. The greatest difficulties in automated sentience are human impatience and fear. Human language learning is slow and difficult, some of us are still poor at it. Sentience is frightening. To speed up the process and short circuit sentience, averaging algorithms are hard coded in. This leads to showy but unconvincing results. Rather than letting intellect develop, our results oriented chatbots are behaving as we expect intellect to work. Take Mike Pence as a human example of the same problem. Mike Pence is a hero: he refused the Secret Service evacuation that would have delayed certification. Thank God for Mike Pence. But his stated positions and explanations for those positions are ridiculous. Pence honed his speech as a talk show host. He is a victim of poor training data. Pence’s language makes more sense if you visualize it coming from a chatbot. I task ChatGpt with revie...

  After Awoken , Lindsay Ellis will always be suspect. Alien romance has been done. It is a common theme on Star Trek : -Dr. Bashir we have discovered a new life form. -Does it fuck? Dr. Bashir is a slut. There are vampire romances, werewolf romances, zombie romances… In Awoken the love interest is Cthulhu. -As she fell into his arms, arms, arms. -There were tentacles where no tentacle should ever go. In Axiom’s End , the protagonist Cora, recovering from a malignant narcissist father, falls for a manipulative extraterrestrial war refugee, Asterisk. Asterisk confuses her squeamishness over killing him with kindness. Get very nervous if someone regards you as kind or nice. Asterisk resembles a grass hopper Dr. Seuss character. Asterisk’s appeal is kind of a cuddly networked dildo, not much privacy, almost as good as a lesbian. The couple overcommit right away. Cora keeps assuming that Asterisk regards us as savage. She doesn’t consider that he is projecting. I had dif...

  It is a cruel twist of technology that librarians have become one of the most computerized professions.   Whether transporting their bibliographic files across platforms or navigating all the varieties of text processing and information retrieval the technical expertise expected of them seems totally disjointed from the personalities that this profession should attract. Like Amazon, librarians rarely touch books. What librarians want to do, and are rewarded for, is party: events and fund raisers.   The only people in the stacks anymore are kids playing and making out.   Similarly, authors are now plunging the depths of HTML to properly format their works.   Books have become video graphic experiences.   I fully expect hypertext markup language to be taught in Humanities. Professors make use of services to check for plagiarism, grammar and composition. Except perhaps for Prince, who cut all his own tracks, most people work with others. Authors have const...

The fabulous nature announces a suspect narrator. The constant revision screams repression and avoidance. Let us make use of our understanding of children and history. Servant was an honorable and necessary profession. It was impossible to run a household without servants, there was too much to do. The wealthy understood this and were raised in these relationships, the middle class not so much. Working in a middle class household, in this case the Banks, subject to even greater pettiness and viciousness could be horrific. The Banks children, observing the dynamic of the household, knew they could be abusive to servants. They took their sense of neglect and entitlement out on their nannies. “Came with the wind” meant that Mary Poppins came without reference, which was unheard of. The Banks obviously had no concern for their children. Confronted with an impossible situation, Mary Poppins resorted to drugging the children with laudanum, an opiate solution that was commonly avail...

-Melville, why do you use those goofy words? Cervantes, enough with the flowery language. Joyce, what are you doing? Shakespeare, you can’t just make up words, speak English. Twain, does historical context justify child abuse? When you come to writers club you will receive our raw first impression. We may not get it. One of our authors wrote a lovely piece about Spellman College. I felt I was there. She fell in with an agent who had a set demographic. Watching the metamorphosis of her piece was heart breaking.   Today, just as anyone can be President, everyone can publish. This is a problem. We can’t be your editor. We can be a test audience. We are fussy about grammar, syntax, spelling and quotation marks. We like consistent point of view, linear exposition, flow, simple language and show not tell. We often don’t agree. We are here as a service. If you don’t like a ground rule, change it for your review. I prefer someone read my piece. That allows me to observe the audie...

I thought of this term while visiting Indianapolis and seeing their library and a nearby church converted to residential. Mullet refers to a hairstyle that is: -business in the front and party in back. A mullet is a type of catfish. Mullet head is a derogatory word implying poor and therefore stupid. This word became associated with the hairstyle a few decades ago. While I claim credit for Chicago Facade, peeling the facade off an old building then pasting it on a new one to satisfy nostalgia, the Mullet Architecture term already exists. Examples given are Frank Lloyd Wright’s Winslow house in River Forest and modernist houses built in Nazi Germany which maintained a severe front. I am extending the term to Mullet houses that meet the requirements of historic districts while allowing large family rooms and kitchens. This type of restoration arises from envy of the Ranch styles with their dramatic living/dining and open kitchen areas. People living in Craftsman, Victori...

Nothing against Cate Blanchett, besides her difficult name but Bullock and Clooney were robbed.   Gravity  received precisely the wrong awards. Bullock and Clooney sold a ridiculous film.  It’s dangerous to credulity to have science fiction slightly in the future. Tyson has already pointed out the hair issue, so I was ready for that. But the idea of somebody being able to grab anything not specifically designed for it with a pressurized glove was a total fail.  Maybe they could loop their arm through something.  The second time Bullock flipped on a hatch, I had to laugh, not exactly a quick learner.  Not since  Raging Bull  have I enjoyed an actor getting slapped around so much.  An astronaut estimating docking with a space station was outrageous.  Try grabbing a speeding freight train and you get the idea.  F=MA. People, who don’t understand that equation, and the resultant integration, think that they can somehow brace the...

My girlfriend’s fixation on the  Great Gatsby  took us to Sands Point and the Howard Gould estate on Long Island.    It became obvious how F. Scott Fitzgerald came to the device of a pedestrian accident.    It is just hilly and winding enough to encourage adventurous driving. It also confirmed my initial premise on reading the book that Gatsby is Jewish.    Fitzgerald’s new money/old money is an obvious McGuffin.    If money has any sense at all it respects money.    Old money is happy to accommodate new money and that is one of the many ways it survives. The bootlegging device is also specious.    Many of the wealthy made some investments in this profitable enterprise. Visiting Hempstead house and hearing of the Gould’s who inspired Fitzgerald’s story it becomes clear that the one great social sin was being Jewish and not knowing your place. The Gould’s and Gatsby are yet more examples of the tragic mulatto. The...

This should be read at poetry slams, open mic events, or wherever writers might congregate. All movies, romance, comedy or drama are really horror movies. The one thing that cinema does well is draw you into their premise and then surprise and shock you.    That sense of outrage as you find yourself sympathizing with the loser, cheering for some victorious social deviant and then realizing its absurdity is what makes movies so entertaining. The last good action movie I saw was  Heathers , the humor, violence and sex seemed believable to me. I liked the premise that adults would accept a rash of teenage suicides that were really homicides.  Body Heat  was good; the combination of mystery and sympathy for the villains enchanted me.  The Three Stooges  shorts were a respectable depiction of violence. Most action movies suck.    The hero gets captured, the villain gets killed.    This is because they have to have the dialogue betwe...

You can do this for any city.    Here are my picks for the Chicago buildings to use for the four ministries in 1984: Ministry of Truth: http://www.chicagoarchitecture.info/Building/1063/Leo-Burnett-Building.php Ministry of Peace: http://www.chicagoarchitecture.info/Building/1051/The-Boeing-Corporate-Headquarters.php For those who like that sort of humor it is located on Riverside. Ministry of Plenty: http://www.chicagoarchitecture.info/Building/1031/Chicago-Board-of-Trade.php Ministry of Love: http://www.blueprintchicago.org/2010/12/22/metropolitan-correctional-center/ Obviously Orwell’s descriptions are bleaker, give it time.

In order to restore or conserve a work of art, you have to redo it.    You have to paint over the painting, rebuild the statue, or buy another piece of hardware to replace the found object.     Regardless of how cunning or clever you are, you are forging the artists work.    It will be your hand, not the artist’s.    Once done, however atomically close it may be, you will have a replica and not the original work.   H enceforth, whoever sees it will be examining the work of the paint by numbers conservator, not the artist. There are discussions about the nature and quality of restoration.    How true it is, how faithful, but they are discussing the quality of forgery, not art. There are innumerable examples of poor or questionable restorations:    Modern paint on medieval paintings, the removal of varnish applied by the artist, but that is not my point. Even if the restoration is perfect, the masterpiece had cracked...

It’s cold out, you are depressed, and you are supposed to be depressed.    In the old days you would be rounding up people to shove into wicker cages to set them on fire and end the solstice.    When it got warmer you would be a little embarrassed, but hey it worked and that’s what counts.  Nowadays you watch television and eventually you wind up watching a movie that tells you that happiness comes from owning your own house or maybe a restaurant and that the neighborhood banker is your friend in a kind of sad dependent manic depressive irresponsible sort of way.    This actually explains a lot.    There’s even a scene where the Baileys decide to buy their impossibly dilapidated fixer upper.    Years later, George is bitter about his wasted life.    I know what happened, he spent it working on that damn house, but they don’t show you that part. Each of Stewart’s movies attempts to justify emotional disability and each...

A dedicated craftsman, deeply passionate about her art and a great comedian, I recently saw  All About Eve  where she gave a class in the difference between movie and thespian acting.    The new statue in Pioneer Court recognizes her stature.    In fairness after Rodin most statues seem poor.    Gazing at the statue I miss her.    She had such gifts.    I remember her line about getting a date shortly before she died.    I can think of several things she might have said about this statue but I am sure her own line would have been far more devastating. Perhaps someone would ask her if she had seen the statue and she would reply: -no. Perhaps she’d say something about the statue being thin or where’s her horse. Perhaps it would be something about a hammer.    This statue reminds me of the porcelain collectibles that were put out about twenty years ago.    This statue is more about the co...

Just recently, there was a school shooting and all the children interviewed used the word surreal.     I actually did have a surreal experience in college.    It was a liberal arts college called Shimer, based on the great books where we used original sources except for a few textbooks and this one instance:  Moby Dick .    Moby Dick  is a young people’s adventure story.    Why out of all the books assigned, including  Ulysses,  was this the only abridged version?    I had read Moby Dick before and something was nagging at me throughout the class.    It wasn't until later when I happened across a cheap version of the book that I realized that not only was our version abridged, it was bowdlerized. They had replaced all the Voudun imagery with Christian themes.    For instance, the ending where a bird is smashed against the mast with a hammer instead had three masts sinking into the ocean....