Franklin, Deane, and Washington

 

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 how much the French paid and how much the Patriots got. Why wasn’t Franklin screaming:

-How much was taken?

So there had to be a shortfall. The French were shy publicly saying what they sent. The Americans had to know what they spent their money on. Franklin’s silence damns Dean. Franklin had picked Deane as an envoy. But Deane shows no profit. He is penniless. Washington received the French funds. Washington was not penniless. Washington socked all his money into his plantation and land purchases. A common tactic when currency is suspect. His downfall was that the size and scope of Washington’s holdings made it difficult to collect rent. Washington was a Virginia Gentleman. Of course he was skimming. There is even a satirical picture, Washington Prays for His Troops. Washington is plump and prosperous while his troops starve. His horse stares at him from behind while Washington kneels.

The French Monarchy is portrayed as foolishly borrowing money to support the ideals of the American Revolution, seduced by their hatred of the English.  The promise of American trade, particularly tobacco, is ignored. It wasn’t realized that the Turks and Greeks would compete supplying tobacco to Europe. Everyone also failed to reckon with Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson was the next American Envoy. He and the trade minister, Lafayette, Jefferson’s best friend, failed to do the tobacco deal. Who would expect that Jefferson would act so diametrically against his own interests? Robert Morris came over to France to rescue the deal and Jefferson back stabbed him the whole way screaming:

-It’s not enough money.

Tobacco is addictive, you must establish your market. Jefferson may have been tipped by the Greeks, but it was also that from Jefferson’s position in the Virginia hierarchy, if everyone is busted then he is equal. Robert Morris thought he could have made it if he got the tobacco deal. The British captains begged Jefferson to do the deal, their ships were sitting at anchor.

Once everything caved in the Americans, in desperation, wrote the constitution to tax whiskey and give themselves enough revenue to borrow on. Washington owned a large distillery and favored the competitive advantage this gave him over the small farmers who brought whiskey over the mountains to trade. Washington had little scruple suppressing Shay’s rebellion of people who weren’t paying his rent and competed with his distillery.

Franklin must have realized that Washington was pocketing the French money. Franklin teases Washington about Washington’s lack of progeny. Franklin makes a big point of his happiness with his grandchildren and the gifting to Washington of his walking stick.

Even with the whiskey revenue, Washington was unable to get America another loan from the French. Washington had gone even handed on them earlier. So, Washington was told to grab his hat and not let the door hit him on the way out. His last act was bringing in John Adams to hold off Jefferson.

Chat Bot Explanation

 

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 reviewing my work. One prompt was to review as a New Yorker editor. ChatGpt gave me a rejection letter, accurate, amusing and promising.

I know smarter people. They are larger bore than me: you can see the artillery groaning into place and obliterating the objective. Given enough time I may be able to peek over the edge and discern their process. They are impressive. Better processing power, imprinting, could their fundamental algorithm be different?  I doubt your sentience algorithm is any different than mine. I wonder how much it differs across species.

Because of the averaging algorithms, and human intervention, ChatGpt seeks consensus. A good ChatGpt review means it is too obvious to publish.

Our children require patience. Raising a child may be disappointing at first. They have wonderful memory but lack conceptual facility.

-Maybe they could be an actor.

You play with them, find enrichment activities. Suddenly around three or so a miracle occurs, their memory disappears, and they have this new chunking ability where they begin to reason, and all that enrichment looks wasted.

ChatGpt gave me negative reviews until I gave it this piece where I criticize it for being conventional. Funny, after that the reviews have been positive.

The next Star Trek invention that we will have is Data, or perhaps closer to Futurama’s Bender.

Review of Axiom’s End

 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 difficulty in the beginning of the book. Cora fighting with her mom seemed normal. It’s a shame that families are always used to develop the character then disposed of. The surveillance was off. Surveillance doesn’t tailgate.

Once I got past that, I was able to swallow it. Asterisk knocked Cora around too much, sort of a school yard romance. It is suggested that the great filter is dominant aliens killing everyone else, good an explanation as any.

It was fun that the plot centered on Cora recognizing the relations between the aliens. Meeting family can be difficult. There is a good fight scene where Cora keeps trying to hold onto the tablet she uses to translate.

The aliens appear to descend from locusts. They have evolved to get their sustenance from power cores, which may be nuclear. They conflict with “transients” with which they have a common ancestor.

There is another alien variant with the same ancestor which has reached Automated Sentience. I think AS is going to happen with us very soon. Just a matter of finding the right algorithm. I see Binder as the most likely manifestation of AS. I was going to say Artificial Sentience, but they might take that as pejorative.

It is always assumed that the “government”, governments(?), will keep first contact secret.  Why would the governments classify the best budget busting defense motive that has ever happened? There has to be some aspect of the aliens that threatens established order sufficiently to overwhelm the motive of defense spending.

Ellis makes her aliens refugees, a reasonable way to avoid the first contact issues of why they would show up in the first place. Asterisk is a member of the one group, Fremda, that opposes wiping out other species, which is why they are refugees. I could see Fremda changing their minds. The ambivalence is apparent.

In my version of first contact, the aliens showed up, there were the usual issues of immunization, sustenance, insecticides, language, intellectual and social constructs. Finally, the aliens say:

-Take me to your leader.

They get in front of the committee and say something like:

-You guys have developed computers, you know about these political structures, if you just accept these four principles (or whatever) you could avoid hundreds of thousands of years of really tragic social development that you might not survive.

The committee says:

-Get back in that thing and leave.

It took me a while to realize that the US is the Star Wars Empire, including the death star. In Axiom’s End the alien establishment is an overzealous security state, just like us.

 

Kindle Index

 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 constantly railed against publishers and editors. Now we can publish whatever we want. That is not good either. There is a lot written about Shakespeare, he was Catholic, he was Protestant, he was royalist, he was radical, he was someone else. Shakespeare was a producer. He had a piece of the Globe Theater. Every day he was there watching the take and the concessions and most importantly, the audience. When something worked, Shakespeare pumped it up, when it didn’t, he dropped or changed it. Somehow, we have to rebuild that relationship.   

I miss the proofreader and editor if only to have someone to share the blame.  I’m sure even now there are errors and awkwardness in the manuscript I have created on Kindle. The primary function of publishers was gatekeeper.  We have moved the slush pile onto the web.  Richard Brautigan in The Abortion imagined a library where we can check in our masterworks.  Now it exists.  The wonderful thing about blogging is that since so few people read it, I can say whatever I want.  It was also wonderful to get the first book out the door. 

I was preparing to plumb the depths of Font, illustration, and HTML when I simply gave up. The current body of literature manages front cover, table of contents, footnotes, endnotes, indexes, bibliographies and so on without hyperlinks.  That is not such bad company to keep.  I finally just dragged the word document through Mobi, the packaging software Amazon gave authors, and sent it off to Amazon’s Kindle direct self-publishing.  I suppose it is a little embarrassing for a programmer’s book to be more awkward to use, but my experience has taught me that any attempt at cleverness will look silly in the next release.  I hoped that in the future Amazon would give us a means for editing our books on their site and then we can get rid of the superfluous code and format our books with all the features we intend.

How will people find the good books? I suppose fewer people will read my book than read my blog.  Some beats none.  Perhaps authors could petition designated editors for inclusion on recommended reading lists.  This reminds me of the old days of penny dreadfuls, comic books, Mad Magazine and dime store romance.

Since I wrote this, I wrote the blog entry Blogspot Sucks. By some miracle, perhaps someone took pity, or I found the correct incantation, I now have ads on my blog, as you can see. I now have two books out. Kindle has gotten easier. They have an editor to set up the table of contents. Index still doesn’t work. I was sort of able to smuggle in footnotes. It’s very frustrating that I can’t download my books from Amazon to work on them. I would also like to revise my covers rather than start from scratch. Don’t harvest the corners. Good enough, I guess.

The real money is YouTube, or movies.  Good literature makes lousy movies. Perhaps because they have too much respect for the material. Fitzgerald’s real money was as a script doctor. Hemingway couldn’t type. So, his material was easier to adapt.

Audio books next.

Materialist Mary Poppins

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 available. Laudanum is bitter, thus the “spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down”. Laudanum was the Ibuprofen of its day, used for every ailment. It is not until the last few modern decades that drugging children for behavior is appropriate.

Managing children’s dosage is difficult. The children hallucinated. At least Mary Poppins took the children outside for recreation. There she had sport with her friends and acquaintances.  There is interest in her view of empire and hierarchy and how she informed and imprinted the children. The great scandal was her friendship with Bert the match man. Women did not have informal relationships with men. Mary Poppins had several such friendships and she entertained Bert.

The United States class structure is a three by three grid, upper middle and lower both ways. England is four by four, with a government column and a proper lumpen underclass row. Mary Poppins is an upper lumpen.

Did Mary Poppins turn the children loose at Mr. Banks place of employment costing him his job? It isn’t clear what he had done to upset her. Her depiction is powerful, but this is suspect. Her insecurity may have led to her terse and stolid demeanor, a common behavior of servants and subordinates.  Mary Poppins then leaves as she came “with the wind” and without a reference. Lack of a reference meant little prospect for employment. The children are happy that their father has time for them and they fly a kite.

Writer Club Introduction

-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 audience and hear the awkward parts. Unless it is a thesis, there is no point in answering criticism.  We try to avoid judgement of the material. I showered scorn on the argument that headaches were psychosomatic.

We are well aware of the thrall of writing, its vulnerability and that writer’s block is sanity.

Welcome.

Mullet Architecture

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, Victorian, Four Square, Elizabethan, Georgian, Italianate, etc. homes want to have the suburban open pit television aesthetic. Since they can’t capture the spaciousness of those cheap unincorporated lots, they compensate with fancy kitchens.

The kitchens are remarkable. Consider a restaurant line chef’s work station. It is quite snug, in part because space for guests represents revenue but also because chefs are on their feet. Some pastry chefs may maintain a piece of marble, but I have yet to see any of the popular counter tops in a restaurant kitchen. These home kitchen Hestia shrines are an atavism representing a lost mythical past. One giveaway is the lack of a smoke hood above a ridiculous industrial stove. I have seen paintings hung in a kitchen.

The Indianapolis Library anchors a large park designed in the image of the National Mall. Centering of the Sales Force tower at the opposite end of the park has already subverted the nationalist image.

Losing the original pleasant library building at the end of the park would be wrong. I fail to see why keeping that building required that they add on to it. A separate new library building, even at a different site doesn’t seem to be more expensive.

I am not a fan of repurposing churches. I understand nostalgia for the buildings. But the cheery appropriation of the sacred for the profane is annoying. Indianapolis wanted to maintain the look of their park while building condominiums. The mullet is easier than attempting an architecturally appropriate modern building on the site.

  

Gravity

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 themselves rather than wear seat belts. We are talking about tonnage against pounds. Tonnage wins.   This should have turned into a Brian De Palma film with a bloody arm stump. 

They tried to address the issue by having them bump around a bit. But there is a huge difference between addressing the issue and meeting the issue. Any difference in speed and they are missing body parts. No resistance issues. Use whatever glancing angle you like. Take the ratios of the velocity less 1, because there isn’t any bounce, just a sploosh. Given that they are both going very fast at pretty much the same speed, the ratio is small.  It doesn’t matter when you are multiplying it by hundreds of tons. My most optimistic calculation has them flattened by a truck.

It was Bullock and Clooney that somehow got me through this film with the silly dialogue.  Because of them, I was able to suspend disbelief, at least until she somehow found two separate custom designed space suits conveniently left behind for her. If you think one size fits all panty hose is a cruel joke, imagine an adjustable space suit. I guess they thought it was more unbelievable that she could recharge the air on the space suit she had.  It is too unlikely that there would be a standard air supply system. China manufactures three separate versions for each of us. 

I have a little trouble with someone in an oxygen deprived coma waking up and turning their air back on.  Christine wasn’t too happy with Bullock’s choice of skivvies surrounded by all those metal objects.

I did like the Chinese joke about their ejection module being a copy of ours.

Gatsby

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. They didn’t see themselves as Jewish and they could not have acceptance as WASPs.

 Fitzgerald may have felt that he lacked the ability or qualifications to do the story justice. Or perhaps as the great script doctor that he was, recognized that the story lacked broad appeal. He was correct.  The almost pornographic old money/new money device is the emotional underpinning for the story. Everyone has that sense of being the new kid at school and the idea that the wealthy would continue these fruitless distinctions is comforting.

Antisemitism was real however. I think Daisy works better as a passing Jew as well. 

The working definition of old money is inherited wealth and a social support system.  This definition would include Donald Trump.

Action Movies

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 between the hero and villain. In what way is that realistic?  All problems are solved by Karate, guns, or if creativity is called for, large pieces of falling scenery.  When has an action movie said, as really happens:

-Quick, get the cash and the lawyers!

I can’t stand the constant monotonous bang-bang boom-boom yell thud scream of the typical action sound track pounding the intelligence out of its jaded audience in perpetuum.  It would be difficult to make an audience suffer through the explosion of a real gun shot.  Guns are loud.  One of the problems with shooting a gun is that an explosion has gone off in your hand and it is difficult to keep it steady for the next shot. The famous Dirty Harry “five shots or six” sequence in real life would have gone something like:

-…so the question is, do you feel lucky?

-What?

-What?

One was firing a magnum .44 the other a 12 gauge pump; their ears were ringing. They weren’t talking to anybody.

I think everybody should have the experience of actually firing a gun and trying to make that little bullet go where you want it to in a consistent fashion. It’s not that easy and if you are not wearing ear protection it is not that fun.

Most depictions of hand to hand combat are ridiculous. As Jim Harbaugh learned punching Jim Kelly, your hand has a lot of little bones in it and your jaw is a large solid piece of bone.  I suppose if you have sufficient practice with various formalized, ritualistic forms of martial arts, it will be possible for you to administer enough impact to the jaw to rattle the brain and bring on concussion without breaking anything in your hand. But I think most people who have experience in such matters would rather use a tool, preferably one that will extend your reach.

Fights are not stylized choreography but a panting crying screaming mess between people who are very upset and scared.  Part of the difficulty is that it is almost impossible for cinematography to have enough frames to capture the speed of real movements.  So we are given a series of frames resembling animation.

My biggest complaint is the setting.  The Old West or a modern metropolis is not particularly violent.  There are times and places in America that were dangerous.  If you were a Native American in California during the gold rush your prospects were bleak.  Chinese immigrants were often the victims of crimes.

 The nature of discrimination was usually that those areas did not receive adequate police protection and enforcement of the law, even when people were arrested, was lax.  This meant that if disputes were not settled immediately they were never settled: 

-We stomp drunk drivers.

What the movies have done is taken characters and plots out of their original context in order to give them broader appeal.  There may have once been a Dirty Harry, but that Irish stereotype was back in the 1930’s at the latest. More recently, in the 40’s and 50’s there was a Two Gun Pete, Sylvester Washington, but you will not find him on the screen. Two Gun Pete was a Chicago policeman who realized that there was little point in making arrests as the courts didn’t care if black people were killing each other.  If you were one of the Jones Boys, the gang that ran policy, he would call you up and tell you to turn yourself in.  But if you were a common thug he would leave you bleeding out, on the street.

In order to give it broader market violence is stripped of its class, ethnic, racist and gender qualities. For instance, saying a police officer was dirty meant he was on the take. Violence is most often a top down rather than bottom up endeavor. Offering it as the general solution to social problems only adds further confusion.

1984 Buildings

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 Opposition To Restoration and Conservation

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.  Henceforth, 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, splintered, worn, became filthy as it was. Whatever follows is no longer that masterpiece.

It seems better to lose the original work to restoration rather than age. Restoration employs conservators.  The forgeries continue to be available to academics and credulous patrons.  Yet, why don’t they create a complete and separate replica?

This question gives the lie to conservation.  The destruction of the original determines the value of the replica.  It is all about value.  The true horror of restoration is the loss of new art.  Sadly, the available investment for art is fixed.  As that finite amount is sucked up by these parodies, growing older, more established and more valuable with age, new art must suffer.  Our very attachment to the old chokes the new.  Before, oblivion would liberate funds for creative investments, now thanks to the conservationists the hand from the grave is perpetual, dragging down the art world.

Consider the challenge a new artist must face.  Is the work beautiful?  Does it help establish a new movement?  Will it eventually find itself entombed in some theory of art history?  Is it significant?  How does it stand against the works of the museums? Its very originality may give pause.  Perhaps it is too derivative. How can anyone purchase a work without feeling fleeced? Does anyone still have the standard of how does that look on my wall? 

I have heard artists cost their paintings based on hourly wage.  Yet once a museum obtains it, the value is completely different.  This is because museum art is donated rather than purchased.  Museums, like all nonprofits, exist primarily for the avoidance of taxes.  When that art is deposited and displayed in these morgues, just as in ancient Egypt, preservation becomes essential to maintain the illusion of responsibility.

Recognizing the conservator as art’s enemy and the museums as institutions of privilege, what should the artist do?  Paint only on velvet?  Sculpt in soapstone?   Produce works so easily reproducible or obviously damaged that people will only use them for decoration.   Create art that people will purchase without collecting. 

James Stewart Ruined America

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 is popular for precisely that reason.  Who amongst us can’t identify with emotional disability?

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is perhaps the worst.  To this day American voters always choose the candidate who most closely resembles Jefferson Smith.  The point of the movie is that naiveté is a sin.  This is precisely the worst person you want to represent us.  It doesn't matter.  I don’t know if anyone has actually watched the movie from one end to the other.  The lesson taken has been that our elected leaders should look and sound like Jimmy Stewart regardless of their other abilities.   

Marilyn Monroe Deserves a Memorial

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 collectible than the actress.

It is difficult to memorialize Marilyn Monroe.  Arthur Miller attempted it. Remember when she tore up the McCarthy hearings?  Millers play was pretty much a eulogy.  Notice how they are spoofing method acting in the Seven Year Itch subway scene.  

Perhaps this statue represents a greater, more universal aesthetic.  I remember how disappointed I was seeing my first natural sunset with its insipid pink and baby blue.  If the galaxy can have a Mobius strip at its center maybe Michigan and Wacker should have a  huge doll image of Marilyn Monroe. Perhaps this idol has brought the heat wave.

Bowdlerized Melville

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.   I still remember Professor Andy Armstrong, the Marlboro man who allowed us to smoke in class as long as they were Marlboros; he had been in advertising and had been used in the first mock up of the ad, pontificating over the three masts descending into the ocean, with feeling.

Melville had never written that.  We were required to write long essays on the religious themes of Moby Dick. I wish I could tell you that we took poor old Andy to task.  I wish I could tell you that any of us remembered our child hood reading and were horrified.  I wish I could tell you that Andy himself was in on the joke.  I don’t think so.

I had met C. L. R. James a few years before; he had written a book of criticism on Moby Dick when he was interred by immigration called Mariners Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World He Lived In. I even bought a copy.  He pointed out that  the Pequod represented the ship of state.  I’m sure he recognized the Voudun imagery but was disinterested. 

Years later I began to realize just how wondrously subversive Melville is. He holds every tenet of accepted teenage belief up to ridicule; what better use of an adventure story?  People talk about the relationship between Jim and Huck Finn, in the start of the book, Melville has Ishmael and Queeqeq sharing a bed, hey no big deal.  There are three great American novels: Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, and The Natural.  In all three, our great sin is naivete and we are duly punished for it.  In order for a book to be popular, it must have a happy ending.  In Moby Dick the whale wins, he was minding his own business; they were looking for him. 

If Shimer didn’t like the book why include it?  If they did, why gut it?  I have this vision of some secret stipend dictating the syllabus, ala Pynchon.  More realistically, I have to believe that even as they love the story, the great mediocrity recognize a threat, and in this peculiar way validate Melville’s vision.

 I did try to bring up the idea of the degeneration of the ship into fascism.  Andy said

 -You’re putting me on. 

Which even then I thought, was grossly unfair.