The only television that I wish to watch at the moment is PBS Nature's multi-part series on cats. Did you know that the rusty spotted cat of Sumatra, when full-grown, is barely the size of a domestic kitten?
1,2: So adorable!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p05srpx8
I gave up on The Wrestler after an hour. Fucking mumbling, no plot, shitty sound, fucking shaky cam. Low-budget, one camera, fine. You can't afford a steadicam to follow a guy walking down the street? Fuck you. That the same person made The Fountain just beggars belief.
The only kind of wrestling I like to watch is cats wrestling other cats.
I occasionally watched WWE when I was in HS and maintained it was funnier than most sitcoms. Don't know what I'd think kow. Some of my cohorts seemed to watch it unironically.
OTOH Warrior, an MMA movie, is great. Basically just a fight movie, but possibly marginally relevant in that it takes some trouble building a folk-hero narrative on both sides of the fight. And uses actual MMA commentators for the fights.
3: Thanks for the link; that was an adorable segment.
Apparently WWE is now in cahoots with the Saudis.
Possibly relevant in that I vaguely recall WWE having some racial/class-based characters and storylines:
The nineteenth-century social order was constituted as a hierarchy of distinct categories differentiated by morality, and power associated with morality. The shadowplay of the Malay peninsula provides an example of how this was understood by peasants.
[...]
Figures in the shadowplay were identified primarily by category of being [...] Three of the major categories were the nobles or 'lords' {caomuang), the clowns (tuatalok), and the ogres {yak). [...] The clowns, unlike either nobles and ogres, were identified with actual peasants who lived in the past in certain villages. As non-idealized local people, they ranked somewhere between the nobles and ogres, and did the dirty work for the nobility.
[...]
Moral category was also represented in appearance: Princes were made to look attractive in conventional ways, while ogres had an assortment of non-human and ugly features--they were hairy, had fangs, and stood improperly (with one leg lifted). Clowns were black, ugly, and had animal-like features. This, and their futile attempts to be more cultured, was the vehicle for much of the humour of the play.
[...]
Another, more indicative means by which the straightforward hierarchy was subverted, and another was constructed, is suggested by the sequence in which puppets were stacked in a chest when not in use. [...] From top down, the order was (Chalermpow, 1980:25s14):
1. The ruesi [teacher/master] who is dharma
2. The divine beings
3. The six major clowns
4. Nobility (lords, queens, princesses, and princes)
5. Other human characters (minor clowns, soldiers, bandits, rich men, and so on)
6. Ogres and the not-dharma ruesi
7. Spirits and some miscellaneous comic characters and animals.
[...]
The slippage between a more Buddhist hierarchical structure on the one hand, and the practice of everyday life on the other hand, was parallel to the slippage between structure and performance in the shadowplay. In the actualization of shadowplay, the productive labour of the peasants, associated with folk-Brahman power, was ranked higher than power associated with the morality of nobles in the plot.
GLOW really kicks it up a notch when Alison Brie started doing her evil Russian persona.
Also, should I read Wolf in White Van? Also also, GoT volume one was actually quite good, as indicated by the 'tariat, for which thanks.
Although GRRM's line in toponyms is frankly lacking.
10 and 11 are both interesting thanks.
14. The whole thing is written in one character's voice-- that's done really well, but it's a style that has limitations. If you dislike an excerpt (like the one on Amazon) you probably won't like the whole thing either.
The wrestler was awesome, perhaps the best sports movie I've ever seen. Warrior looked pretty tedious -- more support our troops nonsense with a ridiculous plot.
Also, Barthes.
I have a friend who writes for GLOW, should I ask her to stop by?
lw, Mould isn't just a wrestling enthusiast; he literally worked as a wrestling writer (the nWo period of the WCW promotion, which is now owned by WWE; that was coincidentally the last time I was watching wrestling with any regularity).
If you're interested in this stuff at all, let me recommend Deadspin's wrestling coverage, where e.g. I recently learned that Jesse Ventura abortively tried to set up a performer's union in the '80s.
16: Thanks.
Magic Mike maybe belongs here too. I'm thinking of the McConaughey character's spiel about fantasy and wish fulfillment for the audience.
I'm anti-Fountain and I love Aranofsky. It's almost a movie. It's a draft of a movie, it's the I have a ten page paper due tomorrow and I haven't started of movies. But if it had been done properly it would have been brilliant.
Whereas that's how I would describe The Wrestler or Pi (also gave up on after 30 minutes or so).
16: If you want to continue on the lines of 10 there's this whole book which apparently tries to analyze the whole pre-colonial political economy of Bali as a fractal theatrical performance. I'm not going to read it because I'm prejudiced against anthropologists.
I know it as trace Italienne, not Italian. This is going to bug me the entire book.
22: I was going to ask whether you'd seen Pi after you complained about the look of this one (which I haven't seen) but that sounds like the response I'd expect.
I gave up after the third, or possibly thirty-third, word-for-word repetition of the protagonist's hypothesis.
The film's title sequence shows the Greek letter π, followed by hundreds of lines of numbers representing the numerical value of the constant. However, the numbers are not accurate past the first eight decimal places
This made me so angry I turned off the movie, brought it back to Blockbuster, and demanded a refund.
I kind of love Pi, but then I can think of few nobler ways to die than stroking out while trying to understand the universe.
27: A friend has a pi t-shirt where the digits curl around the center, colored so it looks like Captain America's shield. I felt bad letting him know that the shirt makers, confused by the rotation, had put 3.14156.
28: The guy's whole theory seemed to me to be based on a misunderstanding -- he seemed to think that the stock market was a closed system. But then I guess if he was figuring out the numerical value of G-d then the closed system is the entirety of Creation, so maybe I was the one that was confused.
28: Ditto, I think. I first watched it back when I had multiple migraines a week, which made it feel more realistic than it might have otherwise.
I liked Pi a lot. I haven't seen the Wrestler.
Aronofsky is a very divisive filmmaker.
I despise racial and ethnic humor, but someone less punctilious might ask "Could this conversation be whiter?"
N.B. that the PBS Nature-watcher does not exempt himself.
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The Jacob Wohl mishegas is amazing.
|>
Speaking of Lenas and mishegas - Lena Epstein...
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/never-go-full-trump-the-lena-epstein-story
The Jacob Wohl mishegas is amazing.
The latest mishegas. He's no stranger to it. How he is not in jail yet is beyond me.
He's white
Assuming Jews count, which is less clear these days than it used to be.
How can you speak this way about the extraordinary Jacob Wohl?
Jacob Burkman defends Jacob Wohl's age: "Jacob is a child prodigy who has eclipsed Mozart."
https://twitter.com/willsommer/status/1058034843383185408
Serious question (sorry if tactless): would I be wrong to interpret Pbg as just the American shooting of the month? "Stochastic terrorism" or whatever heebie called it.
No. It's specific to election-related conspiracy mongering.
Stochastic terrorism is different than the normal* regularly scheduled background shooting of the month that goes on in America these days. It's Trump's "who will rid me of this tiresome priest".
*can't believe I typed that but there you go.
The regularly scheduled background shooting was the one that happened in the high school in North Carolina a few days ago. The synagogue shooting and the Kroger shooting are political violence.
Ugh. I hate being this cynical.
Ernest Gellner's "pendulum swing theory" of Islam. This is a theory of both politics and history, but they are constituted by and oscillate between two more or less timeless cultural forms: "an egalitarian, scripturalist monotheism and a more mystical cult of saints" (Gellner, 1981: 209).Any usefulness to that theory?
The Pittsburgh shooting is also unusual in the shooter's explicit antisemitism, which is very uncommon in American public discourse compared to other prejudices (though becoming less so in the Trump era).
Honestly been too long since I've read Gellner to give an informed opinion so I'd have to think on it, maybe when I've less Irish whiskey in me. But I put a lot of stock in his work, his Saints of the Atlas is excellent and many other works as well.
Offhand I'd say those poles interpenetrate, the cult of the saints may be hierarchical (and it's actually explicitly constituted as such in Sufi texts, there's a pole who upholds the cosmos, then 4 'tent pegs' then 7 substitutes, and so on. But the saints themselves are often radically egalitarian both in their persons (from extremely humble backgrounds) and their teachings. Don't know if that makes much sense.
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John Bolton actually talks like this?! More support for the "central casting" theory of cabinet appointments. (Also, Donna Shalala is running for office in Florida? A figure I remember well from Wisconsin women's basketball games in my youth: she was an ever-present fan.)
The article also notes that "Brazil's new president-elect has a terrible record of past statements but is someone whom Trump might be able to do business with" -- if they can't even agree on a violent, repressive plan to stabilize Venezuela, I'm going to have to conclude that this "global fascism" thing might not be so great for humanity after all.
|>
Donna Shalala is running for office in Florida?
And doing such a poor job of it that she might actually lose what should be one of the easiest Dem pickups this cycle. It's all very strange.
Donna Shalala and Bob Menendez, two great examples of "clearing the field" in which all relevant party actors endorse one horrible candidate because that candidate is a connected insider, ensuring that no good candidate will have enough oxygen to win the nomination.
What has Shalala messed up? I scanned a recent Hill article and although it has various grumblings like "slow start" about her the only concrete error I found was inviting Barbara Lee without considering how her openness to Cuba would be taken locally.
She was behind in the polls for a while which led to grumbling about various decisions she'd made. It looks like she has recovered in more recent polling and is still favored to win.
I think the main error is having a candidate who is a 77-year-old with no experience of running for office who doesn't speak Spanish. Not much she can do about that, it was a party decision not hers.
With all due respect for the upcoming elections, I fear none of you has followed the link. Bolton is an incredibly poor sport for introducing the "Troika of Terror" the day after Halloween. With even a week's lead time I would have pulled out all the stops to put together a Troika of Terror costume, plush demon-horses and all. (In his defense he was probably up late last night scribbling: troika of trommunism DAMN NO.)
This should actually be in the Trolley thread, now that I think of it.
Oh my apologies, it's Troika of Tyranny. Still costume-worthy.
62: She needed the health insurance.
23: Which further reading indicates to have been, essentially, bullshit. Prejudice FTW!
(Don't mind me. Just talking to myself.)
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the seminal importance of regalia (sacred daggers, umbrellas, crowns, written chronicles, and dwarfs, transvestites and clowns)|>
So I read Wolf in White Van and honestly just don't know. The music and Conan and RPG culture things aren't anything I know about. The attempted-suicide-gone-wrong-plus-consequences I theoretically should identify with but in practice don't, and I don't think Darnielle sufficiently captured anything I can recognize as a pre-suicidal mindset to make that aspect, and the conclusion, have the impact they need to have.
The performative aspect LW talks about I don't really see and would like her (?) to flesh out. Because there the performer I think isn't actually the gamemaster but the players; the GM has the script, but it's the players who perform it, for no audience really but themselves.
I thought that the scriptwriting part wasn't really done in advance, but was fleshed out as a response to what the players did. I could be wrong about that.
In any case, to me the main contrast was between on the one hand the narrator's extreme reclusiveness and avoidance of contact in almost all facets of life and on the other hand the lavishly detailed descriptions and shared world-imagining that happened via mail order. In that sense ( a shared collaborative vision very different from at least the narrator's daily life) it seemed similar to stage performance. Possibly that's trite or peripheral.
It seemed to me that JD was more interested in the post-accident reclusiveness and the mindset of someone who sees themselves as damaged rather than in the mindset and events that led to getting hurt, which I read as adolescent nihilism and unhappiness.
It's an odd book-- hard to assess it in isolation because JD has done so much other writing and performing. There are other pieces of introverted writing that I like, but it's definitely a register that asks a lot from the reader. I'm a guy reaching the grey side of middle age btw.
I haven't heard any of Darnielle's music, and had forgotten he did that (I heard of the book some time ago). I agree he is more interested in the aftermath than the cause, but for me that made the book feel kind of weightless.
The scripting is done in advance. The GM sometimes adds a couple of lines but otherwise he literally just pulls the next move out of a file. I agree the contrast between reality and imagination is crucial, but I'm not sure how collaborative the gameplay is. The players travel through the GM's imagination, and they have to add their own imagination to bring it to life, but the bandwidth connecting those imaginations is so narrow I don't see it's really a shared space.
A stage performance has vastly higher bandwidth, and I don't think there are any performers who live in their imaginations the way the GM does. There are some reclusive actors, but I think all of them still care a great deal about how they are perceived, and I don't see that with the GM.
Have you read DeLillo's Cosmopolis? Also introverted, and maybe similar in a lot of ways, but for me with a weight this book lacked.
I haven't-- I read a different DeLillo, I think White Noise, which didn't leave me looking for more, but I'll remember your recommendation.
Bartleby and Cheever's short stories are the books I like best that I'd characterize as introverted. Maybe Proust, but that stands alone in my mind.
I'm not a fan of DeLillo in general, but Cosmopolis is different than his norm (if he has one) and very short. The Cronenberg film is also very good.
61, 62: From what I've read, *national* Democrats didn't want her to run; they were behind popular state senator José Javier Rodríguez. But local power brokers were concerned about their ability to hold Rodríguez's seat and didn't coalesce behind him.
Why she thought 77 years old was a good time to start running for office is beyond me.
She won a six way primary by fewer than the votes of the guy who came in sixth. If the bottom three had dropped out before ballots were printed -- when they surely knew they wouldn't win -- the results might have been different. For that you cannot blame the party, but instead for people who run for office with no expectation that they will win, and no concern for the impact they are having on who might win.
I get that someone might run hoping to highlight an issue, but guess what: if your issue gets 8% of the vote, you haven't demonstrated that it's a pressing concern to the electorate.
Fewer than 45,000 votes were cast in her Democratic primary. (More than 110,000 were cast in ours, also a six way race, also with the margin of victory less than the total of the guy who came in sixth.)
At a certain point, it's time to stop whining about the Democratic establishment, and start accepting that candidates and voters have some agency.
Are you complaining about the primary system, or saying that the party actually is a democracy?
79.last: This.
I will also posit that structureal misogyny contributes to views of her (and almost all older women politicians).
80 Both?
A silly story from the state house district I lived in a few years ago. Open seat because the incumbent was termed out and running for state senate. A very strongly Dem district. Two strong women candidates: a retired teacher, and a young woman anti-gun violence activist. A man signed up as well -- no public profile, but had been energized by Occupy Wall Street. Finally, the housemate of a friend, who'd just moved to town (from out of state), thought filing for the seat would be a great way to meet people.
78/82: we really need instant runoff voting.
83 No, it's a primary. The retired teacher won; she's going to win the general in a walk, and be a great legislator. If I still lived there, I would probably have gone with the younger woman, because I think we need to be doing that, in general. But a dynamic young woman beat 3 guys to win the primary in the neighboring district, so our delegation is still going to be young-ish.
84 I don't think we need to get baroque: if we get people to stop running for office as part of their personal voyage of self-discovery, and just have candidates who want to serve in a representative capacity, for the actual polity, with realistic expectations, we'll have small enough fields that an ordinary primary would suffice. Ponies, too.
Just because ponies are small doesn't mean you have to have small fields for them.
Oh, I see Trump is back in MT, for his fourth visit this year. Has he been more often to any state that doesn't have one of his golf courses? It's a testament to just what a zero his candidate Matt Rosendale* is, and how badly he feels that he has to punish Jon Tester for scotching that dumb VA nomination.
* Rosendale is really nothing more than a Fox-spouting empty suit, and is continually ridiculed because he cannot pronounce Montana correctly. (He's from Maryland, and was claiming residency there, for some tax purposes, even while serving in our legislature. This shit would've been fatal in the pre-Trump era.) The Republican primary had a well respected judge, who's father had been a well respected Republican leader decades ago, who probably would have won the primary if we had IRV. And might very well have won the Senate seat by 4 or 5 points.
that dumb VA nomination
Well the guy had praised his genes after all.
Bozeman doesn't have the same lettering on the mountains* thing we have, so this is how they greeted the president. Near the airport: https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=filter%3Afollows%20-asgdhdkdkdh&src=typd
* Yeah, they have an M too, but it's kind of distant from town . . .
Didn't work? The mowed 60' high letters in a field by the airport: F U 45.
Here you go: https://twitter.com/rickhasen/status/1058868681982205952
Newcastle Brown Ale isn't made in Newcastle and hasn't been for some time now. I just learned this.
Because the bottle says "Brewed in Holland. Late Capitalism. Fuck You."
I don't know why I feel strongly about that.
OT: If you tell the bartender he only needs a hat and a moustache to look like DeGaul, you won't get your check quickly.
I was hoping your bar looked alike this.
93: I just had a friend (who is generally very nice and smart) post on FB that the phrase "you are only as old as you feel to be" is an example of neoliberalism. It really literally means "something I don't like" for leftists now. I'm pretty sure I could argue the exact opposite sentiment is also neoliberalism.
|| N. N. Ta/leb doubling down on this 50/50 "maximal entropy" explanation (here's a reasonable place to jump in) after Nate Sil/ver said that the Dems losing the house is "extremely possible" may be the dumbest thing I've heard a smart person say. (Runner up was when NNT doubled down on his belief that Levantine Arabic is not actually a variety of Arabic.) |>
That was me. Not sure why I can't unfogged today. Need more coffee.