Transit of Venus

Great post today about Harry Crosby and the Transit of Venus at Steven Fama's the glade of theoric ornithic hermetica.

    

    All brightness like an orchestra of swords
    All flashing messages of joy
    All gay as ladies with their lords
    Meteor with comet spinning spun
    New every morning with the sun.

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San Francisco discovered in Game of Thrones

This cgi from Game of Thrones shows the San Francisco Palace of Fine Arts in the background, and a second shot of the same dome enlarged behind it. The buildings in front were photographed in Malta. Ned Stark is about to be decapitated: Joffrey and retinue are on the platform to the left, waiting for the Lord of Winterfell who will enter through the portal at the right.

The Palace of Fine Arts was built for the Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915. Obviously its creator Bernard Maybeck, shown below at home with his family around 1910, would have been completely cool with its appearance in Game of Thrones.

+    Clicking embiggens as always.

Street art in Berlin

Photo: Dieter Grzondziel

Is it local patriotism on my part that leads me to think that street art originated in San Francisco in the Seventies? Long gone from here, but flourishing evidently in the streets of Berlin, shown from this fabulous sequence of 252 photos from the online Media Center at Der Tagesspiegel. (You have to click on the picture of the kid wearing a blue hoodie and holding a pole.)

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The most offensive tv commercial in 2011

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I saw on Huffpo a discussion recently which attempted to adjudicate the most offensive tv ad in 2011. I declined to participate, thinking that the field would be richly contested and that my own nomination would not be particularly well-informed, since I don't watch that much television to begin with.

On the other hand, I can't help wondering if anything worse could be found than the 30-second piece of arrogant, mendacious misrepresentation that prefaced the PBS Newshour every weekday evening for half of last year. This malignant piece of "underwriting," which is PBS-speak for advertising, was delivered every single night to the point of mental stultification by Chevron, anxious to define its corporate self as engaged to the exclusion of all other activities with the protection and enhancement of the environment, and the creation of employment in the economies of developing countries.

This ridiculous sanctification of Chevron's corporate mission, its suppression of the circumstance that the company exists to sell a variety of oil-products which cannot be considered other than toxic to the environment, combined with the mesmerizing stupidity and endless repetition of such dumb-downing self-presentation, should I think easily elevate Chevron to the field of top contenders for the worst tv commercial of the year.

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I'm deleting you from facebook, cha cha cha

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East Portland Blog directs us to a long overdue rejection of various facebook lunacies from somewhere in Spain.

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Signs and wonders

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I’ve been homebound for the past five weeks, recuperating from a badly sprained knee. The constant ingestion of pain-killers, as I discovered, makes it hard to focus on reading and writing, but happily I was able to make good progress with my guitar-playing and with copy-editing two more books queued for publication later this year.

The long hours of  convalescence made me much more aware of current events, culminating with last week’s parade of horrors. In the space of only six days,

1.         Wisconsin Republicans revoked collective bargaining for public employees—especially infuriating to me personally, since I  worked as an AFSCME shop steward for three years.

2.         By midweek it appeared that Colonel Shitface Qaddafi had gained control over the rebels in Libya, while the so-called international community continued to dither about intervening, in the usual manner of Rwanda, Darfur and Somalia.

3.         McCarthy-style Congressional hearings began with much publicity to investigate the risk of attack by domestic Islamic radicals, thus likely creating many more of them and ignoring the more cogent issue of how our own homegrown, non-Islamic paranoid schizophrenics like McVeigh or Gestedner are able to obtain explosives and automatic rifles as easily as they do.

4.         By the end of the week Japan had been devastated by a horrendous tsunami and by a row of incipient nuclear meltdowns, while just yesterday

5.         A ten-car train derailed near the Concord BART Station, because, as it was first reported, three or four wheels had fallen off one of the coaches.

In short this was one of the worst weeks in recent history, making one acutely aware how good we have it living our comfy, computer-driven lives here in San Francisco.

I’ve also decided to add a couple more gallons of bottled water to my earthquake emergency supply kit.

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One mad prick

Whatever you do, don't miss Charlie Brooker's Colonel Gadaffi rant, as posted yesterday on BoingBoing.

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The Great Blizzard of 2011

The big news this weekend in San Francisco was the record-breaking snowstorm promised to us by every professional weathercaster from here to San Luis Obispo. So devastating was this impending event imagined to be that it was duly reported Saturday on Huffpo, MSNBC, NBC Evening News, and even internationally on BBC online. And as quickly dropped afterwards when it became obvious that nothing of the sort had transpired, at  most a light dusting of frost on top of San Bruno Mountain.

I enjoyed Richard Schwarzenberger's reaction at In Faro's Garden:


Big thrilling news in Fogtown, the snow forecast for the weekend, and here it is, the weekend, all sun and blue sky. The only thing getting frozen are the assets of Ghaddafi, and not a minute too soon, having suddenly surpassed their shelf-life.  Just like Mubarak’s.  Ill-gotten gains go bad, like most other things, who would have thought?


Love so often goes bad.  In the Denver Post last Monday 6 pages were devoted to the trade of Carmelo Anthony to the Knicks, his betrayal and the 65 million dollar 3-year extension to his contract.


Divorce is painful.  A trial separation might have been tried, like the one working so well in the U.S.; the rich from the rabble demanding their health care and their pensions in out-of-the-way states.


Hey, everybody’s got to sacrifice. My sacrifice today, I’ve decided, is giving up ice and snow for blue skies and 50.

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The further adventures of Heidi, the Cross-eyed 'Possum

Meanwhile Heidi the Cross-eyed 'Possum has been eating too much, so her keepers at the Leipzig Zoo had to put her on a special diet this week to trim her down. Several facebook groups have been created by her many admirers, and We love Heidi, das schielende Opossum has some especially good photos.

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Image source unknown.

HOW TO KILL OFF CULTURE IN SAN FRANCISCO: PART ONE

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Shut down community radio.


2011 is off to a bumpy start with the Arizona shootings, the attempt of House Republicans to repeal health care reform, and now the elimination of KUSF FM by USF university officials, who, in a secret move obviously meant to forestall any public discussion, sold off the station’s license to KDFC on January 20th.


I won’t take time to deliver an elegy for KUSF—either you loved it as I did, or else ignored it, and that was pretty much it. And I won’t bother to heap abuse upon the bastards who simply shut down the station without a word of warning—a volunteer broadcaster was simply told to get up and leave in the middle of his broadcast—or upon the current president of USF, who in his public statement cynically suggested that he looked forward to KUSF’s glorious future as an online broadcasting station—as if an ipod could replace listening to FM radio in your car or home or workplace.


What concerns me is the effect this has on the production of culture in San Francisco. It may help to view the matter historically. When I got here in mid-sixties, KPFA was the only station that devoted several hours each week to recordings, interviews, discussions of local modern composers and musicians living and working in the Bay Area. Thanks to the efforts of Carl Stone and Charles Amirkhanian and a number of volunteers, KPFA helped establish the careers of musicians, some of whom soon enjoyed nationwide reputations —Lou Harrison, Terry Riley, the Kronos Quartet, to mention just a couple—and also brought news and periodic updates from the Mills College composing program, Stanford computer-music lab, and other local institutions that sponsored modern music performance and composition.


The KPFA Music Department—which I co-directed for a year—also pioneered brand-new musical genres not heard anywhere else in the Bay Area: early music, world music, space music, and punk. As at KUSF, most of the KPFA broadcasters were volunteers—real enthusiasts and often very knowledgeable about the material they programmed.


Unfortunately somewhere towards the end of Reagan One, all this got chucked out when it was decided to double the amount of political programming at KPFA. The traditional Morning Concert from 9-11am was scrapped. World music was now taken to mean salsa; culture gave way to politics and current affairs, interspersed with pop music from Mexican radio.


But also in the 1980’s something marvelous happened: there was a huge eruption of musical productivity in the San Francisco pop music scene, with an amazing variety of new bands and music clubs to accommodate them. They were largely punk-derived garage bands, but there were many blues bands early on, with electronic and synth bands developing in the 90’s. It was a bee-hive of experimentation and, remarkably, it was even financially self-sustaining to an extent thanks to the clubs around town.


At the top of all this chaos sat KUSF, on the air with volunteer broadcasters from midnight to 6pm Mo-Fri, covering the whole scene in exactly the way that community radio excels: savvy people sorting out and broadcasting the best of it, interviewing the musicians, sampling the product, promoting local concerts and new recordings.


Contrast this with what happened at KDFC, the local commercial classical music station. Following a horrible trend that started in the 70’s, it chose to broadcast classical music as a species of “elevator music” or Muzak, as one called it. The station became computer-automated, meaning that hundreds of hours of pre-recorded material were sorted and broadcast by computer. You really didn’t need to have a human being present at the station at all, except an engineer to fix a machine that broke down. Certainly you didn’t want anyone around who actually gave a shit about classical music, understood the difference between a good performance or a mediocre one, or who programmed modern composition that was the slightest bit dissonant.


My point here is that there are different ways that one can handle and manipulate “culture.” You can take the SF Hotel and Restaurant Tax revenues and hand them over to the “Big Seven,” the leading cultural institutions in the city, beginning with the symphony and opera, that require monster infusions of money to operate. But that’s not creating culture—it’s reproducing culture, at best spending mega-sums of resources on some highly-nuanced interpretation of cultural artifacts that arose long before any of us were even born. As marvelous as our orchestra or opera may be, the big bucks are going mainly to maintain a sort of acoustic museum, an arena where little will happen to disturb the comfort zone of the audience, (explaining incidentally the current institutional obsession with John Adams’ work).


So now KUSF FM, which has done so very much to generate and create culture in San Francisco for thirty-four years, has disappeared forever, unless the FCC unexpectedly proves responsive to community protests. Good-bye Deejay Schmeejay, Stereo Steve, Irwin Swirinoff, Terrible Ted, Natalie and Jet and all the rest of you—you were completely awesome, and long may you wave—hopefully somewhere else within earshot, if the stereo gods are favorable.


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Pope Lady Gaga I

I woke up this morning contemplating the interchangeability of Lady Gaga with Pope Benedict XVI. In their shared capacity as the most heavily-costumed celebrities presently and continuously ejaculated upon by the international media, I thought it would be interesting for us to see them exchange jobs for a year and observe what effect this might have on their respective careers.

It certainly isn't hard to imagine Lady Gaga being a mega-hit at the Vatican, I can just see her flying down inside the dome of St Peter's on an aerial trapeze, down to the high altar to celebrate mass while disco lights flash and the Vatican Choir pulsates in orgiastic abandon.

It would be much harder on the Pope, of course, who exhibits about as much charisma as a Safeway shopping cart. In fact he seems pretty talentless at much of anything, and his articulation of the standard Vatican twaddle on whatever subject is of current media interest seems nothing short of soporific.

I blame the Protestant Reformation for the present zombification of the Papacy. Today's Pontifex Maximus  is expected to present himself in a constant state of pious self-absorption, apparently worried 24/7 about the ever-accelerating slide of this wicked world into the blazing fires of Hell, not to mention the horrible prospect of gay people getting married.

Who could envision a modern pope sparking up a doobie and putting on some Grateful Dead tapes in his spare time, or kicking back with a couple margaritas on the exquisitely embroidered papal sofa in his bluejeans to watch the NFL Superbowl?

How one longs for a return of the Papacy to Renaissance times, when expressions of piety and spiritual advancement were really about the least one would expect in the behavior and deportment of the popes.

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Cornelius Dupree

I felt outraged that this evening’s tv news reportage concerning Cornelius Dupree, released after 30 years of false imprisonment for no other reason than that he physically resembled an escaped perpetrator, at no point mentioned the logical implications supporting the repeal of capital punishment.

The Dallas County D.A. explained on PBS News Hour that there have been 25 exonerations for false conviction in recent years in his county. Given the inherently flawed nature of our criminal justice system and its propensity for intermittent failure, one can only guess how many persons have been falsely executed in the U.S. If there had been even one known case, that alone would justify scrapping capital punishment permanently, disregarding all the other arguments that can be brought against it.

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Today's searching question

I was totally amazed at BBC News this morning, whose question for the day is:

My God, can it really be true that the British nation sits around their breakfast tables talking about such things? I suppose it may help them take their minds off their impending World Cup football defeat this Saturday.

Priestly Pedophilia

San Francisco writer and poet John Norton came over for a visit the other day, and we found ourselves talking about pedophilia in the Church, which has reached crisis levels in the eyes of the media.

I opined that thirty years ago Communists were considered the worst people in the entire world, and that these have been replaced since 1989 by pedophiles and suicidal jihadists. I also thought that French films in former times tended to laugh or poke fun at pedophile priests, accepting them apparently as an institutional given in the quotidian rhythms of a Catholic education.

Later I thought of a perfect example, found in Louis Malle’s 1971 film, Murmur of the Heart (Le souffle au cœur) a wonderfully funny story about a 14-year-old lad growing up absurd in bourgeois Dijon in the 1950’s.

Perhaps French school kids are simply more savvy than ours, but judging from the movie it didn’t look that they were greatly surprised or affected by the gropings of horny priests, finding the Church totally ridiculous to begin with.
But perhaps they were secretly gathering evidence to launch injury suits against the Church 25 years later. 

The Long View

I prefer to avoid re-blogging, but Brad DeLong’s entry for March 26th “The Long View” is surely worth disseminating for further contemplation:


If all goes well in China and India in the next generation—and if nothing goes catastrophically wrong in the rich post-industrial North Atlantic core of the global economy—then the next generation will see a real milestone. For the first time ever more than half of the world will have enough food not to be hungry and worry about famine, enough shelter not to be wet and worried about trenchfoot, enough clothing not to be cold and worried about hypothermia, and enough medical care not to be worried that they and the majority of their children will die of microparisites well short of their biblical three-score-and-ten years. The big problems of the bulk of humanity will then be those of finding enough conceptual puzzles and diversions in their work and play lives so as not to be bored, enough relative status not to be green with envy of their fellows—and, of course, avoiding and quickly disposing of the thugs who used to have spears and will have cruise missiles and H-bombs who have functioned as macroparasites infecting humanity ever since the first farmers realized that now that they had crops, running away into the forest was no longer an option.


Matt Yglesias quotes Brad as well, but many of his commenters, worried about collapsing global ecologies, remain unconvinced. And of course if you're a poet, I'm afraid you're screwed no matter what happens.

John Keats in Baghdad

Netflix coughed up a truly odd combination of films this week, both by women directors: Bright Star, and The Hurt Locker. While the former was boring, unconvincing, miscast, and simply dull, the second was brilliantly cast, informative, continuously exciting, and one of the most dramatically innovative films I've seen -- an instant classic. It kept you hanging on the edge of your over-stuffed sofa from beginning to end and wouldn't let go for a moment. My only wish would have been to see a copy of John Keats' letters hanging from the back pocket of one of the explosives technicians.

Still, I imagine Avatar 3-D will get best picture next month, since Hollywood normally rewards filmmakers who produce the most revenue for the industry. Avatar probably also deserves it: despite the dumb-ass script, the cinematic technologies employed are nothing short of transformative. It's a shame they can't give out two best-picture awards this year.

Ang Lee’s Acid Trip

Taking Woodstock is a pleasantly cheerful if brainless film which I won’t bother to review here. Of course this is just San Francisco hubris speaking, since the counterculture events described in the movie were going on here for at least three years before the East Coast finally caught on and had its tiny little burst of glory.

Every aspect of hippie stereotyping is pictured in Ang Lee’s movie—including a walk-on by Gen. Waste-more-land!— but what struck me most was the acid trip that the reluctant but pliable hero undergoes. Dosed in the back of a VW camper bus by a hippie couple from California with what looks like Blue Cheer on a blotter, he sees swirly things emerging from the cheap India bedspreads and faux tantric mandalas before luxuriating in some intersexual body rubs. Next the psychonauts emerge from the camper bus to observe the Woodstock concert stage in the distance, which subsequently whirls around in a cyclonic display of electrical energy before it takes off into the sky like a spaceship and dissolves into pure white light.

Given the stupidity of trying to re-imagine psychotropic drug experiences in films—I may need to revise my opinion after seeing Avatar 3D—I do wonder at what point these silly cliché representations begin to get mistaken for finished historical truth. I too have seen the paisleys leaping, and I quickly learned that a trip without an orgasm is a trip wasted, and I’ve had my share of visions, like anyone else.

But that’s not the point. The take-home from LSD is that because our brains, in the interests of survival, are constructed in such a way that we can all experience reality the same way, doesn’t mean that reality actually is that way. Alter the brain with psychedelics and different worlds emerge. These worlds are fascinatingly variegated and infinitely compelling.

Otherwise I’m reminded of a funny story that Tom Rush told when he was at the Freight & Salvage a couple years back. The L.A.P.D. had arranged a show for some school children where various drugs were displayed in locked glass cases so that the kids would know what to watch out for so they wouldn’t be imprisoned and their lives destroyed forever, etc. etc.

But several items on display were mislabeled, and in the background could be heard the parents of a certain generation saying things like: “That’s not a Tuinol, Tuinols are yellow and that’s red, so it has to be a Seconal.” Or: “That’s not a female plant, it’s a male plant.” Or: “Look at that photo, that couldn't be Acapulco Gold, it looks more like Maui Zowie to me,” and the like.

Shanghai silent films

Many thanks to Nancy Ewart, who writes here (her entry for 12 January) about the Shanghai show opening at the Asian Arts Museum next month, and who refers us to the YouTube posts of silent movies from Shanghai in the 1930's featuring superstar Ruan Yinglu, "the Chinese Greta Garbo." In addition to "Little Toys," YouTube also offers "The Goddess," very capably directed by Wu Yonggang, which shows scenes of streetlife of Shanghai in the 30's, in addition to explicating numerous issues involved with being a single mom and a street prostitute synchronously.

The film can be seen as an attack upon capitalism, and it is hardly an accident that Chou En Lai and Mao Tse-Tung were busily organizing Shanghai factory workers at the time it was produced.



Or go to YouTube directly.

Dennis Cooper and the Half-Blood Prince

On Dennis Cooper's list of favorite things in 2009—which I hadn't exactly thought of as a useful resource for mainstream commercial entertainment—I was surprised to discover that his movie roster included "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," trailing at number ten behind several hard-to-get independent and French films. I'm not sure why Dennis liked the Potter film, and would probably fear to ask, but having ordered it up from Netflix for my Christmas entertainments, I did feel qualified to concur with his approval.

Roger Ebert felt the film was sort of ok for reasons left unexplained; Anthony Lane of the New Yorker didn't like it at all; Philip French of the Guardian and other critics could find nothing more useful to do than titter over the tentative sexual advances of the now pubescent teenage principals—don't you get the impression at times that movie reviewers never really look at the movies they are reviewing?

The real shortcoming of the film, namely that the same principals are now grown up and really aren't very interesting people and certainly haven't matured into any proficiency at acting, seems to have gone unremarked. The only halfways fleshed-out performance was that of old DumbleBore, whose demise was not particularly regretted, at least not by me. (Let's hope he embraced it definitively and won't re-appear in the next sequel, like Gandalf, who re-emerged from certain destruction in Part Two of Lord of the Rings.)

So why is Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince an interesting movie? Because it demonstrates the conversion of a children's phantasy story into a full-blown Gothic novel. Take Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto, mash it up with Anne Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho, and throw in some stock characters and paraphernalia of Gothic fiction to include madwomen, sorcerers, monsters, demons, villains, revenants, maniacs, dark caves, magic amulets, ghosts, Byronic heroes (= Harry), and whatever the hell else, and you're right back there in the 1820's, ready for business. Quidditch notwithstanding, the film's wonderfully designed Gothic interiors, and the new, expressionistically re-designed battlements of Hogwarts' towers, leave no doubt that the future for Harry Potter lies two centuries back in the past.

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