Knocking At The Gate

  Friends, I present to you the 1970s. You might try to watch it for the genre-switching of The Who song, but be sure to hang around for the pantomime during "see me, feel me," the brass flourishes, the mod dancers, the drum solo, the drum solo interpolated with soft shoe, the simulated cardiac arrest, and of course the big teevee show finish.

Writing in The Hedgehog Review , Yale professor Phillip Gorski examines the roots of resurgent authoritarian movements all over the world, and how the conflicts between immanence and transcendence in religion are manifested in political belief: In the American context, these phenomena are usually attributed to populist ideology, racial backlash, or Christian nationalism. Such explanations are not wrong, but they are incomplete. They cannot explain certain puzzling features of the MAGA movement that are also evident outside the American context, including the outlandish behavior of the political leaders, the swirl of conspiracy theories that often surrounds them, or the lack of any clear policy platform. Nor do those explanations account for the enthralling worldviews of the new authoritarian movements, which mix religion, magic, conspiracy, and popular culture in a toxic stew. Historical anthropology and cultural sociology can help us here by placing neoauthoritarianism i

Bo Bartlett. (2021). "Huntsboro." Oil on linen. 70 in. x 120 in. This painting is typical of Bartlett's work: dazzling daylight, idealized but detailed human figures set in wide swaths of color, and a strong sense that we are seeing a single frame from a longer and more detailed story.  In this case, we are viewing the beachgoers as they view the scenery that we don't get to see. Why are we watching them watch the waves? One is gesturing with his hand as if he is speaking. What is he saying? To whom is he speaking? One person has rested his head on the shoulder of a companion. Is he listening to the speaker or is he just enjoying the moment?  This painting comes from a series titled Things Don't Stay Fixed , which happens to be the same name of a movie directed by Bartlett in the same year this painting was made .   Artist site. 

In Wired , Tom Simonite reports on the people working to create machines to replace human writers. The machines are getting better at it, and the future Web will have more and more advertisements and articles that were not written by human beings. There are concerns about all of this. When asked to generate an outline for this article based on the headline and a one-sentence summary, ContentEdge provided six bullet points. The final one was, “What are the dangers?” Full article here.

Artist reconstruction of  Tupandactylus imperator . Credit: Bob Nicholls   (CC BY) Our understanding of the evolution of feathers is growing, and a new paper explaint that the unusual soft tissue in a pterosaur fossil found in Brazil might indicate that this creature's early feather had differentiated colors. This suggests a possibility that the color variations were a form of signaling about the age, health, and sex of the creature. New research published in Nature has been reviewed by Riley Black for Scientific American , who writes that: Long before the first birds flapped and fluttered, pterosaurs took to the skies. These leathery-winged reptiles, their bodies coated with wispy filaments paleontologists call pycnofibers, were the first vertebrates to truly fly. Now experts are beginning to think pterosaurs and birds had more in common than previously assumed: An exquisitely preserved fossil from Brazil not only hints that pterosaurs’ peculiar filaments may have been true

Writing in The New Yorker, Lauren Michelle Jackson reviews Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker, 1965–2000 , edited by Julie Boyd. Jackson follows Walker's paths through lovers and land purchases, through finances and friendships, through doubt and discovery:  It’s possible to divine a connection between a habit of acquisition that seems compulsive, if only for the apparent discomfort she feels about it, and the intense, erratic bouts of depression that choke her ability to write. Walker never knows what triggers them—menstrual hormones, she surmises, or “deep loneliness.” She puts her faith in the usual measures: a healthier diet, less weed, and lots and lots of meditation. By the time the writing returns, the episodes are in the rearview mirror. Full article here.

  Randall Munroe at XKCD considers the implications of the evolutionary tree of life. Much, much more here.

This pair of songs ("Listen Here" and "Freedom Jazz Dance") from Eddie Harris still sound hot and fresh more than fifty years later. If they aren't familiar to you, just let them play for a while until you can hear how much tension Jodie Christian gradually works up on the piano, drawing back to make room for Eddie's sax and but also pushing it until the groove will surely break. Instead it just expands to fill the universe. This is why you can see Brian Jones and Jeff Beck sitting in the audience furiously trying to make sense of what's happening. This is why Miles Davis covered this song . This is why we have ears and hearts.

Writing in X-Ray Literary Magazine , Megan Garwood's one-paragraph short story features grocery shopping, groping, wildlife, age, and worker solidarity. At the grocery store, I am buying whole milk and skim milk because I like to put whole milk in my coffee and I like to use skim milk in my Smacks. I am reaching for a gallon jug when I feel someone grab my butt with a heavy hand. I turn around to see a man with little expression pat my rear. I ask him what does he think he is doing and he smiles and tells me to have a nice day. Full story here. 

Writing in The Independent , Tom Ford explains how one of the dumbest concepts ever turned into the hugely entertaining John Woo classic Face/Off — and why we're still fascinated decades later. So ludicrous is the concept of Face/Off that when Colleary and Werb pitched it to their agent, they were laughed out of the office. “But once we hit on the idea, we couldn’t stop writing,” Werb says. Full article here.

Photograph of Leonard Cohen in Toronto by Aaron Harris/AP Writing in The Washington Post , Diane Cole reviews Matti Friedman's new book Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai , which examines the famed singer-songwriter's decision to leave his wife and family and place himself in the Sinai desert during the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Privately, he lashed out at Suzanne, declared that he felt trapped by fatherhood and railed against his own failings with savage self-loathing. In the brutally candid pages from an unpublished manuscript that Friedman was given permission to excerpt here, Cohen described himself as “gritting my teeth from looking at the wreck of beauty and living inside of hatred and keeping to my side of the bed and always screaming no this can’t be my life inside my head.” He also wrote that as he listened, in October 1973, to reports of the outbreak of war between Israel and a coalition of Arab states led by Egypt and Syria, “I wanted to go fight and die

Photograph of Janelle Monáe by Jheyda McGarrell Speaking with NPR's Weekend Edition , musical phenomenon Janelle Monáe discusses how she came to write her new collection of short stories The Memory Librarian and Other Stories of Dirty Computer, and what authenticity means in her work: Sometimes what you really want to do can take a backseat because you feel like, "I have to prove this first and then I'll get to that." And I'm at a space where I'm making the most fun music I've ever made, just for the people that I love and care about around me, for us to vibe out to. [I'm] just curating my life in a way where I can do that. You know, giving myself permission — and I think with this book, I hope that people feel the permission to show up as their authentic selves. When the world tells you that everything about you — your queerness, your Blackness, you being a woman, you wanting to be an artist on your own terms — when people try a

Sierra, Key West, Florida, 1997. Photograph by Christy Bush. In The Bitter Southerner , Chan Marshall (known on stage as Cat Power) interviews photographer Christy Bush and they consider her compelling Polaroids, her friendship with Michael Stipe, and what makes photographers do what they do. Full interview and gallery here.

The Spring/Summer 2020 issue of Subtropics , the literary magazine of the University of Florida, included "Rebel" by Sylvie Baumgartel: Savonarola was hanged & burned With two others in the same Square where he had called for the Mass burning of paintings, Mirrors, books & makeup. Full poem here.

I want to take this opportunity to remind everyone about the tongue, which is prehensile muscular organ that most of us have in our mouths. It includes four muscles that are attached to bones and four quite strong muscles that are only attached to the organ itself. Those muscles are supplied by massive blood vessels that you can easily see if you look underneath. Your tongue grows right out of the floor your mouth, it is covered with little nipple-like structures, it is soaked in spit, and it is THERE ALL THE TIME even when you're eating or speaking or singing or sleeping. It's pretty much right there in the way of everything 24/7. Chances are pretty good that you are either moving or clenching your tongue in your mouth right now as you read this sentence. Okay, that's all for now so you can go back to whatever it was you were doing. Thanks for coming to my tongue talk.   — J.F. "Jeff" McCullers

Love for great movies is something people are happy, even proud, to exclaim, yet sometimes we pause to admit enjoying a good bad movie. That we do love them is interesting enough to consider at length.  Writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books , Nicholas Whittaker does so and reviews not one, but two books that also investigate this curious pleasure: Why It’s OK to Love Bad Movies by Matthew Strohl and Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer by Rax King. Full article here.

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes in The Atlantic about how things got this bad, and offers suggestions on how to respond: Part of America’s greatness in the 20th century came from having developed the most capable, vibrant, and productive network of knowledge-producing institutions in all of human history, linking together the world’s best universities, private companies that turned scientific advances into life-changing consumer products, and government agencies that supported scientific research and led the collaboration that put people on the moon. But this arrangement, Rauch notes, “is not self-maintaining; it relies on an array of sometimes delicate social settings and understandings, and those need to be understood, affirmed, and protected.” So what happens when an institution is not well maintained and internal disagreement ceases, either because its people have become ideologically uniform or because they have become afraid to dissent? This, I believe, is

Sometimes you just want drag out a good old song and enjoy it with old friends. Here are two legends completely recreating the old Dire Straits number "So Far Away." Mark Knopfler and Emmylous Harris give this classic a lush and loving treatment. The recording is as glorious as the performance.

Jessica Hagy at Indexed reminds us that morality is normally distributed: Full site here.

Professor of Religious Studies Alejandro Nava writes in American Scholar : I don’t deny that these genres are flawed and ambiguous, and sometimes deserve their reputation as “devil’s music”—as when they promote toxic masculinity, sexism, violence, gross materialism, nihilism, and a culture of drug use. But what may seem predictable and uniform to a distant observer, like a view of the ocean from above, can contain remarkable depth, variety, and idiosyncrasy. From this perspective, I suspect that a listener may come away with what I have known: the genre’s bursting joy and inventiveness, its thrilling beats, its love of rhyme and rhetorical extravagance, its portraits of racial injustice, its longing for freedom and equality, its pining for God.  Full article here.

Here's one from the Department of Unintended Consequences and the Department of Poetic Justice: In his customary concise and lethal way, Cory Doctorow lays out how the recent Ed Sheeran case arose from the copyright mess deliberately created by record companies. Full article here.

The Hugo Award nominations for 2022 include a short story by Blue Neustifter that was originally presented as a Twitter thread from Bi Dyke Energy (@Asure_Husky). She covers a lot of ground quickly and deftly: agency, identity, time travel, gender, self-affirmation, causality, regret, technology, triumph, and spirit. "Unknown Number" by Blue Neustifter

Cambodian artist Visothkakvei has phenomenal talent in working with ballpoint pens. He has more than a million followers on Instagram who revel in his ability to render such lovely designs with such a prosaic medium. Artist store at Society6

In The Paris Review , Rachel Cusk reviews Taryn Simon’s Sleep (2020-2021), which is composed of photographs of sleeping children: When we take pictures of our children, do we really know what we are doing, or why? The contemporary parent records their child’s image with great frequency, often to the maximum degree afforded by technology. Inasmuch as the baby or child is an extension or externalization of the parent’s own self, these images might be seen as attempts to equate the production of a child with an artistic act. The task of the artist is to externalize his or her own self, to re-create that self in object form. A parent, presented with the object of the baby, might mistake the baby for an authored work. Equally, he or she might find their existence in an object outside themselves intolerable. In both cases the taking of a photograph is an attempt to transform the irreducibly personal value of the baby into something universal by proposing or offering up its realit

In Guernica , Xiao Xi's poem "the wind would not stop" is translated from Chinese to English by Yilin Wang: a child licks the candy wrapper; the treat has fallen into the mud. those who sing romance of west chamber under wintersweet trees, nearly all lonely elders. Full poem here.  

Musician Nabil Ayers writes in the New York Times to assure us that the guitar solo still can and should be important, despite it being far less common in contemporary music than it used to be: “Perhaps it was inevitable that the guitar solo would outlive its usefulness,” David Browne wrote in Rolling Stone in 2019. “After all these years and innovations, what can it offer? What hasn’t already been done, from Hendrix to Stevie Ray Vaughan? But the rise of hip hop, dance music and modern pop cemented the solo’s irrelevance.” Gone are the days when guitar solos were in almost every song on rock radio airwaves, but they’re far from extinct.   Full article here.

  Yeah, heard the river risin' and this is what it said: "I don't need no live ones — I just take care of the dead." * * * * * For me, the best song from 1979's hit movie The Rose wasn't Bette Midler's iconic take on Amanda McBroom's song of the same name. That legendary song won a Grammy and has been famously covered by thousands of performers, but it only appears in the credits. Neither did I think the best song Midler's Janis-Joplinized renditions of "Stay With Me" (originally recorded by Lorraine Ellison) nor "When A Man Loves A Woman" (originally recorded by Percy Sledge) although her performance of both of them were heroic, and became staples of her live shows. For me, the song that I couldn't ever get enough of was a song called "Midnight in Memphis" which is as lyrically important to the narrative of the movie as the other songs were. The song shows the talent and elusive joy of the Mary Rose character play

Writing in Book Forum , Gene Seymour reviews the new Zora Neale Hurston essay collection edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and and Genevieve We t: Zora Neale Hurston's literary stature is no longer in dispute, yet people are still trying to put her into a box. “Do you think she was a libertarian?” someone once asked me. For whatever reason, I was too polite to say something like “How the hell should I know?” Far more polite than Hurston would be if she could now answer for herself. Yes, she made conservative, even reactionary noises in her lifetime against the NAACP, leftist politics, Richard Wright, and other socially progressive influences. But tagging Hurston as a libertarian or reactionary is far too reductive for such a formidable polymath whose groundbreaking work as an anthropologist, oral historian, journalist, and gadfly is nearly as monumental as her sui generis fiction, notably her 1937 masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God. She was allergic to anybody’s p

Olga Khazan writes in The Atlantic with possible explanations for why everyone seems to have gone nuts — and why it is worrisome: During the pandemic, disorderly, rude, and unhinged conduct seems to have caught on as much as bread baking and Bridgerton. Bad behavior of all kinds —everything from rudeness and carelessness to physical violence—has increased, as the journalist Matt Yglesias pointed out in a Substack essay earlier this year. Americans are driving more recklessly, crashing their cars and killing pedestrians at higher rates. Early 2021 saw the highest number of “unruly passenger” incidents ever, according to the FAA. In February, a plane bound for Washington, D.C., had to make an emergency landing in Kansas City, Missouri, after a man tried to break into the cockpit. Health-care workers say their patients are behaving more violently; at one point, Missouri hospitals planned to outfit nurses with panic buttons. Schools, too, are reporting an uptick in “disruptive behavior,”

18. Protense: I've read Kant over and again, and I know there's good stuff in there, but holy crap, that's a lot of work for just a few words to handle. Something something dynamical antinomies. I'm reading and things are getting good and then I realize I need to put another hour into that last sentence and then I start wondering what's happening on Twitter and the thing is that I don't even like Twitter because it's almost as bad for ya as Facebook.   Contra, viz : Coffee and oranges, again. The sunlight on our skin. When the morning stars sang together.   18.b. Parenthetical note: (We are stardust, we are golden, we are caught in the devil's bargain, and we've got to get ourselves back to the Garden.)   18.e. Parenthetical note: (Halting problem. Cherubim barring the eastern gate, the flaming sword turning every which way.)   20. Contense: This self-referential post is a non-fungible token on which you are [virtually] invited to bid.   Contra, in l