For the Record: Space Opera

 

This is just to get Jordan to go nuts in the comments. A glorious time for once and all! My expressed opinions are not to be taken very seriously.

My "red flag" is "anybody who thinks a movie or television show form of society* is something we should be working towards."

* Except Star Trek fans because the Federation pretty much gets it right. :)

— Elie Mystal (@ElieNYC) August 23, 2021

It's an updated western movie.

— TimeLovesAHero (@time_loves) August 23, 2021

Inaugural

 

Candle stand, 1830s, from the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing ("Shakers") of Mount Lebanon, New York, collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

I take the same general feeling from the inauguration festivities, watching TV all day, as so many of us, of immense relief and consolation, of reassurance that we have a working government again, with kind and caring and reasonably truthful people at its head, which doesn't mean they're going to fix everything but that we're back in a place from which it's possible to navigate. We all found ourselves in unexpected tears at one point or another, and for me one of the oddest points was that first normal press briefing in four years from Jen Psaki, State Department spox under Obama and now Biden's press secretary.

There's a concept from the British ordinary language philosopher Paul Grice of the four "conversational maxims" that make discourse possible: you must assume that your interlocutor will try to be informative, truthful, pertinent, and clear. These are things that you don't get from arguing with Gish-galloping conservative trolls, and we didn't get them from the communications of Trump or his official representatives, of course, and the freshness of Psaki, just being well-prepared, level-headed, on point, freely admitting to not knowing what she didn't know, and having no reason to lie about anything, seemed miraculous and somehow out of the nowhere, and it really did fill my eyes with tears. I think it's a kind of PTSD: like Londoners in the Blitz, we've been living disoriented and fearful from the constant bombardment of gaslighting language, and as welcome as the silence is it's filled with our own emotions, the ones we haven't been able to listen to for such a long time.

Perfect

 

Photo by Win McNamee/Getty, via Center for American Progress, December 1980.

A year or so ago Rectification Central was exercised about the meaning of the word "perfect" as in 

“It was a warm, friendly conversation,” he said, referring to his conversation with Zelensky. “There was no quid pro quo. There was nothing. It was a perfect conversation.”

In what sense was it "perfect"? Without fault or flaw? Is a quid pro quo an "imperfection" that you should avoid, if conversational perfection is your aim? If you're an artist of conversation, would perfection be the standard you aim at? Perfection in some particular aspect, or overall? Who says something like that, about a phone call, and what do they have in mind?

Anyway this morning somebody on NPR—I think it was my girl Nina Totenberg—gave me the clue to what Trump actually meant, by comparing it with the incitement speech Trump gave to the Capitol rioters before their rampage on 6 January, as he described it 

So if you read my speech --
and many people have done it,
and I've seen it both in the papers
and in the media, on television --
it's been analyzed, and people thought
that what I said was totally appropriate.
And if you look at what other people have said --
politicians at a high level -- about the riots
during the summer, the horrible riots in
Portland and Seattle, in various other --
other places, that was a real problem --
what they said. But they've analyzed
my speech and words and my final
paragraph, final sentence and everybody,
to the T, thought it was totally appropriate.

(The theme in the middle section there is the official bothsides line with which the Republicans have approached the achievement, according to which the looting that took place on the edges of the Black Lives Matter marches in Minneapolis and New York in the first days after the murder of George Floyd and the occasional trash fires around the federal courthouse in Portland. were exactly the same as the murderous assault on the Capitol building—"you got to go to the streets and be as violent as Antifa and BLM," said Louie Gohmert on 1 January—though if you don't recall Governor Kate Brown advising anti-fascist agitators to march down to the courthouse, telling them "if you don't fight like hell you don't have a country any more," I think your memory is accurate.)

Whoever it was said it was "a perfect speech", the way the Zelenskyy call was "a perfect conversation", and I realized he meant he thought it was unindictable—that he'd delivered his illicit message with such perfect subtlety that the cops would never be able to finger him for it, with the majesty of Don Vito and his perfect quid pro quo message

Area Republican: "Donald Trump never even mentioned violence!"

Don Vito Corleone: "I just made him an offer he couldn't refuse."

— Coup Coup Barabajagal (@Yastreblyansky) January 13, 2021

That he'd committed the perfect crime. He hoped.

Conventional Ideas

Adlai Stevenson and Richard J. Daley at the podium for the 1956 Democratic convention, via Chicago Collections. 

Covid-19 is a pretty terrible thing, but after a couple of hours of this year's Democratic convention I would like to praise it for one thing: dealing a deathblow to the post-1972 institution of the overstuffed, overblown, visually dead and dead boring political TV convention, with its vast convergence of people to whom favors were owed and every conceivable tendency and intersection lumbering on and off the stage creating hours of virtually dead air and opportunities for the stupidest TV pandits to argue about who "won",  generally invidiously and in favor of the speakers offering the least content.

I was watching on MSNBC, which took a pretty reverent approach, with just one break (I think during an unexcited performance by a peculiar couple, the Broadway star Billy Porter and the old-line Laurel Canyon rocker Stephen Stills, who gave a heartwarming interview to Variety if you're interested, but whose contribution was leaving me unmoved, don't @ me), without commercials, and I don't know if other venues gave it the same courtesy, but I was just transported much of the time, and I hate to say it because it might sound cynical, but I believe the production values had a lot to do with that.

Because the demands of the pandemic preventing it from taking place in a single location forced a level of planning such as doesn't normally go into these productions. It was practically edited in advance of the performance, and the care, far from harming the spontaneity of the occasion, brought it to emotional life, from the passionate start of a song written for the occasion by Bruce Springsteen (when I recognized his voice is when I started telling myself, "This is going to be all right"). Which was real, that's why I don't think I'm being cynical in bringing it up.

Shark Jump

The Fonz representing the end of a cultural moment. Via inews.co.uk.

Roy (subscription) ties the ongoing shift in public opinion on impeachment to a phenomenon he's been interested in for a while:

The What Liberal Media has us a bit brainwashed with its endless thinkpieces about the how weird and alien and unreachable Trump voters are supposed to be, and the Nazi goblins and dinner-table racists who make up a large chunk of his base certainly are. But most Trump voters are no more weird than other Americans like you and me. I think we spend so much time worrying about how to convince them of the error their ways that we forget most of them are normal adults, able to make judgments on their own. They didn’t need our input to find out that Trump was not a good long-term investment. He was indeed like the pet rock, or maybe more to the point Big Mouth Billy Bass — a funny joke that over time got obnoxious, then disgusting, and had to be taken down.

Which gives him some hope that the bottom could really be dropping out of the Trump market and the Republicans could be forced to ditch him, the sooner the better (for them, not us).

Wall Together Now

Photograph by Bjarni Grimsson for MAGA, a nonprofit arts group led by the Swiss-Icelandic artist Christoph Büchel which aims to preserve the eight prototype Wall samples in San Diego as sculptures with a cultural value as historical "land art", seen here from the Mexican side of the existing barrier, January 2018, via the Guardian.

It's a mystery!

Fox and Friends always has to be the top suspect, and all of its hosts are certainly stupid enough to believe this https://t.co/lNOlLZjxNp

— Scott Lemieux (@LemieuxLGM) January 6, 2019

I'll get to my hypothesis eventually, but I want to remind you that the look of the thing, if not Democrats' attitude toward it, has been a big factor in Trumpy's wallthink from the beginning, when you think about it—Trump always insisted that his wall was going to be "big and beautiful", and was very insistent on the importance of aesthetics when he issued the call for design proposals in March 2017:

For the Record: It's Wall Good

Tijuana side of the border fence, Mothers' Day, 2016. Photo by Brooke Binkowski.

Wish he'd made that clear, right? I mean, if we'd known it was going to be ARTISTIC, who'd have objected? https://t.co/vEyVz49t5k

— Smocking Hot Takes (@Yastreblyansky) December 19, 2018

It's not like anybody really cared about the disruption of cultural interaction that goes back to before the US existed, of the mass disruption of fauna habitat https://t.co/d1k0W3PT16

— Smocking Hot Takes (@Yastreblyansky) December 19, 2018

Make that "or the mass disruption".

A Sublime Thing, Like Space or Mathematics

From the Sublime to the Brooksiculous!

Richard Barthelmess contemplates whacking a policeman with a ukulele in D.W. Griffith's The Love Flower (1920). Via Fritzi.

David Brooks ("Big and Little Loves", May 31 2016) is interested in the concept of the sublime!

Ever since the days of ancient Greece, philosophers have distinguished between the beautiful and the sublime.

Sadly, no. According to my trusty Wikipedia, while an interest in the sublime goes back to classical antiquity, the dichotomy between beauty and sublimity as exclusive categories was invented in England, in the late 17th century, by John Dennis, who found himself, on a trip to Switzerland, struck by the contrast between his previous experience of the beauty of nature as a "delight that is consistent with reason" on the one hand, and on the other the spectacle of the Alps "mingled with Horrours, and sometimes almost with despair". And explicitly argued for the first time by Edmund Burke in his 1756 Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.

Brooks is working clearly on pure memories from something like 35 years ago, when he was first curating his self-image as the sort of interesting young man who has a favorite philosopher nobody else in the dorm has ever heard of, Burke, of course, and his lovely distinction between the dreadful revolutionary categorical continentals and the modest, conservative, whimsical, hobbity Englishmen of the 1790s. He wrestled, no doubt, through the first four or five pages of Burke's gnarly and unpleasant treatise on aesthetics—life was so hard in the days before Google!—for an only partly cribbed term paper, and what remains of it in his frazzled, weary brain has gotten divorced from Burke's name:

Don't look now, but your pyre is empurpled

Vital Update 7/19/2014

Beth has gone on beyond mere aesthetics to John C. Wright's HOT SEX ADVICE. There is nothing for me to add but you have to read it.

Note 7/19/2014

As Smut Clyde gently suggests in the comments, John C. Wright's name is actually John C. Wright. When I first hit "publish" on this piece, he was also referred to as "Spencer" a couple of times for reasons I will not attempt to analyze, and on reading it I felt it would be more effective if his name was the same throughout, so I got rid of "Wright", which was the wrong choice.

Cold Majesty. For a film project by Malado Francine Baldwin.

A hilarious manifesto of conservative aesthetics by one John C. Spencer Wright is arousing indignation over at LGM under the gleeful direction of bspencer, for its suggestion that these dreadful young Leftists like Marcel Duchamp have "raped beauty" from out of our midst:

The most precious, profound and important of the great ideas which the Left has raped from us is beauty. I need spend no time on the proposition that life without beauty is a nightmare..