angiereedgarner

Just finished: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad. I don't know what else to say about this scathing, perfect little book beyond that I wish I could make everyone in so-called Western civilization sit down in a chair with their eyes forced open, Clockwork Orange-style, until they'd read it. Until they make this atrocity fucking stop. It's one impassioned cry in the midst of genocide but it's a very powerful cry.

The Dragonfly Gambit, A.D. Sui. I have mixed feelings about this novella, which is a military sci-fi about a pilot, sidelined after a career-ending injury, who plots an elaborate revenge against the empire that blew up her planet. I first encountered the author at the same event where I first encountered Suzan Palumbo, and this could be a paired reading with her book Countess, only I read Countess first and preferred it. Which is not to say that this book isn't good, because it really is, but it's a bit inevitable to compare two anti-colonialist lesbian revenge fantasy space operas that end in tragedy that came out the same year, y'know?

My main criticism is that it suffers from the same issue that a lot of space opera suffers from, which is that there's a big universe and a limited cast of characters, doing all the things. The genre wants scrappy underdogs with interpersonal drama, but it also wants its protagonists in positions of power, which you can do in longer-form work but is challenging in a first-person novella. The Third Daughter is very hands-on, and it's implied that Mother is as well, but at least the former is ludicrously incompetent for someone running a massive empire. Which is to say that if you've blown up someone's planet, you probably shouldn't promote three young people, all of whom are childhood friends, from that planet into critical military positions. Especially if you're going to fuck at least two of them.

That said, I like the romance in this one more, if you can call it a romance; it's wonderfully toxic. And the ending is a gutpunch.

Currently reading: Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons From Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. This continues to be excellent. One thing that I think is really cool about it, among the many things that are cool about it, is that she's decided to capitalize the word Black in all instances, not just where it applies to humans. Which has the intended effect of anthropomorphizing the creatures she writes about in a way that identifies them as the racialized Other, and thus part of the struggle for liberation. Look, this is poetry about marine biology, I'm going to basically love everything about it.

Lost Arc Dreaming by Suyi Davies Okungbowa. I just started this one last night but we have a future Lagos that is mostly underwater, save for five skyscrapers. Which is a cool enough concept that I'll overlook that the book starts with both a dream sequence and the main character dressing for work. I'm into the worldbuilding so far.

sabotabby

This one was clearly ripped off the Ashley Madison hack, with a weird reference to Rohinie Bisesar (the woman who stabbed a stranger to death in the PATH Shoppers Drug Mart). The latter is even name-checked in the show, which I'm kind of surprised is legal.

The plot is needlessly convoluted. A hacker gets the database for Not!Ashley!Madison Dot Com, and appears to be blackmailing either the owner or someone in the database. People in the database include a well-regarded judge and a pastor of a megachurch. She's about to reveal the identity of someone in the database to her married best friend, but will only do it in person. They agree to meet in their usual spot in the PATH, but the hacker, who arrives first, is being followed. She makes her way to a Shoppers, where she's stabbed to death by a masked assailant.

( you know the drill )

mallorys_camera

It was a very grey day yesterday, so I was in a very grey mood.

Either I have become so susceptible to meteorologically induced mood changes that they've jumped the calendar, and depression is no longer just seasonal. Or my body is no longer capable of being a battery that stores up sunshine for cloudy days. Or the world right now is such an awful place that it is nearly impossible to revel in the joy of being alive. Take your pick!

###

Near the beginning of yesterday's TaxBwana debriefing, the head honchos announced that we are no longer being funded for new Chromebooks.

Which means that we can no longer give out equipment to new volunteer TaxBwanas. Not that there are very many of those.

The ranks of existing TaxBwanas are constantly thinning as TaxBwanas move to independent living communities in South Carolina, or undergo joint replacements that leave them immobile, or throw up their hands & say, Fuck this shit. (For whatever reason, there are no youthful TaxBwanas.)

But I don't think attrition is gonna shut down the program.

No, I think Trump's goons are gonna shut off the funding faucet.

We tax preparers all work for free-eee-eeee, but those Chromebooks cost money, and our modems & printers cost money, & in some places where no community agency will donate space to set up shop, we rent space. And all this money comes from a grant from the IRS. My guess is that the grant will be one of the "unnecessary" expenses the goons decide to toss.

Which is a pity. One of the New Paltz team leaders did the math, and assuming the clients we tax-prepared for free-eee-eeee this season had gone to paid tax preparers, we saved our clients about $250,000.

###

I carpooled with the extremely pleasant Steve W whose Parkinson's has gotten noticeably worse since January, the last time I carpooled with him.

For someone I barely know, I'm privy to a lot of details about Steve W's life. The professional trajectory that defied parental expectations. The problematic first marriage. The son who committed suicide. The son's children—Steve's grandchildren—now living abject, impoverished lives in the afore-mentioned South Carolina and other Red states.

"But that's awful!" I said when he finished describing one granddaughter's life. "Can't you bring her up here?"

"No," Steve said. "No. Even if I wanted to. She's got so many problems, and she's so..." He left the sentence unfinished. "My wife couldn't handle it. Jane's almost 80, you know."

Since I'm in the middle of that Larry McMurtry reading binge, Steve's family members reminded me a bit of the Greenway diaspora post-Aurora, which is a modern take on the old Tess of the D'Urbervilles scenario: a downward trajectory. Over the course of a century, very few families stay in the same economic/cultural stratum, but it's only in fiction or The Daily Mail that you get to view the contrails in living color.

Anyway, I was seized with an intense sadness for Steve W. Fundamentally, such a smart, decent guy. Drives people without cars to their medical appointments. Teaches drivers' safety for free-eee-eeee! TaxBwanas! Heavily involved in liberal politics (in the liberal enclave of Gardiner!)

And his personal life is just one long heartache.

This is ridiculous, I thought to myself as he dropped me off at my car. My eyes were actually filled with tears.

So I got in my car and I drove to the ganja store!

I had thought of putting myself on Saint John's Wort, but it turns out Saint John's Wort interferes with Synthroid metabolism.

But I gotta do something.

I'm sick of feeling other people's pain.

Ganja's great! I pop one gummy at night, and not only do I sleep like a hibernating bear, I wake up feeling jolly & utterly impervious!

sabotabby

By no one's request, I have downloaded Law & Order Toronto: Criminal Intent season 2 so that I can watch it so you don't have to.

This one is bad. Like, I normally like my trash TV but it's possible for a pop culture product to be actively harmful and the season opener, "White Squirrel City," is definitely that. It's also an incredible microcosm of our cultural moment.

Which is to say, a few years ago the cops cleared a tent encampment at Bickford Park. Residents were violently displaced, their possessions confiscated, and either forced to go elsewhere, minus their belongings, or shoved into insufficient temporary shelter. This is a major cause of death for homeless people.* Then, to film the copaganda show, they set up a fake tent encampment in the same place where the city had evicted real ones.

So it's one of those situations where even if it had been Great Art, the price of creation would have been outweighed by the moral violation. That said, it's also bad art.

Here is an article from the excellent Grind magazine about all of the things wrong in this episode. The author says it better than I could, and also points out its most egregious flaws, leaving me to nitpick and mock the minor ones.

( spoilers )

mallorys_camera

Spending time in the garden was lovely. Stayed three hours. Got maybe half the 12' X 12' plot weeded? Will return to complete the task later this week. I may not even need to beg Claude to rototill this year: The earth is quite pliable.

###

Spring is more advanced in Dutchess County than it is in Ulster. Maple trees all sporting that tender green blur that, upon close examination, is not leaves at all but tiny tree flowers, lethal to anyone prone to allergies. The magnolias & weeping cherries are all in bloom, and the daffodils & forsythia seem to have staying power this year, so the roadsides are a riot of yellow & pink & spring green.

###

I drove by L's house where I used to live. It's shabbier than ever though the daffodils I planted are blooming in great clumps.

I was pretty happy for most of the time I lived at L's house, and I wondered—not for the first time—if L would have lost her mind if she hadn't had that knee replacement.

I warned her!

Good little libertarian that I am, I have a pretty hard & fast rule about never offering personal opinions about courses of action when it's clear the other person is bound & determined to see them through—except when I feel an emotional bond with the other person and the course of action runs straight through a disaster zone.

Surgery under general anesthetic is risk enough on its own for anyone over 80, but added to that, I'd seen L's chest X-rays! I knew how badly her lungs were compromised.

So over lunch at one of the Culinary's extravagant restaurants, I told Linda my concerns.

It was one of the few occasions I can remember that I ever saw Linda get angry.

I can't remember exactly what she said—I wrote about it at the time, so it's here somewhere—but the gist was that I was not the boss of her, so why didn't I just STFU.

I felt so badly about the encounter that I ended up paying for the lunch—$100 plus.

But shortly after the knee replacement, Linda began manifesting signs of dementia. I think she may have stroked out on the table. Or thrown a mini-clot. Or something.

###

Linda was never someone with whom I was going to forge a deep connection, but I was fond of her and grateful to her.

I haven't seen her since I moved out, but Belinda, whose grim sense of duty compels her to take Linda out every couple of weeks, tells me she's not doing well. She doesn't appear to bathe, smells faintly of urine. She prattles thoughtlessly. She eats half a dozen rolls at a sitting.

Neither one of her children like her, so they're not looking out for her.

Mrs. Neighbor Ed drops by for tea and takes her out shopping once a week, but Mrs. Neighbor Ed, though a kind person, has definite boundaries.

The house keeps getting shabbier and shabbier.

Sad.

And maybe I'm in complete denial, maybe this is just what happens to people when they get old, but I can't help thinking, It didn't have to be this way...

mallorys_camera

Dreamed my friend Erin had fallen in love with Ben.

She was incredibly apolgetic about it and kept assuring me that she understood all the nuances, having been a Faithful Mallory's Camera reader lo, these many years. In fact, she was really glad she'd been reading my diary because otherwise it would have been impossible for her to imagine how somebody (for which read Ben) could simultaneously be so appealing and so awful.

Throughout our conversation, Ben himself was strewn across a sofa in a nearby room and being incredibly whiney, trying to get Erin all to himself.

Busy day yesterday.

In the morning, I sold Duck Derby tickets with Ellen at a folding table in front of the Wallkill hamlet post office.

The Duck Derby is one of innumerable civic activities my dinky little community group, Vision of Wallkill, sponsors. On May 10, we will float a bunch of rubber ducks in the Wallkill River. There is no appreciable current in the portion of the Wallkill River that runs through the hamlet, so the rubber ducks mostly just sit there. But eventually—entropy!—one of the rubber ducks breaks loose & is declared the winner.

The lucky duck's sponsor wins some kind of cash prize, which protocol demands they donate back to the hamlet, so you know: The whole thing is a rip-off.

Funds raised this project go to the Wallkill High School to provide a "safe space" for the Wallkill High School senior class to enjoy prom night.

The Wallkill High School senior class is mostly the spawn of bug-eyed, drooling, rabid Trump supporters, so personally, I'd like to see them all die in fiery car explosions or by chugging methyl-alcohol-infused keggers on prom night.

But you can't always get what you want, and anyway, it's important to maintain Protective Camouflage.

While we were sitting at our table, a fleet of buses drove by and turned down River Road.

"Sightseerers in Wallkill?" I asked Ellen.

"Oh, they're on their way to the Sherpa festival," Ellen told me.

A convoy of cars followed. Expensive cars.

"The Sherpas bought that big field on the other side of Merrie's property," Ellen explained. "They wanted to build a temple or something. But, of course, the town wouldn't let them."

Sherpas!

That must mean... Himalayans!

I resolved to check it out!

Watch on YouTube

Maybe five thousand people? In a field! Right up the usually deserted road from the transfer station. Hundreds of cars parked in a makeshift parking lot.

I ditched my car by the side of the road & hiked in.

"How much are tickets?" I asked the people at the gate.

Tickets were a hundred bucks!

I prepared to hike out.

But then the ticket sellers looked at each other & one of them asked me, "You live here?"

"Yes, I do," I babbled. And next year, I can sell Lhapso Fest tickets along with Duck Derby tickets! I thought, beaming in what I hoped was an appealing fashion.

They let me in for free-eee-eeee!

There wasn't a lot to do. No cultural performances. I think it was mainly a networking meet-and-greet for the Himalayan community of New York State who are mostly Nepalese. I didn't see any other Caucasians.

Most of them were in native garb, and the native garb is stunning although, of course, it is very rude to stalk people for photos just because you like their clothes. I tried to be discreet.

A lot of the men were wearing what I can only describe as modified gaucho costumes. It's so interesting how men in high-country cultures always end up going for those wide-brimmed hats, serapes and ornamental boots. The universal herder swag!

A huge, multi-course feast was in progress that looked and smelled delicious, but I decided it would be rude to partake. So after wandering around for an hour, I left.

I know this culture a little bit because of all the English As a Second Language tutoring I did in Ithaca where I was not only the English Language Tutor of Choice among the surprisingly large Tibetan population there, but also the Tax Preparer of choice.

What surprised me most about the Tibetans in Ithaca was how very materialistic they are. They live for Black Friday! And yet they are very religious Buddhists. What I took away from that is that they understood impermanence without having to practice detachment.

After the Sherpa Fest, I scampered over to the monthly meeting of the Shawangunk Dems where I volunteered to take over their website. This will be good because not only will it help me become more proficient in Squarespace—a potential revenue-generating skill—but it will also help me tailor the Shawangunk Dems' message a little more subtly so as not to alienate potential supporters.

Remember, boys & girls: Imperfect allies are not the enemy.

I am contemplating scampering across the bridge this morning to begin prepping this year's garden, having accepted the Hyde Park Community Garden's invitation to garden with them again this year, since gardening is kind of intimate, thus not something I want to do with Icky.

The symbolism of Easter is not entirely lost on me.

After all, when all is said & done, Jesus is a harvest god.

sabotabby

You asked for more art history posts so I'm afraid that you have no one to blame but yourselves for yet another lengthy dip into the early 20th century avant-garde. If anyone had "Sabs holds forth about John Heartfield" on their bingo card, congrats, you are correct, and your prize is that you get to read about me holding forth about John Heartfield.

But first! Happy Easter to my Christian American peeps!

As they said during the time that we acknowledged the covid pandemic, "Easter will look a little different this year." Which is to say, despite ostensibly electing Trump because of the high cost of eggs, the price of eggs has not come down and in fact has gone up, leading the regime's propagandists to pen numerous articles suggesting that Americans instead dye potatoes, turnips, and marshmallows. What was supposed to be an American golden age of economic prosperity is in fact, more of the same, with the change that you probably no longer have a job.

And while for another week or so I can laugh from over here in Canada at the irony that America can't even properly produce eggs, literally one of the easiest things in the world to produce, it's a little horrifying to see how quickly the failed state has managed to trash the economy. The right wing tends to talk a good game about economics, but that's only because your average slob doesn't understand how economics work. I include economists across the political spectrum in that "average slob" designation, by the way, which is to say that the vast majority of economists believe in a critically dangerous fiction—that of infinite growth. Only those on the extreme left and the extreme right acknowledge that line can't go up forever on a planet with finite resources. This is self-evident but society as we know it would crumble tomorrow if anyone acknowledged it. The extreme left proposes extreme left solutions like "maybe we shouldn't keep burning fossil fuels and redistribute the existing wealth better than we currently do," while the extreme right proposes practical, reasonable solutions like "if we purge all the immigrants and transes, you can live in the houses they were forced to abandon and get all their stuff and thus we can keep burning fossil fuels until we get to Mars." For whatever reason, most people in the Anglosphere are suckers for the latter approach.

Interestingly, despite all of Trump's rhetoric around the return of factory jobs, most MAGAs don't actually want to work in factories themselves. Nor do they want to pick blueberries, judging by a since-deleted post with hilarious comments by a farm desperate for workers now that the mass deportations have started:

492144252_10171784752080268_8283116023390604126_n

My favourite comment on the post: "Y'all better ask Chat GPT to pick them bluberries😂😂😂😂."

It would seem that the right doesn't actually buy their own propaganda on the economy. As it turns out, conservatives, let alone fascists, are predictably awful at managing money (unsurprising; their economic model is the casino, which they're also not good at); not only will the trains not run on time, but the planes will fall out of the sky.

So if all of these Trump voters knew deep down that he wasn't going to make their eggs any cheaper, why did they vote for him? What is the promise of fascism?

( I promise I'll get to art, I promise )

Happy Easter everyone, and enjoy your painted turnips!

P.S. If you need a chaser, of course Heartfield also had a big influence on industrial music, so here is is name-checked along with Hoch (and Marinetti) by Einstürzende Neubauten:

Watch on YouTube

sabotabby

Podcast ~~Friday~~ Saturday. Whoops, no one told me that yesterday was Friday. I should have known based on it being called "Good Friday" and the previous day having been Thursday, but to be quite honest I am very tired.

Anyway. This week's podcast that you simply must listen to is the season finale of AURORA AWARD-NOMINATED PODCAST Wizards & Spaceships "AI and Transhumanism ft. Robert J. Sawyer." The renowned sci-fi author talks about the existential threats posed by GenAI and the deep rot and grift at its core.

As you know, Bob, I have strong, spicy, and controversial opinions on this topic and in particular on why, even though no one asked for this, even though GenAI is not a profitable business for anyone and is threatening to tank the global economy when its speculation bubble bursts, it is still being rammed down our throats. While there are more obvious and immediate threats—the genocide in Gaza, the mass deportations of immigrants and citizens and persecution of trans people in the former US—GenAI to me is a microcosm of the lie at the heart of the liberal democratic order. It improves no one's lives and adds nothing good to the world and yet we are all being forced to believe that it is inevitable. Sawyer's righteous rant is the counterbalance to that narrative that you need right now.

P.S. does anyone want more art history posts from me? I mean you're getting them regardless, but I'm curious to know.

sabotabby

God help me I'm going to hold forth on art history again. This is mainly instigated by a friend elsewhere, who challenged my statement that the aesthetics of AI are inherently fascist. I respect his challenge, and I want to respond with something other than "vibes" so I'm going to go off half-cocked and attempt to draw an historical parallel with the OG fascist movement.

I know more a little more than a normal amount about Italian art. I would argue that it peaked not in the Renaissance but in the Baroque era (source: vibes), but Italian artists have been chasing that high ever since, as has every other artist in the Western world. You can't really blame them.

Michelangelo_-_Creation_of_Adam_(cropped)

Artemisia-Gentileschi-Judith-Holofernes-top

Don't get me wrong, I stan my gay king Michelangelo. But I find Gentileschi a far more interesting artist. Sue me.

( more about art )

So what does this have to do with AI and why I think, based on my vibes, that AI is fascist? It goes back to the pattern I suggested in both Italian Futurism and Russian Constructivism. An avant-garde art movement meets a nascent political movement, the former gleefully attaches to the latter, only to be betrayed when the latter comes to power in favour of more conservative aesthetics.

And this is what I witness happening in the visual iconography of modern-day fascism. Let's take a trip down the rabbit hole to, say, 2014-2016. What's the ascendent visual style of the alt-right? It's janky, ugly-on-purpose, constructed with the most basic tools available, edgy and debauched. It's creative—evil, yes, but it's doing something different and exciting, so much so that it escapes containment. In 2025, what is the visual style of fascism? Slick, corporate, but unnerving. Too perfect in that Uncanny Valley way. More beholden to Thomas Kinkade than to Matt Furie. It feels off, because its proponents want the symbolism of power without a particular deep interest in the structure and the foundations of the aesthetic. An arcade of Roman columns that, when you turn sideways, is nothing more than a Western movie film set facade, all plywood that whole time.

Fascists are simple creatures; they want art that they can understand, none of that high-falutin' Jew degenerate modernist stuff. The problem is that artists, left alive long enough, will tend to change and innovate. They'll fall in love with the art of other cultures. They'll create community. Fascists want art without artists; art that doesn't show the brushstrokes or enable bohemian lifestyles, art that is frictionless and vapid. It's fitting to me that one of the plagiarism machines is called DALL-E because Dalí would have genuinely approved. Mussolini would have wet his pants over AI's potential, at once forward-looking and reactionary, relying on regression to the mean in all things.

Just like the Futurists of yore, the unruly and radical propagandists of 4chan have been abandoned by the same forces they put in power. Their innovation is no longer necessary. They're not even worth subjecting to the Night of the Long Knives.

The ugliness of this aesthetic doesn't even breach the top three reasons to always oppose AI, obviously. That's the environmental holocaust that it unleashes, the use of the technology to target apartment buildings in Gaza or immigrants in the former USA, the mass unemployment it threatens to unleash, and the wholesale theft of creative work. But it's also ugly in the way that the art of totalitarian regimes tends towards ugliness, bereft of a culture of experimentation that makes for great art. And that's why I think it's fascist rather than simply boring.

sabotabby

I have never seen lineups like this. It took an hour (I know that's nothing in the US, but in Canada that's a very long time—you're usually in and out in 5-10 minutes for advance polls). Also it's Easter, and raining. The poll workers were stressed but the mood in the lineup was quite cheerful and chatty.

You do not get a sticker or a lollipop and I think that needs to change.

mallorys_camera

Yesterday was gorgeous.

And I did return to the Walkway, my old tromping ground. Its familiarity was soothing.

The Wallkill, much smaller, is a prettier river.

But the Hudson is majestic.

###

On the Walkway, the Hasidim were out full force with their families. Old mystery solved—they bus them in from the Hasid compounds in Orange & Ulster Counties.

Hasidim roller skate & ride bicycles and scooters just like us! They speak a strange 19th-century variant of Yiddish and wear weird hats and polyester suits & dresses that leave no flesh uncovered, not just like us! They fulfill Elon Musk's commandment: Go Forth & Multiply!

I am philosophically opposed to human insect colonies, so the Hasidim present quite the quandry: On the one hand, they are a rigid, oppressive culture; on the other hand, they don't evangelize or care what I do—in fact, non-Hasidim barely exist to them except as physical objects—and shouldn't people be allowed to live however they want to live?

I thought about taking photographs, but that would have been rude.

###

Also, though I'm toned as shit, all those gym trips don't seem to have enhanced my stamina.

Tromping five miles exhausted me. In particular, I could feel it in my vastis lateralis and other quadriceps.

###

Icky has suddenly begun smoking dope, which has put him in a confiding mood, so on my way out the door, he had to ramble at me for 10 minutes about a hiking trail less than a mile away from the casa where you can find chanterelles & chicken of the woods and ancient apple trees.

The trail sounded kinda cool, actually, so I may check it out next week.

But it was still weird listening to Icky—who'd told me some months back that the only recreational drug he ever does is cocaine (figures), and that he never drinks alcohol or touches marijuana.

After the trail recommendation, he had to tell me how the Eulogy episode of Black Mirror's seventh season made him cry. And this was Definitely Weird because the Eulogy episode of Black Mirror's seventh season is all about how misplaced Pride ruined True Love 4-Ever for Paul Giamatti—and, I mean, c'mon, Icky! Why would you imagine I give a fuck about your emotional problems?

But I tilted my head to the left, turned my palms up, and smiled—that's what they taught us to do in nursing school when you're trying to convey to a patient: I hear what you say!

All the while thinking, However badly Paul Giamatti may have fucked up his love life, I know he didn't make his tenants go wiithout heat for a week in the middle of the winter! Learn from Paul Giamatti!!!!

###

Today is another glorious spring day.

So after I finish my Remuneration allottment, I will figure out a way to get out in it.

mallorys_camera

What's been saving my sanity this past couple of months is a strange little radio station out of Jersey City called WFMU.

It's totally non-commercial. Operating expenses are generated through marathons several times a year. The volunter DJs are a motley crew. There's X-Saturday Night Live writer Andy Breckman who upon release from the Lorne Michaels gulag went on to create the TV show Monk and has been doing a weird Andy Kaufman-esque show called 7-Second Delay on FMU for the past quarter century; a classical music program called Why Do We Only Listen to Dead People?; a Latin American show, Secret Canine Agents; Mr. Fine Wine's Downtown Soulville; Strength Through Failure (highlighting the failure of rock, the failure of sound, the failure of noise, the failure of the 21st century); and dozens more.

Mostly I listen to FMU on the drive to the Y.

But honestly? If I were at the top of a cliff and could be assured I'd end up in a world where FMU was the elevator Muzak, I take the plunge in a heartbeat. And if I were a character in a Thomas Pynchon novel, I'd rely upon FMU to decipher the Grand Conspiracy for me.

###

Also still working my way through Larry McMurtry-Land.

Terms of Endearment is such a bad book! But has such a powerful ending.

Next up on the jukebox: All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers. (I must say, however uneven McMurtry's prose is, his titles are always genius.)

###

Mostly this week, I have been sad, sad, sad, sad, sad.

Nothing I can really do about it.

I pull it together when I'm interacting with other people, (and there's a lot of that), but my ground state right now is melancholy.

Human beings suck, you know?

But it's a sunny day for the first time in a week and afternoon temps are supposed to flirt with 70°, and I'm gonna tromp the Highland side of the Walkway, so maybe I'll change my mind.

mallorys_camera

Very intereresting article about Elon Musk and his baby mommas in today's Wall Street Journal. High hubba-hubba factor! I present it to you unlocked:

https://www.wsj.com/politics/elon-musk-children-mothers-ashley-st-clair-grimes-dc7ba05c?st=Ebczgb&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

It comes on the heels of a equally fascinating piece excerpted in The Atlantic called The World Porn Made, which, while lengthy, is also well worth reading:

https://archive.is/WymsI

I can't help thinking that the two articles are connected. In gist. In terms of Important Things both left out.

There is a science to inferring Important Things from gaps in the record...

###

Elon Musk would appear to be a Robert Heinlein fan. 😀

His Austin baby momma compound is straight out of the pages of Stranger In a Strange Land. Heinlein lived long before medical fertilization procedures, but if he hadn't, I'd have expected him to be a fan of cherry-picking IVF embryos, too.

The "Ick" factor is strong in the Musk piece because most of us are not living in a libertarian science fiction novel. But it is kind of an interesting scenario if you use the omniscient third-person point of view and pretend you're reading a history of the opening years of the 21st century written in the 23rd century.

###

What the Musk article hints at—but does not explicitly say (because how could it?) is that Musk does not enjoy traditional baby-making.

Which, you know, involves penises and vaginas and secretions and involuntary twitches and general loss of control.

There is one allusion to Musk having actual sex with one of the baby mommas, but as a one-time writer of "investigative journalism," the allusion rang false to me, felt planted, seemed to me like the baby momma's attempt to whitewash behavior that unless you are living in a Brave New World alternate universe is very outside the conventional norms.

The new Meet Cute!

Hi! I liked your X-Twitter posting. Can I send you a check for $12 million and a vial of viable sperm?

###

The Atlantic piece about porn is an excerpt from a book that I have pinned to the top of my Stuff I Gotta Read list.

The excerpt actully drills down into porn's effects on feminism—which while not uninteresting is not one of my main interests when it comes to analyzing porn as a sociological phenomenon.

No, my main interest in porn is the effect it has on libido.

Porn actually seems to extinguish libido, in a very convoluted, circuitous way.

The studies all seem to have been done on men, and, of course, they're correlative, not causal. But in the last few years, there's been an unprecedented rise in erectile dysfunction among young men. It seems related to dopamine response mechanisms in the brain.

Personally? I think this unbattening of libido is not just a consequence of porn consumption alone but also a logical response to the use of sexy as a marketing weapon. I mean, Bigger! Hotter! Better! It's classic conditioning, right? The natural response to a sexual stimulus is excitement. And if a sexual stimulus is repeatedly associated with a product (which doesn't inherently in and of itself produce excitement), in time, that product will become associated with excitement—

Until it doesn't.

Is that because some saturation threshhold has been reached? I really don't know.

But I suspect that lack of excitment transfers backwards to the original stimulus—which was sex.

###

Full disclosure here: I watch porn—though increasingly, it is difficult for me to find porn that is at all arousing. Part of that is because I dabble my feet in the shallow end of the pool on account of my age & the societal mores with which I was raised. Part of that is because of my participation in the Berkeley Feminist Health Collective back in the Jurassic, I actually know what feminine arousal looks like and 99.9% of the porn I see ain't it.

But I do have to wonder whether sex on a societal level is on its way out.

sabotabby

Strap in for the next few weeks, lads: it's awards season.

Just finished: Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich. So good. I love all of these characters. I talk a lot, when I talk about writing, about specificity of character, and above all else, Erdrich is a master of this. She can give you three lines of description of a person and somehow they feel immediately real, no matter how minor they are.

Orwell's Roses by Rebecca Solnit: I loved this too—it's such a beautiful way of exploring the dimensions of a person, and a movement, and a relationship between ourselves and the more-than-human world. I can't help but compare it to The Gift of Strawberries again, in that it's a book that made me go out into my garden, and look at the rose hips and thorns on my rosebushes that are just starting to bud, and think about the ways that we keep ourselves going in the darkest of times.

The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed. Mohamed is getting nothing but raves lately and I can see why. This novella is gorgeous. It's a dark fairy tale about a woman, Veris, living in a village under the occupation of the Tyrant. The villagers know not to go into the forest, which contains another, secret forest within it, from which no one returns. The Tyrant's two children, however, don't know any better, and as the only person to have ever retrieved someone from the surreal other world, he forces Veris to search for them. It's suffused with magic both subtle and otherwise; I loved the uncanniness of the setting and the little details like the three tokens Veris uses to find her way. She's a fantastic character, a world-weary, done-with-your-shit middle aged woman who just wants to be left alone, internally rebelling against colonialism but compelled by her own empathy.

Currently reading: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad. What can I say about this one? I wish I could buy all the copies in the world and make every single person in the West read it. I wish I could curse our leaders to hear nothing but this book in their brains, 24 hours a day, until they stop the genocide. I would make a gift of it to everyone who's unfriended me or yelled at me or disowned me for my stance on Palestine. It's the most important thing you will read this year. Both about Gaza and El Akkad's own life as an immigrant and a journalist, every word is note-perfect.

Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons From Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Did you know that if we restored the population of whales to their pre-19th century levels, they'd be a massive carbon sink? This is a fact that lives rent-free in my brain now. Anyway, this is a poetic short book of meditations on Black liberation, trauma, and anti-colonialism. It's so good, you guys. I will always read a book about whale facts but also this is whale facts specifically geared at activism and I am here for it.

mallorys_camera

So, it turns out that an organization exists that does EXACTLY what I wanted to do. Infrastructure already in place! Good news.

It's called VoteRiders.

Most importantly, in addition to providing a portal for state-by-state information about voter ID requirements, VoteRiders covers payment of costs associated with acquisition of necessary documents.

I haven't completed the vetting process, but the website looks great.

So, now I just have to figure out ways to support & promote VoteRiders' mission.

Because no matter how many awful things are going on right now—& make no mistake, at this point, the Nazi Germany resonance is unmistakeable—the absolute worst thing would be what if we can't get rid of Trump's enablers in 2026 and Trump himself in 2028 because we've lost the right to vote?

###

What I can't figure out is whether the economic turmoil is intended to be a distraction from the sub rosa erosion of civil liberties or the sub rosa erosion of civil liberties is intended to be a distraction from the economic mayhem.

###

Meanwhile...

Still behind on Remuneration. (Will the kiskas & I end up in a washing machine carton under the bridge?)

Notwithstanding which, I broke off in the afternoon & toddled off to the gym:

Working out makes me feel better. All those endorphins, doncha know.

And I was very melancholy yesterday. Not just all the geopolitical stuff but also the grey skies that never lift & the great pain of being human.

marthawells

If you are planning to watch the Murderbot TV series (starting May 16!) on Apple TV, if you could add it on your watchlist, that would be a big help. It's kind of like pre-ordering a book, it tells the publisher/streaming service that you're there for our show.

There's a link here for US viewers: https://tv.apple.com/us/show/murderbot/umc.cmc.5owrzntj9v1gpg31wshflud03

I'm pretty sure it's different for Apple viewers in other countries.

You can also see the trailer at this link.

mallorys_camera

At that Jamaican restaurant in Brooklyn, I tasted a fabulous black bean soup and could not stop thinking about it, so yesterday had thoughts about recreating it—

Which I did not do! Ended up making a kind of vegetable soup with a lot of black beans.

Tasty nonetheless. But I guess I don't have a good enough palate for recreating dishes from scratch without a recipe.

###

That was my main activity yesterday: Making a ginormous batch of soup.

Otherwise, I Remunerated, went phone-vox with a bunch of folk, and watched endless episodes of The Pitt.

Back in the day, ER was one of my favorite television shows, so I liked The Pitt. It was nice to see Dr. John Carter all grown up and running an ED in the Rust Belt. But can emergency rooms really have changed all that much? Back in the Jurassic when I was an ER nurse, the nurses did most of the work. We'd do what needed to be done, and then we'd tell the interns & residents what orders to write.

And it was really boring a lot of the time! I worked at Highland Hospital in Oakland, at that time a very poor and mostly Black city. Highland Hospital bore the designation, Provider of Last Resort, so we got all the uninsured GSWs, stabbings, & assorted gangbanger mayhem.

But we also got the uninsured mothers of eight trotting their broods in for ringworm checks, and that could get pretty dull.

I did like one of the residents' throwaway observations: Anyone who works in an emergency room probably has undiagnosed ADHD.

Ring of truth!

###

I spoke for an hour with Public Policy Eleanor who will not have time to help me with The Project until the end of May—because she's going off for a week to Madrid and thence for another week to walk the Camino de Santiago.

I was green with envy. I want to walk the Camino de Santiago!

I spoke for another hour with Ellen whose head is bent out of shape by the Mean Girl antics of the VoW crowd. Civic involvement in small towns is so-oo weird.

Why do you care? I asked Ellen at one point.

She didn't really have a convincing explanation—except that she does care, so as a Loyal Friend, I said nasty, villainous things about all the VoW ladies and made her laugh. Tomorrow, she & I are going out canvassing local Wallkill businesses—there aren't very many of them!—to drum up sponsorships on behalf of the Duck Derby & village-wide flea market. Which should be a laugh riot.

Today I must finish this segment of the ongoing Remuneration and begin drafting the Project description—I'm thinking a nationwide network of volunteers at the granular county level who guide prospective voters through the process of attaining Enhanced IDs (cheaper than passports.) I need a punchy first sentence, though!

And, of course, I must hit the gym.

sabotabby

I've finished watching it (I know, I know, I missed the Discourse). Conspirituality recently did an episode about it (two, actually, as it was mentioned at length in the preceding episode. They thought it was well done but ultimately fell into a conservative framework while distorting basic truths and fanning a moral panic, and I've seen that sentiment elsewhere online. However. I disagree to the point where I wonder if they watched the same show I just did.

The spoiler-free version: I thought it was stunning acting. The continuous shot thing can be a gimmick (and I think it can be problematic in a way slightly orthogonal but not unrelated to Conspirituality's critique) but it made for compelling TV. It is very obviously a fictional show that plays some elements up for dramatic effect, but it captures some fundamental truths about the kids today and I think it's worthwhile. I do not think it should be the basis of policy for the UK government or anywhere else; I do think it's important viewing for people who work with kids or have kids in their lives.

( I have to get more spoilery if I want to discuss the critiques. )

sabotabby

As always, if you're interested in context and sensible thoughts you can check out

ioplokon 's post.

I am inclined to think that no one should go to prison, but of course that's not exactly true. Certain things that are illegal, say, sex work or drug use or trying to save the world, are unfairly criminalized. Other things that are illegal, such as rape or murder, are fairly so, though one could debate whether prison is necessarily the most effective way of dealing with them. And some things that are legal, such as building a pipeline on stolen land, or cutting down the Amazon rainforest, or jerking around the global economy so that your buddies can make a quick buck, ought to be punishable with Forever Jail at the least, if not execution by space trebuchet into the fucking sun. If you're a 13-year-old kid torrenting an album, that's illegal, but if you are a huge corporation stealing the work of every creative person alive, it's not illegal, even though it is, like, illegal under current laws. So I'm not 100% a prison abolitionist. Smarter people about me have written about this; let's instead talk about civil disobedience, which is another free association my brain makes with this prompt.

I have a dear friend who, for years, was involved in Extinction Rebellion in [redacted country]. The strategy there was mass nonviolent civil disobedience; they would often deliberately try to get as many peaceful demonstrators arrested as possible to draw attention to the cause. Or to grind up the gears of the legal system. This is in contrast to many of the movements I've been involved in here, where they do not deliberately get as many peaceful demonstrators as possible arrested, but it happens anyway because we keep letting ourselves get kettled for some reason.

This technique has worked well in the past. Most famously, during the Spokane Free Speech Fights in 1909, the Wobblies would stand on a soap box (legal for the Salvation Army but not for anarcho-syndicalists) and give a speech, and the cops would arrest them. Eventually, the jail would get so full that they had to let everyone go. This strategy was effective because neither the prison-industrial complex nor digitized information and surveillance systems were advanced like they are today. These days, this would be a great opportunity for a private-public partnership to build a larger, supermax jail and profit massively per prisoner.

The other day, the Indigo 11, anti-genocide protestors who were violently arrested for the crime of putting paint on the wall of the worst bookstore in the country, were acquitted of all charges. Which is great news! But I wonder how many wasted hours, legal fees, disrupted careers, emotional trauma were suffered, and whether there might be a better way. At least here, and I assume in most alleged Western democracies, the state's strategy to deal with political expression that it doesn't like is to arrest people for charges that everyone knows won't stick. They then spend years grinding down the accused through the courts and disrupting the movement through house arrest and non-association conditions. By the time the person is inevitably free, their name has been dragged through the mud, they've been separated from friends and comrades, they've lost their job or education, and they're broke. You beat the rap but not the ride.

Add to this the context of the US, which could easily be exported here, even if the Tories lose. As the cases of Rümeysa Öztürk and Mahmoud Khalil and Abrego Garcia show, in America you can be thrown in a secret prison for any reason, whether or not you violate the law. It's very clear that we will have to devote a lot of time to prisoner support and legal costs to free innocent people. Movement lawyers are going to be incredibly busy and GoFundMe's are going to be incredibly empty. We cannot fuck around with pretending the state has a conscience anymore.

Therefore I propose: No going to jail for justice if you can avoid it. Run, don't go limp. If you're going to get arrested, make sure you do so for a reason that justifies taking you out of the game for potentially years at a time. Do not make mass arrests at demos part of your strategy.

mallorys_camera

Birthday trip was fabulous.

Rendezvoused with the BoyZ on Stone Street, which, back in 1658, became the first cobblestoned avenue in New Amsterdam:

Had dinner at a Cuban salsa bar & RTT paid! (An exciting new development. 😀) I was expecting the food to be touristy & pedestrian, but in fact, it was very tasty:

Our fourth at table was Brian, Madeleine's very pleasant BF. (Madeleine herself is in Tustin.)

Brian was exceedingly impressed that I play D&D! Amusingly so. I could have told him, Why, yes, I did cure cancer, and last year when I was in Oslo accepting the Nobel Prize for literature... and still the most impressive thing about me would be that I play D&D!

After dinner, we went to NYC's hottest production, Life and Trust, which is an immersive event that takes place in a bank, one block away from Wall Street. The bank was originally built in 1931—a bad time for building banks—and subsequently overlaid by a 59-story skyscraper so that the original bank is now underground.

Now, I ❤️LUV❤️ immersive events because they combine all the best elements of theater and museums.

And Life and Trust did not disappoint—although I will say my ❤️LUV❤️ was not entirely unreserved.

Life and Trust centers on a Faustian deal. The action itself takes place on October 23, 1929—the day before the stock market crash that launched the Great Depression.

At some indeterminate point in the past, a man named J.G. Conway sells his soul to the devil in exchange for a recipe for some kind of magical green and highly addictive liquid, which he then mass markets as cough medicine. (This segued into a private Family Joke: I have been telling the BoyZ since they were kids that they were heirs to the DiLucchio Cough Drop Millions.)

Then, in the only spoken part of the show, the devil invites the paying audience to travel back into the Past and watch Bad Things transpire.

Since the paying audience are wraiths in that past, we had to wear these incredibly uncomfortable masks. Mine gave me a headache! Plus it was impossible for me to fit my glasses under it! Plus it was really fuckin' hot and my face sweated buckets!

We also had to do an incredible amount of running around—my FitBit logged more than 10,000 steps—including up and down an incredible number of stairs. My 73-year-old body was barely up to the challenge. (Pretend Nazis are chasing you, I counseled myself at the two-and-a-half hour mark.)

###

The sets were unbelievably wonderful! Bedrooms, parlors, business offices, bank vaults, Dr. Caligari-like labs filled with vials of sinister green liquid & Weird Science specimens, ballrooms, secret gardens, a forest, a lake, a livery stable, a movie theater, a burlesque stage, a boxing ring! All of them meticulously designed and outfitted in the most amazing detail. Dreamlike! You could pick every object up and study it. You could sit in the chairs and lie in the beds. You could work out with the boxing bag! This was my favorite part.

###

I don't know how many characters there were that you could follow around. Dozens & dozens. J.G. Conway. His sister (who is having a Lesbian affair with her maid.) A mad scientist. Many Bohemians, bankers, politicians. A tarot card reader. Several clowns. Cameo appearances from Gilded Age celebrities like Stanford White and Evelyn Nesbit. Mephisto and his various demonic adjutants.

But here's the thing: The characters didn't talk. They danced.

And I'm not that into dance.

And the dance was pretty repetitive. I mean, none of the individual Life and Trust characters had an individual mode of dancing that distinguished their unique personalities or backstories. It was all your basic Martha Graham arm-flinging and back-bending.

And I got—well. Bored. Philistine that I am.

###

Our airbnb was in Brooklyn, and Ichabod had to go back to Brian-and-Madeleine's place in Queens to pick up a suitcase he'd left there (long story), so RTT and I subway-ed alone and got into the Customary Big Fight ('nother long story), which we always seem to get into at least once on every family vacay.

I always forget that as innocuous & defenseless as I seem to myself, in RTT's eyes, I am the Loch Ness Monster, dripping with the kind of deep-water archetypal power that only parents possess!

Anyway.

We resolved the fight, but before we did, we were treated to one of those awful late-night-NYC-subway vignettes that are so massively depressing—namely a homeless guy, crawling with lice, sprawled on one of the hard, fused-plastic subway seats, ostensibly trying to sleep but unable to sleep—the subway car was brightly lit—so he reached down into the crotch of his pants and began to masturbate—

"How's that for immersive theater?" I murmured to RTT.

And we began to laugh.

This guy was once somebody's little pink innocent baby, I reminded myself.

But it was a hard sell.

###

RTT had to leave at the crack of dawn to accept the Working Families Party endorsement back in Ithaca on the Day itself. It meant so much to me that he went to all that trouble to make the trip down for such a short time!

"What do you want to do on your birthday?" Ichabod asked.

What I wanted to do on my birthday was visit the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, which is a touchstone in my personal mythology, a place where I spent many happy, happy hours when I was a kid.

So, that was what we did.

We had lunch at a Jamaican restaurant that had the best mac 'n' cheese I have ever tasted. It had a texture like kugel! Except... It was mac 'n' cheese!

And absolutely amazing banana pudding ice cream at the Ample Hills Creamery.

And then went back to the airbnb and watched all six episodes of the just-dropped seventh season of Black Mirror.

###

Yesterday was hard, hard, hard because saying good-bye to my kids is always so hard. I love them both so much! Not just because they're my kids but because of the people they are. It's like when I'm with them, the world is in color.

There are other people who turn on color for me, too (one or two of whom may actually be reading this.) But I have to say, most of the time, I float in a world that, if not exactly grey, is deeply unsaturated.

And also—WT-fuckin'-F???—it was snowing in the quaint & scenic Hudson Valley! Hideous White Stuff From the Sky!!! I passed six accidents on the country roads as I wended my way home. The roads in Ulster County were unplowed and covered with about three inches of slippery slush. I drove with my knuckles in my mouth, absolutely convinced I was gonna end up in a ditch.

But I didn't.

And today, I have an enormous amount of work to do and very little interest in doing any of it.

What else is new?

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Angie Reed Garner

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February 2020

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Page Summary

sabotabby - Reading Wednesday
sabotabby - L&O season 2: Episode 2
mallorys_camera - Other People's Contrails
sabotabby - L&O season 2: Episode 1
mallorys_camera - The News From Dutchess County
mallorys_camera - Duck Derbies & Sherpa Fests
sabotabby - Of butter, eggs, and the promises of fascism
sabotabby - podcast friday
sabotabby - Futurism and 4chan
sabotabby - Voted
mallorys_camera - Learn From Paul Giamatti!!!!
mallorys_camera - Another Way to Decipher the Grand Conspiracy...
mallorys_camera - Can I Send You a Check for $12 Million and a Vial of Viable Sperm?
sabotabby - Reading Wednesday
mallorys_camera - VoteRiders
marthawells - Murderbot on TV
mallorys_camera - Business As Usual
sabotabby - A defence of Adolescence
sabotabby - Approaches to Politics 4: The just man must go to prison...
mallorys_camera - Life, Trust, Subways, & the Brooklyn Botanic Garden

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