tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30512664654327105502024-02-19T17:45:22.821-08:00Slouching Toward UrschleimGoing all primordial on youRand Careagahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04993454654652802173noreply@blogger.comBlogger135125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3051266465432710550.post-44275339862779772382023-07-27T20:08:00.000-07:002023-07-27T20:08:31.327-07:00When you’re a tsar they let you do it<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2z2S3xMt1QDzn2Cx4wdNDi1uiUcM81R0rjcDZlZAqpHX34zfBoRmLVhU5-EdaUrhQjQu9jd97TwNi-ka2Y85uZSk9ddz7zYR30Z4rLfEFdAkH1Th18WzAYjZYib2ai_KggtrtQR-wwrKYbGdWYiQiZHIhuzgopnYOCyupbPclUdJIi7gvyTnBSyRNbzdp/s2048/boots_dersantis.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2z2S3xMt1QDzn2Cx4wdNDi1uiUcM81R0rjcDZlZAqpHX34zfBoRmLVhU5-EdaUrhQjQu9jd97TwNi-ka2Y85uZSk9ddz7zYR30Z4rLfEFdAkH1Th18WzAYjZYib2ai_KggtrtQR-wwrKYbGdWYiQiZHIhuzgopnYOCyupbPclUdJIi7gvyTnBSyRNbzdp/w300-h400/boots_dersantis.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>Floridamandias</b></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">I met a pollster with the latest news</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Who said—“Fleece vests and shiny boots of rock</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Litter the Everglades. Near them, in the ooze,</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Half sunk, a ruined campaign lies, in hock,</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Disorganized. The race was his to lose.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">‘Kick immigrants and fags,’ his handlers said,</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">‘LGBT—rile up the common folk.’</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">But out the gate the effort’s looking dead.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">On OAN and Fox the chyron reads:</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>He’s Ron DeSantimandias, Scourge of Woke;</i></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>The budding fascist that this country needs!</i></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">It hasn’t worked. In Mar-a-Lago far</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Former Guy maintains a solid lead,</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The MAGA hordes are sticking with the Tsar.”</span></div></div><p><br /> </p>Rand Careagahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04993454654652802173noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3051266465432710550.post-59775750154443935712022-12-31T15:30:00.000-08:002022-12-31T15:30:38.137-08:00Point of origin<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-fQGs0ng8clNfSc3ieZFtmFh6ldbCIX1DqGlCXrn6uIpZwfeo9ZB-PMtfC8oUn8nukNyBVdIVEA3c73Mbu0Ya0wC6vZPC9FnHctNnGr2rfjn5TzZAloYbBB6k6TxYZDdjTYyFH4fctDgxX5v_iVJSNvzdiXIc-cK1G95K-mLWKZx8IcCcutdug0H_bg/s1024/sfv_sunset.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="768" data-original-width="1024" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-fQGs0ng8clNfSc3ieZFtmFh6ldbCIX1DqGlCXrn6uIpZwfeo9ZB-PMtfC8oUn8nukNyBVdIVEA3c73Mbu0Ya0wC6vZPC9FnHctNnGr2rfjn5TzZAloYbBB6k6TxYZDdjTYyFH4fctDgxX5v_iVJSNvzdiXIc-cK1G95K-mLWKZx8IcCcutdug0H_bg/w400-h300/sfv_sunset.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Medical issues have compelled the household’s attendance to Southern California—specifically the San Fernando Valley, more specifically Northridge, a postal designation therein—since early summer. We have spent two or three weeks out of each five in the Southland as the spousette receives treatment for a life-threatening disease (Cedars-Sinai proposes to cure this; our local HMO was prepared to slot the patient straight into hospice care).</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">I quit the Valley for the first time—I was raised but not, as I tell friends, cultivated there—in 1970; found myself couchsurfing at various addresses within its boundaries in summers 1971, 1972 and 1975 before I finally shook its grit from my desert boots. Until this year I had seldom thereafter passed more than a few consecutive nights in the Valley.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">A kind friend vouchsafed us her vacant, somewhat spartan condominium in Northridge (how is it that some people end up with multiple homes and others with none at all? It’s a conundrum as well as a condo). Here we sheltered in place over the therapeutic regime, cowering under the brutal SoCal heat, which hovered within a few degrees of 100°F all summer and a few weeks into autumn. Not until November did the weather abate.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The entire summer was oppressive. Come the autumn, though, I was distantly tickled by the cooler weather, the clear days, the brisk air between them summoning up my formative years: not to the degree that, visiting the region decades past, a sense of my salad days would occasionally descend upon me there with almost shattering immediacy, but sufficient to put me in mind of Mole from <i>The Wind in the Willows</i> when he catches a whiff of his old burrow, not hitherto missed, and the scent summons his attention, poignantly, to the memory of that abandoned past.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">I’ve never wanted to live in the San Fernando Valley again, not the sprawling whitebread suburb I quit the first time in 1970, nor the polyglot slum, the wilderness of strip malls, into which it has devolved today, but I am obliged to acknowledge the tidal tug that even now, weather permitting, causes the hindbrain to twitch in response.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i><b>Above:</b> Sunset from near the borrowed condo. More strip malls’n you could shake a stick at.</i></span></div></div><p><br /></p>Rand Careagahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04993454654652802173noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3051266465432710550.post-26368742061313455952022-09-28T18:45:00.002-07:002022-09-28T18:45:55.549-07:00Fifty years(!)<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQWPczwH-a83CzqvRXIc8HRvbl1k3iuLlu4oGpldVd01rg8D3hpv7f7-73MnEsiLfJePUNn64dPoIcboHUCv4rLFIagcVf7nImkI-aAR9gd7ww4DAJFuoaTGWnrrSQ4H8vTq1a5NwuHoxip1qUeRMH-g4GIIVe9M8QR8cpFw1ezno7Rbw4f5bgMT-rMw/s1840/vb_fifty_2022.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1840" data-original-width="1828" height="356" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQWPczwH-a83CzqvRXIc8HRvbl1k3iuLlu4oGpldVd01rg8D3hpv7f7-73MnEsiLfJePUNn64dPoIcboHUCv4rLFIagcVf7nImkI-aAR9gd7ww4DAJFuoaTGWnrrSQ4H8vTq1a5NwuHoxip1qUeRMH-g4GIIVe9M8QR8cpFw1ezno7Rbw4f5bgMT-rMw/w354-h356/vb_fifty_2022.jpg" width="354" /></a></div>I can scarcely believe that five decades have elapsed since that evening. It doesn’t seem possible meaningfully to enlarge upon this account of 28 September 1972, posted two years ago, so I will merely <a href="http://urschleim.blogspot.com/2020/09/a-memory-28-september-1972.html" target="_blank">link to it</a> anew. But half a century, geez…</span></div><br /><p></p>Rand Careagahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04993454654652802173noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3051266465432710550.post-33383813164257086372022-07-16T15:18:00.005-07:002022-07-16T20:06:20.330-07:00A surfeit of Murdoch<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBWdl9SjvHGZm11hVo1kMU9SZLEeMotfqQasNSR49fUr9XFO-HNjRBVDSo4Hl9R33JYjrcf-bQMkf7rWo57KHWl3tfWJSIKhvzSHlATcBIJcvO3l-Z88wUfeE8sBstulbX8e5cLQw2XQOZDtaZO7Axi0gW_sv8KPdYoq2uUlWptppHGTuxsqqWOM7OgQ/s1685/severed_head.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1685" data-original-width="1032" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBWdl9SjvHGZm11hVo1kMU9SZLEeMotfqQasNSR49fUr9XFO-HNjRBVDSo4Hl9R33JYjrcf-bQMkf7rWo57KHWl3tfWJSIKhvzSHlATcBIJcvO3l-Z88wUfeE8sBstulbX8e5cLQw2XQOZDtaZO7Axi0gW_sv8KPdYoq2uUlWptppHGTuxsqqWOM7OgQ/w392-h640/severed_head.jpg" width="392" /></a></div><br /><div><span style="font-family: verdana;">At the end of 1986, with my domestic arrangements having fallen to flinders, a friend whom circumstances had granted a ringside seat to the debacle pressed upon me her copy of <i>A Severed Head</i>. “Read it,” she urged, “and understand.” Well, truth to tell, the novel hadn’t much to say about the particulars of my situation, but there was an eerie resonance with the tangled skein of personal histories, relationships, delusions and estrangements characterizing that bleak period. Looking back I suppose that, not unlike Murdoch’s fifth novel, the situation was not without its comedic elements (which I think my friend must have detected), but few of its principals were in a position at the time to appreciate these. Still, <i>A Severed Head</i> impressed me sufficiently that, Berkeley in those days still being my cultural center of gravity, I betook myself over the next few months to the used bookstores on Telegraph Avenue to score five or six copies of the author’s other works—which I then left untouched for a third of a century until I was unaccountably moved late this past spring to take up <i>Under the Net</i>, her first novel. For most of the preceding year or so I had been reading mainly histories and biographies (including <i>The Education of Henry Adams</i> in a handsome edition received as a birthday gift forty-nine years ago, to which I found myself at last receptive after reaching its author’s approximate age at the time of its composition), and only began to edge back into fiction recently.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>Under the Net</i> (1954) was entertaining, picaresque and ultimately, I thought, pointless, although the inclusion of a movie mogul distantly based on Wittgenstein was an amusing touch, and had this been my sole exposure to the writer’s œuvre I doubt whether I should have been moved to pursue it further, but on the strength of what I recalled of <i>A Severed Head</i>, I prepared to submit my decision to a tiebreaker, and somewhat arbitrarily selected from the backlist on hand her nineteenth novel, <i>The Sea, The Sea</i> (1978), which scored its author the coveted Booker Prize.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;">Its opening chapters were…exasperating. I recognized that Charles Arrowby, the narrator, was intended to be off-putting, but half an hour in I felt far from certain that I could bear, at that point, another 450 pages (in my Penguin paperback edition) of his company. Screwing my patience to the sticking place, however, I plugged on, my interest gradually engaging, as Arrowby related the tale, discreditable to rational reader, of re-encountering after half a century his first love—in memory a sylph, a soulmate, his very anima; in 1978 a drab, faded housewife unaccountably unwilling to leave her husband to take up again with the boyfriend of her teens, whose importunities to this end become increasingly unhinged. My exasperation never abated, but my interest was engaged.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;">From here I was moved to take in <i>The Sandcastle</i> (1957), in which a forty-ish schoolmaster becomes infatuated with a young painter who returns his affection, the romance being thwarted by the educator’s dithering and the intelligent machinations of the wronged wife. Next up was the very interesting <i>The Bell</i> (1958), in a 1966 American paperback edition that hilariously misrepresented the tale as a bodice-ripper, and then a reprise of <i>A Severed Head</i>, which did not disappoint upon a second reading.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;">Thence: <i>The Italian Girl</i> (1964). A misfire. Murdoch published twenty-six novels in four decades, and even her most sympathetic critics do not assert that all of these were of first quality. This one I will not soon revisit. <i>The Red and the Black</i> (1965) was Murdoch’s only “historical” novel, set in Dublin on the eve of the 1916 Easter Rising, and to my mind engaging and quite readable, with the “obsessive lover” note, so prominent in most of the novels I’ve read thus far, not absent, but nothing like as front-and-center as seen elsewhere to date.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>A Fairly Honourable Defeat</i> (1970) included a figure recurring frequently if not invariably in Murdoch’s novels: charismatic, enigmatic, demonic, occasionally destructive, as here, in which a visiting academic attempts unsuccessfully to engineer for his own amusement the estrangement of a homosexual couple (a relationship sympathetically, even compassionately portrayed by the author), an undertaking which, as an unintended consequence, results in the destruction of another character, an armchair philosopher, this collateral damage occasioning not a moment’s remorse on the part of the culprit.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;">I might mention that I took in most of these novels while laid low with The Thing That’s Going Around, which entered the household shortly after mid-June, probably with SWMBO after she attended an outdoor concert a few days earlier. We were flattened sequentially; she first and than, a few days later, your proprietor: it is difficult to maintain social distancing in 1700 square feet. But thank Log for the vaccines and boosters! I was still bedridden by the time I took in <i>The Black Prince</i> (1973), and maybe it was covid and maybe I’d lost patience with Murdoch’s obsessed narrators chasing after young girls or their phantoms, but the exasperation I felt in the opening passages of <i>The Sea, The Sea</i> had returned by the time I closed this one.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;">Murdoch’s books are not page-turners—sometimes, indeed, they’re a chore to get through—and her prose style, while unobjectionable, is generally unmemorable. In fairness, though, every now and again the lady lights it up and demonstrates what she’s capable of, and on these occasions she boosts her gifts to very high altitudes indeed. It is her intelligence, though, that kept me going through nine novels (and likely through more presently, although for some reason I am willing to acquire only “used” editions, and have scoured and plundered most of the vendors in reach), and her ability to finish strong.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;">Having completed <i>The Black Prince</i> I craved something at once comparable in points of style and respectability, and also more readily readable and less likely to provoke impatience. A few days later some household circumstances arose that thrust considerations of literary entertainment offstage for the moment. Since then I have found myself drawn in my idle moments (few of those as present conditions permit) to distractions, and to this end the “Aubrey-Maturin” cycle of novels by Patrick O’Brian have answered very well. These are page-turners indeed, not the least exasperating, and as prose impeccable: indeed, Iris Murdoch was among the series’ early champions. So there’s that.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i><b>Above:</b> That’s the legendary “Marber grid,” which dominated Penguin cover designs for years.</i></span></div>Rand Careagahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04993454654652802173noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3051266465432710550.post-78129364465934739312022-07-16T11:56:00.003-07:002022-07-16T11:59:11.644-07:00“Displacement activity” – a new label<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2Q-P3b4jNWwlMlFDY3zjj0KB12TomJOD60uZqg-HV9cfbTlSxrX8ZJggClMQekaxZyG9kV7BAKB_GQO6WGEWXGzqW6vtul7hK9_6AUjBCHQd2gKuF0gC7MnL-wZfk5GZeIMm-TYq0P7Y4ACdxKit-qAOA7h0422iA0UE8oJ1D9wJQ5Hz2FSvVuupCtQ/s768/dog_licking_balls.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br /><img border="0" data-original-height="518" data-original-width="768" height="270" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2Q-P3b4jNWwlMlFDY3zjj0KB12TomJOD60uZqg-HV9cfbTlSxrX8ZJggClMQekaxZyG9kV7BAKB_GQO6WGEWXGzqW6vtul7hK9_6AUjBCHQd2gKuF0gC7MnL-wZfk5GZeIMm-TYq0P7Y4ACdxKit-qAOA7h0422iA0UE8oJ1D9wJQ5Hz2FSvVuupCtQ/w400-h270/dog_licking_balls.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Circumstances unpropitious, unforeseen, potentially dire have lately settled upon the household, and while I’d be disinclined in any event to enlarge upon these publicly, I’ve not a great deal of time most days to spare for even my normal none-too-frequent ruminations in these precincts. Nevertheless, sometimes turning my attention elsewhere affords a transient, as it were a palliative distraction from other cares, and it strikes me that these may be tagged with the appropriate label of “Displacement activity,” which seems as though it would be a good title for an entire blog—and which indeed (checks) proves to have been spoken for already.</span></p>Rand Careagahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04993454654652802173noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3051266465432710550.post-67197008020526898802022-04-17T16:08:00.005-07:002022-06-27T10:05:06.580-07:00Life Turing infowartime<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbVCCZIZgm5OfJ0nAAZOy5Kc_mQ0PG2cB77cwQRhK_3rshr16xOeam4PzcXPLpXUe3PED52vHtwEBIHDppwQmxAl-71I9Y-va16VwBNWGkW3Uq1fXugrrO36sjuUW9FuBy0sJn3rvU8mB8RJlpTbaYiCz9Bz9VER5ukqLSZwzUTs9B9ukYZZwp6Apluw/s1384/hals_legacy.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1384" data-original-width="1172" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbVCCZIZgm5OfJ0nAAZOy5Kc_mQ0PG2cB77cwQRhK_3rshr16xOeam4PzcXPLpXUe3PED52vHtwEBIHDppwQmxAl-71I9Y-va16VwBNWGkW3Uq1fXugrrO36sjuUW9FuBy0sJn3rvU8mB8RJlpTbaYiCz9Bz9VER5ukqLSZwzUTs9B9ukYZZwp6Apluw/w339-h400/hals_legacy.jpg" width="339" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">A <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/15/magazine/ai-language.html" target="_blank">recent piece</a> in <i>The New York Times</i>—the kind of long-form journalism that, notwithstanding The Paper of Record’s many black sins in its political reporting, keeps me behind the paywall month after month—discusses the extraordinary advances that have been made in artificial intelligence over the past decade and change, with particular emphasis on the ability of cutting-edge “deep learning” software—“Generative Pre-Trained Transformer 3,” hereafter GPT-3—to parse language and to compose it. This is not Siri, or Alexa, or any of the consumer-level “assistants” with which we’re familiar, impressive as these may have seemed seven or eight years ago. Indeed, GPT-3 is not consumer-level at all, and its creators, an outfit calling itself OpenAI, are keeping the thing on a tight leash, because it is a vastly powerful tool the existence of which invites all sorts of possibilities for abuse. “The very premise that we are now having a serious debate over the best way to instill moral and civic values in our software,” the reporter concludes, “should make it clear that we have crossed an important threshold.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Read the piece if you are able—the NYT would like you to pay for the privilege, and you ought to, but for anyone who for moral, political or financial reasons can’t see your way to purchasing it, there are ways to tunnel beneath the paywall (<i>cough</i>, “private” or “incognito” browsing), and the article really is worth your fifteen or twenty minutes’ attention, if not your coin.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">“Artificial intelligence” has long been, rather like commercial nuclear fusion, just around a corner never cleared (“nuclear fusion is thirty years away—and always will be”). Indeed, in the 1950s there was much talk about “electronic brains,” referring to room-sized machines that deployed considerably less computational horsepower than the average cellular phone brings to bear without breaking a sweat. Nevertheless, bold predictions were being made, perhaps not entirely without dreams of sweet DARPA research grants dancing in certain academic heads, of “thinking machines” in immediate prospect. Well, you know, the Industrial Revolution had to start somewhere.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Having read “A.I. Is Mastering Language. Should We Trust What It Says?” I was moved to retrieve (and blow off its integument of dust) from the bookshelf in the hall a 1997 anthology, <i><a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/hals-legacy" target="_blank">HAL’s Legacy</a></i>, a collection of a dozen-and-a-half essays about artificial intelligence, about the vision of this presented in <i>2001</i> (a film I regard as a cultural artifact as profoundly expressing the mythos of its era as Genesis and <i>The Iliad</i> did for theirs) and how it inspired a generation, by now two or more, to pursue the grail of software sentience.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Are they there yet? I don’t think so. But they’re a damned sight closer than anyone could have concluded, based on these 1997 descriptions of the state of the art, that we might be by now. Put another way, progress in the field over the past quarter-century considerably exceeds advances made in military aviation between the Sopwith Camel and the B2 bomber. Seriously.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">For far too many years the “Turing Test” was one of the measures of machine sentience. Another was chess, but when Kasparov fell to “Deep Blue,” that metric was tossed. As software continues to mimic and meet the Turing standard, the goalposts continue to be repositioned, and with GPT-3’s latest feats, I imagine that they’re way out at the end of the parking lot, if not into the next county altogether.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">GPT-3 is not “self-aware.” For one thing, I’m reasonably sure that there’s not a “self” there. Except…except…how sure are we that there’s really a self <i>here</i> in our spongy grey matter? Sure, we feel that, but unless you’re going to go all “soul” on me, I hope that you will agree that human consciousness arises from a kind of “emergent behavior” on the part of a collective of preconscious subroutines, themselves based on dense electrochemical interchanges among our tightly-packed neurons. Machines will likely never replicate the essence of these processes, but I’m less confident that they can’t arrive at something resembling the product.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">It is striking how conservative most of the contributors to <i>HAL’s Legacy </i>were. AI, at that point, was still thirty years away, at least, even to the most optimistic among them (possibly excepting Doug Lenat, whose “Cyc” project, perhaps misconceived, and certainly unrealistic given the input resources of the nineties, looks as though it may have anticipated the kind of deep learning that was eventually realizable between the vast volumes of digital intake now at hand and the wherewithal of the processing power that may presently be brought to bear to digest this).</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">I have said this before, and often, but I believe that, unless industrial civilization collapses—a prospect by no means uncertain—machine sentience will arrive among us. It will probably not be recognized until afterward, and with each evidence of its presence the standard of proof, those goalposts, will be picked up and transported across the state line if necessary. And, you know, the machines may talk to us, absolutely passing the Turing test, and we will still wonder “is there anyone home?” But at that point, it may be that posing the same question to ourselves will be appropriate.</span></p>Rand Careagahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04993454654652802173noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3051266465432710550.post-55774844503312069882022-04-15T18:25:00.003-07:002022-05-02T21:08:59.717-07:00Scaling the mountain anew<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPkPvWbR7pBkZpqr3RcTS5OH5BiwH6YBTk0Jxj4DwSL8TYo6xHu-8HDOeysRRFsp8YE5GEdnnlfsxmdB3p8eL1MWNVG9a5QILhts0mq0bbDGFjZVRbmqyTua9H2ERfIHhKUpZj7KAVKrGEPKDNWvUtufzEiVlOkU110kE0_oSWC2MRkamxaXIaapdxGQ/s1280/magic_mountain.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="781" height="626" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPkPvWbR7pBkZpqr3RcTS5OH5BiwH6YBTk0Jxj4DwSL8TYo6xHu-8HDOeysRRFsp8YE5GEdnnlfsxmdB3p8eL1MWNVG9a5QILhts0mq0bbDGFjZVRbmqyTua9H2ERfIHhKUpZj7KAVKrGEPKDNWvUtufzEiVlOkU110kE0_oSWC2MRkamxaXIaapdxGQ/w382-h626/magic_mountain.jpg" width="382" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></p>I grew up reading, as they say, “voraciously,” but my diet consisted largely of trash. OK, science fiction, which was as a rule trashy in those days, and very little else. Looking back, I think the first “serious” novel I ever read outside of school assignments was <i>All the King’s Men</i>, which I took in when I was around fifteen or sixteen. Before I was out of high school I went on a Joseph Conrad tear and, at the instigation of my future ex-wife, began reading Hermann Hesse, few of whose books really stood up to subsequent visits. Another high school friend, learning of this, sniffed “Well, the German novelist you <i>should</i> be reading is Thomas Mann.” I later learned that she personally, with adolescent audacity, had not actually read any Mann, but she was the child of a family far better-read than my own, and had picked up the name and reputation by, so to speak, osmosis (a couple of years later I was talking up Mann to my friend’s mother who, amused, asked me if I’d read Proust. This was, I think, the first time that name had been spoken in my presence. “Whost?” I asked, weakly).</span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Still, I took my friend’s recommendation seriously and, beginning with <i>The Magic Mountain</i>, commenced early in 1971 to chew through the author’s entire <i>œuvre</i> over the course of the next eighteen months. I have come back to <i>Der Zauberberg</i> at approximately seven-year intervals since that time, and earlier this month completed my ninth go-around, just four years since my last.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">I can’t really pin down what it is that delights me so about this book, what has kept me coming back to it since the first time I read it at eighteen. Many readers have been bored: one, in an online discussion thread I look in on, recently called it a “snoozefest.” Not for me. The novel has been a different experience each time I have taken it up. This time out was the third or fourth go-around I’ve taken with translator John E. Woods as my cicerone. My first several sessions were with the 1927 H.T. Lowe-Porter translation, to which I had become so accustomed that the first time I looked over the Woods version I was put off: I missed some of Lowe-Porter’s stately cadences. There came a point, though, early in the century, at which, having taken up her rendition anew, I found it somehow heavy sledding. At this point I purchased the Woods translation and have never looked back.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">It has been said of Lowe-Porter that she contrived the unlikely feat of translating Thomas Mann into German. He was always puzzled that his English-language audiences saw him as “ponderous,” because his German readership regarded him as a deft prose stylist. He was content, however, to retain Lowe-Porter as his authorized translator, and kept cashing the checks from Alfred Knopf.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Anyway, I have loved the book anew. The set pieces are glorious, of course, but even the passages that have put some readers off—the debates between Settembrini and Naphta, for example—are so much catnip to me. I took it in at about seventy-five pages to a hundred each day, and enjoyed every session. Oddly, I don’t think I have ever persuaded my high school friend to read it, but I remain grateful to her for putting the novel in my way.</span></p>Rand Careagahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04993454654652802173noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3051266465432710550.post-40088414823036003812022-04-07T15:00:00.002-07:002022-04-07T15:00:40.104-07:00Bucha can’t eat just one<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpYM4oAp373ka8Zn8HA61lEZb_tVX93P8pmlurb5H-L70M1lA43JMvHVuow3iBVIb2ORv-DzaPlGuKEcvwNG0yge3PjKzsS1PQIeQuRSVGApHNBtbS1lQ-dFbP10yTEPg92KHWdjDOwvm7gVEkgzxYVaHJaCCExtMzLKzVzIPX-E6XF8xq0hCA4WH9Gw/s2048/buchabody.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1365" data-original-width="2048" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpYM4oAp373ka8Zn8HA61lEZb_tVX93P8pmlurb5H-L70M1lA43JMvHVuow3iBVIb2ORv-DzaPlGuKEcvwNG0yge3PjKzsS1PQIeQuRSVGApHNBtbS1lQ-dFbP10yTEPg92KHWdjDOwvm7gVEkgzxYVaHJaCCExtMzLKzVzIPX-E6XF8xq0hCA4WH9Gw/w400-h266/buchabody.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">I am reluctant to get caught up in the current war fever (or, I suppose, sanctions fever) in large part because I remember how ginned up the spurious <i>casus belli</i> was twenty years ago as the Cheney Shogunate prepared to invade Iraq (aluminum tubes! Chemical weapons! WMDs! “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud!”). Public sentiment was being lashed forward across the spectrum of media outlets, and it wasn’t a pretty sight. Hell, a dozen years before that, under Bush the Elder, there was something like the same drumbeat, delivered along a then narrower media spectrum, and even I felt the pull of the (under those circumstances significantly less meretricious) propaganda ringing across the public discourse.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">These latter weeks we are invited to condemn and excoriate the Russians for their conduct of the “special military operation” in Ukraine, and you know what? I’m all in with that.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Some context, not qualifications: I recognize that to the extent that this country could ever claim the moral high ground in matters of armed conflict, it surrendered any pretense to the commanding heights with “Operation Iraqi Freedom” (initially, it is reported, “Operation Iraqi Liberation” until some Pentagon staffer was alert enough to note the appropriate yet awkward acronym). These latter years the USA has tended to conduct its offenses against human rights remotely, and at retail, which was of course scant comfort to a given wedding party in the Helmand Province when a drone operator near the end of his shift at Langley decided to toss a couple of Hellfire missiles in the general direction of the bridesmaids. So this and sundry other deviations from decency noted, OK? Also, nothing like this level of popular outrage hereabouts when the victims in Africa and the Middle East are slain by other national actors, because They Don’t Look Like Us. Got it.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Nevertheless…</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">For a number of reasons not really important just now, I was fascinated with Russia/the USSR, first during my childhood in the first decade of the Cold War—I watched Khrushchev’s motorcade traverse my Southern California suburb in 1959—and particularly beginning in 1972 when over the course of a few months I discovered Nabokov (entry to come anon), read Edmund Wilson’s collection <i>A Window on Russia</i>, and acquired a sweetheart whose diction did not betray in the slightest that she was the daughter of émigrés who had herself grown up speaking the language of the Old Country, which was still in use at home.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">I was disposed, in the seventies and eighties, to cut the Soviet Union a certain amount of slack. I always thought that Nikita Khrushchev was never granted sufficient credit either there or abroad for attempting to cut the USSR loose from Stalinism. Certainly in our domestic propaganda he was portrayed as the despot’s bloodthirsty successor (rather than blood-soaked inheritor—no one, at the end, in Stalin’s Præsediem had emerged from or survived his inner circle since the thirties with clean hands). There was little to admire in the corrupt and lazy Brezhnev, but he also wasn’t Stalin or even close to it. The Soviet Union’s lesser and greater black sins in the Khrushchev and post-Khrushchev eras are nicely described in Francis Spufford’s commentary <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/aug/07/red-plenty-francis-spufford-ussr" target="_blank">here</a>.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">I entertained some hopes for a reformed USSR under Gorbachev. I never had high expectations of his successor, a feckless sot who rose to glory for a single moment when he mounted that tank in August 1991 and who, had some Red Army sniper put a slug in his heart on that occasion, would be justly remembered as a martyr today. Instead, he went on to break up the joint for a transient political advantage and spent the next ten years on an extended alcoholic binge before he surrendered the presidency to a successor who was apparently prepared as a condition of his elevation not to ask any awkward questions about the financial irregularities of Yeltsin’s family and cronies. And here we are.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Vladimir Putin, my near-contemporary—I have exactly two months on him—and I agree for different reasons that the dissolution of the Soviet Union was a historical misfortune: I because, perhaps naïvely, I believed with Gorbachev that “socialism with a human face” was an achievable goal, that a reformed and relatively humane USSR with, perhaps, the Baltic bone removed from its throat, could join the broader human community while still maintaining a distinct social and economic model, a countervailing alternative to Capital not-Red in tooth and claw. The withdrawal of the Soviet alternative, however imperfectly(!) realized, has freed late-stage capitalism to indulge its bloodiest, most predatory and exploitive instincts, with consequences the ends of which we have begun unhappily to descry. And on the Russian side, Putin now embodies a bitterly revanchist mindset, consumed with dreams of empire, yearning for the old days of global dread and respect: <i>Oderint dum metuant!</i></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">So… for these and other reasons I’m a little reluctant to join in the latest spate of Russia-bashing, but you know, I’m going there anyway, notwithstanding our recent sins in Wogland, because Putin’s <i>casus belli</i> is even more preposterous than the Dauphin’s twenty years ago, and because the war aims, between the documented atrocities and <a href="https://medium.com/@kravchenko_mm/what-should-russia-do-with-ukraine-translation-of-a-propaganda-article-by-a-russian-journalist-a3e92e3cb64" target="_blank">what the country’s official news service has stated as its agenda</a>, are nakedly genocidal (like “fascism,” this is a term that has been tossed around rather casually for a long time; like “fascism”—nakedly arisen in our own country’s diseased political ecosystem—the term is appropriate to what is in fact now Russian state policy).</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">I have, I repeat, been sympathetic toward Russia since childhood: it fascinated me then as the “evil” mirror image of our own polity. I have Russian friends—one actually returned to the <i>Rodina</i> last year after spending his childhood and young manhood stateside since the end of the former century—who I fear are all-in with the invasion: I’ve been at pains not to engage them since February. It’s accordingly painful to find myself leagued on this occasion with those who have always detested the Rooskies, and also with what I sense to be a kind of opportunistic moral outrage from certain quarters. But the outrage, wheresoever it proceeds, is well-deserved by its object. Whatever the merits or demerits of Russia’s historical grievances—and not every one of these is entirely unfounded—its conduct under Putin has placed the country outside even the most modest standards of civilized norms. Let it be, and let it remain, a pariah state, isolated and despised by the developed world. Let it rot confined within its barbaric imperial dreams. I hope that there’s a route back—Germany, after all, within living memory the very exemplar of evil, is now among the most humane and civilized countries in the world—but I’m not seeing it from here.</span></div></div><p><br /></p>Rand Careagahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04993454654652802173noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3051266465432710550.post-90560083855040672752022-03-16T17:31:00.001-07:002022-03-17T13:19:06.673-07:00Life during wartime<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='369' height='307' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dwmuPOcEsqZJTyWjGHoM6GsGxTz028_-g26nrwNyrRKv_Qf6V7c12RHH2M_WZy_cjeyQiRXdnd8FV0lmfQy4w' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">On the basis of his, er, intemperate remarks today, Putin seems to be emotionally invested in this clusterfuck to an unhealthy degree. Not a good sign. You know, one thing about the commies was that they possessed a substrate of belief that history was on their side, that the triumph of the Marxist model was, so to say, preordained. IOW, they were going to win in the end, so why take unnecessary chances? Historian Stephen Kotkin, author of a massive biography of Stalin, once noted that when the Soviet archives were (briefly) made available to Western scholars, it was amusing how many of these researchers were surprised to discover that Stalin and his successors were actually…believing communists.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">If Putin believes anything, it appears that he believes in Russian greatness and in the vindictiveness of a world that impedes the operation of this—by no means assured—destiny, and the referenced speech suggests that he takes this perceived insult, the <i>threat</i>, to Holy Russia personally. It’s difficult to see anything good coming of this.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">I’ve been…not dismayed, really, but a little nonplussed to observe, in some of my internet hangouts, the intemperate responses from participants who do not ordinarily raise their voices. I can understand this, and do not fault their responses, being concerned merely that it partakes a bit of 12/7 or 9/11 war hysteria. Certainly I share the outrage, even if I am disposed by temperament not to shout.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">A great many internet generals have sprung from their armchairs demanding vigorous action against the beastly foe, beginning with a no-fly zone, proceeding to NATO troops in Ukraine, and all the way up to <i>nuke them before they nuke us</i>. Myself, I recognize that I’m neither a military nor a foreign policy expert, and have some confidence—as I certainly would not have two years ago—that there are competent, if fallible, people making decisions on the basis of information to which I am not privy.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">It does seem to me, though, that the West has reached an inflection point, if you will pardon the expression, with respect to its relations with a viciously revanchist Russia that has now begun, in Martin Amis’s memorable phrase, to fizz with rabies. Short of war, and even—even—at risk of war, we need to isolate and strangle the regime which, even though we helped midwife it thirty years ago, has figuratively and literally spread poison among its perceived foes for most of the present century, and the leader of which has proclaimed his hostile intent in unmistakable language.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">None of what I say here is by means of excusing the USA’s sundry moral atrocities times past, but if we are not to live going forward in Putin’s world, Putin needs to be, in his own translated phraseology, canceled, one way or another.</span></p><p> </p>Rand Careagahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04993454654652802173noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3051266465432710550.post-71553080670852921872021-12-31T15:21:00.001-08:002021-12-31T17:27:51.105-08:00Looking back, December 1971: homeless, stranded and cold<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjLHh5APCDOQdCxF24_H7HKx1CaNmOxtVPV5QPxvY8U75LXHdZamEMiS7fiTYSELvlXpO1V6xAzOf4T7EVn0KmvzIenS3h3fonnjXpaIKUI3ehItQhTikdE5uRKIv9-03kaNTQmW3rN0UQDaXuxAWM5BLofGCnAyC8Is8cNAAqUVytUWIlCtQ5rL4ifmw=s1152" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="768" data-original-width="1152" height="389" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjLHh5APCDOQdCxF24_H7HKx1CaNmOxtVPV5QPxvY8U75LXHdZamEMiS7fiTYSELvlXpO1V6xAzOf4T7EVn0KmvzIenS3h3fonnjXpaIKUI3ehItQhTikdE5uRKIv9-03kaNTQmW3rN0UQDaXuxAWM5BLofGCnAyC8Is8cNAAqUVytUWIlCtQ5rL4ifmw=w583-h389" width="583" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><b>Very, very cold.</b></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Half a century ago I was a few months into one of the greatest adventures of my young life, a Homeric struggle in terms of personal mythology, although at the time it appeared to me more in the light of a hole into which I’d fallen, or dug myself, and from which my extrication was by no means assured.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">I had, two years earlier, applied for admission in 1970 to the University of California’s Santa Cruz campus. I learned later that I’d made every cut except the last, which meant that by the time I was turned away all my alternative choices—in those days one’s single application to UC permitted secondary and tertiary campus options—had all filled up, and I was remanded, to my horror, to the University’s Riverside campus, in those days the Siberia of the UC system, supplanted these latter years by its Merced campus.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">I was not ready for prime time. I might have not done much better at Santa Cruz, but I flamed out in spectacular fashion at UC Riverside by my second quarter, following the conclusion of which one professor told me that he regretted giving me a failing grade—“Unfortunately the University doesn’t allow me to assign anything lower.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Following this I was, I suppose, poised to go feral for the second time in five years, and still might have absent a couple of lucky breaks fore and aft, but in December 1971 I had been reduced—had reduced myself—to a state of discreet homelessness. Determined upon another assault of the citadel (really, went my thinking, what had I to lose at that point?) I had parked myself at UCSC, dwelling, in a fashion that would be impossible today, in the interstices of the campus residence halls, most nights in a narrow storage closet, not quite long enough to accommodate me at full length, which I shared with a couple of upright bedframes. This arrangement kept the rain off, for which I was grateful.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">I had found weekend employment with the campus food service, a contractor called “Saga,” and took part of my wages in meals, which meant that I generally had no solid fare between Sunday evenings and Saturday mornings. This grew old fast, to judge from the written accounts I left, but one becomes accustomed to these things. Mind, this was not some whimsical regimen of asceticism: I needed my weeks free to hitch back to UC Riverside now and then in order to negotiate freeing my transcript from its grip. That’s a story for another time, perhaps, but I was ultimately to prevail in this unlikely enterprise, so yay, me. In the interim, though, I was near-starving.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">So, in early-mid December the campus closed down between academic quarters, meaning no dishwashing for Rand and no four squares on weekends. I imagine that I could have survived three weeks without grub, but it was not an attractive proposition, and I reasoned that between the two components of my bifurcated nuclear family I could probably cadge some room and board, especially board, without wearing out my welcome at either venue. And so I prepared to depart.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">I don’t know, or can’t remember, why I delayed my departure from Santa Cruz until afternoon, but I parked myself on Highway 1 with a mind to arriving in Southern California by evening.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">It didn’t work out in the event. For one thing, the first ride or two slotted me onto California Highway 1, the “Pacific Coast Highway,” rather than onto the inland and more heavily-traveled Route 101. A couple of subsequent rides left me at dusk in the middle of Big Sur, with little traffic southbound.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">I might mention that the previous month I had lost my cheap sleeping bag in a rainstorm on this same stretch of highway: it had become utterly soaked overnight, my attempted shelter having proved inadequate, and I was obliged to leave the sodden thing draped over a nearby barbed wire fence come the morning.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">So: no sleeping bag, no rides in prospect, impending night and falling temperatures. I had a shirt, a sweater and a light jacket, nothing like enough for the bitter cold that was in prospect. I trudged down the highway, and presently caught up with, or was caught up by, a trio of teenagers similarly ill-equipped for the conditions. They presented themselves to me as “runaways,” although I imagine they were merely highschoolers on a lark. In any event, we proceeded along Highway 1, few cars passing and none prepared to pick up four passengers. Presently we arrived at a tiny settlement proclaimed by a highway sign as “Pacific Valley.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Pacific Valley appeared to consist of a gas station and a coffee shop, neither of which were open for business. It included as well, however, an open shed enclosing a working generator, and this the teenagers and I huddled around for the rest of the night: warm air was emitted from the front end, and hot exhaust, almost certainly with a major carbon monoxide component, from a hose or pipe at some distance from the machine. One of the teens parked himself beside this, and passed out at intervals: the rest of us would drag him away until he came to, whereupon he’d reposition himself against the spew.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Dawn broke. Out came a bearded character in an army jacket with an embroidered stars & bars on the shoulder. He looked at us: “Out,” he grunted. We cleared out. We’d survived the night.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">I can’t recall how I eluded my companions—perhaps they reconsidered and headed north again?—but I secured a ride by myself with an eccentric character who, as I dimly recall, hated the Hearst family. And I remember seeing whales breaching off the coast.</span></p>Rand Careagahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04993454654652802173noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3051266465432710550.post-29049427199823043652021-07-23T22:16:00.001-07:002021-07-23T22:16:43.043-07:00Cinema Geographica<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZ90cMdDO81iseqMaXxAgjpPNmfzskeWreCIicHPPJ1anOg2jRR-Caya3cI6yGCzonqHmeuS0zrtejUUp7BmaVnEN4Xb7FJUAei8_KGOOhlLTpyjYX9EvelvWqHbn8qqasKz561p9ZQQP4/s1024/dublin_indemnity.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="768" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZ90cMdDO81iseqMaXxAgjpPNmfzskeWreCIicHPPJ1anOg2jRR-Caya3cI6yGCzonqHmeuS0zrtejUUp7BmaVnEN4Xb7FJUAei8_KGOOhlLTpyjYX9EvelvWqHbn8qqasKz561p9ZQQP4/w300-h400/dublin_indemnity.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">he kid brother and I recently riffed together on the notion of film titles modified with countries/cities/states swapped in. Before we were through (Rand: “Do you suppose that we might be high-functioning autistics after all?” Greg: “I’m thinking”) we came up with about a hundred and fifty of these. Here they are:</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">India Heat of the Night</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">A Fish called Rwanda</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Sweden Lowdown</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Hungary Games</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Greece</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Where the Buffalo Romania</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Mali’s Game</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Yemeni Below</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Long Dubai</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Heaven Kuwait</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Brexit at Tiffany’s</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Citizen Kenya</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Who’ll Stop Bahrain</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Big Chile</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Ghana with the Wind</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Laos Horizon</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Babes in Thailand</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Norway Out</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Johnny Qatar</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Saudi, Wrong Number</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Unsinkable Malawi Brown</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Belize Rider</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Desperately Seeking Sudan</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Angola’s Ashes</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Oman for All Seasons</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Curious Case of Benjamin Bhutan</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Chad Day at Black Rock</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Man in the Iran Mask</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Fools Russian</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Benin Black</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Nepal Joey</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">3:10 to Uganda</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Somalia Came Running</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Japan’s Labyrinth</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Sudan Impact</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Taiwan Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Hello Delhi</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Big Lebanonski</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Beirut Force</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Empire Strikes Bactria</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">His Gaul Friday</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Burundi World in Haiti Days</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">They Died with Their Bhutan</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Dutch Soup</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Kiev My Regards to Broadway</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Browning Persian</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Ireland of Dr. Moreau</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Romancing the Estonian</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Brest Years of Our Lives</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Mexodus</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Iran Silent, Iran Deep</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Belarus of St. Mary’s</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Raging Bolivia</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Blazing Saudis</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Ballad of the Chad Cafe</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Finn Harm’s Way</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Guinea Shelter</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Tunis of Glory</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">My Brilliant Korea</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Andorra’s Box</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Picnic at Hanging Iraq</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Thebes Highway</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Algeria the Wrath of God</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Wait Until Dakar</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Our Man Finn</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Spain Mutiny</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">House of Sand and Prague</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Two for the Rhodesia</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">True Brit</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Longest Dane</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Aruba Runs Through It</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Once Gabon a Time in the West</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Djibouti and the Beast</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Moldova, Darling</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">On a Clear Day Yukon See Forever</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">What About Zimbabwe?</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Maldives Falcon</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Men Who Stare at Croats</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">When Harry Met Saudi</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Apocalypse Palau</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Senegal and Sensibility</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Glasgow on the Hudson</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Night of the Uganda</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">There’s Something About Mauritius</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Ride the Wild Serb</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Balkan the Wild Side</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Bringing Up Babylon</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Odd Kabul</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Bell, Book and Canada </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Chariots of Éire</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Doctor Chicago</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Suddenly Last Sumer</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Who’ll Stop Bahrain</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Monty Python’s Armenia of Life</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Das Botswana</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Swissfits</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Viet Home Alabama</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Ukraine Man</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">No Country for Old Yemen</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Children of Paraguay</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">7 Faces of Dr. Palau</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Bride of Palestine</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Provence Upon a Time in America</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Same Thai, Next Year</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Hound of the Basquervilles</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Two Mules for Sister Sarajevo</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Eritreahouse of the August Moon</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Travels with My Antilles</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Greek Gatsby</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Istanbul Durham</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Ankaraman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Athens of an Ending</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Talented Mr. Tripoli</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Crete Expectations</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Little Murmansk </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">To Serb with Love</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Seoul Survivor</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Howl’s Moving Castile</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Tomorrow Navarre Dies</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Prague and Prejudice </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">East of Edinburgh</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Boys Don’t Crimea</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Bruges Brothers</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">King Congo</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Zagrebel without a Cause</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Hot Fez</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Rome Alone</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Bataan Begins</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Qatar’s Way</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Quebec to the Future</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Return of the Jeddah</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Godzilla vs. Mecca Godzilla</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Dunekirk</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Lyon in Winter</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Dublin Indemnity</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Belfast Times at Ridgemont High</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Perth of a Nation</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Rocky Harare Picture Show</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Legend of Tarzana</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Amsterdam Yankees</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Ghent Shorty</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Kilauea Bill</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">A Clockwork of Orange</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">I am Curious Yellowstone </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Coeur d’Alien</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Three Muscat-eers</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Quito the City</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Belize of St. Mary’s</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The posters are <a href="http://www.rcareaga.com/cinema_geographica/" target="_blank">here</a>.</span></div></div><p><br /></p>Rand Careagahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04993454654652802173noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3051266465432710550.post-23495891075021204192021-05-02T15:08:00.002-07:002021-05-05T11:14:22.218-07:00The scary month of May; hinges of fate<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLkh5UfHXNmCbEj2843HqvYZQI87pmM890JoOFmepHjvsd8i3svr3453lPpWpHCrFVcOBi-RroHvxPC6fcsVGVyNssNJ65W5gR4DSR-llouH6aJSte-45SexdWejmpACUzp2rDr9IWDSZ9/s1280/minen_sign.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="851" data-original-width="1280" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLkh5UfHXNmCbEj2843HqvYZQI87pmM890JoOFmepHjvsd8i3svr3453lPpWpHCrFVcOBi-RroHvxPC6fcsVGVyNssNJ65W5gR4DSR-llouH6aJSte-45SexdWejmpACUzp2rDr9IWDSZ9/w400-h266/minen_sign.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Although nearly half a lifetime has elapsed since the last disaster I associate with this month, I still incline to tiptoe during the interval each year between April and June, because the darkest and direst episodes in my life have occurred in May. One such occurred half a century ago.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">1971 was…eh, not the best year in a life less than abundantly provided with such years by that point. By mid-January my sweetheart had presented me my walking papers; by March the University of California had begun to get pissy about the considerable arrears that I’d accumulated fee-wise, and the professors of all three classes that winter quarter had flunked me out, at which point UC and I severed all relations save that of creditor-debtor, and the University notified the good people at Selective Service of my availability for the struggle against international communism then being conducted in Indochina. By the end of the year I found myself discreetly homeless, although I flatter myself that an onlooker would not have so identified me, and also near-starvation, eating just four meals a week.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">So no, for these and other reasons, things weren’t going well for me by the first of May 1971, and that evening I stumbled into a personal contretemps I don’t propose to relate here, but which involved me in a spirited beat-down administered by uniformed public employees and the subsequent withdrawal of my freedom of movement for the better part of a day. That I somehow contrived to talk my way out of this fix while leaving only the faintest of audit trails—more, and I would certainly never have enjoyed my alleged career; less and I would likely not have completed college—seems remarkable at this remove.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Actually, I used to retail the anecdote rather casually, because it certainly had its droll and entertaining elements. I was twenty-one, about thirty months later, when I </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">lightheartedly </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">related it to a new girlfriend who startled me by appearing appalled by the tale, at which point it struck me for the first time that I might not really want the incident following me around forever after.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Still, I recognized at the time, in the aftermath of 2 May 1971, that I probably needed to order the course of my life in such a way as to minimize the likelihood of ever again landing in such a plight, and in this I’ve largely succeeded.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">As to the “audit trail,” those ghostly glimmers of my indiscretion were sufficient to persuade some University of California bureaucrats (and I learned that year that a Department Secretary can be mightier than a Dean) to consent to allowing me a second bite at the apple, and that has made all the difference in my life. Another such hinge from that summer: I sat brooding at loose ends on a median of a then sparsely-traversed street in Southern California when a passing carload of high school acquaintances spotted me, stopped, and invited me to accompany them to the graduating class’s “one-year reunion.” There I fell into conversation with a classmate whose chance remark set me on a course that ultimately brought me back into UC’s good graces.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">And had even <i>one</i> of my professors—I’m thinking in particular of the one who told me afterward that I was taking up space at UC that ought properly to be given over to “someone serious about receiving an education,” and who regretted assigning me a failing grade (“I’m only sorry that the University doesn’t let us give a grade lower than F”)—had only one of them given me a “D,” I could not have made it back in. Thanks, Dr. H!</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The following decade, in my mid-thirties, weekends late in May occasioned, in the first instance, consternation and grief as a decisive blow was landed upon my domestic arrangements, and a year later a descent over the course of a day into chasms of wretchedness—the abrupt emotional implosion following a year of insupportable stress—such as I hope never to experience again.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">I’ll allude to one other hinge of fate: in 1966 a customer at a Southern California coffee shop spilled a drink. I wasn’t there, and although the immediate consequences were unhappy, reverberations from this trivial incident changed the course of my life profoundly for the better. At fourteen I was going rapidly feral: I would likely not have completed high school on that trajectory; I would certainly not have made it to college. The entire course of my adult life has followed upon that deflection, of a few ounces of beverage making for a slippery floor. Funny old world.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">But May 1971: <i>fifty fucking years!</i> Geez.</span></p>Rand Careagahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04993454654652802173noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3051266465432710550.post-21183289279698368022021-02-25T22:45:00.003-08:002021-03-02T14:12:22.327-08:00Annals of pop culture<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZkP-bBnMy1u8Vh4BLy59SqFO0OLGk7u-WsFLp-Dkz0qmA5uiuRcXYzZ7VrBuipIcIEvPMdqLAmfD_uJgM55atNFDoLCfs9yS0yrnuqguvcubgOR7yhztGQs4Gxm7Ekn4aB6beNUNszLpF/s704/game_silverado.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="704" height="284" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZkP-bBnMy1u8Vh4BLy59SqFO0OLGk7u-WsFLp-Dkz0qmA5uiuRcXYzZ7VrBuipIcIEvPMdqLAmfD_uJgM55atNFDoLCfs9yS0yrnuqguvcubgOR7yhztGQs4Gxm7Ekn4aB6beNUNszLpF/w400-h284/game_silverado.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><span style="font-family: verdana;">As we close out the first year since this household, at least, became aware that something was rotten in the state of epidemiology, it seems fitting to look back on a couple of the less exalted cultural artifacts we’ve sampled (revisited, actually) during this extended period of house arrest. I mean, it can’t be all Antonioni all the time, can it? Under consideration today are two genre products, <i>The Game</i> (not to be confused with the considerably cleverer David Fincher film from twenty-five years ago) and <i>Silverado</i>, a sort of generic western.</span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">I had supposed the Cold War thriller as a dramatic form to be extinct, like masques or passion plays, or at the very least moribund. After all, even John le Carré, generally considered the greatest master of the genre, felt obliged to move on to depictions of contemporary mischief during the latter years of his long career, although he returned to the classic milieu one last time in portions of his penultimate novel.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">But after all, if Regency romances continue to be written and sold, and if an Edwardian costume soaper like <i>Downton Abbey</i> garners rapt audiences on either side of the pond, why should we not find creative spirits drawn to those fraught decades when the Soviet Union and “the West” were ideologically at daggers drawn, each side desiring the extirpation of the rival ethos; each in dread of the other’s intentions and of its ordnance? Now <i>there</i> was an existential threat worthy of some serious knicker-twisting! There’s still drama to be mined</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The fact that we know how the story turned out—no one pushed the button; no one perished defending the Fulda Gap; the Red Russians renounced their wicked ways, or at least exchanged many of them for our wicked ways—does pose some issues for the storyteller, which brings us to the entry under consideration here, the 2014 six-part BBC series <i>The Game</i>. There will be minor spoilers in my discussion.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">I have alluded to John la Carré, who pretty much holds the patent on Cold War spy fiction, and whose œuvre is the yardstick against which all contenders and pretenders are perforce to be measured. By its major plot elements the series does not merely invite but positively compels comparison with the 1979 BBC dramatization of <i>Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy</i>, and this juxtaposition does not flatter the newer production.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">We are once again made privy to discussions in the upper echelons of “British Intelligence” (“The Circus” in le Carré’s world; here doing business as MI5—one of the series’ few unimpeachable touches of verisimilitude) as its senior officers ponder the measures that must be taken to thwart the latest covert assaults by international communism upon the British Way of Life as it is lived in 1972. There are the obligatory touches of moral ambiguity (“alas, we are obliged from time to time to undertake questionable measures in defense of our ancient liberties and our values, and it’s a jolly good thing that the latter are incontestably preferable to those of the foe, else our slumbers would be troubled by the prickings of such vestiges of conscience as we have retained”) that have been expected of British spy fiction since <i>The Spy Who Came in from the Cold</i>. There’s the long-time chief of the operation, like <i>Tinker, Tailor</i>’s “Control” an embattled, lonely figure who has to contend with swinish, obdurate politicals above and scheming, ambitious subordinates beneath. In fact, let’s meet our principals, shall we?</span></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><span style="font-family: verdana;">There’s the aforementioned chief, a shrewd, corpulent, raddled character known to his team only as “Daddy.”</span></li><li><span style="font-family: verdana;">Bobby Waterhouse, Daddy’s deputy: an aging, expensively-tailored (well, by the standards of 1972, I suppose. In one scene the points of his shirt collar terminate somewhere in the neighborhood of his armpits. I am obliged to recuse myself from any critical discussion of the fashion and grooming choices made during this period) nancy-boy who is itching to put the bureaucratic shiv in pater’s back. Bobby’s actual pater is not in the picture, but his formidable mother has a few scenes, and frankly, I’d rely on <i>her</i> to hold the Fulda Gap in a pinch.</span></li><li><span style="font-family: verdana;">Wendy Straw, Daddy’s pert secretary (the actress puts me in mind of the young Rita Tushingham), whom MI5 appears to be grooming for field work, being as how the outfit appears to be chronically understaffed (see below).</span></li><li><span style="font-family: verdana;">Alan Montag, the bearded Aspergerish tech boffin who can with equal facility paper a room with concealed microphones or wire an intelligence source with a transmitter so small you could fit it into a golf bag. This is 1972, remember.</span></li><li><span style="font-family: verdana;">Sarah Montag, Alan’s wife and one of the agency’s top analysts—she’s one of the first to raise aloud the possibility that someone on Daddy’s inner team might be playing for the other side—and a crackerjack field agent. A candy mint <i>and</i> a breath mint!</span></li><li><span style="font-family: verdana;">and finally, looking as though he has just arrived on the set from a GQ photo shoot, our protagonist, tousle-haired young Joe Lambe, an even better field agent than Sarah. In fact, he’s the star of MI5, Daddy’s golden boy, and I’m here to tell you that on the evidence of this series, if Joe was the best they had, the UK would have been a Soviet Socialist Republic by 1973.</span></li></ul><p></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">These are The Spies Who Don’t Know Any Better Than To Come in from the Cold. The story relies repeatedly and unduly on the convenient “idiot plot”: “Yes, mate, we want you to meet a deadly Soviet assassin in this basement room and worm important information from him. And don’t worry. Me and Alan will be monitoring you from our listening post on the tenth floor, and if something looks to go wrong we’ll be down here in, like three minutes.” Or “So you’ve got vital information on a mole within MI5, have you? Well, you’ll be absolutely secure in this safe house—of course it is. Where do you think the expression ‘safe as houses’ comes from? How certain are we? Well if we <i>weren’t</i> certain, we’d have sent someone on ahead to make certain there wasn’t an armed Red concealed in the laundry room, wouldn’t we?” Intelligence assets perish, bad guys routinely elude surveillance (not surprising, since MI5 apparently has only Bobby, Wendy, the Montags and Joe, plus a policeman seconded to the operation, as field operatives to keep tabs on the Bolshies), and the Russians are constantly getting the drop on our heroes. Perhaps more ludicrously, the entire tale requires us to believe that forty some-odd years ago the senior echelons of the British intelligence community were worried sick about the possibility of an imminent Soviet military invasion of the kingdom.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The series has a few worthwhile set pieces, and the latter episodes proceed a little more briskly. Notwithstanding a few red herrings strewn about, I correctly guessed the infiltrator about halfway through. If you fancy a Cold War thriller (or plodder), and are prepared to withhold comparisons with more distinguished examples of the genre, you might be entertained.</span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">*</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Like many another child of my generation, I was raised on westerns, and I remain at least mildly partial to the genre, which I suppose is why I put up with <i>Silverado</i>, an unduly formulaic example of the form. This is something of a “paint by numbers” western: one senses the writer/director dutifully ticking off the conventions of the genre one by one. Barroom brawl, check. Free-range ranchers vs. farmers, check. Outlaw hideout in canyon, check. Wise and worldly female saloonkeeper, check. Oily gambler, goodhearted prostitute, check. Taciturn hero, check. Gunfights, check, check, check, check, check. Injuns, inexplicably MIA.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">It’s not a bad approach to making a cowboy movie. Contrived, to be sure, and more than a little self-conscious, but those of us who esteem the western expect certain elements, and if your favorite trope has not put in an appearance at any point in the flick, another quarter hour will likely summon it forth. Add to this some decent set design and cinematography, a handsome cast that appears to be enjoying itself and a workmanlike if not altogether memorable screenplay, and it’s two hours well spent, although likely not among the first- or even second-tier of westerns I’ll screen again. Among the cast members, craggy Scott Glenn acquits himself well as the aforementioned taciturn hero, as does Kevin Kline as the hero’s diffident sidekick. Kevin Costner chews the scenery halfway across New Mexico to the Colorado state line, but he’s having so much fun that his otherwise annoying performance compels our indulgence. Danny Glover hits all his marks as the <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MagicalNegro" target="_blank">Magical Negro</a>; Roseanna Arquette is briefly on camera as the Love Interest in a role so severely truncated that it probably ought to have been omitted altogether; John Cleese(!) shines in a small part as an honest, by-the-books sheriff who nevertheless maintains a realistic vision of his professional responsibilities, particularly where these involve his personal safety.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The soundtrack by Bruce Broughton is unobjectionable as music, but is deployed in an almost intolerably heavy-handed fashion, and served throughout as an auditory irritant. I appreciate directors (John Sayles in <i>Lone Star</i> comes to mind) who do not feel the need to punch up the orchestra to convey drama, excitement, romance that ought properly be carried by the actors and the camera. Lawrence Kasdan has not learned this lesson.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Summary: a pleasant western pastiche, ably performed and photographed. Not otherwise particularly memorable, and rather less than the sum of its tropes, but nevertheless a diverting evening’s entertainment for fans of the form.</span></p>Rand Careagahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04993454654652802173noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3051266465432710550.post-44345915132160801372020-12-25T09:28:00.000-08:002020-12-25T09:28:10.650-08:00Streaming of a White Christmas<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMoje3CwJZy0_d8hZ7qpm9X4rDMAQ6mFdLztG45AFmY7Rh1VRUbtTBYKMIO6rhdkdPhmQGwFO-tQHfm9oQh_jbv-YP7bANk-CZl9o1fTFRH334ucPPNgF_bkRgTerKJnde2uiK0pckhMR3/s1280/white_xmas.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="1280" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMoje3CwJZy0_d8hZ7qpm9X4rDMAQ6mFdLztG45AFmY7Rh1VRUbtTBYKMIO6rhdkdPhmQGwFO-tQHfm9oQh_jbv-YP7bANk-CZl9o1fTFRH334ucPPNgF_bkRgTerKJnde2uiK0pckhMR3/w400-h225/white_xmas.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Lina has had us watching a streaming series about Pablo Escobar, but agreed with me that it mightn’t really do for viewing on December 24. I know that the traditional American movies for this occasion are either <i>It’s a Wonderful Life</i> or <i>Die Hard</i>, but we felt that neither of these would be endurable. She vetoed the Alistair Sims <i>Christmas Carol</i>. All of the Xmas-themed selections on our two services looked intolerably treacly. Ultimately we settled on the 1954 production (Bing Crosby/Danny Kaye/Irving Berlin/Michael Curtiz) <i>White Christmas</i>, which we’d gone all these decades without catching hitherto.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">It was curious for us to reflect that this was “popular culture” when she and I were toddlers. The society it depicts is figuratively fat, happy, prosperous, complacent, genially and unselfconsciously sexist, sentimentally militarist (“Gee, I Wish I Was Back in the Army”—easy for <i>you</i> to say, Irving), and, with the exception of a barman in the club car scene, the film features a cast as white as the snow that eventually does fall [<b>spoiler alert</b>] on Christmas in Vermont. I observe none of this by way of sneering—for some, perhaps many of our own cultural assumptions, however self-evident they may appear to us and however comfortably we hold them, must inevitably strike posterity as outlandish or worse—but merely by way of emphasizing how strange it is to contemplate having existed in that milieu, even if its salient characteristics lay at the time entirely outside my own purview.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">It was curious as well to consider, not for the first time, that it has been less than a century since, with the introduction of “talkies,” human beings have been routinely granted an experience dreamt of by our forebears for millennia: the phenomenon of seeing the departed dead and of hearing them speak. Talk about ghosts of Christmas past! Crosby, Kaye, Rosemary Clooney, Dean Jagger and all the other speaking parts with just one exception are at present doing business on the other side of the sod, but there they all were, summoned forth from the æther to sing and dance and camp it up for the patronizing delectation of a couple of jaded old coastal urbanites on Christmas Eve. Funny ol’ world.</span></p>Rand Careagahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04993454654652802173noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3051266465432710550.post-10296121940886748042020-11-28T19:20:00.002-08:002020-11-29T07:55:51.312-08:00Jubilation River<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcR9KL7pz7IcK4JIUgAK7qIxl-DGVOMZxhtISg048QOpnys2rkuio013S-_ygSTeotl3M25ErIWkjN_hPSTb0GAKXUMu7y3YoddgOLzZfuJh4tK0NksN8EKJIuub-sV9fn8guTFXPwGzZG/s1285/jubilation_river.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="798" data-original-width="1285" height="261" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcR9KL7pz7IcK4JIUgAK7qIxl-DGVOMZxhtISg048QOpnys2rkuio013S-_ygSTeotl3M25ErIWkjN_hPSTb0GAKXUMu7y3YoddgOLzZfuJh4tK0NksN8EKJIuub-sV9fn8guTFXPwGzZG/w420-h261/jubilation_river.jpg" width="420" /></a></div><span style="font-family: verdana;">I’ve long been fascinated by the way cultures and societies depict themselves in film (among other media, to be sure). Earlier in the year I watched a couple of Eclipse titles from Japan, </span><i style="font-family: verdana;">Jubilation Street</i><span style="font-family: verdana;"> and </span><i style="font-family: verdana;">Black River.</i><span style="font-family: verdana;"> The first of these was produced during the Pacific War; the second thirteen years later, with the formal US occupation of Japan ended, but its military presence still very heavily in evidence.</span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>Jubilation Street</i> concerns the dwellers of a Tokyo residential district who are shortly to be displaced as their neighborhood is appropriated for military purposes. The characters regret this development but do not contest the necessity of their removal for the war effort. And in retrospect, after all, Tokyo was shortly to undergo “urban renewal” via the fleets of B-29s dispatched by Curtis LeMay.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>Jubilation Street</i> reminds me of <i>Mrs. Miniver</i>, depicting civilians on the home front bravely enduring the depredations of a relentless foreign enemy. The rah-rah propaganda element is little in evidence—there’s a bit at the end, probably included to soothe the sensibilities of the wartime censors. </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">The film brings home to me (I’m a child of the late Truman administration, so I was brought up saturated in pop culture depictions of Nipponese wartime cruelty and depravity) the sense that as the USA brought the war home to Japan, we were punching way above their weight.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Come to </span><i style="font-family: verdana;">Black River</i><span style="font-family: verdana;"> in 1957 and we see a demoralized, corrupt, cynical Japan, its traditional values infected and despoiled by the West. The social solidarity depicted in </span><i style="font-family: verdana;">J</i><i style="font-family: verdana;">ubilation Street</i><span style="font-family: verdana;"> is long gone: in the squalid quarter in which </span><i style="font-family: verdana;">Black River</i><span style="font-family: verdana;"> is set the gangsters and the prostitutes and the indigent struggle and squabble for scraps among themselves. The two films, taken together, present a remarkable contrast.</span></p>Rand Careagahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04993454654652802173noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3051266465432710550.post-25919466657202778662020-11-26T10:14:00.000-08:002020-11-26T10:14:06.877-08:00Parallel Lives<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUATNuBb6DwFIWcgFeoZEDNsGgNsJ-ly5oD4n7WSibAW-HbDbVK1fbMvWuUGHKrWERp3D5XnLnySq7VJz-u8HwidwKBMzCVSgwsc2_wk_jxE9SnVcwP7dc7mvvsgK0fqADDHq0q2Ih9Cbe/s789/castro_churchill.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="789" height="274" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUATNuBb6DwFIWcgFeoZEDNsGgNsJ-ly5oD4n7WSibAW-HbDbVK1fbMvWuUGHKrWERp3D5XnLnySq7VJz-u8HwidwKBMzCVSgwsc2_wk_jxE9SnVcwP7dc7mvvsgK0fqADDHq0q2Ih9Cbe/w400-h274/castro_churchill.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></div><p></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">I was reminded just now that Fidel Castro died four years ago yesterday, and this put me in mind of some odd parallels with another twentieth century statesman, that swashbuckling, drunken old imperialist and orator nonpareil </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">Winston Churchill.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Castro and Churchill probably had in common few points of philosophy, but there are some intriguing career parallels: each died at ninety after a decade out of public life; they will both of them be remembered as political leaders who successfully fended off ruthless continent-spanning predatory empires bent on subjugating their respective islands. Also, the two men pursued strategic partnerships with the Soviet Union for defensive purposes, and both were fond of cigars. Churchill lived to see Germany laid in ruins; Castro lived to see Donald Trump elected president. Eerie, no?</span></p>Rand Careagahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04993454654652802173noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3051266465432710550.post-64844698131750342782020-11-25T14:39:00.000-08:002020-11-25T14:39:41.522-08:00‘People Like Us” (they don’t, actually)<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvogqCxuo1GLWBewc86nNZqyeOuO5b0iU1XlCE_ekA8yaqc-tphN2_Kg4L7aadyvjo9Y6C3Q1tjiQrnOtKSXZiPowxgMWbKy6WPKOUm-p_gfjEkIITRyff14c9usanyeoo7msKEDuHKSNC/s986/tammyson.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="668" data-original-width="986" height="271" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvogqCxuo1GLWBewc86nNZqyeOuO5b0iU1XlCE_ekA8yaqc-tphN2_Kg4L7aadyvjo9Y6C3Q1tjiQrnOtKSXZiPowxgMWbKy6WPKOUm-p_gfjEkIITRyff14c9usanyeoo7msKEDuHKSNC/w400-h271/tammyson.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><span style="font-family: verdana;">Almost twenty years ago I caught a documentary “People Like Us” on the local PBS station, that treated the subject, often elided in our public discourse, of class in America. </span><b style="font-family: verdana;">Spoiler:</b><span style="font-family: verdana;"> it exists. One segment in particular (“Tammy’s Story”) was heartbreaking: the filmmakers cover a working single mother in Ohio attempting to raise her family in circumstances that might charitably be described as “benighted.” I identified with the elder son, about fourteen, an age at which I was myself rapidly going feral in marginally better circumstances, an alternate reality from which I was abruptly plucked by what came down to the accident of a spilled drink in a coffee shop (long story, which I do not propose to relate here). The boy is ill-educated, melancholy, more than intelligent enough to descry his almost inevitably bleak future. Watching this, I thought at the time: </span><i style="font-family: verdana;">he could be saved</i><span style="font-family: verdana;">. Take him away from this material and cultural privation, feed him wholesome food and wholesome education, and the kid could amount to something. Alas, as a sequel segment makes clear, his adulthood followed the trajectory upon which the boy had been launched. His potential has died; the squalor of his formative years thrives to blight another generation.</span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Did he vote for the Orange Man in 2016 and again last month? I don’t know, but who could blame him in that event? What stake do people like these have in a “meritocracy” that views them, when they are contemplated at all, as collateral damage in the long march to the shining upland of a cosmopolitan global future? They’re not even being considered for a place at the table: why <i>wouldn’t</i> they be receptive to a “burn it all down” populist appeal? What’s in it for them, the maintenance of the current order—and Clinton in 2016 was selling “more of the same”—when that has so signally neglected them? What do they have to lose if the existing order is torched (</span><b style="font-family: verdana;">Spoiler:</b><span style="font-family: verdana;"> probably more than they think, but they are scarcely to be blamed for failing to take the long view)? Had I been raised among these people, or even had my own destiny kinked the other way in 1966, I might have shared their bitter nihilism.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Anyway, although the documentary can’t be had on optical media for the price the average consumer would contemplate parting with, I see that the Tube of You features the individual chapters, and I link to the playlist <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU5MtVM_zFs&list=PLC6D871A2A8C3C8EF" target="_blank">here</a>. It is worth an hour to contemplate what our increasingly steeper class divisions portend for the Republic. Nothing good, I wot.</span></p>Rand Careagahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04993454654652802173noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3051266465432710550.post-80583660932888946372020-11-17T14:18:00.011-08:002020-11-26T08:11:12.913-08:00First flight, and afterward<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjigl8xgKNPtmypU2nemIesC6S7o0kFw4qCvWf_U82yiJxTpluQZGHbhLYW03R5h8pVtc-eWnpvEvDoY0KXUSJucjdBH5hhQKQVVCxsZIWEiByB-oKa2DAKNi55VAB59F9p_u1oOpFc3V0E/s2048/Apple-II.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1383" data-original-width="2048" height="270" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjigl8xgKNPtmypU2nemIesC6S7o0kFw4qCvWf_U82yiJxTpluQZGHbhLYW03R5h8pVtc-eWnpvEvDoY0KXUSJucjdBH5hhQKQVVCxsZIWEiByB-oKa2DAKNi55VAB59F9p_u1oOpFc3V0E/w400-h270/Apple-II.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Over forty years have elapsed since I first saw a personal computer in operation, in a private residence in Marin County, a tony California precinct. It was an Apple II (or “Apple ][,” according to a curious typographical convention of the day, which I will not bother repeating), owned by a friend’s father, a fiftyish chemical engineer, and it was running, on a green phosphor monitor, and loaded from a cassette drive, a program called “Flight Simulator,” the distant but direct ancestor of the product marketed by Microsoft unto the present day.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">A little background: in the initial years of my romantic history I was successively involved with three women who subsequently made their livings in the computer field—even before the (Mis)Information Age had wrapped its tendrils anything like so thoroughly around and through the populace and the polity today—and a fourth who, early in 1974, endeavored in vain to interest me in the computer terminals available for undergraduate use at various points on the UC Santa Cruz campus. “Faugh!” quoth I. “I am a humanities major. What have I to do with these machines?”</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">A fair amount, it was to turn out, but that proved true one way or another of many of us of a Certain Age.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Anyway, a few years later my then-spouse began to agitate for the acquisition of one of these gadgets, and because what we’d seen was a Cupertino product, we went shopping for an “Apple II+,” the current model as of October 1982, and landed at an outfit—was it in Berkeley or San Francisco?—called, I think, “Quest Computers,” at which a slick salesman (for some reason I still remember his name: Phil Sotter) unloaded on us a computer with 48K—that’s kilobytes—of RAM, a green phosphor monitor, a “floppy” drive and a dot-matrix printer. Woo! I think that the tariff, which we financed by means of a particularly avaricious consumer lender, was initially around $3500, which was probably close to half my net annual salary in those days.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">As initially configured, the thing could only display upper-case characters, although it could output lower-case to the printer. Fortunately…er, not quite…fortunately the machine accommodated plug-in cards, and we acquired, for a couple of hundred dollars, an “eighty-column” card that permitted the monitor to display both cases. Did I mention that the software could also do italic and boldface provided the appropriate <tags>were entered</tags> in the word processing environment? But also, the eighty-column jobbie was a little slow: it could not keep up with my keyboard input, and then, as now, I am a fucking two-fingered typist.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Within half a year of taking delivery, although I purchased and played “Flight Simulator” (on a 5.25” floppy—how cool is that?) I could scarcely look at the goddamn machine without hating it, and myself for my folly in consenting to indenture myself to its purchase. The spouse, however, used it to “typeset” several pages worth of content in one issue of Tim Yohannan’s “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximumrocknroll" target="_blank">Maximumrocknroll</a>” magazine—<a href="http://rcareaga.com/MRR003_Nov-Dec_1982.pdf" target="_blank">this one</a>. I met Tim Y, dead these many years now, once or twice during that period: he struck me as an exceptionally charmless character.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">In late summer 1984 my wife again suggested a computer purchase, this time of an Apple Macintosh, which had first reached the consumer market earlier that year, and which had already struck me as the homeliest piece of consumer electronics I’d ever set eyes on. “Absolutely not,” I growled. “I will never consent to having another product from that loathsome company in my home again.” Perhaps I should mention here that for the nine years we cohabited following our move to Oakland in 1977, I was for various reasons the principal breadwinner as she worked lower-paying, temporary, part-time, voluntary or not-at-all gigs, and that I regarded my views on big-ticket expenditures as accordingly carrying a correspondingly greater weight.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Cannily, she said nothing to this. A couple of weeks later, working late—she was then employed at a software firm on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley—she called to ask if I could fetch her from the workplace. When I arrived, she apologized, told me that the staff meeting was running overtime, led me to an otherwise empty room with an original Macintosh, the 128K model, booted up and running, I think, MacPaint.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">I’d never seen anything like this. When she returned after three-quarters of an hour, I sighed: “Where do I sign?”</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Two years later, she’d moved out, and on, to gigs in the IT/tech writing field that paid far more than she—or I—had ever made when we had common premises. But a year after that I began to make my living on the Mac (a story for another time, perhaps), and did so until my retirement in 2017, so yay. I probably could have brought home the same or greater income from the same employer during those latter three decades, but I would not have enjoyed myself as much, and would likely never have attained anything like the sundry technical and artistic proficiencies I can claim today. Thanks you, K. No, really.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">I owe this also, I suppose, in minor part to that horrible Apple II+ back in the day. I salute the machine, halfheartedly, in whatever metal-retrieval landfill might have claimed it, you otherwise unmourned old thing.</span></div></div><br /><p></p>Rand Careagahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04993454654652802173noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3051266465432710550.post-76119486079198963412020-10-23T15:52:00.000-07:002020-10-23T15:52:18.114-07:00Heavy traffic not<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgp1z9eEPS14QL0-jqTLCMsRMxmbfUphSRITUe7QF4wH_d0PwyQAeh8JAStT2wlqRw_TL-W-lkoN57viUD1mzbriqQax6CtEnIZgOFTxA3k4oV2v2T8kBrvc4Ru-miMyFDCKsuk1v3ijLpS/s964/desrted+405.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="641" data-original-width="964" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgp1z9eEPS14QL0-jqTLCMsRMxmbfUphSRITUe7QF4wH_d0PwyQAeh8JAStT2wlqRw_TL-W-lkoN57viUD1mzbriqQax6CtEnIZgOFTxA3k4oV2v2T8kBrvc4Ru-miMyFDCKsuk1v3ijLpS/w400-h266/desrted+405.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">It has been several years since this blog has elicited a comment—there was one early in the present year, but this was from a deranged stalker who trailed me here from a private discussion group dating from our contentious exchanges during the Cheney Shogunate—but I continue to mumble to myself in this obscure corner of the innertubes.</span></p>Rand Careagahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04993454654652802173noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3051266465432710550.post-70570392286616859912020-10-18T17:35:00.000-07:002020-10-18T17:35:14.029-07:00Just for the record<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEha6b-df7SLVl8zX6FC31gUO1OmNWaEn7rW3YWfGF-zVlYCNllH3W6SXvuvA2rTOaqR9uhrobZhsZMelj0mOVKyYPfYWBtlEepq9SCOMFi5-AiXHO20bphqBatP7UXg7xqYzF2b2Qt9H4uQ/s933/vb_0373_2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="933" data-original-width="928" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEha6b-df7SLVl8zX6FC31gUO1OmNWaEn7rW3YWfGF-zVlYCNllH3W6SXvuvA2rTOaqR9uhrobZhsZMelj0mOVKyYPfYWBtlEepq9SCOMFi5-AiXHO20bphqBatP7UXg7xqYzF2b2Qt9H4uQ/w398-h400/vb_0373_2.jpg" width="398" /></a></div><span style="font-family: verdana;">So lately I’ve been having a series of dreams in which I run into V on, I don’t know, something like a rolling meadow-themed bardo at twilight, and she says, affectionately (approximate sense), “Welcome.”</span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Well, my belief system doesn’t allow for a metaphysical cosmos in which V (1954-2008) is ethereally competent in 2020 to pluck the strings of my mind’s lyre as I sleep, although I’m prepared to entertain the possibility that time is a lot weirder than we understand. What strikes me as likelier is that my unconscious is gently tugging at my sleeve to convey that I really ought to submit the cardiac plumbing, which has lately given signs of silting up again, to medical evaluation.</span></p>Rand Careagahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04993454654652802173noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3051266465432710550.post-26068742698571834342020-09-28T13:59:00.001-07:002020-09-28T16:32:29.869-07:00A memory: 28 September 1972<p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPR3CgG1hRfm6AWkPosLIxDPSnSZ73UyQLeEj8eKnf2hzZoetS3IN28rggVRha25F41gH4lyGIOPp_4hVLqHzahL3hSGZqF62RCYfyonEZLuBjhY0QsMcI6v8Urm8viGfp24ElwsJ-Q-NA/s920/vb_0473_u.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="920" data-original-width="914" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPR3CgG1hRfm6AWkPosLIxDPSnSZ73UyQLeEj8eKnf2hzZoetS3IN28rggVRha25F41gH4lyGIOPp_4hVLqHzahL3hSGZqF62RCYfyonEZLuBjhY0QsMcI6v8Urm8viGfp24ElwsJ-Q-NA/w398-h400/vb_0473_u.jpg" width="398" /></a></div><span style="font-family: verdana;">An evening class at Cowell College, UC Santa Cruz, just a couple of days into Fall Quarter. I am, two years later, a freshman again, having been granted a second bite at the apple. A dozen or twenty fellow freshmen gathered around a circular table in a smallish room. At some point before the class came to order a noxious bug, something like a fly, but blacker, slower, softer, was buzzing about my head. I swatted at it, and on its second or third pass contrived to propel it across the room and into the face of the young woman directly opposite me across the table. Fate, it appears, will sometimes hinge upon an insect. At close of class, as we all dispersed outdoors, I caught up with the girl and apologized. We walked together across the Cowell upper quad. As we passed a first floor room (the same room which my younger brother was briefly to occupy thirteen years later) she noticed a political poster on the wall, visible through the window. “That’s Russian!” she exclaimed. It happened that I’d just that summer commenced my infatuation with all things Slavic. “Oh? You know Russian?” At which point Veronica—for it was the legendary, now departed Veronica—clammed up (a speaker of Russian since infancy, she’d just had demonstrated to her earlier in the day her deficiencies in the written language, and was smarting in consequence) with a charming and ambiguous disclaimer. I saw her to the ground floor of her dorm, and set off to College V, half a mile distant. “Here comes a girlfriend,” I thought, correctly, and would have whistled, had I ever learned how. Actually, that’s never stopped me. I strode across campus, in the dark through the trees, emitting low, hoarse, lighthearted hoots through my pursed lips, forming clouds before me in the cool, slightly damp autumnal air.</span><p></p>Rand Careagahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04993454654652802173noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3051266465432710550.post-4068574422127985482020-09-27T18:53:00.002-07:002020-09-27T18:53:45.085-07:00Bright college days<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7ITadd_x-pve35izUjL2issc3-1koc8o2cV6_ukDHJljQdTTFvyUfT9W0Bu53bYWJczsECvmiSrlfcNqJ00VeiO6XtVnzMek6CPugw5LfYbXrfaF8eRkGSi_fC-m1plX4JfhBmlqqaSn2/s768/aberdeen_darker.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="605" data-original-width="768" height="315" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7ITadd_x-pve35izUjL2issc3-1koc8o2cV6_ukDHJljQdTTFvyUfT9W0Bu53bYWJczsECvmiSrlfcNqJ00VeiO6XtVnzMek6CPugw5LfYbXrfaF8eRkGSi_fC-m1plX4JfhBmlqqaSn2/w400-h315/aberdeen_darker.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Half a century ago today I arrived, most unwillingly, at the Riverside campus of the University of California. That’s a long story, to be related another time, if ever. Still, the following months before my ignoble exit (conveyed in the event by the University to the good people at Selective Service) yielded up some piquant memories. Hearts full of youth! Hearts full of truth! <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dl3mRjydcPw">Six parts gin to one part vermouth!</a></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">—Although my set really didn’t drink much. Back in those days we regarded it as a little counterrevolutionary.</span></div><br /><p></p>Rand Careagahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04993454654652802173noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3051266465432710550.post-80222187444169014112020-09-20T14:46:00.006-07:002020-11-04T11:20:57.110-08:00“The Happiest I’ve Been”*<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXVEs0v30RhcUKyzSEzOyOBNGsKCV2rUgX0vNNfog-zChkGOgpJfhBHJRo7ihoQHoNgBumHvRZSKLN-SIczWSfHn5SjX_reoEpkOeAGWeAS4hXoNyFUbgJzHSSAtoKAvVW6zNSFzD5SE7w/s1250/zuma.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="834" data-original-width="1250" height="318" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXVEs0v30RhcUKyzSEzOyOBNGsKCV2rUgX0vNNfog-zChkGOgpJfhBHJRo7ihoQHoNgBumHvRZSKLN-SIczWSfHn5SjX_reoEpkOeAGWeAS4hXoNyFUbgJzHSSAtoKAvVW6zNSFzD5SE7w/w474-h318/zuma.jpg" width="474" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>20 September 1970</b></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">I was summoned to the telephone at my parents’ home that Sunday morning. A group of high school friends were organizing a trip out to Zuma Beach in Malibu—was I interested? Of course I was.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">This was just about a week before my graduating class was to scatter to the four winds, those of us who were going the “higher education” route, to our sundry and far-flung colleges and universities. I, to my disappointment, was bound just ninety miles away, to an institution that would spit me out half a year later; my classmates went on to various fates, some known, some not: that day was the last time I was to see most of them.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Among the teenagers present was my beloved, with whom interludes in the course of the preceding summer and the following autumn are among the tenderest of my youthful memories. That romance did not endure past the turning of the year (more on this anon), but this Sunday at the beach was the capstone of the year. At one point, as we waded in the shallows, a wave knocked my sweetheart down, and her spectacles into the churning surf: groping at my feet, I found and retrieved these before they were swept out to sea, for beaucoup points.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">I do not think that, up until this day, I had ever experienced such an episode, so many seamless hours, of sustained joy.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">By January the beloved, four hundred miles north of me, had developed other interests. I was unhappy, and peppered her with letters (in that distant era, <i>meine Kinder,</i> one had to convey text messages on paper and via the post) for the next few years until I finally wore her down and rekindled the romance in 1974. Two years later we wed; ten years after that she had reconsidered and, on this day in 1986, took a step, my weeks of anguished entreaties being dismissed, that pretty much put paid to the entire matrimony thing, so that’s another 20 September, a grim one, to bookend the first.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Someone asked me, twenty years ago, “Don’t you think it’s turned out for the best?” I imagine that the ex would agree—from the scant online evidence, she has long regarded our entire common history as an ill-considered detour from her own life’s journey. For my part, the question makes no sense: had I never been divorced, I’d be a different man today. To desire that counterfactual, to make it magically come about, would necessarily involve an act of self-cancellation of the man who might make that wish. So no, I do not rub the lamp. It is what it has been, and I am who I have become. And today is, fifty years on, the twentieth of September.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>*The post title is taken from John Updike’s <a href="http://rcareaga.com/happiest_ive_been.pdf" target="_blank">1959 short story</a>.</i></span></div></div>Rand Careagahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04993454654652802173noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3051266465432710550.post-69793476139954921712020-09-11T18:40:00.002-07:002020-09-11T18:41:24.133-07:00Waving the bloody shirt<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2gzWSOexJRn9EXVgDFpV1QI5C2gDrZ3sjTJgPL-Mj5ttEGR7Z9gx1rT7YG4RAlycFHvn5UxYyH0UsYivKH9zCvcZA1koGGKh4ddn6g0pvWKonifuX-cH1UU6t_eGHsdWhwUk-lklryf07/s1200/get_over_it.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="1200" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2gzWSOexJRn9EXVgDFpV1QI5C2gDrZ3sjTJgPL-Mj5ttEGR7Z9gx1rT7YG4RAlycFHvn5UxYyH0UsYivKH9zCvcZA1koGGKh4ddn6g0pvWKonifuX-cH1UU6t_eGHsdWhwUk-lklryf07/w400-h266/get_over_it.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">God-fucking damnit, I get so tired of the bleating every year at this time: never has so blameless a nation, so virtuous a people, ever been subjected to so inhumane, so vile an atrocity. Why, <i>innocent people died!</i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Break me a fucking give. Measured against the number of noncombatants this country has slain from the air during the past seventy-five years, the butcher’s bill nineteen years ago was a rounding error. To the side that has the cruise missiles, asymmetric warfare will always appear an unsportsmanlike proposition.</span></p>Rand Careagahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04993454654652802173noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3051266465432710550.post-38153590815775468012020-09-09T19:21:00.003-07:002020-09-09T19:21:49.297-07:00Got a kinda postapocalyptic vibe going here<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvbqmr9WYK4Oql4VVxRVBXeSkHxmnLcqQRmHniUf4ZFOiX9t1BSvjAJJKUash_AcJlEr-vBLlnoDt_tgJ4nhmeep6aK2t2CAsP6Z5sXNYYti0LC3UJBgXjVN8zWk-H-v7thnFJJmje1UEZ/s2016/mid0909.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1512" data-original-width="2016" height="375" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvbqmr9WYK4Oql4VVxRVBXeSkHxmnLcqQRmHniUf4ZFOiX9t1BSvjAJJKUash_AcJlEr-vBLlnoDt_tgJ4nhmeep6aK2t2CAsP6Z5sXNYYti0LC3UJBgXjVN8zWk-H-v7thnFJJmje1UEZ/w500-h375/mid0909.jpg" width="500" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">I joined the landed gentry exactly twenty-one years ago. The weather outside The Crumbling Manse™ did not, as I recall, look anything like this, descried today at mid-afternoon.</span></div><br /><p></p>Rand Careagahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04993454654652802173noreply@blogger.com0