"For nearly 28 years Karl Bushby has been walking around the world with two rules: no transport and no going home to Hull unless he arrives on foot."

"On Monday afternoon, for the first time since 1998, the former paratrooper, now aged 57, stepped on to British soil after swimming the Channel. Bushby started his epic trek in Chile on November 1, 1998, shortly after leaving his mother Angela’s home in east Yorkshire. Since then, he has traversed the Darién Gap as fighting raged between the Colombian government and Marxist guerrillas; covered the frozen Bering Strait on foot; and become the first person known to have swum 184 miles across the Caspian Sea....He swam on his back the whole time as he is 'not a swimmer' and it is the 'most energy efficient way.'..."

From "Adventurer sets foot on British soil after 28-year walk home/Karl Bushby arrived in Kent after swimming the Channel for the final stage of a 30,000-mile journey from Chile back to Hull" (London Times).

How does he pay for this lengthy adventure? "Werner Herzog is directing a feature-length documentary about Bushby’s journey, titled Walk of Life, co-produced by Westward Productions, which has been supporting the adventurer for the past 16 years."

"I don’t like introspection. There’s something not right, not in my life, not in my existence. I try to avoid it."

Said Werner Herzog, on the Freakonomics podcast, right after he denied that his childhood was traumatic, even though he went hungry in the post-WWII years. He continues:

This is why I believe that psychoanalysis is one of the great mistakes of the 20th century.... I think it is not good if you illuminate all the dark recesses of the human soul. It’s good that we can forget and that we forget traumas. We do not have to unearth them and articulate them in endless sessions with a psychiatrist. And the 20th century is full of very, very deep mistakes. Psychoanalysis is only one. But because of all these monstrous mistakes of this century, I do believe that the 20th century in its entirety was a mistake....

I was also interested in his opinion of art museums:

"And I try to encourage all my friends who are not Trump supporters, I tell them, don't complain. It is a majority, it's not lottery..."

"... that brought Trump to the presidency. He won the popular vote by a very significant margin. Both houses, Senate and Congress, and the Supreme Court is to some degree shaped by him. So it's significant. It doesn't come because he's a lucky man. No, there's a clear world view, a clear cultural war that he wants to wage. And it's evident. He really says what he means. It's not that there's anything hidden. And I say to everyone, if you do not agree, take America — the heartland of America — take it seriously. That's where the heart beats.... And many of my friends who are working in Los Angeles, I say, don't you come from Kansas? Yes, I come from Kansas. And I say, when were you in Kansas last time? Ah, that was 20 years ago. No, you should be every year. When did you meet your high school buddies? Oh, no contact with them at all. You have to get in touch with them, ask them how they are doing, ask them about their visions, ask them about their grievances, keep them engaged. They are your buddies, your high school friends. Do something. Don't complain. I don't like the complaints...."

Says the wise film director, Werner Herzog, on the Freakonomics podcast.

"One day I saw this camera room, and nobody was in there, and I took one and tested it, walked ou,t and they never noticed that a camera was missing."

Said Werner Herzog to Anderson Cooper, who injected flatly: "That's a stolen camera."

Herzog: "It was more expropriation than theft. You have to have a certain amount of, I say, good criminal energy to make a film. Sometimes, yes, you have to go outside of what the norm is."

And I like this, about Klaus Kinski: "I had a a mad man as a leading character. He had a temper as demented as it gets. You had to contain him, and I made his madness — his explosive destructiveness —productive for the screen.... Every gray hair on my head I call Kinsky."

"He helped transform the Republican Party into a cult, worshiping at the altar of authoritarianism."

"He’s damaged our country in ways that may take a generation to undo. No, I’m not talking about Donald Trump. The politician I'm referring to is Mitch McConnell.... He’s been a truly awful public official. McConnell has always put party above America. Remember when he said his most important goal as Senate leader was to make Barack Obama a one-term president? The fact that he hasn’t always kissed Trump’s backside has infuriated the former furor-in-chief. Despite his opposition to Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election — admitting publicly that Trump 'provoked' the attack on the U.S. Capitol — McConnell voted to acquit Trump on the charge of inciting an insurrection on January 6, 2021...."

Writes Robert Reich, in "Goodbye, Mitch: You were the worst/But the Republicans might find someone even worse to replace you" (Substack).

I'm not agreeing with this, just calling attention to it for its harsh language and for Reich's drawing of Mitch McConnell, which is quite nice.

And then there's "furor-in-chief." Did he mean Führer-in-chief? "Führer," which means leader, is strongly associated with Hitler. "Furor" refers to an emotional state, not to a person. It means "fury, rage, madness, anger, mania" (OED). Maybe saying Trump was the "furor-in-chief" is like calling Aguirre the "Wrath of God"...

"He is, for sure, the world’s most grandiloquent crash-test dummy."

"He’s fallen off a barn and broken both arms. He’s had 14 stitches in his chin, a soccer injury, and a tooth pulled after declining anesthesia because the pain was synonymous with 'the way I expected the world to be.' His collarbone was detached from his breastbone while ski jumping. He has been lifted off his feet by random explosions. He fell 40 feet on an opera stage and sprained his neck. He was hit so hard by a stuntman while filming a scene for a movie that two crowns popped loose from his molars. He has intentionally leaped into a cactus field and has eaten his shoe (which he cooked at Chez Panisse). He missed an airplane that crashed, and came close to being beheaded in Peru by the Shining Path. He was shot, and 'slightly wounded,' while being interviewed by the BBC in Los Angeles."

From "The Cosmic, Outrageous, Ecstatic Truths of Werner Herzog/The filmmaker’s new memoir, 'Every Man for Himself and God Against All,' prompts a critic’s incredulity'" (NYT).

He = Werner Herzog.

The incredulous critic = Dwight Garner.

"He seems incapable of small talk or explaining his craft, instead delivering a series of observations about the slippery nature of time, the mutability of consciousness and..."

"... the way people (and mice, apparently) fabricate their own realities. When asked how he arrived at the structure of his novel, which zigzags from the 1990s to the 1970s to the 1940s and then forward again, he replied with a koan-like commentary on the illusion of chronology: 'We settle ourselves into a grand fiction of present time. It is a fiction. Technically present time does not exist. Our sense of present time is technically impossible, because when you lift a foot from the ground, lifting it up is already past, setting it down on the ground is already future.' Herzog bristled slightly when I asked why he is drawn to stories of zealots who go to extreme lengths to pursue their obsessions — figures like Timothy Treadwell in 'Grizzly Man,' whose quest to commune with bears ended with his being mauled to death, and Lope de Aguirre, whose mission to find a lost city of gold was chronicled by Herzog in his 1972 historical drama 'Aguirre, the Wrath of God.' 'They are all family. You recognize your siblings,' he said of his subjects. 'I think none of my characters are extreme nor strange. They are dignified human beings, and they take the struggle of life as it’s thrown at them.'"

From "Werner Herzog’s Fever Dreams/The filmmaker behind 'Grizzly Man' and 'Fitzcarraldo' makes a late-career foray into fiction with his new book, 'The Twilight World.' He feels he has finally found his medium" (NYT).

The book — which you can pre-order at Amazon — comes out on the 14th. The audiobook is read by Herzog. The book is about Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier who continued fighting World War II for 29 years after it ended.

"The vanishing of nature is also romanticized: the lonely polar bear on an ice shelf. Romanticism has trickled down through Walt Disney..."

"... and now we have the Disneyfication of landscapes, of human existence, of storytelling, of our relationship with wild nature. The bears are cuddly and you have to hug them and you have to sing to them. That’s the tragedy of Timothy Treadwell, in 'Grizzly Man,' a tragedy of misguided philosophy. When somebody espouses New Age ideas, I always lower my head and charge."

Said Werner Herzog, quoted in "Werner Herzog Has Never Liked Introspection/A conversation with the filmmaker about the place of literature, the toll of war, and the conviction that his writing will outlast his movies" (The New Yorker). I see he has a book coming out soon, called "The Twilight World" that is, in part, the true story Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier who fought, from a position on an island in the Philippines, for 3 decades after WWII had ended.

Herzog met Onoda in real life. He was in Japan, and had actually turned down an invitation to meet the Emperor. He didn't want to see the Emperor, because he would have been required to "speak only in formulas and polite, prefabricated dialogue." So who did he want to meet? He said, “Onoda.”

"You have said before that you haven’t seen any of the 'Star Wars' films. Do you feel that affected your performance in any way?"

Variety asks Werner Herzog in "Werner Herzog on Why He Didn’t Need to See ‘Star Wars’ Films for ‘The Mandalorian’ Role" (The "The Mandalorian" is Disney’s live-action “Star Wars” series.)

Answer:

No, it doesn’t really matter. You see, it was a very lively exchange, man-to-man so to speak, between Jon Favreau and myself. I was not tossed into unknown territory. I was very well briefed. I knew what was expected of me — I knew the interior landscape of the character and I knew the exterior landscape. You shouldn’t feel upset that I haven’t seen the “Star Wars” films; I hardly see any films. I read. I see two, three, maybe four films per year.

Asked if he watches television, he says:

I do, I watch the news from different sources. Sometimes I see things that are completely against my cultural nature. I was raised with Latin and Ancient Greek and poetry from Greek antiquity, but sometimes, just to see the world I live in, I watch “WrestleMania.”... You have to know what a good amount of the population is watching. Do not underestimate the Kardashians. As vulgar as they may be, it doesn’t matter that much, but you have to find some sort of orientation. As I always say, the poet must not close his eyes, must not avert them.

I like that — "The poet must not close his eyes, must not avert them." It's an idea I associate with another film director, Akira Kurosawa. Perhaps Herzog read the same obituary I read in 1998. I blogged about it in February 2004:

"To be an artist means never to avert one's eyes." On this topic of disgust and shock... let me share a passage from the obituary, written by Rick Lyman, for Akira Kurosawa, which is one of the most influential things I've read in my life....

"When we asked America’s foremost intelligence experts what keeps them up at night, one response came up over and over again: the risk of a crippling cyberattack."

Writes Mike Allen at Axios:

• A well-executed cyberattack could knock out the electrical grid and shut off power to a huge swath of the country, or compromise vital government or financial data and leave us unsure what is real.

• The sheer number of internet-connected devices, from cars to pacemakers, means the risks are growing by the day.

The big picture: Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said this week that the U.S. is in "crisis mode," comparing the danger of a massive attack to a Category 5 hurricane looming on the horizon. Intelligence chiefs from the last three administrations agree, and told Axios there is no graver threat to the United States....

I wonder if they've got a plan for dealing with our most frightening, powerful cyberattacker in waiting: the sun. Here's the sequence from the Werner Herzog movie "Lo and Behold" that can scare the hell out you:

"Most Science-fiction missed the most important thing in the world, which is the internet itself. They had flying cars. They had rocket ships. None of that exists..."

"... but the internet governs our lives today. It used to be that when you communicated with someone, the person you were communicating with was as important as the information; Now on the internet, the person is unimportant at all. Becoming your own filter will be the challenge of the future. Will our children's children's children need the companionship of humans - or will they have evolved in a world where that's not important? It sounds awful doesn't it? But maybe it will be fine, and the companionship of robots and an intelligent internet will be sufficient. Who am I to say?"

Says Lawrence Krauss, the theoretical physicist, at the end of the Werner Herzog documentary, "Lo and Behold/Reveries of a Connected World."

These are the last spoken words in the film, which then ends with some scientists outdoors playing guitar/banjo/fiddle and singing the old song "Salty Dog." I can see there's a Johnny Cash version of this song and a Flatt & Scruggs, but the version I've known for half a century is by Mississippi John Hurt.

Flatt & Scruggs sing, "Let me be your salty dog or I won't be your man at all," and so does Johnny Cash, but Mississippi John Hurt sings "Let me be your salty dog/I don't want to be your man at all." It makes a difference! Ah, here's the whole script for the movie, and it gives the lyrics: "Let me be your salty dog/I won't be your man at all." That makes a difference too — a difference that affects what I want to say. But let me try anyway.

The movie not only talks about the loss of humanity on the internet (as the last spoken words show), it includes the famous cartoon, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" (showing an actual dog using the internet). You see where I'm going with this. The film ends with the spoken idea that maybe in the future people won't need the companionship of another human, and then you get the sung lyric of an offer of companionship that excludes being an man. The singer wants to be your dog and not your man. In one way, very literally, it reinforces the Krauss + New Yorker cartoon idea of evolving away from real touch with another person.

But because of the way we suddenly see and hear live human beings together playing and singing, we are roused into feeling that nothing could be more important than getting together with other people in the flesh. It's the very last thing in the movie, number one. Secondly, these men are obviously vitally alive and enjoying their immediately company. Thirdly, they are singing an enthusiastic plea for physical love from the "you" whose salty dog they are begging to be. I feel certain the film's final send off is a message to hold onto your humanity.

And yet that message is complicated by the old line about not wanting to be a man at all. Even before we got abstracted into the bodiless world of the internet, there were songs expressing an intense desire to escape being a man. But that was in the opposite direction from abstraction and into the role of dog. It was a desire to be even more intensely in the fleshly, embodied world.

"Salty Dog" is an old song, not to be confused with "Salty Dog" by Procol Harum (which is about sailors). The idea of being your dog has been around for a long time. Here's "I Wanna Be Your Dog" by The Stooges:



Also, for those who've followed the story of Althouse and Meade, there's the line "We want to BE your dog."

"I think I was so taken by how the Orioles played because it was different—Earl’s philosophy was effectively countercultural at a time when many teams..."

"... especially in the National League, placed great emphasis on the running game, on bunting men over—on scratching a single run from an infield single, a stolen base, a bunt, and a sacrifice fly. Earl thought that required too many things to go right for a maximum reward of a single run. He preferred to encourage his hitters to work the count, to take walks, and then, with a man or two on base, swing for the fences. If you followed that strategy, he believed, you had a far better chance of putting three runs on the board than the run-scratchers had of putting up a singleton.... In my instinctive contrarianism I grew deeply attached to this way of playing baseball, so you can easily imagine how I felt when, in my twenties, I started reading... Bill James’s Baseball Abstract. For James’s early and profoundly influential exercises in sabermetrics... proved pretty conclusively that Earl was right all along, and those guys scrabbling for one run at a time were just chasing a losing hand. I felt vindicated, and even more so as the years went by and sabermetrics grew more detailed and sophisticated. Earl Weaver was in a way the patron saint of sabermetrics, and I was happy to bask in the reflection of his glory. What makes this a problem is that, as boxing fans have always known, styles make fights. What made Earl’s Way so fascinating all those years ago was its distinctiveness; and that’s what made the arguments among fans fun too. As fascinating as the sabermetrics revolution in baseball has been—and I cheered it on for decades, following James and the other pioneers with passionate intensity—the comprehensiveness of its victory has simply made baseball less enjoyable to watch, for me anyway. Strangely enough, baseball was better when we knew less about the most effective way to play it...."

Writes Alan Jacobs in "Giving Up On Baseball" (Weekly Standard).

And there's the trouble with rationality, in a nutshell. At some point, you may ask yourself, why bother at all? And the rational answer is: Don't bother! The whole wonderful, fascinating thing was irrational, and if it's going to be rational, what's to love?

Now, this makes me think of a scene in the Werner Herzog documentary "Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World," in which we see robots programmed to play soccer:



If you watched that to the end — and maybe you didn't, because robots playing soccer... why bother? — you heard Herzog ask the young man holding one of the robots, "Do you love it?," and the man answered yes. So is the perfectly rational thing lovable? Well, the man loves the robot he's making. But he's experimenting and creating. He's not just a spectator. And I'm watching a Werner Herzog documentary because I love things like the moment when he gets the scientist to experience awareness of his love and to express it.

"The 25 Best Man Versus Nature Movies."

I like this list, by Scott Tobias (at New York Magazine). This is one of my favorite types of movies, I've seen 12 of them, and 4 of my all-time favorite movies are on the list: "Touching the Void" (#17),"Aguirre the Wrath of God" (#9), "Grizzly Man" (#8), and "The Gold Rush" (#1).

Of the ones I have not seen, I added 4 to my Amazon Prime watchlist. (And I'm not saying that to get you to use Amazon, but if you do decide to use Amazon, I'd appreciate your going in through The Althouse Portal.)

"I don't believe in the devil. I believe in stupidity."

Said Werner Herzog — on the new episode of WTF with Marc Maron. Yes! Herzog and Maron! That was great to wake up to on Monday morning. Herzog has a new movie. It made Marc Maron dream about spiders, causing Herzog to relay his own dream — he only dreams once a year — about being told to renounce the devil.

ADDED: Here's the trailer for the new movie, the one that made Maron feel doomed. It's about the internet — which isn't evil, just stupid, per Herzog — "Lo And Behold: Reveries of the Connected World":



"Have the monks stopped meditating? They all seem to be tweeting."

"Above the Law" kills its comments section.

Ah! I've been there and back more than once. Let's see how it's reasoned out:

In the early days of ATL... the comments were amazing.... Today the comments are not what they once were. Although occasionally insightful or funny, ATL comments nowadays are generally fewer in number, not very substantive (often just inside jokes among the commentariat), yet still often offensive. They also represent a very small percentage of our total traffic (as we can tell because of the click required to access them).

It’s not clear how or why our comments changed in number and quality....

This is like a lovers' quarrel: You changed! In the lovers' quarrel context, when that line comes up, what's the next line? I think it's: You never really knew me.

... [N]umerous websites have eliminated their comments sections in recent years, largely because they felt that the comments were not adding sufficient value and that discussion had migrated to social media....

So it's not like a lovers' quarrel, because it's not a face-to-face discussion. It's the writer on one side and whoever all those people are who choose to respond in that writer's space, the comments section. The writer feels that in the old days, a different sort of person came around. It's not that those people changed. Those people left, having found better places to write — Facebook, Twitter, etc. — and the people who are here now are not changed people. They're different people.

That made me think of a line from "Grizzly Man": "He discovered that many of his bear friends had gone into hibernation and scary, unknown and wilder bears from the interior had moved in."

"Just as people are free to contract, they are also free from contract, and we find it neither prudent nor permissible to impose contractual liability for offhand remarks or grandstanding."

Said the 11th Circuit today, denying $1 million to the law student about whom I said, 5 years ago, "Give this law student a million dollars."

A criminal defense lawyer had argued that his client could not have committed the murder he was accused of because the time frame was impossible. From the opinion (PDF):

[F]or the last leg of the journey, Serrano would have had to get off a flight in Atlanta’s busy airport, travel to the La Quinta several miles away, and arrive in that hotel lobby in only twenty- eight minutes. After extensively describing the delays that would take place to render that twenty-eight-minute timeline even more unlikely,[the lawyer James Cheney] Mason stated, “I challenge anybody to show me, and guess what? Did they bring in any evidence to say that somebody made that route, did so? State’s burden of proof. If they can do it, I’ll challenge ‘em. I’ll pay them a million dollars if they can do it.”

A law student, Dustin S. Kolodziej, made the trip within 28 minutes, demanded the million dollars, and when it was not forthcoming, sued Mason's law firm for breach of contract. Kolodziej's theory was that Mason's challenge was an offer to form a unilateral contract and that he could and did accept by performing the task. According to the court (applying Florida law), that depended on whether "a reasonable, objective person would have understood [Mason's words] to be an invitation to contract."

The exaggerated amount of “a million dollars”—the common choice of movie villains and schoolyard wagerers alike—indicates that this was hyperbole….

We could just as easily substitute a comparable idiom such as “I’ll eat my hat” or “I’ll be a monkey’s uncle” into Mason’s interview in the place of “I’ll pay them a million dollars,” and the outcome would be the same. We would not be inclined to make him either consume his headwear or assume a simian relationship were he to be proven wrong; nor will we make him pay one million dollars here.

ADDED: Werner Herzog did eat his shoe:

The Werner Herzog inspirational posters.

From Werner Herzog Inspirationals via Metafilter ("One of my favorite things is to do my own gloomy Herzog narrations about banal subjects. Only people who really like Werner Herzog understand how fun it is.").

"What should happen is the following: please develop the film and hand it over to your students."

Wrote the great film director Werner Herzog to the film professor who had 2 weeks earlier handed him a Super-8 camera and instructed him to make a film for the Film 102 class.

My demand is the following: they have to make films, collectively or individually, which should include my footage. Obviously, they do not need to take everything, nor in the order I filmed the material.

The title of their film/films has to be WHERE’S DA PARTY AT? 

In my footage this appears in one of the graffiti, and at least this portion of the text should appear in the film, or all the films.

The film prof told the students their project would be a bit like what Herzog did making the film "Grizzly Man," using the footage (and pawage) of the late Timothy Treadwell.

"It's just nuts. It's crazy." Why are you texting and driving?

Please watch this half-hour documentary. Made by the great film director Werner Herzog:

Meade goes to Obamastock.

Me, I was working yesterday, even locked out of the law school, so I didn't make it to the big political rally in the center of campus — Bascom Mall. But Meade was there, and he was really inspired. He wrote a song about his nearly ecstatic experience, and he won't stop singing. It goes like this:

I came upon a child of Obam-a
She was walking by Sterling Hall
So I asked her, "Where are you going?"
And this she told me...

"I'm going up to Bascom Mall,
I'm gonna join in a political rally
Gonna put out my two hands
Try and keep my birth control free.

We are starstruck
We're beholden
And we've got to keep ourselves in government lardon."

Then can I walk beside you?
I have come here to dialogue
And with a Flip cam, I feel like Herzog,
Artistically burning.