The Baselitz Tree.

I am inviting you to invert images today in honor of the recently deceased Georg Baselitz, who said, as I quoted below, "The hierarchy where the sky is at the top and the ground down below is in any case only an agreement, one we have all got used to, but one that we absolutely do not have to believe in."

"In contrast to the refined intellectualism and impersonal aesthetic of artists like Sol LeWitt and Donald Judd, he offered an art that reveled in raw emotion, extroverted brushwork..."

"... and a fierce engagement with the complexities of 20th-century German history.... Mr. Baselitz’s 'Hero' series of 1965 and 1966 — blocky figures in thick impasto stumbling through tormented landscapes — plunged the viewer into a nightmare vision of postwar Germany. No less disturbing were the woodsmen, hunters and cows of the 'Fracture' series, disassembled into horizontal strips and merged with the landscape. In a break with convention, Mr. Baselitz began turning the central images in his canvases upside down in the late 1960s.... 'The hierarchy where the sky is at the top and the ground down below is in any case only an agreement, one we have all got used to, but one that we absolutely do not have to believe in,' Mr. Baselitz told the critic and historian Walter Grasskamp in 1984."

From "Georg Baselitz, German Neo-Expressionist Painter, Dies at 88/Along with contemporaries like Anselm Kiefer, he mounted a frontal attack on Minimalism and Conceptualism, the dominant 'cool' styles of the 1970s" (NYT).

Here's an example from the "Hero" series 

I wish Baselitz could have done the official portrait for... various political figures. But I will not say who because I'm chilled by the arrest of James Comey.

And here's an example from the "Fractures" series, totally inappropriate for an official portrait:

"Nearly 48 hours since being appointed as the third supreme leader of the Islamic Republic in Iran’s history, Mojtaba Khamenei is nowhere to be seen."

I'm reading "Iran's new supreme leader is still nowhere to be seen" (CNN).

No video message has been put out from him addressing the crowds of supporters that have gone onto the streets across Iran to pledge their allegiance to him, nor has a written statement been issued by him or his office. State media has relied on archive footage to introduce him to the audience, and state propaganda networks have heavily relied on AI video and stills to create an image of an all-wise leader who rightly inherits the mantle of leadership.... But even as the leader remains hidden from sight, it seems the wider body politic is still functioning with little suggestion of a change in the war posture....

I wonder when, in human history, has the news of the death of a leader been suppressed so that people would believe that he was continuing to govern?

I haven't studied this question in great depth, but I have formed the opinion that the best story — the story to beat — is that of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China. As Wikipedia tells it:

I'm seeing a lot about the Jeff Bezos wedding, but how do we know he's really getting married?

There are motivations to put on this big show that are separate from any reasons to enter a marriage in the legal sense.

Consider this: "The embarrassing truth Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez haven't revealed about their $20m 'wedding'" (Daily Mail)(reporting that a Venetian official supposedly said no registrar had been appointed for the ceremony).

And here's the NYT: "What to Know About the Wedding of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez/The second marriage for both is taking place in Venice, Italy, under a shroud of secrecy and amid a swarm of speculation": "Italy has a variety of rules surrounding marriage rites, which can involve religious ceremonies, often performed in Roman Catholic churches. The Sánchez-Bezos wedding, however, will be nondenominational, likely of a ceremonial nature."

What I want to know about that couple is why, with all their money, they have, both of them, engineered their face into that post-human fright mask?

Why would the wedding be any less fake than the faces?

And here's Tina Brown: 

The Jeff Bezos-Lauren Sánchez (circa $56 million) Venice-sinking nuptials, tying up every tender on the Grand Canal (and 90 private jets expected), is the big beautiful buster bomb of high-net-worth exhibitionism. Now that the 55- year-old bride Sánchez has proved that landing the fourth richest man in the world requires the permanent display of breasts like genetically modified grapefruit and behemoth buttocks bursting from a leopard-print thong bikini, she’s exuberantly and unapologetically shown that the route to power and glory for women hasn't changed since the first Venetian Republic.

*** 

Sailin’ round the world in a dirty gondola/Oh, to be back in the land of Coca-Cola!

Where hate seems to be going.

As perceived by Marianne Williamson, writing on X:

We seem to have gone from calling for justice for Palestinians - a call with which I wholeheartedly agree - to an absurd romanticization of a gigantic death cult. That cult is not just coming for the Jews. Those who continue yelling 'We’re not antisemites!!!' while at least passively joining Hamas in their call for our destruction are naively aligning with a movement that hates them too.

"A social media trend has men surprising their friends with a call before bed. It has led to a lot of laughs, but also some deeper connections."

I'm reading "Men Are Calling Other Men to Say Good Night, and the Results Are Amazing" (NYT).

Calling, not texting. I'm thinking the only reason to make a phone call is to have something to video for social media. A phone call. Just to say good night?

Now, I'm going to read this article, but my presumption is that the NYT is involved in 2 things. First, it's what I've been collecting for many years under my tag "MSM reports what's in social media." What's happening in social media is considered news, partly because it kind of is and partly because the newspaper wants to seem decently hip to various trends. Second, I think the NYT has framed men as a problem. They're not thriving, they're not aspiring. We need to figure out what's wrong with them, maybe even empathize with them, because, after all, we do need them to function.

All right. I've read the article. It's written by a woman, Gina Cherelus, and "All of the men interviewed for this article said their female partners encouraged them to make the call."

"... showing the best people the best people...."

I'm reading "The Interview/Can Whitney Wolfe Herd Make Us Love Dating Apps Again?" (NYT). Wolfe Herd, a co-founder of Tinder, left Tinder and founded Bumble, then left Bumble and went back to Tinder, which she thinks she can reform into something that makes sense in this crazy world. Her career sounds like a romcom story arc — a jobcom.

I just want to focus on this one Q&A:

You’re quite bullish on A.I. I’ve heard you talk about it. How are you imagining A.I. functioning in this next iteration of the app?

Let’s say we could train A.I. on thousands of what we perceive as great profiles, and the A.I. can get so sophisticated at understanding: “Wow, this person has a thoughtful bio. This person has photos that are not blurry. They’re not all group photos. They’re not wearing sunglasses. We can see who they are clearly and we understand that they took time.” The A.I. can now select the best people and start showing the best people the best people and start getting you to a match quicker, more efficiently, more thoughtfully. The goal for Bumble over the next few years is to become the world’s smartest matchmaker. This is beyond love....

How do you become one of the best people who will be shown the best people? Obviously, you will use A.I. And so everyone using the app will also use A.I. to refine their profile, photos including, into something that A.I. has come to believe is best, and these A.I. bests will be paired up with other A.I. bests. Where, if anywhere, are the humans?

Do you picture the desk jobs of others like this?

I think this is, essentially, how Elon Musk pictures 90% of the federal workforce:

"Why Do We Want to Believe That Jim Morrison Is Still Alive?"

Asks Naomi Fry (at The New Yorker). Subheadline: "The singer died in 1971. A new documentary series posits that he faked his death to escape the burden of fame, and is living in hiding."

That prompted me to ask Grok, "What was that movie in the 1980s about a rock star who faked his death so he could live life as an unknown? Maybe something like 'Eddie and the Cruisers.'"

The answer made me laugh: "You're likely thinking of Eddie and the Cruisers, a 1983 film that fits your description perfectly...."

Yes, Grok doesn't know what I'm thinking. I'm enjoying its circumspection. I'm likely thinking of "Eddie and the Cruisers" when I suggest that the movie I'm thinking of is maybe something like "Eddie and the Cruisers." So meticulous. That's what I want from my A.I.

Later in that artificially intelligent conversation, I wrote: "I'm seeing a New Yorker article, 'Why Do We Want to Believe That Jim Morrison Is Still Alive?' That strikes me as the better path for reflection. Not: Is he alive. But: Why do we want to believe that this particular dead person is alive? What if some other famous person really did withdraw from celebrity life and live on as — to coin a phrase — a complete unknown? They'd be looking on as people imagined Elvis or Jim still walking the earth and thinking: What about me? If I were writing a screenplay about this character, which dead celebrity could I choose to portray as the central character who had made himself too unknown and now struggles to return to the world as a somebody but realizes that no one will really care because it's not as though Elvis or Jim returned into the light."

Meanwhile, Jim was brought back to life in a movie, "The Doors" (1991). And now, we see that Val Kilmer — the actor who played him — died yesterday.

"Kamala was just caught using a teleprompter at her Univision town hall!"

"Producers panic and turn off the prompter midway through her answer. Why did Univision allow this?! This is egregious journalistic malpractice."

Writes Charlie Kirk, at X, with this video:

 

BUSTED!!

Kamala was just caught using a teleprompter at her Univision town hall! Producers panic and turn off the prompter midway through her answer.

Why did Univision allow this?! This is egregious journalistic malpractice. pic.twitter.com/tH5Bh2clBx

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) October 11, 2024

If it's a town hall, you're not supposed to have the questions in advance. It's supposed to test the candidates. If the answers are pre-written, the candidate is cheating on the test, posing as capable of spontaneity, when she is actively protecting herself from the risk of spontaneity, and hiding that self-protection from us. She's asking us to see her as our protector.

Further evidence of scripting and self-protection:

I’m at the Kamala “town hall” being taped right now in Las Vegas. The corporate PR director of Univision is refusing to allow journalists access to the audience members who have been pre-selected to ask Kamala questions pic.twitter.com/Mb1AjRfMMx

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) October 10, 2024

UPDATE: I'm seeing some people on social media saying that the teleprompter was displaying Spanish text and had some other function than to assist Kamala Harris. I've searched for a mainstream news site that provides this information, but I cannot find it. Since it's a big topic and damaging to KH, I believe that there would be mainstream stories if it were true that the text was in Spanish.

"For years, companies avoided mentioning the remote assistance provided to their self-driving cars."

"The illusion of complete autonomy helped to draw attention to their technology and encourage venture capitalists to invest the billions of dollars needed to build increasingly effective autonomous vehicles...." 

I'm reading "How Self-Driving Cars Get Help From Humans Hundreds of Miles Away" (NYT).

If a Zoox robot taxi encounters a construction zone it has not seen before, for instance, a technician in the command center will receive an alert — a short message in a small, colored window on the side of the technician’s computer screen. Then, using the computer mouse to draw a line across the screen, the technician can send the car a new route to follow around the construction zone.... While Zoox and other companies have started to reveal how humans intervene to help driverless cars, none of the companies have disclosed how many remote-assistance technicians they employ or how much it all costs....

That's always how it's been with robots. We suspect there's really a little guy in there....

"Does dementia make you taller?"

Let me tell you what I really think. I don't have *any* inside info about this particular event. However, it is a fact that presidents have body doubles and decoys for security reasons. And, from a very reliable, firsthand source: To the extent our intel agencies (or whomever)… https://t.co/lAgeTIYQbm

— Sharyl Attkisson 🕵️‍♂️💼🥋 (@SharylAttkisson) July 26, 2024

"To anyone drawing a parallel between my film Bob Roberts and the attempted assassination of Trump..."

"... let’s be clear. What happened yesterday was a real attempt on a presidential candidate’s life. Those that are denying the assassination attempt was real are truly in a deranged mindset. A human being was shot yesterday. Another killed. They may not be human beings that you agree with politically but for shame folks. Get over your blind hatred of these people. They are fellow Americans. This collective hatred is killing our souls and consuming whatever is left of our humanity."

Writes Tim Robbins. 

Thanks, Tim. 

How can the it-was-staged theory get any traction when we know Corey Comperatore was shot dead? Do they think that was fake? 

"Calm down people, it is not raw/cold, it is a veggie burger patty underneath a slice of tofu."

Said Chuck Schumer [CORRECTION: No, just some random commenter], quoted in "Chuck Schumer deletes Father’s Day photo tweet in front of grill after critics slam his spatula skills" (NY Post).

Oh, Chuck! Stand up for yourself. 

"The admission came after footage taken by a hiker circulated widely on Chinese social media, prompting consternation online."

"It showed water gushing out of pipes that had been built high up into the rock face, feeding some — if not all — of the waterfall’s flow.... 'Depending on the season, I cannot guarantee that I am in my best condition whenever my friends come to see me,' read the statement, written from the perspective of the waterfall. To make your experience of the journey more complete and to make you feel that it’s a worthwhile trip, I underwent a small enhancement so that I could meet my friends in better shape in the dry season,' it continued."

From "Tallest waterfall in China is fed by pipes, officials admit/Yuntai Falls is considered China’s 'tallest uninterrupted waterfall.' Officials admitted that its water is sourced from a pipe network during the drier months" (WaPo).

On June 3, in Yuntai Mountain, Henan, China, a man climbed up the Yuntai Mountain waterfall to explore its end and discovered that the source was actually a few water pipes. pic.twitter.com/wOkldRnnRp

— Li Jianping (@cz8921469_z) June 5, 2024

"'You take thirty or sixty seconds of a kid’s voice and log in to ElevenLabs, and pretty soon Grandma’s getting a call in Grandson’s voice...'"

"'... saying, "Grandma, I’m in trouble, I’ve been in an accident."' A financial request is almost always the end game.... 'And here’s the thing: the bad guy can fail ninety-nine per cent of the time, and they will still become very, very rich. It’s a numbers game.'... In 2020, a corporate attorney in Philadelphia took a call from what he thought was his son, who said he had been injured in a car wreck involving a pregnant woman and needed nine thousand dollars to post bail.... In January, voters in New Hampshire received a robocall call from Joe Biden’s voice telling them not to vote in the primary. (The man who admitted to generating the call said that he had used ElevenLabs software.) 'I didn’t think about it at the time that it wasn’t his real voice,' an elderly Democrat in New Hampshire [said]... 'That’s how convincing it was.'"

From "The Terrifying A.I. Scam That Uses Your Loved One’s Voice/A Brooklyn couple got a call from relatives who were being held ransom. Their voices—like many others these days—had been cloned" (The New Yorker).

"The New York Times found hundreds of X accounts sharing images of dead bodies, claiming to be Israeli civilians killed in the last 24 hours of fighting."

"Some of the images viewed by the Times appeared to be manipulated and edited. Underneath some of the videos and images posted on X, people warned that they could be spread as part of a campaign to stoke fear among Israelis. Some of the accounts claimed to be working on behalf of Hamas. On WhatsApp, Israelis warned each other not to look at X, which often auto-plays videos without warning. 'Don’t look, you might see someone you know,' wrote one person on a WhatsApp group dedicated to a neighborhood of South Tel Aviv. There is a long history of misinformation being shared among Israeli and Palestinian groups, with false claims and conspiracies spiking during moments of heightened violence in the region. Since Elon Musk took ownership of the platform one year ago, he has eliminated many of the content moderation teams that once removed violent imagery from the platform...."

From "Graphic images of violence flood social media" (NYT). 

ADDED: From "German tattoo artist ID’d as woman paraded through streets by Hamas" (NY Post):

[A] cousin spotted footage of Shani online as her body appeared lifeless and surrounded by armed militants in the back of the truck. One Hamas fighter had his leg over her waist as another grabbed part of her dreadlocks. Her legs were unnaturally laid out in the back of the truck. Her parents watched the video to confirm it was their daughter.... 'We recognized her by the tattoos, and she has long dreadlocks'....

AND: From "Israeli student screams ‘Don’t kill me’ as Hamas terrorists kidnap her from rave: horrifying video" (NY Post):

"A substance that has long been associated with parties could be mainstreamed and medicalized..."

"There could come a day when MDMA is associated less with feeling good than with trying to get better.... In the late nineteen-nineties, a psychiatrist named Charles Grob published a study showing that MDMA could be safely administered in a medical setting. His researchers administered the drug at a hospital to volunteers.... The only person who had a problem with the tests, he reported, was the head nurse. She was annoyed that her nurses were neglecting their duties, instead choosing to spend time with the study participants. 'The subjects were so empathetic and interested in the lives of the nurses,' Grob wrote, that the nurses gravitated to them, eager to talk. One of the peculiarities of MDMA is that it turns its users into listeners.... [T]he sexiness associated with MDMA might not be one of its intrinsic properties; instead, the drug might work more broadly to deepen our interest in others. Therapy is a social pursuit: a good therapist provides not just insight and tools but a relationship in which it’s possible to change. When someone takes MDMA in the presence of a therapist, they might feel more supported and secure in this bond, and more able to dredge up painful feelings or hard memories without being overwhelmed by fear or shame...."

From "The Rebranding of MDMA/Ecstasy used to be known as Therapy. What kind of drug could it become next?" (The New Yorker).

As I said yesterday, look out for the medicalization of everything.

And, reading this, let me add, look out for the transformation of anything that you've thought of as sexual into something that isn't sexual at all. 

"When people were asked about the morality of people close to them or who lived before they were born and they didn't know, 'the perception of moral decline was attenuated, eliminated or reversed.'"

From "Many people believe morality is declining — but it may be an illusion" (Axios), summarizing "The illusion of moral decline" by Adam M. Mastroianni & Daniel T. Gilbert (in Nature).

ADDED: You have to realize what these researchers were talking about when they talked about "morality." As Axios put it:

The study... focuses on "everyday morality," the kindness, respect, and honesty that most people agree are a reflection of morality.

The researchers also surveyed people in January 2020 and asked them to compare whether people were "kind, honest, nice, and good" in 2020, 2010, and 2000, as well as at various times in the past, including when they turned 20 years old and the year they were born.

Most people agree that "kindness, respect, and honesty" reflect morality? But then we're told that people were not asked about "kindness, respect, and honesty" but "kind, honest, nice, and good." Did the researchers equate respect and niceness? I don't think niceness is a reflection of morality. Do "most people"? Niceness is superficial behavior that may arise from genuine beneficence but could just as well come from a desire to get along and fit in or to manipulate others. 

"In 1964, Gloria Szymanski, a recently divorced mother struggling with the sexual and behavioral strictures of her new status, was filmed as a patient of three renowned therapists..."

"... Carl Rogers, Frederick Perls, and Albert Ellis. The film was produced and narrated by the psychologist Everett L. Shostrum, who was Szymanski’s personal therapist and who recruited her for this starring role.... 'He told Gloria that the films would only be used in schools and colleges to teach psychology students so imagine her surprise then when making her breakfast pancakes a year or so later to see her interview with Dr. Perls on TV and then she found out that the films were going to be shown in full in movie theatres all over the country.'... She talks, with frankness and charm, about her daddy issues and her pinings for smart, authoritative men. If not for the clinical setting and the disapproving gaze of the therapists, her desires would seem normal—which, of course, they are...."

From "Gender Critique Meets Lewd Spectacle in 'The Patient Gloria'/Gina Moxley’s play examines the sexual and behavioral strictures on women through the lens of psychotherapy circa 1964" (The New Yorker).

Even as disease could be perceived as health — see the first post of today — health could be perceived as disease.

ADDED: I believe it is a terrible invasion of privacy, but nevertheless, I found the original film on YouTube, so I present it here: