"It was like a chinook coming out of the Pacific Northwest. It had an anger to it and it appealed to twenty-something people who felt displaced and unemployed and left out."

Said David Letterman — speaking at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony — about the 1991 Pearl Jam album "Ten." He continues:

I was almost 50 and even I was pissed off.... Then, it turned out that these guys in Pearl Jam were something more than a band. They're true living cultural organisms. They would recognize injustice and they would stand up for it....

In 1994, these young men risked their careers by going after those beady-eyed, blood-thirsty weasels. I'm just enjoying saying that. And because they did, because they stood up to the corporations I'm happy to say, ladies and gentleman, today every concert ticket in the United States of America is free....

I used to have a television show, they were on my show 10 different times over the years. Every time they were there, they would blow the roof off the place and I'm not talking figuratively. They actually blew the roof off the place. For two years I did a show without a roof over the goddamn theater....

I love that joke format: Use a metaphor and then act like it's not a metaphor. Can't think of any other examples at the moment. Maybe you can.

"5Pointz Graffiti Artists Whose Works Were Erased Will Get Day in Court."

The NYT reports.

This is no vandalism case in a criminal courthouse, but rather a federal lawsuit filed in 2013 by the 23 artists who painted regularly at 5Pointz, against its owner, Jerry Wolkoff, who ordered the artwork destroyed....

The judge’s ruling offers the artists a chance to confront Mr. Wolkoff in court and to seek redress for painting over their work, said Jonathan Cohen, an artist who had curated the murals and helped organize the artists at 5Pointz since 2002....

In an interview, Mr. Wolkoff called the judge’s decision “mind boggling” because the art was never intended for anything but short-term display. The 5Pointz artists followed a street graffiti tradition of creating murals knowing full well that they would soon be painted over by other artists, he added.

“They call it bombing, and the next artist goes over someone else’s work,” he said. “They painted over their own work continually, and it goes on for years. That’s the idea of graffiti. There were tens of thousands of paintings there, over the years, and they’d last for three or six or nine months.... I never thought they’d sue me — they bit the hand that fed them,” he said, adding that the work was, after all, spray painted on his property. He said he reminded the artists constantly that one day he would turn the building into high-rises.

“They knew for 10 years I was going to tear the building down,” he said.... “I know people laugh at me but I cried” watching the building come down, Mr. Wolkoff said.

How can the artists can win this? Relying on Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990, they claim entitlement to notice in writing 90 days before the destruction of the art, which, they say, would have given them the opportunity to remove or photograph the work. The artists are not arguing that the owner can't tear down his building.

(Here's my earlier blog post about this controversy.)

"He can't sing, or he can’t really play. Picasso spent 40 years trying to get as simple as that."

Said John Lennon about David Peel, quoted in the Rolling Stone obituary for David Peel, a New York City street character who lived to be 71:

The singer, born David Rosario, first came to notoriety in the late Sixties when he and his band the Lower East Side – named after the New York City region where they routinely performed on the streets – scored an offbeat hit with "I Like Marijuana," off the group's 1968 debut Have a Marijuana....

Peel and the Lower East Side's first studio album, 1970's The American Revolution, also boasted pro-pot tracks like "Legalize Marijuana" and "I Want to Get High," but also examined more social issues of the era, including his anti-Vietnam War stance ("I Want to Kill You," "Hey, Mr. Draft Board") and a song about "bad cops" ("Oink, Oink").

John Lennon sang about David Peel in a song called "New York City":

"Up come a man with a guitar in his hand / Singing, 'Have a marijuana if you can' / His name was David Peel / And we found he was real/He sang, 'The Pope smokes dope every day' / Up come a policeman, shoved us to the street / Singing, 'Power to the People today.'"

Listen to the John Lennon song here. Here's the audio of David Peel singing "I Like Marijuana." It's not good and I don't think it was ever intended to be good, just kind of fun and stupid, which expresses the essence of marijuana, no? Here's a clip of Peel singing "Marijuana," which I'm linking to only because something horrible becomes visible at 0:58. Here's Peel explaining himself and showing off a hippie style of speaking in 1979. Before clicking, just stop and think how you would answer the question "Who are you?" in the style of a hippie:

"The strange and improbable tale of a Barack Obama impersonator who tries to cash in on the 'look of a lifetime.'"

That's the description at Amazon for the movie "Kings of Pastry" (click to enlarge and clarify):



I went to put that on my streaming-video "wish list" as I was reading a review of the documentary "Somm" (which we watched last night):

Even those who view high-end oenophilia as an elitist waste of money will have to marvel at the dedication of the four wine freaks in Somm, men intent on entering an exclusive club of sommeliers that to date has only admitted around 200 experts to its ranks. Jason Wise's doc is reminiscent of 2009's Kings of Pastry, which focused on a similar test for pastry chefs; but this film has broader commercial appeal, and should attract its share of gourmet viewers at the arthouse.

"Arthouse" is one of my favorite words, by the way. Demonstrating why, here I am in Austin, Texas, in 2007:



The first comment at that old link asks: "Ann: You are so easily amused, would you consider yourself a low-maintenance date?"

Well, I was a low-maintenance date yesterday, as Meade and I ate Meade's special chili and streamed "Somm." It was a worth-watching documentary, and documentary is my favorite category of movie. As a person with almost no sense of smell, it's interesting/painful to encounter people engaged in the most difficult feats of smell. But it's not only the capacity to smell that these guys were tested on. Somehow they perceive — or imagine or purport to perceive — 10 or so smells in one glass of wine. They must also — quickly — translate the smells into words. It's a test of smell power and word power. And you need a vast background of real-world experience even to know what the things the wines smell like smell like — such as a grandmother's closet or a new and cut garden hose. Why would you cut your new hose? The answer seems to be: So you'll have one more point of comparison when you need to talk about how wine smells.

But, anyway, that's not going to work for me. I stopped to smell a magnolia flower yesterday and asked Meade, "Does it smell like anything?" I didn't mean did the magnolia smell like something else — a freshly opened can of tennis balls or whatever. I meant did it have any smell at all, because I smelled nothing. I assumed that if there was a smell, it was a magnolia smell, and I struggle to remember the particularity of flower smells.

I'm thinking "Kings of Pastry" will be better for me, because pastry has more of a textural component — creamy, crunchy, flaky, granular — and more of a visual component — which is kind of important in a movie:



Plus that movie was made by D.A. Pennebaker, who made 3 of my favorite movies "Don't Look Back," "Monterey Pop," and "The War Room."

And, come on Amazon, it's about pastry chefs taking a pastry-chef test, not about Barack Obama impersonator who tries to cash in. I'm thinking that's not somebody's idea of a joke, but just a misplaced description of an actual other documentary. Maybe it's "Bronx Obama"...



Ah, yes. Here's the long version at Amazon. I wonder how false Obama is doing now. And I wonder how the flowers smell, as the dawn breaks, and I'm up early and cracking the blog open one more time in Madison, Wisconsin.

Reddit's amazing April Fool's experiment, "Place."

"Each user could choose one pixel from 16 colors to place anywhere on the canvas. They could place as many pixels of as many colors as they wanted, but they had to wait a few minutes between placing each one."

Here's a time-lapse picture of how that played out over a period of 72 hours:



This is the most fascinating art-and-sociology project I have ever seen. The link above explains how factions emerged and coordinated, focusing on just a few of the things that happened (like how that American flag ended up in the middle).

"Well, I think that it may be that the real foreign policy doctrine of this administration is, keep them guessing..."

"... and not just in operational terms. If you think about what President Trump said in discussing these strikes, he said, America has to stand for justice. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said earlier in the week that we needed to act on behalf of the international community. That fits squarely in a liberal internationalist and neoconservative foreign policy establishment that Trump seemed to reject root and branch during the campaign. If you take that rhetoric of this week seriously, then the sort of things Senator McCain is saying, follow from it. If we really are going to stand for justice, we need to have a broader intervention in Syria. Is Trump willing to take his own words to their logical conclusion that way? I’m not sure that he should, but -- and I’m not sure that he will."

Said Ramesh Ponnuru on "Face the Nation" today when he was invited to explain what Trump's strike in Syria tells us about whether he's still an America-first nationalist, as he seemed to be during his campaign, or had gone neoconservative.

It seems to me Trump has said all along that he wants to keep everyone guessing.

In an effort to understand the subliminality of war rhetoric, I erase some of the words in a paragraph of a Washington Post column.

Here's the first paragraph of "Obama’s Syria strike plan was much bigger than Trump’s" by Josh Rogin in The Washington Post:

Same screen shot, with erasures:

"Companies now fight 'presenteeism,' a neologism that describes the lackluster performance of foggy-brained, sleep-deprived employees..."

"... with sleep programs like Sleepio, an online sleep coach, and sleep fairs, like the one hosted last month in Manhattan by Nancy H. Rothstein, director of Circadian Corporate Sleep Programs and otherwise known as the Sleep Ambassador, for LinkedIn. For the last few years, Ms. Rothstein has been designing sleep education and training programs for a number of Fortune 500 companies. At the LinkedIn sleep fair, she taught attendees how to make a bed (use hospital corners, please) and gave out analog alarm clocks.... Sleep entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley and beyond have poured into the sleep space, as branders like to say — a $32 billion market in 2012 — formerly inhabited by old-style mattress and pharmaceutical companies.... [T]he best sleep I’ve had in weeks cost $22, and lasted 33 minutes. It was a Deep Rest 'class”' at Inscape, a meditation studio in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan designed by Winka Dubbeldam, the sought-after Dutch architect, to evoke the temple at Burning Man, and other esoteric spaces, and created by Khajak Keledjian, a founder, with his brother, Haro, of Intermix, which they sold to the Gap for $130 million in 2013."

From "Sleep Is the New Status Symbol" in the "Fashion & Style" section of the NYT.

I didn't realize there was so much commercial marketing of sleep. You could almost call it — like "Big Pharma" — "Big Sleep."

But "the big sleep" is death:

Good thing there aren't death entrepreneurs flooding the market with products to help us on our way.

But maybe there are, and they're just doing such a subtle selling job, overcoming our resistance.

Nicholas Kristof uses the phrase "Free at last!" to describe Hillary Clinton in a NYT column titled "Hillary Clinton, Free to Speak Her Mind."

I was going to blog about what I first saw, that headline, "Hillary Clinton, Free to Speak Her Mind." Hillary Clinton sat for an interview this week, but did she actually reveal what's in her head? Even if she's free to be revealing, is that something she did or even something she's able to do? And I was considering going super cruel and asking what it would even mean for a person who is dishonest to her core to "speak her mind"?*

But then I skimmed the column and was amazed that Kristof had seen fit to appropriate the "Free at last!" exclamation — the last words of Martin Luther King Jr.'s sacred text: "we... will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: 'Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

In a week when Kendall Jenner got excoriated for appropriating "Black Lives Matter" to sell Pepsi,** why would Nicholas Kristof appropriate "Free at last!" to sell Hillary Clinton?

Talk about tone deaf — Pepsi never came out and said "Black Lives Matter." It watered BLM-ish protest down into demands for "love" and "start[ing] the conversation." Kristof lifts the slogan verbatim:

One gauge of Clinton’s new freedom is the simplest: her name... When she ran for United States Senate in New York she was Hillary Rodham Clinton, but her 2016 campaign book and ballot name downsized her to Hillary Clinton to avoid antagonizing traditionalists. Her Twitter page and website are still just Hillary Clinton — but after our interview we walked backstage together to sign a poster for Women in the World, and she scrawled: Hillary Rodham Clinton. Free at last!

And I don't think Kristof meant that as cutting sarcasm. If he did, though, I'm laughing with him.

______________________

* This sentence should be recognized as employing the rhetorical device called apophasis.

** Last night's "SNL" made fun of the Pepsi debacle, here.

"Thank you, Scott!"

From last night's "Saturday Night Live."

This would be funnier in Wisconsin if they'd chosen another name for the guy.

I try to augment this post by finding video of the "Thank you" chant from the 2011 Wisconsin protests. It wasn't a thank you to Governor Scott Walker, but a thank you to the 14 Democratic state senators who fled to Illinois and holed up in a motel. The so-called "fleebaggers" had, for a time, blocked a vote on a bill supported by the newly elected GOP majority. In the end the fleebaggers returned, and the bill was passed. But I remember the big rally celebrating them, and the chant was "Thank you, thank you."

I tried to Google to find video of that...

Did you mean: wisconsin flea badgers thank you

I love that. I love misreadings.

And I love an unexpected appearance by the Wisconsin Badgers.

And fleas. On a political post. That makes this one of the rare occasions when I get to use the old "insect politics" tag.

"Too Many of Trump’s Liberal Critics Are Praising His Strike on Syria."

According to Joan Walsh at The Nation.

She's fareeking out.

On CNN’s New Day Thursday, global analyst Fareed Zakaria declared, “I think Donald Trump became president of the United States” last night. To his credit, Zakaria has previously called Trump a “bullshit artist” and said, “He has gotten the presidency by bullshitting.” But Zakaria apparently thinks firing missiles make one presidential. On MSNBC, Nicholas Kristof, an aggressive Trump critic, said he “did the right thing” by bombing Syria. Anchor Brian Williams, whose 11th Hour has regularly been critical of Trump, repeatedly called the missiles “beautiful,” to a noisy backlash on Twitter....

Any liberal who praises these missile strikes has to account for what comes next....

It was disappointing to see Hillary Clinton say Wednesday afternoon that she thought air strikes on Syrian airfields were an appropriate response to the chemical-weapon attack. She was always more hawkish than I wished, and that shows it. But it’s wrong to insist she’d have done the “same thing” as Trump. Clinton’s secretary of state wouldn’t likely have told Assad we were no longer concerned about removing him; if she did fire missiles at Syrian airfields, she would have done so with a clearer notion of what comes next. Trump appears to be clueless....

Yes, in the imaginary world where Hillary is President, she does the same thing as Trump, but differently. She's so disappointing, and yet so superior to Trump.

It's so difficult for Joan. She doesn't know which way to tsk.

"The American military strike against Syria threatened Russian-American relations on Friday..."

"... as the Kremlin denounced President Trump’s use of force and the Russian military announced that it was suspending an agreement to share information about air operations over the country, devised to avoid accidental conflict...."

"'Work this out,' Mr. Trump said, according to two people briefed on the exchange."

"The admonition was aimed at Stephen K. Bannon, the tempestuous chief strategist, and Reince Priebus, the mild-mannered chief of staff, over a series of dust-ups with Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, and the top economic adviser, Gary D. Cohn. But they may not be able to...."

"That's just somebody in the BLM sabotaging."

Said Meade, after I texted him the link to "Public lands agency changes website from family visiting a park to a giant pile of coal."

Is Meade right? I see in the article (at Mashable) it says:

By putting up a coal photo, the BLM is simply showcasing another aspect of its wide-ranging mission, Paul Ross, a spokesman for the Interior Department, said in an email. He clarified that Interior Department bureaus and agencies manage their content separately from the main department's accounts.

"We applaud their creativity in getting their message out," Ross said. He added that Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke "has made it clear that he will manage our public lands in accordance with President Teddy Roosevelt's mixed use philosophy, where development of our natural resources is done in a way that balances conservation and public access."

Is Meade right?

Yes. The spokesman is trying to cover and minimize.

No. This is a legit expression of the BLM mission under Trump.

I don't know.

 

pollcode.com free polls

ADDED: Something similar came up on March 31st, blogged here, and I made a very similar poll. The overwhelming vote was sabotage. The EPA had put up a "media alert" titled "What They Are Saying About President Trump's Executive Order on Energy Independence" and the first thing on the list was a quote from Sen. Shelley Moore saying "With this Executive Order, President Trump has chosen to recklessly bury his head in the sand...."

Super bloom.

Trampled.

CNN analyzes the photograph of Trump's Mar-a-Lago war room.

"What this photo of Trump's war room tells us."

It's nice to see all the participants identified and to see the names of 3 people who you'd think might be there but were not (and to know they participated "via secure teleconference from Washington"), but I think it's silly to purport to be explaining what the photograph "tells" us and to go wandering into one's own mind and finding associations:

What does the photo evoke?

The photo has already been likened to the iconic picture of former President Barack Obama huddled with his national security team in the White House Situation Room as they monitor via live video the killing of Osama bin Laden. The picture is shot from the same angle, with the president receiving a briefing on the operation he just ordered.

If we're going to compare the photographs, there are some notable differences. Trump is sitting at the head of his table, with his advisers arrayed around him. Obama is off to one side, at approximately the position of the Secretary of Commerce in the Trump photo.

At the head of Obama's table is the one man in uniform (Marshall B. Webb, the Assistant Commanding General of the Joint Special Operations Command). In the Trump photo, there is also one man in uniform. He's the only person in the photograph standing — he's standing at the door — and the only person CNN doesn't identify. In the Obama photograph, many participants are standing, not just the doorkeeper.

Another difference is that in the Obama photograph, the table is covered with laptops and 2 participants — Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates — have paper cups, perhaps coffee cups. In the Trump photograph, there are no laptops on the table, and nobody but the President has a drink. It's water, and it's in a glass.

If we're going to talk about what photos "tell" us and drag in this second photograph, let's not stop at squeeing over its iconicness. Let's ask what the difference between the 2 photographs tells us. You may think this is trivial, but I'm just following CNN's lead here. You could infuse a lot of meaning into the differences. The distinction I indentified could be used to spin out an interpretation that Trump is more presidential, more commanding, etc. etc.

If interpreting photographs is what we're doing.