A little bout with black magic
It pains me to report that eventually my mother’s dabblings led her into a little bout with black magic. I wish I could deny this and prevent many of her descendants from being burned at the stake, but unfortunately she not only wrote and signed a small treatise on the subject under the influence of a sinister buffoon called Aleister Crowley, but she is also mentioned either under her true name or under an alias in all books about this rancid character.
At just about the time I was becoming acclimated to the Ecoles des Roches in Normandy, quite unaware, as usual, of what Mother was up to, Mother was in London acclimating herself to Aleister Crowley.
The practitioner and staunch defender of every form of vice historically known to man, generally accepted as one of the most depraved, vicious, and revolting humbugs who ever escaped from a nightmare or a lunatic asylum, universally despised and enthusiastically expelled from every country he ever tried to live in, Mr. Crowley nevertheless was considered by my mother to be not only the epitome of charm and good manners, but also the possessor of one of the very few genius-bathed brains she had been privileged to observe at work during her entire lifetime. Ask me not why! Much as I revered her, my mother was still a woman, one of that wondrous gender whose thought processes are not for male understanding.
- Preston Sturges, Preston Sturges
40′s movies marathon – best of 1948
Well, that was 1948. A year of slow but noticable change in the movie industry, and of change in this marathon, where I learned how to upload clips of the scences I can’t or don’t want to forget. You can also find the clips on YouTube, and that may actually be more interesting than these reviews, because is there anything more pointless than reading about movies? I try to make clips that represent what I liked about the movie, so if you like the clip, you’ll probably like the movie.
Best of the best
Literary classics
Meanwhile, in the former Axis
Angry murdering murderers and the murdering murderers who murder them
Disney at their worst
Preston Sturges at his worst
I can’t think of more categories
Organize your work like a programmer
In my essay on how software is made, I mentioned how programmers are constantly trying to find smarter, more flexible ways to Get Things Done. This involves adopting all kinds of fads, and then some fads turn out to be really good ideas, and become permanent.
An interesting fad in my world at the moment is called Kanban. One core idea is about how you visualize and restrict your team’s workflow in order to highlight bottlenecks, and maintain a steady flow of tasks without getting distracted by doing ten things at once.
What you do is make a board with different stages a task can go through. For each area you choose a limit for how many tasks can be there at a time. And then you use post-it notes to mark where each task is. Every time a task is moved, that opens up space for another task from upstream. Essentially tasks are pulled instead of pushed through the system.
For instance, you may have a Backlog area for future work (max: unlimited? four months worth?), a Ready area for tasks you are ready to start on next (max: 5?), an In Progress area for the tasks you work on right now (max: 2?), and an Approval area for finished tasks that somebody needs to verify, (max: 5?) The areas and limits are up to you.
Here’s one version of such a board. Here’s another:
This might be useful in all kinds of situations, also for individuals. Try it for your own work, see if it works.
Ergo Proxy
Year: 2006
Type: Science fiction
Subtype: Shining dystopia on a hill, with monster gods and androids on the verge of self-awareness.
Primary audience: People who think it’s quite okay that many things sound like Coldplay now.
Tics: Hey look how much I remember from philosophy class!
Worth watching: Yes.
The earth is formless and void, except for a great domed city run along the principle of “life is hard, let’s go shopping!” Outside there’s only the wind and the cold, dead rock. Inside there is dull perfection. Androids do all the work, a junta all the thinking. A secret race of monsters do something as well, but it’s not quite clear what. A bit of murdering, a bit of mystery. A bit of bringing the story outside the dome, where madmen and even more monsters hide in ruined neighbor cities.
There ought to be a law against filling your stories with philosophical references and hints of metaphysical relevance. Or maybe a fine. It’s the old The Prisoner sickness, where the ambitions of the Magnificent Creator spin out of control, towards a like-a-significant ending about existence and narrative etc.
But that’s only the end. The feet of this series stay mostly close to the ground. I like the characters, the mood, the visuals, the music. I even liked the nonsensical standalone episode that spoofs Walt Disney. Balanced against all that, pompousness is a price worth paying.
40′s movies marathon – part 120
The Treasure of Sierra Madre (1948, USA, Huston)
Being poor doesn’t make you a better person. It makes you greedy and mean and paranoid, and desperate to hold on to any wealth that may come your way. Well, or maybe that’s just Humphrey Bogart, whose latent psychotic tendencies are triggered by the sight or thought or even smell of GOLD, GOLD I tell you, the hills are full of GOLD, and it’s all mine!!!!! Watched it all.
.. and so we enter .. 1949!
House of Strangers (1949, USA, Mankiewicz)
You can put a moustache on Edward G. Robinson and teach him to talk like Chico Marx, but that still doesn’t make him a believable Italian-American. And it’s a shame too, because this looked pretty good until he showed up. Watched: 20 minutes.
Reign of Terror (1949, USA, Mann)
Trust Anthony Mann to make the most out of a low budget, and bring out the Reign of Terror not the way it actually happened, but the way it appears in our nightmares, a time of blood and chaos and fanaticism. Watched it all.
The Red Menace (1949, USA, Springsteen)
The Communist Party has tentacles all over America, and every time they manage to seduce and ensnare another disaffected veteran, a Party boss in some secret Party lair strokes his Party cat and goes muwhahahaha. Watched: 14 minutes. I kind of look forward to seeing some genuine red scare movies now. Maybe there are even a few good ones?
Then he rapidly jabbed the scalpel three times into my upper arm
We lined up outside the infirmary and, as we got near the door, we were told to pull our left arms out of our shirts. Inside the infirmary I saw a very surprising sight: a young cow, hitched to a desk, wearing a leather bandage over its eyes. When I got close enough for my turn, to my horror I saw the doctor reach into the cow’s hide with his forceps, cut off one of the pustules the cow seemed to be covered with, and dip his scalpel into the severed pustule. Then he rapidly jabbed the scalpel three times into my upper arm. This procedure didn’t seem to hurt the cow at all and it didn’t hurt me either.
But when I described all this years later in Hollywood to my doctor and yachting companion, Bert Woolfan, he told me I was full of flit, that I must be dreaming, that no tehcnique such as I described had been used since the beginning of the nineteenth century, that I had obviously confused a steel engraving of an early Edward Jenner experiment with a recollection of my own, that since 1850 it had been done with vaccines, that there hadn’t been a live cow in a hospital since Grant took Richmond, etc. But the good doctor was wrong. Exactly what I described happened to me when I was in the thirteenth class of the Lycée Janson de Sailly on the avenue Henri Martin (now Georges Mandel) in Paris in about 1907.
- Preston Sturges, Preston Sturges
Jada, men hvor er det innvandrings_liberale_ partiet i Norge?
To FrP’ere har skrevet kronikk om den flerkulturelle trusselen mot Norge. Så får vi det samme gamle: VG ringer opp Vigrid, og alle later som de er sjokkerte. Selv var jeg fullt klar over at FrP har mange innvandringsfiendtlige politikere og velgere sist jeg stemte på dem. Og jeg tror nok også samarbeidspartnerne deres i Høyre har kjent til dette en stund. Det er ikke en stor hemmelighet.
Hvilket politisk parti du støtter handler, som mange andre relasjoner i livet, om hva du liker vs hva du kan leve med. Jeg har slått meg til ro med innvandringsretorikken til FrP. Jeg liker det ikke, men jeg kan leve med det.
Andre vurderer det annerledes. Men jeg har et spørsmål til alle som nå går gjennom avstandsmarkeringsritualet: Hvor finner jeg egentlig det innvandringsliberale partiet i Norge? Eller, for å unngå et oppbrukt ord: Partiet med en human og fornuftig innvandringspolitikk?
Alle partiene som i dag kritiserer Tybring Gjedde & Co har nemlig selv vært innom regjeringskvartalet i løpet av de siste tiårene. Og det de har gjennomført der er i praksis FrP-politikk. Det er en gradsforskjell, og en retorisk forskjell, men ingenting virkelig annerledes. Det handler bare om vi skal stenge grensene mye eller enda litt mer.
Nå vet jeg egentlig ikke hvordan en human og fornuftig innvandringspolitikk skal fungere i praksis. Og et slikt parti ville nok slitt ved valgurnene. Men det ville iallefall gitt de harmdirrende FrP-kritikerne litt tryggere grunn under beina, og gjort denne debatten til noe mer enn en retorisk lek.
There were some fairly bright people in the world around 1900
In the salon of the apartment there was an earphone hanging beside the fireplace. I had listened to this idly once or twice, but it was completely dead and I had not the faintest idea what it was for. Then one night after dinner, Dr. Max Mertz, the kapellmeister of Isadora’s school, who was visiting us, unhooked the earphone and listened to it. His face took on a beatific expression. I asked him what he was listening to and he immediately waved me down, telling me in my own home, with perfect German manners, to shut up. He now resumed his listening and his expression varied between deep puzzlement and that of someone listening to celestial music. The earphone was connected directly with a microphone in the proscenium of the Paris opera house and was a service supplied for a very reasonable fee by the telephone company. It was called the Opéraphone, and I mention it only to show that there were some fairly bright people in the world around 1900, and that the whole idea of wired shows for which one pays is not a new idea.
- Preston Sturges, Preston Sturges
Political power grows out of the erupting casing of a bomb
Michael Moorcock can’t take the entire credit for inventing steampunk with his 1971 novel The Warlord of the Air. (There’s also Walt Disney, for one.) But he can take some of it. Here’s the airships and the steam tech – and also something that (for better or worse) didn’t make it into the rest of the genre: Anti-imperialist satire.
Moorcock is a writer with a mission, and that’s one of the things I like about him. When you take the ideas out of SF, you remove some of what made it so interesting in the first place. It doesn’t have to be political ideas, but that’s what you often get from Moorcock, and what makes him one of my personal favorites. He probably wouldn’t enjoy sharing that spot with Robert Heinlein, (whose novels he once compared to Mein Kampf), but hey.
The Warlord of the Air is one of his very political novels. Moorcock’s neo-Victorian technology isn’t something glorious, it’s a symptom of a rotten world, an alternate world where the European empires never fell, and have continued to carry the white man’s burden up to the present, ie. the 1970’s.
Moorcock spoofs the arrogance of the well-meaning imperialist, and he uses the story to argue that a peaceful 20th century wouldn’t necessarily have been better than the 20th century we actually had. It would have just delayed the shakeup we needed.
Well – not sure about that. But then, disagreeing is half the fun of alternate history scenarios.
Listened to last week: The Blind Boys of Alabama, Monoral, Twinkie Clark, Nick Drake
The Blind Boys of Alabama – Atom Bomb, from the 2005 album Atom Bomb
Monoral – Pompadour, from the 2008 album Turbulence
Twinkie Clark – Let Your Anointing Be In This Place
Nick Drake – At the Chime of a City Clock, from the 1970 album Bryter Layter
