August 26, 2022

James Risen sees danger in the GOP

Elvis Costello in 1980 calls Ray Charles, James Brown, niggers.

Via 

Too long on tour, too many drugs, too much drink. Fatigue and irritation on a mammoth scale. A scenario common to the vocation which rarely comes to good. And there were the Attractions: stranded in an Ohio hotel bar with castoffs from the love generation. “Whatever the larger argument,” Costello recollected in his 2015 memoir Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, “the petty sniping over a few cocktails soon escalated from snide remarks to unspeakable slanders. I’ll have to take the word of witnesses that I really used such despicable racial slurs in the same sentence as two of the greatest musicians that ever lived, but whatever I did, I did it to provoke a bar fight and finally put the lights out.”

[…]

“Does anything else that I’ve done in the other 59 years and 525,550 minutes suggest that I harbor suppressed racist beliefs?”

August 27, 2022

Via The Economist https://www.economist.com/the-world-in-brief

Officials in Pakistan said that the death toll from floods after heavy monsoon rains that have afflicted the country since mid-June had risen to nearly 1,000. In appealing for international help on Friday, the prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, said that 33m of Pakistan’s 230m people had been affected by the floods.

Heat and drought in China

The end of summer cannot come soon enough for tens of millions of residents in the megacities of Chengdu and Chongqing. For weeks Sichuan province in south-west China has experienced record-breaking heat. Temperatures are supposed to cool at the end of August—but much of the damage is already done.

The energy system has been strained by greater demand and weaker supply. A drought reduced hydroelectric output by about 50% year on year in the province. Industry has been hit hard. Provincial officials have been forced to tell thousands of manufacturers to cease production. That includes important multinationals such as Toyota, a Japanese carmaker, and Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronics group that supplies Apple. The load-shedding ended on August 25th. But the power crunch, the second in as many years, has raised serious questions about China’s ability to cope with the effects of climate change.

brucesterling:

neil-gaiman:

kayas-wife:

iconuk01:

neil-gaiman:

vardasvapors:

why isn’t there a short film based on the thing where diana wynne jones refused to drop out of tolkien’s college class even though he was intentionally making it as boring and dense and unintelligible as possible so that everyone would drop out and he could get out of teaching it and write lotr instead. just imagine the potential of a 1940s Female College Student sitting in an empty classroom with Secretly Furious professor resentfully lecturing a meandering incomprehensible stream-of-consciousness inner monologue about The Structure of Narrative to this kid determined to get her money’s worth out of this chump. and them both getting way more personal and intellectual development out of this song-and-dance than they thought they would. hey guys why isn’t there a

I love this idea. In our world Diana (1950s, Tolkien was working on The Return Of the King) went every week. In the end it was just her and one other man. Tolkien wanted them both to quit because if nobody turned up for one lecture he got the rest of the term off to write. So his lectures were not actually student friendly, delivered as they were inaudibly to the blackboard. (She said it wasn’t the denseness so much as the pipe in his teeth, that you couldn’t see his mouth or hear exactly what he was saying, and he seemed to be talking to himself. The bits she could make out were fascinating but they were few and far between.)

Meanwhile, Diana told me, CS Lewis was a rock star, delivering his lectures in the biggest hall at Oxford, with students hanging from the rafters.

In the story world, Diana would be the only student. And she’d do a deal with Tolkien, to learn Story Things out of class, in exchange for not coming any more.

Except… I like that Diana became the best writer of magic, possibly the best children’s author ever, all on her own. She didn’t need Tolkien magic or CS Lewis magic. She just needed to be irritated by the books she was reading her children, and determined to write better. And it took her a couple of books until she got there. But she did.

With all respect to Tolkein, whose work IS brilliant, if I have to choose between one of his books, and one of Diana Wynne Jones book’s it’s not even a close contest. 

The range of her imagination; Parallel worlds with a magical guardian best knwon for his magnificent waistcoat (Probably a Time Lord… Oh God, David Tennant as Chrestomanci!!!), Norse deities! Beings who “farm” the abstract elements of  urban life! Howls Moving Castle, Children getting hold of an Alchemistry set! And the accessibility of her prose was a wonderful thing to find as a child..

Somehow it didnt occur to me that British authors are as chummy as British actors, and I had to Take a Moment to process that Neil Gaiman *met* Dianna Wynne Jones!!!!!!!!

More than met. We were good friends for 25 years. She grew me from a bean. I still miss her.

This is what I wrote when she died. (The Doctor Who episode I wouldn’t tell them the name of was The Doctor’s Wife.)

Being Alive. Mostly about Diana.

I'm in the UK right now, in the middle of nowhere, working on Monkey, about to go offline for a few days. I came over to do three things: t

journal.neilgaiman.com

*Since I’m an American guy, I once repaired a toilet in a British hotel after Diana Wynne Jones accidentally broke it

I was walking the dogs this morning and as often happens, a song from my early years came into my stream of thought. I replayed it in my head, laughing at it and feeling smug. And, as happens, I realized once again that you can’t escape your roots.

Princess Leia warns Tarkin that the more he tightens his grip, the more will slip through his fingers. The singer of “Hold On Loosely” recalls similar advice:

… my mind goes back to a girl I met
Some years ago who told me
Just hold on loosely
But don’t let go
If you cling too tightly
You’re gonna lose control

Princess Leia wasn’t, of course, advocating that the Empire “hold on” at all, but in my mind the one phrase recalled the other.

I think 38 Special came along in a transitional period of pop music. My memories are vague. They were “country flavored” and wore cowboy hats, but I don’t know anything about music history — they remind me of Michael MacDonald or Bob Seger, post yacht rock stuff. When I saw one of their music videos I remember them having something like six guitar players and two drummers, but I don’t trust my recollections. They looked like their music, anyway.

As a side note, I recall being disappointed when I finally saw pictures of Molly Hatchet. After seeing their album covers, how could it not be a let down to see that they were not Nordic adventurers wielding battle axes?

Anyway. The song starts with the hook:

You see it all around you
Good lovin’ gone bad
And usually it’s too late when you
Realize what you had

And then switches immediately to the chorus, and after that into a bridge of sorts… It keeps switching up, hook after hook. There’s not really much to the song after that, just variations on what came before, but it all must have hit my psyche at a formative time, because it remains there to this day.

In any event, I listened to it this morning, and enjoyed it thoroughly, not ironically. The guitar solos at the end were satisfying in a way I hadn’t anticipated. And as so often happens I found more seeds of my musical tastes that I’ve since forgotten.

(I’m reminded that they also did “Rockin’ Into The Night,” which is more like T-Rex or Kiss, but similarly formative for me.)