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Homages
Sometimes Shakespeare Is What It Takes
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to Time thou grow’st.
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Film Criticism (Of a Sort)
So I find myself netflicking again the other night, looking for something to rest my weary eyes on after another long day spent reading and writing on that radiant little iPad of mine. Ah, here we go then, a new one of those geriatric menaces with Liam Neeson in it. This time he’s to be a hit man (what else) retired in a village full of innocents the producer seems to have borrowed from the Banshees of Inisherin. It does also have Ciarán Hinds and Colm Meaney in it, though, so maybe….
Turns out it’s quite satisfying—serious enough to portray a character who has as hard a time as any of us figuring out if it’s his death or his life catching up with him, and wise enough to cast a superb Kerry Condon as the young harridan with a revolver who helps him with the final bit of calculation. It’s not quite Inisherin, but it doesn’t embarrass itself.
It’s called In the Land of Saints and Sinners, and it’s on Prime. It wouldn‘t kill you to have a look at it.
Ars Gratia Artis Ain’t the Half of It
The sarabande from Bach’s cello suite no. 2 in D minor, BWV 1008, was my first glimpse into the one abyss that human beings can always look into with confidence that their eternal immaturity will be respected. Music is the abyss that looks back into us without any attempt to claim dominion over us, the abyss that offers us a rare chance to defeat entropy. Music isn’t always destined to soothe the savage beast in us—every once in a while it escapes the definitions we’ve reserved for it and confirms the fundamental savagery of our right to exist in a universe filled with marvels that otherwise might remain beyond us in every way.
In Search of Lost Angeles—December 27, 2024
58 years ago a twenty year-old Mike Davis taught me to love LA. Even then he was a sharply critical lover of that magical place, so I’m not sure how it was that, despite his tutelage, my love for LA came to be so much less critical than his. Like Randy Newman, I loved LA without reservation, and kept loving it even when, roughly 25 years after I last saw Mike, I found myself reading my library’s copy of City of Quartz and nodding along in agreement as I followed his historical analysis of what I’d long since thought of as his city far more legitimately than it had been mine.
These days, I live in Arizona, feeling much more exile than expatriate, even on my good days, for reasons anyone who’s spent any time in Dogtown will understand. I’ve long wanted to thank Mike publicly for his exuberant gift to my younger self, but not having the patience to write memoirs, and being temperamentally unsuited to the writing of eulogies, I never got around to it while he was alive, and couldn’t bring myself to commit to it in the days after he passed, as surfing on his hard-earned fame as a public intellectual seemed a rotten way to honor his memory.
So let me do this instead: For anyone who lives in LA for any length of time, and responds to it as I did, memory becomes a sort of protean creature, one which with or without their consent claims a small but significant share of their consciousness. One can never tell for sure whether what one remembers is something lived in the flesh, experienced vicariously in a darkened movie theater, or simply appears unbidden as an inexplicably alchemical fusing of the two.
This, then, is the introduction to a series of small, but haunted Los Angeles memories that have affected me more deeply over time than I had any reason to expect when they first came to me. They’re personal, of course, not necessarily having any significance for anyone but me, but I offer them here for any others who may find them resonant—you’ll know who you are. Above all, though, they’re my thanks to the Mike I still remember from those long ago days when we were both impossibly young, who long before he had any thought of leaving the life he lived so furiously, gifted me with this oddly Southern California capacity for double vision that I’ve treasured ever since.
Unbidden Bits—December 23, 2024
Historians of the Future:
Frank Herbert’s Dune seems to have been written by a man who’d read too much Gibbon. Max’s DUNE Prophecy, on the other hand, seems to have been created by people who’ve watched too much TikTok.
Viewed from a certain critical perspective, both are satirical masterpieces, and like all such masterpieces, feel eerily appropriate to their times.
Metamorphosis/Metempsychosis
Ten years ago I was privileged to witness the emergence of a dragonfly from its nymph form. A creature that at first glance had seemed like a beetle to my untrained eye had crawled laboriously up from my back yard, attached itself to the side of the concrete step leading to the sliding glass door to my bedroom, and remained there, unmoving, tempting me to believe it had died.
I don’t remember exactly how long it remained there, but it was long enough for me to pass it a number of times on my way back and forth to the alley behind my house. Then, the last time I started to pass it, I discovered to my surprise that the back of its carapace had split open, and the dragonfly it had become was perched atop the empty shell that had sheltered it, had been it, and was now unfolding its wings in the afternoon sun. I watched until the wings, now fully dried, suddenly began to vibrate, then powered a beautiful, iridescent liftoff and arrow-like disappearance into the distance, a movement almost too fast to follow with the naked eye.
Being a child of the 20th/21st centuries, my first thought at witnessing this astonishing sequence of events was that any sufficiently advanced technology will be indistinguishable from magic, my second that there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Being a child of the 20th/21st centuries, I didn’t find those two thoughts to be incompatible. Now, ten years later, I still don’t.
Yeah. Okay. Fine.
Kamala. She’s not Trump. I get it. More importantly, she’s overcome the obvious disadvantages, even in California, of her race and gender, and like President Obama before her, she’s visibly ambitious, with the talent, the intelligence, and the courage to realize those ambitions in a system designed to discriminate against people like her. Also like President Obama she seems to have managed to steer her way through the myriad corruptions set out in our system to trap the ambitious without succumbing to any of them as thoroughly as many of her peers.
Given the limitations of the Presidency, she’ll do. She’s got my vote. What would be nice, though, is if we’d all stop for a moment and look beyond the hagiography and see that we’ve been beating a dead horse politically for decades now with no resolution in sight. Kamala won’t help us with that. She can’t. She owes things to people, and we aren’t those people. We’re the people who can’t survive the decadence, the corruption, the cluelessness about the future that both parties are obliged by their true allegiances to defend, the hostages they’ve all given to fortune to get where they are today. Politics is not a consumer good, it’s a slow motion conflict about who gets to decide how we approach the future. We forget that at our peril.
John Gruber Gets It
For an old Mac guy, John Gruber, bless his heart, has always done his damndest to be fair in his judgments about tech. After several days of watching some of my favorite tech columnists lift their legs on iPads in general, and the new iPads in particular, reading his review of Apple’s M4 iPad Pro pretty much made me jump for joy.
I’m typing this on my new M4 iPad Pro with a nano-textured screen, and I don’t care what anybody says—the little girl in Apple’s “What’s a computer?” ad of 2017 got it, and John Gruber, prince of the grumpy old Mac diehards that he is, also gets it. He’s made my day….
Full disclosure: I’m 30 years older than John, and far grumpier, but the iPad still has the power to make me want to live another hundred years. That little girl—and John—speak to me, and for me, and I suspect I’m not alone.
A Brief Reminder
Our grandchildren aren’t stupid. Their mental equipment isn’t inferior to ours. They just live in a different world, one which no longer belongs to us even though we helped create it. It’s theirs now, and whatever we imagine, we’re no longer in any position to judge them. Likely they’ll be fine, but if they turn out not to be fine, it’s going to be very hard to show how listening to us would have made the slightest bit of difference.