Bronte-mania - portraits

Very good exhibition of Charlotte Bronte artifacts at the Morgan Museum and Library. 

I was very impressed that the show had the actual oil painting by Branwell Bronte of his sisters (which originally included a self portrait but he painted himself out), known as the "pillar portrait."

Here is an image of it, but it was so cool to be up close to it. It normally lives in the National Portrait Gallery in England.

The exhibition helpfully provided magnifying glasses to look at some of the miniature books and drawings Charlotte produced but I also used one on the larger pieces like this painting to really get a good look. I was interested to see that Bramwell had done a fairly complete pencil drawing on the canvas first before he applied a thin layer of oil paint. You could especially see it in the cross-hatching for the shadow on Ann's neck.

 The Wikipedia version of the portrait is large enough to show what I'm talking about.




It's interesting that he did that - his technique is more like a watercolor painting than oils.

I hadn't realized that Branwell was only 17 when he painted this which means that Ann (left) was fifteen, Emily (center)  was sixteen and Charlotte (right) was eighteen.

This portrait of Anne by Charlotte was also in the exhibition. This is close to the actual size of the original. The magnifying glass came in handy.

I had been aware of these drawings and also the very nice portrait of Charlotte by George Richmond, which is in this show, also usually in the British Portrait Gallery. It's a very well-done portrait in pencil and chalk, a nice work of art in itself, even without the Bronte connection.

What really blew my mind in this show though was a piece of art that I had never seen before nor heard of - I am sure I would have remembered if I had seen it. A cartoon self-portrait by Charlotte, complete with a word balloon, included in a letter to her friend Ellen Nussey. As far as I know there is nothing like this in the entire Bronte family collection of art.

Caught at the Met

While coming home from the Morgan Museum & Library today I got caught in a sudden thunderstorm just as I was passing by the Metropolitan Museum of Art so I had to hang out under one of their red umbrellas. And obviously I wasn't the only one.

Apparently I have been a practicing semi-Stoic my entire adult life

According to William Irvine by way of Massimo Pigliucci's blog, How To Be A Stoic:

“The stoics thought they had an answer to this question. They recommended that we spend time imagining that we have lost the things we value— that our wife has left us, our car was stolen, or we lost our job. Doing this, the Stoics thought, will make us value our wife, our car, and our job more than we otherwise would. This technique— let us refer to it as negative visualization—was employed by the Stoics at least as far back as Chrysippus . 5 It is, I think, the single most valuable technique in the Stoics’ psychological tool kit.”

Yep, negative visualization is the story of my life.

Ginger ale tastes like love

I saw an article about the medicinal uses of ginger ale (and ginger) in the Atlantic and now I have this commercial stuck in my head - I haven't heard it since it was actually on the radio, but it's the nature of commercial jingles to stick in your head - and the hook "ginger ale tastes like love" as been there in my mind all these years.

And now you will have it in your mind too - Mwah-hah-hah!

If love's what you like...

Charlotte Bronte at the Morgan

Going to see this very soon.

More philosophizing

I sat in on a workshop recently, Stoicism 101 with Massimo Pigliucci at the Ethical Society. He gave an interesting lecture, including mentioning James Stockdale - whom I remembered as the vice presidential candidate for Ross Perot who said during a debate: "who am I, why am I here." Which would normally be a pretty philosophical thing to say, but wasn't appropriate in the context. So I was amazed when Pigliucci mentioned Stockdale's ordeal in Vietnam and how lessons of the Stoics helped Stockdale - or as it says in Wikipedia:

His primary focus was ancient Stoicism and the Roman slave-turned-philosopher Epictetus, whose lessons captured in The Enchiridion Stockdale credited with providing him strength during his ordeals as a prisoner in the Hanoi Hilton.

I was amazed and impressed to know this about Stockdale.

During the lecture I also got the idea for a Meetup group that does philosophical plays, and decided to do some research and found quite a few and not just from the ancient Greek philosophers.

My list so far:

• THE CLOUDS by Aristophanes
• WAITING FOR GODOT by Samuel Beckett
• THE ROBBERS by Frederich Schiller
• SOCRATES by Voltaire
• NO EXIT by Jean-Paul Sartre
• OEDIPUS by Seneca the Younger
• WHO SHALL DIE by Simone DeBeauvoir

I was a baby lesbian

When I was a kid television networks would show old cartoons after school and on weekends. But although cartoons were thought to be for kids, these cartoons had often been made, originally, for adult audiences, as an opening act for a feature movie, and they reflected that. Especially the male-gaze sexuality.

You can see below an example of something I might well have watched as a little kid, a Tex Avery cartoon featuring a wolf-whistling wolf admiring a (human) showgirl.

So one day I happen to be sitting in a willow tree in my front yard, and I couldn't have been more than five or six years old. The tree was later blown down by a hurricane, before I was ten. The willow overhung the sidewalk. This was in the Philadelphia suburbs and at the time far away from shops and supermarkets, so there wasn't a lot of sidewalk traffic, but now and then somebody in the neighborhood would go by. A teenage girl came along and, since she had a face full of make-up and was wearing high-heels and a very short skirt, just like the ladies in the cartoons, I felt it was the social expectation, nay, my obligation, to wolf-whistle at her.

She looked up at me and said "you're a girl, dummy."

I had no idea that only boys were supposed to wolf-whistle, and I was mortified - you can tell I was because I still remember it, and this was from a time where I don't have that many clear memories. But this faux pas has stuck with me all these years later.

And that was the end of my faux-lesbian phase. Although I didn't fully realize with clarity I was heterosexual until I heard the Beatles recording of "Twist and Shout" when I was thirteen. (This was long after the Beatles had broken up, I'm not that old.)

There was something about the way John Lennon screamed that really really got to me. And I didn't even have a visual, which, as you can see below was magnificent. Just Lennon's voice alone made me realize there was something to this whole boy thing, and I wanted it.

The truly odious Dinesh D'Souza

Dinesh D'Souza is an unhinged, nasty, right-wing weirdo. He has a long history of making bizarre, racist, inflammatory statements. He's Ann Coulter with less testosterone. Apparently D'Souza and Coulter dated at one point.

This might have been the most evil and yet most stupid tweet he's ever tweeted though:

Truly amazing to blame a ten year old child for parents leaving. What a degraded, vicious, vile creature D'Souza is.

And that doesn't even consider that he's a convicted felon. Who cheated on his first wife. And was ordered by a judge to get psychiatric care.

Or as Salon said:

Dinesh D’Souza, adulterous felon and disgraced academic, really embarrassed himself this time.

Imagine having that much rage and bitterness, as well as being just a total overall sad hack, mostly recently as the creator of a film described by one critic “the single dumbest documentary” he’d ever seen. It must get lonely, to have gone from actually being taken seriously a few years ago to being just another Twitter troll. And as D’Souza finds himself increasingly dumped by his former supporters, you’ve got to wonder, maybe they know something, huh?

I had a nasty exchange on Twitter with D'Souza, which, like everything about the man was ugly. But I got some nice feedback, so it was worth it:

Trump gets booed BIGLY

Here is Donald Trump, showing up to the Al Smith dinner to attack Hillary. Apparently the concept of the dinner - to tell self-deprecating jokes - is something Trump is incapable of even conceiving of.

Gets booed BIGLY.

Here's video of Trump getting booed down during his set at the Al Smith Dinner pic.twitter.com/025zgItcfy

— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) October 21, 2016

Mull of Kintyre

I have heard of Paul McCartney's "Mull of Kintyre" but never heard it. It finally occurred to me that I could just go to Youtube and listen to it. I didn't know there was a whole McCartney video, completely with bagpipes associated with the song.

History of Japan - apropos of nothing but fabulously educational and entertaining

LaBute sighting

I'm pretty sure I passed Neil LaBute on my block today while going for a morning coffee. He was headed in the direction of Central Park, walking with someone I sincerely hope was his personal trainer. The dude is out of shape.

Even though the UW and UE sides are crawling with so many celebrities it's like the wax figures escaped from Madam Tussands in Times Square and headed uptown, I wasn't expecting to see LaBute, so I quickly Googled him to see if he lives on the UWS and sure enough... the photo on this post is from the Twitter feed of a guy who bumped into LaBute at an UWS movie theater a year ago. LaBute is on the left but the photo is cropped so you cannot see his prodigious avoirdupois.

Normally I wouldn't mention someone being overweight - I've certainly had my own up and down struggles with weight over the years - but I just can't stand LaBute - and not for his work so much as his contemptible attitude which I noted six years ago on this blog:

LaBute isn't only angry, he's also a gigantic self-confessed douchebag:

And that makes a side of LaBute happy. "It's part of my makeup," he says, "to ruin a perfectly good day for people."

I'm happy to report that LaBute failed to ruin a perfectly good day for me, at least. This time.

Trump continues to run his campaign by the Nazi playbook

Source: https://twitter.com/ClydeHaberman/status/787793573878136832

Meanwhile Democrats donated $13K to help rebuild the Republican office that was firebombed. 

Trump's tweet:

Donald Trump has gone full Nazi

I never thought I would live to see this day.

From the NYTimes:

“Whether intentionally or not, Donald Trump is evoking classic anti-Semitic themes that have historically been used against Jews and still reverberate today,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, a group that fights discrimination, said in a statement.

Not surprisingly, card-carrying Nazis are beside themselves with joy over Trump's "international banker conspiracy" speech.

I think Trump knows exactly what he's doing. And it's monstrous.

 NPR has the transcript. From the speech:

The Clinton machine is at the center of this power structure. We've seen this first hand in the WikiLeaks documents, in which Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers, her special interest friends and her donors.

This is the basis of Nazi anti-Semitism, straight out of the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

We did not fight Hitler in order to let Trump destroy our democracy.

It's always something

This is my most popular, most retweeted tweet by far - it would have been nice if there weren't two glaring typos. *sigh*

Well at least I like that Scandinavia lifestyle

Their plays, not so much.

I just saw the first half of Ibsen's HEDDA GABBLER and then I couldn't take it any more. I've also seen the entire THE SEAGULL which I did not care for at all, and technically this is Russian not Scandinavia, but they are right next door.

And I read Strindberg's MISS JULIE and hated it.

I love Rachel Maddow

IT WAS THE MEN IN BLACK!!!

Sun Salutation Cheat Sheet

Handy!

It's always a trade-off

I know an incredibly handsome actor. So handsome that when I introduced him to another actor recently she blurted out right in front of him: "Oh my god I didn't know he was going to be so handsome!"

And he isn't only handsome, he's sweet and affable and incessantly flirty, with men, women and Siamese cats.

It's one thing to imagine making love to such a creature but the reality of an ongoing relationship must result in an incredible amount of stress, knowing that so many others want to jump on his dick. And not just middle-aged playwrights, but women who are professionally beautiful, the kind of women an actor is likely to meet - dancers, singers, models, other actors. To maintain a relationship with him you'd have to have a personality composed of a rare combination of rock-solid self-esteem, low-levels of jealousy, and probably most important, an obliviousness and self-absorption so complete that you are spared from noticing the constant onslaught he is subject to, the endless bids for time and attention and much more from hoards of women and a not inconsiderable number of men.

There are so few men who combine beauty with approachability that when one appears he is the flame to all the moths within a 50 mile radius. Maybe it's better to imagine the pleasures of fire than risk the heart's sure immolation.

What Krugman said about the second presidential debate

Trump. Is. Done.

The Republican presidential candidate describes his sexual assault techniques.

Club Anaphlan

The Vice Presidential debate left me completely uninspired so let's discuss philosophers and masturbation instead.

You can't get a more clear example of the fact that no matter how brilliant, creative, deep or original are the thoughts of great philosophers, they are still entirely of their own time, than Immanual Kant's attitude towards masturbation. Pigliucci mentioned in passing, during the Sunday Philosophy-in-Manhattan meet up that Kant was anti-masturbation.

And sure enough, according to Wikipedia's History of Masturbation (yes it's a thing):

Immanuel Kant regarded masturbation as a violation of the moral law. In the Metaphysics of Morals (1797) he made the a posteriori argument that 'such an unnatural use of one's sexual attributes' strikes 'everyone upon his thinking of it' as 'a violation of one's duty to himself', and suggested that it was regarded as immoral even to give it its proper name (unlike the case of the similarly undutiful act of suicide). He went on, however, to acknowledge that 'it is not so easy to produce a rational demonstration of the inadmissibility of that unnatural use', but ultimately concluded that its immorality lay in the fact that 'a man gives up his personality … when he uses himself merely as a means for the gratification of an animal drive'.

Kant, as it says in the Wiki for him, "... is considered the central figure of modern philosophy."

It's pretty amazing that such an important figure in philosophy would have such an absurd view of masturbation. But that view as all the rage in Europe at the time, thanks no doubt to Christianity. And Kant was big into Christianity.

The ancient Greeks, who invented philosophy, were much more relaxed about masturbation:

The ancient Greeks regarded masturbation as a normal and healthy substitute for other forms of sexual pleasure.[5] They considered it a safety valve against destructive sexual frustration.[5] The Greeks also dealt with female masturbation in both their art and writings. One common term used for it was anaphlan, which roughly translates as "up-fire"

I had never heard of this anaphlan before but others certainly have as can be seen in this Google search. Although Club Anaphlan of Tampa Florida no longer exists, judging by the fact that it no longer has a web site. Although it seems that it was a swingers club, which is odd since anaphlan means masturbation and that doesn't seem worth going to a club for.

In any case most of us are already members of Club Anaphlan. Presumably Kant was not, although let's face it, he probably really was and was just ashamed of it.

Existential Comics

Thanks to following Pigliucci on Twitter I discovered Existential Comics. It's pretty funny but the drawing is atrocious. I immediately looked up the installments associated with Schopenhauer. The first one is about Schopenhauer's antagonism towards Hegel.

You see what I mean about the drawing.

But the author captures the sit-com-esque relationship between Schopenhauer and Hegel - Schopenhauer always fuming about what an idiot Hegel was, Hegel constantly succeeding and appearing not to know that Schopenhauer exists. Really you could sustain a comic about Schopenhauer based on that scenario alone. That and Schopenhauer's relationship with his poodle.

I referenced both poodle and Hegel-hating in my play JULIA & BUDDY in which Schopenhauer makes an appearance:

SCHOPENHAUER

Life is misery. Each and every one of us must suffer and each and every one must die. That is what unites us all. Instead of Sir or Madame we should greet each other in this way: “Greetings poor soul, how is your suffering today?” and when we part we should say: “Farewell, I hope you will suffer less tomorrow.” We are such wretched creatures that we have nothing of value to offer to each other except tolerance, patience, and love.

JULIA

That’s beautiful.

SCHOPENHAUER

Jah. I have my moments. That is from my “Studies in Pessimism.” But tell me, would you say my work is more popular than the work of Hegel, in your time? 

JULIA

Yes. I believe so. 

SCHOPENHAUER

I shall make another prediction - the more time that goes by, the more my work will be appreciated. All the things I have said - all will be empirically verified. 

(A dog barks offstage.) 

     And now I must leave you.

JULIA

Oh don’t go. There is so much more to say - 

(Another bark.) 

SCHOPENHAUER

Butz must have his walkies.

More on Massimo Pigliucci

I've been looking online at Pigliucci's work - his blogs, Youtube videos, published work etc. There's a lot out there - I wonder that he had time to drop in to the Philosophy-in-Manhattan meet up on Sunday.

Pigliucci identifies as a Stoic and has a blog called How to be a Stoic and I found this especially interesting:

Stoic practice. And we finally get to the crux of the matter: how, exactly, does one practice Stoicism nowadays? There are a number of modern Stoic practices, or “spiritual” exercises, inspired by the writings of the ancients. Of course, different combinations will work for different people, but these are the ones I do regularly:
* Morning meditation: as soon as I get up I find a quiet, not brightly lit spot in my apartment, seat comfortably, and mentally go over the potential challenges awaiting me during the day ahead, reminding myself about which of the four cardinal virtues I may be called to exercise in response to those challenges.

So what are the four cardinal virtues?

The Stoics thought that the good life (eudaimonia, often translated as “flourishing”) consisted in cultivating one’s moral virtues in order to become a good person. The four cardinal virtues recognized by the Stoics were: Wisdom (sophia), Courage (andreia), Justice (dikaiosyne), and Temperance (sophrosyne).

One of the guys from the Partially Examined Life crew had nice things to say about Pigliucci in 2011:

What I really like about Pigliucci is his scientifically-minded intellectual honesty, and the fact that he is more interested in honoring the practice of science than worshiping its fetishized ideal. In other words: his determination to follow evidence and arguments wherever they take him, even when they lead him to conclusions concerning the limits of scientific inquiry that many partisans find so threatening to their ... faith.

Swinging cats

Soon-Yi and Allen - I had to pass them because
they walk slow like a couple of tourists

You can't swing a cat without hitting a celebrity in this town. Today I went to a Meetup meeting for Philosophy over on the UES across the park from me and got to meet Massimo Pigliucci who was presenting a lecture with audience participation on the topic of morality vs. ethics. Of course he's not known outside of the world of philosophy, but he's a pretty big deal within it. I had heard the name before but I wasn't aware that Pigliucci was such a prominent critic of Sam Harris - I've been a non-prominent critic of Sam Harris for years on this blog.

After the meeting I found this excellent piece online, Reflections on the skeptic and atheist movements in which Pigliucci says:

I have already mentioned Harris, who writes about ethics with little acknowledgment (or understanding, or both) of just how complex a topic it is, and how much literature there is out there to engage with. As he infamously wrote in the first footnote of chapter 1 of The Moral Landscape, “Many of my critics fault me for not engaging more directly with the academic literature on moral philosophy … [but] I am convinced that every appearance of terms like ‘metaethics,’ ‘deontology,’ … directly increases the amount of boredom in the universe.” Why are we taking such a brazen display of anti-intellectualism as anything more than a clear mark of an overinflated ego? But far from that, Michael Shermer then builds on Harris’ point (or perhaps simply restates it, at much greater length), coming out with yet another “revolutionary” book about the science of ethics, predicated on an argument that had so many holes in it that I felt a bit embarrassed having to explain them in a public forum a couple of years ago [15].

Pigliucci goes after other New Atheists I've expressed dislike for, Dawkins and Hitchens, although he doesn't mention Steven Pinker in this piece (he does elsewhere though.) He also criticizes Neil deGrass Tyson, which surprised me, but then I wasn't aware that Tyson had dismissed philosophy. And he goes after P. Z. Myers, unfairly, I thought, although I will agree that his Pharyngula can get really nasty - but I found it much worse before everybody realized what an asshole Dawkins was. And of course Dawkins himself was a contributor to the nastiness of Myers' blog, as I found out directly through personal experience.

I also disagree with Myers on some issues, most especially his defense of identitarians (aka Social Justice Warriors) like Suey Park of #cancelcolbert infamy, and I tangled with him briefly over Hillary Clinton a couple of months ago on Twitter. But he's generally one of the good guys. And naturally he had plenty to say in response to Pigliucci.

I'm surprised it took me so long to really become acquainted with Pigliucci's critiques of the New Atheists, since he's especially well-qualified to defend philosophy from their attacks, being not only a long-time skeptic/atheist activist but also an evolutionary biologist as well as a philosopher. 

I came to know the New Atheist celebrities not through their various political controversies but through my disagreements with evolutionary psychology. Which I discovered via the anthropologist Marvin Harris, who criticized it back when it was known as sociobiology. 

And I came to philosophy also from Marvin Harris, through his criticism of Hegel (and the Hegelian dialectic) and his quoting Schopenhauer. In fact currently if you Google "Marvin Harris, Hegel, Schopenhauer" my blog post is the first hit.

So like so many New Atheist notions, the idea that philosophy is no longer of value, to be replaced by "real" science is overweening and absurd.

After the Philosophy-in-Manhattan Meetup, I walked home through Central Park when I was stuck on a path walking behind a slow couple in front of me. To my annoyance it was another one of these old man with a much younger woman couples, which I see so often on the Upper West Side due to old men using their wealth by buy women. But as I passed their slow asses I realized it was in fact Woody Allen and Soon-Yi. 

I once fantasized that if I ever ran into Woody Allen, whom I despise at least as much as New Atheists, I would kick him, but thanks to this natural experiment I have discovered I would not. But I still think he's a creep. And he walks like a freaking tourist.

I heart Justin Trudeau

And he hearts me right back YAY!

Is there any man, let alone leader of a free country, more adorable than Justin Trudeau? He has it all and he's a proud feminist. He needs to be cloned. 

Need more?

Trudeau identifies as a feminist,[197] having stated, "I am a feminist. I'm proud to be a feminist." Trudeau has also stated that "the Liberal Party is unequivocal in its defence of women's rights. We are the party of the Charter." After being sworn in as Prime Minister, when asked by a reporter why he felt gender parity was important when naming his cabinet, he replied simply, "Because it's 2015."[198] More recently, he has similarly answered to feminist organizations on social media that "On behalf of the Government of Canada, I am writing back to let you know that I wholeheartedly agree: Poverty is Sexist".[199]

OH CANADA!

Samantha Bee wins the election season

Best line:

"Save us from fascism, but like, don't be a bitch about it."

That describes exactly what Clinton has to put up with.

Plays plays plays

Well I should be working on the latest draft of my play DARK MARKET since I'm having a reading pretty soon, but instead I was diverted into a new draft of my play PALMYRA NJ, which I was working on over five years ago, without much success. But I think I can make it work this time. Famous last words.

I didn't realize it when I lived in Palmyra (for barely a year but it seemed longer) but the original Palmyra is

...an ancient Semitic city in present-day Homs Governorate, Syria. Archaeological finds date back to the Neolithicperiod, and the city was first documented in the early second millennium BC. Palmyra changed hands on a number of occasions between different empires before becoming a subject of the Roman Empire in the first century AD.

Palmyra New Jersey was named after that one.

...settled in the late 17th century by Swedes, marking the northernmost border of New Sweden. A farmhouse built in 1761 by the third generation settlers still remains as the oldest house in Palmyra.[21] Farming was the primary use of land in Palmyra and the surrounding area until after the construction of the Camden and Amboy Railroad in 1834 with a station in the area, after which railroad workers built homes on lots they purchased along the railroad right of way. The community was originally known as Texas, but a local landowner, Isaiah Toy, a descendant of the original Swedish settlers and a stockholder in the Camden and Amboy Railroad, who wanted to have a post office established in the community, convinced the railroad to change the name of the station in 1849 to Palmyra, which came from his love of ancient history.[22] Palmyra was the name of an ancient trading center located in central Syria.

 It turns out there are lots of Palmyras in the US and elsewhere.

Steven Pinker, still hawking gender essentialism

To Steven Pinker, everything is reducible to evolutionary psychology. And since it is evo-psycho, he doesn't even consider the need to present evidence that:

a. the term "alpha male" describes something outside the evo-psycho imagination;
b. said alpha males are more concerned about incipient megalomaniacal robots than everybody else; and
c. women are less power-mad than men, by nature 

Nope, you don't need evidence to promote evolutionary psychology explanations, just a plausible-sounding just-so story to impress the dullards and make a snappy Big Think soundbite.

LOL - Trump is such a loser

Excellent 2008 financial crisis explanation

I admit I am worried about a potential meltdown happening in the not-too-distant future thanks to low interest rates.

As this video explains, at minute 6:30, the motivating force behind the risky lending that created the 2008 financial crisis was the desire for investors to get a better interest rate on their investments than 1% which is what they can get for investing in Treasury Bills.

Thanks to my recently watching Krugman videos, I'm aware that not only are investment rates low, but Krugman believes that they will remain low for a long time, thanks to aging populations and lower overall rates of investments.

Krugman talks about this at his recent 92 St. Y presentation and points out that 80% of Americans aren't living on the interest of their savings, and older Americans are living on Social Security. But of course it's the people who do have enough savings, so much that they do get a significant portion of their income from interest rate payouts who will drive the next crisis. In addition to pushing the Fed to raise interest rates, they will also be looking for ways to make riskier investments, which pay out a better interest rate. As Krugman noted:

What is the role of interest in this world? Interest, classically (and I do mean classically, as in Mr. Keynes and the), is the reward for waiting: there’s supposedly a social function to interest because it rewards people for saving rather than spending. But right now we’re awash in excess savings with nowhere to go, and the marginal social value of a dollar of savings is negative. So real interest rates should be negative too, if they’re supposed to reflect social payoffs.
This really isn’t at all exotic — but obviously it’s a point wealth-owners don’t want to hear. Hence the constant agitation for monetary tightening.

The video was created by Jonathan Jarvis. Who also has a Twitter account.

Just a shit-ton of famous people

I've forgiven even Mark Ruffalo for being such an intransigent Berniebro. Although Joss Whedon actually gets credit for putting this together.

And I still remember Whedon's hysterical ad in 2012, Mitt Romney's Zombie Apocalypse.

Krugmania

Krugman is always an enjoyable source of enlightenment on the issue of economics and politics, but I was especially interested in brushing up on my Krugman as a way to get me back into re-writing my play DARK MARKET. Now that I've had a good reading of a fairly good draft of my NORMA JEANE play it's time to get ready for the next DARK MARKET reading - the first in almost a year (!)  in a couple of weeks.

So I've been mainlining Krugman speeches.

Krugman himself, via his Twitter account provided a link to his most recent public speaking engagement at conference in Geneva.

Next I was interested to see that I had somehow missed him speaking - again - at the 92nd Street Y. I caught him in person at the Y in 2009 almost exactly seven years ago, back when I lived on the Upper East Side. I was excited to see he was interviewed by Gillian Tett, whom I first heard of thanks to her interview in the movie Inside Job.

Krugman has also been on Bill Maher's show. I don't think I knew that.

Hillbilly Con Man

J. D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy, who has charmed the gullible media with his aw-shucks, white racists is jes folks persona has revealed his true colors today.

First this tweet:

It's absolutely mind-boggling that Vance would equate a monster like Donald Trump with John Oliver, someone who has actually stood up for poor people - you know, the people that Vance claims to champion.

And also today, Vance promotes the media's favorite false equivalence - that Hillary Clinton calling out racists is just as bad as Donald Trump's and followers' racism.

Welcome to Autumn 2016

A maple tree with little birds 紅葉小禽図 by Itō Jakuchū 伊藤 若冲 (1716-1800).

This evening, autumn chills me—

 But there will be a day 

When I will lovingly recall this evening 

Buson

The feelz

Say what you want about the self-indulgent pauses and lack of drama (except the feelz) of the plays of Annie Baker, thanks to their skimpy dialog it's a freaking snap to read them. I've saved some serious dough ray mi by reading her plays in the bookstore.

Recently it was THE ALIENS which, like every other thing she's written, the critics are delirious over, exactly the same way they are for everything written by Mac Wellman (who? yeah, he was fashionable twenty years ago), as I discuss here. Wellman is apparently Baker's mentor. It took me no more than fifteen minutes to read ALIENS.

I thought it was OK. It was about young menz having intense but understated feelz. And I was spared the necessity of following the stage directions at the top in which Baker states that the play will consist of one third to one half silence.

At the end of the play there was something that I am beginning to think of as a Bakerism - appropriating another work of art in order to punch up her own decorous low-keyness with some actual drama.  In the case of THE FLICK it was reciting the entire Ezekiel 25:17 monologue from Pulp Fiction. In the case of THE ALIENS it was having a character sing "If I Had a Hammer." Here I was feeling guilty because I have a character performing a few lines of HAMLET in my JULIA & BUDDY. Guess I need to get over that.

For the recovered sheet music co-written by Mozart and Salieri

Unbelievable. This year, in January, they discovered a piece of music that was lost for centuries - and co-written by Mozart and Salieri. It's called For the recovered health of Ophelia.

This recording seems to suggest that the piece is just three small pieces strung together, the first written by Salieri, the second by Mozart and the third by Cornetti. Nobody knows who the hell Cornetti was. But I haven't found anything written about this piece yet explaining how they know who wrote what.

More great stuff from James Burke

BBC: Connections (1978) - The Wheel of Fortune (5/10) from Markus Kocher on Vimeo.

Patriotism postponed

The Burke show is worth watching just for this
explanation of space ship navigation techniques alone.

Looks like I'm not making it to Philly today - I have postponed my get-out-the-vote trip until next month.

In the meantime, I have re-discovered the work of James Burke, which I do every four years or so. He usually does series but he did this fascinating one-off from 1979 called The Men Who Walked on the Moon. He explains the basics of how lunar spacecraft and rockets work. As Spaulding Gray said in Swimming to Cambodia - leave it to a Brit to explain American history to an American.

Jim Lovell makes an appearance along with the men who actually walked on the moon - Lovell was portrayed by Tom Hanks in the movie Apollo 13 - and in just a brief clip it's clear that Lovell is one of the more witty and personable astronauts.

And if you've seen Apollo 13 you're be especially fascinated by the middle of this program, which talks about the things that went wrong. I found it especially interesting to see how this documentary matched up with the movie - it mostly did, although the other two astronaut's response to the crises was much more relaxed in real life than in the movie, according to the interview with Lovell in this documentary. Apparently Haise and Swigert were very confident in Lovell's and NASAs ability to rescue them and so instead were both concerned about taking photos of the dark side of the moon - according to Lovell they were both fiddling with their camera settings soon after the tank explosion.

Towards the end of the video you'll learn more than you'll ever want to know about how astronauts poop in space.

And at the very end, Burke rants about the end of the space program - he's really annoyed by the end of deep space exploration.

You can watch the whole thing here.

Set phasers on BURN

Albee out

Albee in his loft in 1991 - I was in that very same loft
eight years later - albeit Albee wasn't there at the time.

Edward Albee has died. Unlike virtually everybody else in the world of theater, I was never a big fan of his, going so far as to write a 10-minute parody of his play ZOO STORY.

So I don't feel a huge amount of regret, although it's always sad when somebody dies. And it's a big deal in the theater world.

Patriotic activities

As Donald Trump is a certified traitor to this nation,   any actions that oppose his candidacy are automatically patriotic. 

Here's my actor buddy Matt working the refs, tweeting at various media outlets (this is only one example, you can see more here) for their typically weak job of checking Donald Trump's incessant lies.

As for me, in addition to my Facebook posts, I am going to Philly, my old home town, with the Clinton team on Sunday to get out the Democratic vote. I will be reporting on that soon after.

Many people are panicking about Donald Trump drawing even with Clinton, as this NYTimes article notes:  Hillary Clinton’s Backers Thought She Couldn’t Lose. Now, ‘I Can’t Go There.’

Then there are those who traffic in angst professionally, who are straining to consider even the chance of a Trump election.
“The possibility of that is too horrifying to broach,” Larry David, the “Seinfeld” co-creator and “Curb Your Enthusiasm” star, wrote in an email. “It’s like contemplating your own death.”
Surely Mr. David had done that, too?
“I can’t go there,” he said.

And good old Stephen Colbert makes an excellent point in this clip - the previous three presidential races were also tied in mid-September. So maybe hold off on that Canadian citizenship application for the time being...

A crappy premise for a play

From the NYTimes:

In Mr. Bartlett’s “Love, Love, Love” (the title is a sly riff on the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love”), she plays Sandra, a rapacious woman who ages from 19 to 64 in the course of the drama, exemplifying the egotism of the Me Generation, often at the expense of her children. (Mr. Bartlett’s New York breakthrough was as the writer of “King Charles III,” on Broadway last season.)

I hate generational generalities anyway, but especially a woman standing in for "Me Generation" egotism. Yeah those horrible women, thinking of themselves first, instead of the kids, like they're men or something. This play sounds incredibly reactionary.

Donald Trump, still a traitor to the United States of America

Thomas Friedman's article Donald Trump's Putin Crush:

When it comes to rebutting Donald Trump’s idiotic observation that Vladimir Putin is a strong leader — “far more than our president has been a leader” — it is hard to top the assessment of Russian-born Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion, which The Times’s Andrew Higgins quoted in his story from Moscow: “Vladimir Putin is a strong leader in the same way that arsenic is a strong drink. Praising a brutal K.G.B. dictator, especially as preferable to a democratically elected U.S. president, whether you like Obama or hate him, is despicable and dangerous.”

Indeed, Kasparov’s point cuts to the core of what is so scary about a Trump presidency: Trump is what The Economist has called “the leading exponent of ‘post-truth’ politics — a reliance on assertions that ‘feel true’ but have no basis in fact,” and, sadly, “his brazenness is not punished, but taken as evidence of his willingness to stand up to elite power.” When politics becomes “like pro-wrestling,” society pays a huge cost, The Economist added, because any complex explanation of any problem is dismissed as experts just trying “to bamboozle everyone else.”

It's the adventures of Butz & Schopenhauer

I happened to bump into this web page about a comic strip based on philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.

His word-balloon reads: "all religion is in antagonism with the culture"

It's all in German. According to Google translate the intro says:

The Comic Strip series BUTZ & Schopenhauer puts the philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) in our time. Together with his life Companion, the Poodle Butz, is the great thinker as modest pensioners among us. It traverses the public spaces of the modern city: the pedestrian areas, the Department stores and the city parks. He finds himself in communication and conflict with the Types and characters of our time. Our contemporaries Schopenhauer speaks with those wonderful and scarce resounding aphorisms that have made him famous and cited to this day a lot. With the power of his language he represents our world to the test ; But our world is A tough test for him. Not infrequently gets his philosophical composure falter, and the eloquent spirit man must rely on the emotional backing his dumb dog BUTZ .

I assume when they use the word "dumb" in this case they mean mute, rather than stupid. There only seems to be nine episodes of this comic strip though, which is a shame.

BLACKBIRD/UNA remind us: the male POV reigns supreme

I finally read the script for David Harrower's BLACKBIRD and it turns out to be exactly what I suspected it was - a male fantasy in which the victim of child rape and her abuser are portrayed as a couple in love. Or as Ben Brantley said when it was first shown off-Broadway at the Manhattan Theater Club:

This is essential, since for “Blackbird” to work, you have to accept it as a love story — a tragic, horrible love story that destroys lives, but a love story all the same. Mr. Daniels and Ms. Pill are extraordinary in guaranteeing this acceptance.

In spite of the Ray character having a cellphone, the play BLACKBIRD is pretty much obsolete in the United States. In the play there is apparently no sex offender notification laws so that only Una and, maybe, Ray's wife know that a convicted child rapist has access to another twelve-year-old girl. The Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act has been the law of the land in the United States since 2006. So the play was already obsolete by the time of its first off-Broadway production, let alone the recent Broadway production.

What's really bizarre is that we are apparently supposed to believe Ray when he says he won't sexually abuse his wife's 12-year-old daughter. In spite of the fact that pedophiles have an extremely high rate of recidivism. The strong chance of a pedophile victimizing another child is what caused the creation of the Sex Offender law in the first place.

So why do theater organizations want to produce an obsolete play about a pedophile and his victim "in love"? Because theater is still completely dominated by men, and men's misogynist attitudes towards women and girls, and theater loves to wallow in the endless, helpless pain and suffering of women - something theater has done since THE TROJAN WOMEN. Plays like this are much easier for men to watch because of their cultural conditioning to view women as the Other, which reduces any painful feelings that could result from empathy.

I guaran-fucking-tee you that if, instead of a pretty woman in her twenties showing up ready to have sex in a trash-strewn company break room with a man pushing 60, the man was a priest and he had abused a twelve-year-old altar boy, who was now in love with and DTF the priest, these male critics would not find it nearly so romantic.

Naturally Blackbird was turned into a movie, "Una" made by men. As the Todd VanDerWerff in Vox says:

But the far more troubling error is that Una depicts, in several flashbacks, what happened when Una was 13. To its credit, Una knows her statutory rape was horrifying; less to its credit, it can’t figure out a way to visually reflect that horror. Thus, the flashbacks have a strange romantic, erotic charge that really shouldn’t be there.

I'm not sure what he means by "shouldn't" be there, but I think the fact that they have a "romantic, erotic charge" tells us what the men who made the movie actually feel about the scenario. The review later notes:

And yet, all the same, neither film can entirely escape the fact that it was written and directed by a man. They might feature women as protagonists, but the thing both films want you to think about is ultimately something that has nothing to do with those women: the thought of being a rapist who is understood, yes, but also absolved, and maybe even forgiven.

Well but of course films about rape will be told from a male point of view and include a plea for understanding and forgiveness. And it will continue to be that way as long as men continue to dominate the world and use their power to harm women.

Dick is abundant and low value

And speaking of Evan Marc Katz and the "how to get a man" franchises, how did it take me so long to learn of this perfect mantra?

Dick is abundant and low value. I had gotten my new motto amidst the worst break-up of my life. Shaken to my core by the degrading insults my ex had hurled at me but also mourning the permanent departure of some poetically good dick, I was spending a day mindlessly refreshing Twitter and reading up on how to spot sociopaths. I came across two tweets from Madeleine Holden, a lawyer and writer who regularly entertains the Twitter masses with her unapologetic analyses of toxic masculinity and her praise of amazing female-identified people: 

In my memory, those last six words emerged from the screen with their outer edges glowing like the inscription in the Dark Tongue of Mordor on the One Ring. I was transformed, nay, transfigured, by the message. 

Conversations were governed by the same rules as matches. Lead with a pussy joke about my cat? Dick is abundant and low value. Choose a meeting place that doesn’t account for my commute there? Dick is abundant and low value. Ask for nudes too soon? Dick is abundant and low value. Cancel twice? Dick is abundant and low value. Send an unsolicited photo of your lower body in your laundry-day underwear with your hand suggestively but not sexily placed over your semi and not even bothering to crop out your poor cat? Dick is abundant and low value.

I'm going to start sending the motto to the random assholes I meet on dating sites. Speaking of which - thanks so much for the offer, random pudgy man.

Evan Marc Katz: women must be passive for alpha males

Once again, Evan Marc Katz has fresh content in which he tells women to be passive if they want a man:

For the uninitiated, mirroring is designed for one purpose – to prevent women from chasing down men who are not interested in them. It is not a game. It is not a throwback to the 1950’s. It requires no thought and very little effort. Mirroring presumes one basic thing about that guy you like: if he’s interested in you, he’ll let you know.
So…
If he texts you, text him back right away.
If he calls you, call him back right away.
If he says he wants to see you this weekend and you’re free, say yes.
If he says he wants to be your boyfriend and you feel the same, say yes.
Mirroring is reactive, not proactive.

It gives men the space they need to choose you, prevents you from looking needy and desperate, and reveals what men are thinking – all without doing ANYTHING.

Mirroring is based on confidence, not insecurity. You should never have to chase a guy down and remind him that you’re alive and available and want to see him. All you have to do is be warm, enthusiastic and available when he reaches out to you.

The primary exception to mirroring comes in the form of beta/feminine men. Beta/feminine men are often some of the best husbands out there, but they conduct themselves in a passive way, leaving women wondering how they feel. In short, these nice guys are so insecure about pursuing you and making a move that they often wait for YOU to express interest in them. “You can call me, you know,” might be their mantra. Which is fine. However, this puts you in your “masculine energy,” and forces you to be the one to reach out to him to gauge his interest and availability.

As a dating coach for women, I don’t like that model. Nor do most of my clients. They may be proactive superstars in real life, but they tend to prefer being courted by men.
Which brings us back to the beginning. When a man is interested in you, you don’t have to do anything except say yes. You never have to reach out to him because he will do it for you. It’s in his best interest – whether he wants to get laid or whether he wants to be your boyfriend. You have to trust that.

"but they tend to prefer being courted by men"

So "beta/feminine men" says Katz, using the terminology of evolutionary psychology and Men's Rights Activists, are not actual men.

And the best part is that Evan Marc Katz claims to be a feminist.

It's important to note that the kind of men that Katz is promoting to his poor sad clients are so backwards, their masculinity is so incredibly fragile, that they will freak right the fuck out if you exhibit any initiative whatsoever. You must absolutely wait for him to choose you, or no deal.

To Katz a true man is one who believes in traditional gender roles - in other words men who are more likely to be abusive. 

You know who didn't take the kind of advice that Evan Marc Katz is dishing out? Linda McCartney.

...Five months later, in May 1968, she turned up at a press conference being given by Paul and John at a New York hotel. ‘I managed to slip him my phone number,’ she recalled later. ‘He rang me up and told me they were leaving that evening, but he’d like it if I was able to travel out to the airport with him and John. So I went out in their limousine, sandwiched between Paul and John.’

Is Paul McCartney a beta male? Well it didn't utterly emasculate him when Linda didn't wait for him to ask for her phone number. So by the Katz definition, yes.

You know who else was not passive? Yoko Ono:

Eventually, Yoko’s dogged pursuit of John became so blatant that it developed into something of a private joke between the married couple. Yoko’s grande atrocity occurred one night when she turned up at the Transcendental Meditation lecture John and Cynthia were attending in London. When it was over she followed them out of the lecture hall and into the backseat of John’s psychedelically hand-painted Rolls-Royce limousine and sat herself down between them. Cynthia and John exchanged embarrassed smiles over her head until the chauffeur dropped her off at Park Row, where she was living with her husband.

So apparently in Evan Marc Katz's book, John Lennon, leader of Beatles was a beta male, and not "a man." 

Granted Yoko's approach was much more extreme than Linda's but neither of those women - who were, by the way, older than the man they were pursuing - Linda only by a half-year, Yoko by eight years - were passive. They were proactive and extremely proactive in the case of Yoko Ono.

So John Lennon and Paul McCartney both failed the alpha male type test. They ended up with pro-active women. Women like Elizabeth Warren, who proposed to her husband.

You know who does match the "alpha male" type that Katz is constantly selling to his sad backwards traditionalist clients? Donald Trump:

Introduced at a party in 1998, one year after he had split from his second wife, Marla Maples, "I saw Melania and I said, 'Who is that?' " Trump recalls. "She was a very successful model. She was terrific. I tried to get her number, and she wouldn't give it to me."

He came to the party with a date!" Melania explains, laughing. "I had heard he was a ladies' man, and so I said, 'I'm not one of the ladies.' He said later that he sent her to the ladies' room so he could get my number. I was like, 'Oh what a sneaky way!' "
Still, Melania says she liked his "sparkle" and took his number. After returning from a modeling gig in the Caribbean, she called him, and on their first date, "we talked for almost the whole night," she says. 

Clearly when a man is attractive, women will pursue him and the man won't necessarily be turned off by being pursued. And if Lennon and McCartney are examples of "beta males" why would any woman want any other kind?

And it's not a stretch at all to make the connection between men with fragile masculinity issues and voting for Donald Trump. As this Atlantic article notes:

Standard commentary about Clinton’s candidacy—which focuses on her email server, the Benghazi attack, her oratorical deficiencies, her struggles with “authenticity”—doesn’t explain the intensity of this opposition. But the academic literature about how men respond to women who assume traditionally male roles does. And it is highly disturbing. 

Over the past few years, political scientists have suggested that, counterintuitively, Barack Obama’s election may have led to greater acceptance by whites of racist rhetoric. Something similar is now happening with gender. Hillary Clinton’s candidacy is sparking the kind of sexist backlash that decades of research would predict. If she becomes president, that backlash could convulse American politics for years to come. 

To understand this reaction, start with what social psychologists call “precarious manhood” theory. The theory posits that while womanhood is typically viewed as natural and permanent, manhood must be “earned and maintained.” Because it is won, it can also be lost. Scholars at the University of South Florida and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign reported that when asked how someone might lose his manhood, college students rattled off social failures like “losing a job.” When asked how someone might lose her womanhood, by contrast, they mostly came up with physical examples like “a sex-change operation” or “having a hysterectomy.” 

More on the traditionalist views of Evan Marc Katz.

Tiny little bitty theater world

And speaking of Ghostbusters - here is my friend Valerie (in the boots) hanging out with an improv group. Fans of the newest Ghostbusters will recognize the guy in the brown jacket as the villain in the movie - Neil Casey.

He also writes for SNL and Amy Schumer.

Man-babies vs. Ghostbusters

I went and saw Ghostbusters again - this time I took my friend Valerie and she loved it too. It was released into theaters for the Labor Day weekend.

Which gave the misogynist man-babies a chance to scream all over again on the Ghostbusters Facebook page about how much they-hated-this-movie- and-it sucks-and-it's-a-bomb-and-only-PC-feminist-SJWs-like-it-and-nobody-else-should-watch-it-and-this-has-nothing-to-do-with-misogyny-because-I'm-married-to-a-woman!

Here are some comments from those philosopher-kings.

In spite of the enraged shrieks of man-babies, I didn't have much interest in seeing this movie until I saw some cool clips. But the fact that misogynists hate it makes it even better. And after reading these inane comments and then seeing this... I laughed so hard I couldn't breathe, so I stopped because I got worried I might die - and then I read it again and laughed again. This cycle continued for a good half hour.

I'm lucky I survived. So far.

This gif about murderous Ghostbusters almost killed me.

Backyard - another perspective

My upstairs neighbor shared a photo she took of our building's backyard, which she took in winter. You can see the pine tree on the right covered in snow. Such a shame it's gone.