Rebooting the Calendar

Happy new year, world. 

I am not sorry to see 2025 go. 2025 sucked. From beginning to end - dominated by Donald Trump, doing all he can to fuck this country up six ways to Sunday, in the most embarrassing, shameful, idiotic way imaginable - what a nightmare. Is there any way this gets better? Well, there will be mid-terms this year, presumably, and if Trump doesn't send in the army, he is likely to lose all the congressional support he has. Though for that to matter, congress and Democrats have to do something - not just fend off the worst, but find a way to break the son of a bitch. I don't know. They should have done that in 2021 - he should have been frog-marched from the White House, probably on January 7, but January 21 would have worked. Letting him and his minions get away with trying to overthrow the government brought us to the disaster we are in today.

That's Trump. My pessimism about Democrats might be a function of being in Maine, and watching the ancient and infuriating Susan Collins running against the equally ancient, but usually pretty respectable Janet Mills, though Mills is likely to slot in with all the other ancient and respectable Democrats in congress. Who wants that? Unfortunately the most prominent alternative to those two is Graham Plattner, a guy who thought it was a good idea to get the Third SS Panzer badge emblazoned on his chest. Sure, it was a long time ago and he was drunk in Croatia, where I imagine this happens all the time - still, man, still! It took him until this year to do anything about it, and he ran his mouth more than once in those years and - I don't know. If he had ever served in any elected office in his life, we would at least have a track record to look at, but no. He's an "outsider"! He talks a good game - Bernie bro stuff - but that's talk, and a particularly cheap kind of talk at that. To me, he comes off as a shameless opportunist whose only real value is his own personal advancement. It is convenient for him to play the outsider, and to his credit he's playing the lefty outsider, but in the extremely unlikely event he ended up in Washington, I'd put my money on him turning into, at best, John Fetterman, at worst, Tulsi Gabbard. Though apparently he plans to wear a suit. 

What a hell hole this country has become.

Well, there is more to life than politics. There is, for example, Sport. As it happened, 2025 was a pretty entertaining year for sport. A very cool baseball season, with the local nine doing well, producing one of the most exciting young players in years, in Roman Anthony - promising to hang around. But all of baseball was fun this year - a fun season, a fantastic post season, lots of good young players coming up - it promises to stay fun, at least until they shut it down for a strike or lockout in a couple years. But there's a couple years before that happens. Beyond baseball, it has been a pretty good year locally - the C's are respectable, even with their best player out for most of the year, the B's are competent again, and the Patsies are back on top as if the post Brady years never happened. How thrilling!

2026 is also when the World Cup comes back to the US. Normally, that would be thrilling, but this year - yikes. No. The tournament itself is ridiculous, bloated and confusing, covering three countries and way too many teams. I haven't followed soccer close enough to know what to expect, and there isn't a lot making me do so. That and the fact that this is three straight world cups help in dictatorships. FIFA, of course, paid their proper bribe to the grifter in chief, but that is to be expected. Still - when push comes to shove I am more likely than not to get caught up in the fun. Maybe.

And? There is tech. My tech year has been a shit show. IPad dead; TV receiver dead; Mac mini dead; laptop screen dead - the cat bit it. Thanks, cat! That was fixed at least. And last week, my coffee grinder died! maybe the most horrible failure of them all! Alas - the wide world of technology does not seem to be doing any better. Everything is AI this and AI that, and it all sucks. This might even be made worse by the ways generative AI poisons the very idea of AI - which, I am told, can do many good things in other uses. I don't know enough to judge. I do know that that there are not a lot of technologies in 2025 that aero better than the same techs were in 2015 or 2005 even. Yeah, faster, lighter, sometimes cheaper - but I have seen people drop laptops and shatter the screens completely and the machines keep on working for years - mine died because the cat bit it!

All right; that's enough. It is time for 2026, which has almost infinite room to get better, though has not lack of ways to get worse. Let's hope for the best and get on with it. This year, let me try to be a better person. Try to post more often, once again; eat better, get more exercise, read more, write more, see more movies, pat the cat, be nice to people, backup my work (oh god) and go Red Sox! Good luck, 2026, you're going to need it.

Tech Woes

This has been a tragic week for me and my machinery. A worst case disaster kind of week - my main computer died the death. There I was, innocently finishing Wordle the other day, and when I did, I tried to click off to a different page and Chrome starting spinning. Then it stopped responding - anything. The mouse would not click; I could not even force quit. I finally turned the machine off and on - and got a ? for a disk icon. Not good. I ran a disk repair, and got it to reboot - but Chrome launched automatically, and more or less immediately froze again. Another restart, more disk repairing - I even tried reinstalling the system - no go. An error, hardware it would seem. There is no getting around it - the disk on my rather ancient Mac mini has given up the ghost.

It has been a bad year for me and technology. I already had to replace my iPad, then the receiver I had attached to the TV - now this. Not to mention fixing the screen on my laptop. And just adding insult to injury (though this might in fact be the real injury here, other than to my wallet), I do not have a backup since last January - though I am pretty sure I did an interim backup over the summer. Except - note the theme of this post - the disk I think I did it on won't mount. Good times!

I will try not to dwell on the fact that everything I did this year on the computer is gone. There are some lessons to be learned - the obvious one being, back up, back up regularly, and don't be afraid of redundancy. The other lesson - the one that is about to cause my poor credit card to grown under the strain - is more mixed. The fact is that mini served me very well, for a very long time - 11 years basically. It has grown troublesome in the last couple years, mostly due to trying to get new software to run on it - but though that has been a nuisance, the machine kept on going. What I mainly use - surfing the web and writing - have been as good as ever. Why change? Until the thing dies and you have to replace it. (This complaint probably applies to the iPad and receiver as well - the iPad was ancient, though it didn't die alone, it required gravity and a heavy object landing on it. The receiver was old, a cast off from a friend - who replaced it with another cast off. This does not apply to the laptop, which is less than 2 years old.)

Replacing this machine is going to be a pain. The money is annoying, but not terrible, and I was angling toward buying something new anyway. It is a pain because of the stuff I use with the old machine, that I will have to get working on this one. It is all old - mostly USB - which is no longer part of the basic Mac. So to use the keyboard, mouse, camera, external storage, even external CD drive I have - I need to get a pile of adaptors. Nice. When I upgraded my laptop a couple years ago, I went through the same thing - adaptors and so on to connect monitors and thumb drives and keyboards and the likes - that was less annoying since that is a secondary machine. Though of course the adaptors I bought are not the ones I need for the new machine. Knew that was coming.

All right. I am not going to belabor this. I will pay the piper, find the right connections, get what data I can find back on the thing, and move on. I will probably have somewhere sleepless nights thinking about it - and might even come back in here to opine on the state of computer technology today (mostly about its increasing fragility - try to imagine the equivalent in 100 years of finding a shoebox full of old photographs in the closet) - but you deal. But boy, that's a lot of dealing in one year. 

Battle of the Bulge 80 Years On

One of the casualties of my neglect for blogging in the last 7 or 8 years is my history posts. I was quite committed to my Civil War commemorations; I managed to keep up the appearance through the WWI anniversaries - but never tried anyhting like that with WWII. Granted, WWII didn't have as good an anniversary to base posts on as the 150 and 100 for those other wars - but 80 would have worked. I did some 70 and 75 year anniversaries. If I hadn't given up on writing, I might have tried it.

But here it is, December 2024, 80 years since the Battle of the Bulge - and I figure I should give it a shot again. The battle itself began on December 16, 1944, and lasted through the end of January. The Germans launched a surprise attack on American lines in the Ardennes forest of Luxembourg and Belgium, hoping to punch through this poorly defended area, get into the Americans' rear, drive to Antwerp and cause the US and UK to either abandon one another or abandon the USSR. It was complete folly, but Hitler was well gone by that time, and didn't put up much resistance to his pipe dreams. The end of 1944 was an interesting time in the war - the Allies had basically had their way all summer, once they broke out of Normandy; but things were starting to go sour in the fall. Operation Market Garden, an ambitious and misguided attempt to cross the Rhine in the Netherlands with a massive parachute drop, went very wrong; fighting on the borders, the Battle of Aachen, or in the Hurtgen Forest or the Vosges mountains, bogged down significantly. Punching into Germany was not going to be easy. While the allies prepared for the next stage of fighting, they left the Ardennes somewhat under defended. Divisions mangled in the Hurgen forest, or brand new on the front, were there, resting, training, waiting. They did not expect trouble in the Ardennes, a mountainous, wooded area full of river valleys and bad roads, very difficult for armies to move through. Which is why that is where the Germans attacked in 1914 and 1940, and now again in 1944.

When the attack came, it was a complete surprise. The German forces shattered the American fron lines - thin and patchy as they were - and threatened to get out fo the woods and out where they could cause trouble. But the Americans fought desperately to save the situation. They defended every post card village and miserable crossroads with all they could find. Their leaders, Ike and company, reacted far faster than Hitler imagined, immediately ordering reinforcements into the area, ordering Patton to utrn north and cut thins thing off. The Germans still punched deep into Belgium - but it took longer than they hoped, and they never did break through in the north, where they were expecting to make a big breakthrough. They got stuck for days trying to take crossroad towns like St Vith; they never did manage to take another town, Bastogne. Panzer divisions drove past, leaving these places isolated in their rear - but doing that, with Americans still parked on the best roads, meant they couldn't get a strong enough force forward, and more importantly than that, they couldn't get supplies forward - they couldn't get gasoline forward. They ran out of gas; the allies counterattacked an drove them back, often in long drawn out slogs through woods and hills - the kind of thing that made the Hurtgen forest such a nightmare.

But in the end - it's hard to say whether this battle delayed the end of the war or accelerated it. A lot of Germans died, a lot of equipment was ruined, the luftwaffe was pretty much crippled after trying a massive surprise attack on January 1, 1945. They did not have the resources for any of this stuff. It they had dug in and fought it out 0on the borders the whole time, they may have dragged things out a lot longer. Or, if they had held the west with the least they could manage, and done everythign they could to hold off the Soviets in the east - they might have extended the war a while. Even more people may have died. But the results weren't going to change. So it's hard to say there was any point to any of it, other than dying in Belgium instead of Germany.

On the other hand - the Battle of the Bulge made a hell of a story. It was a fascinating, dramatic battle. The fighting in the fall of 1944 was ugly stuff: grinding through dense woods, one German emplacement at a time - it was getting back to the meat grinder horrors of WWI. But the bulge was mobile, complicated, with forces scattered all over the map, desperate fighting for towns and crossroads and lonely hills, without a lot of contact with anyone else. Fights for Clerveau, St Vith, the Elsenborn Ridge, Wiltz, Bastogne, places like Hotton and Marche and Stavelot all happened on their own, the men attacking or holding cut off from the rest of the battle. This, I imagine, is mostly a function of the terrain - narrow roads through heavy woods, so that fights were concentrated on the towns, the open places, the river crossings and so on. It made for fantastic stories.

The fight for Bastogne gets most of the attention - got the press at the time, got one of the great World War II movies, in Battleground. It was a good story - a crucial position, surrounded, held by a famous elite unit (the 101st Airborne), in a well known town - there were spectacular air drops and a daring rescue mission by Patton's tanks. And it produced one of the definitive quotes of the war - "Nuts!" -  Anthony McAuliffe's answer to demands from the Germans to surrender. And there is the fact that it held - that the Americans won the fight, tactically as well as strategically. It was a perfect focal point for talking about the Battle of the Bulge.

But it was not the only crucial fight in the battle. Other towns, especially St Vith, another major road hub, saw equally desperate fighting north of Bastogne. St Vith fell, in the end - but the battle there held up the Germans for days, blocked the roads west for days, and was almost as important in disrupting the overall attack as Bastogne. Many other towns and villages - Clerveaux, Hotton, the twin villages of Rocherath and Krinkelt, saw desperate stands of their own, that held up the Germans, bought time, even when they did not hold. And the last of those - Rocherath-Krinkelt was part of what was, in the end, probably the most important fight in the Battle fo the Bulge - the decisive moment, the battle of Elsenborn Ridge. This was the very northern edge fo the battle - this is where the Germans expected to break through most decisively, with their best divisions, their best equipment, the works. And here, the 99th and 2nd infantry divisions held. They held out for days in places like Rocherath and Krinkelt, before falling back to a solid defensive position on the ridge itself. (Joined there by several other divisions.) And this line held. Some of the Germans got past them, and made trouble to their west - but they were isolated. The main line held, and the Germans finally had to shunt their tanks south, to try to take the long way to Antwerp. Past St Vith and Bastogne, which held long enough to make those roads difficult. So it went.

It is all very fascinating. And here I have to turn to a bit of autobiography. Back when I was a wean, I was a terrible military history nerd - I'd say teenaged history nerd, but this started long before that. It started in fifth grade - I got the present of Bruce Catton's history of the Army of the Potomac - I read that and I was hooked. I promptly emptied the school library of everything they had about the Civil War, then any other history I could find. When the school library was exhausted I cleaned out the town libraries. That is where I found a host of popular military histories, mostly of WWII. This might have really started when Reader's Digest published an abridged A Bridge Too Far - but it went from there. All those writers: Cornelius Ryan, Walter Lord, John Toland, their books - The Longest Day, Day of Infamy and Incredible Victory - and the hero of this story, John Toland's Battle: The Story of the Bulge.

I loved that book. I was probably in 6th or 7th grade when I read it, and it hit hard. Of all those books, it's the one I go back to (along with Catton's). I still read it almost every December. I can see the reasons - the battle itself was fascinating, and the setting, those woods and hills of the Ardennes, is part of it. I've seen pictures of the place - take away the castles and I see Vermont and Western Maine in those hills and woods and narrow river valleys. I could imagine what the battle looked like. And the situation is very evocative: the surprise attack, the desperate scramble to hold off the Germans long enough to bring things back to normal. The best war stories are underdog stories, and this is one of the rather few times when Americans really the underdogs in WWII - at least for a week or two. And while I don't know if Toland's account is necessarily the best it could be - it seems very spotty, probably because he was a journalist and wrote it from the interviews he could get, emphasizing the stories, and concentrating on the best accounts he found. But that is also its strength - because it is so rooted in the first hand accounts he obviously relied on, it is very visceral, it conveys that sense of desperate struggle. There are accounts in there: Hurley Fuller at Clerveaux; Don Boyer and Bruce Clarke at St Vith; people like Jesse Morrow at the twin villages; Sam Hogan in Hotton, on the western edge of the battle, that have buried themselves in my soul. They are extraordinarily evocative, of the confusion, horror, heroism, madness of war. 

I suppose I should note - Toland's access to interviewees shapes what he wrote about, it is pretty obvious. Those fights are all vitally important, and he had sources; another battle - something like Noville, north of Bastogne, where the 10th Armored division and elements of the 101st held off a German division for a day or so are just as crucial, just as evocative - but his account is looser there. I imagine this is all a matter of sources. And overall, it does warp his account of the battle - which is too reliant on those eye-witness accounts, and sometimes lets the broader picture slip by too quickly. But that's a nit pick, and after all - it is the source of the books power too, so - I can live with it.

And so: 80 years ago, this month, all this happened. It is a very resonant story, one I go back to almost every year. And one I wanted to write something about. 

As The World Turns

 Hello world. Happy new year.

This has been a lousy year at this blog. It's been bad for a while, but this year - yikes.

Well - 2023 was a pretty lousy year all around. For me, maybe not the worst - the worst thing to happen was my poor cat dying, which still hurts. I have to get a new cat. I need a cat. The rest of my life has been mostly just empty - I am lazy, bored and boring, stuck in a rut, etc. Bad habits abound, most of them related to sitting on the couch looking for YouTube videos to watch. Terrible.

That's me. The world has been a good deal worse. The Ukraine war has dragged on another year, with no end in sight. Hamas attacked Israel shamefully, touching off another war int he middle east. Israel has retaliated in almost almost inconceivably evil ways. There is no end in sigh there and not much likelihood of anything good coming out of it. 

The presidential election campaigns are already in full swing, with one party pretending to nominate a bunch of schmucks, but really intending to nominate a criminal, if he cam make it on the ballot. The Democrats on the other hand can't seem to manage to point out that they are in fact running the country pretty well - the economy continues to roll along, even last year's inflation panic mostly gone by the wayside - though there is more than enough to complain about. I don't know. Biden and company do seem far too pro-Israel to really do any good in the middle east. They are at least steadfastly pro-Ukraine, but the Republicans are just as resolutely pro-Putin, so things stall. Ugly.

Well - that's the world. Me? I will note one or two things, right? I did get a new couch, which made the poor cat very happy for the last month or so or her life. The Rangers won the world series - I did not see it coming, but maybe should have. It is cool when anyone wins their first, and I have had a soft spot for the Rangers for a while. And of course am delighted to see Nathan Eovaldi get ring number 2. What else? I managed to watch a fair number of movies, including a few new releases - Asteroid City, which is a great delight; the new Venture Brother's movie, sending me off to watch the rest of the VBs run; the D&D movie, which stunk, though it was almost redeemed by stealing a Coen brothers joke at the end; what's that - three new movies? No - four! Renfield! amusing, though a bit dumb. And so on. I also watched a couple movies I had never seen before - I hesitate to name them, as it will cause shock and consternation, but - I finally watched Star Wars and Conan the Barbarian. Whatever that is worth.

I tried to read this year, but didn't finish a lot. I currently am in the middle of reading The Heat's On (Chester Himes), Alice in Wonderland, Bulldog Drummond, Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas, and probably a couple others I have forgotten - I might even finish one of them eventually. 

And music? I don't listen to music very systematically - mostly surfing YouTube or picking something out on the iPhone - but I do get interested in things. The past few years have seen me get all excited about The Small Faces, the Kinks, the Brian Jonestown Massacre, Echo and theBunnymen - this year? I spent a lot of time surfing through Les Claypool videos and lately ghave grown obsessed over the Sensational Alex Harvey Band. Good stuff there. 

And so end it with a song in common between SAHB and Les Claypool: Jerry Reed's Amos Moses. Have a happy new year!

A Farewell

I am breaking blogging silence with some very sad news. My cat died last week. It seemed very sudden - Saturday she was having trouble breathing, but she was still moving fine, eating, though with some difficulty; but by Wednesday she was suffering bad, and Thursday morning, she went, while I was waiting for the local vet's to open to take her in. Poor old thing.

She was oldish - 13. Not ancient. I have had her for 12 1/2 years. She has been a superb cat. She was part of a litter my brother's cat had - 4 of them - John, Paul, George and Ringo. They had given away John and George, and let me have my pick of Paul or Ringo. Paul was a handsome boy - black and white tuxedo - but he also seemed a bit too rambunctious. Ringo was playful and friendly, but calmer, and that seemed like a good idea for an apartment cat. So Ringo it was - New Year's 2011.

(There they all are, 13 years ago.)

She turned out to be just about perfect. She was a fun cat, but she wasn't really wild - good in an apartment. She was friendly and social, but not needy - good when it's just the two of us most of the time. She was very sweet and good natured, she loved attention - she could be shy around other people, but 10 minutes later she would be plopped in the middle of the table expecting everyone to pet her. She was a joy.

(Always ready to help out on the computer.)

She was healthy as a horse, for almost all that 13 years. This last week or so is the first time she has given me anything to worry about. She didn't even have hairballs or puke, like most cats - unless she got to eating plastic, which she certainly did. Phone cords, plastic bags, the occasional connecting wire (chewed through the wire from my Roku to the TV, back in the days when I thought a Roku might be handy.) That was it, though. It makes me wonder if she ate something bad this time - I don't know what - but she acted like she might have swallowed something, and it all happened fast. I don't know.

I will miss her. She loved her new couch - 

She loved my old chair. Poor old kitty. Rest in peace, old friend...

Me I'm All Smiles... Welcome 2022

And here we are. Happy New Year! No one is going to miss 2021 - the only thing it had going for it was not being 2020. But it rivals 2020. People kept dying, they kept dying unnecessarily, as vaccines came out and big chunks of the country refused to get them, and prominent political and media figures urged people not to get them, and people kept dying because of it, the disease hangs around and everything remains shitty. 

Speaking of things hanging around making the world shitty, Donald Trump, having gotten stomped in the election, tried to overthrow the government. He failed, but he's still walking the world free, to our national shame. He still talks like he is going to try it again, the Republicans are doing all they can to stop enough people from voting to make it so he can win without a coup, though they are all pretty much fine with a coup at this point. The supreme court, a completely illegitimate institution at this point, works on undoing the twentieth century and the Reconstruction amendments. Republicans, in general, have basically adopted Trump's fascism wholesale, running on a constant attack on intellectual freedom and truth. All of which is mostly aimed at running on a platform of putting Black people back in their place. And women, foreigners, gays and anyone else they can find to hate and abuse. 

In other words, we suck. 

I suppose I can take solace from the economy recovering, though who knows how long that will last with COVID still going strong. I would take more solace if the Democrats were all Democrats. Joe Manchin has decided to singlehandedly betray more or less everything he is supposed to represent - Build Back Better is good for the country, will be good for West Viginia, and is good for the Democratic party - isn't that what a Democratic Senator is supposed to care about? immediate constituents, the country as a whole, and his party? In his case, there is also himself and his donors - he has decided to represent them. Now true - I single out Manchin when the entire Republican party is acting the same way - but they are openly seditious and fascist - they are openly working against the country and their voters. Though to their credit (for what it's worth) they do work for the good (short term anyway) of the Republican Party, which now, is all about power, looting the country, and oppressing Blacks, women, gays, foreigners and so on.

Alas. 

Well, I will not belabor politics anymore. How goes it with me? Not great. I suppose things are going along well enough in the general sense - gainful employment that doesn't drive me too crazy, I'm healthy, smart enough to be vaccinated (though not lucky enough to get a booster - I was scheduled for this very day, but the local pharmacy is down a person so closed up at the last minute. Bloody hell.) That all could be worse. 

But I have become unspeakably lazy in the last couple years. Just look at the output on this blog! And that reflects general lack of motivation for anything. I don't watch movies anymore, not much anyway. I don't write much, not much of anything. I did Nanowrimo, as usual, and produced almost 70,000 words - though with almost nothing I could imagine being part of an actual novel, in the end. Weird stuff. I used to hope to finally finish something - these days, I hope not to go backwards. And outside of that? I mentioned a couple years ago surfing on YouTube - that's still a thing, but these days, I spend most fo that time scrolling through YouTube looking for something to watch. Sad. 

I did knock off a few books last year - most notably autobiographies of Richard Thompson and Will Sergeant - both very fine books by very fine guitar players. I have been worshipping Thompson for 30 odd years; I was reminded this year how much I liked Echo and the Bunnymen back in the 80s, and spent a lot of time this year listening to them. This happened with the Gang of Four a while back - I heard them, remembered how much I liked them for a while, and went back and dove in and have worshipped them since. The bunnymen have gotten the same treatment this year. Don't ask me why it took so long.

All of which does bring up one thing that went a bit better this year: I did listen to a lot more music than I have in a while. I tend to latch on to things - art forms - movies or music or books, or other things, like different sports or games or what have you - and ride them hard for a few years, then - stop. I stopped obsessing about music a while back, after obsessing about it hard for a long time. Strange. This year? I didn't pay m,uch attention to anything contemporary - but I paid attention to some old stuff. The last couple years, really. I will have to write about that some day. This year? Echo and the Bunnymen, the Kinks and Brian Jonestown Massacre got the weight of my attention. A lot of it from YouTube, though I bought records, and listened to them. Interesting. Maybe I will write about it again.

Anyway - there you have it. Something to mark the change of the calendar. I will even end with a resolution of sorts: I want to post once in a while on here. Something. Something besides obituaries and laments about the end of the republic, I hope. Maybe music.

Plague Journal

It looks so innocent, the end of February. I could still imagine a good candidate to vote for in the presidential election, though that hope was probably false. I could imagine a candidate I would not mind voting for, at least, in Sanders. Well. I could go to the Walmart and buy toilet paper, I could go out to eat, I could hang around the house and play games, I don't know. I was looking forward to spring training and baseball, watching Liverpool win the Premier League, watch8ing the C's now and then. Fun stuff! I could go to work, whatever that is worth!

Well, I can still go to work. I can't really complain about work, on balance: I'm doing video calls mostly, isolated from the world and even my coworkers - hey, cool by me! But there's not much else the recommend the last month or so.

Month: March 12-13 were the days when things seemed to click in, at least where I am. That was right after Italy locked down, about the time some of the harder hit American states started to ramp up controlling efforts. I had just put in for some vacation time, to do other things - I told my coworkers it looked like I was wasting my time off, since none of the events I wanted to attend were going to be open in a month, and maybe not even the job itself. They were not convinced, but within a week, yeah, all the events were canceled, most of the workplace's contact with the public was gone - yeah. I mean - a month ago.

It has been a hard month; the country locked down before the horror started to hit - the last week or so, the bill is coming due, and it is not good. I don't know where it will end - yesterday had something like 1800 deaths - horrible, and likely still on the climb. Famous people are dying, John Prine or Adam Schlesinger or Ellis Marsalis and Wallace Roney, others are sick, or at least infected, from Tom Hanks to Boris Johnson. I don't know. I don't know if this is going to rise and peak and fall abnd be gone; I don't know if this is going to rise and fall in little waves as we quarantine and break quarantine and quarantine again - I don't know. I don't know how it ends, how long we can stay locked down, what happens when we stop. Can the economy recover? will it, since what can happen and what will happen in the USA are not always the same.

That was a useless paragraph. Most of what I do is useless. It is a strange crisis in that the best thing you can do is wait for it to get better. It's a crisis that rewards patience and resilience - letting the disease run its course, find a vaccine or treatments, let a level of immunity build up that turns it into just another variety of the flu. That is hard to do, partly because it is so easy to do. You feel guilty. I certainly feel weird, reading about everyone's lock down travails, while I continue to go to work more or less on my regular schedule, never needing to find a way to stay sane alone for two weeks at a time. Which, I have to say, is not something I would have a lot of difficulty with, comparatively. I am fine being alone, at least as long as I am healthy. Though I wish I got more writing done.

All right. This is just to say that he re I am, and to prove to myself at least that I can force myself to do something like this, once in a while. Huzzah and all that.

And maybe dabble in politics? Bernie Sanders finally gave up. The Democrats are left with Biden - my god. But it is far more important to take the senate anyway - Biden and the senate is worth more than Sanders without, so, forward decent people! don't stop, for a moment, reminding the world that Trump is a monster, that Mitch McConnell is worse, and if they can win elections when they are a clear minority, we should be able to take one or two as the majority. Though we'd better ake this one, because we probably won't get another chance.

Though then again - nothing ever ends. So - yeah.

Vote, whatever it takes.

2020 Hindsight

Happy New Year!

This blog has become a ghost site - I thought it was bad last year, or the year before, but - 4 posts? Why bother at all? Well - if I could get back to posting, I suppose that would be the answer in itself. I won't promise it. As it is - it's as good a place as any to toss some thoughts out into the world, to let them float in the ether on a sea of forced metaphors. It's as good a place as any to welcome the new decade, to bid the last one farewell and all.

It was a strange decade. For me, personally, it began on something of an all time low: my mother died, the day after Christmas, in 2009; 2010 began with her funeral. There has been a lot of that this decade - I am of an age when the generations before me are starting to die. My father, a couple close friends, many uncles and aunts have passed, some of them very hard to process. But - I am of an age when that is going to happen. I am getting perilously close to the age when having my contemporaries die will seem less like a shock and more of the natural way of things. Another decade and I will be there, I am afraid.

But that said: the first half of the 2010s weren't a bad time for me. I moved to a place I liked, a good apartment, where I stayed for 7 years. I took classes, I wrote, I posted regularly, here, and sometimes on other blogs. I got out of the country a couple times, still played softball, sometimes well, I ate well, lived well. My job even seemed to reach a detente with me - though that got me accused of "complacency." That, of course, should have been a sign - was a sign - but - that's the second half of the decade. In all - I lived pretty well in the first half of the 10s. Even just using this blog as indication - I posted regularly; I started up a couple series that carried on a while, and gave me a chance to write some things I liked. History posts - following along with the Civil War, then WWI for a while; music posts, those band of the month posts; movies - screen shots and directors and things like that. It was good. I was, I think I would have to say, satisfied with my lot in life.

The second half fo the decade has been a bit different. Maybe not objectively - nothing really bad has happened to me, except of my own making (sort of) - but a lot of the things I was satisfied with had to go. And the world outside has gone straight to hell. For me - the job is what got me. Things changed. A generation of managers where I worked left, and a new generation came in - people who use words like "disruption" as a positive term; people who openly admitted to forming their management ideas by watching TED talks and reading online management consultants. The results were predictable. And I was not willing to take it, because I did not have to. I had resources to move, and did, though it meant I gave up living in the city - but I could live closer to my family, could support myself on a lot less money, and could engage in other past times - bowling and D&D in place of softball and education! So - not a bad tradeoff, over all. Though it changed me in strange ways. I went from being a fairly obsessive habitual movie goer to almost never going to movies, and barely even watching movies. I went from the blogging you see before 2017 to almost nothing since 2017. Some of this is me - some of this might be the world, the way the technology has evolved (as fewer and fewer blogs seem all that important - Twitter is where all the conversations seem to be happening. That is not a good thing.) BUt there is it.

And the world, of course, has gone to hell. It held on in the first half of the decade - but you could see the disaster coming. The mid-term elections in 2010 doomed us, giving the Republicans completely undeserved and unrepresentative control of the machinery of government that they have exploited to hold power as they sink into smaller and smaller minority status. The GOP, long having embraced white supremacy as a vital part of their politics, doubled down on it. They reacted shamefully to Obama's election, the worst of them used it to build the racist elements in the party. All this brought us to Trump, who has made all the racism, sexism, xenophobia and everything else the whole point of his existence. Was Trump a break from what the GOP had been? Maybe - there is a sense that earlier Republicans used racism as a way to get votes for their tax cuts. Trump and his closest supporters seem to be using tax cuts to keep support for their racism. The white supremacy seems to be their defining point. It sometimes seems like this is so.

And no? Trump himself is a plain fascist - he has all the makings: the racism, xenophobia, authoritarianism, use of violence for politics, corporatism, aestheticization of politics, turning it explicitly into spectacle, and working very hard to make only the spectacle seem to matter. (Though I think the most important element in the aesthetics of fascism is the idea of the dominance of Myth. It's the idea of a mythological justification - Make America Great Again. The red hats are part of it - but the idea of a lost golden age, an imaginary version fo the country that conforms to their political goals, etc, is what really defines fascism. This is an essay I am not going to write just now, though.) The country, of course, is something else - even now, he is only the president, one branch of government, he is a Republican, one party - if the other branches act, if the other parties resist, if his own party decides to try to not be fascists - he is not going to succeed in turning the country into something worse than it is. He has been impeached; there are elections coming; we will see how this goes.

But I don't want to write about the future. This is one last look back at the decade gone. So: the second half fo this decade - 2016 on at least - have gone from worse to worse. All the celebrity deaths in 2026 hit hard. My job went to hell in 2026. And Trump - getting elected came on top of a primary and election campaign that defied my ability to imagine the depths of stupidity possible int he American political system. Trump? The idiotic attacks on Hilary Clinton? Though the defenses of her were sometimes just as hard to take - I mean - how could any Democrat worth a damn vote for anyone who voted for the war in Iraq? why was that forgiven? I don't know. Now - 2020 - big chunks of the country, the Democrats in particular, seem determined to relive 2016. I don't get this. Why does so much of the discussion in the Democratic party revolve around Bernie Sanders (and by extension, Hilary Clinton?) That might be because I read Twitter and Facebook too much - that is a topic unto itself. The point is, 2016 was awful even before Trump got elected; his election just made sure the next 4 years would be even worse.

All right. That is enough. One more thing - just a hint. Technology - here is something I have been thinking about lately. There are major technological shifts going on - streaming, Disney's domination of the entertainment industry, the effects on discourse of Twitter and FAcebook, etc. But have there been any real technological changes in the last 10 years? Twitter and Fecebook existed in 2010; youtube did; streaming services existed. Digital film distribution. Almost everyhting that defines the technological world now existed, was even fairly significant, in 2010. Compare 2010 to 200 - that is not true. The 00s brought us youtube, Facebook and Twitter and MySpace and all the other dumber forms of online communication. It brought ius smart phones, tablets, iPods, it started streaming services. Or the 90s - from 1990 to 2000 we gaines DVDs, the world wide net and the popularization of the internet; computers changed fairly significantly; digital photography and video started to appear (though they became ubiquitous in the 00s). What has appeared int he 2010s that has changed things the way - any of a dozen things changed the world in the previous decades? This has been more about cultural shifts to accommodate technology - which have mostly felt bad: corporate control over all of it; the colonization of places like Facebook and Twitter by propagandists, who have made all of us amateur propagandists and ad writers. Another reason to worry, I guess.

But I won't end with pessimism. I like a lot of what the world offers. I can lose days browsing through YouTube - I don't know why videos have replaced blogs as the preferred method of amateur communication, but it seems they have. 10 years ago, I counted mostly blogs as the most interesting sources of information and discussion online. Now? it tends to be youtubers - Seth Skorkowsky! The History Guy! Scholagladatoria! (All reflecting my recent interest in games and history, no doubt.) Is this better than reading blogs? I won't say yes - but it's still a nice feature of the internet, the ease with which people with interesting things to say can communicate with the world, without a lot of extraneous resources.

And so - happy new year! Happy new decade! And here's hoping I manage to post something here before 2030...

Expos! Nats! Baseball!

Well, this blog may be just about laid to rest, but it is Halloween, so what better time to raise it from the dead and send it stumbling about in search of topics to devour....

Right. No. I see the last time I managed to post was, in fact, the beginning of the baseball season - so why not come back for another baseball post? I don't get to celebrate the Red Sox this year - but I can settle for watching the Nationals take their first championship.

I've been enough of an Expos fan through the years that this feels really good. I remember watching them from very early in their history. I have relatives in Canada, and we'd visit,a nd we'd watch the Expos on TV. Most fo the Canadian family were Red Sox fans, but I'm not sure they got to watch the Sox on TV - the Expos, on the other hand, had a few games aired - I think. Because I remember the old Spos - Rusty Staub! John Bocabella! Ron Hunt! - on TV up there. sitting in my grandmother's kitchen, watching the game, with my parents and a couple uncles and some older cousins, talking and watching baseball. Through the years, I paid attention to the Expos - usually because of the Canadian connections. A few of the kids my age picked pu the Expos as their favorite team (though most stuck with the Sox, or went with the Blue Jays when they were created - the younger kids, I think.) But all of them knew the Canadian teams, probably, again, because they were on Canadian television. So I knew the Expos more than I knew most of the National League - Ellis Valentine and Andre Dawson and Gary Carter and Stave Rogers - and of course, the Spaceman. (The first Expos team to get screwed by labor strife?)

And I followed the next generation - the late 80s early 90s teams that could drive you crazy. (And got really screwed by labor strife.) Grissom and DeShields and Larry Walker and the Cat, Dennis Martinez, Ivan Calderon, John Wetteland and Mel Rojas; Cliff Floyd, Wil Cordero, Orlando Cabrera, Vlad Guerrerro - Pedro! (Until they very generously donated him to the Sox.) A great team that kept disintegrating and being rebuilt for most of a decade, until their owners managed to demolish them completely and get them moved to Washington. After that - I still liked them, nostalgically, wished them well - but they were just a team. Though not just a franchise....

And so now, after 50 years, they have managed to win it all. In a most spectacular and strange manner - 7 games in which no one managed to win at home! Against a powerhouse team and franchise - though as we were constantly reminded, after the first couple months of the season, the Nats were tied with the Stros for the best record in baseball. The Nats have been there before - very good teams, that collapsed in a heap in the post-season. It's nice to see them finish one off. And very nice to add the franchise to the teams to win a World Series. The last 20 years have been goods ones for baseball teams killing curses - The Angels, Astros and now the Expos/Nats have won their first, after long waits; the Sox (Red and White), Cubs, Giants (who waited 50 odd years between championships) purged their demons, etc. It's always satisfying.

And - it made for a good series. Two very good teams, with elite pitching, two teams you could basically like (Roberto Osuna aside), good stories - and a very fine game to finish it off, Scherzer grinding out five innings with clearly less than his best stuff (since his best is as good as anyone has had this decade), Greinke turning in an absolutely dominant performance, with one changeup sitting in the middle fo the plate to hit all night, and it all turning on a wounded duck home run that hit the opposite field foul pole. Ha! Great fun!

Anyway: I was wondering what I thought about the Nats this year - I see I probably summed up their entire season rather neatly, good and bad:

2. Washington - they underachieved woefully last year, as if they thought they made the playoffs on opening day, and started choking early. Now they don't have Harper anymore - but they are still pretty loaded. Turner and Rendon and Soto, maybe Victor Robles - the rotation, which is very strong. This is avery competitive division, and they are as likely to run the table as anyone.

They wasted the first couple months, but after that, they ran the table, including taking out a couple very very good teams in the Dodgers and Astros. It's a nice result, and helps ease the pain of the Red Sox' pitching staff woes that took them out of the race from day one...

It's A Cold World Outside

2019 is almost a month old without a post. So much for resolutions.

There is not a lot to write about, other than politics. Okay - the weather - cold! not so bad here on the coast, but bad in the mid-west. We keep getting promised snow, but keep getting little storms that end up leaving ice everywhere - that might be worse than getting a good 20 inches of powder, to be honest - it's certainly less entertaining.

I could say something about sports - being a New Englander, I know I am supposed to be all excited about the local brain damage and steroids club heading for the super bowl again, but I can't muster it. I can find the energy to wonder if the Sox can fill out their bullpen for the season, though; and Liverpool is winning the Premier League! I do like some football...

And there is politics. I'm not sure why I don't write more about politics: politics is engaging just now, and desperately important. I know I stopped writing about it all the time because it was just too depressing, back in the days of Bush the Less - I turned to movies and music and tried hard to avoid driving myself crazy. Now? It is easy to despair, but on one hand, there's not much room for the luxury of despair, and on the other - Trump and the Republicans hold power by the thinnest of margins, and any work to take that power away from them has the chance to do it. You can see that - the Democratic party has come back strong, and moved to the left doing it - we have responded well, over all. Fight the good fight and all that.

The other problem, though, is that there is so much to write about - and so much talk about it already. So far this month we have had the shut down, and all that entailed. Trump's baby and he got stuck with it and had to back off in the end. Labor! shut down the airports! and the Democrats not blinking: they were right, they always had the votes, etc...

Or the MAGA kids vs the Native American parade. Everyone has an opinion on that. The right wing loonies managed to twist the story enough that people began doubting their eyes and ears - they are a shameless and astonishing bunch. I don't know if it they would be better or worse if they just said what they meant from the beginning: "He's a white kid, the old guy is some kind of foreigner, and probably a liberal. People like that should be silenced." This week, Jussie Smollett, a black, gay actor, was attacked by (allegedly) racist homophobes - I imagine again, the right will find ways to attack the victim and defend the attackers, and never quite say what they mean: "He's black and gay - he should be lynched."

That's harsh. Sorry, MAGA hat wearing fascists; go fuck yourselves.

Or a series of mass shootings, by young white guys - including a man executing 5 women in a bank - yeah. We still don't address that as a country - the degree to which violence is still gendered, men against women. Racism is real and pervasive, but so is misogyny. There are signs, real signs, that the country as a whole is becoming less racism, less homophobic, less misogynist - but that very loss of white, male, power seems to be inspiring more aggressive open terrorism against blacks (and other ethic groups), women, gays. Encouraged by the fascists in the wWhite House. Fuck them all.

Sorry. That was harsh. Where was I? Venezuela seems to be getting worse (somehow), and now members of the Trump administration are floating the idea of getting involved, sending troops, that kind of thing. Good god. Though it is predictable enough - as Trump's hold on power gets more and more precarious, it is likely they will try more extreme ways of holding power. Flirting with a "national emergency" during the shut down was bad - starting a war somewhere is simpler, maybe, more traditional, among Americans. Their defenders saying openly a war with Venezuela will "unite" the country - not even trying to pretend, are they. Though of course they are also typically ignorant of history: wars do not unite much of anything, unless they are either widely popular before they start, or someone attacks you. Did war in Iraq unite the country? did war in Vietnam? invading Mexico in 1846 tore the country apart, was a major step toward the Civil War in this country. Even WWI created significant rifts. People look at WWII, and they say, war will bring us together - but wars don't do that. They are at least as likely to wreck the current administration as save it. (See Richard Nixon and Barack Obama. Hell - Ike got elected because of Truman and Korea.)

Thus current events. Future events? the 2020 presidential campaign is starting to get into gear. Acquaintances on the internet are starting to get stupid - someone said something about Democrats losing to Trump again - I'm not sure how that is going to happen. Trump won in 2016 because of James Comey, the Russians, the press pissing on itself, and the Electoral College - you can add in whatever degree of hatred you have for Hillary Clinton if you like - and even then, in the end, it was the Electoral college that did it. In 2020, we will still have the Electoral College, we will probably have Russians playing games, and the press (if there is any of it left), is as likely as ever to let itself get played by the right wing propagandists - but everything else is going the other direction. No one will be in Comey's position - who is going to trust anything coming from the Trump administration? The country will have had 4 years of Trump, and has been going as hard as they can in the other direction. What's better, as a Democrat, is that not only are people voting for Democrats, but the Democrats themselves are moving left - that has been true since the middle of the Bush administration at least, but it is getting more significant all the time.

And as far as the presidential campaign goes - I like the way the Democrats are shaping up. There were good choices in 2008 - but in 2016, no one had emerged to challenge Clinton, who, whatever her merits, was something of a relic from the days when the Democrats thought they had to move right to get more votes. Sanders came along, and he was all right, but he never had a chance to win the primary, and didn't always react to losing with the sense or grace one would like. But this time? Going on both the people who have declared for presidency and those flirting with it - I see four people I could be enthusiastic about: Gillibrand, Warren, Harris and Sharrod Brown. I see a number of others I either like with some reservations or don't know enough about - Klubuchar, Beto O'Rourke, Cory Booker - maybe even Pete Buttigieg, though he seems like the longest of shots. Any of them would be fine, even now. And beyond that are a couple people who I am not voting for in any primaries, and don't really want clogging up the race - Sanders again, and the inexplicable idea of Joe Biden running - but would happily support in any general election. (Hell, Clinton would fit into this, though I don't think she's fool enough to get involved this time.) That pretty much leaves Tulsi Gabbard - right wing crank in the wrong party? - on the outside.

That's a great set of choices. I suppose you can find faults in all of them, but grownups weigh pros and cons and make their choices - and though a lot of Democrats and liberals (especially the ones who call themselves "progressives" and complain about Democrats) don't sound like grownups a lot of the time, they usually end up acting the part. (Though less whining about whoever we do put forward would be nice.) If the republic can survive these next two years, we should have a pretty good president in place to start the 2020s, and we might have even better options in 10 or 12 years. Though surviving those two years might not be assured.

And of course, we might all be under 10 feet of water 10 years from now. There's always that....

Another Year Older a New One Just Begun

Hello world, time to say good bye to another year. Not sure I'll miss it.

I have not been in here at all this year. Looks like 17 posts, from a new year's post to Armistice Day. That puts paid to resolution #1 - I did not get back to posting regularly! or at all! If not for the Red Sox (three world series posts!) and Wonders in the Dark (four television posts!), we'd be down to 10. I am not sure what I can say about all this: I have had time to write, and have, written plenty for other purposes. Nut nothing that makes for good blog posts. I suspect one reason is that I have also almost stopped watching movies - that is also very strange, since I have had plenty of time to watch films; I just haven't. Given how much of my blogging has been about films, that will knock things down some. I suppose if I wanted to I could note that my lack of blogging is the way of the world these days - blogs are an old, outdated, fading form of internet communication. I suppose I should move to Twitter, though that makes no sense to me at all. I still can't figure out the appeal of writing one liners all day. It's like communicating by telegram after email was invented. (Though that actually makes it seem rather cool.) I suppose some people treat it like a conversation - I shudder at the thought....

All right. I won't dwell on it. I will go on foolishly hoping that this year I will start posting again. I hope for a lot of things. Stranger things have happened - though I'm not counting on it. But hoping...

I could dwell on the continued disintegration of the Republic. The Donald Trump era is a train wreck at every level. His administration is a chaos of incompetence and criminality, though no one is willing or able to hold them to account. But even without anyone holding them to account, his administration has disintegrated - half the cabinet is currently "acting", as is the white house chief of staff; swaths of former officials are indicted or convicted, some of them singing to the rafters, some hoping for that pardon; the government is shut down, directly because of Trump (the rest of the party managed to come up with the votes to prevent it, but Donnie boy scotched it); he himself is close to the point where the only way he can stay out of prison is to stay in the white house. He'll lock himself in and barricade the doors, until the Russians find a way to sneak him out, probably. All that occurs alongside the signs of an economic collapse (caused by Trump's shenanigans, as well as the erosion of Obama's policies, which did well to shore up the economy, if not make it all that great), and escalating domestic tensions, and vicious policies that have killed two kids on the border already this winter...

On the other hand, in less than a week, the Democrats will resume control of the House; GOP still has the Senate, but who knows what they will do. When they see that their chances are better with Pence than Trump, he's done. That may or may not come soon. Two years from now there will be an election, and if Trump is not out of office, we will be in such a shambles, the Republicans will be lucky to carry South Carolina. Because it will be Trump's fault and he will be blamed. So - if we last that long - not that there will necessarily be much left to save by then.

And so. This is a strange time to be alive: we are in as much trouble as a country as we have been in a long time, and all of it is completely self-inflicted. We aren't being attacked from outside; we survived the economic crisis of the late 00s (by electing Democrats). Things are actually better in a lot of ways - though the things that are better are a big part of what is wrong with us. The rump of white racists and misogynists and homophobes can see that they have lost the country, and they are fighting very hard to keep it. The issues are not as obvious as slavery was, but it's the same fight. Almost literally - ginning up fights with Mexico... what is this, 1845? Who gets to be treated like an American? a human being? A reason things are the way they are right now is that we have expanded the idea of who is a human being far enough to frighten the people who want to limit it. They fight back (racists and misogynists and homophobes and authoritarians), and they find they have the constitution with them.

I worry for the republic: not just because the bad people are in charge, but because I am not sure the structure of the nation is on the side of good. In some ways, democracy and equality have spread far enough in law and practice that the constitution is explicitly against them. Civil rights, voting rights, attitudes have advanced to the point that the anti-democratic elements of the constitution hold the country back. The Senate, the electoral college, maybe even the courts as constituted - even states themselves - all work against freedom and democracy as they are practiced, or would be practiced, in the USA. The amendments work against this, sometimes - dear old 14th! - but much of the rest of the structure of government seems to work against the freedom and democracy we have achieved, on paper at least. We are more and more able to talk about what is wrong with the country, from its deep baked racism to its inequality, to its inability to institute the kinds of basic services most of the first world instituted decades ago - but we can't do enough, because our government is designed around ancient institutions designed to keep the mob from ruling. It is a cause for concern.

Well - plenty to worry about in the coming year! A year from now, the 2020 presidential campaigns will be in full swing. That should be edifying. Odds are good we'll be looking at some kind of proceedings against Donald Trump in the next year - at least, constant hearings in the House, dredging up all the filth around old short fingered vulgarian. Though the astonishing thing with Trump is that almost nothing that comes out about him is new: he has done most of his monstrous behavior in plain sight. He survives based on chutzpah and bribery (pass tax cuts, keep the orthodox republicans in line!) and those outdated institutions. He won't survive for long; he'll be voted out the first chance the country gets, if he lasts that long - even the ancient wobbly constitution we have won't keep him around more than a term... But that's enough time to ruin everything. He and the GOP is working hard to prevent Americans from voting - it could all break. And that is terrifying, because when it is clear there is no legal salvation from him, why does he think he will still be saved? He can bring it all down - certainly his own regime... though what replaces it might not be the answer that we're looking for.

So there you go. 2018 - a disaster in the world at large, though with signs of hope. The Democrats have the House; the wheels of justice grind on; Trump himself is a collapsing mess. And if the economy doesn't collapse, and we don't get into a war, and Trump doesn't try to impose martial law, the world will go on. Movies and music and books will come out, I'll hate myself if I don't watch them or listen to it or read any of it. Maybe I will write, maybe I will moan about not writing. They will stage sporting events - it was a good year for me there, as the Crimson Hose won it all, with one of the most dominant teams of all kinds. And being a soccer fan I can revel in Liverpool's success (owned by the Red Sox, which is enough for me to pick out an English football team to root for), which was revel worthy indeed in 2018. And - so it goes. I hope to be back here more often, but even if I'm not - I imagine I'll be in it intermittently... So Happy New Year, increasingly hypothetical reader! I wish you the best.

Nothing Changes on New Year's Day

Happy new year, world!

I can't say I will miss this last one. Personally, it was not as bad as the year before - 2016 felt like hell on earth. But objectively - 2017 was a shit show. Trump as president was as bad as anyone could ask, and though his incompetence tended to suppress the enactment of his bad ideas, the year ended with one of the worst ideas - that tax cut - going through. I don't know how long it will take for that thing to wreck the economy - but if it isn't quickly undone, it will. But on the bright side, we haven't had a nuclear war - yay!

But along side Trump, we've had mass shootings; we've had terrorism mostly from the right, but a few from foreign agents. (The left mostly behaves itself, though - as usual.) The right - the hard right, the racist right - has been out in force all year,and show no signs of going anywhere. Why should they? Trump is a fascist, and has spent most of the year testing how far he can push his authoritarianism, racism, and so on - his followers gleefully competing with him in their own fascist ravings. As policy, it is mostly aimed at immigrants - though the continual attacks on the media, education, political protests and other activism, voting, could always bear fruit.

It is easy to be depressed. But there are reasons for hope. The one tool we have to make things better is the vote (well - there are lots of tools, but that is the one that had direct and immediate consequences.) And this year, the Democrats have tended to smoke the Republicans at the ballot box. The most extreme instance being the election of Doug Jones overRoy Moore in Alabama - yes, the GOP had to run a child molesting fascist nutcase to lose, but they did lose. And though Republicans have won a lot of special elections this year too, they have done so in hard-right districts, and the Democrats have run them very close. In Montana, in Georgia - if this continues, it bodes well. The Democrats have to overcome a massive structural disadvantage to win the house - a strange thing, but gerrymandering and other oddball vote distributions makes that body remarkably undemocratic - but they might be able to do it. Might have to win 5 million or so more votes to break even in the house - but that has happened before and might again.

Politics: I have written more about politics than anything else here,this year,and more than I have in a long time - politics is maddening these days,but it's also vital. It feels like life or death for the republic, sometimes. And it is hard to be optimistic - the last two years haven't just shown that white resentment is hanging on in the country, and can still hold a great deal of power; it's also shown that the system itself doesn't work. The constitution itself at its worst is explicitly racist (most of that is gone, thankfully, but the Electoral college remains), and often practically racist (the senate, by helping exaggerate rural votes is practoically racist, at this point in history at least) - but the bigger problem is that the system, with its checks and balances and diffusion of power gives overwhelming power to minority groups, if they are willing to use it. The American system depends on the good faith of all participants: and the Republicans are not operating in good faith. There is nothing to force them to operate in good faith - they took control of the courts,in an act of shocking bad faith - so there is no counter to any ofthis except the vote,and the system currently requires a massive landslide toward the Democrats to overcome the system.Depressing.

But not hopeless. Or - put plainly - in politics, you can't afford to take things for granted,good or bad, because, in the end, what you do determines what politics is. So I guess, keep at it. Vote, argue, work - what else is there to do?

I have to write something about something else. Alright. This was a momentous year - I moved, which has changed my movie watching options for the worst - I compensated with a fair amount of TV, or at least, with some TV - whole first run TV shows, watched first to last! Ken Burns' on Vietnam; and of course Twin Peaks - the latter of which was more or less awe inspiring and brilliant - obviously better than anything else I saw this year, since I barely saw anything else - but as good as anything I've seen on a screen in years. I also watched a good deal of old TV this year,for the TV Countdown at Wonders in the Dark (including the coming Part 2) - but not enough movies.

And so? I suppose the new year is a time for resolutions - and - well: I wish I had some. Or rather, I wish I had some I felt sure of following through on. But I guess the new year is the time for promises, listing the things you hope you do or will regret not doing - I can play that game. So:

1) I hope to post here again, more than once a week (though I suppose that should really be, at least once a week, as I have fallen well short of that unimpressive standard). I know, I know, blogs are old hat - but I am old hat, so, I would rather write for this than for twitter or something like that. Now - I fear if I deliver on this resolution, it will bring a lot of politics - but that is the world we live in, so...

2) I hope I can get back to a more regular film watching regime. Might not be possible to do my habitual 2 new films a week, plus 2-3 older films somewhere - but I need to get in the habit again of watching films. Probably will - I don't lose that habit for long, usually.

3) I hope I write about films, and other subjects - books, TV, music - here - once in a while. It has been a while since I have made a habit of writing longish posts about arts here, and I don't know if that habit will come back (without external stimulus - I get work done for other people, when I can...)

4) I will try to acknowledge the fact that this is 2018. the 100th anniversary of the end of WWI, and all the stuff that went on around it - so some Great War blogging might be in order. I hope. Reconstruction blogging, too,if I can - 150 years since 1868 - a vital part of the country's history....

5) Finally, a lot of this depends on my ability to write, in general. f that goes well, then, some of it should end up here.

And so - that's enough for now. Happy New Year!

(And here's a holy shit I'm old moment for you: U2, 35 years ago:)

A Berry Nice Friday

Happy Friday again. A busy kind of week, with the holiday and all, at least the beginning of it. Lots of summery stuff! parades and fireworks, fried dough, barbecues, strawberry picking, jam making, lots of shortcake eating, you name it. Along with watching bicycle racing, complete with Controversy! - involving stray elbows, not doping this time... Major star #1, Peter Sagan, collides with major star #2, Mark Cavendish, and Cavendish crashes and breaks a shoulder. Sagan gets kicked out of the tour for it. Everyone who cares has an opinion, and most of them think Sagan was badly done by - there area couple angles on the crash, one of them looking like Sagan whacked Cavendish with an elbow as he went by, the other looking like Cavendish ran into him first, and Sagan's elbow came up after Cavendish was already down. The more you lookat the picture, the less Sagan seems to be to blame - but the tour kicked him out.

Anyway - there's plenty of bike racing to come, for those of us who care about that sort of thing. No Sagan, which drains a lot of the fun out of it, but plenty of Chris Froome and the invincible Sky Team, for those who love the Yankees.

I could say something about politics, though as usual, it is nothing but depressing. Trump feuding with CNN, some dipshit making a dim witted wrestling meme of Trump tacking CNN - which Trump, being more dimwitted and classless even than his fans, retweeted. Followed by controversy over whether CNN should name the dipshit who made the meme. All of this creating noise while Trump and company continue to work on dismantling the country. Trump abroad, where he's soiling himself among other world leaders and getting ready to meet the boss. God.

So maybe I won't write about politics. Do't forget to look in on Wonders in the Dark's TV Countdown. Don't forget to watch Twin Peaks when it comes back this Sunday. (I actually have pay cable these days - I can watch these things when they air!) Don't forget to enjoy the summer as much as you can.... And eat all the strawberries you can. To which end - some music:

Brother's Johnson!



Strawberry Alarm Clock!



An obscure group from a northwestern English seaport!

Happy Friday!

Happy Friday! It is time to find ways to get this blog going again. Not just this blog everything. I moved recently, a new state, new everything - that has been a huge disruption of my life (though one I chose) - though the build up to it was just about as disruptive. That may be a topic for another day... Right now, I have moved, I am getting settled, and I have to start resuming the things I like to do. Writing - writing for this blog. Yes.

I can't promise anything too fancy yet - start with the simplest posts. Nothing makes for quick content better than music - so here you go. Friday music: rebuild my writing habits from the bottom up! So without further ao - the last few days I have been listening to a lot of Janelle Monae - enjoy:

Here she is singing Smile, with guitar accompaniment:



And Sincerely, Jane, live in 2012:



Finally - both those songs feature Kellindo Parker, her guitar player - here he is, shredding on his own:

The Future, Where We Will Spend the Rest of Our Lives

I guess so.

It's kind of a sad thing to revive this poor blog with a post about politics and despair, but that's the world we live in. Boy, 2016 was a shitty year. That seems to be the consensus, and I'm not one t argue. All the famous people dying - and all the great artists who died - all the interesting people who died - it was a year that seemed to bring an endless stream of obituaries and loss... That has picked up in 2017: an online friend died; I found out that one of my closest friends for much of my life, who I'd lost touch with for the last decade or so, had died a couple years ago - been plenty of bad news this year too...

Though let's not kid ourselves: what makes this year look even scarier than last year is Donald Trump. His election put the finishing touches on 2016 - and now we're stuck with him. Of course he makes any day worse when you hear about him - there has never been a time when I knew he existed and didn't wish he did't - but as president? Dear god. How did he win? Like everything else he's ever done - he failed, and was bailed out on a technicality. I worry, though - he's gotten to a point where he can't hope for generous bankruptcy courts and 18th century racists to undo his failures - as president...

Dear god. Friday, Donald Trump is going to become president. The contrast to this and Obama's inauguration in 2008 is almost to much to think about, I remember how that felt: it was a day of wonder - it was hard not to feel optimistic, joyful. The USA had done something we could be unambiguously proud of - we had elected an African-American president - we had addressed, directly, America's original sin, and come out on the right side! Well - fat chance! Obama's election flushed the racists into the open - they howled and gibbered for the next 8 years and gave the Republicans the spine to cripple the country for electoral gain, culminating in what is hard to distinguish from a slow motion cup in the last year. Not confirming Merrick Garland comes awfully close - and then Trump sneaks into the white house, probably with the active connivance of the FBI and Russia - great. A loathsome little braggart pretending he routed his enemies - picking fights with people )John Lewis) whose boots he is not worthy to lick clean - sucking up to fucking Vladimir Putin.... We are well and truly fucked.

Though given how extraordinarily unpopular Trump is, he might do more to strengthen his opponents than to enact his (and the Republican party's) evil deeds - who knows. I'd rather not have to find out.

So that's the world outside. And me? It's odd, in that 2016 was not all that bad, for me, objectively. Things were all right for me, nothing bad happened to anyone too close to me, no relatives or friends dying or getting sick, nothing like that. It could have been all right - but it felt like shit. All the reasons up above, but there's more to it. Some of it, I won't deny, is work - Im not saying much about it, but suffice it to say that I have had my fill of it... But that might just be a side effect.

This blog is not, really, my life, but it does tend to reflect how things are going in my life. Look at those numbers, over there on the right of the page, going down, year over year - does that not signify? It can - I know what I have been writing. I know, back in 2011-13 what I was writing - weekly music posts, simple and routine - weekly film posts, screen shots, similar to the music videos.... Plus director of the month posts for a year, which were basically replaced by band of the month posts in 2013. And film posts - collections of capsule comments, some longer reviews; occasional essays - not just more posts, but more substance. Plus history - especially during the 150th anniversary of the civil war - and the usual occasional politics, sports and whatnot. But over the years, from 2014 on, these things have fallen away - the film posts first - then the history posts (the Civil War wrapped up; I started doing the same with WWI anniversaries, but never as ambitiously) - and finally, last summer, the band of the month posts - and then even the weekly music videos. Since summer, it's been a ghost town here - other than essays for Wonders in the Dark, there isn't much - and when their science fiction countdown ended - it's done. Some lamentations re the election, and a couple anniversaries... and silence.

Easy to blame Trump. Tempting to blame work. I don't know. Something has enervated me, something that has been going on longer than those things. Which has, I think, mostly convinced me to uproot myself, move back up to Maine, see what I can find to do up there. Which is a strong temptation, not to be dismissed. Some of it is the realization that I am not really doing anything in the city I can't do elsewhere - my movie going has declined almost as much as my movie writing. (Maybe not that radically - but it's not anywhere near as much an obsession as it used to be.) I stay at home more - don't eat out as much, don't go to museums as much. I stopped playing softball a couple years ago - the knees and hips were starting to insist - but that's cut down my exercise, and the time I spend hanging around with people. These days, when I hang around with people, it's mainly my brothers and some of their kids online, playing games and sooting the breeze - and they mostly live up in Maine. So - there's a theme...

But whatever I do in the atom world, here among the bits, I have to start writing more. This is not one of those "I'm still alive" posts, "See you next year!" - I hope. There's only so long you can feel sorry for yourself (or your country) - you have to do something. So - you know - nice to see you again! (anyone who might come by here), and I promise to try not to be quite such a stranger. What form these miraculous new literary emanations may take, I don't quite know yet - but I shall try to emanate them.

World Series and Crazy Christians

I am getting lazy lazy about blogging, but have to come in here for this - the World Series starts tonight - with some good old fashioned curses on the line. Cubs and Indians! Though for me, it looks like a Red Sox intramural game - Tito, Napoli, Miller, Coco Crisp vs. Theo, Lester, Lackey, Anthony Rizzo (probably why Theo is in Chicago - if AdGon had worked out in Boston, he and Tito might still be there...) Fun times!

All logic dictates the Cubs to win. If the Indians had their full compliment of pitchers, it would be close to a toss up, since with Kluber, Salazar, Carrasco and Tomlin, they would be a match for anyone. As it is - Cubs just have more at their disposal. And some big game players in there - Lester going for his third ring, Lackey too... But still - I think I might root for the Indians. Underdogs - and not the Cubs. Much as I like this edition, they are the Cubs...

Meanwhile - as far from that as you can get - I read that Jack Chick has died. Well - not completely unrelated. Chick's tracts - the little ones, the ones people handed out at camp meetings and on the streets - have always been around me, and I got to read a good sample fo them when I was a kid. I always remember This Was Your Life - some smug asshole gets struck dead at a party and goes before the throne of god to be confronted with his sins. Typical camp meeting style scare mongering "evangelism" - with a line I couldn't ignore. At one point our damned hero is sitting in church - he's all excited - "see! I went to church!" - but god can read minds: "I wonder who's winning the ball game?" That's a burning offense! And poor me, sitting in some church service, wondering who was, in fact, winning the ball game, or who would make the all star game, or whatever occupied my mind, thought, well - I guess I am one of the damned too....

So: now he is dead, Mr. Chick. Im not sure if it's more surprising that he was still alive, or that he existed at all - there is something about those little tracts that suggests an elaborate joke of some kind. Dark dungeons, in particular, has taken on a pretty strong half life as a camp classic - but a lot of them have that effect. Even when I was a kid and subject to that kind of pressure more than I care to admit, Chick tracts were almost amusing, and somehow extremely compelling. I think it's the art - the simple, crude, mostly realistic style - it was within my reach, maybe. I wished I could draw, tell stories in pictures (and words), and those tracts showed a way to do it. Maybe. I know that - here's an irony for you - the look of those comics had the same effect that the art in the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons books had, especially the incidental art in the DMG - "no honor among thieves" - the same pen and ink drawings, clear and quick points, little mini-narratives in every picture... like marginal doodles. I have a soft spot for that kind of art generally - illustrations in Hardy Boys books do the same thing. Great stuff. So - I could smirk at the heavy handed fire and brimstone stuff and admire the form, even in high school or before....

Though that didn't work so well when I came across some of the comic books he published. The Crusaders - sweet holy fucking Jesus! The tracts are fairly standard issue high pressure Repent or Go To Hell! "evangelism" or cheesy culture war stuff (taking on evolution, D&D or whatever). But the comics? I saw some of those when I was in high school still - fairly innocuous things about smuggling bibles into Russia or whatever - but in college, I came across the harder stuff. One of the guys had a pile of them he'd let people read - and these... I guess it's the "Alberto" stuff that really took the prize: a former Jesuit who found the truth and revealed the inner workings of the Catholic church. Yikes: they invented communism, evolution, satanism, nazism, homosexuality and rock and roll (if I remember it right), all while priests and nuns fucked like rabbits and filled tunnels with aborted fetuses.... I don't think that is hyperbole. They were astonishing, those comics - both for their virulent anti-Catholicism (in 1979! I still heard some ant-papists running around in the 70s and 80s, but even the worst of them weren't accusing the pope of founding both the communists and nazis), and for the batshit insanity of it all. It was stuff straight from the good old days, 19th century know nothing anti-catholic propaganda (rather specifically: I saw the same stories in 19th century anti-Catholic tracts)... horror show stuff, played - kind of straight. Though like a lot of things, it's hard to tell the difference between someone trying to seriously argue that the pope founded the communist and nazi parties, and someone parodying the idea, to make a good horror story...

Anyway. I can't deny, I found those things fascinating - the tracts anyway. The comics, trying for a more sophisticated style, plus their plain evil, were less interesting. Read them once and walk away... But the tracts - people still hand them out on the streets once in a while and I look them over with that odd mix of amusement and revulsion, and, well, envy - at some weird level, making art, no matter what the purpose, offers something like redemption, even for evil people and evil art. Maybe that attitude goes back to Chick, just a bit - the split between the stupidity and viciousness of the content, and the inherent value of being able to express yourself is very strong in some of those tracts. I suppose I am one of the damned - damned to formalism. There are worse things, though.

Was I What You Wanted Me To Be

Well, I wasn't planning to write about Prince this month - this is not the way it is supposed to work. But I have to. I have to find words to wrap my head around this news - it is beyond unexpected. And horrible.

He is, was (how awful to write that - "was"), like Bowie and Dylan (who I was planning to write about this month, and will get to), an artist I revere, but - find very hard to get my head around. He was in the air in the 80s - the dominant musician of the decade - others might have sold more, gotten more attention (Michael Jackson or Madonna, say); I might have listened to the indie punks I've written about here over the last couple years more... But Prince was the one who got on both lists. The biggest acts of the decade - the best acts of the decade - and my favorite acts of the decade. He defined the 80s. He redeemed the 80s (though I can't deny being pretty fond of a lot of the music of that decade, not just indie and punk, but it's best pop acts - Madonna at her best; Michael Jackson especially early; George Michael - new wave stuff, like The english Beat or ABC or Talk Talk - rap, obviously - etc.) Still: Prince redeemed it, transcended it, he was better than all of it. He did everything. He did everything as well or better than anyone else. Maybe more pop/soul/funk than anything else - but everything you could do in rock is in there. He claimed all of music history for himself, and bettered it. (Look at his Superbowl Halftime Show - playing a couple of his greatest hits, and running through a quick history of American rock music - Dylan and CCR to Foo Fighters and back to himself - making it all his.) The - what do you call them? middle early records? - Dirty Mind, Controversy, 1999 - are pop/soul/funk to be sure, but they are also New Wave - clean and spare and tight - put them on headphones, and they sound as minimalist and precise as Young Marble Giants - and funkier than funk. Never mind something like Sister, which, spare as it is, is basically a punk song... Then comes Purple Rain, and he takes on and betters arena rock. And you get indie rock songs like The Cross, you get hiphop, you get Zep impersonations - everything.

And in the 80s, along with the music, there was more. There was always something explicitly Utopian about Prince - getting beyond race, beyond gender, beyond sexual preference, beyond the duality of spirit and body - though without ever losing any of it. He didn't transcend race or gender, he embraced all of race and gender. Am I black or white? Am I straight or gay? - well - sure - why not? It's all good. And on a practical level, he played it out: he appealed to anyone who would listen. The rock kids, the dance kids, the pop kids - bringing all of those things with him to your favorite genre, which he played as well as anyone at home there. And always sexy and funny.

I'll tell a couple stories - this one is kind of sketchy, but the basics are this: I remember having an argument, sort of, with a girl in college. She was a Bowie fan. She was defending him - I don't remember the details, but I compared him to Prince, two chameleons, two brilliant musicians and writers who deliberately tried to be everything it was possible to be.But she didn't like Prince - or - maybe she liked the music, but she found him disturbing. The sex! the religion! the - something. I remember asking her how she could like Bowie for the very same things, and not like Prince. I wish I remembered the details - did we even finish the conversation? I remember thinking about it - thinking it came down to the fact that she was religious herself, but Bowie's polymorphous perversity was safe because he never pretended to involve god or religion. He could be cool without being religious. But Prince didn't let her break things apart like that. He was everything Bowie was, and he was steeped in the church. He claimed everything, and claimed it was all continuous - black and white, male and female, straight and gay, spiritual and physical, sex and love and ecstasy - it's all a game; we're all the same; do you wanna play? I think that's what bothered her - he didn't let people keep their distinctions, he could recite the lord's prayer and then wish we all were nude in the same song. (And I think she was complaining, specifically, about Controversy.) He really did break down barriers - and the barrier between sex and the spirit is a pretty big one - and Prince wasn't going to let anyone out of it. "I am something that you'll never comprehend." Sex and god are the same thing. Worrisome, maybe....

The other story is clearer. This happened in 1989 - the opening of Batman, with its Prince soundtrack. I saw it twice the weekend it opened. First time at a sneak preview at the old Cherie theater in Boston, the backbay - sellout crowd that looked like a Prince audience: white, black, Hispanic, Asian, all mixed up together, and everyone absolutely stoked. They cheered everything - they cheered the previews, they cheered the credits, they cheered all the stars, and they cheered Prince maybe louder than anyone. They cheered all the way through, every joke, every fight, every song. It was, easily, the best movie showing I have ever been to. The next night, I went to see it again, with a different bunch of friends (a couple black kids and 3 or 4 white guys, a fact worth noting.) This was at a suburban mall, and though the crowd might have been almost as diverse as it was the night before, the vibe was completely different. The white people and black people came in in separate groups, sat in mutually exclusive blocks, and (after a brawl before the movie started, when some white kids mouthed off to some black kids over holding seats for their friends), when the film started, cheered and booed in separate blocks. The white kids cheered Batman; the black kids cheered the joker; the black kids cheered Prince - the white kids booed Prince.

Who boos Prince? How do you boo Prince? That night was pretty decisive, I think, in making a city boy out of me - took a couple years to have the resources to afford to move to the city, but I got there... but after that second night - I never much cared about the suburbs again. I figured I'd take my chances in the city, with the city people, with the Prince fans...

And then, in the world, the 90s came - Prince got weird, changed his name, stopped sounding quite as vital. I stopped listening to the radio, MTV stopped playing music. And when Prince got weird, I let him go, and didn't really come back to him until the last couple records. Which have been pretty good in themselves - and of course, completely unlike each other. I have been hoping to dig through the last 20 years of his music before writing about him - I guess that's off, though the digging will still be on... But it gives this essay more of an 80s feel than it should have - and makes it sound as if Prince has been in hiding the last 25 years, and that's not true either. Sometimes weird, yes; probably not as immediately compelling as he was in the 80s; but still at it, and still a force.

Still, quite possibly, American's greatest rock and roll star. Which probably means, the world's greatest. Quite possibly.

All right.

Songs - a top 10? because that's the format, right? Hey, I did a Beatles top 10 - I can take a shot...

1. When Doves Cry - this is, maybe, the best single ever; I suppose you have the usual suspects - Hey Jude, say - but damn... Certainly when I was listening to the radio - seriously: was there ever a song that, the first time you heard it on the radio, came out and grabbed you by the neck like this?
2. Controversy
3. Kiss - this is a pretty damned good single too; and another example of what a light touch he had - the stripped down sound, full of space, all the sounds clean and precise, and always funky.
4. 1999
5. Sign of the Times
6. When You Were Mine
7. Dirty Mind
8. I Would Die for U
9. I Wanna Be Your Lover - though I remember the first time I heard this, too, on American top 40, Casey Kasem - I think i remember old Casey saying something about Prince playing all the instruments... I thought, ooh - listen to that dirty pun! and - cool song. Also - speaking of Casey Kasem, Richard Lyons, from Nagativland, also died today... these guys are from England and who gives a shit?
10. The Cross - yeah, I'm a sucker for tuneful guitar rock...

(Sorry, then, to many many songs - Head and Uptown, Sexuality, Let's Pretend We're Married, Delirious and Little Red Corvette, Purple Rain and Let's Go Crazy, Raspberry Beret - oh well...)

As for video - this is more trouble than it is worth, since old Prince made life hard for video posters. He had his reasons, and he had the right, but - maybe - youtube is kind of the radio of the 21st century, maybe - for some of us... It's all right. I will find what I can:

Like this full concert in 1982:



And Dirty Mind, from the same show:



Here's a live version of When Dove's Cry - I wish I could find the actual video, which is almost as much a kick in the ass as the song, but Prince's copyright lawyers have done their work - but this will do. From the period - Wendy on guitar...



Purple Rain live on TV (I had a different video here yesterday; it was gone overnight - but this one works):



Can't really ignore this video:



And here's Partyman, from the Batman soundtrack - playing Harvey Dent for the video. I remember thinking, they should cast Prince as Robin in the sequel. (Since Harvey Dent was already Billy Dee Williams). Oh well; no one listens to me. (And they even recast two-face when he got his star turn. Jesus.)



And a couple videos showing his mad skills on the guitar, on other people's songs: here he is doing Creep, with an epic solo at the end...



And here he is playing with various Traveling Wilbury's at a tribute for George Harrison - he comes in halfway through and - everything else disappears.... top this, mere Beatles!