by Eric Miller

To the mainland

When we climb the stairwell out of the depth of the ferry, where our car rests parked amid grimy trucks, we find taut bands of yellow plastic tape setting off the tables and benches of the observation decks. We have to sit far from other people. Someone took pleasure in this prohibitive festooning, officious pleasure perhaps but also childish joy. It is like decorating for a dance, though its effect is opposite: to un-couple us, to make all of us wallflowers. A disinvitation to the ball! Now our huge white ferry sets off from Swartz Bay—a self-willed tower. Excluding wind and sound, impervious windows mute the passing islands, each projected for us as in a theatre. The thrum of the engine pleases, supplying constant reassurance that everything is fine. Its weak, unvaried arpeggio would seem to guarantee the integrity of our own simmering organic system. A humming machine befriends us. It defends and supports us by a flattering yet ideally stable mimesis of our private vibe, our autonomic hubbub.

The Salish Sea imparts not the least sensation of rocking to the vessel, the vessel is so big relative to the swell. When I see that yellow tape, however, I always worry about the disposal of it. It consists of a sort of plastic that stretches thin, but is reluctant to disappear. Round and round the globe like longitudes and latitudes, such tape persists impertinently after the end of perceived emergency that—once upon a time, it will have been so long ago!—cordoned off part of the habitable world from the rest. The rationale is Covid-19.

From where I sit like a moviegoer, I watch the water. Without pangs of apocalypse or a sense of my witness being in any way representative, my contemplation accumulates the fewest seabirds I have ever seen, the fewest birds in general I have ever seen, between Swartz Bay and Tsawwassen. Three gulls. Three cormorants. On other occasions Bald Eagles have been as common as crows, murres dove before the bland advance of our blanched castle, rafts of ducks, mergansers, all nonchalance, paddled a derisive minimal distance from our apparition. The ocean almost stagnates, preserving the bubbles of our ferry’s hours-before previous passage as though so surpassingly enervated as not to prick them. Flabby Neptune’s trident is too dull, this August day, to lance any eruption. We can see how little the skipper deviates from a set course by these viscous-looking residues. The brisk ship hurries to escape an ambient torpor. Read more »

by Alexander C. Kafka

Can the moon strike twice? Sadly, no.

The question hovers over John Patrick Shanley’s new film Wild Mountain Thyme because it aims for the same sort of bittersweet heartache seasoned with gritty and eccentric comedic beats that characterized his Oscar-winning script for Moonstruck (1987).

The grit then was of the Brooklyn Heights variety while now it is West Irish farm dirt. The story, adapted from Shanley’s 2014 play Outside Mullingar, was inspired by a trip the Bronx-born writer took with his octogenarian father to the family’s County Westmeath homestead. Shanley was smitten with its denizens’ quirky, homey warmth and he translates that into a stew of poetically depressive, circular philosophizing centered around a thwarted romance between two neighboring farmers, Rosemary Muldoon and Anthony Reilly.

The result is a beautiful, somewhat patronizing, nonsensical muddle, in large part because it is irritatingly unclear what exactly does thwart the romance. The answers, near as we can tell, are Anthony’s self-doubt, inertia, and psychological instability and Rosemary’s pride. He is “touched,” as country folk often are on Broadway — talking to himself and carrying a sensitive secret. The long-suffering Rosemary has been waiting decades for him to make a move and subsumes her longing in cigarettes and a stoney-faced stiffness. On the rare occasion that she smiles, we fear that her visage may shatter. Read more »

Until

I’ve not roamed the four corners of the earth
but I have roamed the four corners of the earth
I contain as much love and callousness as any human does

I love and harm as sure as the passionate sun does,
which inflames dawn clouds in iconic peace and beauty
which inflames sunset clouds in ironic blaze and beauty
in billowing portraits of the One

and which the brutal sea behind its placid sun-struck
sometimes mask of absent wind and freeze does
when a seaborne mist of amethyst and gentle swells comes
with southern breeze and warm calm but with sense to know
we drift up to a brink . until

(as everything from dust to stars does)

Jim
12/1/20

by Rafaël Newman

All my life I’ve been fascinated by the systems of mutual connections and influences of which we are generally unaware, but which we discover by chance, as surprising coincidences or convergences of fate, all those bridges, nuts, bolts, welded joints and connectors… —Olga Tokarczuk, Nobel Lecture, December 7, 2019

When I was quite young I had a dream, or fantasy, of a Purple Book: a richly satisfying, totally illuminating, all-encompassing volume that would replace all others and provide endless comfort and sustenance. There were to be numerous candidates for this status in my subsequent “real life”, including novels like Watership Down, Ulysses, Bouvard et Pécuchet and Austerlitz, as well as books of towering historical survey or “grand theory” such as Mary Beard’s SPQR, Yuval Harari’s Sapiens, and Tony Judt’s Postwar. The Purple Book remained for a long time a symbol of an elusive fulfilment, now and then briefly glimpsed, always fleeting; until the more pressing cares and more vivid, if still ephemeral, satisfactions of adult life drove it into retreat.

That such total understanding and ultimate satisfaction should have been represented in my imaginary by a printed object has a fairly straightforward aetiology, given the academic culture into which I was born. The purpleness of that dream book, for its part, was multiply motivated: by my youthful apprehension of the color’s sacerdotal significance; by a naïve, pre-adolescent suspicion of its intoxicating powers of erotic evocation (I had once heard the father of a grade-school colleague refer to crème de cassis as the “sexiest” liqueur he had ever tasted); and, perhaps most profoundly because least patently, by its subterranean association with Jewishness, that most elusive, and thus most attractive, element of my own personal cultural makeup, which would remain a tantalizing chimera during much of my youth and young adulthood. For not only was the velvet bag enclosing my Polish Jewish grandfather’s prized Crown Royal rye whisky, famously manufactured by the Bronfmans, Canada’s preeminent Jewish dynasty, a dusky papal hue; not only was the membership of the notorious Purple Gang, which had been among the mobsters smuggling the Bronfmans’ products into Prohibition-era America, and which rated a name-check in Elvis Presley’s “Jailhouse Rock”, predominantly Jewish; but the very description of the Jews as “the People of the Book” lends itself, by oneiric transposition (people/purple), to a connection with the color. (Extra weight may have been granted the association by my Jewish father’s invention, in my infancy, of a game he called “the Purple Terror”, which involved propping me up against the back of the sofa and then allowing me to collapse, riotously, into the cushions, thence to be “rescued” by my deliciously horrified mother: a ludic enactment of the illusory promise of upright paternal support giving way to a vertiginous subsidence into the amorphic maternal.) Read more »

by R. Passov

This will be one of the most important compounds of our generation. —Jeff Kindler, former CEO, Pfizer, commenting on Torcetrapib

Failure of a drug in development, especially in a late stage clinical trial, is shocking. Torcetrapib, for example, failed at the very end of its phase III trial. So many resources had been expended to get that far in development. Everything spent was lost. All that remained was a big data pile worth virtually nothing, along with pilot plants that were built to supply the drug to thousands of patients across years of clinical trials.

The high cost of failure is why big rewards are offered to underwrite the risk of drug development. But because the costs of failure are so high, you have to be careful not to over-reward success. This is can happen rather too easily when the odds of success are relatively immutable with respect to the amount of money spent in search of success. And when the prize money continues to grow.

When you have these circumstances the incentives to take risks grow to the point where the amount of risk taken is excessive leading to repeated failures and wastage. How does this happen? When, given success, there is too much pricing power; too much power such that the profits the industry generates fall into the realm of what economists term ‘rent’ vs true profits that result from increasing overall social welfare. (See Garthwaite.) Read more »

Salman Toor. Three Friends. 2018.

Oil on panel.

More here and here.

by Usha Alexander

[This is the sixth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. All the articles in this series can be read here.]

“The American way of life is not up for negotiation.” —George HW Bush to the assembled international diplomats at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, 1992

“Much talk. Talking will win you nothing. All the same, the woman goes with me to the house of Hades.” —Thanatos to Apollo in a scene from Alcestis by Euripides, 5th Century, BCE

***

In Classical Greek mythology, Thanatos was Death. As a minor god who got little press in the surviving tales, he appears in the play, Alcestis, as something of a functionary, dutifully gathering those whose time had come and spiriting them to the underworld. Not that he doesn’t find some satisfaction in his work, but he wields his power neither masterfully nor hungrily. The touch of Thanatos did not bring on death from war or violence—those deaths were the domain of other deities—but an ordinary death, as experienced by most. In ancient times, Thanatos was often depicted as a winged youth, as a babe in the arms of his mother, Nyx, goddess of Night, or with his twin, Hypnos, Sleep. Thanatos was not a villain. But he was ruthlessly inevitable.

In the 21st Century Marvel film franchise, Thanatos has been reinvented as Thanos. In this reimagining, Thanos still wields death, but he sees his job in larger terms: he wants to bring peace to the universe, which is engulfed in strife. “Too many mouths. Not enough to go around,” he explains, referring to the overpopulation of the Marvel Universe. Thanos’s solution is to reduce the number of living things through a painless existential cleanse that will magically drift across the universe, gently annihilating half of everybody. He understands himself as the only being possessed of both will and power enough to act upon the need of the hour—to turn every other being into dust, thus restoring balance and enabling peace among the untold trillions who will survive. His desire to erase half of all the living isn’t personal, nor is it inspired by cruelty, venality, or a lust for power. Like his Greek inspiration, Thanos is pragmatic, goal-oriented, and transactional. Though he’s depicted with the stature of a supervillain, in command of limitless legions of grotesque warriors, he’s motivated by a sense of duty: the universe is out of balance and must be set right. “I am inevitable,” he quietly declares. Read more »

by Eric J. Weiner

Ours, like the moments after the Civil War and Reconstruction and after the civil rights movement, requires a different kind of thinking, a different kind of resiliency, or else we succumb to madness or resignation. —Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

Those convictions and motives, upon which the Nazi regime drew, no longer belong to a past that one can count by the intervening years: they have returned with the radical wing of the AfD – up to and including its phraseology – to the democratic everyday. —Jürgen Habermas: Germany’s Second Chance

Not since the Civil War and Reconstruction has the citizenry in the United States been so divided. In our current historical conjuncture, the division can be characterized as a fight between Trumpism and “the Resistance.” As a political bloc and in its current formation, the Resistance is comprised of too many fractured groups to have a coherent ideological agenda. The one thing that these disparate groups can agree on is their fury and disdain for Trumpism and the people who support its white-nationalistic, xenophobic, misogynistic, anti-democratic, neoliberal agenda. It’s clear what and who they are fighting against but less clear what they are collectively fighting for. In contrast to the Resistance, Trumpism is a fully realized neofascist ideology with a cult-like following that won’t go away with Trump. It is a principled system that directs and solidifies a disparate constituency with differential attachments yet not at the expense of ideological cohesion and coherence. As this battle rages on in the United States, the democratic experiment teeters on the brink of failure. The election of Joe Biden to the presidency does not end the threat that neofascism represents to democracy in the United States. But it might provide an opportunity to systematically formalize critical educational strategies that can help re-enculturate a divided citizenry into a radically democratic habitus.

I know using the term neofascism to describe something other than formal state systems of uberviolence is provocative and controversial. Yet, according to Brad Evans, Chair in Political Violence & Aesthetics at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom and Henry Giroux, McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest & The Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy, there are fourteen political principles of neofascism that articulate with our current historical conjuncture even as they acknowledge that the lived reality of this new form of fascism that is germinating in the United States is substantively different from its 20^th century European and South American versions.[1] If we ignore how these political principles of neofascism are undermining the democratic habitus, we are engaging in a form of “historical amnesia” and might miss, as a consequence, an opportunity to develop anti-neofascist/pro-democracy educational projects that can help reverse the rise of its popularity in the United States. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Bill Murray

This column is about travel to less understood parts of the world. In yet another travel constrained month, how about a little political tourism here in Georgia, where none of us really understands the sordid late-Trump morality play swirling around our dual Senate runoffs. We still have thirty days to go. Unlikely circumstance offered our state the fate of the Senate and we are shaky stewards.

Beware pundits bearing wisdom. All their elaborate, self-assured opinions at this early stage tell me that when the national press comes to your town with instant, penetrating analysis of, say, Flint’s municipal water supply, or that crazy Sturgis biker thing, be careful. They bring to mind Emerson’s “the louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.”

All punditry has right now is conventional wisdom. Here on the actual battlefield, candidates compete against one another, the Republican party competes against itself, dark money scurries in the shadows, QAnon jeers from the sidelines and the truth is, nobody has any idea what’s going to happen. Read more »

The leaves have all fallen off this wild tree but some apples still cling to it for dear life, in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, in December of 2020.

by Philip Graham

Back in 1971, I couldn’t have predicted that the release of Joni Mitchell’s fourth album, Blue, would mark the beginning of the end of a friendship.

During my college years, Donald and I had bonded over a love of literature and a shared ambition to become, some day, actual writers. While I chose the route of fiction, Donald wrote song lyrics, taking poetry classes to hone his craft.

The great songwriter love of his life was the Joni Mitchell of her first albums, Song to a Seagull, Clouds, and Ladies of the Canyon. But then Blue dropped, and it crushed Donald. He believed the new, conversational quality of Mitchell’s lyrics betrayed her past poetic strengths. While we sat in the college coffee shop he quoted a few lines from the song “California”:

So I bought me a ticket
I caught a plane to Spain
Went to a party down a red dirt road

and then protested with real hurt in his voice, “How could she write something so ordinary?”

I didn’t mind that Mitchell had moved away from her lyrical era of “mermaids live in colonies” and “sweet well water and pickling jars.” I thought she fully lived and breathed in her new songs, became more approachable as a fellow vulnerable human. Donald remained unmoved. I suggested that at least we still had her exquisite voice, her gift for melody, and her guitar playing—what haunted tunings!

He insisted he couldn’t listen to any song, no matter how beautiful, if he didn’t first respect the lyrics. I countered that no matter how well-composed a lyric, if the melody was a clunker I wouldn’t listen twice. The beauty of the music came first. If the words reflected that beauty? Bonus. Read more »

by Dave Maier

2020 has been a wild ride, but it’s almost over, and I’m here to tell you it wasn’t all bad, as some great music came out this year – so much, in fact, that we’ll have to have two or even three podcasts this time even for the small taste which is our annual year-end review. Here’s part 1 (widget and link below).

Jonathan Fitoussi – Soleil de Minuit

We heard a great track from this guy in a recent set, and here he is again with a terrific new album of unashamedly retro space music. “Soleil de Minuit” (“Midnight Sun”), for example, performed on a Buchla modular system, electric organ, and electric bass, sends off a distinctly Michael Hoenig vibe to my ear. Keep ‘em coming, Jonathan, we love it. Read more »

by Ali Minai

Given where we find ourselves in this late November of 2020, it is hard to think of a book more relevant or timely than The Hype Machine by Sinan Aral. The author is the David Austin Professor of Management and Professor of Information Technology and Marketing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As one of the world’s foremost experts on social media and its effects, Prof. Aral is the perfect person to look at how this phenomenon has changed the world and the human experience. This is what he sets out to do in his new book, The Hype Machine, published under the Currency Imprint of Random House this September, and with considerable success.

The book provides an excellent overview of where things stand with social media, its promise and its peril. For anyone looking for a single, accessibly non-technical source of information and insight on these important issues, this book is essential reading. The book is very well-organized, and the logical flow – both across and within chapters – is remarkably smooth. Overall, the book is an easy read that informs and educates the reader without getting mired in technical jargon – no mean feat for a book about a technical field that is rife with jargon. And, while a large proportion of the book simply communicates information on where things stand and how different social media platforms are shaping the lives of their users, Prof. Aral does not shy away from building a useful abstract framework in which to place all this, and to address the complex issues raised as a result. Read more »