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shadowkat1. So, right on schedule and as Lando and I predicted Nancy Pelosi Speaker of the House) announces formal Impeachment Inquiry into President Trump.
WASHINGTON — Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced on Tuesday that the House would begin a formal impeachment inquiry of President Trump, saying that he had betrayed his oath of office and the nation’s security in seeking to enlist a foreign power for his own political gain.
“The actions taken to date by the president have seriously violated the Constitution,” she said after emerging from a meeting of House Democrats in the basement of the Capitol. Mr. Trump, she said, “must be held accountable — no one is above the law.”
Last year we were speculating and both decided it wouldn't be until this Fall. The Mueller stuff had to be completed first, and a few more horrible things had to hit the fan, and the Dems needed control of the House and more influence in the Senate, and the Republicans needed to slowly pull away...it will take a while. This won't be fast. I'm thinking hearings and scandal will go into next year, and it will get far far worse before it gets better.
I was discussing this with another co-worker the other day. And we agreed -- for change to happen, people have become uncomfortable and desperate. People are inherently selfish -- and if they are comfortable, they won't do anything. Complacency is far worse than anything else.
I'm watching "Country Music" and it's right now during the 1970s and the Watergate hearings/scandal. They show Nixon in Nashville with a friendly audience during this period. "CEO's manipulate the gears of this country every day -- and a CEO in Country Music means cash..." - quote from the documentary.
2. A Reckoning for Our Species..
The Anthropocene is not only a period of manmade disruption. It is also a moment of blinking self-awareness, in which the human species is becoming conscious of itself as a planetary force. We’re not only driving global warming and ecological destruction; we know that we are.
One of Morton’s most powerful insights is that we are condemned to live with this awareness at all times. It’s there not only when politicians gather to discuss international environmental agreements, but when we do something as mundane as chat about the weather, pick up a plastic bag at the supermarket or water the lawn. We live in a world with a moral calculus that didn’t exist before. Now, doing just about anything is an environmental question. That wasn’t true 60 years ago – or at least people weren’t aware that it was true. Tragically, it is only by despoiling the planet that we have realised just how much a part of it we are.
Morton believes that this constitutes a revolution in our understanding of our place in the universe on a par with those fomented by Copernicus, Darwin and Freud. He is just one of thousands of geologists, climate scientists, historians, novelists and journalists writing about this upheaval, but, perhaps better than anyone else, he captures in words the uncanny feeling of being present at the birth of this extreme age.
“There you are, turning the ignition of your car,” he writes. “And it creeps up on you.” Every time you fire up your engine you don’t mean to harm the Earth, “let alone cause the Sixth Mass Extinction Event in the four-and-a-half billion-year history of life on this planet”. But “harm to Earth is precisely what is happening”. Part of what’s so uncomfortable about this is that our individual acts may be statistically and morally insignificant, but when you multiply them millions and billions of times – as they are performed by an entire species – they are a collective act of ecological destruction. Coral bleaching isn’t just occurring over yonder, on the Great Barrier Reef; it’s happening wherever you switch on the air conditioning. In short, Morton says, “everything is interconnected”.
As Morton’s work spreads beyond cultural hierophants such as Björk to the pages of major news outlets, he is arguably becoming our most popular guide to the new epoch. Yes, he has some seemingly crazy ideas about what it’s like to be alive right now – but what it’s like to be alive right now, in the Anthropocene, is pretty crazy.
3. Greta Thurnberg's Full Speech to the UN regarding Climate Change
I decided to follow her on Twitter...and made the mistake of checking out the comments, then began as one guy suggested, blocking all the trollish ones -- fifteen minutes doing it.
People may not listen until they have no choice -- which means a cataclysmic event.
Which she's fighting to stop -- at 13 years of age.
4. The History of Celebrity
There are two ways of telling the story of celebrity, and both are true. The first narrative holds celebrity to be a modern invention. There were always famous people, but they made their names through great deeds and works and with an eye to posterity. Glory usually came after death, in monuments and songs and rumours of miracles near their graves. They were kings and heroes and saints, embodiments of the highest and most precious values of their communities. Their example inspired the young and chastened the reprobate. Their touch healed the sick, their flesh a direct conduit to the divine. Then came modernity, with wires and steamships and women shameless enough to strut the stage. A celebrity changed from a man who had done useful, important things in the world to an entertainer, often female and young, with a knack for fascinating audiences. The religious fanatic transformed into a fan, eager for stolen glimpses of the beloved star, hungry for private gossip and salacious revelations, ready to buy an endorsed cigarette or shoe or perfume for the feeling of having come closer to her image. The internet sped up the process and took it to its inevitable conclusion. Celebrity became its own performance. Reality itself turned into a show, and ordinary people began to polish their personal brand. Fame was the accomplishment, the great deed, the healing salve, the song that sang itself.
The second version of the story is not as breathless, and suggests that celebrity has been around much longer. Even when women were kept from performing in the high drama of the ancient Roman stage, some captivated audiences with dance and music and bawdy mime. There was usually someone around to say it was a bad idea. In his treatise “On the Spectacles”, the second-century Christian writer Tertullian railed against the cross-dressing actors, pantomimes and women prostitutes on the stage, claiming that the entire allure of the theatre lay in its filth. The great heroes of old were contradictory figures, too: Mark Antony’s fame came with a dose of scandal and erotic transgression, as did Joan of Arc’s. Before being canonized and neutralized, saints and prophets enchanted their followers by refusing contemporary notions of the good life. Their disciples sought out the places where they had slept and suffered, travelled to touch a slip of skin or cloth or hair. Kings and queens may have paid less attention to their great deeds and more to their public image, to the masques and poems and ceremonies that cemented their exceptional status. Some, such as Elizabeth I, had a talent for turning a personal failing (her lack of children, for example) into evidence of divine nature. Contemporary celebrity culture is a pumped-up, sped-up version of an old dance between people who want to be special and the folks who want to watch them try.
In The Drama of Celebrity Sharon Marcus takes a middle path between these two narratives. Marcus acknowledges the long prehistory of modern-day stardom, but focuses on the flowering of celebrity culture in the West since the eighteenth century. In lucid prose, she describes celebrity as a drama with three main characters: celebrities, the public that adores and judges them, and the media producers who exalt, criticize and satirize. The star of the book is Sarah Bernhardt, the genial actress and calculatedly charismatic “godmother of modern celebrity culture”, whose success in shaping her public persona in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was unprecedented. Marcus introduces a predictable supporting cast – Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Anna Pavlova, Madonna – but Bernhardt remains the magnetic centre of the story. The book reproduces a rich trove of archival material which, if it does not bring Bernhardt back to life, at least reveals the scintillating liveliness of her image a century ago. Photographs, engravings, paintings, fan scrapbooks, outlandish caricatures, letters and diaries all speak to Bernhardt’s hold on the public attention.
Bernhardt’s methods may sound familiar. She took little account of society’s rules for women or even of its lowered expectations of actresses. We might expect this in the sexual arena, and indeed, Bernhardt had a child out of wedlock, briefly married a much younger man, and had a long, possibly intimate relationship with another woman, the painter Louise Abbéma. But Bernhardt outraged in other ways, too, breaking her contract with the Théâtre-Français, managing her own productions, flitting around in a hot-air balloon and writing a book about her travels in the clouds. Her very body was an affront, slender at a time when public taste preferred plump and curvy women. Marcus explains the appeal of celebrity scandal as a kind of wish fulfilment. While most people who break the rules are stigmatized as a result, defiant celebrities – and notorious politicians – do not lose face. They hold out the promise of winning all of society’s rewards – money, fame, adoration – while ignoring its precepts. Obedient, scared mortals need not suffer the penalties of nonconformism to enjoy its pleasure: they can watch a star do it for them.
This is not to say that society’s arbiters were quiet. Bernhardt was mocked for her Jewish heritage: in one caricature she was depicted with a large nose and frizzy hair under a Star of David. Her critics described her as a freak, a fakir and an acrobat, which did not keep her from continuing to act even after having one leg amputated after being injured in an on-stage stunt (she delivered her lines seated). Her fans, too, were ridiculed mercilessly, especially when she toured the United States. In the pages of the Parisian magazine La Caricature, cartoonists depicted adoring audiences as unruly mobs of Sioux warriors and Mormon wives. The message was clear: this uncontrollable woman unleashed savage forces, and her popular appeal was a sign of irrational democracy at work.
What was so unsettling about Bernhardt? A self-willed, successful woman was not an easy pill to swallow, but her acting style added another dimension. Marcus traces the rise of melodramatic or “overpowering” acting – the explosive style of the eighteenth-century Shakespearean actor Edmund Kean, for example – over the course of the Romantic period, emphasizing the pleasure it gave audience members to be overwhelmed. It could also infuriate – sometimes at the same time. Here, for example, is Lady Monkswell writing in her diary in 1880, after seeing a performance by Bernhardt: “I will not go to be harrowed up again in this most wanton manner. I did not know what beauty of movement was till I saw Sarah, it is overwhelming, bewildering”. Like the martyr saints and operatic divas who came before her, Bernhardt managed to exercise this electric power even when performing characters on the edge of collapse or annihilation.
People turn to celebrities to feel emotion, connection, even transcendence. The emotions a star provokes can be just as gratifying if they are negative. Disgust, scorn and outrage provide their own satisfactions. A celebrity who is good at her job gives the public the opportunity to experience unruly feelings. She also arouses in them a desire for her true, “authentic” self. Marcus convincingly argues that celebrities do so by crafting their image carefully. Bernhardt enchanted audiences through precisely controlled movements, deliberately modulated vocal intonation, and the careful choreography of her performances both on stage and off. This was a woman who had herself photographed sleeping in a coffin, was reported to keep a menagerie of exotic pets, and apparently drank from a skull and kept a skeleton in her bedroom.
5. Ken Burns' Country Music - Episode 7 : Would Hank Williams Do it That Way?
This isn't as good as last night's episode. But here's a nice clip of Dolly Parton singing the song she wrote -- to get across to Porter Waggoner (her duet partner, and manager) that she really needed to break ties with him. (Because he wouldn't listen to her or let her go, so she got desperate and wrote a song.)
Parton Singing I Will Always Love You to Porter Waggoner
Ironically it became her best-selling song.
ETA: Also goes in depth on Willie Nelsen, Waylon Jennings, Emmylou Harris, Marty Stuart, Hank Williams Jr., and Rosanne Cash -- including Ricky Skaggs, Gram Parsons, and others.
Found out things about Willie Nelson that I didn't know -- such as he more or less founded the Austin Music Scene, and started Austin City Limits, and that Waylon Jennings was the first to start his own production studio. And made the first platinum record.
WASHINGTON — Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced on Tuesday that the House would begin a formal impeachment inquiry of President Trump, saying that he had betrayed his oath of office and the nation’s security in seeking to enlist a foreign power for his own political gain.
“The actions taken to date by the president have seriously violated the Constitution,” she said after emerging from a meeting of House Democrats in the basement of the Capitol. Mr. Trump, she said, “must be held accountable — no one is above the law.”
Last year we were speculating and both decided it wouldn't be until this Fall. The Mueller stuff had to be completed first, and a few more horrible things had to hit the fan, and the Dems needed control of the House and more influence in the Senate, and the Republicans needed to slowly pull away...it will take a while. This won't be fast. I'm thinking hearings and scandal will go into next year, and it will get far far worse before it gets better.
I was discussing this with another co-worker the other day. And we agreed -- for change to happen, people have become uncomfortable and desperate. People are inherently selfish -- and if they are comfortable, they won't do anything. Complacency is far worse than anything else.
I'm watching "Country Music" and it's right now during the 1970s and the Watergate hearings/scandal. They show Nixon in Nashville with a friendly audience during this period. "CEO's manipulate the gears of this country every day -- and a CEO in Country Music means cash..." - quote from the documentary.
2. A Reckoning for Our Species..
The Anthropocene is not only a period of manmade disruption. It is also a moment of blinking self-awareness, in which the human species is becoming conscious of itself as a planetary force. We’re not only driving global warming and ecological destruction; we know that we are.
One of Morton’s most powerful insights is that we are condemned to live with this awareness at all times. It’s there not only when politicians gather to discuss international environmental agreements, but when we do something as mundane as chat about the weather, pick up a plastic bag at the supermarket or water the lawn. We live in a world with a moral calculus that didn’t exist before. Now, doing just about anything is an environmental question. That wasn’t true 60 years ago – or at least people weren’t aware that it was true. Tragically, it is only by despoiling the planet that we have realised just how much a part of it we are.
Morton believes that this constitutes a revolution in our understanding of our place in the universe on a par with those fomented by Copernicus, Darwin and Freud. He is just one of thousands of geologists, climate scientists, historians, novelists and journalists writing about this upheaval, but, perhaps better than anyone else, he captures in words the uncanny feeling of being present at the birth of this extreme age.
“There you are, turning the ignition of your car,” he writes. “And it creeps up on you.” Every time you fire up your engine you don’t mean to harm the Earth, “let alone cause the Sixth Mass Extinction Event in the four-and-a-half billion-year history of life on this planet”. But “harm to Earth is precisely what is happening”. Part of what’s so uncomfortable about this is that our individual acts may be statistically and morally insignificant, but when you multiply them millions and billions of times – as they are performed by an entire species – they are a collective act of ecological destruction. Coral bleaching isn’t just occurring over yonder, on the Great Barrier Reef; it’s happening wherever you switch on the air conditioning. In short, Morton says, “everything is interconnected”.
As Morton’s work spreads beyond cultural hierophants such as Björk to the pages of major news outlets, he is arguably becoming our most popular guide to the new epoch. Yes, he has some seemingly crazy ideas about what it’s like to be alive right now – but what it’s like to be alive right now, in the Anthropocene, is pretty crazy.
3. Greta Thurnberg's Full Speech to the UN regarding Climate Change
I decided to follow her on Twitter...and made the mistake of checking out the comments, then began as one guy suggested, blocking all the trollish ones -- fifteen minutes doing it.
People may not listen until they have no choice -- which means a cataclysmic event.
Which she's fighting to stop -- at 13 years of age.
4. The History of Celebrity
There are two ways of telling the story of celebrity, and both are true. The first narrative holds celebrity to be a modern invention. There were always famous people, but they made their names through great deeds and works and with an eye to posterity. Glory usually came after death, in monuments and songs and rumours of miracles near their graves. They were kings and heroes and saints, embodiments of the highest and most precious values of their communities. Their example inspired the young and chastened the reprobate. Their touch healed the sick, their flesh a direct conduit to the divine. Then came modernity, with wires and steamships and women shameless enough to strut the stage. A celebrity changed from a man who had done useful, important things in the world to an entertainer, often female and young, with a knack for fascinating audiences. The religious fanatic transformed into a fan, eager for stolen glimpses of the beloved star, hungry for private gossip and salacious revelations, ready to buy an endorsed cigarette or shoe or perfume for the feeling of having come closer to her image. The internet sped up the process and took it to its inevitable conclusion. Celebrity became its own performance. Reality itself turned into a show, and ordinary people began to polish their personal brand. Fame was the accomplishment, the great deed, the healing salve, the song that sang itself.
The second version of the story is not as breathless, and suggests that celebrity has been around much longer. Even when women were kept from performing in the high drama of the ancient Roman stage, some captivated audiences with dance and music and bawdy mime. There was usually someone around to say it was a bad idea. In his treatise “On the Spectacles”, the second-century Christian writer Tertullian railed against the cross-dressing actors, pantomimes and women prostitutes on the stage, claiming that the entire allure of the theatre lay in its filth. The great heroes of old were contradictory figures, too: Mark Antony’s fame came with a dose of scandal and erotic transgression, as did Joan of Arc’s. Before being canonized and neutralized, saints and prophets enchanted their followers by refusing contemporary notions of the good life. Their disciples sought out the places where they had slept and suffered, travelled to touch a slip of skin or cloth or hair. Kings and queens may have paid less attention to their great deeds and more to their public image, to the masques and poems and ceremonies that cemented their exceptional status. Some, such as Elizabeth I, had a talent for turning a personal failing (her lack of children, for example) into evidence of divine nature. Contemporary celebrity culture is a pumped-up, sped-up version of an old dance between people who want to be special and the folks who want to watch them try.
In The Drama of Celebrity Sharon Marcus takes a middle path between these two narratives. Marcus acknowledges the long prehistory of modern-day stardom, but focuses on the flowering of celebrity culture in the West since the eighteenth century. In lucid prose, she describes celebrity as a drama with three main characters: celebrities, the public that adores and judges them, and the media producers who exalt, criticize and satirize. The star of the book is Sarah Bernhardt, the genial actress and calculatedly charismatic “godmother of modern celebrity culture”, whose success in shaping her public persona in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was unprecedented. Marcus introduces a predictable supporting cast – Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Anna Pavlova, Madonna – but Bernhardt remains the magnetic centre of the story. The book reproduces a rich trove of archival material which, if it does not bring Bernhardt back to life, at least reveals the scintillating liveliness of her image a century ago. Photographs, engravings, paintings, fan scrapbooks, outlandish caricatures, letters and diaries all speak to Bernhardt’s hold on the public attention.
Bernhardt’s methods may sound familiar. She took little account of society’s rules for women or even of its lowered expectations of actresses. We might expect this in the sexual arena, and indeed, Bernhardt had a child out of wedlock, briefly married a much younger man, and had a long, possibly intimate relationship with another woman, the painter Louise Abbéma. But Bernhardt outraged in other ways, too, breaking her contract with the Théâtre-Français, managing her own productions, flitting around in a hot-air balloon and writing a book about her travels in the clouds. Her very body was an affront, slender at a time when public taste preferred plump and curvy women. Marcus explains the appeal of celebrity scandal as a kind of wish fulfilment. While most people who break the rules are stigmatized as a result, defiant celebrities – and notorious politicians – do not lose face. They hold out the promise of winning all of society’s rewards – money, fame, adoration – while ignoring its precepts. Obedient, scared mortals need not suffer the penalties of nonconformism to enjoy its pleasure: they can watch a star do it for them.
This is not to say that society’s arbiters were quiet. Bernhardt was mocked for her Jewish heritage: in one caricature she was depicted with a large nose and frizzy hair under a Star of David. Her critics described her as a freak, a fakir and an acrobat, which did not keep her from continuing to act even after having one leg amputated after being injured in an on-stage stunt (she delivered her lines seated). Her fans, too, were ridiculed mercilessly, especially when she toured the United States. In the pages of the Parisian magazine La Caricature, cartoonists depicted adoring audiences as unruly mobs of Sioux warriors and Mormon wives. The message was clear: this uncontrollable woman unleashed savage forces, and her popular appeal was a sign of irrational democracy at work.
What was so unsettling about Bernhardt? A self-willed, successful woman was not an easy pill to swallow, but her acting style added another dimension. Marcus traces the rise of melodramatic or “overpowering” acting – the explosive style of the eighteenth-century Shakespearean actor Edmund Kean, for example – over the course of the Romantic period, emphasizing the pleasure it gave audience members to be overwhelmed. It could also infuriate – sometimes at the same time. Here, for example, is Lady Monkswell writing in her diary in 1880, after seeing a performance by Bernhardt: “I will not go to be harrowed up again in this most wanton manner. I did not know what beauty of movement was till I saw Sarah, it is overwhelming, bewildering”. Like the martyr saints and operatic divas who came before her, Bernhardt managed to exercise this electric power even when performing characters on the edge of collapse or annihilation.
People turn to celebrities to feel emotion, connection, even transcendence. The emotions a star provokes can be just as gratifying if they are negative. Disgust, scorn and outrage provide their own satisfactions. A celebrity who is good at her job gives the public the opportunity to experience unruly feelings. She also arouses in them a desire for her true, “authentic” self. Marcus convincingly argues that celebrities do so by crafting their image carefully. Bernhardt enchanted audiences through precisely controlled movements, deliberately modulated vocal intonation, and the careful choreography of her performances both on stage and off. This was a woman who had herself photographed sleeping in a coffin, was reported to keep a menagerie of exotic pets, and apparently drank from a skull and kept a skeleton in her bedroom.
5. Ken Burns' Country Music - Episode 7 : Would Hank Williams Do it That Way?
This isn't as good as last night's episode. But here's a nice clip of Dolly Parton singing the song she wrote -- to get across to Porter Waggoner (her duet partner, and manager) that she really needed to break ties with him. (Because he wouldn't listen to her or let her go, so she got desperate and wrote a song.)
Parton Singing I Will Always Love You to Porter Waggoner
Ironically it became her best-selling song.
ETA: Also goes in depth on Willie Nelsen, Waylon Jennings, Emmylou Harris, Marty Stuart, Hank Williams Jr., and Rosanne Cash -- including Ricky Skaggs, Gram Parsons, and others.
Found out things about Willie Nelson that I didn't know -- such as he more or less founded the Austin Music Scene, and started Austin City Limits, and that Waylon Jennings was the first to start his own production studio. And made the first platinum record.