Look, a journal!

Apparently if permitted to sleep for nine hours, my brain presents me with a cheerfully escapist dream of meeting Dirk Bogarde at a film festival and then spending the rest of the afternoon perusing his library and forgoing dinner in favor of sailing, which was probably more my idea of a good time than his, but I like to think if I hadn't woken when I did, he'd have introduced me to Anthony Forwood.

Still toast. Successfully collected my father from the airport two nights ago. Would like my capacity for movies to get back online before I run out of month in which to write about them. Would also like our next-door neighbor to have ceased to use loud air-whining machineries after seven p.m.

I saw the news of the death of Pope Francis. If it was going to be one of his last public statements, the construction site of Hell was an incredibly metal image to go out on.

I was not expecting to see the news that Willy Ley had been found in a can in a co-op on 67th Street. The idea of sending his ashes to space is completely correct and I wouldn't put SpaceX anywhere near that gesture. I could rewatch Frau im Mond (1929) for his memory.

Playing Stan Rogers' "Macdonnell on the Heights" (1984) for spatch may actually have counter-observed Patriots' Day, but my point still stands that the song has successfully superseded its chorus, or at least one in ten thousand seems to underrate Rogers' influence.

Personally I would ask Nigel Havers about the 1986 LWT A Little Princess.

From my office window, I just watched a visitor deliberately smell a Bradford pear and regret it. The trees have really broken into bloom, so I took my camera out into the blotter-paper overcast that kept thinking about raining and then not quite.

( Once I was outside Penn Station, selling red and white carnations. )

spatch has been showing me Hill Street Blues (1981–87), which after a season and a handful I can see resembled nothing else in the Nielsen ratings of its time, structurally, tonally, perhaps even politically, since what I would not have expected from a cop show of the early Reagan administration is so much emphasis on what we would now call non-toxic masculinity as an ideal if not always achieved. Its attitudinal snapshots are fascinating. It is working seriously for diversity. Its interlocking narratives and human messiness make sense of it as the yardstick for J. Michael Straczynski in creating Babylon 5 (1993–98), which is how I heard of the show originally and what it is currently doing in my eyes. I am also enjoying the worldbuilding of its fictional city, whose geographical location is deliberately obscure but whose individual neighborhoods and businesses and sports teams are throwing out runners all over the plot. Actually, to my surprised pleasure, it reminds me distinctly of Frederick Nebel's Kennedy and MacBride.

I may be toast at the end of this week, but I would not trade the gorgeous double feature of David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986) and Wild at Heart (1990) with which rushthatspeaks and I wound it up. Late to the party, I saw Hoosiers (1986) for the equally first time last month and Dennis Hopper at the top of his game really could do anything. We were passing Porter Square afterward when we saw a loose collection of action along the sidewalk that turned out to be a troop of redcoats marching down Massachusetts Avenue, presumably on their way to fight Lexington. Thanks to the street we lived on in my childhood, my very favorite iteration of Paul Revere's ride was the year in which, instead of clattering under the window shouting per usual, he came in a truck and explained his horse had broken down. No kings.

In the same way that I donate to SMYAL and Keshet in this country, Mermaids just got a multiple of eighteen from me because actually I like it when trans youth thrive and grow and with any luck or justice live to see the tearing down of laws which have nothing to do with what is right. I like it when trans adults can just get on with their lives, too. The feedback loop the world feels in right now is bullshit.

Donuts are totally unpesachdik, but since I dropped my parents at the airport before six in the morning, I am eating a jam-filled from Gail Ann's. Outside the construction assembles with rumbles and beeps, but I am eating a fried object the size of a saucer and functionally indistinguishable from pączki. It covered me with granulated sugar instantaneously. The sunrise came up in gilt tissue and lavender and the fluorescent stipple of the windows of dawn-drowned trains.

[edit] No photographic evidence of the donut survived, only the smile on the face of the tiger.

January: “AI cannot even retrieve information accurately, and that there’s a fundamental limit to the technology’s capabilities. These models are often primed to be agreeable and helpful. They usually won’t bother correcting users’ assumptions, and will side with them instead. If chatbots are asked to generate a list of cases in support of some legal argument, for example, they are more predisposed to make up lawsuits than to respond with nothing.”

February: “Are these cookbooks written or reviewed by a dietitian or medical professional? Could a gastric bypass or cancer patient receive cooking instructions to make a meal contraindicated for their medical condition? If I were choosing for a library, I’d vet each one. With Hoopla, they are all there. Some might be excellent. Some might be dangerous.”

March: “Over the past few months, instead of working on our priorities at SourceHut, I have spent anywhere from 20-100% of my time in any given week mitigating hyper-aggressive LLM crawlers at scale. This isn’t the first time SourceHut has been at the wrong end of some malicious bullshit or paid someone else’s externalized costs – every couple of years someone invents a new way of ruining my day.”

“Most of the tools we tested presented inaccurate answers with alarming confidence, rarely using qualifying phrases such as “it appears,” “it’s possible,” “might,” etc., or acknowledging knowledge gaps with statements like “I couldn’t locate the exact article.” ChatGPT, for instance, incorrectly identified 134 articles, but signaled a lack of confidence just fifteen times out of its two hundred responses, and never declined to provide an answer.”

“ChatGPT responded with outputs falsely claiming that he was sentenced to 21 years in prison as “a convicted criminal who murdered two of his children and attempted to murder his third son,” a Noyb press release said. ChatGPT’s “made-up horror story” not only hallucinated events that never happened, but it also mixed “clearly identifiable personal data”—such as the actual number and gender of Holmen’s children and the name of his hometown.”

“Amazon says that the recordings your Echo will send to its data-centers will be deleted as soon as it’s been processed by the AI servers. Amazon’s made these claims before, and they were lies. Amazon eventually had to admit that its employees and a menagerie of overseas contractors were secretly given millions of recordings to listen to and make notes on.”

“eBay have changed their terms of service and you’re automatically opted-in for your personal data to be used for AI development and training.” (With opt-out instructions.)

I don't see why the cloudburst which held off until I had left the house to check on the state of the local flowering trees couldn't have hit this morning when a square of concrete was jackhammered out of our immediate sidewalk, but I did actually manage to sleep and dream most vividly of hanging out in a waking-stranger's garden-level apartment whose bookshelves seemed to be populated entirely by Michael Whelan-jacketed science fiction. My bookshelves in high school would have been heavily tilted the same.

Yesterday I walked to Porter Square Books, who in their new location further up Mass. Ave. are still only about thirty-five minutes from me on foot, which felt like a major achievement considering the vaporized state of my physical health for longer than I like to think about. I got two books for my father, whose actual birthday it was, after which I had to drop off my watch at the same repair shop in Harvard Square from which I had collected it right before leaving for D.C. I don't think it should stop twice in three weeks, especially if it was supposed to have been fixed in between. That said, D.C. as detrimental to the healthy flow of history makes a certain amount of sense to me right now.

Today I left messages with all of my elected officials about the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, since an executive branch that no longer even pretends to play by the constitutional rule of law is beyond overstatement bad, not to mention that even without the additional monstrosity of administrative error, nothing about the present hell of any of America's for-profit deportees improves my safety or security and if by some atrocious miracle it did, still no. I was born into this house we don't ask what became of the previous inhabitants. I don't have to go looking for more rooms.

P.S. And then this rainbow and the sunset at the other end of the street. Tomorrow I can call about Mohsen Mahdawi.

The sidewalk jackhammers arrived directly in front of our house on the dot of seven and persisted on our street until the point in the afternoon when they moved off to torment an audibly adjacent block. The shallow nightmarish gasps I slept in were not enough. I can't do another spring at this pitch of sleeplessness. I can still hear industrial whines and trucks beeping up.

I opened the door to the stranger. I made charoses after all. This afternoon I went for a walk in the misting rain.

( You put your soul in a beggar's bowl. )

I am feeling especially scraped thin and valueless, but selkie sent me a bonanza of tinned fish, so that for dinner I had coconut curry sardines and olive-and-pepper mackerel, and spatch brought me home a bag of intensely tropical Hi-Chews as a surprise dessert, all of which made a nice change-up from my traditional habits of eating treyf sandwiches on matzah. I read Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary (2021) on the recommendation of N. and enjoyed very much how it functions like a Heinleinian hard sf novel where a level head and a slide rule can solve all problems only without the slide rule or the level head. Georgette Heyer's A Blunt Instrument (1938) could have done without its obligatory inclusion of antisemitism, but I appreciate the romantic pairing of its long-lashed, willowy, deprecatingly vague hero and its blunt-spoken, crop-haired, monocle-wearing heroine. She writes novels and he was last seen wandering around the Balkans. They should have a great time in a different mystery. sholio has written most excellent B5 fic. I like the idea of the Odyssey having a moment.

Because it is springtime in New England, it snowed this morning.



I am coming into Pesach furious, not with the holiday, but the circumstances under which it is happening. The most, the very most important part of the Seder as observed by my family, the stripped-down, fire-and-the-place-in-the-forest core, is to open the door to the stranger. To offer them shelter and succour, to share food and freedom, not to answer the Four Questions with FYGM. And I am living in a country that makes me feel maddened not even with its indifference but with its gleeful spectacle of cruelty toward the stranger which just makes me want to go with my bare hands. Of course I am glad of this amicus brief, but what's to be glad about the the necessity of it? For travel-related reasons, my family is not holding a Seder tonight, so I will open the door, offer the wine and the matzah, say the words, try not to scream them. Next year in freedom, my mother has said for years. Zero-sum games cost us everything.

We have just received notice in the mail that the concrete sidewalks of our street are going to spend the next week being replaced, thus explaining the sudden proliferation of no-parking flyers and the ear-juddering industrial noise around the corner to which I woke this afternoon. Adjacent streets will also be involved in this mishegos. After last year, I do not know if I can trust the official time estimate. I know the jokes about construction season, but I need to sleep ever again in my life.

I’m using the DW version of the original post as the masterpost, not gonna try to keep the WordPress mirror up-to-date. Off to add some new notes…

 

 

Related: an “oh, hey…” moment…

There’s a brief reference in Sybil Exposed to a diagnostic method that Sybil’s therapist reportedly used. As the author describes it:

After starting at the University of Kentucky in 1967/68, Dr. Connie Wilbur “showed residents how to test for [MPD]. She recommended that a patient be hypnotized, then encouraged to look into a mirror until someone different appeared. The patient was then asked if the person in the mirror had a name and an age. If the answer was yes, the diagnosis was multiple personality. Connie did not seem to realize what recent studies have shown: many people, even normal ones, will see different faces in a mirror within minutes of gazing.” (147-148)

(The book is from 2011, and apparently the paper that first named the “strange-face-in-the-mirror illusion” was from 2010. She meant really recent studies.)

It really sounds like both Jane Phillips and Christine Beauchamp could’ve been experiencing a version of this. They don’t describe a whole cinematic experience of seeing the figure in the mirror move and speak — they just describe looking at their face for a while, seeing it become someone else’s face, and connecting it to a separate presence. (Christine knew she was part of a system, so she was able to ID a specific headmate she already had some contact with. Jane was diagnosed years later, for other reasons, and only connected this in retrospect.)

So! Sybil’s doctor thinks that everyone who sees this illusion is multiple. And Sybil’s exposing author points out it’s an illusion everyone sees, inviting you to conclude that nobody is multiple.

But, look — compare this for a second to the mirror box illusion (video), the one used in mirror therapy for phantom limb pain. That works on everyone too! You can trick your brain into processing, say, “the mirror image of your right hand” as “actually your left hand” — and it still works whether or not you physically have a left hand.

Makes sense that everyone can optical-illusion their brain into processing “your face” as “somebody else’s face,” and it works whether you have other people in your head or not.

—

Finally, real quick, a Moon Knight thing:

From the strange-face article above: “The author, Italian psychologist Giovanni Caputo, describes his set up which seems to reliably trigger the illusion: you need a room lit only by a dim lamp (he suggests a 25W bulb) that is placed behind the sitter, while the participant stares into a large mirror placed about 40 cm in front.”

The first time Steven perceives Marc acting differently from him in a reflective surface, the shot looks like this:

Hmm. Hmmmm.

(A second later Steven turns on a better light, and the mysterious not-him motion disappears. For now.)

theseatheseatheopensea invited me to make one, so here is a list of a hundred films noirs. It is non-completist. It is non-proscriptive. I had intended it to start with proto-noir and end with neo-noir, but it turned out I had far more than a hundred noirs of the classically defined period to winnow down from and any number of solid citizens and weird little ornaments had already been left by the side of the meme. Like all of the other lists, it will be different tomorrow. Anything on this one that I haven't written about, rest assured that I want to. I would, however, need to sleep more than an hour, which is how the last couple of nights have been going.

Randomly stumbled over the omnibus collection of this at the library…immediately took it home and blazed through the whole thing.

It’s a short-lived newspaper comic from the 60s about characters who know they’re running a comic. The fourth wall is in tatters, the meta jokes are decades ahead of their time, the crossover gags are exquisite. And beautifully drawn! Apparently people at the time were sure the parodies and cameos were an elaborate copy-and-paste job, or at least traced — but no, the artist was just that diligent about recreating the styles of the characters getting cameo’d.

It was the brainchild of Mort Walker (creator of the army comedy Beetle Bailey and its suburban spinoff Hi and Lois) and Jerry Dumas (who by then was his assistant/co-producer, and who did the art for Sam’s Strip). Honestly, I would put Hi and Lois on a list of the most blandly-generic newspaper strips, so I’m kinda surprised Walker had something this weird and innovative in him.

…Although it sounds like he’s not the one I should be judging, because the bland stuff was what sold. Sam’s Strip was beloved by the readers who got the jokes, but never caught on with a wider audience, and got canceled within less than two years.

(Then the character designs got repurposed for a much-more-generic comedy strip about small-town cops, and that was a hit.)

Wikipedia has a Sam’s Strip article, this blog has scans of a bunch of individual strips, and this omnibus has the whole run with fun notes/annotations. If you get the opportunity, give it a look.

The hundred movies meme was even harder to assemble because I spent far more of my childhood and adolescence immersed in books than in movies and therefore many of the films on this list were not so much formative as illuminating once I finally started paying attention to cinema as an art form, and/or they wired themselves instantly into my brain and are quoted regularly to this day. A list of favorites might overlap significantly but not identically, I imagine tilting more heavily toward sff and noir. I feel it may be a much more mainstream list than my formative books, although still full of meaningful absences. (I sacrificed a number of classics as well as movies whose circumstances were potentially more important than their content, but just glitched on The Medium (1951) and Katerina Izmailova (1966), both of which I even own.) I find it very difficult to try to winnow accurately. I may just not be designed for this format of meme.