An American esthetic

Hey, I survived registering a bunch of students yesterday! Barely. Spending hours trying to be on and enthusiastic with young people is sometimes tough for this old guy. I’m usually used to having time for my eyes to go black as my soul recedes into the void for recuperation, so I emerged from my day of brightness and light feeling drained. But it was worth it.

Part of my recovery technique was to sit back and watch something on the TV, and this time I tuned into Homecoming: A Film by Beyoncé on Netflix. It was non-stop intellectual stimulation, though, and got me thinking.

Remember Nirvana’s “Feels Like Teen Spirit” video? That one tore down that common American experience, life in a public high school. The bleachers, the cheerleaders, the marching bands…all just a framework for ennui, melancholy, dismay. I loved it, still do, but it’s not exactly optimistic.

Beyoncé takes that same framework and turns it into a fierce celebration of music, dance, HBCUs (man, a lot of the dialogue is about the power of education and community), the black experience, liberty, and womanhood. The interludes where they show the process of creating show were exhausting — so much work and talent went into assembling a complex show. Beyoncé is a genius.

This is the America I want to live in.

“The charge on you is to make this country more than it is today.”

Maya Angelou

That’s the opposite of “MAGA” — it’s looking forward rather than desiring to return to the past.

The best gods are the spider gods

This True News Story missed the most important detail.

After long eras of systemic racial discrimination by humanity, God has clarified he will keep inventing new, terrible kinds of spider until we stop.

“Okay guys,” said God after Donald Trump’s second attempt at a travel ban, while screwing giant mandibles onto the front of a new tarantula model. “You brought this one on yourselves, though.”

If they’d thought to look closely at the god doing the speaking, they might have noticed that he looks like this:

Or this:

Everyone knows the True Name of God is Iktomi, or Anansi. He’s creating new spiders to build webs in our bones if we don’t stop. He’s not trying to get you to stop, though, he’s just anticipating that your eye sockets and rib cages will provide plenty of homes for his children.

I guess we’ve got to start hatin’ on another class of immigrants

Christians. I’ve just learned that they regard themselves as Not Of This World, so they’re not even from Earth. I guess we’ll have to deny them the vote now, and send ’em back to where they came from. Or maybe Build The Roof so they’ll quit invading in their terror caravans.

Apparently there is a popular bumper sticker for this mob of illegal aliens, although I haven’t seen any around here, or I’d have to turn them into homeland security. I’d never put one on my car, that’s for sure. But I did get an alternative in the mail: Noodles of the Marinara

Now that’s a true American symbol.

Catastrophes and annihilation

I’m a guest on this week’s Philosophers in Space podcast, and that’s the cheerful topic of our discussion of the movie Annihilation, a film that I saw as one of the creepiest horror films ever when I first saw it, but my appreciation has grown greatly after a second viewing. It’s actually a movie about change and transformation, bringing together concepts from cancer and deep ecology. So we had a lot to talk about. So much we need two episodes, and Thomas Smith and Aaron Rabi and I will continue next week.

Also, that bear…haunts my nightmares. And we didn’t say enough about how great and atmospheric the music was.

Startling prescience

This is from a 1958 TV western. I think it might have been inspired by some kind of magical morphic resonance echoing backwards through time.

It looks real — I recognized some of the actors, who were familiar faces from the olden days of black & white TVs (wow, Robert Culp looks really young), but also Snopes confirms it, and also found a copy of the full episode.

I liked the ending. Maybe that’s a prophecy, too.