Blog Mirror. Painted Bricks: Art or vandalism?

Painted Bricks: Art or vandalism?:

Art or vandalism?

We don't like to put up photos of graffiti here as it's not in the same category as what this blog is dedicated to depict.  Here, we make a bit of an exception.

The scenes depicted above are of the backs of two local office buildings.  Both are actively occupied. I.e., there's going businesses in them. They aren't abandoned buildings.

So what, you may ask.

Well, graffiti has been a feature on the back of these buildings for a long time, but it's grown markedly worse in recent years.  The amount of graffiti has increased as the building on the right has been oddly popularized in the local press. And when I say the building, I mean the alley.  For reasons that aren't apparent to me, the fire escape  has become locally celebrated as some sort of a wonder.  That's drawn people to trespass on it and as that's occurred, graffiti has likewise increased as well.  So have high school graduation pictures with the staircase as a backdrop and even wedding photos.

And now a local theater company.

I'm not a big fan of local theater, which speaks poorly of me. When I was very young my parents introduced me to the theater at the local community college which was a real treat for all of us grade school kids.  I can dimly recall seeing You're A Good Man Charlie Brown and The Man From Lamancha at the college theater.  While in high school I was never in theater but about that time I was introduced to the text of plays as literature, and I really like some of those.  I've seen more college production in latter days, including when I was in college, including, by my recollection, The Dark Of the Moon, which I don't particularly care for, and A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum, which I do.  When our kids were little, we took them to a college play about the Wright Brothers.

Local theater, however, is another deal entirely and you have to admire the people who are willing to do it.  It doesn't get hte same viewership as college theater, for one thing.  And the quality fo the volunteers is bound to be uneven.

Anyhow, there's a couple local theater companies around here and one of them decided to put on a version of a famous Greek play.  I've read the text of the play as a college student, which is a long time ago, but I can dimly recall the outline of it.  In this production of the play, apparently, there's an element that emphasizes the need to put on a play in spite of hte presence of an Athenian plague, which apparently might be a real background story to the original play.  I.e., it was staged during a plague, perhaps, during which the author felt it critical to reopen the Athenian theaters in spite of hte risks.

There's a lot of things that are interesting about that, including that if that's correct, ancient Greeks, while they may not have had the germ theory of disease, grasped that hanging around in groups spread it.  Athens apparently closed up shop to try to combat it, something that might seem familiar to the readers here.  If my understanding of the views at the time are correct, there were also those who dissented from that view. . . which is also interesting in context.

In the current context, it's generally those who are on the left to the center left, politically, who have been for keeping things shut down and a tight quarantine, while on the right to the center right the view is the opposite.  In the middle, where most folks are, the views are nuanced.  On the edges, they aren't.

Anyhow, most theater people are on the hard left.  It's the hard left that generally would really have a really tight quarantine.  Probably most people in local theater on are the left somewhere.

Which makes a play all about protesting quarantines oddly ironic.

Anyhow, that's not why we have posted this here.  Apparently determining to stage this out in the open for a certain sort of street cred feel to it, the producers have added to the graffitti.

This may make the town about hte only town around which graffitti making reference to ancient Greece, but it's still graffitti.  Of course, there was a lot of it before.

I'm not quite sure what to think.

The play on opening day.  I happened to be in the building at the time and so I snapped this photo.  There wasn't a large crowd, but then it was opening day during a time of pandemic too.

One thing maybe the theater company and the audience might think is how gracious the building occupants are.  It's impossible not to notice a thing like this and in a lot of places the reaction would have been hugely negative.  No reaction at all isn't permission, but it is pretty gracious.

Somehow I missed the fact that the master biographer Edmund Morris died last May.

He was 78 years old.

His series on Theodore Roosevelt, started as work when he was a graduate student, is an absolute masterpiece.  The three volume work was interrupted by his biography on Ronald Reagan, which I haven't read, but in which he included unusual writing techniques including the acknowledge inclusion of fiction in order to illustrate events which actually happened, a technique which lead the work to be condemned and which I suspect was done to address the problem that Ronald Reagan's early years simply weren't that interesting.

Morris was born in Kenya and had a clipped upper class English accent.  His early career was not in history or writing and The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, his first book, was not issued until he was 40 years old.  His last well known work, Colonel Roosevelt, and the second volume of his history of Roosevelt, Theodore Rex, were delayed by his twelve year effort researching Reagan, an effort that lead him to the conclusion that Reagan was almost impossible to understand.  

Morris wrote only seven books, with his final work on Edison being published after his death.  He'll always be remembered for his three volume set on Theodore Roosevelt.

Blog Mirror: Dos and Don’ts for Back to School, Pandemic Edition

Dos and Don’ts for Back to School, Pandemic Edition

For International Dog Day. The Camp Tender

 

August 26, 1920. Summer Camp boat exercises at Hampton Roads, Virginia.

 

Railhead: Derailed Union Pacific Grain (corn) train, Bosler, Wyoming. August 22, 2020

Railhead: Derailed Union Pacific Grain (corn) train, Bosler ...:

Derailed Union Pacific Grain (corn) train, Bosler Wyoming. August 22, 2020.

Failure

Our greatest fear should not be of failure, but of succeeding at something that doesn't really matter.

D. L. Moody.

Perry Mason, Season 1.

I have no first hand recollection of the Perry Mason television show which ran from 1957 to 1966.  of course, when it went off the air in 1966, I was three years old.  Still, I know that it ran in syndicated reruns but I never watched it for more than a few minutes, and it always appeared rather boring.  To a kid, it probably would have been.  I didn't know until recently that the Mason character was based on a series of books that first came out in 1933.

I know that now as HBO has put out a new Perry Mason series that just premiered this year.  This entry is a review of that series, not the television series.

Still, because the television series is so famous, it's not really possible to deal with the new HBO series without dealing with the tv series, and indeed, the HBO series basically acknowledges that.  Taking off before the legendary Los Angeles trial lawyer's career is supposed to have started, Mason is uniquely suited for this treatment as apparently lawyer, turned author, Earl Stanley Gardner, never bothered to fill in the background details of his character.  In very early novels, apparently, some slight clues to Mason's past were inserted, but that's about it.  In later ones, people just took it for granted that Mason was a solo practitioner super trial lawyer with a strong investigative streak and didn't look for more.

If that seems odd, modern television shows often don't offer more than that either.  Some do, but many do not.

Anyhow, there were a huge number of Perry Mason novels written by Gardner, followed by movies, and then ultimately the television series, all set in the time in which they were written or filmed.

HBO's series takes the opposite approach, putting the character back into the early 1930s in the depth of the Great Depression, just as prohibition is about to end, and introduces us to a disaffected, not yet lawyer, Mason played by Matthew Rhys.  It's done brilliantly.

Rhy's Mason isn't yet the super lawyer.  Rather, he's a Depression era dairy farmer turned private detective.  He's also way down on his luck. An air strip is crowding his farm, which is down to two cows.  His family has left him.  He's a heavy drinker who has a "blue discharge" (a discharge that simply discharged from the service, usually given due to morals charges that weren't developed) from the Army in World War One.  He's suffering from PTSD, as we'd now term it, and early on we learn why.

He's working for an elderly Los Angeles lawyer who has practiced a bit beyond his mental acuity who is assisted by an extremely able Della Street (Juliet Rylance).  The series takes us to a complicated story involving the kidnapping and murder of an infant in which the mother is accused.  I'll not get into the plot beyond that except to note that the plot informs us on how Mason becomes a lawyer.  

The entire season one (there will not be at least a season two) is excellently done. The plot is extraordinarily complicated but not so much that it's impossible to follow.  Fans of Foyle's War will find a similar approach in that regard except that the pacing is blisteringly fast (I actually had to watch a couple of the episodes twice in order to figure out what was going on with all of them).  Like Foyle's War the series has a sense of reality about it which is achieved in part by either making reference to actual events of the time.  The Ludlow Massacre is a frequent and surprising reference. The Sister Alice (Tatiana Maslany) subplot draws loosely on an actual California female evangelist of the period.  A fan of history will catch these references but the non student of history doesn't need to know of them to view the series. Still, such details is unusual and captivating for a history fan.

One thing that I should note is that, like Babylon Berlin, set in a similar time period (1920s Germany) the HBO series isn't shy about nudity at all, and likewise it's really gritty in its portrayal.  Prostitution is a feature of both series but in Perry Mason its given a really dark unattractive edge it deserves.  Indeed, while nudity and sexual portrayals occur throughout the film, much of the nudity in Perry Mason is far from erotic.  Parents, however, should be cautious and likely not let younger people watch the series.

On material details, the show is excellent.  The early 1930s, which is a lot of ways harkened back to the late 1920s, is well depicted and no errors were detected.  The racism of the period is well dealt with.  

An oddity of the show, although not an enormous distraction in it, is the unusual focus on homosexuality.  Della Street, who appeared in the television series as Mason's assistant, shows up in this series as well, in her early days as the assistant of E. B. Jonathan, the older lawyer that Mason is working for.  In the television series viewers were always left wondering if there was a romantic relationship between Street and Mason that was just under the surface, and viewers here might somewhat wonder if that's a possibility in future episodes as well, but here Street's character is really developed and we learn that she's a well educated woman in a homosexual relationship with another woman.  The story line isn't necessary for the plot, but it isn't a huge distraction either.  We also learn, however, that Mason has a "blue discharge" from the Army, in which he was a World War One era captain, and it's hinted at that it was for a homosexual act, although we know that he's been married and has a son.  We also learn in the series that Ivy League educated future District Attorney (he's an Assistant DA here) is also a homosexual.

The list of characters above does indicate, we should note, that fans of the 1950s/60s television who will recognize some characters, but they may not be identically portrayed.  Street, in this HBO series, may be on her way to becoming a lawyer.  Burger is on his way to becoming the DA.  Paul Drake was apparently an investigator for Mason in the series, and we are introduced to him here, but he's an African American in the HBO series, which is critical to the plot.

Probably the only thing that the series could be criticized for is a loose treatment of courtroom procedure from time to time (but not consistently), but all in all, it actually does better with that than most legal dramas.

And yet. . .

 I ran an old editorial cartoon a couple of days ago from an August 23, 1920 newspaper.

August 23, 1920. Portents

From the Sandusky Ohio Star Journal, August 23, 1920.  "The Sky Is Now Her Limit".

I also cross posted that on Reddit's 100 Years Ago subm where somebody made this observation:

Pretty much everything has been ticked off except presidency and it’s looking like that will likely change soon as well!

I hadn't thought of that, but that's correct.

Which makes me wonder why item number one on the rungs is still around.  The slavery one, that is.

Now, this isn't going to be a feminist manifesto proclaiming that something like marriage is slavery, or some other such nonsense.  No, rather, by slavery, we're referring to concubinage.

That may sound odd, and even impossible in the modern context, but it isn't in this one.  

A concubine, as well all know, is a species of prostitute, the prime thing being different from conventional prostitutes is that their services were bound to a single master rather than simply sold to everyone and, therefore, I am perhaps being polite here.  By way of movies, television, magazines and, most importantly now, the internet, thousands upon thousands of women prostitute their images to those unknown and by extension putting their entire gender into a type of ongoing concubinage.

We've dealt with this before.  Starting in 1953, when Playboy magazine brought photographic prostitution into the mainstream, starting first with Marilyn Monroe.  Monroe managed to overcome the scandal, through the intervention of Life magazine which published her naked photographs first, but she was never really able to overcome the image.  She'd always be, in the eyes of thousands of men, about to take off her clothes, no matter how clothes she might really be.

The way we'd probably like to remember Marilyn Monroe, if we could. We really can't, however, as she built her career on her figure in a more revealing way than still rather obvious here (with a nice Yaschaflex camera by the way).  From this earlier thread here.  Playboy's co-opting of her body, sold several years earlier to a calendar photographer when she was unknown and desperate, nearly ruined her career, which was saved only by Life magazine determining to beat Playboy to the punch and publishing it first.  Life's parry saved her from an immediate ruined career, but the overall publicity launched Playboy.  In the end, of course, she'd be only one of the lives effectively ruined by Playboy, although her own selling of her image in less graphic form, combined with an early tragic history, played a larger measure in that.

Anyhow, since that fateful 1953 publication date, the prostitution of the female form has expanded enormously.  And hence the slavery.

Every Kate Upton who appears for the viewing pleasure of thousands of unknown men strikes a blow at women of achievement.  There's no two ways about it.  So that first rung remains one to be overcome.

And, of course, in some direct ways, the portrayal of young women in anonymous pornography is actual slavery, aided along by drugs, desperation, and social decay.

Novella d'Andrea, a professor in law at the University of Bologna and daughter of canon law professor Giovanni d'Andrea, who gave her lectures from behind a screen lest her beauty distract her students.  Both of Giovanni's daughters were professors of law.  What?  You didn't think that possible in the 1330s and 1340s. . . well it was.

No matter how far women come, until their routine selling of their images ceases, and until women themselves stop participating it when they voluntarily do, and until its no longer tolerated by men and women, true equality will never really be achieved.

Vindictiveness

To the vindictive man it is vain to offer reparation, for he does not desire reparation; he desires his wrongs.

Chesterton

August 24, 1920. The first issuances of Palestine postage stamps.

 

The Missile Knows Where It Is...

August 23, 1920. Portents

From the Sandusky Ohio Star Journal, August 23, 1920.  "The Sky Is Now Her Limit".

The achievement of the franchise was being heralded as a major advance for women in society by the press around the country, which of course, it was.

Poland's dramatic reversal of military fortunes, and the Soviet Unions, was also being noted.  The Poles were on the verge of defeat just a few days ago but now were defeating the Soviet Union.  Red Army soldiers were departing Trotsky's forces for captivity with the Poles.

At the same time, German workers in Danzig organized a Communist Soviet which took action to disrupt Allied shipments to embattled Poland.

Danzig's German dockworkers present an interesting item here, in that the Danzig Corridor was one of the contention points between Germany and Poland that the Nazi's would use as a basis for war.  At least in 1920, however, those German workers were Red.  They'd lose their homes in 1945 when the Soviet Union came in and pushed the Germans out and the city has since been known by its Polish name, Gdansk.  It's Polish dockworkers were instrumental in bringing down Poland's Communist government in 1989 which was the first step of the end of Communism as a serious entity anywhere.

Sunday Morning Scene. Churches of the West: St. Peter's Catholic Church, Greeley Colorado.

Churches of the West: St. Peter's Catholic Church, Greeley Colorado.:

St. Peter's Catholic Church, Greeley Colorado.

This is St. Peter's Catholic Church in Greeley, Colorado.  The Gothic style church was built in 1909.  In addition to serving the residents of Greeley, it also serves the students of the University of Northern Colorado.

Primary Notables

A Tribune columnist noted something interesting in an article today that I should have noted in this item below:

The 2020 Election, Part 9

Except. . . .maybe it really isn't noteworthy.

Some other things about the primary were, however.

So what was that noteworthy thing the columnist wrote an article on and I didn't note at all?  Well, the headline for the article probably aptly states it (although it should be noted that headlines are not written by the author's, but by separate writers):

Here's A Shock--Women' Top November's Ballot.

Shocking. . . um. .  . not.

In fairness to the author, she didn't say it was shocking, but rather unprecedented. It probably is, but not in a way that's really newsworthy anymore.  Like so many stories that get reported in the press as really amazing developments, the real story broke eons ago.

Women in politics is now such an accomplished fact that the only people who find a woman running for any office amazing are members of the press.  There have been lots of female members of Congress, legislators and Governors in the United States. Women have been Secretaries of State.  It's just not news.

Indeed, locally, Wyoming has always had female suffrage, so even the recent anniversary noted here of the 19th Amendment didn't do anything in Wyoming. Women could already vote.  Nellie Tayloe Ross became our Governor in 1925 and then went off to be Director of Mints for the Roosevelt administration.  She was the first female Governor in the United States and while she is, so far, the only woman to be elected to that office the well respected Democratic contender in 2018 was a woman.  The state's had two women Secretary of States, the office next to the Governor, and the last one was widely mentioned as a probably unbeatable gubernatorial candidate should she choose to run.  Cynthia Lummis was the state's first female Congressman and the current congressman, Liz Cheney, is obviously also a woman.  We haven't had a female Senator but up until the Tribune mentioned it, it didn't even occur to me that we were about to achieve that first.  That's because that first is, frankly, no longer notable.

If that sounds harsh, pointing this out would be similar to pointing out that, at this point in time, it looks as if Joe Biden is about to become the second Catholic President in the country's history, although observant Catholics would note that he unfortunately seems to fit the "Catholic on Sunday" standard set by John F. Kennedy (without, of course, Kennedy's alley cat morals). This hasn't been noted, however, as it isn't interesting to anyone except observant Catholics.  Nobody believes that being a Catholic bars a person from office in 2020.

Being a woman doesn't even really figure into Presidential weights and measures in 2020 either, except in the eyes of the press.  2016 proved that women don't vote for women because they're women.  If Kamala Harris becomes the first female President of the United States, and she now stands a good chance of achieving that, it won't really be that notable.

When we passed this bar isn't exactly clear, but I'd argue that it was as long ago, if not longer, than when Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister of the UK. That's a different country, of course, but trends of our fellow English speaking transatlantic neighbor aren't irrelevant here, just as ours aren't irrelevant there.  By that point women were clearly advancing in all sorts of politics and law and by the 80s, it really wasn't novel.

Indeed, again locally, we have a female majority Supreme Court, near parity in new law school graduations for women, we have a female Federal District Court judge, and a female state attorney general.  

Indeed, I'd frankly find it to be much bigger surprise if Canada had a female prime minister, as Canada seems a lot more prone to box checking than the United States, and it hasn't achieved thaat.  Here in the US the topic just gets a big yawn from everybody but the press.

This is, I'd note, true of racial categories too, in spite of the times we're in, with some slight exceptions, which is the real story that's being missed here.

First, on race, ethnicity and related topics, we've had a black President, as we all know, and after that, the "first (fill in racial category here)" just doesn't matter.  When we have the first Hispanic President, and we will (and nearly did in 2016), the only ones who will find that noteworthy will be the press.  The first Jewish President, which we haven't had either, won't be noteworthy.  We nearly had a Mormon President, who followed the Kennedy discounting of his religion when he ran plan, and nobody really found that very interesting.  We had a really conservative candidate running in Tusli Gabbard, who is Samoan ethnically and Hindu, and both of those topics hardly came up in the press.  In order to really get people to notice in this area we'd have to have a serious Muslim President, which I think most voters wouldn't support, whether they'd admit it or not.  Muslim legislators at the state or national level. . . well we already know that in a lot of places that's not noteworthy.

Which takes us to some noteworthy items.

The first is that the state Democrats are running Lynette Grey Bull for Congress. She's a Native American and that really is noteworthy here.  American Indians are a massively disadvantaged demographic and have not really had much of a political presence in Wyoming in spite of being a fairly large minority group.  The fact that she's a woman isn't notable.  The fact that she's an Indian woman definitely is.  Indeed, while she will not win, she puts in sharp contrast Cheney's claims last election to be a Wyomingite, which she isn't.  Grey Bull is a native Wyomingite with ancestry so far back in the state it predates any other claimants.

That takes us to the Senatorial race where University of Wyoming professor Marev Ben David is running.  Ben David wasn't born in Wyoming, she was born in Israel and she's a Professor of Zoology and Physiology.  

UW hasn't sent a professor to Washington since Gale McGee, and Ben David won't win this go around. But she is notable as she's a scientist, not a lawyer.  And that brings up this point.

For the first time in a long time the Democrats are really sending candidates into the fall who should be viable in normal times, and they may actually prove to be here.  In picking Ben David, the Democrats picked the most serious candidate in the entire election locally, and rejected Ludwig, a candidate who virtually defines the unelectable, unrealistic, left that the Democrats have been mired in for the past fifteen years.  While the GOP is having squabbles with its extremities, the Democrats this year firmly pushed the eject seat on them and hurled them into the stratosphere, picking instead really solid candidates.

The press isn't, frankly, good at picking up on trends.  And it is too early to tell what's going on here.  But whatever it is, the story isn't "gosh, women are running for office here".  That's old news.  What might be the trend is that the Democrats are actually getting their act together in the State just as the GOP become really mired down in an internecine battle that regular voters don't want a part of.  Wyoming may be solid "Trump Country" in the eyes of the press, and he will do well in the fall, but GOP candidates basking in the warmth of a Trump Sun are going to be disappointed after the general election and feel like they're under siege.  If the current fights keep on keeping on, lots of regular voters are going to be looking elsewhere, and the Democrats are starting to give them a place to look.

Best post of the weeks of August 9 and 16, 2020.

 The best post of the weeks of August 9 and 16, 2020.

An Appeal to the States of the World by the Maronite Patriarch of Antioch and All The Orient

Stupid legal moves. New York Sues The NRA

Mid Week At Work

The death of Robert Trump, . . .

Presidential age

A Checkerboard Blunder?

The 2020 Election, Part 9

This is exactly what trying to get information about gmrs radios is like.

That Smell. The past, present, and odors

Corporate virtue signaling and parliament.

August 22, 1920. The club picnic.