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Weak XLIII

22 October 2020

No. 5,644 (cartoon)

I’m only happy when I’m miserable.

I’m only miserable when I’m happy.

We were destined to be together.

23 October 2020

Aesthetic Values

I propose curating a big money museum show, Aesthetic Values. The premise is so simple and pleasing I’m surprised that it hasn’t been done before.

It’s more of a conceptual presentation than a retinal exhibit; I wouldn’t need more than a single floor. I’d instruct the cafeteria workers to hang the institution’s most valuable two-dimensional works any way they want. I’d then cover each piece with sixteen-ply rag matboard with an opening just large enough to see the artist’s signature. Now here comes the real good part ...

The annotated title is the crux of this aesthetic biscuit. For example:

The Scream
Edvard Munch, 1893
Appraised value: $150,000,000
Cost per square millimeter: $224.27

Most museum visitors are there for the product, the signature. The image is just the buy-product, and therefore of relatively little interest bordering on irrelevant.

Aesthetic Values would pack in the punters and fill the museum’s gift shop, every major exhibition’s raison d’être. The administraitors would love me, but since the feeling’s not mutual I shall add this project to the long list of things I’ll never do.

It’s now time to not do something else.

24 October 2020

My Coronarama Bed

Alonso was interrogating me about my life in the desert, and asked me what time I get up in the morning.

“I wake up whenever I wake up,” I replied.

“No, I mean what time is that?” he continued.

“It’s the same time every morning,” I explained, “I wake up whenever I’m done sleeping. There’s no other possibility, is there?”

He persisted, but I cut him off by telling him that I don’t tell anyone what I do in bed. That worked.

Thus, I didn’t have to admit that the only thing I do in my Coronarama bed is sleep. I know that’s boring, but since there seems to be a binary choice between boredom and terror during the pandemic, I’ll take the former.

25 October 2020

Just Another Day in Texas

I’ve stolen many things from Harry Shearer, but I’m feeling rather munificent today so I’ll credit him with coming up with the word, “ifpology,” a conditional apology that’s not really an apology at all. Example: “If you were offended when I told you that you had more chins than the Hong Kong phone book, I apologize.”

Schearer’s example du jour is Charles Hood, the head of the fire department in San Antonio, Texas.

“This photo was taken at the front entrance to the party,” he ifpologozed. “I certainly didn’t intend to offend anyone, and if I did, I sincerely apologize.”

Translation: “You got a problem with me posing beside an unclothed Asian woman being used as a serving platter for sushi and sashimi?”

He made the classic public relations blunder when he failed to go on the offense. He could have pointed out that he was nude except for some little pieces of cloth stitched together just like she was nude except for being covered is sushi, sashimi, and flowers. Instead, he went on to dig himself into a deeper hole. He claimed it was all about “... trying to honor the Japanese culture.”

That obviously wasn’t deep enough, so he kept digging. “‘It would be like me taking a picture with a flamenco dancer in Vegas or a Spurs dancer ...,” i.e., any other sexually objectified and/or exploited woman.

Erik Walsh, the city manager, responded to the public outcry by saying that he, “will certainly be looking into it.” Translation: “I’ll get her phone number if she’s single.”

In conclusion, there’s no news, and no conclusion either, alas. Just another sexist day, like every single one that preceded it ...

26 October 2020

Das Keyboard

Many years ago Shelly responded to my complaints about my shoddy socks by pointing out the obvious: I was an idiot for not wearing good socks since I spend over half of my life in them. I was reminded of that a few days ago when I was frustrated by the crappy computer keyboard I’ve been using “temporarily” for several months. That’s how long it took me to again realize the obvious: life’s too short to work with mediocre tools.

Das Keyboard arrived this morning, and I’m quite pleased with everything except the silly name. Somewhere in Germany someone’s typing away on Die Tastatur, a precision instrument designed with Teutonic rigor that was lovingly and precisely assembled by Bavarian artisans with white hair and thick glasses.

Conversely, Das Keyboard was designed on the back of napkins in a honky-tonk in Austin, Texas, and produced in a sprawling Chinese factory. But hey, it works!

The keys go clickety-clackety. LOUDLY. I can’t really type, so I appreciate the aural feedback on whether I’ve actually typed a character. I am quite enjoying the tactile sensation of noisy keys. My previous keyboard felt like I was massaging a rotting banana. I think it will be some sort of conceptual convergence when the traitorous hardware is buried beside putrefying garbage in the local landfill.

The manufacturer claims that I’ll be able to type fifty million characters before the switches wear out. I glanced at my server and see that I publish a million characters every four years, so, in theory, this is the keyboard I’ll use to write my obituary. The older I get the easier it is to buy something that will last the rest of my life.

In practice, though, I know I’ll probably inadvertently destroy it in two or three years by spilling a big glob of salsa on it and frying the circuits with tomato acid. My keyboards never die of natural causes.

Now that I’m done with my Nostradamus impression, it’s time to get back to das werk.

27 October 2020

Snow Refuge

It rained a lot today, but, because of the freezing temperatures, it didn’t rain at all. It snowed. A lot. I knew the unusual weather would amuse my friends around the world, so I grabbed my camera and went on a ten-meter hike.

Snow-covered anything is just about the easiest subject matter for a chromophobe like me to photograph, so I was back inside with a visual cliché in less than a minute, or in a few thousandths of a second, depending on your perspective.

Oscar Wilde was just plain wrong when he said, “Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative.” Today, for me, it’s the first.

28 October 2020

A Criminal Lack of Synergy

If you’re looking for Keith Rainere, he’ll be easy to find for the next hundred and twenty years. That’s the length of the prison sentence he just received after prosecutors threw the book—no, make that half the library—at the Nxivm conman for, “racketeering, alien smuggling, sex trafficking, extortion, and obstruction of justice.”

I told Ferdinand that I couldn’t fathom how anyone’s mind could work that way. He agreed, sort of, after rejecting my moral arguments as amusingly quaint and sentimental. He then deigned to talk down to a country pumpkin like me from his lofty perch as a Stanford Business School graduate and explain where Rainere went wrong.

He said that the perp was off to a good start by using proven economic models such as slavery, pyramid scheme scams, and sex cults. And then he made the classic amateur blunder of combining the disparate enterprises in one organization.

“What was the idiot thinking? There’s just no synergy there,” he lectured. “If he’d sensibly put all his wood behind one arrow he’d be enjoying the fruits of a very lucrative enterprise.”

I appreciate getting a terrifying view of the world through Ferdinand’s eyes. As a visual artist, I’m always trying to see things differently than I did yesterday, but I’ll never be able to experience the surreality of seeing everything through the distorted lens of money.

29 October 2020

Halloween Sans Yakuza

I’ve been to New York many times, but I never visited the Mafia’s headquarters. I have no idea whether there is such a place; isn’t that the whole point of running a crime syndicate?

Things are different in Japan; that’s why it’s Japan. The Yamaguchi-gumi—that’s Yakuza to you and me—is a venerable business enterprise that’s been around for over a century. The organization can’t be described as shadowy or underground; any taxi driver in Kobe can drop you off at th criminals’ main office.

In a shocking break from tradition, it won’t be business as usual for the racketeers there on Saturday. Hyogo Prefecture legislators passed a law banning the gangsters dressed up in holiday costumes from passing out Halloween candy to children at their headquarters. In fact, anyone under eighteen is forbidden from entering the building unless they have a good reason, e.g., that’s where their mobster parents work.

I’m incredulous; I can’t recall ever hearing of a Japanese tradition being summarily terminated.

I wonder if the Yamaguchi-gumi arrangement would work in the United States? The criminals could conduct their illicit business with the tacit understanding that the authorities wouldn’t interfere as long as they didn’t do anything too outrageous. Or maybe that already happened when I wasn’t paying attention.

I’m quite out of touch with popular culture, perhaps that’s always been the tacit agreement between law enforcement and organized crime. I wonder if that’s why it’s called organized crime? I wonder what percentage of the prison population is unorganized criminals?

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©2020 David Glenn Rinehart