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Weak XLIV

30 October 2022

No. 4,762 (cartoon)

Everything is real.

So nothing is also real?

Is there nothing in everything?

31 October 2022

Mondrian on His Head

A clever curator reported that Piet Mondrian’s New York City I is being exhibited upside down. I’m scratching my noggin pondering whether the investigation is news.

Susanne Meyer-Büser was the first person to notice the mistake, so that’s certainly newsworthy. On the other hand, it’s been exhibited that way in several museums for seventy-five years now, so her finding isn’t exactly a timely exposé.

There’s no debate over what to do next; curators agree that the best thing to do is nothing since the work is so fragile that gravity might destroy it if it was rotated. That makes sense to me since curators are good for nothing, praised for nothing, and at least a dozen other ways of milking a weak joke for nothing.

I think the incident is a cautionary tale for arrogant young artists who think that they are going to turn the art establishment on its collective head: it works the other way around.

1 November 2022

A Pox on Zombie Lingua

There’s a new paper out that says swearing makes you “seem more persuasive,” “can also make you happier, fitter and more impervious to pain,” and may produce, “a range of distinctive psychological, physiological and emotional effects [by activating] the amygdala and basal ganglia, rather than higher order processing structures.”

Why did anyone bother to publish a study on something we all learned in eighth grade? One look at the source told me all I needed to know; the worthless report appeared in Zombie Lingua.

Lingua is owned by Elsevier, a Dutch company run by shit-for-brains necrophiliacs who are clinically insane from licking the putrid gonorrhea discharge from the corpses they bugger in the boardroom. After the rapacious assholes decided to turn Lingua into a de facto extortion racket with an exorbitantly high subscription rate in 2015, the editors and editorial board decided the fucking fuckers were fucked, and formed the new journal of linguistic record, Glossa.

All the cunning linguist action is now at Glossa, and Lingua is now generally known as Zombie Lingua. The name has nothing to do with the Dutch corpse-fuckers publishing it; it’s a reference to a lifeless, contemptible journal of no critical relevance as is apparent by the goddamned study on swearing I cited.

English is my favorite—albeit only—language, but it’s embarrassingly piss-poor when it comes to profanities. I used most of the common ones here, but it certainly didn’t make me more persuasive let alone happier, fitter, and more impervious to pain.

A pox on Zombie Lingua.

2 November 2022

Better Live

I grew up with Bob Seger in Michigan; his music was part of the warp, weft, and woof of my childhood. That’s not very truthy. I never went to the Mikatam Lounge near my boyhood home where he occasionally performed; I only photographed him once. Nice guy.

Now that I’m done with the setup, it’s onto The Thing I was going to say ...

I can see why a musician might issue an album (remember those?) of a concert recording; it’s a great way to sell more music without the bother of having to come up with new material. That makes financial sense, but seems silly aesthetically. What could possibly come out of a live recording that couldn’t be done better after spending days or weeks in a recording studio with all of the human and technical resources there?

I found the answer when I listened to some of Bob Seger’s early recordings. I recognized several of the songs from his live album recorded later (when I was still a teenager!) but, well, they didn’t sound nearly as good as they did on the live album.

That’s when I realized that a live album can provide musicians with an opportunity to rerecord their earlier work when they’re older, wiser, and better. On occasion, perhaps. Mostly though, I agree with the cynic in me that sees selling live albums as a simple way to get the rubes to buy the same thing twice.

3 November 2022

Nietzsche’s Coronarama Update

Clarissa looked like she was rode hard and put away wet; a Coronarama attack will do that to a gal. She was in surprisingly good spirits when I visited her in the hospital after she got off a respirator.

“You don’t look too bad after a brush with the grim reaper,” I said.

“What doesn't kill me makes me stronger,” she replied with a weak smile.

Normally I’d tease anyone who trotted out that hackneyed Nietzsche quote, but I couldn’t do that to someone who was weak and convalescing.

“Time to update your maxims for the twenty-twenties,” I suggested. “What doesn’t kill you mutates and tries again.”

People don’t call me the good humour man for nothing!

4 November 2022

The Icicles That Got Away

I saw some unusually beautiful icicles this morning. Dang; they sure was real purdy! Instead of the usual stalactite configuration, the wind had blown the melting snow into delicate lattices. If the glistening icicles descending from the sparkling snow against a deep blue sky could talk, they’d say something like, “This is a postcard waiting to happen; where’s your camera?”

I left my serious camera snugly packed away in my backpack where it belonged. My artistic achievement for the day was not to make a pretty picture; pretty is pretty boring.

Coming next weak: more of the same.

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©2022 David Glenn Rinehart