The Long Road Out

All in all, it's been a decent year for films, commercial or otherwise, though we suffered through unusually thin gruel for the first six months of 2015.   My favorite films of the year, in descending order... 1001 Grams --Bent Hamer, of Kitchen Stories  fame, does it again--a loving look at characters literally trying to find the weight and balance of life as they lose parents and partners.  Hamer should really be on the list of smartest directors--with Mark Duplass, Lars van Trier, and a handful of others who actually care about their stories and characters.   Your soul does, in fact, weigh 21 grams--and you'll value every dust particle after watching this one. Embrace of the Serpent-- this is actually a 2015 release but no one saw it in the US until 2016--when it lost the Best Foreign Film award.  It shouldn't have (no comments about the surprise that a  holocaust film won out over a true original gem with radical environmental and racial politics). ...

Bright-shiny-object of the second: Guiliani says truth is not truth.   Every since Rudy reemerged from the dustbins of celebrity, he's been short a few brain cells.  But, since he's a celebrity, he can't stop sharing his impairment. Recall that his first effort to ride on Trump's celebrity machine was his insipid and manic assertion that he represented Don in the Stormy Daniels' non-disclosure fee.  It's hard to know.   Trump had corrected Guiliani three times by tweet in the first 24 hours of Rudy's cool new client engagement (has the White House actually written any checks to Rudy?   Wow, that's pretty low value for taxpayer dollars.   He's senile!).  I've never loved the Guiliani brand.   Most people forget about his admirable U.S. Attorney career where he really did get some bad guys (remember the Pizza Connection RICO trial?   No one outside Guiliani's office ever used RICO as effectively since, as the Galahad's sword it was i...

Apparently, there are now millions of extortion emails circulating.   These are called crypto blackmail, and like other scams, they're bothersome but meaningless.  If you're receiving them (I started getting them every day on July 17)  Chris Hoffman at How-to Geek wrote a great article that should give you comfort.   What is CryptoBlackmail? As Hoffman says, "CryptoBlackmail is any sort of threat accompanied by a demand you pay money to a cryptocurrency address. Like traditional blackmail, it’s just a 'pay up or we’ll do something bad to you' threat." He offers these examples of CryptoBlackmail: Physical mail saying “ I know you cheated on your wife ,” and demanding the equivalent of $2000 in Bitcoin sent to an included Bitcoin address. Emails saying “ I’ve got an order to kill you ,” followed by a demand to pay $2800 in Bitcoin to call off the assassination. Emails claiming an attacker has placed malware on your computer and  recorded you watching ...

Colin Kaepernik's career was ruined because he sat down twice for the National Anthem two years ago. Trump joined in on the debate back then--if the mob has an idea, Trump will repeat it on Twitter. So, the NFL owners had a problem:  highly paid players they needed to get rid of.   Two years later, they decide on a policy to stop this.   As of today, every one must stand if they're on the field when the music starts. Kind of like a junior high school dance!  In a gracious bow to free speech, the NFL decided dissenters can avoid the embarrassment of participating in a silly ceremony they don't support by staying in the locker room. I love the thought of an empty playing field once the recorded bugles start to pound.  Build some bigger locker rooms, guys--it's gonna be CROWDED in there! Here's Roger Goodell, summing up the wisdom of two years of what must have been painfully stupid discussions among a whole lot of rich-ish white men: "We want people to ...

I want to celebrate this cultural essay by Zach Webb , writing for thebaffler.com.   Webb is incensed that a bunch of entrepreneurs are charging more than the Louvre so that millennials and others can photograph themselves with ice cream, or in one of eight pre-editted dreamscapes. To make matters more commercial, most of these "look at my picture now" rooms are sponsored by web brands.   The noose of selfie celebrity tightens beneath our chins. The good news is Webb sees what's happening clearly, and he can write.   Starting with the quote in the headline above.   Yes, we are, in fact living in "populated meme-crap."  Over 150,000 repostings from The Museum of Ice Cream, late of Miami and elsewhere, sponsored by Dove, Tinder, and American Express (swipe right on that shit!).   What does Webb have to say about this?  He quotes Jonathan Crary, author of 24/7, to build up steam: “[W]hatever remaining pockets of everyday life are not directed towar...

I own two gorgeous but more-than-15-year-old Yamaha Clavinovas.   One's a CVP 209.   It's old enough that it has a floppy drive.   The over is a CLP--slightly newer with an original generation USB port.   Both have MIDI, fortunately. My partner asked me to record a few pieces of original music to be used as intro and outro on her webcasts.   I tried saving to the USB but the firmware is so old the move and copy functions don't work. So...how to use Garageband with these two digital/acoustic pianos. The first suggestion are headphone out to headphone/MIC jack on my MacAir.   To date, I've not been able to get Garageband to see the Yamaha this way. The second suggestion is to download the Yamaha drivers to the Mac.   This suggestion has failed me in two ways---first, all of the current drivers are USB-MIDI, and of course my old keyboards only have regular old historical MIDI.   Second, every one seems to agree that Garageband has entered the...

Gary Cohn is some Goldman Sachs guy.   He took the Economics job in the Trump administration and lasted 14 months before he resigned yesterday.   That's a long time--he must be pretty determined. Many journalists have commented that he was supposed to get the job of Fed chief, but it wasn't offered to him--many think it was because he appeared to not support Trump's support of the white supremacist movement last summer.   Here's Slate's great epitaph for this indistinguishable banker : Gary Cohn: The man who swallowed the president’s racism and personal humiliation in order to guide tax cuts for his old employer at Goldman Sachs, and then quit over some steel tariffs. Wall Street is sure to welcome him back as a hero.