The Greatest Artist of the 20th Century

In one of Rolling Stone's year-end double issues was an essay by James Toback about Hitchcock and the great filmmakers -- two separate categories, according to Toback -- a judgment which surely ruffled the feathers of some those Hitchcock fans who noticed it. As far as Hitchcock himself, he's supposed to have said that he wanted to give his viewers, not a slice of life, but a slice of cake. If Hitchcock was so silly as to give a feather for his place on lists of greatests, he kept it soundly to himself.

I was going to say a bit about some of the other things in that year-end double issue which had left an impression on me -- the first time I'd ever learned anything about the Shroud of Turin, or about the city of Turin at all, and the section on jazz, in which I learned that Joni Mitchell had switched from pop to jazz and was working with Charles Mingus, first I'd heard his name, and some stuff about jazz/rock fusion, but the thing which most impressed me about the entire jazz section was this headline in an ad : "You've been  rocked. You've been rolled. Now get jazzed." And the cover story, an interview with Richard Dreyfuss in which Dreyfuss expressed some very strongly-held opinions, such as how "they" (They who? I dunno) had denigrated Brando for his portrayal of Marc Antony, when Brando was the only one in the movie who knew how to wear the blankety-blankin toga. Okay, Richard, good stuff, I say, slowly and carefully backing away.

But my memory, was again, was unreliable: all of that other stuff was in the Rolling Stone 1978 year-end issue, while Toback's essay was in the 1980 year-end issue. and it's the only thing in that issue I found memorable. Toback insisted that the great filmmakers were obsessed with death and that this elevated their work above Hitchcock's cake, as finely made as Toback admitted the cake was.

The greats, according my best recollection of what Toback said back in 1980, were Eisenstein, Ford, Welles, Truffaut, Herzog, Godard, Bunuel, Kurosawa and Peckinpah, and I feel I must be forgetting someone, and he said that Scorsese, Coppola and Spielberg had a chance of joining them. And he said that Orson Welles was not only the greatest of them all, but that he was the greatest artist of the 20th century, even though Welles had done his best to rid himself of this "burdensome title."

I find such titles and lists both ridiculous and irresistible. Welles, the greatest of the century in any genre, you say?! I say. Yeah, Welles was awesome, I agree. But what about Picasso, or Brancusi, or Miles Davis or John Lennon or His Bobness, or James Joyce, or James Baldwin, or Pynchon, or Mann or Doeblin or Musil or Ingeborg Bachmann?

How about the fact that I know so little about 20th century literature in ant language other than English or German that no writers of any other languages occur to me, making this entire exercise even more absurd? Or that there is only one woman on my list and none on Toback's?

So why do I find Toback's little essay -- this essay which I really do find quite silly -- so much more interesting than all of his movies combined? Has his filmmaking career robbed of us a writer who would've been so much better?

"I believe that artists often don't know they do best, because they're too vain." -- Nietzsche, from Nietzsche contra Wagner, in MY translation, and certainly true of Nietzsche. 

 Rolling Stone's 1980 year-end double issue at Amazon: https://link.amazon/B04JBHHno

A Lot of Women Have Been Written out of the History of Chess

No, this is not a blog post about "Queen's Gambit," the recent Netflix series about a fictional female Grandmaster in the mid 20th century. I haven't seen "Queen's Gambit" yet, but I'm going to have to. I've heard very, very good things about it. I've heard that it's given a very large boost boost to the popularity of chess. And I gather that Garry Kasparov and Bruce Pandolfini were technical advisors. Pandolfini is the guy who was played by Ben Kingsley in Searching for Bobby Fischer. I've heard that the chess in "Queen's Gambit" is legit, which would make it unique among fictional representations, as far as I know. 

No, what I'm talking about is the aristocratic women who played chess in Medieval Europe. I've read in enough sources that chess was extremely popular among women of the upper classes, sources serious enough, that I believe it.

But the only names of those women I know are those I know for many other reasons. Names like Eleanor of Aquitaine and Elizabeth I of England. I could not name a single Medieval woman known primarily for her prowess in chess. I cannot refer you, gentle reader, to the moves of a single game of chess won by a Medieval woman, which have been recorded and preserved for their brilliancy.

I simply do not believe that, of all the games of chess played by Medieval women, none was brilliant enough that its moved were written down. I simply do not believe that, in an era of several hundred years when chess was played mostly by women, none of those women played the game well enough to become famous for that reason alone. That dog won't hunt.

When the best chess players' names do begin to be known, in the 16th century, the names are male, and competitive chess remained very strictly a He-Man Women Hater's Club until the 20th century, and it remains sexist, with several male players in chess tournaments for every female player taking part, even several years after the first showing of "Queen Gambit."

Nothing disappears without a trace. Perhaps some day traces of that Medieval, predominantly female game will begin to be recovered. And maybe we will begin, someday, to learn of other things those clever ladies were doing, perhaps things they weren't supposed to to be doing, like reading and writing in Latin, and philosophizing.

Grob's Attack, Carlsen Variation

PLEASE DO NOT BE ALARMED I AM WELL, WELL, WELL! THIS IS JUST ANOTHER CLUMSY ATTEMPT AT CONCRETE POETRY 

Grob's Attack, Carlsen Variation. AI, open-source, Stockfish, popular in Nigeria as well as Norway. How expensive will oil have to get before Republicans, even the formerly-Republican Never-Trumpers, can mention EV's, solar or wind as something other than a joke in passing? "Yeah wind power haha" and it's back to what oh what will we do about this energy crisis. Is it hot in here or is it just the end of the world? California buys more than 40% of the EV's in the US, Caitlyn Jenner said she wanted to leave California because homeless people made her sad because they blocked her view of her private jet, but sadly, she stayed in Malibu.

Grob's Attack. 1. g4. Ask a chess nerd. Or just google it. Bobby Fischer said the object of chess was to crush the opponent's mind. I suppose there's less literal brain crushing than in boxing. Yes, I know that some people combine chess and boxing, box a round, sit down and play some chess, repeat and repeat and repeat. This, too, makes me sad, and saddens others who'd heard that the whole point of chess was to avoid violence. Channels warlike urges into less harmful directions, you see.

PS: YES, YOU'RE RIGHT, I SHOULD'VE LOOKED UP "CONCRETE POETRY" BEFORE POSTING THIS, WHICH IS MERELY PROSE POETRY 

Concrete poetry at Amazon: https://amzn.to/3NWqgxg

The Division Between Art and Science, And the Decline of the Study of Greek and Latin

This is one of those posts where I offer no answers, but simply pose a question which has struck me recently. In this case the question is: can the division between the arts and the sciences in Western society seem natural only to those who have not studied ancient Greek and Latin?

In case there are readers to whom it is not already obvious: I have no idea whether the art-science split has occurred in other societies, nor how it might seem to observers from other parts of the world.

Back within the western world, I have greatly admired admired contemporary and recent authors, such as Bronowski and Pynchon, who clearly reject the notion that art and science are incompatible. I don't know how conversant those two are in the Classical languages, but when we go further into the past, there's often no longer any doubt: Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche were all very familiar with ancient Greek, and all three published in Latin. And none seemed to have the slightest inclination to separate the arts from the sciences. 

Travel back a bit further in time, to the 17th century, and Galileo wrote sonnets, and Milton wrote treatises in logic. These efforts have not become famous, non-one seems to consider them particularly brilliant, but no one of their contemporaries found it strange that they crossed the art/science divide. It takes a more recent perspective to find it strange. It requires a more recent perspective to see any divide between art and science. 

Back farther in time, to the 16th century, and we have the archetypal "Renaissance Man" -- archetypal from the point of view of some more modern commentators, that is: Leonardo da Vinci. And we are told -- by some recent and contemporary pundits -- that it is no longer possible to be such a brilliant artist, and at the the same time such a brilliant scientist. 

But who exactly is telling us this? And who goes a bit further still, in some cases, and tells us that the decline in the study of Greek and Latin was a necessary outcome of the rise of science brought about by people such as Leonardo?

Was the decline in competence in Greek and Latin necessary? Is it a good thing? 

I'm not saying that no people who are fluent in Greek and Latin have accepted such assertions. Obviously, many have. But I'm asking whether these ideas could have spread and taken hold to begin without mistaken ideas being aggressively spread by people with no knowledge of Latin or Greek, and, therefore, no idea what they were talking about, no idea of where art or science had come from.  

 Books by J Bronowski on Amazon: https://amzn.to/424W3Qu

Another Example of Being Autisitc

I looked at the clock just now; it was 3:43 PM. 343, I said to myself. 7 x 7 x 7 is 343. But, I continued, the time 3:43 does not refer to the number three hundred and forty-three, because the first 3 means 3 x 60, not 3 x100. 3 x 60 minutes past noon or midnight, plus 43 more minutes. 3:43 on the clock  means 223 minutes past noon or midnight, past noon in this case.

Then I said to myself, wait -- is 223 a prime number? And I soon discovered that it was, because it not evenly divisible by any of the primes 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, or 13, and the square of the next-highest prime, 17, is higher than 223. It is 289. 

It took me about 10 seconds to do that math in my head, and to double- and triple-check my math, and to be certain that 223 is a prime number. Without a calculator, without pencil and paper. Not Rain Man. But above average. 

This is an example of why I got frustrated with people who couldn't do the math back in March 2016, when Obama, Rachael Maddow and I told them that Hillary had clinched the nomination. 

Also, I am autistic, and for 9 1/2 years I haven't been able to explain to a single person how it was that Barack, Rachel and I knew. I assume Barack and Rachel have both been able to explain it to at least a few people, because they both have far more people paying attention to them, and also because neither one of them is autistic: they're both much better at talking to people, at persuading people. 

Dover Books on Mathematics, at Amazon: https://amzn.to/40CvBwT 

Randon Thoughts About Some Golf Stats

According to the website golfplayed dot com, there are 38,864 golf courses in the world, and of those, 16,752 are located in the US. Japan is in 2nd place with 3,169 courses. Scotland, widely agreed to be the birthplace of golf, is in 10th place with 614 courses. That's about 1 golf courses for every 200 square miles in the US, every 500 square miles in Scotland, and every 35 square miles in Japan.

An estimated 1 to 2 billion golf balls are made annually. That's roughly 25,000 to 50,000 balls per course, per year. Where do they all go? The folks in the golf subreddit, the best experts I know, say: driving ranges, water hazards, golf bags, garages, Bigfoot. Perhaps the #1 answer is; Yeah, I don't know either, that's a whole bunch of golf balls.

How many golf carts are there in the world? Or perhaps I should ask, after searching and searching for even one estimate: why is no one willing to answer this question?  But I see that the golf cart industry is about $2.5 billion a year and growing. At $5,000 to $15,000 a cart, that's hundreds of thousands of new carts a year. 

Hundreds of thousands a year. That's a lot.

Golf carts have been selling well since the 1950's. I'd say there have to be millions of golf carts out there. Not necessarily mostly on golf courses full-time either, because is there room for all of them on golf courses? Not all at once. I've seen a lot of golf carts on movie lots, in movies about movies.

And here's where I start to get paranoid: I've been paying rather close attention to electric vehicles for about a decade now. I had never been one of those Who-holds-back-the-electric-car guys until now, when I think about all those big shots playing golf, the guys who call the shots, riding around in millions of electric golf carts for the past half century or so. Electric, because almost all golf carts are electric, because golfers, just like the rest of, would rather not be bothered by the noise and stink of internal combustion.

All those big shots playing all that golf, riding around in those constant reminders that electricity provides perfectly good, reliable transportation, all the way back to the Eisenhower administration...

 

New and used golf balls for sale at Amazon: https://amzn.to/4jXU0EF

Rainbow-Translucent Graphite-Fiber K-Pop Hyper-Efficient Micro-Mini EV's --

 -- would sell well here in the US. To those who say that they wouldn't sell, I ask: who's trying?

The post title refers to EV's which currently exist only in my head, unless they're on sale somewhere else in the world, and if I saw them I'd say, Yes, that's it, exactly. There are many, many tiny inexpensive EV's which have been sold in other countries. Every report of a new one ends: "-- and they will not be available in the US." The smallest US-made EV was the Chevy Bolt, manufactured until the end of 2023. We're waiting for the next-generation Bolt, and while we wait, the next-smallest EV from GM is -- the Equinox? Ain't exactly small. 

I literally dreamed about those tiny EV's with K-Pop vibes and colorful, translucent exterior panels. In the dream, magically, I was able to make drawings of cars in my head. In real life, I must rely on the magic of words. In my head, these tiny, sleek, fun 2-passangers cars have a K-pop youthful vibe. In my dream I was pitching the design to Hyundai/Kia, and they were talking about building and selling them here in Murrka.

In the dream, some friends of mine disapproved, saying that public transportation and walking and bicycling should be promoted instead. I replied that all of those things should be promoted, and EV's too. It's a debate I've had many times in waking life. 

The dream design I was pitching to Hyundai/Kia was fun. These are tiny little hot hatches, and the see-through exterior panels, as far I know, would be a new thing. Maybe we could save the world without having any fun, but would there be a point to that?

 Shop for K-Pop videos on Amazon (caution: you may have fun!) : https://amzn.to/4isHmMC