(The above looks like some kind of art installation in a gallery, doesn’t it? Well, shudder, it ain’t. It’s the Unabomber’s actual cabin in an FBI warehouse. That door is one few would want to open. More here) Photo, Richard Barnes
The Ides of June.
The morning of my tooth extraction, my computer crashed. I wasn’t in a great mood as I was going to lose a part of me that I’d had for 84 years, albeit a small part. I rebooted and did all the things one does when tech fails. Nothing worked.
Finally I noticed it had gone to an alternate source in the night (or tried to, then it just went blooey) and quit cursing Elon—not Starlink’s fault. This time. Once the Musk henchpeople updated software with no warning; blood pressure shot up all around offline rural Kansas and words dropped and bounced and shattered the morning calm.
Some households are still affected because those words were picked up by small children. Ever notice how they rarely remember to say “thank you” or “excuse me” but delight in repeating “What the effety eff effing %$##&*?”
Anyway June. An unstable month hereabouts. Pop-up rains and hailstorms.
Photo source: Lord Jim
Speaking of instability, the unabomber died. Suicide. Another monstrous experiment of that set of initials that dreamed up MK-Ultra. I didn’t know that until I read this Counterpunch article; Unabomber, Troubled Life of a CIA Mind Control Victim. Scary stuff, if true, and Counterpunch, a left-leaning publication of few minced words generally vets its stuff well enough.
The article says, at one point,“It is an extraordinary occurrence for someone to enter Harvard at the age of 16, [as did Kaczynski] pursue a career as a mathematics professor, and then abruptly abandon everything to become a terrorist.” Then it makes its claim. Uncontested, so far. It also mentions “the deep state” which I had thought was pretty much a province of the right.
On to lighter stuff. Koons Balloons in June and the wobbly Dymaxion car of Bucky Fuller. I pair them because they seem a bit alike to me, bulbous and smooth. Though Koons’s sculpture never harmed anyone other than a stray driver crashing into one of them. Which reminds me of a Henny Youngman joke; he was in Las Vegas, driving under the influence, careened into the fountain at Caesar’s. He sat there for a moment, then shouted “No wax!”
Here's a link to how Koons makes these 3-ton balloon things. And here’s one to an amusing article that takes the instability theme one notch further: We drive Buckminster Fuller's terrifying Dymaxion car (so you don't have to)
Books! Just finished these two and found them quite interesting. Kubrick by Michael Herr; I dug it up by looking for anything by Herr (his Dispatches war correspondence was the very best of that genre and I’ve missed his genius over the years) and was happy to find this compelling account of a 20-year friendship with the complicated filmmaker, Stanley Kubrick, in which he sets some misconceptions straight. It’s not Dispatches but it’s pretty good.
Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist And The Murderer begins this way: ‘Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.” And she never lets off the gas pedal from there, in this riveting book about a convicted murderer’s (Jeffrey MacDonald’s) lawsuit against a journalist (Joe McGinnis) he felt scammed and misrepresented him.
This book caused me to buy yet another Malcolm book that I’m reading now: Forty-One False Starts, Essays on Artists and Writers; I’ll probably read a lot of her books in the future.
I tune into Public TV’s Woodsongs whenever I can—always a pleasure, always—though their roots are bluegrass, they feature everything and anything they deem good music; it’s where I discovered Victor Wooten who jazz fans know as a virtuoso, and now, Phoebe The Yodelin’ Cowgirl. Prepare to be enchanted; the smile, the attitude, the easygoing sense of self and acceptance of her wide-ranging musical talent at such a young age. Here’s another link that explains some of her feelings on the matter.
Photo by Andrea DeLong