Christ. This is worse than Charles Whitman.
[UPDATE: ABC is reporting 29 dead.]
Year / 2007
BSS #109: William T. Vollmann II
Condition of Mr. Segundo: Distancing himself from emus.
Author: William T. Vollmann
Subjects Discussed: The relationship between The Atlas and Poor People, the dimensions of poverty vs. the moral compass, I.A. Richards’ poetic experiments, photographs, the problems with objective solutions to poverty, “More aid, better directed,” poverty based on psychological makeup vs. poverty based on environmental circumstances, the exploitation of people as a result of Kazakhstan oil, ethical choices and poverty, Vollmann revealing personal flaws in his text, Kurt Eichenwald, and why Vollmann pays his interview subjects.
EXCERPT FROM SHOW:
Vollmann: I think that one of the mistakes that we have made with so many problems — including drugs, poverty, illegal immigration, sexual conduct that we don’t agree with — is that there is a technocratic solution, or even a one size fits all solution. Alcohol is clearly bad and it’s addictive. It’s dangerous. Fine. Let’s prohibit alcohol. Well, that didn’t work so well. And of course it didn’t stop people from doing the exact same thing with drugs and we’re just beginning to sense that maybe that’s not going to work so well either. It’s not working so well with immigration. And we haven’t made a lot of progress with poverty either. And one of the reasons is that people talk about some kind of objective solution. We throw a certain amount of money at the problem. If people are in bad housing projects, let’s tear them down and put them into new housing projects. Maybe some of those things might have useful effects. Maybe not. But they’ll only go a certain degree in addressing the problem. Because poverty is a state of being. It’s the way somebody feels. And if somebody feels that he doesn’t have enough. Maybe he has enough to eat, enough to sleep on, whatever. But he has so much less than the people around him that he feels humiliation and rage, and yet he’s above the minimal monetary standard for poverty, let’s say, then what solution do we have for him? So it’s a problem like so many of these social problems that involve communication skills and particularly require the ability to listen and individualize on the part of the prospective benefactor. And that’s something that we’re not good at.
Listen: Play in new window | Download
Don’t Say Goodbye Quite Yet
Terrene Rafferty: “But what Altman does in ‘The Long Goodbye’ goes way beyond simply stating the idea that the private eye’s day was over. Instead of trying to correct, or ignore, the creeping vagueness of the landscape in which his lonely hero is a figure, he actually emphasizes those qualities. The images captured by his cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond, are as un-noirish as they can be: sun-bleached, unstable, heat-shimmery as mirages. And the camera moves constantly, always slowly, and just enough to keep every shot from settling into anything fixed or too easily readable.” (via Sarah)
I’ve always thought The Long Goodbye to be the most underrated of Altman’s films. Even more so than 3 Women.
RIP Don Ho
Washington Post: “Legendary crooner Don Ho, who entertained tourists for decades wearing raspberry-tinted sunglasses and singing the catchy signature tune “Tiny Bubbles,” has died. He was 76.”
I never got to see him, but my sister did. She reported to me that Ho had the decency to confess to his audience that he was sick of “Tiny Bubbles,” but he performed it any way. As kitschy professionals go, Don Ho was sui generis.
The Balding Report
There is currently a tiny thatch of hair on the left side of my receding hairline. I thought it would go as swiftly as the others. But it appears to be clinging to the rock, like some leech that the finest blade devised by humankind couldn’t t even remove. It apparently didn’t get the memo that the other follicles got. Perhaps this thatch wishes to distinguish itself, but it seems to think that I’m still 28. It’s an area of hair on my head that wants to attend nightclubs again and maybe MDMA. Of course, I know those days are pretty much over, and my drug habits, for the most part, have been limited to the legal stuff. Drug-wise, I’m that garden-variety taxpayer you want to kick repeatedly in the ass. I’m sorry for being so unhip.
Mind you, I’m happily balding. I intend to be a badass bald motherfucker. I intend to tell people to get off my lawn, even if I don’t have one. There have been plenty of fantastic bald men, and I hope to be one of them. I just wish that the process had some kind of logic or consistency. There is no reason for this stubborn patch of hair to remain. Yet it does, with stunning resilience.
I only write about this because recent emails my way have suggested some confusion on the subject, when my hair should be a dead giveaway. While I am happy to be thought young, the truth is that, depending upon how you view the age spectrum (my own observational window conflates it with a value associated with Andrew Carnegie), I’m in the beginnings of early middle age. So I can’t exactly be called young or precocious. But I assure you that I’m still a silly person.
Now that we’re cleared up on that subject, let the balding commence!