KOTM

Frankly, it's wonderful (RealPlayer link probably good for a few days), and it only gets more so the more I listen to it. It's been running through my head constantly for the past two days. She's done something here that feels very new: typically it's been her vocal which pushes the song along, but here it just floats on top of hypnotically layered rhythms. Not going to get all wankily precious about it, but go listen. Volume up, lights out. And listen a few times; this one's a virus that'll kick in by then.

On the consequences of naming hurricanes

You had a big hit some time ago. It's twenty years now, but it doesn't seem like quite so long. There were some smaller hits, but there's really only the one that people remember well. Then, twelve years later, when it looks like success is all in the past, there's a chance of a revival, and it goes better than you could possibly have expected, but it's just another flash, followed by nothing much. Still, even after all this time, you've still got that first big hit, and the name. Whatever happens now, nothing can take away your name.

Except, maybe - oh fuck - except this.

A Civic Fuck-You

As you drive north on the 110 through downtown LA, a spectacular photo-realistic mural of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra (by Kent Twitchell) looks benignly down from the multi-storey side of a very-LA concrete parking structure. It's every bit as striking and fresh as it was the first time I came to LA. The incongruence between the image and its brutal canvas has always struck me as slightly disturbing, yet at the same time a vision of hope - art dominating the artless.

Twitchell is an artist, so his work gets noticed - rather than just seen - but there are others who plough a furrow that's not so very different whose work is so transparent as to be practically invisible. Coming eastward through Westwood on Wilshire, a hand-painted hundred-foot Jodie Foster is currently cross-eyed in panic at the prospect of Flightplan not doing very well (seriously, humungous film company, was that really the best image you could have chosen?). It might as well be a poster, but it isn't. The verisimilitude was painstakingly painted directly onto the wall by a process that I'm very happy to be baffled by. Huge film ads dominate this city, of course, but there are also plenty of car ads, shampoo ads, and so on and so forth, all with the love of Twitchell's murals, but with obsolescence built in. The layering pleases me: these are works of terrific skill, but no art, directly copying an artfully constructed promotional representation of yet another work, whose aim is occasionally artful, but more often the purest commerce.

Just as typical of LA are the bold but faded murals on the sides of freeway walls (an alien observer would find little difference between LA's 'river' and its freeways). They're more easily accessible to the defacement of graffiti and carbon monoxide and time than Jodie's grimace, but they still shine here and there: children bounding playfully around the edge of the 101; marathon runners pounding purposefully along the 10. These have a civic weight to them.

So. Sitting on the Santa Monica bus this morning as it wound its beetle-ish way through the downtown grid, I had a vision of a collision between the proud civic murals of LA and the vast ephemera of the advertising murals, which would play out against the sides of the skyscrapers of financial dullness. The result might be a profound fuck-you civic statement, as drawing of the eye as the Eiffel Tower in Paris, but still pure Los Angeles. Think of that magic half-toning material that's plastered across the sides of buses more these days, which presents the entire space for advertising imagery, yet doesn't restrict the view from within. Now imagine it covering each side of a hundred-storey building. Now imagine it covering each building in a vast cityscape. And then let artists of Twitchell's skill with the grand gesture free to paint. Like those radio-telescopes which are combined by software into a single hyper-telescope, imagery could move patchworkwise from building to building. It'd be unifying, and - that word which a SoCal twang renders somewhat comical - genuinely awesome.

No chance though, obviously. The biggest change to the downtown skyline during the past few years has been the addition of company logos to the glass totems, which draws them even further away from a civic unity.

The Zeitgeist Joke

It's the zeitgeist joke, but damn if it isn't a doozy:

Q: What's George Bush's position on Roe v. Wade?
A: He really doesn't care how people get out of New Orleans.

From BoingBoing.

Protecting 'LEGO'

Cory Doctorow whines a bit over at BoingBoing about the Lego company's redirect from legos.com, and the accompanying bit of trademark defence. Might be just me here, but I don't see a whole lot on the redirect page there which 'scolds you viciously', and the BoingBoing whine seems a lot more whiny. I don't know what legal backup might exist, but the Lego text reads to me like a gentle request, and Wikipedia's entry for Lego claims that essentially the same text was printed on Lego catalogues as far back as the 1970s.

Personally, as I've burbled about before, I'm far more interested in how the usage of 'Legos' as a count noun came about, because I have no memory of hearing it used that way until I began coming to the US. I wonder if the fact that Lego is considered to be something for kids is a factor. There's a Parent Gene somewhere which I reckon prefers count nouns to mass nouns when engaged, even unconsciously, in child language development. Parents don't talk to young children using the mass (and abstract) noun 'money'. They use the count noun 'pennies': 'How many pennies do you have?'; 'Do you have enough pennies?' Maybe that's one reason 'Legos' hits me at an odd angle: not because of the Lego people's dislike for it, but because it sounds a bit juvenile, like it's baby-talk for those who haven't quite mastered abstract concepts yet.

As far as 'as far as'

Reminded driving back from USC this morning as I listened to NPR of how dissonant it feels to me when the construction 'As far as X is concerned' (or 'As far as X goes', or somesuch) is lazily collapsed to 'As far as X'. It's a lingustic meme that I'm guessing gets passed on verbally in a single chunk, with no consideration for what might have been left dangling - language that's lost morphology and is only phonology. Is it a particularly American drift? I can't remember hearing it in Britain - not that we're any more precise when it comes to language, but I don't think that particular laziness is one of ours.

But I don't have to guess, because someone's done the work, amazingly enough: Syntactic variation and change in progress: Loss of the verbal coda in topic-restricting AS FAR AS constructions. Also, some brief discussion here.

Needless to say, when searching for this one of the first links I found was to a scholarly piece entitled Survey Results Show the Necessity for Good Grammar Instruction in which the mistake is made not once, but twice:

As far as implications for teaching, these results stress the importance of teaching the standard writing dialect.

As far as being bothered or not, the numbers were very close.

Aerial

Twelve years. My god. How to make me feel old, Kate. That's before the web. I taped the first single from the last album from the radio, complete with overlapping outtro from Bruno bloody Brookes. Didn't even have a CD player then. I miss the sheer physical presence of vinyl, when buying an album was an investment in far more than money: house-space, also credibility. To carry home a double album in a big fucking gatefold sleeve was a matter of nailing one's colours to the mast.

Tragedy by Slow Motion

Why didn't I know more about Frank Rich until recently? I'd had this distant image of him as a gleeful, maybe slightly out-of-touch with anything other than Broadway, poison-penner of acidic theatre reviews. Not sure I could have been more ignorant. Turns out he's a frankly brilliant Op-Ed, to the NYT as James Wolcott is to Vanity Fair. I've been reading him a lot recently, and this week he hit something that I've been thinking for days and have been surprised no-one else has used. I read someone use the John Carpenter film Escape from New York as a metaphor for the neglectful collapse of urban space in New Orleans and the sense of the whole place being ring-fenced by authority, but a more apt metaphor is the casual hubris that preceded the sinking of the Titanic, and the terrible stratification by class of the deaths which followed. SUVs for lifeboats, and the slow creep of tragedy by slow motion. It's not merely a neat parallel that both involved the dispassionate threat of water en masse; it's precisely because water sweeps away the lowest-lying, both houses and liner-cabins, the cheaply bought, both houses and liner-cabins, that it hits the poorest hardest, who haven't the means to acquire height, distance, safety. Rich:

In that sense, the inequality of the suffering has not only exposed the sham of the relentless photo-ops with black schoolchildren whom the president trots out at campaign time to sell his "compassionate conservatism"; it has also positioned Katrina before a rapt late-summer audience as a replay of the sinking of the Titanic. New Orleans's first-class passengers made it safely into lifeboats; for those in steerage, it was a horrifying spectacle of every man, woman and child for himself.

It feels as if the wave of shock has been slow to spread across the US, too. It took a long time for anyone to suggest that the death toll might be in the thousands, and I reckon it'll end up an order of magnitude higher than that. I have a feeling that there's a calculus we can't help wheeling out at times like this. We imagine ourselves in the path of such disaster, and game ourselves to safety. It's one of the reasons why 9/11 was so shocking: there was really no such game to play. If you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, you simply died, and that was that: a plane crash scenario that happened also to involve planes. The Titanic unfolding of tragedy by a sequence of ratcheting discrete steps over a period of hours or days, however, allows the gaming, and it would be nightmarish not to allow ourselves a path to safety. We'd have driven out of New Orleans, or hitched a ride, or caught one of the last planes. Or just walked. Anything to get away. That's not just the game-piece labelled 'hindsight', though. It's also a complete failure to empathise with the paucity of realistic choice available to the poor. If they hunkered down and hoped for the best, it might well have been the only, and therefore the best, choice available to them. Juxtaposed with the lack of preparedness of the local and national response, it might seem like sensible pragmatism.

In that classroom geography exercise that I'm sure is a perennial across the globe, we're asked to decide in a conveniently diverse environment - river here, hill there, perhaps some woodland elsewhere, as if designed by Potentiality Brown - where to build a town. No kid would get many marks for placing New Orleans where it grew, but that's not entirely relevant. If we value urban centres insofar as they're safe from natural disaster, LA ought to be emptied tomorrow, Naples the day after. We're used to living on the edge of oblivion, but we build buttresses as high as we can to give our odds a boost. That the literal buttresses in New Orleans weren't nearly as high or as strong as they might have been will have to fight it out with the chains of miscommand and miscommunication after Katrina hit, worthy of the Californian that night in 1912, for the hubris crown that posterity will award.

Meanwhile, Bush comes about as close to fiddling while Rome burns as he can without actually learning to fiddle. Maybe he has someone learning for him. Delegation, you know. Sign of a great leader.