"Long Face" by Lestat de Lioncourt

If you know, you know.

(Armand told the truth.)

https://www.amc.com/shows/anne-rice-interview-with-the-vampire--1053259

The Grace of the Sun

Grace of the Sun was a lighted installation by artist Robert Montgomery (previously here) shown at COP 26 in Glasgow, Scotland, 2021.

https://www.robertmontgomery.org/

BEAUTY: Painting--BENKA

I just discovered the work of  BENKA. His artist statement on his site explains it all:

BENKA opposes mankind´s dangerous game of underestimating the consequences of AI. Whether it is the digitization of our social relations through the invasion of smartphone screens, the progressive introduction of humanoids and cyber-surveillance, our contemporary society is facing a crazy mutation.

His artistic approach aims to expose the question of the robotization of our world. If we are still very far from a war against robots as seen in the series of Terminator, our time calls in his opinion to the questioning of our relationship to artificial intelligence. If A.I. has a considerable advantage in fields such as medicine or astronomy, on the other hand, it presents many drawbacks and raises both questions and concerns.

These numbers and letters in his paintings are captchas.

A captcha is a program that protects websites from bots by generating tests that humans can perform unlike malicious computer programs (robots). The captcha is used to verify, for example, that you are a human when connecting to an interface (login) or to avoid "SPAM" on your mailboxes for contact forms on your website.

These captchas are interpreted by BENKA and transformed into a symbol of his artistic struggle.

https://www.instagram.com/benka.1

Thank You, Joe...

...for everything, including this beautiful speech full of honesty, authenticity, and integrity.

"Lovers From The Past" by Mareux

Romantic darkwave from Mareux (the nom de musique of Aryan Ashtiani). "Lovers From The Past" has a compelling, retro sound and I love it.

https://www.mareux.com/

The Cyanometer Postcard by Macarena Ruiz-Tagle

Based on the original Cyanometer (previously here) invented in 1789 by Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, a Genevan geologist, meteorologist, physicist, mountaineer and Alpine explorer, the Cyanometer Postcard is a convenient, updated version. Artist Macarena Ruiz-Tagle created it for the 13th Annual Architecture Venice Biennale. She says "The Cyanometer Postcard captures the nuances of sky blueness at a specific moment, allowing senders to document and share this information with the recipient. Its purpose is to connect individuals globally, embracing contemplation of the sky's beauty across different latitudes."

Photo: Franziska Strauss

Photo: Franziska Strauss

She has also created a Sunsetometer to gauge the colors of a sunset...it might take a few colors to describe such an event.

And sadly, a Pollutionometer measures the color related to airborne particulates...but apropos of the Northern California coast in my backyard, it could be used for our nightly refreshing fog.

Photo: Macarena Ruiz-Tagle, at Tiananmen Square, China

https://macarenaruiztagle.com/

HARRIS 2024

http://kamalaharris.com

Pete Supports Kamala

https://www.instagram.com/pete.buttigieg
https://www.wintheera.com/

Herb Moon

"your milk is cold now" by Neon Genesis

OH.MY.GOD. I am in love with this floaty, dreamy, ethereal track "your milk is cold now" by L.A. duo Neon Genesis.

https://www.instagram.com/_neongenesis_/
https://neoncatalog.bandcamp.com/

The Ice Cream Project at The Village Hall 2024

If you're in London, you have a few more weeks to visit Anya Hindmarch's's summer pop up ice cream shop (previously here)! Returning for its third year, The Ice Cream Project has come home to The Village from 7th June – 18th August, serving a line up of unexpectedly delicious ice creams and sorbets. There are some brand new flavors--with a few return cameos--based on Anya Hindmarch’s favorite cult food brands.

I am a huge fan of interestingly flavored (including savory as well as sweet!) ice creams, sorbets, and granitas and Anya Hindmarch has created some wild flavors. I wish I were going to be in London this summer to sample some of these amazing flavors!

https://www.anyahindmarch.com/pages/the-ice-cream-project

The Gunman and the Would-Be Dictator by David Frum

The Gunman and the Would-Be Dictator
Violence stalks the president who has rejoiced in violence to others.

By David Frum

July 14,2024

When a madman hammered nearly to death the husband of then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Donald Trump jeered and mocked. One of Trump’s sons and other close Trump supporters avidly promoted false claims that Paul Pelosi had somehow brought the onslaught upon himself through a sexual misadventure.

After authorities apprehended a right-wing-extremist plot to abduct Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Trump belittled the threat at a rally. He disparaged Whitmer as a political enemy. His supporters chanted “Lock her up.” Trump laughed and replied, “Lock them all up.”

Fascism feasts on violence. In the years since his own supporters attacked the Capitol to overturn the 2020 election—many of them threatening harm to Speaker Pelosi and Vice President Mike Pence—Trump has championed the invaders, would-be kidnappers, and would-be murderers as martyrs and hostages. He has vowed to pardon them if returned to office. His own staffers have testified to the glee with which Trump watched the mayhem on television.

Now the bloodshed that Trump has done so much to incite against others has touched him as well. The attempted murder of Trump—and the killing of a person nearby—is a horror and an outrage. More will be learned about the man who committed this appalling act, and who was killed by the Secret Service. Whatever his mania or motive, the only important thing about him is the law-enforcement mistake that allowed him to bring a deadly weapon so close to a campaign event and gain a sight line of the presidential candidate. His name should otherwise be erased and forgotten.

It is sadly incorrect to say, as so many have, that political violence “has no place” in American society. Assassinations, lynchings, riots, and pogroms have stained every page of American political history. That has remained true to the present day. In 2016, and even more in 2020, Trump supporters brought weapons to intimidate opponents and vote-counters. Trump and his supporters envision a new place for violence as their defining political message in the 2024 election.

Fascist movements are secular religions. Like all religions, they offer martyrs as their proof of truth. The Mussolini movement in Italy built imposing monuments to its fallen comrades. The Trump movement now improves on that: The leader himself will be the martyr in chief, his own blood the basis for his bid for power and vengeance.

The 2024 election was already shaping up as a symbolic contest between an elderly and weakening liberalism too frail and uncertain to protect itself and an authoritarian, reactionary movement ready to burst every barrier and trash every institution. To date, Trump has led only a minority of U.S. voters, but that minority’s passion and audacity have offset what it lacks in numbers. After the shooting, Trump and his backers hope to use the iconography of a bloody ear and face, raised fist, and call to “Fight!” to summon waverers to their cause of installing Trump as an anti-constitutional ruler, exempted from ordinary law by his allies on the Supreme Court.

Other societies have backslid to authoritarianism because of some extraordinary crisis: economic depression, hyperinflation, military defeat, civil strife. In 2024, U.S. troops are nowhere at war. The American economy is booming, providing spectacular and widely shared prosperity. A brief spasm of mild post-pandemic inflation has been overcome. Indicators of social health have abruptly turned positive since Trump left office after years of deterioration during his term. Crime and fatal drug overdoses are declining in 2024; marriages and births are rising. Even the country’s problems indirectly confirm the country’s success: Migrants are crossing the border in the hundreds of thousands, because they know, even if Americans don’t, that the U.S. job market is among the hottest on Earth.

Yet despite all of this success, Americans are considering a form of self-harm that in other countries has typically followed the darkest national failures: letting the author of a failed coup d’état return to office to try again.

One reason this self-harm is nearing consummation is that American society is poorly prepared to understand and respond to radical challenges, once those challenges gain a certain mass. For nearly a century, “radical” in U.S. politics has usually meant “fringe”: Communists, Ku Kluxers, Black Panthers, Branch Davidians, Islamist jihadists. Radicals could be marginalized by the weight of the great American consensus that stretches from social democrats to business conservatives. Sometimes, a Joe McCarthy or a George Wallace would throw a scare into that mighty consensus, but in the past such challengers rarely formed stable coalitions with accepted stakeholders in society. Never gaining an enduring grip on the institutions of state, they flared up and burned out.

Trump is different. His abuses have been ratified by powerful constituencies. He has conquered and colonized one of the two major parties. He has defeated—or is on the way to defeating—every impeachment and prosecution to hold him to account for his frauds and crimes. He has assembled a mass following that is larger, more permanent, and more national in reach than any previous American demagogue. He has dominated the scene for nine years already, and he and his supporters hope they can use yesterday’s appalling event to extend the Trump era to the end of his life and beyond.

The American political and social system cannot treat such a person as an alien. It inevitably accommodates and naturalizes him. His counselors, even the thugs and felons, join the point-counterpoint dialogue at the summit of the American elite. President Joe Biden nearly wrecked his campaign because he felt obliged to meet Trump in debate. How could Biden have done otherwise? Trump is the three-time nominee of the Republican Party; it’s awkward and strange to treat him as an insurrectionist against the American state—though that’s what Trump was and is.

The despicable shooting at Trump, which also caused death and injury to others, now secures his undeserved position as a partner in the protective rituals of the democracy he despises. The appropriate expressions of dismay and condemnation from every prominent voice in American life have the additional effect of habituating Americans to Trump’s legitimacy. In the face of such an outrage, the familiar and proper practice is to stress unity, to proclaim that Americans have more things in common than that divide them. Those soothing words, true in the past, are less true now.

Nobody seems to have language to say: We abhor, reject, repudiate, and punish all political violence, even as we maintain that Trump remains himself a promoter of such violence, a subverter of American institutions, and the very opposite of everything decent and patriotic in American life.

The Republican National Convention, which opens this week, will welcome to its stage apologists for Vladimir Putin’s Russia and its aggression against U.S. allies. Trump’s own infatuation with Russia and other dictatorships has not dimmed even slightly with age or experience. Yet all of these urgent and necessary truths must now be subordinated to the ritual invocation of “thoughts and prayers” for someone who never gave a thought or uttered a prayer for any of the victims of his own many incitements to bloodshed. The president who used his office to champion the rights of dangerous people to own military-type weapons says he was grazed by a bullet from one such assault rifle.

Conventional phrases and polite hypocrisy fill a useful function in social life. We say “Thank you for your service” both to the decorated hero and to the veteran who barely escaped dishonorable discharge. It’s easier than deciphering which was which. We wish “Happy New Year!” even when we dread the months ahead.

But conventional phrases don’t go unheard. They carry meanings, meanings no less powerful for being rote and reflexive. In rightly denouncing violence, we are extending an implicit pardon to the most violent person in contemporary U.S. politics. In asserting unity, we are absolving a man who seeks power through the humiliation and subordination of disdained others.

Those conventional phrases are inscribing Trump into a place in American life that he should have forfeited beyond redemption on January 6, 2021. All decent people welcome the sparing of his life. Trump’s reckoning should be with the orderly process of law, not with the bloodshed he rejoiced in when it befell others. He and his allies will exploit a gunman’s vicious criminality as their path to exonerate past crimes and empower new ones. Those who stand against Trump and his allies must find the will and the language to explain why these crimes, past and planned, are all wrong, all intolerable—and how the gunman and Trump, at their opposite ends of a bullet’s trajectory, are nonetheless joined together as common enemies of law and democracy.

David Frum is a staff writer at The Atlantic.


Link to original article:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/07/donald-trump-democracy-dictator/679006/

"Death Valley High" by Orville Peck and Beck

What an amazing collaboration between Peck and Beck! This fantastic song, "Death Valley High" sounds like something Tom Jones would have sang in 1969 (without Beck's rap, of course). Look for Sharon Stone's "eff off" moment...

https://www.orvillepeck.com/
https://www.beck.com/

Bonne Fête Nationale! 2024

Aujourd'hui c'est la Fête nationale en France!

The French National Day is the anniversary of the Storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, a major event of the French Revolution, as well as the Fête de la Fédération that celebrated the unity of the French people on 14 July 1790.

A mes lecteurs qui habitent en France, je vous souhaite...

Bonne Fête Nationale!

Happy Birthday To Two California Landmarks!

Happy Birthday to two very important California landmarks! Let's start here in my own backyard in Northern California, at the edge of San Francisco.

The Ferry Building was commissioned in 1892 when California voters passed a bond issue for a new ferry terminal. Designed by A. Page Brown and influenced by his studies at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the Union Depot and Ferry House (as it was originally called) was imagined as a beautiful European-styled structure based on an arched arcade; inside, a gorgeous Great Nave was to function as a baggage and receiving area. Brown included a 245-foot-tall clock tower modeled on the 12th century bell tower in the Seville Cathedral in Spain to serve as a welcoming beacon on the Bay.

To support the 56,000 tons of cement it would require, a concrete seawall was created. Then over 5,000 fresh cut, 80 foot long Oregon pine piles, each with a girth of 16 inches, were driven 20 feet into the bay. 111 concrete piers were sunk to the same depth. And finally, all these elements were joined together by a series of 2-foot thick, groined concrete arches reinforced with steel rods. Brown's foundation—which has supported the entire steel-framed structure in such a remarkably dependable manner through not only one but two earthquakes (the Great Earthquake of 1906 and the tragic Loma Prieta Earthquake of 1989)—became the largest such foundation for a building over water anywhere in the world.

It opened this day in 1898, receiving its first ferry passengers from across the San Francisco Bay. Happy Birthday Ferry Building!

The Ferry Building, still standing in 1908, two years after the Great 1906 Earthquake.

But then in 1958, something unfortunate happened to the poor Ferry Building. In the boom of post-war construction and urban growth, The Embarcadero Freeway, an elevated 1.2 mile stretch of double-decker concrete road was erected directly in front of the Ferry Building, effectively cutting off visual contact, and making it harder for anyone to get to the building or even the water, to gaze out at the Bay. I recall the Embarcadero Freeway quite well: it was useful enough but also provided a supremely dramatic entrance into The City, especially at night, with the freeway winding around glittering buildings so close one could practically reach out and touch them, and dropping one into Chinatown or near the Wharf. But pity the people below in the dark, dank, cave-like space which had become a haven for crime and the homeless. By the 1970s, ferry use resumed as a way to combat the growing traffic congestion problem and people once again needed access to the Ferry Building. But as writer William Thompson put it, the Embarcadero Freeway "shunted pedestrians through a dark, sooty gauntlet between downtown and the San Francisco Bay."

A postcard from the 1ate 1950s/early 1960s showing the newly completed Embarcadero Freeway.

But it was not until the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake that the freeway's fate was sealed. Heavy damage sustained in the quake left it unsafe for use, and despite cries from certain sectors for it to be rebuilt (particularly from the merchants of Chinatown who feared disappearing revenue without easy access), it was demolished in 1991. A better decision could not have been made. Revenue did not disappear, and predictions of street gridlock never materialized.

With its flagpole askew, the iconic Ferry Building Clock Tower's mechanism
stopped at the time the Loma Prieta Earthquake struck on October 17, 1989.

The Embarcadero Freeway being disassembled in 1991.

I also recall quite well feeling a marvelous expanse and seeing sunlight fall along the Embarcadero proper for the first time after the freeway was gone! Just marvel at the difference: below is the Ferry Building and the now-beautiful Ferry Plaza, with greenery and stunning palm trees along a promenade. The city's collection of vintage streetcars have been restored and now run along the Embarcadero. It is an open and welcoming gateway between the Bay, with its lovely view of the SF Bay Bridge to Yerba Buena and Treasure Islands, and downtown San Francisco. The Plaza hosts craft and food booths and the Ferry Building hosts a farmers market, renowned throughout the country as one of the top farmers markets to visit.

Here is a superb Before and After view from Coit Tower of the Ferry Building and the Embarcadero Freeway. Click on the photo to go the original page featuring the interactive version of these images.

In 2003, a four-year major renovation was completed and the Ferry Building was restored to its former glory. The interior of the building had been chopped up into ill-conceived office spaces but today, the Great Nave is once again great: it is home to The Marketplace, a wonderland for foodies, which brings together the greater Bay Area's agricultural wealth and famous specialty food purveyors under one roof: flower stalls, book stores, mushroom vendors, wine and honey merchants, green grocers, Blue Bottle Coffee, Acme Bread Company (supplier to world-famous Chez Panisse just across the Bay in Berkeley), and restaurants like Hog Island Oyster Bar.

The Great Nave under renovation.

Hog Island Oyster Bar

And the bountiful and sprawling Farmers Market wraps around the front, sides, and rear of the building, with a glorious view of the Bay Bridge while you shop for purple carrots and French breakfast radishes! It is open Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10AM to 2PM and on Saturdays from 8AM to 2PM.

For a listing of current shops, go to: http://www.ferrybuildingmarketplace.com/

And now let's travel south to Hollywood and wish a Happy Birthday to the iconic, world famous Hollywood sign! Originally reading "HOLLYWOODLAND," the sign was an advertisement for a local real estate development in the Hollywood Hills. It was dedicated on this day, July 13th, in 1923. The sign was lit up at night by 4,000 light bulbs and flashed in segments: "HOLLY," "WOOD," and "LAND" individually at first, and then lighting up entirely as "HOLLYWOODLAND."

The sign became a landmark of the area and although it was only built to stand for a year and a half, it was allowed to stay. In 1949, the "LAND" suffix was removed to reflect not the housing development but Hollywood itself. Unfortunately, by the 1970s, the sign's flimsy wood and sheet metal construction had deteriorated and the sign was in serious disrepair.

In 1978, a restoration campaign headed by Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner raised the necessary funds to completely rebuild the sign, this time out of longer lasting materials: steel letters on steel columns supported by concrete foundations. Many celebrities gave money to sponsor individual letters. Gene Autry bought an L, Hugh Hefner bought the Y, and rock star Alice Cooper bought an O in memory of his good friend and Hollywood legend Groucho Marx! In 2005, the sign underwent a refurbishment with the letters being stripped back to their metal, and repainted with a fresh coat of optical white.

The sign was designated a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument in 1973 and is protected by the not-for-profit Trust for Public Land, while the site and land are part of Griffith Park. Happy Birthday, Hollywood sign!

http://hollywoodsign.org/