The people who have all the money have no art

I have fond memories of taking my newly wed wife on a date to see Raiders of the Lost Ark at the theater in downtown Eugene, back in the day. I also have fond memories of putting my toddler son Alaric in a little red wagon and trundling him over the Willamette River pedestrian bridge to the Valley River Center mall to see the next Indiana Jones movie…and also the Star War with all the Ewoks in it. These were movies made for entertaining fun, and were the background of my young adulthood. I think they also made my kids happy.

This past week, the latest Indiana Jones movie, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, is playing here in Morris, and it’ll probably be playing next week as well. I haven’t felt even the most subtle stirrings of sentimentality to motivate me to go. The movie studios have milked me dry.

Also playing: Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. I hope the theater is cleaning up — it’s a co-op, and I’m a member, but here I am, a guy who loves going to the movies, and I’m not at all interested. I’ve even got a free ticket tacked to the refrigerator, and the impulse just isn’t there any more.

One reason is that I’m aware that Indiana Jones is a terrible role model and a very bad scientist built on colonialist preconceptions, part of trope that has been thriving since H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs.

The basic outlines of the adventure genre will be familiar to Indy fans, though its structure is heavily beholden to the colonialist politics of Haggard’s era: A brilliant White man, very often a professor, deploys personal reserves of cleverness, resilience and unrelenting determination in the service of exploration, discovery and resource extraction. That narrative template guides these stories even when the author attempts to push back on their ideological implications. Think, for example, about how the Indiana Jones films use the Nazi menace to distract from the fact that our hero is almost always appropriating the treasures of Indigenous or pre-colonial peoples. It’s as if they felt obliged to remind us that there’s always a worse White man, as a sort of alibi. It makes perfect sense, from this perspective, that Indiana Jones’s least-successful films are the ones that, like “Temple of Doom,” leave the Nazis out.

That contributes to my lack of interest, for sure. I feel a little bit guilty for enjoying a tale of a swashbuckling college professor fighting Nazis and also, unfortunately, looting non-white people’s history. Unfortunately, the pleasure part of “guilty pleasure” started to fizzle out as I also realized that every single movie is centered on garbage pseudoscience/pseudoarchaeology — the Ark of the Covenant with its vengeful ghosts, an evil Hindu priest who can magic hearts out of his victims, a goblet that grants eternal life, the crystal skulls of telepathic space aliens, and now in the latest, an ancient widget that allows one to travel in time. When you lay it bare like that, stripped of its gallant romanticized hero, they just look stupid. Maybe I can suspend disbelief once or twice, but not for 42 years. The well has gone dry.

I can’t help but feel that Hollywood has lost the script. It’s no longer about creativity and leaps of imagination — it’s about franchises, and repeating the same thing over and over again to wring out every last drop of profit. Indiana Jones should have been retired after the third one, going out on a high note — you could even argue that the first one was enough, time to move on. Star Wars, the same story: wasn’t the first trilogy more than enough, take a break and develop some new “intellectual properties”. Don’t get me started on superhero movies. I am so over the endless permutations of Batman. And now they’ve got this “multiverse” nonsense as an excuse to slap new costumes on tired old musclebound heroes.

It’s not just me, either. I was shocked to discover that the ever-optimistic Mikey Neumann, of Movies with Mikey, failed to find a single moment of joy in his review of Space Jam 2 (a movie that was completely off my radar, admittedly, and would actively avert any interest I might have in going to the movies). This was entirely out of character for him, but I think I share his despair at the ongoing corporatization of art. Neumann can usually find something worthy in even the most dreadful dreck, but Space Jam 2 is the product of a soulless corporate beancounter who saw the entire legacy of Warner Bros. as a fantastic collection of assets, a pile of stuff he couldn’t appreciate but could sell at an ungodly profit.

There are still a few movies I look forward to seeing, but none of them are attached to a “franchise.” That word is killing movies, just as “franchise” has killed so many small, unique, interesting diners around the country. It’s a word that makes profit-seeking landlords and accountants drool, though — too bad it has the opposite effect on consumers.

It is a good day to get some work done

It’s some kind of national holiday celebrating our independence, but I don’t feel like celebrating in a country where justice has been deposed and our supreme court is nothing but a corrupt arm of the far right Federalist Society. So instead I’m going to murder spiders.

I’ve got a set of wild-caught Steatoda triangulosa, and another set of wild-caught Parasteatoda, and yet more long-term lab-fed S. triangulosa, and they’re all going to feel the kiss of cold 95% ethanol before being stashed in a freezer. Then this weekend they get delivered to a collaborator up north who will disembowel them and sequence their microbiome.

That’s how we celebrate America’s birthday around here.

Also this weekend, we’re going to visit a few cemeteries around Gary, Minnesota and check out the graves of some long-dead relatives, and do some sight-seeing of great-great-great grandparents’ old haunts, while also chasing down a few spiders. It seems appropriate.

No cheese, no tomato sauce? That’s not a pizza

But it still looks delicious. This is a fresco found in the ruins of Pompeii.

I stared at that image trying to figure out what’s in it: focaccio bread, was easy enough, seasoned with pesto, but what’s on it? Is it all dried fruit, which would make it rather sweeter than I’d like, or are there onions and mushrooms in there? There’s not enough information in the picture, I’d have to free wheel it.

The more I stared, the hungrier I got. I could probably make the focaccio, since I won’t find it in the markets around here, and I make pesto all the time. But what to top it with? I’d want something more savory, with dried fruit on the side, and of course I’d need a cup of red wine. This could be an all day project.

Twitter: The End

This morning, I discovered that my Twitter account is “rate-limited”. Actually, everyone’s account is rate-limited.

So I’m only allowed to read 600 tweets per day. What that means in practical terms, since I follow about 800 people, when I first log in Twitter will access all the tweets made by those people overnight, and then…I’ve reached my limit within minutes, and I’m done. That’s all it takes, Twitter is over for me before I take my first sip of coffee.

I pity all those people who are paying $8 a month to get privileged access — now nobody is going to read their prioritized tweets, except other blue check users, and even then, only until they finish their breakfast, and then they’ll be done, too.

Brilliant move, Elon. Just shut it down.

Meanwhile, I’m on @pzmyers@octodon.social.

I don’t follow Elon Musk, but does he even realize that he’s just effectively blocked people who do? Probably not.

Well, that’s over

Waiting for our flight to Chicago, United abruptly announced that it was canceled — you should have heard the howls of fury from all the people waiting. Then they announced that maybe it would fly anyway. Then they said one of the flight crew was missing so it was canceled. Then they found him! Maybe not canceled?

I was finally able to talk to a gate agent — I needed to arrange our connecting flight from Chicago to Syracuse. They were all canceled! All of them! For the next two days! I might be able to get a flight for the last day of the conference.

So I canceled them.

No trip to AAS this year. I’m disappointed, my student is disappointed, but it looked like we were going to spend days and days in limbo, with no certainty of getting there for any time at the meeting.

Now we’re waiting at the airport for long-suffering Mary to drive out from Morris to pick us up and take us home again.

United Airline sucks.

The struggle continues…

We are trying to get to Cornell for a scientific conference. We’re supposed to be there right now. Last night was an epic run-around of sitting and waiting in lines and repeated announcements that we’ll be boarding a plane any minute now…and a final announcement that no, you will not be boarding a plane today, try again tomorrow. Our heroic quest has become a stalled adventure, where we are left noodling around the edges of the Shire, unable to reach Osgiliath, let alone Mordor.

Our plan for the day is to take a shuttle to the Minneapolis airport and sit around and stand in line some more while we listen to excuses from United Airlines. Maybe they’ll put us on a plane; I sure hope so, since Liz has a poster presentation this afternoon, and I’d like to get this damn ring thrown in Lake Beebe today.

I’m beginning to appreciate why Frodo and Sam couldn’t be dropped off directly at Mount Doom by the eagles. It’s because the eagles needed maintenance, they didn’t have aircrews to man them, there was lightning on the runway, and we already have your money, suckers. Also, one does not fly into Mordor.