Good morning. Hello. How are you? #627
Twitter's gonna get Tesla kicked out of China and I suppose that's fine. Sarah Polley's Robin Williams synthesizer.
Good morning. Hello. How are you this fine, god, what is it? Thursday? Not gonna lie, I do not like five-day work weeks one bit nosiree. I’m in an okay mood, all things considered, given the insane shit I’ve been reading about in the 40 minutes or so since I woke up. A bunch of lunatics have decided all of our teachers and a bunch of other people are “grooming” now. They couldn’t find any evidence of actual child abuse or pedophilia (except in, you know, DHS agents and Trump campaign advisors but those don’t count), so now they’ve just decided that everyone is “grooming,” our teachers are all grooming, our politicians are grooming, our president is grooming. It’s just so fucked up and depressing and for a while there I think I let myself think that the Qanon lunatics were gonna fade away for a bit but I don’t know why I thought that at all.
I am very into Jane drawing Hello Kitty as some sort of super-sized hero cat that has… a lipstick? A cell phone? Not sure? Also those people are good! And the window, so cute. Emma used this drawing as a jumping off point for explaining skin color, and now she is drawing more varied human skin tones and darker skin tones, so hopefully you will be seeing those soon.
Ed Yong has another insanely good article in The Atlantic yestrday. The Final Pandemic Betrayal: the grief of one million COVID deaths is not going away. It is a hard read. All of these people suffering, alone, being judged by everyone who they talk to. People wanting to move on, people wanting to know it can’t happen to them.
People regularly ask Rekha if her dead mother was vaccinated before they offer condolences or sympathies. “It’s not just one time; it’s all the time,” she said. “It’s all the time,” Kristin Urquiza echoed. “Pretty much from every person,” says Christina Faria, who lost her mother, Viola, late last year.
And this was sort of revelatory for me:
Many grievers are starved for sympathy and patience because our popular understanding of grief is wrong. An influential but misleading model suggests that it progresses through five stages—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. But in fact, [grief] doesn’t involve discrete stages, doesn’t proceed along a predictable linear path, and might not end in acceptance. “Closure” is a simplistic myth. Grief, as it actually unfolds, is erratic, and in many cases slow.
I mean inasmuch as I’ve ever thought about the five stages of grief, I probably assumed they were bullshit, but this spells out the reality very clearly.
And then this poor woman:
Sympathy is even scarcer for people whose loved ones bought into COVID disinformation. Kristin Urquiza’s father, Mark, took COVID seriously at first but let his guard down in May 2020. Trump had said it was time to reopen society, Arizona Governor Doug Ducey lifted restrictions, and Mark, a lifelong Republican, said, “Why would they say it’s safe if it’s not safe?” Kristin recalled. “That’s when I lost the battle with my dad.” Later, after he caught COVID, most likely at a bar, and before he went into the hospital for the last time, she asked him if he felt betrayed. “My dad never, ever hesitated with his words, but there was just this long pause, and he quietly said yes,” she told me. People have told her that Mark deserved what he got. But Kristin sees him as yet another victim of the disinformation that ran rampant among his social circles, his media universe, and the elected leaders he trusted. “That shouldn’t result in a death sentence,” she said.
When I mentioned my desire to go to New York for dinners, several of you sent me your stories of having similar thoughts lately and then doing it and then getting covid. That is crazy! Not one person wrote “I flew to another city for a dinner last month and it was fine,” though I’m sure it happened. But wow. Man. This thing is still everywhere. Part of me wants to give up on even going to Boston in late May. I mean this thing has to have faded by then, right? Right? Imagine if one of us got COVID while our whole family is in a one-bedroom AirBNB. That would be a mess. Gulp.
I am sorry I am blockquoting so much I guess now that the floodgates have opened there is no stopping me. It’s a real shame, too, because blockquote formatting in Substack looks like ass on mobile. Which is why I italicize, to make it clearer. Bringhurst is rolling over in his grave. Wait, shit, is Bringhurst still alive? OMG Bringhurst is still alive. You could go talk to him right now. That is amazing. Someone please tell me they have spoken to Robert Bringhurst.
And then I get downstairs to my computer and learn that Elon Musk wants to buy all of Twitter. He’s offering everyone $54.20 a share, a “54% premium over the day befre I began investing.” This is presumably a tender offer that the board has to approve, but who knows, because he hasn’t actually filed ther paperwork. It’s completely unclear how it’s supposed to work, because Elon Musk thinks he’s a hedge fund or something except he doesn’t know how to be one and can’t even file the paperwork. He says he’s doing this because “I believe in free speech around the globe and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy.”
Let’s leave aside the fact for the moment that Elon Musk owning a free speech Twitter will 100% immediately, absolutely, and irrevocably get Tesla kicked out of China1. I mean, that is a hard thing to leave aside, not because I personally want to do business in China, but Elon Musk and Tesla sure do. They have a giant factory there, 7% and growing market share, China is their second largest market after the US and doubling every year and will probably overtake the US by 2023. You may have heard that China does not super believe in free speech. They also DGAF in the theories behind Section 230 or “limited liability” or “shareholder protections,” and are 100% into blaming platforms and their owners for things that are posted on them. Nor do they care whether or not your product is actually used in China. Pretty sure this hashtag page, alone, will be enough to get Tesla kicked out of China. This, alone, is absolutely evidence that Elon has not thought this through, or if he has, his 3D chess game is shitposting and trolling so, yeah, pass. Also it doesn’t matter if he has a master plan because this, alone, is enough for a super-solid shareholder lawsuit at Tesla.
But leaving all that aside, has Elon Musk ever suffered from the Twitter censoring him? No. What does he mean by “a free speech Twitter?” What does he want said on the platform that cannot be said now? Is he saying they shouldn’t have community standards? The whole thing is so vague not because it is ill-conceived, but because it is a lie. He has absolutely zero concerns about free speech on Twitter. He has not once stated a single example of their chilling free speech.
You know what? Buy fucking Twitter. Kill two birds with one stone. Ruin the fucking thing and get kicked out of China. Why not. You do you. I stupidly still love Twitter and I’m too addicted to the thing so, yeah, sure, kill the thing off.
Also I love how he bragged and bragged about how he was going to build a Twitter competitor, and like all VC Silicon Valley assholes these days, he pretended that Network Effects no longer exist and there was nothing special about Twitter and it could totally be replicated, but in the end he realized that was totally wrong, you cannot actually build a new Twitter to beat Twitter, so he shifted gears to shitbidding without taking a single moment to reflect upon the fact that his initial instinct was wrong.
He is exactly like the villians in Moon Knight, shifting gears a bit, and every other stupid fucking show I am so so sick of where the villian is doing their villian thing, acting all smug and pointing guns at someone they think is a feeble minded and timid Egyptologist, only to find out whoops, no, they are pointing their guns at a superhero posessed by a diety. Yet this important new information about the situation they find themselves in does absolutely nothing to change their plans. They still wear their smug villian smiles and charge into battle as if they are still fighthing a timid Egyptologist and not an actual god. Their reality has completely changed around them, they are now actually in mortal peril instead of being in control of the situation, and they do absolutely nothing to adapt. I was ranting to Emma about this last night, as the main villian (well, of this one scene, they couldn’t be bothered to develop his character for more than two minutes prior and I’m still not sure what his deal was other than “plot device”) had literally all twenty of his henchmen slaughtered by Moon Knight. If this were you or I, we would think “shit I made a terrible mistake provoking this guy who has an Egyptian God in him. My live is now absolutely in danger, and all of my bodyguards are dead. I should make an effort to preserve my life and run away!” But nope. He thinks “I still totally have control of this situation and I will jump on this horse and attempt to joust with this superhuman diety who just killed all my bodyguards.”
I was ranting and raving about how tired I am of this trope in films and television (never mind that the entire fight didn’t need to happen at all), saying how unrealistic it was but naw. It’s not unrealistic, I’m realizing. The sociopathic super rich do not seem to think reality applies to them. With Elon this has lead to great things like a worldwide electric car revolution. But I guess hey, he named his company Tesla and not Edison for a reason after all. OH BURN.
Last night I read the essay in Sarah Polley’s book (really good book, strong recommend) about her time in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and despite being a fan of that film my entire adult life and a fan of Sarah Polley’s since the early 1990’s, I never realized until this week that that young kid in that movie was Sarah Polley. Learn something new every day. Anyway, the whole ordeal was insanely traumatizing for her. Terry Gilliam intentionally blew up a large piece of plastic explosives just feet away from her, ripping the detonator out of the VFX chief’s hands, leaving him traumatized as well. Later in life, he was working on another film with Polley and came to her and told her how awful he felt, profoundly apologized, and helped her fill in her childhood memories. They re-watched the movie together, as an exorcism, while holding hands. During Terry Gilliam’s #metooing, Eric Idle, to whom she hadn’t spoken to since shooting Baron, defended her and said that she was absolutely in danger multiple times during the shoot. She was hospitalized three times. Everyone was scared of Gilliam and didn’t know what to do. Her father was cowed by Gilliam, being his biggest fan, and didn’t stop anything. Her mom tried to, and at one point Polley was literally taken away from her mother’s arms, both of them crying, to go do another shot. It was horrible.
BUT, the best part about it, a spark of joy, was that Eric Idle did his best to keep Polley safe. And very late in the shoot she discovered that Robin Williams was in the movie, playing the King of the Moon. She was a huge fan of his, from Mork and Mindy (what a great show amirite?) and she was so excited. And Robin joined Eric in taking care of her, trying to cheer her up. She had a little toy piano her mom gave her and she loved it, and Eric and Robin decided she needed a proper one, so they bought her a sampling synthesizer, and, get this, programmed a sample set entirely of Robin Williams voice saying funny things to and for Sarah Polley.
Where is that Synthesizer now. I so hope she still has it. Or, even better, it ended up in a thrift store somewhere, and someone else bought a synthesizer with a custom, unique soundset made entirely by Robin Williams. And in my fantasy they knew what it was, and they made an awesome deep-cut electronica 12” with it, printed it on acetate and drove it from Toronto to Detroit and it is now in some DJ’s personal collection.
What a gift, what a gift.
Hey look I ended this kind of on a happy note.
Shoegaze mix today! It’s a good one. Space out! Feel pretty and emotional! Dream baby dream.
OK maybe not forever. Disney managed to get back in after ten years of grovelling from the slight of a totally different arm of the company releasing Scorcese’s Kundun. Ten years.
Fear Not! I have talked to Robert Bringhurst. I saw him give a talk at the library a couple years ago when he was on a book tour for his biography of the typeface Palatino. Also, that Jane drawing is really excellent.