Good morning. Hello. How are you? #719
A holiday weekend alone with my daughter, wherein she discovers parkour. Starting a neurotic digital archiving project. Obsessing about Le Duan's mental state. Carter moaning about judicial noms grrr.
Good morning! Hello! How are you? Did you have a lovely Labor day weekend? I am very proud of myself that, at the age of fifty, I can keep Labor Day and Memorial Day straight finally. I spent a good chunk of time this weekend explaining Labor Day to Jane, along with jobs. And strikes. We didn’t go too too far, just a little light toddler indoctrination.
Lovely weekend, Jane and I had. Emma left for Atlanta Thursday, to go to DragonCon with her friend Clara. I am a bit jealous, it looked super fun. But my favorite thing to do at DragonCon is sit at a vendor table in the Marriott lobby and people watch for 10-12 hours a day, and that was, alas, not an option this year, so stay home and watch Jane I did.
Staying home with Jane was great! What a fun weekend. It is definitely a whole lot easier to watch your child when you have absolutely nothing else to do. I had a few lightweight hopes for things to accomplish this weekend, but I accepted that they were all optional, that I might not get any of them done, and that Jane got to choose the agenda. Turns out what she chooses to do is predominantly play with dolls. My god, we played with dolls for hours and hours. And Lego, but I liked that more. So much doll playing I did this weekend. I am sad to report I did not convert to liking playing with dolls. It still seems kinda dumb.
In the end, I did manage to get most of my tasks done: I got what little gardening that needed to be done, done: harvested the tomatoes and peppers, checked in on things (that reminds me I gotta go water the broccoli seedlings this morning. The second batch of shallots are sprouting, even though “the experts” say you can’t get a second planting of shallots here in NC. I am ingorning them. The corn is bursting through it’s eight-foot tall hoops, it is insane. But I am determined to protect it from the squirrels. Radishes and arugula and lettuce is doing great. New potatoes haven’t sprouted yet, but the new baby bok choy and snow peas have. Nice transition into fall gardening. Also dried some of the jalepenos I grew: I have grown way too many jalepenos. So I’m drying them and adding them to my anti-squirrel chilip powder bucket.
We also got the recycling taken care of and shipped off to the collection center, on our way to the park. Jane and I went to the park Saturday, which was blissfully empty since it was a holiday weekend. She played on the playground for a while and we did a nice long walk around the park — the walk I used to do every day in the morning before she was born that I miss so much. She did it on her scooter. It was a bit too long for her but she didn’t complain.
Oh and I did manage to get my podcast done. I did it Friday morning, before I took over with Jane, when she was still at Grammy’s house (thank you, Grammy!). So here it is if you are into that sort of thing.
Jane’s really been being great lately. Whenever she needs some love or attention or patience — or I do — we reach inside of us and grab some and hand it to the other one and say “here have some patience,” and it works! Like at least 90% of the time if I give her patience, or comfort, or love, or sympathy, if I take it from inside me and hand it to her, it does the job. It is magic. I can’t believe it’s working so well. I hope it lasts forever.
And then there’s the Parkour. This weekend she was watching an episode of Cardboard World the sort of crafty-youtube channel she loves, and at the end of each episode, when the cardboard diorama is done, the owner lets her pet chinchilla run free in the new diorama. And in this episode, the chinchilla jumped over a couch, so she subtitled it “Parkour!”
Jane then asked what Parkour was, and I explained it to her, and she said “watch some Parkour videos?” So I found some women’s parkour (gonna stop capitalizing it now) videos, and Jane was utterly and completely mesmerized. Just transformed. Within twenty minutes, she was running around the playroom, shouting “Parkour!” and trying to do parkour. It was amazing. So I give you this:
(That is one of those Youtube links that only works if you have the link, but I think this should work?) Anyway, parkour obsessed for two days, it was all she could talk about. Emma came back yesterday, though, and she seems to have already forgotten about it. But wow. That was fun. I tried to show her gymnastics videos to get her into something that was, you know, more common for Americans. But Simone Biles left her unmoved. She prefers parkour. There is, weirdly, a Parkour gym in Raleigh that starts classes at age 6. I told her if she was still into it in a year she could go. Fingers crossed she forgets about it: the gym is a 45 minute drive away!
Other than that, on Monday once I got a day to myself I started to undertake the gloriously tedious task of going through my Plex library, sorted by video resolution in ascending order, and replacing any movie that is in less than HD resolution with a more HD version of the movie. It is so fantastically tedious, exactly the sort of painful, unending digital archiving task that I love so much, occupies my brain and keeps me from thinking too much. There are about 150 video files to go through, one by one, checking Netflix to see if they have the blu ray, then going to Amazon, eBay and IMDB to see if a blu ray even exists, then if one does exist, figuring out how much it costs and how best to obtain a digital copy. Making a giant list of every film, and the status of my research and obtaining it. Some of them are no brainers to purchase: a $10 4k copy of My Science Project? Sign me up. Some are impossible, don’t exist. Sometimes it was a TV movie or show: something like The Pirates of Silicon Valley or, of course, The Star Wars Holiday Special. But a lot of really good, honest, real movies that came out in theaters have never been released on blu ray. The most maddening are the ones that exist in HD on the streaming services, but don’t have a blu ray release. That happens a surprising amount. There is a ton of HD content out there that simply cannot be purchased in physical media, and that is very frustrating to me.
Then we have things like Louise Brooks’ 1929 film Pandora’s Box, which got a very loving Criterion release, which I owned, of the DVD in the late 1990’s,but which has not gotten a blu ray release from Criterion. So what is going on there? Did Criterion spend all that money on restoring and scanning a film print of Pandora’s Box but only do so at 480 lines of resolution? That seems unlikely. Did they mis-judge the Louise Brooks audience, and now they have a far better idea of how many they’ll sell, taking data from the DVD version’s sales, and I assume they have some baseline ratio, now, of how many blu rays they’ll sell compared to how many DVDs they sold of an original version. And maybe now Louise Brooks just isn’t as part of the zeitgeist as much as she was back then? That is sad.
One film had a laser disc and VHS release, I ripped my VHS, but it’s never had a blu ray release, let alone a DVD release. In that instance, I actually have a friend who’s friends with the director, and I am half-planning to demand an introductionso I can ask the director whether she even has a copy of the film, maybe a work print or something, and I can pay her to scan it in HD? But, alas, our mutual friend is recovering from some pretty intense cancer surgery (please get well soon!) so maybe not the best time.
Anyway, after a half day of intense work, I have obtained maybe 30 films, got a line on maybe 60 more, and about 60 are just going to be impossible to obtain. This will take a year or so I suspect. But I am so into it.
My other weekend’s obsession is trying to figure out the mental state of Le Duan, leader of North Vietnam during the Vietnam war. Ken Burns’ seventeen-hour documentary The Vietnam War is proving maddeningly unsatisfying in its examination of the North Vietnamese motivations. It touches on them, but its not nearly in-depth enough. It just sort of takes their steadfastness as a given. But I just got through the episode on the Tet Offensive and, god. The US the Tet Offensive is seen as this turning point in the war, and it was, but only because it was so heavily reported on in the US, and not entirely accurately. The North Vietnamese not only lost, decicively, militarily, but strategically. Every single assumption Le Duan made about the South Vietnamese and the US were wrong: The ARVN did not crumble. The Americans did not leave. The South Vietnamese did not rise up in the streets and welcome them as liberators. They lost half their troops. And yet not only did Le Duan not seem to pay any political price for it, he tried it again and again: for more “mini Tets,” losing badly, each and every time, until seven years later, he finally won one. But how did he last seven more years politically? I mean, it helps that Ho Chi Minh died not long after the Tet Offensive.
I dunno. I am obsessing over it and I’m not sure why. Because, I suppose, the truth is not how I learned it. And it was such a turning point in US foreign policy, the psychology of a nation, etc. etc. But part of me feels like I and we took the wrong lessons away. One thing that’s really coming through is how bad the North Vietnamese leaders were. They were bad people! They committed many, many atrocities, massacres! Way worse than the American ones, and with no repurcusions. There was a single massacare during the Tet Offensive that killed ten times more Vietnamese civilians than every documented US massacre. And to this day, the Vietnamese government does not even recognize it. Meanwhile over 50 US Soldiers were court maritalled for their participation in the various atrocities the US committed, and we acknowledge and have paid reparations for every one. I am not doing moral equivalency here to say we are great, but rather to say that the way I learned about all of this in school was very one-sided. A thing I keep hearing in my learning — from high school to college to even now, over and over, in the Ken Burns doc and the Perlstein books: There was never really a country called South Vietnam. This is used as a kudgel to clearly illustrate how pointless the US presence was: what were we even protecting. And while it is techincally truel, it is morally untrue. In the 1959 treaty with the French, the region of South Vietnam was created as a region for the people who did not want communism. Millions people throughout the country displaced. The communists were supposed to go north, the non-communists were supposed to go south, and most of the latter did (many communists didn’t go north because from day one they were planning on war). Once this happened, south Vietnam might not have been a country but it had a character, and that character decidedly did not want to be communist.
Also, once the Hue massacre happened during the Tet Offensive, South Vietnam, not unreasonably, became convinced that if the North ever took them over, thousands would be killed immediately. And they were right! We talk about the US and “hearts and minds,” but Le Duan decisively lost the hearts and minds with the Tet Offensive. Yet he still won.
Anyway. You probably don’t care about any of this. I don’t know why I do. But now I am watching some professor of history doing a 2-hour lecture on Youtube about Le Duan, Ho Chi Minh and general Giap.
The Rick Perlstein history of conservatism books are becoming a slog. I am so done with Carter. I mean, man seems like a great ex-president, and I applaud his moral fortitude at sticking to his guns about a lot of things. But he was also utterly wrong about a lot of things, hopeless at others, and utterly failed at the job. The Democratic congress gave him the power to nominate over half of America’s federal judiciary and he whined about it. I am sorry, but screw that. That, alone, is disqualifying for a president. Reading about his complaining about this made my blood boil.
I feel a little crazy in the brain thinking so much about conservatives and the vietnam war I need to stop. I have about 600 more pages. I really want to finish this week. My next book is about aquaducts and that seems so much more calming.
Aquaducts.
Here. Have a post rock mix for today. It’s cloudy here this morning, so this works thematically. Holy Fawn is playing Wednesday at Cat’s Cradle I really wanna go. I gotta motivate. I also have a friend in town, in Durham on Wednesday. Maybe I could combine the two.
Okay! Again, hope your weekend was lovely. Talk soon!