The Oxy Epidemic Shows What Happens When Addictive Drugs Are Easily Available | Mother Jones

~ Mark

It’s easy to favor drug legalization when you’re middle-class and well educated. Your social group probably doesn’t include many people who abuse drugs much in the first place. Moderate users can afford their habit. And when their use turns into addiction, they usually have a strong support network to help out. It’s a problem, but not a huge one. In poor communities, none of this is true. Drug addiction is financially ruinous. It often leads to petty crime. Support systems are nonexistent. The justice system is harsh. There are no rehab centers on the Malibu coast to help out. Drug epidemics — Oxy, meth, heroin, you name it — are devastating. It’s something to keep in mind when you consider both the costs and benefits of drug legalization. Ending the war on drugs would indeed be a huge benefit, but the costs might be higher than you think.

The Oxy Epidemic Shows What Happens When Addictive Drugs Are Easily Available | Mother Jones

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

~ Mark

Star Wars: The Force Awakens. I had fun, and quickly forgot it. It mostly felt good to be watching a Star Wars movie again. If you’re pretty sure you don’t care about Star Wars in general, this movie will not convince you otherwise. If you do, you will probably leave feeling satisfied, depending on how you like your ratio of pandering nostalgia vs. breaking new ground. The hat-tips and references to previous movies wore thin pretty quickly and for me slowed down what otherwise has some nice momentum. Definitely some groaners, though (for example, the snowy mountain Nazi castle…). I really like Ridley and Chiyoga as the new faces. Isaac is always reliable. I feel like in a few months or maybe not until VIII we’ll look back and admit “Hey, VII is pretty thin but it’s not a total trainwreck and that’s okay”. Ranking the best episode 7’s in 2015:

  1. Creed, by a landslide.
  2. Furious 7
  3. The Force Awakens
~ Mark

To discard the stuff we’ve acquired is to murder the version of ourselves we envision using it.

Laura Miller in Marie Kondo Will Help You Tidy Your House, Embrace Your Mortality. Cleaning up is hard to do, y’all.

The piles of stuff we might need someday are an argument that we will always be around to need them. The plans to revisit those photos and take up again that course of study, the books we fully intend to finally read assure us that there will be enough time to do so. Mementos presume the ongoing existence of a rememberer. Yes, all of that is a lie, but it’s a necessary lie. And all the joy in the world can’t really compensate for having to let that go.

Cf. “Our unlived lives…”

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith

~ Mark

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. I don’t know how you could watch the prequels and pick anyone other than Obi-Wan Kenobi as the coolest guy in the galaxy. I also appreciate that it undercuts the Jedi a bit. They are powerful and try to do some good, but they mess up a lot. I really dig the psychological battles and manipulation in this one. Great stuff. While Christensen is not a good actor, I buy into his tortured melodrama because I believe in Darth Vader’s arc. You’ll forgive a lot if the story is worth believing in. Would have loved more of that. Meanwhile, who the hell is General Grievous? (Know what’s cooler than two light sabers? Four light sabers!) Yeesh. Better than the other two prequels, I think, and a good way to close things out.

Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones

~ Mark

Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones. One of my major complaints of the prequels is that everything looks so nice, and nothing really feels lived in. Very true in this one. I like that we get to hang out with Obi-Wan so much, doing private eye stuff, chasing down assassins. Overstuffed and scattered, though, and there’s just no way that Anakin & Padme fall in love. Teen Anakin is a nightmare. While I don’t see him in that relationship, I can start to feel for him here, just tragicomically buffeted by his emotions, absolutely at their mercy. The soundtrack is in peak form here, too.

Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace

~ Mark

Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Maybe it’s just that time has washed away the hurt and shattered expectations of 1999, but my thoughts after a second viewing:

If I learned anything from STAR WARS it’s to let go of hate and stuff and I realized episode 1 is kinda campy and charming on second watch?

The story is blah, the writing and acting is blah. But yet, I don’t regret watching it again. I love how every setting is packed with goofy species and local details, every cityscape is full of air traffic. If there is any saving grace, it is the soundtrack – the best part of all of the prequels.

~ Mark

You don’t realize how much of your sense of self is bound up in how you use your time until you have a lot of it.

Max Read in Milling Time.

New year, new you? Forget it

~ Mark

Behind the seductive lure of “New Year, New You” lies another kind of mistake, too: the idea that what we require, in order finally to change, is one last push of willpower. (Presumably, the hope is that the “January feeling” of fresh starts and clean slates will provide it.) The assumption is that you’re a bit like a heavy rock, poised on a hill above the Valley of Achievement, Productivity and Clean Eating. All you need is a concerted push to get you rolling.

Filed under: my really good resolutions tag.

New year, new you? Forget it

~ Mark

If you’re 30% through your life, you’re likely 90% through your best relationships. Some really great visuals in this one – how many books you might read, how many times you might go swimming – and then it comes to this:

I’ve been thinking about my parents, who are in their mid-60s. During my first 18 years, I spent some time with my parents during at least 90% of my days. But since heading off to college and then later moving out of Boston, I’ve probably seen them an average of only five times a year each, for an average of maybe two days each time. 10 days a year. About 3% of the days I spent with them each year of my childhood. Being in their mid-60s, let’s continue to be super optimistic and say I’m one of the incredibly lucky people to have both parents alive into my 60s. That would give us about 30 more years of coexistence. If the 10 days a year thing holds, that’s 300 days left to hang with mom and dad. Less time than I spent with them in any one of my 18 childhood years.

Damn.

~ Mark

austinkleon:

Ellsworth Kelly, Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance I—VIII

From The Philadelphia Museum of Art:

While in Paris between 1948 and 1954, Ellsworth Kelly explored many new artistic strategies. Seeking to abandon figuration for abstraction, in 1950 he seized upon the randomness of collage made of cut-up pieces of his drawings. In a further effort to remove any semblance of a figurative image from his work, the next year he arranged collaged elements by chance on the systematic form of the grid. The fortuitous discovery in a Paris stationery shop of a stock of gummed papers in twenty colors led to eight collages entitled Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance; the present composition is the first in the series. With a method both systematic and random, Kelly took the small squares of colored paper and arranged them quickly and intuitively on the grid, as if by chance, using no system or scientific method except to proceed progressively from the grid’s lateral sides toward the center. As a result of Kelly’s instinctive and playful method of composing, try as one might, there is no scheme or pattern to discover in the arrangement of the colors in this vibrant collage. Innis Howe Shoemaker, from Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections, 2009.

From an interview at the Tate Museum:

Christoph Grunenberg: Did you use a mathematical system with the early works?

Ellsworth Kelly: It was a chance system for the placement of colours on a grid. Numbered slips of paper each referred to a colour, one of eighteen different hues to be placed on a grid 40 inches by 40 inches. Each of the eight collages used a different process.

Christoph Grunenberg: Did you make conscious references in the arrangement of these works to the aesthetics of the colour chart?

Ellsworth Kelly: I never thought of colour charts at all when I was working on them. They were really an experiment. I wanted to show how any colour goes with any other colour. Above all, I wanted to learn about colour relationships. Many of the works of this period start from chance encounters, such as shadows on a staircase, the reflections of the sun on the River Seine and the exposed sides of buildings that showed the abstract black patterns where the chimneys had been. After the experiments with arranging colours by chance came my first works using the actual colour spectrum as a source (Spectrum I, 1953).

via Socks. Filed under: Ellsworth Kelly, color

I really love these. Pixel art before pixels were a thing.

The Man Who Knew Too Much

~ Mark

I read GK Chesterton’s story collection The Man Who Knew Too Much, and it was a lifesaver. I picked this book on instinct right before I took off on a flight. When I was doing my final packing the morning of my trip, none of the books on my nightstand felt right. All the books at the airport looked dumb. It was a crisis. Then I remembered Project Gutenberg. I skimmed through some of the top/popular lists, clicked on some names I recognized, and a few seconds later I had a handful of options ready for travel. A good collection of fun, cynical mysteries, usually with some laconic or mordant humor. There’s usually some corruption at the heart of things. If you ever find yourself in a pinch, Gutenberg has you covered.

~ Mark

BLDGBLOG: Ghost Streets of Los Angeles.

I love the idea that the buildings seen here take their form from a lost street—that an old throughway since scrubbed from the surface of Los Angeles has reappeared in the form of contemporary architectural space. That is, someone’s living room is actually shaped the way it is not because of something peculiar to architectural history, but because of a ghost street, or the wall of perhaps your very own bedroom takes its angle from a right of way that, for whatever reason, long ago disappeared.

Chi-Raq

~ Mark

Chi-Raq. This one made me wonder if other movies are even trying to be interesting. Some parts I didn’t love, some I actively kinda disliked, but man there’s so much good stuff. So many different moods and shifts. It’s a little bit of a mess but I’d much rather feel that investment, alternately cackling with pleasure and rolling my eyes, than settle for a placid, sated indifference for two hours.

Equilateral

~ Mark

I read Ken Kalfus’ Equilateral, and thought it was worthwhile. A 19th century engineer coordinates the construction of a giant continent-spanning triangle built as a signal to Martian civilization. There’s a faint kinship with Euphoria (which I loved), in its blending the romance, science, and exploration.

Creed

~ Mark

Creed. Loved it. Loooooooooooved it. I’d put it up there with the original. Jordan and Thompson leads radiate young beautiful blackness. There’s nothing new in the plotting of their story, but I love how they grow together. They each have their own thing cooking, neither one gives it up, and they find a way to show up for each other. Stallone – and I love how these movies can’t help but be autobiographical – is solid, that ideal Balboa mix of tough and noble and vulnerable. Interesting naming of Jordan’s lead. I was thinking Adonis complex, but rather than driven by misperceived appearance, it’s a deeper shame from ancestry, or maybe even just existing in the first place. Also ties in with rebirth pattern you see in the myths: the son and the franchise. Love the camera tracking in the first big fight, and its willingness in calmer scenes to sit back and bit and not shove faces in your, uh, face. Also dig the fun details like the stat cards for rival boxers. Why not? Even the triumphantly corny moment with the biker kids taps into something so local and specific you can’t argue with it. I was ready to fight. One of my favorites this year.

~ Mark

I started using Day One last fall. Today makes 365 consecutive days with at least one entry, most with several sets of notes and a photo or two. Think I might get those 600-something pages printed and bound and read everything I forgot. I guess I could have been putting this on paper all along, but y’know, whatever helps you build the habit…