Fragments

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Elon Musk is not as complicated as many people seem to think he is, and it's also not at all surprising that the aspiring oligarchs have bent the knee.

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"Filmmaker. Born Missoula, MT. Eagle Scout." For years, this was the biography David Lynch – who died on 16 January – gave to the media.

While every local cinema screens Lynch's films, Brandywine Coffee Roasters made this coffee in tribute. It is as weird, funky and complex as it ought to be.

The quote on the bag, from Lynch's Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity

Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you've got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They're huge and abstract. And they're very beautiful.

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This Público (Portugal) report is on a group of musicians with developmental disabilities who have formed an orchestra. Beautiful stuff. It's in Portuguese but there's a translation.

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"Fiat ars—pereat mundus,” says Fascism, and, as Marinetti admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of “l’art pour l’art.” Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.

- Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction"

Fascist art glorifies surrender, it exalts mindlessness, it glamorizes death.
Such art is hardly confined to works labeled as fascist or produced under fascist governments. (To cite films only: Walt Disney's Fantasia, Busby Berkeley's The Gang's All Here, and Kubrick's 2001 also strikingly exemplify certain formal structures and themes of fascist art.)... The tastes for the monumental and for mass obeisance to the hero are common to both fascist and communist art, reflecting the view of all totalitarian regimes that art has the function of "immortalizing" its leaders and doctrines

- Susan Sontag, "Fascinating Fascism"

Sontag was writing in the 1970s. We might now add the glut of superhero films, particularly the endless Batman and The Avengers franchises, to her list of films with fascist themes. A.S. Hamrah touches on the Marvelification of American cinema, along with the loss of the American critical faculty, which has followed from the "Spielberg-Lucas reimagining of the American cinema as family entertainment" (Hamrah, "Depiction is Not Endorsement", The Earth Dies Streaming):

The studios expend enormous effort endowing this kind of lightweight, childish entertainment with heft, mostly in the form of expensive, repetitive special effects, but also in the form of pseudopolitical subtext used to mask militarized, fascistic tendencies and themes. When critics and others write think pieces about whether, say, The Last Jedi is anti-Trump or Avengers: Infinity War is about immigration or something, they are playing into the con... The actual political content of these movies lies there, in this cynical desire to leverage ambiguous, implanted meaning. The blockbusters made by the Hollywood studios reflect a period of US-sanctioned war, in which the police have been militarized at home while death and destruction (and torture) continue overseas, with no end in sight.

- A.S. Hamrah, "Remember Me on This Computer", introduction to The Earth Dies Streaming

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Sunset is an event in Dominical, near where we were staying. People come out to the beach about an hour before, sit, watch it together, then go back into town for dinner or drinks or whatever.

We went to the Nauyaca waterfall——quite a tourist destination——but got there early, so went for a swim before it got crowded.

The view from our accommodations, a glamping dome on a platform.