Happy Syttende Mai! - Happy Every Day!

Today is Syttende Mai (17 May), which is the founding day of modern, constitutional Norway (officially Constitution Day).  It feels like a super-arbitrary day most everywhere in the world except, perhaps, Scandinavia and Northern Minnesota where my people hail from.

Every country has their day - as I started this post, it occurred to me that Haiti's Independence Day is January 1st (1 January 1804), the official end of the Haitian Revolution.  Starting on January 1st, I figured I would start another perpetual post* which would function as a calendar outlining founding dates of the countries of the world.  I'll start with the one's I know and think of off-hand (which is these two, plus the 4th of July^), and build from here (I'll appreciate anyone's input in the comments section!, or I'll add as I notice them going about my daily life):

January

1 - Haitian Independence Day

May

17 - Syttende Mai (Norway's Constitution Day)

July

1 - Somalia's Independence Day

1 - Canada Day (formerly Dominion Day until 1982 - which sounds much more bad-ass, Canada and you may want to consider switching back)**

4 - United States of America's Independence Day

September

16 - Mexican Independence Day (Celebration of the Mexican War of Independence with this date marking the start of the Hidalgo Revolt in 1810)

December

1 - Romania's Great Union Day (marking the 1918 unification of Transylvania, Bessarabia, Bukovina & The Romanian Kingdom)

* a perpetual post is one on Roman Numeral J that gets updated over the course of months & years, and may never truly be finished, but is a work in progress toward some declared end goal (e.g. the Lost Last Fives, the Vodka Ranking, and the Star Trek Chronology).

^July 4th feels significant - until you spend an American Independence Day outside of the United States.  America does a pretty good job of lampooning itself most of the time, but that's nothing until you experience a bunch of people from all over the world throwing you and your American friends a party that is heavily sarcastic (and always features a sparkler, which i think is the only firework that is partly legal in most sensible countries)

** it's a small sample size thus far, but on discovering that both Canada Day & Somalia's Independence Day both occur on the same day, I wonder if we will come to discover that a disproportionate amount of founding days will be on the first of the month.  Like the start of a month feels like a good 'reset button' when you're starting up a new country (as opposed to most countries "happening" on some random date).

"do you like puzzles?"

As the Great Quarantine of 2020 was about to get underway, my brilliant wife bought a jigsaw puzzle on a whim during a Target run (back when Target runs felt normal and less like "missions").

Her choice of images on that (first, as it turned out) puzzle was absurd - and also perfect, as it turned out.  Killer whales, a diverse underwater scene along with a sky full of skies and fireworks and two sailing (pirate, right, they've got to be pirates) ships passing by a coastline lit by a rising full moon.

Some years ago, JP asked me the simple question: "Do you like puzzles?"

My mind went straight to jigsaw puzzles, and, never having been too fond of them (or probably never completing one beyond the toy versions of 10 or 50 or 100 pieces of my youth), I told JP, "not really."

He was disappointed, I could see it - and shortly thereafter, I discovered why.  JP had created an elaborate and immersive experience for us in our home and neighborhood.  It started with a message - I think it was a long letter, and contained the name (an old-timey name, which i do not recall) of an early code (16th or 17th Century?) written in letters from a prisoner.

Using this code, we discovered a message: Tippecanoe ISBN 9780452275003 with each number spelled out fully (or some number, which led me to the book Zombie, by Joyce Carol Oates).  This brought the search to a temporary stand-still, because Tippecanoe is the name of my neighborhood, and I happened to own the book in question (i suspect JP may not have realized this, or was increasing the challenge).  At the same time, we had begun to discover a number of odd items around our house - a plastic pencil sharpener & a Bierdeckel that we weren't familiar with.

Once I had solved it (perhaps with a hint!), i went to our local library (the Tippecanoe branch!), and pulled their copy of Oates' novel from the shelves.  Slipped under the cover, was a receipt - a Walgreen's Photo receipt, which was pre-paid.  I took it to our local Walgreen's, and turned it over for a roll of photos - 24 (remember when pics came in sets of 24!?) pictures of items that had been hidden around our house.

And so it goes... I do love puzzles.  I love to play the game, and the total immersion game - where you literally walk around the earth and un-earth it is the ultimate iteration.  Jason Segel has created for us - i think in part from his own struggle - Dispatches from Elsewhere, which at its core is an immersive game experience.  Dispatches is a team game, and a game played outside in the world.  It unlocks a narrative, and you get to choose how deeply you want to play (just dancing with Bigfoot & along for the ride or taking the deeper game behind the game approach that our heroes take).

I was a late adopter of Myst but loved puzzling through it once i had discovered it after starting college.  But i wasn't able to defeat it (not in the Arfives*!), because many of the puzzles in the game are ones that require patience.  My preference for a long time had been the "riddle of the sphinx" type game where a lot of folks had perished at it, but once you came to the answer it was immediate.

As i become old (or perhaps as we are becoming more familiar with the art of passing time, because we're in quarantine!), I have come to appreciate the slow boil puzzles.  Nick Bantock was an author who I adore(d^), and read most of his work in the early Aughts.  Among the collection of books I owned was The Egyptian Jukebox, which was one i had never finished.  It's described as "A Conundrum" on the cover, and it's as beautiful as all of Bantock's works, but one meant to be worked at.

As we have now started here at home on our 4th puzzle, I have become comfortable with the idea that yes, indeed, i do like puzzles and the satisfaction of completion that goes with them.  Jigsaw puzzles are fine, but I enjoy even more immersive the better... 

On another visit to Milwaukee, JP left at our house a deck of cards, and some mode of giving us a specific sequence of cards.  Each of the cards had a small hole poked in it, and there was one outlier card, which had (i think random) letters over all of it.  With the sequence, we were able to decode the following message:

"At the centroid of _________, _____________, ____________ in the sculpture in park."  The blanks were three locations in Milwaukee, and at their centroid was a park in the 5th Ward.  I Bublr biked there one day on a lunch break, and tucked in to the sculpture in a park was an envelope with a gift card to Milwaukee's Public Market that JP had hidden there a week earlier.

Magical.

I don't think Dispatches from Elsewhere could have come out at a better time in history.  While the scenes of sitting in diners, or large gatherings in public parks or old timey theaters feels a bit like porn just now, it's more fringy questioning at the corners of reality that I think is so vital.  Was that all just a game, as the end party contends, or is there something real that the game is a cover for.  The concept / device isn't new (see 1997's The Game or 2018's Game Night), but the idea feels important now, whereas it might earlier have seemed merely fun - a welcome distraction - a bit of whimsy.

As we all going to be re-evaluating (sooner or later) the structures of the systems in place that surround our lives, I would like to recommend that we create some space and some infrastructure for these kinds of immersive experiences, either irl or virtually, a la Ready Player One or "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale".  I'm talking about a major company or companies that begin to work on this.  It will be the next Facebook - i am quite sure of it...

is this what you were picturing? (Source: Amazon.com)

* this is also a time to consider the place of video games (as opposed to other games) in the Arfives, which I have never really included in my listings, because to complete a video game I have always felt that i had to "beat it".  Unfortunately, I've never been all that good at video games and also not very diligent, so it's possible that i've never in all my life actually completed a game (actually, I do distinctly remember defeating Contra - after using the upUpDownDown... trick).  I may revise this going forward.

^ I would like to contend, that we no longer should be held to a standard of loving everything today that we once loved in our past, and yet at the same time need to couch that love in a past-time-i-ness...  I loved Nick Bantock's works for a time in my life, and while i don't find them as compelling today, we should embrace the moments that we loved things... unconditionally. 

Play Ya' Charactah'

All the worlds a stage... 

In my case (and the case of most recovering academics and definitely most bloggers!) that world is more like a podcast studio (and not like a nice one, rather one where one of the participants is sitting on a bed, which is next to an IKEA desk which is also "the board")...

 My DM (and yes, as an old person i urban dictionaried that to make sure i wasn't going to sound too stupid - turns out it's #5!) is a young fella, DM Steve, and as a young white man he has a lot of opinions (as i did {and do!} when i was/am a young white man).

...Among these [is] that Star Trek: Picard is not truly a Star Trek show.  His premise is (i've been taught that the best way to argue is to first state your opponents case as well as they could have ever said it so they can only say, "i agree with that") that Picard isn't Star Trek...  It lacks Gene Roddenberry's foundational vision that the future is bright and the human project (for early Star Trek read that as the American Project) is optimistic.  DM Steve pointed to the fact the Raffi, the only major black (and female) character we've met (or seemingly will meet) lives in a trailer after her Star Fleet career has (been) ended, because she was Picard's right hand and he decided to quit.

Furthermore, the inclusion of swears is highly un-Star Trek (notable fanFeeds notwithstanding).  DM Steve contends that the new show may be quality sci-fi (tho as yet that is to be determined), but it is decidedly not a part of the Star Trek universe, because it doesn't adhere to the defining vision...

The story of Star Trek (production-wise) is complicated and varied.  When The Original Series (TOS) was on TV, it was struggling for continued existence and was limited by the constraints of its era as a monster-of-the-week series with minimal character development.  As a result, every problem was wrapped up by the end of the hour.  TOS had just one single two-part episode in its three year run...

Thus, it wasn't until the movies (and really not until the second - The Wrath of Khan) where any problem - with a monster of the week; or with the larger world (er, galaxy) - had real stakes.  The Wrath of Khan ends in a victory, but it is partial, and at great cost (sorry, Spock!). 

When The Next Generation (TNG) came about, it also began as a monster-of-the week series.  Through its run of seven seasons there were 9 two-parters, but only one before the end of season 3 (and that was the series premiere, where both episodes aired on the same evening).

As TNG came in to its own, it started to venture away from the straight "one episode, one new problem" formula, and explore recurring conflicts in the larger world.  First external, like Q, the Ferengi, the Crystalline Entity - but TNG also started to explore the concept that Star Fleet - the human institution at the core of the entire Star Trek Universe - was perhaps not infallible.  I think first with "The Measure of a Man" where Star Fleet sanctions reclassifying Data, a graduate of their academy, as property.

More importantly, as the series progressed, was the relationship with the Borg - and particularly how Picard deals with them (and particularly the changes in his behavior after his assimilation).  The Borg are the perfect test case - an enemy so heinous that any action to thwart would be justified.  When Picard has the opportunity in Season 5's "I, Borg" episode to infect the Borg with what might constitute a genocidal pandemic he plans to use it right up until the last minute when he is swayed to take another course.

Picard's moral dilemma (much like his rampant revenge motive throughout much of First Contact, the best of the Next Gen films) is what makes it Star Trek.  Roddenberry's vision was one of a future that had achieved much - an optimistic outlook to answer the dystopian imagining that makes up most science fiction.  But the Star Trek universe is not a utopia.  It is utopian in its ideals, but that work (like our work) is an ongoing project, toward betterment.

In Star Trek: Picard, there is a clear moral balance - "good guys" and "bad guys" (some are what we expect - e.g. Romulans bad | but some teams aren't matching our expectations - e.g. Borg, Star Fleet, or androids).  What's unfamiliar about it is the pace - i expect that by the end of Season 1 we will have resolution of the moral order and clarity and what has gone wrong.  It's a season-long episode, and good will triumph in the end (though perhaps just a partial victory).

The world of Star Trek isn't achieved.  Even at its origin (whether that's TOS, Enterprise, Zefram Cochrane or even the Kelvin Universe reboot), the utopian ideal was a work in process.  And a core value of the world is betterment.  There were cracks in Star Fleet in The Undiscovered Country, TNG and DS9.  Too long resting on its laurels assuming it was good because it was Star Fleet.  In Insurrection, the corrosive corruption had taken full hold, and 10 years later when Mars is destroyed (by whom, we're not quite sure yet - though it sure seems it wasn't the synths), it has taken full hold... Selfish protectionism and the path of the human project seemingly lost...

Call to Order

The March 2020 meeting of the Commune starts in 20 minutes...  (as a reminder, first Friday of each month 6pm - 8pm CT).

Please feel free to text me with any new business, or we can use the comments section...

Let me know if we need to set up a group chat or anything...

Jalapeño Serioso

We ate last night (for about the 500th time) at Jalapeño Loco - hands down the best Mexican restaurant in Milwaukee.  Just north of the airport (5067 S. Howell Avenue), it looks from the street like a place you'd pass by, but inside it's cozy, particularly on the bar side (best option if you're two or one is the bar, which is friendly and plenty of space for food).

Order the High Taste Margarita while you consider your menu options.  It is a superior concoction made with the Sauza Conmemorativo.  The house and gold versions are fine - and there are flavors if that's your speed, but if you don't go high taste you're selling yourself short. 

The reason there are so few great Mexican restaurants is finding a balance of a great margarita with exceptional authentic food.  Jalapeño Loco (or "Jalapanoes" {hard 'J'} as my in-laws fondly refer to it) specializes in Oaxacan cuisine, and dabble in a number of other regions of Mexico.  You really can't go wrong on their menu, although their moles are quite special and not to be missed.  The weekly specials are also generally quite good, and we frequently visit and only stay on this ever-changing list.  Last night, it was the Chalupas appetizer and Pollo Estofado and a few High Taste Margaritas. 

As we were entering last night, we were bemoaning the fact that Milwaukee doesn't have any truly upscale Mexican places, which are coming into favor in larger metros.  So we propose a new restaurant in Milwaukee - in the same vein as Jalapeño Loco (perhaps even with the exact same menu!).  I think we should call it Jalapeño Serioso, and it should probably find a location in the 3rd Ward/5th Ward fluidity.  A lofty, industrial space - if Hugo and Janet want to start it, that would be awesome (!), but if they don't want to, that's okay... your spot is a favorite already. 

But i duly submit this as a brilliant idea...

Stakes, rare...

A dozen years ago today, I started a post where i was going to (i think) review the holiday show we'd been to see a few days prior.

I have these past few years been working on a reclamation project for Roman Numeral J - finishing the "draft" posts that were never released to the public (quite a tragedy, i know).  Generally, i've tried to recapture what i remember as the original intent of the post.  (On occasion, these have been "important" RNJ contributions, really furthering the thinking and mission of this blog.  Other times, including the John Waters one).

As i watch the 4th quarter of the 200th matchup of the Bears & Packers (Anthony Miller just scored to bring them within one score), i wonder for a moment what it's all about...  Why write this?  Why post it publicly?

My answers are manifold.  I do still primarily consider myself a writer.  And a thinker.  Success in this capacity is nebulous for me.  Or any capacity, really.  I write because i enjoy it.  I write because i value the ability to look back at how my thinking has changed over time.  I write to commit myself to the thoughts i thought at a certain time.  (Our era is one of self revisionist thinking - where we can pretend we always knew the things we now know.  The era of truthiness is all around us). 

Happy Christmas to all of y'all.

i get it now!

I have been re-watching the Star Wars saga chronologically in preparation for Episode IX.  I've reached, at long last, The Last Jedi (Die Letzten Jedi, as i like to refer to it, to show that it's plural!) and have been watching all of the Forces of Destiny shorts in order as well as a few of the other ephemera.

So far, i have read several of the comics and working my way through a few novels that are now considered "canon".  Of course, i have throughout my days read some of the Star Wars universe literature (Timothy Zahn's trilogy, Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina, and Splinter of the Mind's Eye), now all disavowed.  But now i plan to make a slow crawl through this new canon.

Source: funko.com

I promise not to drag it out here and bore you all with an epic play-by-play (as i have been guilty of for some other sci fi universes...), but the pop-cultural mass-production machine has put a mythology together which is vast and rich.  They will spend the next decade exploring it in upcoming tv shows and a new trilogy and more Star Wars Stories (i expect)...

With this third trilogy about to finish its arc (as well as put a closing argument on the entire nonology), I think it's worth noticing both how each trilogy was a set of its time, but the themes of the entire story are timeless and timely.

Much attention has been paid to Kylo Ren's line about "killing your past to become who you were meant to be".  I think this has been read largely as a millennial claim of the future (from the hands of the likes of, say, Boomers like Kylo's annoying dad and his former teacher).  While this trilogy does serve to pass the torch to a new generation, it's also a reminder to us all to leave behind the vestiges of the prior generations that would hold us back in our whole new world.

Kylo's request of Rey (implicitly at this moment and explicitly later) to join him and join the existing corporate power structure {aka "The Dark Side"} and help him overtake it) is one of multiple poles in the power nexus in this galaxy far far away (and so too ours as well).  We will call this particular position the Zuckerberg Lane, a young upstart acquiring a vast amount of power while the primary great powers of government (The Empire & The Rebellion) are focused on consolidating their own power against each other.  

Another "power pole" (i don't love this term...) that explicitly states its case in The Last Jedi is when force ghost Yoda says to Luke that "we are what they grow beyond.  That is the true burden of all masters."  This is an acknowledgement of the idea that our next generation not only will be our betters, but must be.  It's a radical acknowledgement - and one that used to be inherent, unspoken.  When we look back, we (the "now people") look better, smarter, more intellectually sophisticated compared to our ancestors.  This doesn't mean we don't honor them and appreciate them, it's just a different stance from blind fealty.

It's easy to think of the Jedi (current and former) as a bloc of good - all light side, all the time - but I think they more closely resemble something like, say, "Democrats".  Sure, they mostly do good things most of the time and are generally on the right side of history, but in order for them to truly have power we also have to accept the Joe Manchins and John Bel Edwards who may think some things we don't want them to sometimes, but also mostly agree that governments (Galactic Senates or domestic ones) can do some good.  As a bloc, they have also accepted some evils (whether those be Southern Segregationists or an Imperial Clone Army), but those are products of historic naiveté, and must be accepted within its historical context in order to build the movement, n'est-ce pas?

Yoda's line about passing history on to your progenitors is fundamental to a progressive perspective of history.  Each generation must both believe itself to be the best, most enlightened, best suited to move history forward, and also willing to let the next generation be better than they were once their time has passed.  

This is the era we now inhabit, where our "resistance establishment' (pro-Biden Democrats - also perhaps Deval Patrick's constituency) is struggling to make arguments against The First Order (the Tea Party ==> the Trump Party), but hand wringing and hemming and hawing at the radical approach Democrats who want to let the system crumble and build it up new (here Yoda and Luke are played by, I guess Bernie and Warren?? - I think this all ultimately will come to mean that Rey is AOC & Stacy Abrams wrapped in to one, and we will pass the keys on to them soon enough...).

This closing trilogy of the Skywalker Epic is unfolding in tumultuous political times not just here in the US, but globally.  Trumpian politics are dripping even in the first installment in 2015 with the First Order taking out a vast portion of the inner planetary systems and the existing establishment politics.  "Draining the Swamp" as it were.  

The Prequels began in a pre-9-11 moment, and the world they introduce us to in the first installment, it's a dreamy vision of the always better erstwhile.  The Phantom Menace's Coruscant (and even moreso Naboo) are an idyllic past to the familiar worlds we knew from the original trilogy.  While there is a nod to Clinton-Era political squabbles and self-dealing, the world is an "OK, Boomer" dream status that will never be revived. 

It's the middle trilogy, the original set, that comes from an era of our world when they didn't know yet what they were really all about.  It's a big part of why the themes of the movies are so general and mythological.  The trilogy knows it's about struggle, but what that struggle is wasn't clear until much later.  1977 - 1985 was just at the start of the Era of Inequity that we live in now.

This is the struggle of our era - it's the fight of our lives.  We will see what the Rise of Skywalker has to say about it in a month's time.  And then, let's see what we do next in 2020 in our own response.

*      *       *

17 December 2019

Watching Star Wars: Behind Closed Doors from REELZ (is that a thing?), and the clarity of misunderstanding of the prequels is made clear.  A lot of the critique of the prequels is couched in storytelling - i.e. the original trilogy made the battle versus good and evil the main point, but the prequels are so bureaucratic, administrative and political.   The new trilogy has been exciting and modern and definitely better than those pesky prequels.  It's a fair argument, but i think is the argument for what i said above.

The simple way to say this is (unfortunately) that people were simpler.  But it's not just that.  The more important function of (American) history is that the era of the prequels (1999 - 2005) was an empty era (i know, i know - 9/11 happened then, but 9/11 is a logical conclusion of the 1970s/80s Islamic Terrorism that we ignored for most of the 80s and 90s).

Politically, and culturally, it's a kind of boring time.  1999 was a kick-ass year for movies, and the era of prestige tv was about to begin (or maybe did, i don't have exact dates), but it was sort of easy politically.  [NOT HISTORICALLY by the way!!!  Bush v. Gore, then 9/11, then re-electing the (up to then) dumbest person we had elected president.  And culturally, the technological superfuture was still sorta basic. 

My argument basically is that folks watching the original trilogy needy clarity (good vs. evil, dark v. light) because they'd just come out of Vietnam, Watergate, hippie reclamation, etc.  The prequels came out when it was only just becoming clear that all of the powers that be (Republicans and Democrats and large corporations and big tech {whatever that might be!} and all of it were aligning against actual regular people who weren't already rich and had maybe just trusted the hangover of the New Deal to carry them through to retirement could just start to grasp that everything was conspiring against us, the regular people.

I think in this context the prequels read amazingly well.  They are prescient, not just of Anakin's turn to the dark side, but of a vast chunk of America - first in the re-election of a war criminal president, and then later in the historic and wonderful and also par-for-the-course election of Barack Obama who governed as a Compassionate Centrist (and i love him dearly and what he accomplished, but by the time The Force Awakens comes out it is clear we are off the rails and are going to elect someone for our times like either Donald J. Trump {or Bernie!}.