Motley Kamuka

Listening to Ezra Klein show  interview of Kingsolver. Barbara Kingsolver  (b 1955) grew up on the border of Appalachia in Kentucky. She went to Congo in 2nd grade. She found out she was a hillbilly when she went to college in Indiana. Now she lives in Virginia. She backpacked around Europe for a few years. She lived in Tuscon Arizona for some time. She read a book set in Appalachia and she got into Kentucky writers, and embraced her own roots. She wrote Beantrees because she owned her background. She lives close to Kentucky in Virginia. Demon Copperhead is an Appalachian story. She wanted to write the great Appalachian novel. All the views about Appalachia are just put on things. People ask her how she can live in the middle of nowhere. She feels it's somewhere, everywhere. Being part of the land is harder to tax. If you live in the city you can be taxed. The Whiskey rebellion is a war about this issue. If you look at the way rural people are mocked, it's how they're se...

The guru will present himself when you are ready. Or maybe it's you discover a movie, that is mostly irrelevant.  Dan Harmon was born in 1973 in Milwaukee Wisconsin. He went to Brown Deer High School. He went to Glendale Community College briefly, and then Marquette. He produced a comedy album with Rob Schrab. He did a pilot that wasn't picked up, and produced a Sarah Silverman special. He did 2 episodes of Yatch Rock. There are a few more obscure efforts, and in 2009 he did Community. Wikipedia is slow to update things. Harmontown came out in 2014. It's almost 9 years later. That's OK, I often listen to an opera for the first time that came out centuries ago. I read books from ages ago. We can listen to all the old art from ages back--culture is accumulating and the choices you make are huge choices. I can't help but feel I'm getting more and more sophisticated, and yet the culture isn't really coming along with me. I watch a lot of shit. I don't read ...

I'm not going to vote for any of them, so I didn't have to watch the republican debate. Only 2 candidates had the guts to say they didn't support Trump, so I guess those two were against the criminality and not so blinded by bias. And they're the only ones who should be running for president as Republicans because the others should drop out if they don't think he's guilty. Their actions betray their stated beliefs.  I'm blinded by bias. Anytime you say something against Biden, I think, that's not so bad, and it's a lot less worse than Trump. Does he have the elderly too handsy with children thing? Is he really old? Maybe. I don't even want to compare his sexual misconduct to Trump. Jimmy Carter was a man of integrity and America chose a cold hearted Reagan who put us on this horrible conservative path. But Conservatives see us put on a horrible path by Roosevelt. The democrats lost the racist vote when Roosevelt started to make inroads into justi...

Vivek Ramaswamy 's Tweet TRUTH. 1. God is real. 2. There are two genders. 3. Human flourishing requires fossil fuels. 4. Reverse racism is racism. 5. An open border is no border. 6. Parents determine the education of their children. 7. The nuclear family is the greatest form of governance known to mankind. 8. Capitalism lifts people up from poverty. 9. There are three branches of the U.S. government, not four. 10. The U.S. Constitution is the strongest guarantor of freedoms in history. I couldn’t agree: 1. God is an assumption and one of many spiritual traditions. There are non-theistic religions and non religious people. God is real psychologically in those traditions that have it, but it varies and the statement is false and vague . USA claims to be a Christian nation, but any ideology can be twisted to support any agenda, so you know. Cater to populist bird whistles of Christo-fascism is what he's doing. Ramaswamy went to Hindu temple, so if he follows his family religion he...

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) was born in the Czech Republic city of Jihlava. His mother had 14 children but only 6 survived infancy. Gustav was the second born, and the eldest surviving child. His father ran a distillery and tavern and there was a piano in the home. He took to it, and was the town wonderkind . At age 15 he went to a Vienna conservatory. He became a conductor to pay the bills. He conducted and composed, married, and asked his wife to give up her music, or helped her, depending on the narrative. They had two children and one died. He would come to New York City for a few years. He kept on the move in Europe because anti-semitism would build. His music wouldn't be played during the height of the Nazi's. He had health problems. He died in Vienna in 1911. His wife would live 53 years after his death to 1964. She married a few more times and wrote a memoir of their time together. Their surviving daughter they had became a sculptor, who was married 5 times. I was read...

Intro: This model of learning seems to work for me. Just open up a file in your brain and just keep pouring more into it. There are so many female painters, this is going to be a long post, and long in the making as I discover them. Maybe you can sort these into living and dead, and styles. There are a lot of women who paint as their artistic range, but I'm focused mostly on painters and not conceptual artists who use lots of mediums. Previous posts: Lisa Yuskavage Tamara de Lempicka : There's a musical on broadway about her ( NY Times ). As I find them female Painters: Dora Carrington (1893-1932) Emma Thompson portrays Carrington in the 1995 British biographical film Carrington , written and directed by Christopher Hampton based on the book Lytton Strachey by Michael Holroyd. She writes a moving letter to Lytton Strachey that she's going to be marrying another bloke. Painting of Strachey below. Elin Danielson-Gambogi (1861-1919) was a Finnish painter, really quite brillia...

Myanmar has various ethnic groups and one of them is the Karen (KNU). They have an independent military and they have put others on notice that they're willing to fight. ( source ) There was a military Junta in Feb. 1, 2021. They want democracy. As a force resisting the current military regime, 600k Karen have been displaced due to conflict with the regime. They wish the international forces would step in to rebuild the democracy. Corruption with Chinese crime syndicates is a problem. The KNU operates almost as a government within a government, with its own bureaucratic center. "There are more than 1.2 million people under KNU administration, which oversees vital services such as health, education, agriculture, forestry and transport as well as dealing with humanitarian emergencies alongside military affairs." Burma was ruled by Great Britain, and they gained independence in 1948. It is bordered by Bangladesh and India to its northwest, China to its northeast, Laos and Th...

De Santi's culture wars ape government overreach in an attempt to avoid real interventions against gun violence, and health care with distracting nonsense that is crafted to mobilize his base. "I don't like government," as they drive on roads created by the government, get trash hauled away by the government, deposit their social security checks in the FDIC protected bank accounts. "I don't like government" as they meddle with Disney, tell teachers what they can teach. Luckily Ohio didn't fall for Ohio's nonsense attempt to try and block democracy. ( twitter )  I'm going to deadname X because while it's wrong to deadname for individuals, and it's wrong for Elon Musk to do it against his own child, I think it is deserved for a corporation that has basically wrecked the best method for following soccer news, and spreading information. That is why he's wrecking it and opened it up to far right wingnuts. He's suing a watch group t...

Fisk is another cringe comedy, the struggle between authenticity and assimilating. Kitty Flanagan is the star of the show as Helen Tudor-Fisk, a recently divorced woman who's also been fired, and switches to probate law in Australia. There are many odd scenarios, clients who want to use the execution of a will to extort weird things, like getting your brother to have a vasectomy, and penis paintings. Or clients who steal things constantly. She gets banned from the downstairs coffee shops, and kicked out of an Airbnb. Her father is a famous judge, and he recently left his wife for a man. Everyone is oddly controlling and works to manipulate their agendas with extreme vigor.  It starts out with a skit about her trying to get work, and someone doesn't notice she's there because she's in a brown suit.  One phrases I like is, "and all my friends beyond the binary" said after ladies and gentlemen. I hadn't heard that one. The webmaster is "pansexual"....

I don't like the the most watched movie on Netflix has guns in it. When are we going to not be so fascinated by violence? I don't like that NY Post amplifies Trump's nonsense toware Rapinoe. Cheering against the national team is what he's all about, splitting America into groups of hate.  I do like watching Keith Jarrett listen to Solaris.  Watching my daughter do her balloon dances.

  This is a good book. I meet people who ask you how to pick books. This one has a huge reading list at the end that I am temped to upload. But she also helps me to understand Nabokov so I am better able to appreciate him and why I would want to read him and his limits. There are some memoirs she writes about I feel compelled to read. I want to read Nabokov and Hong Kingston so far.  Some of them I've read. Some I'm not as interested.  I think my first draft is all tell and no show, this is about my 5th try at writing my memoir. I'm going to try and finish it, and then I can rewrite it to death.  This is a rich book, and I particularly liked Chapter 14 about false voicing and finding her own voice. She usually has short chapters, like Chapter 16 "The Road to hell is paved with exaggeration." I believe that. When I was supervisor in child welfare, and had to edit workers writing, I always crossed out the "very". There is also good editing and knowing when...

The day started with an excellent article about Lisa Yuskavage in the New Yorker . Click on the link of her name, to look at her paintings.  John Currin is mentioned. It also got me looking at  The Painter's Studio ,  The Garden of earthly delight ,  Sacred Conversation . I could look at these paintings quite a lot. I zoom in and out.  The New York Times profile linked below states that she liked Duchamp's  Étant donnés . I wrote about her on my mental health blog . New Yorker: "Nothing irritates Yuskavage as much as the suggestion that she is producing what her husband calls “stroke material for the patriarchy,” because that’s what buyers want." “Yes, there are boobs everywhere, but it’s actually so unbelievably not about boobs,” James Rondeau, the director of the Art Institute of Chicago, told me. (During Rondeau’s tenure, the Institute has added four Yuskavage paintings to its collection, three of which are boob-free.) “It’s more like, you’ve got to ha...

"When Pence would not fraudulently alter the election results, Trump whipped up the crowd he had gathered in Washington, D.C., against Pence and then, according to the indictment, “attempted to exploit the violence and chaos at the Capitol” to overturn the election results. “As violence ensued,” the indictment reads, Trump and his co-conspirators “explained the disruption by redoubling efforts to levy false claims of election fraud and convince Members of Congress to further delay the certification based on those claims.” On the evening of January 6, 2021, the indictment alleges, Trump and Co-Conspirator 1 called seven senators and one representative and asked them to delay the certification of Biden’s election." Reading Hannah Cox Richardson's post about the indictment, every paragraph is harrowing to a patriot. " The indictment is what’s known as a “speaking indictment,” one that explains the alleged crimes to the public. It undercuts Trump loyalists’ insistence t...

July Music August 1st: Little Feat.  Lowell George  (1945–1979) is the central figure, who died in 1979 at the age of 34.  Born in Hollywood California was the son of a furrier, who raised chinchillas. He played the flute in the Hollywood High School marching band. He liked jazz. He worked at a gas station when he graduated from high school, and studied art history at Los Angeles Valley College. He played in Zappa's Mother of Invention.  Little Feat 's first album came out in 1971. Little Feat came out with 8 albums with George alive. They have 9 albums since George died, they reformed and went on 9 years after his death and still perform. "George led an overindulgent lifestyle of binge eating, alcoholism and speedballs (heroin and cocaine mixed together), and he became morbidly obese in the last years of his life, weighing 308 pounds (140 kg/22 stone)." He died of a heart attack on tour in Arlington Virginia.  According to Fred Tackett, "We were driving down th...