Words Fail Me

Topology

Posted on April 6, 2018 by d4vid

Coming down the mountain from Cloudcroft, looking back at the Lincoln National Forest. I always think of New Mexico as a flat desert, but it the north has beautiful pine forested mountains.

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Apple

Posted on April 6, 2018 by d4vid

Kill it! Kill it with fire! Or, sweet heaven, will that only make it more deadly by making it more delicious???

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Covenant

Posted on April 5, 2018 by d4vid

Visited White Sands National Monument. Sand. As far as the eye could see. I let the grains slip through my fingers as if I had lifted them from the Ark of the Covenant.

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Highway

Posted on April 5, 2018 by d4vid

Coming down the U.S. Route 70 out of the Mescalero Apache Reservation, looking out at the White Sands and the San Andres Mountains beyond.

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Visited Roswell’s International UFO Museum & Research Library.Um.Nice mural.Kind of an adorable design, really.Okay, now we’re getting to the crazy stuff.“Head Rest.” Clearly.Fox Mulder would be cringing at this point.This looks like one of those “There are 7 mistakes in this picture. Can you find them all?” puzzles in a kid’s magazine.With everything about this phenomenon, I’m more interested in the art that in inspires rather than the “science.”An atomic clock. Sort of. (Cool trinitite, though.)A whole corner devoted just to Star Wars. We nerds are predictable lot.

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Containment

Posted on April 5, 2018 by d4vid

What do they have locked up in the Roswell Correctional Center? For the love of God, what do they have locked up?

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Rewrite

Posted on April 4, 2018 by d4vid

When my friends & coworkers at DreamWorks tried to create the animation pipeline for Oriental DreamWorks, we went with a “line-one rewrite” of the entire pipeline. We wrote everything, from the first line of bash, from scratch.

I regret this.

As in biology, adaptation & evolution accrete a lot of indecipherable cruft over the years. An engineer’s impulse is to clean everything up by starting over. But by doing this, tons of subtle utility and patches for (sometimes obscure) edge cases are lost. Not to mention how angry some people get.

I’m a big fan of Lawrence Lessig and reading his book Republic, Lost I instinctively agreed that we may need to call for a second constitutional convention. Sort of “Fuck it, America, let’s just start over.”

I no longer agree with that.

It’s telling (and worrisome) that some of the groups most enthusiastic about a new constitutional convention are far-right and neo-Nazi groups. They don’t care who gets hurt as long as their ideals get codified. The risk inherent in that sort of Maoist disregard for the human cost isn’t something that America should be comfortable with (despite Jefferson’s assertion that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”) The Founding Fathers were, in many ways, assholes. But they were clever. The U.S. Constitution is imperfect but, like an infinite game, has mechanisms for self-editing.

I am now of the belief that we should try and fix what we’ve got before throwing everything out and starting over.

Better evolution than revolution.

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Delight & Melancholy

Posted on April 4, 2018 by d4vid

Driving down a lonely New Mexico highway at dusk listening to “Wicked Game” filled me with a Lynchian sense of melancholy.

My favorite feeling is delight. But I’ve also always found a certain delight in melancholy. Not all melancholy, perhaps, but a sort of sweet melancholy that doesn’t descend into despair. Like Butter’s “beautiful sadness” speech:

Unlike Kyle, however, I get that feeling from listening to The Cure.

Posted in Artesia | Tagged #depression, #film, #meaning, #music, #tv | 1 Comment

Godrays II

Posted on April 4, 2018 by d4vid

More godrays, this time over Texas.

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Valor

Posted on April 4, 2018 by d4vid

With all the Civil War sites I’d visited on this trip—between Manassas and Gettysburg and Chickamauga and Chattanooga and Petersburg and Appomattox Courthouse—the idea that “both sides showed valor” was reiterated ad nauseum. After seeing the flag of the Confederate States of America celebrated in the Texas Capitol Building, I couldn’t stand it any more.

Valor cannot be separated from values. There is no valor in abstraction. That’s sports. If you want that, watch the Olympics. Cheer for the achievement of people from different nations. Celebrate their tenacity and will and cleverness and skill.

But if you’ve decided to pick up a weapon and kill people, you better be on the right fucking side of history.

I can, academically, appreciate the tactics and even sacrifice of the Confederacy. But I will not celebrate their valor. They fought their damnedest to commit treason in order to preserve America’s original sin of slavery. Fuck the Confederacy.

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Lone

Posted on April 4, 2018 by d4vid

Toured the Texas State Capitol building. Flanking the entrance are statues of Sam Houston (who was notably the president of the Republic of Texas and, as governor of Tennessee and then Texas, also the only person to ever be governor two different states)……and Stephen Austin. (One could argue that the stone is cold.)The have portraits of all of the Governors of Texas. But these last two. These motherfuckers.Nice to see Wendy Davis on a photoboard of legislators, though.The chamber for the state’s House of Representatives.Texas’ continuing obsession–nay, fetishization–of The Alamo is on full display.The chamber for the state’s Senate (with what was once actual working skylights.)The marble floor under the rotunda is inlaid with representations of the five flags that have flown over Texas: Spain, Mexico, Republic of Texas, Confederate States of America, and the United States of America.What was I just saying about fetishization?The office space of the capitol building was doubled in the 1990s with an underground annex built to it’s north. Here’s a shot looking back up at the capitol dome from down inside that annex.

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Lawgiver

Posted on April 3, 2018 by d4vid

I’m a big fan of the Alamo Drafthouse theaters. Apparently, each one in Austin is themed differently, Fry’s-style. The one in northern Austin near where I was staying was decorated with Planet of the Apes memorabilia, including this statue of The Lawgiver!

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Cowboys

Posted on April 1, 2018 by d4vid

Visited the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum. Where else are you going to find a room full of rolling racks with hundreds of different kinds of barb wire on display?

I understand this monumental plaster statue called End of the Trail was all but abandoned in Visalia, CA of all places until it moved to the museum in 1968.They had reconstructed a period Main St. with a church and saloon and jail and train depot.True story: the Christian elementary school I attended was so conservative that we studied McGuffey Readers just like these shown here.I’ve tried my best to comfort Abe in the past, to no avail.Even the landscaping outside the museum was impressively beautiful.