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Released 41 Years Ago Today

Dire Straits: Brothers In Arms (1985)

On May 13, 1985,  Dire Straits Released Their 5th Album, “Brothers in Arms.” It spent 9 weeks atop the Billboard 200 album chart, and has sold over 30 Million copies worldwide. It was also the first album to sell over 1 Million copies in CD format.

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I Could Live There

Villa Castelluccio

This Puglian Villa was completely renovated in 2021, stripped back to its essentials and recrafting the low-slung pared-back spaces in natural materials. After a period as a holiday retreat, Villa Castelluccio is back on the market offering up peace and solitude amid five acres of olive groves outside Ceglie Messapica in Puglia.

The three-bedroom bungalow still exhibits the pared-back warmth with soft tones, thick walls, local handiwork and thoughtful proportions where steady streams of light enter the home through a series of openings. At the center is a living room that leads directly into an open kitchen, where concrete countertops and sinks made by local artisans are paired with brass fittings and simple joinery. The kitchen and connected dining room form the house’s gathering point. There are two very large  bedrooms in the main building , each with an en suite bathroom, while the third bedroom studio sits a few meters away with its own shower room and secluded terrace.

More terraces extend from the house under timber pergolas, creating outdoor rooms for cooking, dining and lingering during the hotter months. A partially enclosed pool area sits deeper in the olive grove, edged by drought-tolerant gardens.

The villa is within easy reach of Ostuni, Martina Franca and both coasts, and can be yours for a hair more than $1.7M USD.


(click to embiggen)

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Relatable. So Relatable.

Photo by Tarikul Raana on Unsplash

Like many truthful things, the reply arrived housed in humor but left a terrible lingering aftertaste of regret.

I was joking, but I also wasn’t lying.

I wonder if that resonates with you: the grief of remembering the person you used to be before this sickening season began; of wondering what in the hell happened to that previous iteration of yourself?

When I think about the millions of people I’ve crossed paths with over the last decade doing this work, there is such a through line of loss. Whether it was saying goodbye to the idea of God or country or family, to a belief in the goodness of people, to their sense of optimism about the future, to relationships with people they once felt fully at home around, they have been attending a long-running funeral that never fully ends.

But of the legion of lamentations they’ve shared with me, the greater mourning I have sensed in people is the loss of their former selves.

There is a cost to enduring the unceasing storm of Constitutional crises, acts of treason, atrocities against vulnerable people, and cultic indoctrination of tens of millions of people we share a nation with.

In our earnest and valiant efforts to confront this incessant ugliness, we have been transformed, and often not for the better. Oh, sure, these days have helped us clarify our convictions, distill what truly matters to us, and enabled us to tap into the strength and perseverance we’d likely never have discovered otherwise—but they’ve also rightly beaten the hell of out us in the process.

When I consider the person I was a decade ago and compare him to the person in the mirror (well, aside from looking forty years older), I can’t help but notice the latter doesn’t laugh as easily as the former, he is far less naive about his friends and family members, he finds it far more difficult to give people the benefit of the doubt, he doesn’t see the horizon of history as wide open as he used to.

I begin to grieve that version of myself and feel a bit guilty for losing the earlier one along the way, but I also know exactly how it happened:

He had to watch his former church friends collectively sell their souls to a vile, profane, serial predator, as if he were the Second Coming.

He sat at dozens of holiday tables listening to uncles and in-laws deliver well-rehearsed racist rants as easily as breathing.

He scrolled through hundreds of hours of the most asinine and baseless conspiracy theories about face masks, vaccines, rigged elections, and Democrat child trafficking networks.

He overheard his white neighbors of stratospheric privilege, rambling about the dangerous immigrants supposedly overrunning our town.

He began countless days reading about incomprehensible Supreme Court rulings, the passing of mindbogglingly hateful legislation, and the political victories of sociopaths and criminals.

All that shit leaves a mark.

And as I inventory ten years of exposure to senseless cruelty and prolific discrimination, it suddenly makes perfect sense what happened to that previous incarnation of me: he gradually faded away in the face of too much hatred winning too many times.

So, today, I am missing and mourning that younger, more hopeful version of myself, and I’m also worried that even this tired-but-not-ready-to-give-up iteration of me will also burn up in the inhospitable atmosphere of this national sickness, yielding someone whose heart is harder and whose sense of belonging in this place is even more tenuous than it is today.

But future me is none of my business, because today is waiting on me.

Right now, all I can do, all any of us can do, is to wake up within the day before us and appeal to the better still angels within our reach, to wield the damaged but still functioning humanity in our possession, to access all the goodness, courage, and faith we can still muster.

If there’s any blessing in lamenting the version of ourselves and of the nation we’ve lost over the last ten years, it’s in realizing we can’t afford to squander a day, waste a moment, or allow a single act of inhumanity to go unchallenged.

I miss the person I used to be before this nightmare began, but I’ll be damned if I let these heartbreaking days and the people authoring them take any more.

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Don’t get me wrong. I have no love for AI, but it does have its uses. Specifically, I use the Generative AI feature in Photoshop to get rid of unwanted elements and fix glaring damage in photos that can’t be eliminated by Photoshop’s other, conventional tools.

I also use the feature to extend images that are otherwise too small to use for some of the header images you see on this blog.

On the other hand, I still remain staunchly anti-AI for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the environmental damage the datacenters that run these AI models is causing. Does this make me a hypocrite? Probably.

I used ChatGPT in the past to create images that left my jaw on the floor (like when I recreated my sketches and artwork, or more recently created the Grace Jones/Joan Jett thing), but I try to use it sparingly (as entertaining as it may be) because while I don’t think we have anything to fear from AI itself, I trust the people funding and running AI and their motivations about as far as I can throw one of those datacenters.

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A few days ago, I opened my Threads feed and was greeted by the post of a young woman, featuring a couple of resolute carseat selfies, along with the caption:

 

I AM….. PRO ICE PRO Military Pro Law Enforcement Pro Trump Pro Charlie Kirk Pro Voter ID Pro Accountability [sic]

Immediately below that post was another, absolutely identical to the first, except for a different account handle.

I continued to refresh my feed, greeted again and again by the same image, the same quote, yet from different accounts. (I’m currently at 26 and counting, by the way.)

Scrolling through my timeline, this morning alone, I encountered, not only five more greetings from my now ubiquitous brunette, shapeshifting female MAGA warrior, but at least four other different versions featuring other white women, supposedly also declaring their love for their Predator-In-Chief, his barbaric ICE foot soldiers, and MAGA’s anti-immigrant, anti-Black, Anti-Democracy agenda.

A cursory glance at my newsfeed, and no one would blame you for thinking a massive number of young white women are inexplicably assembling around a court-adjudicated rapist and likely serial predator, whose misogynist regime is trying to take away women’s body autonomy and voting rights.

And it’s all a mirage, just like everything about this President, his Administration, and their barbaric, yet rapidly shrinking white supremacist movement, but it’s an exhausting mirage.

Being gaslit will wear you the hell out, which of course, is the plan.

I think we all need to collect ourselves and understand what’s really happening here.

We need to inventory the emotional and mental toll of being inundated throughout our waking moments with an endless stream of gaslighting nonsense, Right-Wing propaganda, bot proliferation, and Conservative algorithm manipulation.

It’s critical that we don’t allow ourselves to be defeated by an alarming, terrifying, and infuriating fiction. We are not outnumbered.

Donald Trump’s current approval rating is hovering between 28 and 36 percent, depending on the source, and his support is never going to rise from here. This is his absolute ceiling.

His covering up of the Epstein Files, the lawlessness of ICE’s domestic terrorism, his starting of an unnecessary, sickeningly expensive war with Iran, stratospheric gas prices, and a cratering economy that has been in a tailspin ever since his disastrous tariffs began—these are mortal wounds to Trump and his party, and they know it.

Republicans have known since 2024 that the window was going to be incredibly short; that their policies have been wildly unpopular, their base has been dwindling, and that their quickly-collapsing, cognitively-addled, lame duck wanna be dictator has been steadily losing his capacity to bulldoze criticism and manipulate reality.

Trump’s broken campaign promises regarding transparency around Epstein, his vow to end wars, his asinine boasts to bring gas and food prices down, his wasteful ballrooms and national mall desecrations are not playing well with the former faithful who can barely keep the lights on or put food on the table.

The MAGA arrow is pointing down and nothing can prevent that.

Friends, what this all means is that we are the majority and it ain’t even close.

Well over two-thirds of this nation despise this Christo-fascist regime, their assaults on black and brown people, their endless persecution of the LGBTQ community, their attacks on the free speech and the Arts and diversity.

A massive portion of America is disgusted with their coddling of the wealthiest one percent, their pillaging of the Public School System, their poisoning of Health and Human Services, their polluting of the CDC, and their absolute refusal to address affordable healthcare or housing.

We have the numbers. All we need to do is start acting like the majority.

If we can all transcend our wars of preference, our purity politics, and our relatively superficial differences, we can defeat this minority movement. If we wield our collective power and unify our voice in November, it won’t matter how much they gerrymander, how difficult they make it to vote, or the violence they resort to in order to try and intimidate us.

The United States isn’t in hopeless peril; we’ve all just been fooled into believing the myth of our impending doom curated and amplified by those who have nothing else but lies, spin, fake followers, and paid rally crowds.

Donald Trump’s entire life, his supposed success as a businessman, and his disastrous presidencies have been fool’s gold; the smoke and mirror illusions of disinformation and media malpractice.

Beneath the partisan propaganda and the prolific gaslighting, MAGA is in its last days. It is a crumbling, self-devouring, rapidly evaporating niche movement of a small percentage of this nation who are being swallowed up by time and progress.

Don’t be disheartened by your newsfeed or distracted by the bombast of the propagandists.

The vast majority is anti-MAGA, anti-Trump, and pro-Democracy.

Let’s act like we know.

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For Those Of You Who Didn’t Grow Up In Phoenix…

For those of you who didn’t grow up in Phoenix in the 60s and 70s this may not mean anything, but for those of us who did, when Ben pointed out that the Phoenix Public Library was issuing these Wallace and Ladmo library cards, I knew I had to grab one.

50 years ago you’d mail in a postcard with your name and address on it to the show, and if it was one of the ones randomly drawn, you’d be invited down to the studio to appear live on television. You’d also be able to pick a toy (courtesy The Toy Cottage on 7th Avenue) off the shelf to take home with you. (This was before they started giving out “Ladmo Bags” as prizes).

Unbeknownst to us, sometime around my 9th or 10th birthday, my mom sent our names in and one afternoon—in the midst of a screaming match I was having with my five-year-old sister—our card was drawn. Mom heard our names called out over the cacophony and yelled at us to STFU—we were winners!. There is no photographic record of this momentous day since Mom didn’t think to take her Instamatic with her when we went down to the studio several days later—and probably wouldn’t have been allowed to use it even if she had—and of course this was LONG before the days of household VCRs, so all I have is memories.

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Two Servants Rooms And A Boudoir! Oh My!

⁠In their earliest years together, Marston and Van Pelt⁠ would become renowned for their Arts and Crafts style homes, such as the 1913 Residence of Mr. and Mrs. ⁠Henry Newby, Esq. The home was constructed by John H. Simpson as the first house for the Arroyo Park Corporation’s Arroyo Park tract. By 1915 Henry Newby, a prominent Pasadenan who would serve as president of the First National Bank of Pasadena for 15 years, would purchase the home as his family’s private residence. ⁠
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The home is a prime example of the English-influenced Arts and Crafts style, with a parred down stucco exterior, carved wooden details, a prominent chimney, and a steeply pitched roof. I’m a particular fan of the home’s gracious porches on either side of the ground floor, which allow increased access to the out of doors. ⁠
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The home’s ground floor plan is arranged around a central stair and entry hall, with the living room and library to the left and dining room, breakfast room, and service spaces to the right. I appreciate how the living room’s fireplace is located within a generously sized inglenook and how the dining room’s fireplace is delightfully off center, forwarding the home’s charming Arts and Crafts air.The upstairs includes four bedrooms, a boudoir and two bathrooms in addition to the staff quarters. ⁠
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Located at 1015 Prospect Boulevard, the home is extant and has been well maintained. ⁠
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Project: Residence of Mr. and Mrs. ⁠Henry Newby, Esq., 1913⁠
Architect: Marston and Van Pelt⁠
Location: Pasadena, California⁠
Source: ⁠The American Architect⁠, Google Maps

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Released 46 Years Ago Today

Grace Jones: Warm Leatherette (1980)

My favorite—or maybe second favorite—Grace Jones album. I can never definitively say if this or Nightclubbing is my favorite, followed closely by Slave to the Rhythm in third place. Both Warm Leatherette and Nightclubbing are so good they could easily have been released as a double LP.

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