“Typewriter Eraser, Scale X” by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen (1999).

I was watching a documentary last week on modern art and at one point the discussion turned to pop art and the sculpture of Claes Oldenburg. I was familiar with a few of Oldenburg’s works, but I hadn’t seen the one they splashed on the screen: Typewriter Eraser, Scale X.

What really took me aback though was that without the title I wouldn’t have even known what this was a (giant-sized) sculpture of. Something about it triggered a very vague memory. I’m sure I’d seen erasers like this somewhere before, but I couldn’t tell you where or when. And I learned to type on a classic Underwood that was as heavy as an engine block, complete with a long silver arm that you swatted back for carriage return. But I never used a typewriter eraser. I think there are few people alive who have, and fewer every day. And yet this was a 1999 sculpture (albeit one Oldenburg had apparently been thinking about doing since the 1960s).

The reason this struck me as meaningful is that Oldenburg’s sculpture, like a lot of pop art, was based on representations of instantly recognizable, everyday objects. He made giant clothespins and giant cheeseburgers. So what happens to pop art when the objects it represents have become so alien? I mean, a giant typewriter eraser might even be an alien, with the spindly brush a shock of blue hair coming out of a round pink cyclopean head. Less imaginatively, it’s a wheeled pizza cutter with a handle that’s come apart.

It seems like an interesting question for art appreciation. If the point is to have you recognize an object that is immediately identifiable even when it’s presented on a different scale and in a different setting, but you don’t know what the object is supposed to be in the first place, then the whole effect of the piece has changed. It hasn’t been lost, mind you. Just changed. I think there’s an analogy that can be made to how we respond to current events when we’ve lost so much historical understanding and perspective. Events lose their meaning, or their meaning changes, when they no longer have any generally understood context. The giant eraser becomes a metaphor.

Back in 2020 I had a post asking What happened to Amazon? What inspired it was my observation that the behemoth online retailer’s prices had gone up, way up, during the pandemic, while their search function had gotten so overgrown with sponsored links that it was nearly useless. Their ability to deliver packages quickly and efficiently was (and still is) impressive, but the shopping experience has gone to the dogs.

A couple of years after this Cory Doctorow came up with the label of “enshittification” to describe the death spiral of platforms: “Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”

I don’t know enough about the operation of the big platforms to judge how close to death they are, but from a user’s point of view I can certainly testify to how shitty they’ve become. As I said in my earlier post, Amazon took a steep dive into the shit at the time of the pandemic (a time when it was also raking in the cash). More recently, however, I’ve been noticing a similar trajectory being followed by YouTube.

I like YouTube. I watch a lot of stuff on it, from shorts to half-hour lectures and podcasts, to full-length documentaries. I’m often impressed at the production values of a lot of the videos I see, if not always as impressed at the content. But there are lots of things to click on and have playing in the background while I get something to eat.

But there are ads. There have always been ads. These cut in, unannounced, sometimes at really annoying moments that can’t be predicted (I’m sure on purpose). If it’s handy I just click to skip these when they start up, but since a lot of them are short (5 to 15 seconds has long been a standard) I often let them play.

What I’ve noticed happening just in the past month though is that not only do there seem to be more ads, but the ads themselves are getting longer. Much longer. Much, much longer. Ads that run for a minute and a half are now not uncommon. But I’ve also seen them run 4 and 5 minutes, and (this was the record) one a couple of days ago that was 8 minutes and 30 seconds! That’s not an ad, it’s a full infomercial. This goes beyond being annoying, to the point where it actually has had the effect of driving me away.

It’s no secret why they’re doing this. They want you to pay for a premium service where you don’t have to see ads. Or so they say. I don’t know how true that is (sponsored ads, I assume, are still included), or how long it’s likely to last. I can remember when cable TV became a big thing and it was known as Pay-TV and the deal was you paid a subscription and you got to watch everything with no ads. That’s not cable TV today.

Still, I’m scratching my head at advertising that’s so deliberately alienating. Who wants to watch an eight-and-a-half-minute ad? Absolutely no one. That isn’t an irritant, it’s a nuclear bomb being dropped on the platform. It’s a message to everyone that if you’re not paying for a subscription they don’t want you there at all. That seems self-defeating to me. But Amazon is still going strong despite its enshittification and I suspect YouTube will still be in business even after it’s become so overwhelmed with advertising it’s barely functional. There’s a lot of room for things to get shittier yet.

Not me, but these guys. It’s the middle of January! I think this is a staging area, but they still need to get moving. (You can click on the pic to make it bigger.)

It may be cold, wet, and snowy, and the holidays are all gone, but if the bins are out you know everything’s going to be alright.

I started my book review site Good Reports in 1998, which I believe makes it one of the longest-running personal book sites in the history of the Internet. I’ve just finished putting a quarter-century in. I launched Alex on Film and this site in 2014, so I’m wrapping up my first decade with both of them. A good time then to take a look back, and ahead.

For the last several years I’ve talked about how I’d like to do more book reviewing at Good Reports, but it’s been hard. Between the regular science-fiction reviewing I do (at Alex on SF) and new features I’ve started on this site like the True Crime Files and Graphicalex, I’ve moved my book commentary around a bit. But I also read less literary stuff, especially fiction. As I’ve said before here, I’ve fallen into “old man” reading habits: mainly history and politics. And at this point I really don’t see that changing. Another old-man habit is wanting to re-read favourites, or spend more time with the classics. You give up a bit on newer stuff that, even if you think it’s well done, doesn’t speak to you as much. And finally there is the fact that some of the reviews I’ve been doing at Good Reports have been a lot of work. My omnibus review on books about evangelical support for Trump was 2,500 words, and the one on the “Road to Trump” clocked in at over 7,600 words. I find these subjects fascinating, but still that’s a big commitment, for both me and the reader.

Alex on Film continues to get the most traffic of any of my sites now, which makes sense because it’s (1) the site that updates the most, and (2) it’s about movies. That said, I haven’t been writing as much there either. After a while, you feel like you’ve said all you have to say and you’re stuck repeating yourself. There’s also the problem that I don’t care much for new movies and old movies come with so much baggage they feel like a burden to write about. What’s the point of doing up my notes on Citizen Kane or Vertigo or Blade Runner? I’m pretty sure everything that not only needs to be said but could be said about these movies is already out there.

And of course weighing down on all of this there has been the burden of real life. 2023 was a horrible year. I was actually a bit surprised I managed to get through it in one piece. Having made it to the finish line I know I’ll be taking some time off in 2024. I’m very much in need of it. Moving forward, I think I’ll just be updating whenever I can or have something to say. There will be fewer regular postings. At some point in 2024 I hope to start a showcase for my bookmark collection, but that’s the only big new development I see happening. A return to movie quizzes will probably have to wait until 2025, if I manage to last that long.

So there you have it with 25 years online. 1,250 book reviews at Good Reports, another 370 at Alex on SF,  just over 2,000 film reviews at Alex on Film with 200 quizzes, and then lots of other stuff that I’ve posted on here to pass the time. This has always been just a hobby and I think the main thing that’s kept me going is that I’ve only followed my own interests and never taken any of it very seriously. That mindset might see me sticking around for another 25 years, or walking away. You never can tell.

Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

As part of my ongoing series of playing chess at the 1000 Elo level, I present my masterpiece of a smothered mate, defined by Wikipedia as a “checkmate delivered by a knight in which the mated king is unable to move because it is completely surrounded (or smothered) by its own pieces.” This usually occurs at the edge or corner of the board, so this one was especially pretty.

Yesterday I visited the local branch of my bank to do a little in-person banking and found myself unable to proceed beyond the vestibule because the inner door was locked. I could see people working inside and since it was only 1 p.m. I knew they were open. I rattled the door to get someone’s attention and a person inside pointed to the door. I assumed this meant to pull harder, but that didn’t work. They pointed again and I saw a small sticker attached to the door saying new (unspecified) security protocols were being put in place. There was no explanation for why the door was locked.

Finally the one customer in the bank at the time left and someone from a back room came out and let me in so I could go to the teller. He informed me that they were only letting one person in at a time for security reasons. He asked if I could do my banking in the vestibule at the ATM. I told him I could not. Why did he think that I was waiting to be let in? I said they really needed to put up a sign explaining what was going on. He said he thought there was a sign. We both looked and he seemed mystified that there was no sign. He was sure there had been a sign at one point. He thought putting up a sign would be a good idea.

At the teller’s, I asked if the bank had been experiencing problems with bank robbers. “You could say that,” the teller said, without lifting his eyes from his computer screen. I later went online and saw that there had been an attempted bank robbery in another part of the city the day before. Apparently a couple of guys came in wearing motorcycle helmets, demanding cash. They didn’t get any and so drove away. It didn’t seem like much of a plan.

As I did my business at the desk another customer entered the vestibule and started rattling at the door, a totally perplexed and increasingly angry look on his face. When I got done the same fellow from the back room appeared and ushered me out and let the new person in. I repeated that they needed to put a sign up explaining what was going on. He agreed and said he was going to “tell them about it.”

In brief, another one of those incidents where you just wonder what’s wrong with the world and the people in it. If you’re going to lock the doors to your business while you’re still open for business, putting a sign on the door explaining what’s going on isn’t just a good idea. Get a sheet of paper and a Sharpie, write a message like “Only One Customer Allowed Entry at a Time,” and then tape it to the door! I know banks are doing all they can to discourage in-person banking, but this is ridiculous. There are days when the world doesn’t make sense to me anymore.

Last week I noticed a couple of houses in my neighbourhood had Halloween decorations out. One clever one I liked had a full-size skeleton pushing a lawnmower. But isn’t mid-September a bit early? I don’t know what the rules are for these things, or if there are rules, but I would have thought three weeks or a month in advance would be the limit.

One of the most annoying aspects of the public response to COVID was the insane attitude some people insisted on taking toward social distancing. The one moment that has stayed with me is the young person I was walking toward on the sidewalk in the winter a couple of years ago who scrambled so desperately to get off of the sidewalk and into the road — so she wouldn’t have to walk past me (insisting on keeping a distance of not 6 feet but over 12) — that she got her legs stuck in a snowbank and fell rather awkwardly. I was literally dumbstruck by this performance, and at the time referred to such people as “deeply disturbed.” I mean, by the time this happened it had been made abundantly clear that it was highly unlikely, if not impossible, to get COVID simply by walking past someone outdoors.

A couple of months later I had this to say in my COVID-19 post-mortem:

Even in the first months of the pandemic I never wore a mask outside, thinking just on the grounds of common sense that it was useless. I wasn’t going to get COVID just by walking past someone. And yet wearing a mask outdoors still seems to be a sort of virtuous fashion statement for many, even in the wee hours of the morning when there’s no one about, as does the annoying habit of running to the other side of a street to avoid passing someone on the sidewalk. This is taking hygiene theater to an extreme, and in a way that sends a confusing message. Are such people saying that they’re infected and that we should avoid them? I don’t think that’s what they mean, but it’s the most logical interpretation for their behaviour.

I wonder how much of this acting out will change in the months to come. In an earlier post I referred to the split between double-maskers and anti-maskers. Apparently there is another group known as ultra-maskers, who are defined as individuals who are going to continue to wear masks, everywhere, for the rest of their lives. This suggests a real mental illness.

Well, these people are still with us. Yesterday, while walking through the same neighbourhood I have every day for the last four or five years, I passed no fewer than three individuals who walked out into the road rather than have to share the sidewalk, ducking back onto the sidewalk once they were past me.

Two years later, I no longer see this as a mental illness so much as a way of performing an act of outrageous everyday rudeness. This was an opinion the woman I was with yesterday, a healthcare professional as it happens, heartily agreed with.

I can’t understand this behaviour. It is definitely a product of the COVID hysteria (and look, COVID was real and we all should have got vaccinated and worn masks indoors, but I’m talking about this kind of overreaction). It’s something I can’t remember I ever saw happening once in my entire life before the pandemic. Not only that, it’s now well known that such behaviour was never of much if any utility in avoiding infection in the first place. Pretty much the only way you could get COVID while outside was to stand in close proximity with someone who had it, while talking to them (or better, shouting at them) for an extended period of time. So maybe if you were packed into a crowd at a concert or sporting event. But even then the chances of transmission were said by experts to be exceedingly small.

So swerving out into the road is just meant to be an insult. It’s rude behaviour, shockingly rude in my opinion. Even worse, it looks as though it’s never going to stop. I mean, if these people are still at it now what would it take for them to ever go back to acting normally? They’ll never feel safe.