How do you move in a world of fog that's always changing things?

I don't know what the photographer intended this composition to signify, but it looks like a male-male Little Mermaid to me:



I haven't seen Hans Christian Andersen (1952) since I was in middle school at the latest. It was almost certainly one of my introductions to Danny Kaye, the other, more lasting imprints being The Court Jester (1956) and my grandmother's stories. I recognize but do not entirely remember most of the songs by Frank Loesser, although I make an exception for "Wonderful Copenhagen," which can get stuck in my head for weeks. I don't know if it would hold up to rewatch (I worry less about the Suck Fairy per se than the Twee Fairy). In any case, while I know the musical explicitly represents itself as fantasia rather than biography, from the time I learned anything of Andersen's actual biography it has always burned me that the film has Kaye's Andersen composing "The Little Mermaid" out of unrequited love for the ballerina played by Zizi Jeanmaire, when the real-life Andersen found some romantic fulfillment with the ballet dancer Harald Scharff. I recognize it's not every day that someone's life gets more tragic when it gets more straight, but still.

It's not that I am not aware of the current politics; I am not posting much about them because I am trying to survive most of them. In things I have read today in news outlets which pleased me, Anthony Lane has checked his usual distaste for anything resembling science fiction or fantasy and loves The Shape of Water (2017).

Advised repair schedule: reboot startup disk, offline for thirty-six hours, and replace head

The trouble is that when I manage to get a day in which I do nothing except lie around and read and occasionally glance at the internet and go back to lying around reading—and now intermittently thinking about rewatching Hans Christian Andersen (1952)—I feel that I am wasting time. I am not writing poems. I am not writing stories. I am not writing movie reviews. I am not working my paying job. I am not looking for supplementary work, of which God knows I need some. The Protestant work ethic is killing this country as we speak and I'm not even Protestant and it has been a demonstrable fact for years that if I do not get time by myself, unplugged, unstructured, not interacting in any fashion including the internet, I go nuts. And yet I feel like I'm wasting my time. Time I can't afford. Time running out. Avoiding my way through the end of days. Title of this post determined by my current mood, not by what I'm watching.

Es muss ein Mensch an der Maschine sein

I remembered John Crowley agreeing with H.G. Wells that the futurism of Metropolis (1927) is no such thing:

Wells notes—it's hard to miss and I thought it was the silliest thing in the movie when I first saw it—that the workers are slaves to machines, like the poor guy who actually has to manually control a clock that somehow controls the works. Did Lang not understand that the machines are designed to replace human drudgery, because machines are so much better at it? The social dislocations caused by that replacement are real, but no modern industrial society can be built on bare-faced slavery.

Leaving aside the fact that, actually, I think the U.S. is doing its best right now to disprove both Wells and Crowley and bear out Lang, I disagree completely that the image of the worker crucified on the clock is silly. Of course it's not literally how industrialization works, but as a metaphor it cuts to the bone. If anything, it's sharper in these days of the so-called gig economy. Got five minutes free? Great, that's another job you could be picking up. Already working nine to five? Relax, here's a service that never sleeps. Just chip in at your leisure, except the work won't pay so well that leisure is exactly an option. Everything that makes space in your life, makes space for more work. You're flexible and independent. You're always on the clock. Keep those hands moving. You've got the time.