Calufrax

Pretty much every time I read a news story about Louisiana, I'm glad that I left Louisiana and am reinforced in my determination to never move back. Today is no exception: The Louisiana House has passed a bill banning chemtrails. You know, chemtrails? Those imaginary, thoroughly-debunked streams of chemicals that conspiracy theorists allege are sprayed from airplanes because they're too uninformed to understand the science behind contrails? Yeah, well, according to Louisiana legislators, those are no longer being used for mind control but instead are being used to control the weather, and Louisiana's not having it! (Because, of course, secret societies spreading chemicals through the air for nefarious ends are well known for their scrupulous adherence to state laws.)

On the bright side, they did at least have to foresight to include an exception stating that this law would not apply to "the injection, release, or dispersal of fire retardant or fire suppressant substances for purposes of extinguishing or suppressing fire, or to the aerial application of seeds, fertilizers, or pesticides for agriculture or forestry purposes." Of course, the exception would never have been necessary if they hadn't introduced their stupid law in the first place, so even the bright side isn't all that bright.

ETA: After Hurricane Katrina, A. and I did everything we could to convince her family not to return to New Orleans, but they insisted on going back. They don't seem happy to be there, and from time to time the idea of them moving will come up in conversation, but the combination of inertia and economics seems to have trapped them there. For the longest time A.'s mother would share any positive news story out of Louisiana, in an attempt to try to convince us to move back. She seems to have stopped doing that, but I don't know if this represents a change in her feelings about Louisiana or just an acknowledgement of the unlikelihood of changing our minds.

I'm currently reading the May 2025 issue of Artforum and wanted to share with you some of the things I learned and, in the process, demonstrate how my mind connects things. One of the current exhibitions reviewed in this issue is of paintings by Alex Israel at Gagosian Beverly Hills, which was accompanied by a reproduction of Israel's 2024 painting "Gas Station."

Upon learning that this gas station actually exists, my thoughts immediately went to William Gibson's short story "The Gernsback Continuum" (published in Burning Chrome).

I then returned to the review, where the final paragraph begins with this sentence: "The works' very status as paintings—as art in a gallery—aligns them, moreover, with the long tradition of veduta painting, that of architectural scenes that don't necessarily demand forensic accuracy, edging sometimes into outright fantasy." Having never heard of veduta painting, I immediately looked it up (link here), and discovered I was familiar with this style of painting (the name comes from the Italian for "view"), just not with the word. From that page, I followed the link to capriccio, which is a form of architectural fantasy art and, again, something I was familiar with but hadn't known the name of. As it happened, one of the images illustrating the Wikipedia entry for "capriccio" was a piece by Giovanni Battista Piranesi called "Le Carceri d'Invenzione (The Prisons of Invention)."

This picture immediately caught my eye, because it reminded me of M.C. Escher's works, particularly "Relativity" and "House of Stairs".

This sort of connection-making, going from Alex Israel to William Gibson to Giovanni Battista Piranesi to M.C. Escher, bouncing back and forth over several centuries, is very much how my mind works. I'm constantly feeding in new bits of knowledge, which then bounce off of each other, make connections, and enable me to produce new things.

When I designed Rumkick's "Drinking Every Day" as a song of the day, silveradept asked if they were actually punk or if they were a manufactured group made to appear punk. I happened upon a couple of Rumkicks interviews yesterday, (here and here), and it appears that they are indeed actual punks!

I went to an online manga drawing class put on by my local Japan America Society tonight. I haven't drawn in years, and I haven't really had any formal instruction, so I made a conscious decision before going in that I Was going to forget everything I think I know about drawing and just follow the teacher's instructions, even if they don't make sense to me or if I think I can see a better way, and to trust in the process. I think I did okay!