Sunday, July 20, 2014

Ink-Black, but Moving Independently Across the Black and White Parquet of Print, the Ant Cancels the Author Out




High Holy Day in Egoslavia. Diana Rigg, first, still best crush ever, is 76 today. The Avengers, the Honor Blackman/Katherine Gale years in b/w, the Diana Rigg/Emma Peel years, but especially the first Emma year, in b/w, first, best crush ever. Two years ago I was able to post some episodes, last year some motherfuckers claimed rights and blocked them. Last year I was able to post the black & white opening theme song, this year some motherfuckers claimed rights and blocked that, here, have the vastly inferior color opening to the second Emma Peel season (which, fine metaphors abounding, was vastly inferior - though still better than almost everything else then, since, forever - to the first season in black and white):







That doesn't give me the toe-curling waves of nostalgic pleasure like the black & white opening still does. I haven't mentioned this here in a while: I remember seeing the Flintstones in color, the first time I'd see a color TV, I was five? six? I don't remember whose house, a relative's presumably, I know it was in western Pennsylvania, but I am convinced that seminal event, followed by a decade of TV repeats after school, home when sick or faking sick, color then B/W then B/W then color then less and less B/W as the old shows fell out of syndication, and especially the shows in syndication like Avengers and Get Smart and Bewitched whose first years were in B/W then toggled to color, influence, for good and bad, how I apprehend and interpret the world still.

Yes, I post a version of that paragraph every year on July 20. Here's the only black & white scene I can find:







Hey, then there's this email:

Hello,
Congratulations!
Your Google Apps domain name, blckdgrd.com, was successfully renewed with enom for one year. You can now continue using Google Apps through July 18, 2015 and your account will soon be charged for the purchase.
Please do not reply to this email; replies are not monitored.
Sincerely,
The Google Apps Team

I'll believe it if this shitty blog is still here the morning of the 26th.












FABLE OF THE ANT AND THE WORD

Mary Barnard

Ink-black, but moving independently   
across the black and white parquet of print,   
the ant cancels the author out. The page,   
translated to itself, bears hair-like legs   
disturbing the fine hairs of its fiber.
These are the feet of summer, pillaging meaning,   
destroying Alexandria. Sunlight is silence   
laying waste all languages, until, thinly,   
the fictional dialogue begins again:   
the page goes on telling another story.



3 comments:

  1. GAAAAHHHHH!!!!! Fucking Google is eating my comments after I try to sign in. Okay, more quickly and as best I can remember: 1) Fuck SSFC, if they waste a sub against what is nominally us, I'll praise them a little; 2) forgiven for the Kate Bush thing, given the proximity of Mrs. Peel and the fact that it's your fucking blog; 3) I find it best to wear my "Don't Cut Me, I Grew Up In This Hood" tshirt on the very rare occasions when I go to that shopping center. Or when I drive Frederick Ave. between Shady Grove Road and Monkey Village Ave.

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  2. There is a story to be written how the city government of Gaithersburg has redesignated a kitschy 'walkable neighborhood built on Fields Road cornfields "Downtown."

    Not by me, but.....

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  3. i am willing to count thomas frank's essay as obamapostasy

    And so, after visitors to the Obama Library have passed through the Gallery of Drones and the Big Data Command Center, they will be ushered into a maze-like exhibit designed to represent the president’s long, lonely, and ultimately fruitless search for consensus. The Labyrinth of the Grand Bargain, it might be called, and it will teach how the president bravely put the fundamental achievements of his party—Social Security and Medicare—on the bargaining table in exchange for higher taxes and a smaller deficit. This will be described not as a sellout of liberal principle but as a sacred quest for the Holy Grail of Washington: a bipartisan coming-together on “entitlement reform,” which every responsible D.C. professional knows to be the correct way forward.

    ReplyDelete