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:
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I'll believe it if this shitty blog is still here the morning of the 26th.
- Marmoud Darwish: Under Siege.
- Quotable: On Resistance.
- The bitter fruits of bellicose policy.
- Money as class dictatorship.
- Thomas Frank finally has his obamapostasy. Well, not really, but he tries.
- Maggie's weekly links.
- { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
- Knausgaard, for those of you who do: on critical hype and book sales. For the record, I gave Book One a hundred pages and it didn't work for me. I'll take 9/10ths blame and reserve 1/10th for Knausgaard: the piece linked to does reveal that James Wood likes Knausgaard, so there's a chance it's not me.
- Thought Experiment: Mary in the Black and White Room.
- Oh, yesterday's hike? Not nearly as scenic as the guidebook suggested, I enjoyed myself for the workout, the other three? Not so much.
- All praise to Seattle Sounders.
- Summer hiatus: posted not only because it's a bleggalgaze but because of the photo: last night, on way home from my parents, we stopped at the Food Lion in Walnut Hill to buy half-and-half for the coffee I'm currently drinking, said Food Lion once and originally a Grand Union. People can vouch for the stop, Landru (yes, I put his name in a sentence next to a Kate Bush song) can vouch in was a Grand Union.
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.
