I have been wearing bandannas as sweatbands while I run and while doing laundry was surprised to realize that a couple of the ones I have been using were ones I have had since I was a teenager. That jolted over into a memory of my maternal grandfather buying me a red bandanna sometime in the 1970s at a rural grain elevator, the co-op store, presumably in northwest Missouri near his childhood home, although I have no memories of visiting my mother’s family in that area with her parents. I guess that means that he may have bought that bandanna with me elsewhere or that it was a different relative.

The elderly bandannas I do have are two-color dye, on white cotton, giving a three-color pattern, and are marked “made in USA” with a pattern number, I guess what we’d call a SKU. There’s no real possibility, I guess, that the factories that made these remain in operation. I wonder how old the patterns are?

I guess they could have been about a century old when they were new, although I doubt that a factory would have kept such a design in production for that long. They surely refer to a design tradition that was about that old. Of course, that tradition drew its design vocabulary from older European and Asian handwork and the collision of that tradition with the industrial age in England and elsewhere between 1790 and 1900.
I suppose there must be a thriving collector’s market for vintage bandannas. Maybe someday I’ll look for it on ebay.

Finally watching Gyllenhall in Nightcrawler. I could tell at release it was an uncredited remake of Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman, and as coverage and reviews pioed up I became actively irritated that the remake was not being noted.

Jake’s gauntness and off-kilter affect are enough, as far as I am concerned, to definitively establish his character as Buster’s descendant.

The film’s described as a disturbing LA noir. As I watch it tonight, clear in my own mind that it’s a remake, I see it as a comedy.

Listening to a regional Sunday evening jazz show spin a series of versions of a specific tune from circa 1920 to circa 1940 and the host keeps emphasizing the movement from pre-Louis to post-Louis, you know, the Jazz Narrative. But I like the oldest stuff best! The arrangements that sound the most modern to me are the most boring. The ones that sound weird and stilted and have bad notes sound THE BEST.

This is clearly a side effect of the Rise of Flight YT playlist I have been growing for the past couple weeks. Certain songs just get stuck in my head, like “Auntie Skinner’s Chicken Dinner,” and no amount of rock and roll can dislodge them.

Listening for the simulated sound of engine trouble always reminds me of far future interstellar ship sensor output directed to audio or scent or touch rather than dials and readouts.

(Posted on Facebook initially, this post is basically my initial post there plus comments I made in the resulting thread.)

We’ve been watching Space: 1999. It’s WAY weirder than I remember. I pretty much dig it, despite the great scoops of plot nonsense often found in any given episode, and just ignoring the whole set of issues with the premise.

For example, I give you this extended electric sitar recital slash film noir tracking shot wordless intro. I mean come on, this beats Data’s string quartet with a two-by-four.

The episode in particular centers on a ghost from the future that the leader of the PLANT SEANCE seen at the end of the intro has summoned. Not once do they engage in technobabble regarding FTL time distortion, time travel, or slingshot orbits: the ghost is immediately recognized as some sort of psychic projection from the actual future that they try to trap in the medical isolation ward with tiny radar dishes! Beige flares and suede ankleboots, maaaan!

The instrument is a Coral electric sitar, which was made by Danelectro. I have an electric mandolin made with parts from one of these, originally including the ‘buzz bridge’, which I swapped out for a conventional bridge because an electric mandositar is something that we all have reason to regret.

One of the fun, strange aspects of the show is the way it blends Hammer horror tropes with sketched elements drawn from the British SF New Wave. It’s not quite as clearly from Another Culture as Eastern Bloc SF, but it is beautifully of its time.

it’s very definitely as silly as Voyager, but unlike Voyager, where the show repeatedly shot itself in the foot by refusing to allow silly premises the dignity of internal coherence over the arc of an episode, this show seems to be very extremely serious about any given silly premise, which is basically how to do great horror camp. And my god! The sets! They spent a BUNDLE on this show, apparently on spec. You can kind of tell when they have budget issues on a show because the “alien ship” interior or whatever will sometimes be a featureless black room with double-exposures of glowy lights. It’s on Hulu, so if you can live with jarring modern commercial intrusion, no expense beyond time is needed.

I guess they extensively retooled for season two, which I have more memories of from childhood – that’s the season which introduces new jackets as a uniform element and the weird-eyebrow shapeshifter alien lady.

Oh, and the sitar guy is UK sixties and seventies session player Big Jim Sullivan.

Intense dream: I was reheating a recalcitrant hypercompact bluetooth keyboard over the open flame of one of our gas burners (no, I don’t know what good that was supposed to do). Amazingly, the plastic caught fire and began to burn and melt! Who could have foreseen such an outcome!

The burning plastic somehow got into the oven and into one of our dish cabinets and ignited several small fires that I was able to calmly. if angrily, extinguish. I was most mad about the oven fire because I was not certain how to knock it down.

This reminds me: although we do have a couple of extinguishers, I don’t know where they are.

Took the dog to the dog park and then to a self-wash place. He hated it, of course, but he was a good boy. Now he’s fluffy!

Mowed the lawn first thing Saturday morning, first time this year, probably since November.