Denis Villeneuve's "Dune"

Last night I watched Part II of Denis Villeneuve's Dune with my youngest son. Dune was one of the key books of my adolescence, and I read it at least three times; he has never read it. We both thought the movie was excellent. 

It is visually magnificent, the acting is good enough, and even the action sequences are ok. I have developed a strong allergy to dumb things in movie action scenes, so much that I can hardly stand to watch the average sci-fi thriller, but this movie was better and the dumb things mostly flashed by quickly. Enough of the plot was included across the two films (5 hours 21 minutes in total) for my son to follow the story and for me to reimmerse myself in it. I recommend it. 

I thought the business of the Benne Gesserit and their prophecies was particularly well-handled.These witchy women have spread prophecies across the galaxy that they then use to reinforce their power, but the question of whether those prophecies are true seems to hang open; certainly characters in the book disagree about it, and when they seem to be fulfilled it is in a way no one expected.

Dune is just an awesome book for a certain sort of teenage boy. Whether it is for anyone else I couldn't say; there is some heavy gender weirdness that I imagine might bother some girls, and neither the story nor the mythos is robust enough to survive educated adult skepticism. But it completely drew in my 15-year-old self and resonated powerfully in my imagination for at least a decade. I was especially taken with the idea of a hero who is trained in both the feminine mysticism of the Bene Gesserit and the masculine ways of war and calculation, thus combining masculine and feminine powers. I think for me it ranked behind only the Lord of the Rings in captivating me and launching my reveries.

It pleases me that it has finally been put on screen in a version good enough that I can happily share it with my sons.

Porcelain Wrecks

Chinese archaeologists have reported two Ming dynasty shipwrecks off Hainan Island in southern China. It always amazes me to see such a huge mass of valuable procelain.

Love the way the outline of this ship is preserved in the scatter of pots and tea bowls across the sea floor.

Recovering a bowl.

Renovating the Bailey Mansion

Great feature at the NY Times about the renovation of the Bailey Mansion in Harlem. 

Built by P.T. Barnum's less flamboyant partner in the circus business in 1886-1888, it was featured on the cover of Scientific American in 1890. The architect was Samuel Burrage Reed; the style is one of my favorites, Romanesque Revival.

From 1951 into the 1990s the house was a funeral home run by Marguerite Blake. After she retired from the funeral business she turned into a stereotypical crazy cat lady, and the place started to fall apart.

In 2008, Blake tried to sell the house for $10 million, but inspectors found that the roof had 35 separate leaks and nobody would buy. Toward the end of 2009 the house finally sold for $1.4 million. The eventual buyers said the basement was full of cats and just walking through it they got completely covered with fleas.

The buyers were Martin Spollen and Chen Jie, he from New Jersey and she born in Shanghai. They were not particularly rich and told the Times that they had to borrow money from friends and relatives to raise the purchase price. (Since the house was not safe for occupancy, they couldn't get a mortgage.) They have been restoring it ever since, doing much of the work themsleves.

The Times says, "It has been a monumental effort driven by love and obsession."

They earn some money by renting the house out as a set for movines and television, but the project has still (of course) been a very expensive hobby. Spollen told the Times, "Our main talent is that we are not in a hurry."

One of the prizes of the house is a large collection of stained glass windows by Henry Belcher.

The former embalming room in the basement, now a woodshop.

What an amazing place.

Links 21 June 2024

Father's Day Card from my younger daughter; text says,

"I drew you a sunflower where the deer can't eat it."

Asking AI to adjudicate Supreme Court cases: Adam Unikowsky thinks Claude 3 Opus is better than the actual court. I mean, who do you trust to respect precedent, Claude 3 or Clarence Thomas?

But here's an argument that AI won't take our jobs. You might think that AI translation would be leading to a decline in jobs for translators, but so far the number of human translators still seems to be rising.  "When creative destruction happens, it’s always easier to see the destruction than the creation." I suspect this is an intermediate stage and before very long AI will be as good as the average human translator, but I won't guess how long that will take.

Intelligent Scott Siskind essay, "Fake Tradition is Traditional."

New Zealand has a Tree of the Year contest, and this year's winner looks a lot like an ent.

Fascinating little Celtic fertility idol.

How much of life on earth is dormant? "We live on a dormant planet. Life is mainly about being asleep."

In January, the discovery of a major deposit of rare earth minerals was announced in Sweden; now a Norwegian company claims to have found an eve bigger deposit in Norway. We won't be crippled by running out of metals.

Audobon photography awards: top 100 here; nice selection here.

With no actual history to speak of, North Macedonia leans on its very tenuous ties to Alexander the Great, to the immense irritation of the Greeks. (NY Times) It's hard to have a nation without national heroes.

Japanse battery maker TDK claims that a new material can increase the energy storage density 100-fold over their current batteries.

Loose Thread Stitchery, the Tumblr of someone who does amazing embroidery.

The amazingly diverse salamanders of the southern Appalachians.

Hoard of medieval silver found in Hungary.

Today's reason to hate the rich: the folks who poisoned the trees blocking their view of Camden Harbor in Maine.

A claim that the camp of the Assyrian army during the siege of Jerusalem has been identified.

Update on the search for Planet 9.

An argument that fossils excavated from Native lands should be repatriated. This piece appeared in Nature with the statement, "According to Lakotan people, they have always lived in Paha Sapa, as they call the Black Hills." This is false both as to the actual history of the Lakotas, whose tradition records that they first saw the Black Hills in the 1750s and did not live there until the 1800s, and to the opinion of better informed Lakota, who know this. And, no, monster stories are not evidence that pre-modern peoples knew about dinosaurs.

Worm charmers.

Some cool Roman armor.

At The Chronicle, Colin Dickey writes that for the past 75 years, many Americans seem to have held that if students emerge from college agreeing with them, they have been educated; if they emerge with different views, they have been "indoctrinated." Many conservatives used to think that professors indoctrinated students into communism, but now the fear is that they indoctrinate them into wokeism. (How and why this changed remain obscure.) Meanwhile, many professors wonder how they are having such a profound impact on students who won't do the reading or show up for class. 

Reason: "Numerous federal appeals courts have ruled that filming the police is protected under the First Amendment, but police around the country continue to illegally arrest people for it."

Photographs of Iceland over the past century, to celebrate the 80th anniversary of its independence. 

This week's music is Orff's Carmina Burana: the whole hour-long thing, the amazing 3:38 of O Fortuna in a live performance with fireworks.

Thread on Twitter/X about the ineffectiveness of KGB intelligence gathering: "Who can any longer doubt that Soviet leaders...would have been far better off throughout the cold war reading and believing Western newspapers, than believing what the KGB told them?"

The German army has placed an order for $9 billion worth of 155mm artillery shells, to supply Ukraine and restock their own arsenals. That's $9 billion for just one category of munitions out of dozens, dwarfing Germany's recent $2 billion order for 100 new tanks. This new era of war and international tension is already very expensive, and it's only going to get worse.

US defense figure Joseph S. Nye, Jr. on Eight Lessons from the War in Ukraine.

Excellent, informative thread on Twitter/X covering the impact of Russian electronic warfare on various NATO-supplied weapons. Longer article version here. From Colby Badhwar, one of the internet's top experts on anything to do with weapons procurement.

CSIS report on Ukrainian resistance to Russian occupation. Involves many women and is especially strong in Crimea.

Autonomous mine-scanning drones have arrived.

Happy Solstice

May the sun of the longest day drive shadow from your life.

The Surreal House of Barnaba Fornasetti

The most interesting house in Milan, to judge from the number of times it has featured in glossy magazines, belongs to Barnaba Fornasetti.

The house was built by Barnaba's grandfather, Pietro Fornasetti, around 1900. The NY Times glosses him as a "typewriter importer," but that's either a grotesque simplification of his career or an outright joke, since I doubt anybody made this kind of money just importing typewriters. I lean toward joke, for reasons that will become clear to you.

The house owes its character to Pietro's son, Piero Fornasetti. Piero was a designer, one of those vaguely artistic characters who would decorate (and sell) aboslutely anything: wallpaper, ceramics, furniture, matchboxes, magazine covers, fabrics, mustard jars. Above is one in one his wallpaper designs that you can still buy.

And here are two of his ceramic plates. He was interested in surrealism, but his work doesn't fit into any particular category; to me it looks like he was aiming for the intersection of "sellable" and "weird."

There are many works by Piero in the house today. This assemblage of butterfly stuff focuses on one of his paintings, The Butterfly Seller (1938).

The bathroom is lined with Fornasetti tiles.

The music room, Barnaba's personal sanctum. Tour guides love taking people into this room because you enter through the back of a giant wardrobe, extra tall because it once held the capes of mounted police.

There are many other such touches in the house: trapdoors, hidden rooms, 

a very tall stack of old auction catalogs,

and lots and lots of stuff. You have to love the oriental slippers left by the bed in the guest bedroom.

Quite over the top, so much so that you wonder how anyone lives here.

On the other hand, the breakfast nook is amazing.

And I think it's good that there's stuff in the world too crazy for me.

Draft Ukraine-Russia Peace Treaty from 2022 Published

Major story and document dump at the NY Times, summary thread on Twitter/X. So far as I can tell the basic stumbling block was that Ukraine wanted to guarantee its independence from Russia within most of its borders, and Putin would not accept that. One interesting theme is that Ukraine's negotiators were never sure if the Russians were serious, or if the negotiators were really empowered to make a deal. Ukrainian diplomats interviewed by the Times disagreed on this point.

Key details:

Russia, stunned by the fierce resistance Ukraine was putting up, seemed open to such a deal, but eventually balked at its critical component: an arrangement binding other countries to come to Ukraine’s defense if it were ever attacked again. . . . Russia inserted a clause saying that all guarantor states, including Russia, had to approve the response if Ukraine were attacked. In effect, Moscow could invade Ukraine again and then veto any military intervention on Ukraine’s behalf.

Russia wanted to set strict limits on what kinds and number of armaments Ukraine could possess; Zelensky agreed to this in principle but the two sides were far apart on the numbers. This was the clause brandished by the Polish foreign minister in a NATO meeting, saying, "Which of you would sign this?"

You have to love this:

A seven-point list targeted Ukraine’s national identity, including a ban on naming places after Ukrainian independence fighters.

Putin thinks Ukraine is a rebellious province, not a nation, and until that changes there will be no real peace.

The Toltec Problem

Tula, Mexico

When Spanish friars asked the Aztecs about their history, they heard a lot about people called the Toltecs. The Aztecs considered the Toltecs to be their predecessors as overlords of Mexico and the source of much of their culture. Indeed their word for "master craftsman" was toltec. Archaeologists date the Toltec culture to between 900 and 1200 AD.

The So-Called "Atlantean" Warrior Statues at Tula

Aztec lore masters told many stories about Toltec history. Which are, some colonial Spaniards had already noticed, suspiciously similar to stories told across central America about gods like Quetzacoatl. These similarities have spawned a debate that still rages between scholars who think there is real history in these stories and those who think they're just myths that somehow got attached to a list of Toltec kings. If the names were Toltec kings. If there ever were any Toltec kings. Or any Toltecs.

Cē Ācatl Topiltzin Quetzalcōātl, from the Florentine Codex

One example: the Aztecs said that the founder of the Toltec empire was a king named Cē Ācatl Topiltzin Quetzalcōātl, which means something like Quetzalcoatl Prince of Reeds. Quetzalcoatl was of course one of the great gods, and the Aztec myths were full of cities named Reedtown or the like. The son of a god, Cē Ācatl Topiltzin Quetzalcōātl led the Toltecs on a long trek around central America before founding the city of Tollan (Reedville). There he established their civilization and made Tollan into a paradise of a city where all crops yielded double. But he was undone by his evil nemesis, the god Tezcatlipoca. Tezcatlipoca got Cē Ācatl Topiltzin Quetzalcōātl drunk and induced him to commit incest with his sister, which so shamed him that he wandered off alone into the east to die; according to one version, he burned himself alive in a canoe.

Toltec Style Vase, likely from Tula

The rivalry between Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca was one of the great themes of  Aztec myth, so, yeah. The god Quetzalcoatl also traveled east to die; according to the history recorded by the Spanish friar Bernardino de Sahagún, many Aztecs believed that Quetzalcoatl had passed across the sea to the east and would one day return.

Coyote, jaguar, and two eagles, all feasting on human hearts

Besides the stories of the Toltec kings, there are many questions about their capital, Tollan. Most archaeologists identify Tollan with a site called Tula; to archaeologists "Toltec" basically refers to the culture of Tula and its surroundings. But Tula was no paradise; in fact it was much smaller and less wealthy than the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, although the storytellers insisted on the opposite. It may be that the Aztecs had confused Tula with Teotihuacan, was was indeed huge and splendid. But Teotihuacan had been abandoned centuries before the Toltecs appeared in central Mexico.

The "Burned Palace" at Tula

Indeed Tula is so unimpressive that many archaeologists refuse to believe its rulers were overlords of the Valley of Mexico. There are three or four other sites of the period at least as big. So, some archaeologists think the Aztecs invented the business of Toltecs ruling essentially the same territory the Aztecs did, and think that the valley was divided into several small states.

Tula

So if you try to read about the Toltecs at any level beyond "look at these cool stones", as I did this week, you wind up hardly reading about the Toltecs at all. The Toltecs are buried under a Talmudic density of argument, and every sentence references what Smith and Montiel wrote what about what Diehl wrote about what Brinton wrote about what Manuel Orozco y Berra published in 1880. (Some people you run into online have opted out of the whole debate by only citing stuff published before 1890.)

Toltec eagle relief

It's a lesson in why it's so hard to write about archaeology for the public. It's easy to write about the thrill of finding treasure in the ground, but geting from that to any understanding of what people were like in the past is just hard. Trying to write a popular account of the Toltecs you could either retell the Aztec legends, which would almost certainly be wrong, or you could try to explain what might really have happened, which would be complex, uncertain, and probably tedious as hell.

So let's just look at some cool pictures of stuff archaeologists call Toltec and leave the wrangling about their history to people whose job that is.