[Kzyxtalk] E questo!

[Marco McClean]

Subject: E questo!

The recording of last night's (2021-02-19) Memo of the Air: Good Night 
Radio show on KNYO-LP Fort Bragg is right here:
https://tinyurl.com/KNYO-MOTA-0424

Just about every time, after everything's over and I've signed off and 
I’m so exhausted after working on the show all day and talking on the 
radio all night all hopped up on decaffeinated green tea and soda 
crackers (and sometimes chocolate covered raisins) that my very skin is 
buzzing, I wince over how at some point in the show I started explaining 
something and went down a ridiculous path with it and, lost and 
embarrassed, moved on. That's okay. This time it was about people who 
are too picky about proper speech, for whom it isn't enough that they 
understand exactly what you said, they want you to say it the way /they/ 
want you to say it. I thought of the great short essay by Stephen Fry on 
the subject (YouTube, Stephen Fry on grammar nazis), mentioned it and, 
on the way to say why, mentioned his part in a movie he was in, in order 
to remember his name, but found I couldn't recall the title of the movie 
either, so, oy. "It starts with V," I said, "Verdure? Verdigris? [no, 
red rather than green] Vendetta? No…" Close, though. Too close. "Natalie 
Portman is in it. It has that poem about the Gunpowder Plot. /Remember, 
remember, the fifth of November./ The mask thing…" Guy Fawkes mask, 
sure, it comes to me /now/, as well as the movie poster with the giant 
bloody V on it. /V for Vendetta./ It's a terrific story, even though, as 
usual for movies, the movie is like the Reader’s Digest condensed 
version of the Wikipedia plot of the book, if not quite a travesty and 
two shams of a mockery.

Besides all that, at https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com you'll find a 
fresh batch of dozens of links to not necessarily radio-useful but 
nonetheless worthwhile educational items I set aside for you while 
gathering the show together. Such as:

Fantasy and science fiction artist Rowena Morrill is dead. A particular 
book cover she painted comes to mind. The book was about a character 
named Lafcadio Hearn, an interdimensional traveler whose method of 
moving to other worlds involved a magical spell, a particular frame of 
mind, and a can of sardines. On the cover, Lafcadio is flying on a magic 
carpet with Princess What’s-her-name, whose decolletage draws the eye. 
There is no doubt she is a mammal. One time back in the Mendocino 
Commentary days (30 and more years ago) Judy Brown saw that on top of a 
box of my books and smirked? appreciated it? I said, "I like that. I 
like the way the flesh hangs on the bones. Look at her arms." She said, 
"I do too." I miss Judy Brown. She, like Rowena Morrill, was an art elf.
https://www.pinterest.com/cecilalderson/rowena-morrill/

Yma Sumac, the Peruvian Songbird, sings /Chuncho/. It's a lie that she 
was just from Brooklyn and her real name was Amy Camus, (Yma Sumac 
backwards). She was born Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chávarri del Castillo 
on September 10, 1922 in Ichocan, an indigenous village in Cajamarca, 
Peru, and her vocal range went from low foghorn all the way up to 
fingernails on a blackboard, which you hear in this recording, whose 
technology was unequal to the task, but they did the best they could.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ry7WgPZ_wok

Speaking of Natalie Portman, this short video clip makes me think of the 
movie /Annihilation/. A truly alien lifeform of unknowable motives is 
changing creatures and plants and people and the very Earth in a vast 
ever-widening circle to, uh, perform an experiment? terraform? colonize? 
conquer? Spoiler: In the last instant before the closing credits Natalie 
Portman’s irises go weird, so she's probably one of them now. Is that 
good or bad? The swamp in /Annihilation/ looked a little like this:
https://twitter.com/RexChapman/status/1362608390699053059

And beautiful footage of  the Yamal, a 75,000 horsepower (!) Soviet 
nuclear icebreaker ship. The phrase /as inevitable as the tide/ comes to 
mind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKaVhXn49xY

-- 
Marco McClean, memo at mcn.org
https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com