Antonio Delgado & Pee-wee Herman: Together At Last!

[mallorys_camera]

G4 geomagnetic sun storm in effect last night. Very, very, very dimly, my naked eyes espied the Aurora Borealis:



Like I said, I spent five hours yesterday getting my computer to do what it was doing perfectly well at the beginning of the day before I started fucking around with it, so I was in a pettish mood all day.

That mood was exasperated by the fact that I didn't do a good job saving for taxes last year and now am paying off the not-huge-but-still-significant amount I put on a credit card. Disposable income is down this month, in other words. I must ration my little treats!



Antonio Delgado is taking on Kathy Hochul in the Democratic gubernatorial primary.

Good!

He's a strong progressive candidate who believes in universal child care, expanded rental assistance, stronger investment in community health centers, higher minimum wage, all well and good things in themselves, but he also has the potential to beat Elise Stefanik, the rumored Republican candidate, who is creepy, creepy, creepy in every imaginable way. Delgado could carry New York City; I don't think Hochul could.

Delgado has done his prep work.

I don't think there's a county fair, volunteer fire department celebration, or Lion's Club picnic throughout the entire state—and New York State has some real backwaters—that Delgado hasn't shown up at over the past five years. The picture above of Delgado & io truly was taken at the 2018 Hyde Park Fourth of July parade.

###

Also, I watched the Pee-wee Herman documentary on HBO. It is very sad. It made me cry.

I am more of a fan of Paul Reubens as a conceptual artist than I am of his conceptual art. I prefer my kitsch with a lot of white space—which his didn't have. Pee-wee's Playhouse is a bit too frenetic for me.

But I do think Pee-wee's Playhouse captures two tendencies of childhood extremely well: (1) children's tendency to take metaphors & other figurative constructions very literally, and (2) children's tendency to anthropomorphize. (I well remember Mr. Light whom I got to talk to in the bathroom as a three-year-old whenever I had to have my hair washed.)

Pee-wee Herman is childlike, but he is not childish.

Big distinction.

Comments

[asakiyume]

LOVELY, your our-human-eye-accurate photo of the Northern Lights. I ignore people's photos of the Northern Lights these days because they're just not what you see! Cool hot pink buddy, but that's not what my eye registers. And the one time I did see it for real (was it last year? when the auroras were so fantastic?), it was such a ghostly hint, so cool in its ghostliness--is that a tinge of pink? is that a tinge of green? are my eyes deceiving me? No! It's real! ... Don't get me wrong, I'd be totally happy to see them more intensely, like I bet I could do if I went to Nunavut territory, but I want records of what I see to be like what I actually saw.

(Yeah, long rant to attach to an "I like your photo" comment.)

And in other photo news, that's a great photo of you and Delgado! I wish him well. Elise Stefanik is definitely creepy.

[mallorys_camera]

Reading the political analyses this morning, the usual suspects are wringing their hands together like Delgado's announcement is a bad thing 'cause it splits the Democrats.

I think they're totally wrong. Rank & file Democrats do not like Kathy Hochul. Even the Shawangunk Democrats do not like Kathy Hochul. 😀

Hochul has absolutely no chance of beating Elise Stefanik. If Delgado cinches the nomination, I'd say he has a slight edge.

[puddleshark]

Northern lights! Oh, wow. Are the skies quite dark there? I'm not sure I'll ever get to see them here. Too much light pollution along the south coast.

Computers. Yeah. There's nothing like computers for making you waste an entire day.

[mallorys_camera]

I live in a very rural area, so no light pollution! 😀

There's nothing like computers for making you waste an entire day.

I know! I was quite disgusted with myself.

[adoptedwriter]

I used to live 5” from that xxx theatre where he was busted for playing w himself /indecent exposure in Sarasota. When I was a kid that movie theater was “normal”. I saw JAWS in there.

[mallorys_camera]

Ah! So you're a Florida girl!

How'd you end up in Ohio? 😀

[adoptedwriter]

I'm a Cincinnati native. My parents had vacation property in Sarasota. We moved there after I graduated. I went to Florida State University for college but moved back to Cincy to start adult life and marry my husband, etc.

[lookfar2]

Ah, let me launch into one of my many copyright Raps recently inspired by the Paul Rubens documentary: I think he fascinates people in just the same way that Edward Gorey does, because he had one thing he wanted to do and he kept doing it, whether the market smiled or not. We'd all like to be so whole, but we're not that weird.

[mallorys_camera]

Huh! No, he had lots of things he wanted to do. He picked Pee-Wee Herman as the vessel because he deemed it the most commercially viable of the various personas knocking around in his brain.

And I don't see the Edward Gorey comparison at all. Reubens was a lot more like Andy Kaufman with a kind of Andy Warhol patina. Pure performance art.

[mellowtigger]

I agree, the documentary was very sad. I believed him at the beginning when he said he was producing his own documentary, and at the end I realized how messed up that control impulse is, that he had to convince the viewer even though it wasn't true. Trying to control the uncontrollable. It was definitely the theme of the last quarter of the documentary. We'll never know what wonderful absurdity he might have given the world, if he simply had been left alone to create.

[mallorys_camera]

I know, right? He was so creative! Creativity just poured out of him.

And I'm not entirely sure his own documentary wouldn't have worked. I mean, look at these online journals we're all writing! They're our documentaries! And a lot of them do work!

[smokingboot]

Delgado's got a nice smile!

I don't know much about Pee-Wee Herman, trying to recall if I heard his voice and it just icked me out. so I just went to check on Youtube Definitely liked the opening sequence of Playhouse episode 1; Ice cream :-) I could live in a place like that! Then it goes on and I'm out.

P.S. Forgot to say that's a good 'natural' photo of the aurora, subtle and strange.

[mallorys_camera]

I like Pee-Wee Herman as a concept. 😀 But the color palette is a bit too garish & the energy a bit too frenetic.

It was interesting to see the evolution of the Pee-Wee character from Paul Reubens' art school days. Reubens was quite the beautiful, dreamy-looking youth with more than a touch of the Dionysian—none of which is reflected in Pee-Wee.