How are you staying sane(ish) during the current pandemic?

Started by SueC, March 24, 2020, 11:48:24

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Ulrich

The holy city breathed like a dying man...

SueC

Do I look sane to you?



Yours sincerely

Not Even Trying
SueC is time travelling

SueC

Songs with general prophecies of doom can be applied to various social crises.  This 2008 song works very well for the 2020 pandemic.


It's funny how the general effect of listening to that isn't depressing - it's more cathartic, and dignifying.  ♥
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SueC

SueC is time travelling

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SueC is time travelling

SueC

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SueC

There's not much pandemic happening in Australia anymore, thanks to essentially eliminating it from the community (and over again if necessary, should something leak through border quarantine) - even though the government is stuffing up the vaccination programme, while simultaneously throwing millions of dollars at private "consultants" to help with distribution and with logistics - since they threw out half the health department employees years ago, in the name of so-called "small government" and "saving money"...and of course the consultants are clueless, since they're marketers, not health department staff... less than 5% of the population immunised so far... :expressionless:

(Brett, by the way, says that if you were a candle you could be waxxinated... :-D)

One thing that has been aiding my sanity in these times is the writing of one Guy Rundle at Crikey, when he puts in an appearance.  Today he's eulogising Jim Steinman.  Who?  That's what I said.  Songwriter for Meatloaf and other illustrious characters like this, apparently.  But you don't have to be a Meatloaf fan (and I'm definitely not) to laugh yourself silly reading this eulogy by a self-identified Meatloaf fan... here's an excerpt...


Quote...Jim Steinman has passed on, taking much of the '70s with him.

The writer of Meatloaf's Bat Out of Hell, of Bad For Good, of ... er ... Bat Out of Hell Two, and numerous other classics — including the insane Total Eclipse of the Heart — has gone, at the age of 73. Who dies at 73 these days. It's almost gauche. Twenty seven or 52 or 90, please.

But how do you memorialise a man, the bulk of whose work was done in bubblegum pop turned into mini-operas, like Bayreuth done out of spun sugar? From one angle the man's work was ridiculous. Yet from another it's a triumph, wringing from mainstream American popular culture one last triumph, the culmination of a culture of self-confidence and continuity, the point at which the country, the empire, was still revelling in its own capacity to create a culture that conquered the world, but only through a parodic version of it, a portent in a convex mirror.

Yes it's another gen-X-marks-the-spot memorial. But there is no alternative. Everything about Bat Out of Hell, which landed in 1977 and has never stopped selling in truckloads, is ridiculous — from barrel-chested would-be opera-singer-turned-OK-actor Marvin Aday's choice of the stage name "Meatloaf", to New York musical theatre student Steinman's obsession with the gold-lettered books of myths and legends in the esoteric bookshops.

Out of it came an album which, together with Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run of the previous year, announced that the first period of rock 'n' roll had reached its culmination. Bat Out of Hell (the song), You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth, and, oh god, Paradise By the Dashboard Light, powered by the energy of '50s rock overlaid with the operatic chorea of the "wall of sound" and driven by a fusion of American teenage-hood with airbrushed panel-van art versions of tragic love from the European myth bank — valkyries on Harleys and all that.

You had to be there, and you had to be 13ish and horny and filled with a sense that life was momentous and sad and beautiful, and not just a trip to the milk bar to buy a copy of Mad Magazine and some Pez.

Yet, hell, there must have been a lot of us, because there was a time when a copy of Bat Out of Hell was owned by everyone — even if, as the years went by, many were increasingly reluctant to admit it.

At the time it was Springsteen who looked like the real deal, Meatloaf the, well, filler of power-pop, suspended somewhere between the archangels and the Archies. Now Springsteen's mid-70s self-remodelling — the bearded beatnik rock poet become the flannel-shirted fauxletarian — looks like the naïve performance, Meatloaf and Steinman's version the more knowing and durable.

Yeah, I well remember an English project in high school which required us to produce the imagined album cover of the follow-up to a real-life album, and an imagined interview with the artist about their "new album".  (Still got the assignment, in fact.  :beaming-face)  I chose Bruce Springsteen, lampooned his working class masquerade in the pretend interview, and drew the front of his jeans on the pretend cover, seeing that Born In The USA (OMG, I hated the title track and I don't know if it's worse if he means it or if it's just to sell albums) had his backside on it - I just turned him around really, and made a comment to the effect that the girls had been salivating at his backside, but this is what they were really waiting for.  :evil: 

A bit more Rundle:

QuoteThe mid-70s is American pop culture's mannerist moment, which announced that the cultural memory was essentially full and must now content itself with refashionings of the vast excess of three-decades of movies, music, books, drugs, sex, magic bus trips and all the rest. Aday, as Meatloaf, was the perfect vehicle for that — a fat Elvis avatar in a frilled white shirt, raging across the stage in front of a 15-piece band, regularly requiring oxygen at the end of each performance.

That shirt! Meatloaf looks like a singing fudge sundae, anticipates Devo and Talking Heads and Mark Kostabi and much more. But from within the last of modernism, the fast fading hope that things might be glorious and more than you could possibly imagine, and that the shopping mall might be the enchanted Earth, and that the gates of Valhalla might open (and to clarify by that I mean sex).

What was it like to have this hit you in Australia? Absolutely extraordinary, better than being American, I suspect. There were no malls. Colour TV was two years old. California was a distant rumour from the movies, which played in single-screen cinemas. McDonald's was the succulent, deliquescent food of the gods, available from a dozen outlets, embassies of excess. 7-Elevens looked like they had come down from space. America was absolutely hyperreal, so close yet impossibly distant.

The Americans have colonised our subconscious, Wim Wenders remarked from Germany, but he didn't know the half of it. To have no culture of your own, and one like it essentially occupying all the interstitial spaces of yours, is to have access to a fantasy that no one else — least of all Americans, stuck in the shitty real of actual America — could actually experience.

No wonder Australia invented the tribute band, our gift to the world. We were the first to enact the idea that the replica was superior to the real. No coincidence that the creator of Rocky Horror was an antipodean. The best thing the Rolling Stones and everyone else did for us was to not come here for decades at a time. We were the anthropologists of a culture that consumed us, participant-observers of our own lives.

:lol:  :lol:  :lol:  :lol:  :lol:  :lol:

Complete article here:  https://www.crikey.com.au/2021/04/21/jim-steinman-meatloaf/


SueC is time travelling

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SueC

Quote from: SueC on April 21, 2021, 15:31:08There's not much pandemic happening in Australia anymore, thanks to essentially eliminating it from the community (and over again if necessary, should something leak through border quarantine)

Did I jinx it?  Today the Perth/Peel area is in a snap 3-day lockdown announced yesterday afternoon (at this stage, the South Coast isn't).  A case leaked through quarantine - the person who ended up infectious in the community had actually been cleared with a negative test on exiting the compulsory quarantine for people arriving from overseas, but he'd caught a highly infectious new strain from the people quarantining in the adjacent room (possibly through air-conditioning) sometime during his quarantine so it didn't show up at the time because it can take a fortnight for it to show up as a positive test...

This guy has a very active social life and went through numerous public places before testing positive on a repeat test - and a close contact has already tested positive as well.  So that's why the snap lockdown - to seriously reduce spread while contact tracers get on top of stuff, and to test all the people who went to the known venues etc.  If we're lucky only close contacts will test positive, but this is one of those particularly infectious variations that jumped rooms, so if we're not lucky it will be clusters to chase for months, and if we're really unlucky it will be a general longer lockdown - potentially also in the regions, because five days is a long time for the virus to travel...

We were informed yesterday afternoon one hour before I had guests arriving from the lockdown zone - they were already on the road when the announcement was made, roadblocks weren't set up until midnight.  It's a long weekend here and lots of people were already on the road Friday afternoon/evening going out to holiday in the countryside; all these people have been asked to wear masks whenever in contact with the public in non-lockdown zones.

So quick thinking was needed at our place.  I messaged our guests and they picked up masks and sanitiser in a town on the way, and I created a "two-bubble" household for the long weekend.  Normally we share the living/dining area with guests but we can't do that this long weekend - I'm passing meals to them on a tray through their French doors and we're all wearing masks whenever we're anywhere near each other, including outdoors.  As the second set of guests cancelled, the guests that did come have the whole guest wing to themselves, and Brett and I are not using the general entry/exit door through that wing, we're leaving through another door instead.

Main transmission route is droplet/aerosol; so we're largely on top of that by not sharing indoor spaces at all and having masks on when we're talking (socially distanced) through the doorways or doing outdoors stuff together (like the meet-the-donkeys session last night).  More minor risk of transmission on surfaces but we're all using hand sanitiser and all the trays etc are kept separate and wiped down with alcohol regularly, with dishes going in the sink.  It's not perfect, but this is a percentage game and I think we're really cutting down transmission risk.

We're staying sane by making funny comments like, "Hey, we look like the Annual Meeting of Donkey Surgeons!"  :lol:
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SueC

@word_on_a_wing brought the RS Twitter stream to our attention yesterday.  And look at this gem of an article that was linked to on it:

https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2021/05/16/covids-existential-question-is-do-we-want-to-survive/

QuoteCovid is no longer a deeply dangerous irritation that we can hope might pass. It now poses an existential question. That question is about whether we want to live, and will pay the price to do so.

That price has to be borne by capital. Nothing else can pay it, not least since much of its accumulation has arisen from violence against our planet as well as against people.

The challenge in this is enormous. But we can't duck it. That would put us on the side of the ditherers who have failed time and again to deliver Covid lockdowns, always hoping something will come along to save them.

This time that something won't come along. We have to decide to change. This time it's real. This time we have to reform. And this time is now.

That's just the conclusion - he presents a pretty good multi-prong analysis on the problems we're facing with this bloody economic system which seems to have become the new Golden Calf.  Also, I saw "tax research blog" and my kneejerk response is to think, "Do they know we're in a biosphere?" but this one really recognises this fact, and the economic myopia about it.   :smth023

Now two whinges:
1. The trolling in the comments section of this article.  I suppose if you've got nothing useful to contribute to a topic, or you can't make a rational rebuttal of what you don't agree with, the standard response of many is to ridicule, or to attack the person instead.  :1f62b:
2. The airheadedness of most of the replies to RS's Twitter post.  Honestly!  From adults???  Kind of reinforces my prejudices about this medium.

Excellent article though, and it's this kind of clearheadedness that keeps me sane-ish during this pandemic, even if clearheadedness means confronting some pretty difficult stuff.  But it's so much better than partying while the ship is going down.
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SueC

Articles like this are sanity savers if you've got flat-earthers out in force where you live - they remind you some people are stoking flat-earthness because they can make a buck out of it. That doesn't improve the conspiracy theories, but it does show that a fair few of the conspiracy theorists have strings attached which are played by the puppeteers.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/the-covid-crisis-suits-rightwing-media-personalities-as-they-monetise-fear

QuoteBetter still, the new pundits feel no responsibility for anything. Why would they? Their success depends not on providing solutions but on ginning up, by any means necessary, the conservative base.

The hallucinatory culture war they deploy probably can't deliver electoral majorities. But that doesn't matter. It reliably generates the online engagement on which media monetisation relies.

The Covid crisis suits such hucksters down to the ground. As a medical emergency foregrounding scientific expertise, it enables them to re-use all the old tropes from climate denialism. They can tout quack cures, mock vaccinations, and blame know-it-all doctors.

By denouncing the coercion of lockdowns, authoritarians can masquerade as libertarians. Without any need to maintain consistency, they can imply one day that Covid doesn't exist and the next day blame China for creating it.

Their patter is their product – and they'll tell the desperate and the delusional anything at all so long as they can make bank by doing so.

Most of these people understand full well what's at stake. They know that, when they spread misinformation and fantasy, some of us may die.

But that's a sacrifice they're willing to make.

Nothing personal, you understand – it's just business.
SueC is time travelling

Pongo

I have changed during the pandemic, I think. I have become more restless. That lack of face to face interaction is doing things to me, even though I regard myself as a mildly introvert person.
How do I stay sane? Funnily enough by reading a lot of the misinformation and trying to find the flaws. Whether it's working is maybe too early to say. I still haven't done anything really stupid, I think.
 

SueC

Are the clowns in charge in the UK and the clowns in charge in Australia singing from the same songbook? Lockdown not for politicians, apparently. What keeps me sane is intelligent reader comments on this in the Guardian (so at least I know there's many people who didn't vote for the current federal government...and they do get wonderfully poetic about it all... :cool), and cartoons like this one, summing up the situation so well...(he's not joking, it was plane spotters who outed the PM's little trip, otherwise it would have successfully been kept secret...)



from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/08/scott-morrison-got-to-see-his-kids-on-fathers-day-and-everyone-is-furious-at-him-all-the-time-now
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SueC

Existential Comics is such a sanity saver...

Pride and Prejudice and Logical Positivism



More on that debate here: https://www.existentialcomics.com/comic/413
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