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Fire and Ice

Now and then, I catch myself bragging about setting a 'personal best' when camping. Last week the temperature inside the camper hit 27 F.  Of course I have a heater, but refu se to use it. U sually I tr y to joke my way out of it. A better explana tion would be to point at the movie, "The Red Violin."  Chilly dry air, in contrast with sunlight at sunrise, seems like perfection to me. With a Platonic and pseudo-religious attitude, I pop my trailer door open to the east, and let the glori ous sun come into the trailer. It feels warme r instantly, and irr esistibly che erful. If there is a better way to start a day, let me know what it is. Neverthel ess, consider this an except ion t o the rule. You will not have to read many advertisements for 'the ideal' or 'perfection ' on this blog. Experience has taught me that the enemy of the Good is not the Bad, as you woul d expect. The enemy of the Good is the Ideal.

Natasha Dances for the American Deep State

How nice that I have managed to appreciate art in 'this lifetime.' Although music and comedy were two forms of art that were easy to appreciate, the visual arts left me yawning, in the past. I refer to "art" in the Tolstoyan sense. This is quite different from Beauty, which most people confuse with "art."  Tolstoy thought that art was anything that transferred emotional experiences from the artist to the viewer/reader/listener, by means of words, pictures, sounds, or stories. Beauty is a another matter, according to Tolstoy. Movies should be good at providing "artful" experiences in this sense of the word, and, one would think, the Russian movie version of "War and Peace" should be good at it, too. I watched the first third of the three-disc movie, and couldn't make up my mind if I liked it. The star of the second third of the movie was "Natasha," the young Russian noble-girl who came of age during the lead-up to Napo