National Night Out. We’re supposed to go outside and show that we own the streets! The sidewalks! Go away, Crime! We don’t have bad events in our part of town - much - so it’s not exactly a brave stand against the tide of darkness. Just neighbors standing around in the street having a beer and eating chicken, with the latest crop of small children milling around. I was talking to someone I didn’t recognize, and it turned out she grew up in the neighborhood . . . in the Castle of the King of Toast.

Would I like to see it?

Oh well er YES YES PLEASE, I set a chapter in a novel in your house, I’d love to see if I got it right.

I did not get it right.

I can’t tell you how odd it is to have a specific idea about a place, something you manifested in fiction, and you walk in and it’s completely wrong. You want to say “no, sorry, your house is wrong,” but I did get some of the 20s vibe right. I say “King of Toast” because it was built by a guy who invented the modern toaster, the Toastmaster. I say “Castle” because it’s on a hill and has battlements.

When I checked to make sure I had the “Toastmaster” part right, I found the Wikipedia article for the device. At the bottom it had a link: The Alan MacMasters Hoax.

On 10 February 2012, photography and ICT student Alan MacMasters attended a university lecture where the class was cautioned against using Wikipedia as a source. The lecturer mentioned that his friend had falsely claimed to be the inventor of the toaster on the Wikipedia page. Following the lecture, his friends and Allen edited the Wikipedia toaster article, replacing the lecturer's friend's name with Alan MacMasters', alleging he invented the toaster in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1893.

The actual inventor of the electric pop-up bread-toaster is Charles Strite in 1920, who, working in Stillwater, Oklahoma developed the appliance to ensure workers received evenly toasted bread.

Snort he said. Derisive snorting. It was Stillwater, Minnesota, not Stillwater, Oklahoma.

So the article talking about an incident in which people were cautioned against using Wikipedia as a source has an error.

I confess to being burdened by what has come before, and I think everyone should. Otherwise you make the same stupid mistakes. There can never be a Year Zero, only a year (whatever it really is) wearing a shiny white suit over a scabby body.

This does not mean I am in the total thrall to what has come before.

		But apparently if I find meaning and beauty in the past, well, I’m fash.

The fellow is quite right to have a laugh at the person who’s defending Kinkaid. It’s not good. It’s art from your aunt’s house in 1975. Yes, it has technique, composition, coloristic effects, the illusion of light, and so on, but it’s all rather banal.

Was Parrish better? Yes, and he did some of his finest work for advertisements. He had a clear, clean style I absolutely love.

Was Parrish's work as sophisticated as the Renaissance masters? No, but it doesn’t have to be.

Were the Renaissance masters and the movements that followed up to the Great Gauzy Dissolving the high mark of Western representational art? Probably.

Was most of the stuff produced in those periods actually second-rate and not really worthy of fawning acclamation? Yes.

Were the late 19th- and 20th century art movements a necessary and inevitable reaction to formalism? No.

Was the world of Western art better because they happened? Yes.

And so on. Then we come to the big one: just because modern art broke the old rules and produced fantastic, fascinating, brilliant, unique, challenging art, does that mean that the abstract art of today is necessary and important?

Nnnnnnnoooo. In fact it’s a dead end. Once the canvases had nothing to say we moved to installations and video art and “sculpture” that consisted of chrome balloons, and didactic banalities that just slapped up an epigram. MAKES YOU THINK DOESN’T IT Yes yes fine, Ms K., I’m thinking.

The people who find fascism everywhere - except, of course, in the street brigades of masked people who burn things and beat people - are quick to label anyone who has a statue avatar and a general RETVRN vibe to be fascists. I’m sure some are cultural chauvinists and I’m sure a few, after a few beers, will bend your ear about the superiority of Western Civilization. One more beer and they might start swapping “White” for “Western.”

This is regarded as deplorable, but when you’re talking about Western Civ up to the post-war era, it is rather white, no? If you express a set of aesthetic opinions about art, architecture, music, sculpture, and your preferences tend to the European, and you think that the European examples are better than the work of this culture or that, you’re expressing your opinion that this is superior to that.

As in: “the great cathedrals of Europe, from the classical basilicas to the various styles we call ‘Gothic,’ are superior in their interior decoration to Islamic mosques.”

That is a matter of opinion, as is the obverse: “the geometric intricacies of mosque decoration is a better way to evoke the mysteries of the divine than literal depictions of stories.” Civilized people of good will can have that discussion.

Likewise, you can say that you think the cathedrals of the 11th century are more impressive, aesthetically and technically, than the Scandahoovian stave kirks. This does not detract from the merits of the kirks, which have their own origin and meaning.

You cannot, however, imply that any of the examples above can be held against cultures that built little of merit. Then we are imposing our values, and also creating a hierarchy. But we can have a hierarchy within our own culture, as long as it follows the acceptable timeline of Ever Forward and Ever Better Upward Etc., and also if we realize that the statement "our own culture" is fash - unless you're deriding it.

		So the modern model would be the dumb junk of Basquait . . .
		. . . and the fascist model is Kinkade.
		I think a lot of the objections to Kinkade would be calmed if you just turned down the farging saturation. There. Is that fash? YES THE BRIDGE IS STILL SOAKED WITH SENTIMENT
		Yes, but the bridge does exist, and it’s in that famous shot by Drahomir Joseph Ruzicka. Can I like the photo without being Fash?

Just so you know: The personal is political extends to aesthetic preferences. Your tastes put you in the political camp that deserves violence. Hunt down the fash Kinkade fans and ship them to the camps, or our democracy is in peril!

Rockwell? Oh, we'll get around to him.

A newspaper in the Gladstone House. Not to be touched, lest it disintegrate.

The front page as usual, is full of ads.

Video of the aftermath of the Empire Palace Fire can be seen here.

It’s 1904.

Standard design, no big screaming heads.

Before there were plane crashes, there were incidents like this.

		Wait - train not all found?

Was this a heist? Text of the story:

Pueblo, Col., Aug. 8.-A Missouri Pacific train crashed through a
bridge over Dry Creek near Eden, Col., last night. It is estimated that from eighty to 100 live were lost either under the waters of the raging torrent or beneath the wreckage.

At 2 o'clock this morning a refugees' train returned with those re. maining, a number having probably been lost.

The water was flowing over the trestle as the train started across the creek. The engine baggage car, smoker and chair cars plunged into the torrent. The baggage car and smoker were washed down stream and have not yet been found.

The chair car was found a mile from the scene half filled with sand, under which a number of bodies were buried.

The express car was found near the scene. The safe was open and the contents gone.

No follow-up story.

		Oh, there’s a story here. There has to be.

And there is.

He took on temperance by recognizing that the saloon was the “poor-man’s place of resort and recreation.” Rather than shutting down bars, he advocated reforming them so they served no alcohol.

“Unprecedented business,” says the story. Not exactly.

This makes it sound as if the train had a grudge and was willing to go a long distance to kill someone.

		“Sick.” Hungover, perhaps.

Editorial page: unsigned notes and observations.

		The last one’s a bit stern.

		It’s been a while since the nation had a Famous Harpist. “From Chicago to the Black Hills” isn’t exactly the breadth of the land.

A mystery:

		A grip, remember, was a briefcase, a businessman's suitcase.
		What?
		WHAT?

HBO Deadwood fans, that one's for you.