Medrawt

In Dreams

2009-12-20T10:39:00.002-06:00

Just had a half-dream (still dreaming, drifting into a waking state) in which I received a letter that I couldn't finish reading. The part of me that was waking up tried to force my dreaming self to finish creating the letter, but one of us couldn't bring myself to finish writing it, or to finish reading it.

This Is Where It Is Going

2009-12-20T01:26:00.003-06:00

Bad times in my head around here.

I'm tired and alone and angry. At the world and (some of) the people around me and at myself and at my life.

I feel like I'm straining to keep something from getting out.

I'm coming out of the most ridiculously compressed period of overwork I've ever experienced - 40 consecutive days in the office, working nonstop on one project, 5-6 hours a day on the weekends and 11-12 hours during the week - and by the end all that was keeping me going was my continually escalating contempt and rage for the work and the people making me do it (not the people in my company). By the end I promised myself that when the project was over, in the new year I'd commit to looking for another job because I hated the person I was becoming inside (and outside; I threw away a year of halting progress on my weight and am back to about 245 pounds). Instead I accepted a move to a different position and a fat raise (not yet in effect, sadly).

I have nothing I want in my life except a nice computer and a Fender P-Bass.

I'm smart enough and controlled enough that I'm not really afraid I'll do something stupid, but I'm living every day with the feeling that I'm approaching something precipitous.

I Hope He Burns In The Hell I Don't Really Believe In Anymore

2009-11-11T22:45:00.002-06:00

It's not the sadly bigoted but predictable opening gambit here that makes me apoplectic; hostility to organized gay tourist groups is idiotic but I'm not so surprised. What puts me over the top is:

I consider if someone is homosexual, it is a provocation and an abuse of this place. Try to go to a mosque if you are not Muslim. It is abuse of our buildings and our religion because the church interprets our religion that it is not ethical. We expect respect of our church as we expect to respect that a person does not have to belong to the Catholic Church. If you have different ideas, go to a different location.

The Catholic Church I grew up in had a small leaflet with every hymnal in the pews, which in addition to providing the schedule of services and other such items had a few FAQs (before that was common parlance) in the back, one of the questions being something like "is it appropriate for me to observe or partake in a mass if I am not a Catholic?" The answer was something along the lines of:

Our church is of course welcoming to visitors of all faiths and creeds, whether they be guests of a member or simply exploring the nature of Catholicism. We ask that non-Catholics refrain from partaking in the Communion, as we consider it a holy sacrament, but are always pleased to have visitors to our church.

THAT is the church that I loved as a child, and if I were ever to return to Catholicism, that is the church of which I would be a member.

__________

Veteran's Day, né Armistice Day, is lately most notable to me for being the anniversary of my (other, paternal) grandfather's death. He himself was a veteran, during but not of World War II, as he never saw a foreign theater. Perhaps this is why, or some other reason, I was in a state such that, on seeing this image my eyes reddened and my throat swelled shut. "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" is one of the Oldest Lies, but I remain both moved and confounded by the service and sacrifice offered up by so many, both willingly and under duress, for causes noble, amoral, and wicked.

My faith in God is largely absent (so I should stay out of Bishop Kaleta's church) and my admiration of war long banished since boyhood, but the poetically simple message on the monument still moves me.

Here rests in honored glory an American soldier. known but to God.

Place Holder

2009-11-01T20:29:00.003-06:00

I was going to throw up something rather substantive this weekend, but instead I was occupied with something I might write about in the future. Or not. (It was boring, don't worry.) Two quick thoughts:

(1) I generally get annoyed when people cross subjective and objective types of reaction to art - actually, it pisses me off to an unreasonable degree. I especially find it annoying when people express a strong subjective opinion as objective fact, especially immediately after someone expresses exactly the opposite opinion. This bugs me most, because it seems most misplaced, with acting. If someone's just said that Joshua Jackson is really good on Fringe, and your experience is that he's an unwatchably bad actor, shouldn't you consider the fact that lots of people disagree? Shouldn't you say "Jackson just doesn't work for me, for reasons x, y, and z, and I'm somewhat perplexed that people think he's really good?" Why would you say "Joshua Jackson is wrecking this show with a horrible performance"?

I think I notice it here most because I often seem, on the one hand, less bothered by performances other people find bland or unconvincing, and on the other hand not especially impressed with performances other people thought were transcendent. This surely has to do with my own experience as an actor, which gave me lots of opinions (not necessarily any insight, though! - I wouldn't claim for a heartbeat to speak for other actors, or actors in general). So when everyone's bagging Anna Torv's performance in the pilot of Fringe, which I watched yesterday, I didn't feel one way or the other about it. And (uh oh!) when everyone was applauding Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight, I wasn't especially impressed. I'm not going to be the "provocative" guy who claims that Ledger only got the acclaim because he died - I don't think that's true, except perhaps at the margins. And I thought the Joker character was very well portrayed/presented/whatever onscreen. It was very effective, and the thing that worked best about the movie for me.* But I felt a lot of it had to do with the writing and the costume and the makeup. Ledger's performance, in my opinion, was very very very good, and a lesser actor would have made a hash of it, but once you clear the hurdle of someone attempting to ham it up, I just don't think it was very hard. I don't think you needed to provide what the film required. There's multiple layers and complexities here - you could point out that much of the time a really great movie doesn't require Great Acting, and Great Acting in the way we understand it can seem kind of awkward and forced, which is how lots of people received, e.g., Sean Penn in Mystic River - but I just feel like whatever Ledger's considerable talents and potential, playing The Joker didn't sratch the surface. I have a suspicion that any of the other actors considered for the role would've evoked more or less a similar response. But all of that has to be filtered through my personal conviction that playing scary, creepy, and scarily creepily nuts isn't a particularly difficult thing to do, and that while Anthony Hopkins is enjoyable as Hannibal Lecter, he's just kind of dicking around artistically compared to something like Remains of the Day. (Which isn't a bad thing. Different movies have different requirements.)

*Which, incidentally, I liked more than the critics who hated it, but liked less than everyone who wrote hate mail to the critics who hated it; I thought it was inferior in conception and execution to Batman Begins. I have reasons for feeling that way, but they're incidental here and they don't add up to much that I would consider objective - well, I think my reasons are objective, I think it's a fact that the movie's plot doesn't work as well as its predecessor's, but whether that matters to you as much as it did to me is entirely up for grabs. The major reason I think The Godfather, Part II is better than The Godfather is because I think the sequel's story is infinitely superior in its construction - it's an artful structure, for one thing, and it manages to actually have a well-developed and coherent plot, as evidenced by one movie covering several months in some detail and the other one covering almost a decade in isolated scenes.

(2) I'm reading, and this will be entirely unsurprising, Bill Simmons' The Book of Basketball. Two things that I find kind of jarring: (a) typos. Multiple types in the first couple hundred pages. It's really kind of perplexing to me. (b) the book makes basically no concession to the notion that someone unfamiliar with Simmons' column might be reading. If you start reading someone's column it becomes clear, if they have a particular personality or schtick, that you've stepped into an ongoing narrative, sort of like picking up a TV show in season 3. There are things that aren't really going to be explained for you any more. I would've guessed that in writing a gigantic (and so far, very good) book, Simmons might've gone a little out of his way to be more accessible to someone who didn't read his stuff every week. I guess I shouldn't have thought that, since he's said on his press tour that it's basically the same voice he uses for ESPN, but R-rated. (So far I'd call it a soft R. Mild language, drug use, suggestive situations, brief nudity.) So he makes a gimmick of providing fake explanations of his pop culture references for readers in 2025, but much of the ephemera about Simmons' style really would be inaccessible to someone reading in 2025, and some of it would be inaccessible now. Given that one of the delights of the book is that some of the facts he dredges up about the pre-24 hour news era of professional basketball are the sort of thing that require footnotes to say "Seriously, I'm not joking," which make plausible other wild facts which require him to footnote that he is, in fact, joking, it's jarring to find him making other jokes that a somewhat less savvy reader might not realize weren't true. The subject of the book is intended to be somewhat timeless, and in its substantive approach I'd say it is, but a lot of the flourishes sort of float by weirdly; if in a column Simmons talked about the debut of the Ralph Samson Face, even if he had to explain the Sampson reference (which he does in the book), the general schtick is understood for readers of his column previously familiar with the Faces of Derek Lowe, Peyton Manning, etc. I mean, you can sort of work out what's going on, I presume, but it doesn't flow as easily as it does for the experienced Simmons reader. Just think it's an interesting choice; I wonder if it'll affect the perception of the book years down the road. (One of Simmons' reasons for writing the book is that he quite correctly feels that, compared to baseball, there's an embarrassing dearth of quality basketball books, and his pick for the best ever, John Halberstam's The Breaks of the Game, was out of print when I tried to buy it last year.)

Oh God

2009-10-27T23:32:00.000-05:00

They are coming. From all angles.

Sometimes You Didn't Know What You Were Looking For

2009-10-16T22:53:00.004-05:00

I'm very glad my RSS reader came pre-loaded with a feed to the Wired website. It's been very interesting and informative over the past few months.

This one, about what we're finding at the border of the solar system, is just cool.

This one is really up my Alley of Pet Subjects; it's about how new studies appear to demonstrate that succeeding or failing at activities like field goal kicking, or putting, or shooting a basketball, may directly revise your perception of the size of whatever it is that you're trying to put the relatively small object through. It's a cliche for basketball players who are shooting well (there's another line of inquiry that suggests there is no such thing as a "hot streak" in sports - I tend to come away from reading about the subject with the opinion that people are variously over-interpreting the data or the concept of a hot streak) to say that the hoop starts to look bigger; this is taken as a metaphor for confidence, but it may actually be marginally true! I'm ever fascinated by, and influenced by, information about how the brain mediates our experience of the world. I've remarked recently on several occasions, in several contexts, that I think I'm probably much more likely than the average person to distrust the evidence of my senses, and I have been ever since my 11th grade physics teacher had the class do an exercise which revealed our blind spot. After that, everything I've read or heard about how the brain is interpreting sensory data rather than just opening a window to it has stuck with me. I haven't dragged this back around to metaphysical issues (I was rather unfocused and directionless as a philosophy undergrad, and my nascent interests lay in the realm of ethical and aesthetic inquiry), but this all goes to some very basic Problems of Philosophy shit that I'd probably love to read about.

(Shooting a basketball is funny; you're far enough away that very minor divergences in technique can have disappointingly large effects on the trajectory of your shot, but any experienced player - or a novice with a cheesily inspirational coach - knows that the hoop is actually quite big, big enough to fit two basketballs simultaneously with negative space left over. This isn't as big a ratio as trying to throw a football through a tire swing, but shooting a basketball is easier than putting a spiral on a specific target, or at least that's what I think as someone who knows how to shoot a basketball but throws a wobbly pigskin.)

When the people around me at work became aware of the plight of Falcon, The Auspiciously Named Balloon Boy, I was in the middle of trying not to explode for work-related reasons. People started making funny word-noises, I turned around and saw a colleague was displaying on her computer some streaming video of a big puddle of mylar traveling to the left, and I said something like: "Whu?" I was briefed on what was then thought to be the situation (poor Falcon!) and then I made an exasperated noise and returned to my work, feeling at the moment as though the Balloon Boy was an enemy agent sent to try and provide auxiliary annoyments to hamper my productivity. I would like to think, though, that had I been in a newsroom while this story was being covered for HOURS, without the troubling distraction of new information to interrupt my mylar-obsessed musings, that I'd have started to wonder about some of this.

To Be Clear

2009-10-09T17:33:00.002-05:00

Apparently various "moderate Democrats" are concern-trolling that President Obama should reject the Nobel Prize as a gesture of humility and/or to try and mitigate the negative reaction from the sort of people who are going to be affirmatively upset that he won it in the first place.

That's not at all what I was on about; the sort of people who are affirmatively upset aren't the sort of people who can be mitigated. It's also unnecessary for him to demonstrate any more humility than he already has in his remarks on the subject. Outright giving your award to someone else is kind of a weird maneuver.

Rather I intended to suggest that by the lights of the award's purpose he does not deserve it (more in a minute) but also intended to imply, but then removed the text which would make it clear, that such rejection would be not an act of humility but an act of rejection. Indulge the idea that you've always disdained [award show of your choice] but that one day you are in fact nominated for such an award. Well, it's very nice of them to be so sweet, but presumably you might entertain the idea of not showing up because you really don't give a fuck about the [awards] and couldn't really respect it if you were to receive one. That's what I was intending to suggest by noting that the Nobels seem like the sort of thing you can't just politely avoid the way a musician might skip the Grammys.

Back to the issue of whether President Obama deserves the award; the prize-giving committee has noted that there is a tradition of giving the award in a hopeful spirit, and that this is what they intended by honoring President Obama. My response would be that if the Nobel Prize is intended to be more than simply a pat on the back and a speech - whether for accomplishments achieved or anticipated - it is squandered in this case. The Nobel prize comes with publicity and money, neither of which are any help to Obama: his profile cannot be made any higher than it already is, weight cannot be added to the force of his words (in this way the Prize functions as an acknowledgment that Europeans like him, which we already knew, rather than the pleasant revelation of same), and whatever agenda he chooses to pursue internationally could not be accorded more attention than whatever naturally pertains to someone who happens to be the President of the United States, and in particular a President who everybody knows is well admired by the sort of international set that might care about Nobel Prizes. And of course he's going to donate the money to charity, because he doesn't really have any other use for it; he can't particularly do anything with it during office (nor does he need to) and on leaving office the odds are that he's going to become very, very rich very, very quickly, and his fundraising capabilities for anything like the Clinton Global Initiative are going to vastly outstrip the value of the prize money, which I believe is about $1.5 million.

Instead, the same attention and money could have been directed towards someone who would actually be in a position to benefit from it, whose cause would gain notoriety and admiration on the international stage, who could use the funds productively in its furtherance, and whose voice, validated by the Nobel committee (for whatever that's worth), could be lent a weight it would otherwise lack. This is basically the same theory behind an argument in the jazz community that says people shouldn't give prizes to the likes of Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter, because they're not going to benefit from the attention or funds involved, whereas a MacArthur Grant can make a huge difference in the life of a scuffling young musician. I don't know if it's actually true that Hancock and Shorter can't do anything productive with $500k (I have no idea how much money either one has, although both had a period where they approached mainstream commercial success during the 1970s), but I think the same logic applies, perhaps more forcefully, to the subject of the Peace Prize. (With exceptions noted perhaps for the recognition of truly astounding accomplishments by people who don't necessarily require the attention; I think it's the thin nature of the argument for Obama that lays bare the somewhat perverse logic behind so many Prize recipients to begin with).

Srsly?

2009-10-09T07:34:00.003-05:00

It's pretty clear that President Obama hasn't yet done anything that makes it worth honoring him, so to speak, with the Nobel Peace Prize; it's frankly kind of embarrassing and possibly condescending that he's getting an award for basically showing up and maintaining bodily homeostasis for a while, especially since he's in the middle of not exactly doing everything possible to end the two wars he's currently conducting.

I suspect, however, that the rules for responding to a Nobel Committee invitation are much like the rules for responding to an invitation from a head of state; as I believe Miss Manners once said, there is absolutely no polite way to decline, because declining is the sort of thing that just isn't done.

Aw. kward.

(NB: I have no idea, and no interest in figuring out, how President Obama himself feels about this; I wouldn't be surprised at all if he felt the way I do, and I wouldn't be surprised at all if he thought he was totally deserving. Guys who run for President, even guys for whom I happily vote, are not guys with normally equilibrated egos.)

UPDATE TO ADD

Also, if the Nobel folks liked Obama so much and wanted to see him do Peace Prize worthy things they should've taken the twelve minutes to learn about American domestic politics and realize that he's about to gain a lot of negative attention for this. And be made fun of a lot, even though he had nothing to do with it. Visualize the facepalm graphic of your choice here.

But Alas, I Have Left The Life Of The Mind

2009-10-05T19:06:00.002-05:00

Somehow I do not think that, had I become a graduate student and thereby a Teacher's Assistant, this would have happened to me.

Best line: "I had hoped you would have gotten the hint by now."

Cause I Know All None Of You Are Dying To Read My Thoughts

2009-10-02T18:50:00.008-05:00

Trying to get right to the point and glide past my longer than normally long absence from blogging:

What I find distressing about all I've read of the pundit-driven* commentary against Roman Polanski's potential extradition is that those few voices that aren't primarily focused on the difficult task of being as morally contemptible as possible (I AM LOOKING AT YOU ANNE APPELBAUM) are gesturing in the direction of a reasonable argument but completely missing the seriousness (and thereby failing to make their point) of what their comment implies.

This is the argument, more or less, that it's been a long time, he's an old man, he hasn't repeated his crime, Samantha Geimer has said she doesn't want him subject to legal action, and there's accordingly no purpose served by bothering to prosecute him. (Might as well note that while it's true that so far as we know, he hasn't raped - in the violent coercive sense of his victim's testimony - anyone else, it's not true that he hasn't committed what in the United States would have been and is statutory rape - the crime he pled to - because he carried on a relationship with a fifteen year old Nastassja Kinski, which may have been consensual on its face but under the precepts of American law could not by legal definition have been consensual.) There are two interesting prongs of legal-philosophical argument here that are, to put it charitably, underdeveloped, and perhaps in conflict.

Taking first the victim's wishes, the fact of the matter is that under American law this doesn't mean a damn thing. In practice we are of course reminded of many cases where at the urging of the victim in a crime like, say, domestic abuse, the state declines to file charges (but in part this is because the victim herself would be an uncooperative witness), and the pleadings of a victim's family have certainly swayed decisions (prosecutorial and judicial) about sentencing. These are instances, though, where our criminal justice system is for better or worse (in my opinion, just to get the cards out, worse) bending away from its stated purpose both in philosophical underpinning and statutory fact. The criminal system doesn't work on behalf of, or for the benefit of, the victim (that's what the civil court system is for). My bullshit half-knowledgeable half-conjectural take on this fact is that it stems, at root, in early Germanic/Anglo-Saxon law, and the weregild concept. That society had a long history of violent retribution leading to endless bloody cycles of revenge which were ultimately detrimental to the health of the society as a collective, so blood revenge was replaced by the progressive (for then!) and repugnant (for now!) concept of the blood-price, or weregild (literally the man-money, or more properly man-payment, man-debt). Your station in society determined your worth; in essence, there was a kind of inverse price on your head at all times, which was the amount your potential killer would owe your family if he in fact killed you. This is in some sense still the system we have in the modern civil proceedings of wrongful death suits, but without the creepy actuarial tables detailing the relative worth of men, women, slaves, etc. It's also, in the criminal legal context, a first step in realizing that allowing the victims to drive punitive action instead of the state was harmful to the state (I mean, a murdered slave might be atoned for with gold, but in practice the family of a murdered man didn't usually want the weregild, they wanted to murder the killer and his family, which is probably also still true for many/most people today). By the time we get to the present, we have a long established Anglo-American legal system which prosecutes criminals not on behalf of the victim but explicitly on behalf of the state, and which does not, in its official capacity, recognize the desires or needs (such as they are) of a victim('s family), because the state is concerned with the offense against society at large and against the state's own authority, which would be equally offended by allowing the victims to pursue common revenge.

In practice, our legal rhetoric is still heavily veined with pleas about getting justice for the victims and their families, but this is contrary to the letter and spirit of our legal system, a common example of the common phenomenon whereby human instinct strains against the civilizing bounds of human intellectual theory. And of course I've been writing about circumstances where the victim desires to see her assailant punished, when the case in front of us is a case where she desires, more or less, to not see that. This is just simple consistency, though; you can't have a fair legal system which accommodates a victim's request for lenience but disregards her request for vengeance. In our system as currently assembled, Samantha Geimer's wishes simply aren't supposed to matter from the state's perspective. There are two ways in which you could argue that they should matter: the less ambitious one is further from the folk-concept of justice under consideration, but can be integrated into the OTHER prong of arguing that Polanski should be let alone; the more ambitious implies a complete reordering of our legal system's precepts which hopefully would not lead us back to the days of blood feuds but which would prize the victim's sense of justice over the state's authority, or at least try and place them into more equal balance. I don't think you can go very far in this direction without leading to the kind of personalization of retribution which modern society would find deeply unnerving and which would also severely degrade the integrity of the state: the foundation of our criminal system is the principle that the state has a monopoly on the just and authorized use of violence (in a broadly construed sense of the word, which incorporates incarceration, asset seizure, etc.), and to hand our legal system over to the desires of victims would be to make state-authorized violence into an instrument of the individual citizen and ultimately corrupt the whole concept.

The other way to go is perhaps less intuitive but more interesting and maybe more feasible. Here we retain the primacy of the state's self-concern for its monopoly on violence, but compromise or reorder the details of how it executes the protection of that right. Right now the system is set up in principle to be, well, defensive of the principle. People break the law and they are punished. What could happen is to reimagine the criminal justice system as one which philosophically and statutorily promotes the kind of compromises prosecutors reach in the everyday application of the statute to real cases; the recognition that there are mitigating circumstances not explicitly provided for in the law and the somewhat crass (to an idealist) recognition that some cases are not worth trying because of the fiscal cost to the state or the possibility of an unwelcome jury verdict, hence plea bargains where the accused stipulates his guilt regarding a lesser crime in exchange for lenient sentencing. This is a pragmatic approach to the judicial system, but inconsistently so (is it really worth going after all those harmless pot smokers? - of course not, but we do it so often anyway). An overall pragmatic overhaul of our legal structure would require rewriting and reinterpreting the penal code and its associated sentencing rules, but would also necessarily empower prosecutors and justices to balance their estimation of how important it is to punish a particular instance of a crime against the overall rule. This would make Kant's head explode (not in and of itself a bad thing!); it would also make relevant the victim's wishes, which would be a good thing - borderline instances of statutory rape which are in fact legitimate "Romeo and Juliet" cases that happen to fall directly outside the arbitrary bright lines of the law would be let go, e.g. Samantha Geimer's desire for Polanski to be left alone doesn't stem from that place, though - it stems from the understandable but self-interested desire to be left alone and allowed to live an anonymous life without reading her name in the paper always connected with a traumatic violation. The agents of the state could weigh her interests against the potential threat Polanski poses to society at large, decide that he poses no such threat, and let be. But to be able to do that inside of a just and coherent legal system would require not simply looking at the somewhat exceptional circumstances of this case and making such a judgment, but would require recreating the state's interpretation of its own self-interest in pragmatic rather than idealistic terms. (I think this would be a bad thing on balance, because it would ultimately enhance the different enforcement of the law in different jurisdictions, such that in one locale a man who avenged his family's death [always back to the blood feud and the blood price!] would be let go and in another he would be guilty of murder; you can't be pragmatic and have hard-and-fast guideline at the same time. But it wouldn't be the kind of catastrophic method of arranging the legal system that I believe prioritizing the needs and desires of the victim would be.)

But needless to say, nobody's saying any of this about Polanski; they're just gesturing at the idea that he ought to be left alone because ... well, because. Of course, even in a pragmatic system the state still needs to be vigilant about protecting the integrity of its authority, and in this case Polanski is once again rightly doomed; he's not merely a criminal for the initial rape but a criminal for being a fugitive from justice. He's committed a crime that comes closer than any other to literally violating the state's authority, because he willfully evaded punishment, and a system that allows people to regularly do that is not a system with longevity. Of course, we could just this once make an exception because Polanski is so old and his crime was so long ago, but...

Oh, but in a pragmatic legal system the axe swings the other way. Letting Polanski go breeds cynicism that the law does not apply to the wealthy and famous (whether or not that's why he's hypothetically let go), which ultimately corrodes the state's authority. Making an example of him (justly or not) promotes the impression that the state applies the law equally to all, no matter their station, which strengthens the state's authority. Pragmatically, it's worth it to be less than normally lenient in certain circumstances in order to prove that no one is allowed to evade justice forever. So you've got that to ponder.

Or you could just say that Polanski is a fugitive who justly needs to face his crimes in the legal system that initially set out to try him, because as it turns out our theoretically inflexible, practically flexible (for good and bad) system is actually pretty good when weighed against the alternatives set out above (do you really want to live in a system that incentivizes the state to make an example of people?) and that being inflexible about its principles is generally the right way to go. ESPECIALLY WHEN THE GUY IN QUESTION IS A FUCKING CHILD RAPIST.

Ahem.

* The other anti-extradition commentary is what I'd call Hollywood-driven, in which all right-thinking people swallow a little uncomfortably as their favorite SoCal creative types seem to reveal themselves as, well, the sort of people I described in the prior paragraph. This isn't really so surprising, though. If a good friend of mine were accused of a crime like Polanski's, I'm not sure how I'd react, and if a good friend of mine were in the position I believe Polanski is in - guilty (of more than he pled to), a long-time fugitive from justice, very old and far removed from the time of his crime - I can't promise that I wouldn't say something unfortunate myself (or at least keep my mouth shut and not say what I probably should). Now, not everybody in Hollywood is a friend of Polanski's, of course. But he's widely (and, for his work, deservedly) admired to a considerable degree, and not at the kind of remove that I admire Chinatown and Rosemary's Baby, but with the special intensity reserved for the heroes of your own craft, profession, and love. Plus not everyone in Hollywood is personally associated with Polanski, but I'd be surprised if, taking the set of "people I've heard of in Hollywood" you could get more than three or four degrees of separation from someone who was professionally or personally friendly with Polanski. So basically they're acting like ignorant members of the same social circle, which is unfortunate but totally predictable in any given social circle; these just happen to be famous people.

"I'm Thinking About What I Want And What I Need": Life, Season Two

2009-09-12T17:38:00.002-05:00

Not much to say; not as good as Season One, but the high points, oh the high points. This show should have been bigger. This post is mostly to preserve the dialogue at the end of the penultimate episode, which rockets us into the finale.

"Charlie - what are you thinking?"
"I'm thinking about what I want and what I need."
"What do you want?"
"I want a peaceful soul."
"And what do you need?"
"I need a bigger gun."

Damian Lewis' delivery of those lines, as Charlie, should be bottled and sold. (Adam Arkin is pretty awesome too, btw.) Alone on the page they're walking the line between cheesy and badass, but Lewis nails the tone just right, because while Charlie Crews is a badass, he's (as mentioned previously) a Steve McQueen badass, which means he doesn't talk like someone who learned to be a badass by watching badasses in movies. "I want a peaceful soul" he says, with painful longing, and then "I need a bigger gun," he says, in the same serious but informative tone he uses at work, describing the tool he'll use to save a loved one.

That's the little engine at the heart of Crews, and Life: for all the explicit and implicit reference to Crews' discovery and adoption of Zen philosophy in jail, he's not Zen. Perhaps no one can actually be Zen, but Crews is very, very far from being Zen. But he's trying so damn hard, because he thinks Zen is the path to what we wants - a peaceful soul. He wants peace to quiet the beast inside him, the beast that got him through twelve years of wrongful imprisonment (as an ex-cop in Pelican Bay, no less), the beast that erupts when the people he cares about - too few, he realized in an earlier episode - are endangered, the beast that needs to know not merely who really killed his friends, but why he of all people was framed for it, and by whom. Crews never seems certain whether his quest for the truth of why he had twelve years taken away is a quest for peace, that the knowledge and understanding can soothe his deep wounds, or if it's a quest for vengeance, to let the beast do what it wants and savage the people who savaged him. Crews undoubtedly fears that it's both, that succumbing to violence - not very Zen, he would say, but it'll do until Zen comes along, he says in the finale - will bring him to peace. That's the path he tries to avoid, he tries to use Zen to shield himself from, but in the end he can't quite manage it.

He's not quite ready for the peaceful soul, but at the end of the season - and, sadly, the series - he seems closer to it.
He doesn't ultimately get the bigger gun, but he didn't ultimately need it.

"Do you wanna know how I got through twelve years of prison?" he asks an enemy.
"Your Zen?" his enemy laughs.
"Like that," Crews explains after breaking the other man's windpipe.

He wants a peaceful soul.

I Don't Know What I Just Watched

2009-09-09T23:06:00.002-05:00

Do you want to watch a film set in Thailand? In Thai?

Do you want to watch a Thai action movie starring a young girl (who's actually in her 20s)?

Do you want to watch a Thai action movie whose main character is an autistic girl who learns how to fight by watching other people learn how to fight, and by - metatextually - watching the prior movies of the director of the film I am right now discussing?

I mean, do you?

I'm actually not sure that you do.

If I told you that during the film's 20-minute action scene denouement the autistic girl - who at this point is a kind of Terminator rag doll of Muay Thai - meets perhaps her most difficult single opponent in the film in the form of a twitchy autistic boy who has also apparently learned some tricky moves by watching lots of movies, would that change your desire to see the film?

And if so, in which direction?

I'm honestly curious.

There's Also This

2009-09-03T21:56:00.003-05:00

Look at us; we were both so young then.

At the time I did not actually play the guitar.

And now this has happened:

At the time I do not actually play the violin. But I am glad to have it.

Adeus, Vovozinho.

About Last Weekend

2009-09-03T21:38:00.003-05:00

One expects to go back to the state of one's raising and bury his last remaining grandparent. But one is slightly surprised to bury said grandfather while said state is getting sideswiped by a fucking hurricane. As far as I can remember, not since 1991 and Hurricane Bob, and then just now twice in a month.

Also one doesn't expect the reemergence after a roughly three-year absence of the elder maternal uncle I widely refer to as a druncle. He's still a druncle. He at one point started giving me something between his opinion and his advice on the possibility of either him or me (or, I think, my dad) cockblocking one of my other uncle's friends and picking up his escort to the post-funeral gathering. (There's like this whole other story there that I won't go into, about the guy and his escort - I'm using the term to be polite, not suggestive - but I'll leave it alone.)

The day before the service my dad, uncles, and I went into the funeral home to make some final arrangements. We went in and found no one, and almost by accident stumbled into the darkened room where my grandfather's brief wake would be held; he was already there; for reasons nobody's quite sure about (other than that it was what he wanted, I suppose, which should really count for everything if you take that stance) there was an open casket. We weren't really ready for that. (Then we found one of the directors; he repeatedly referred to himself as [First Name Middle Initial Last Name The Third].) They look different when they've gone. I guess 85 years is a good long time.

"I Know You": Life

2009-08-14T17:42:00.004-05:00

You did not watch the primetime NBC drama Life.

You should (have) watch(ed) the primetime NBC drama Life. I have only seen the first season; it is on DVD. Soon the second and final season will be on DVD. Like, in two weeks.

Particulars:

I appear to be drawn to shows that build to something strong (and for all I know don't stay there) and as long as there's a spark of something I enjoyed to begin with I'll wait a long time (relatively speaking) to let it get there. Lots of people apparently didn't like the way Life started, and it does bear down very heavily to ladle on the quirkiness flavor, but by the end of the first season, having established who these people are and what this world is, they don't need to lean so heavily on the idea that protagonist Charlie Crews is a Weird Guy, Ignorant of Technology and Prone To Eating Fruit and Speaking in Zen-ish Koans; a show with a better start, or a show on a network that was more willing to let its creators breathe (I don't know, so I'm not pointing fingers) might have eased off much faster on shoving some of the basic premises at us. But I watch these things for emotional resonance and moments of art and scenes that delight me, and I'm quite often willing to let a lot of frustrating material accumulate if I get the sense that it's laying the necessary pipe which will lead me to those things I crave. I liked the early episodes of Life, but I understand why people were annoyed. The last four episodes of the first season, though, are stunners.

Firstly: great protagonist, great performance. Damian Lewis plays Detective Charlie Crews, who was wrongfully imprisoned for 12 years; exonerated thanks to DNA evidence, he sues the City of Los Angeles and gains as settlement an undisclosed sum of money (a lot of it) and reinstatement into the police department as a homicide detective. His ex-partner remarks that he was a normal cop before jail; working towards his twenty and his pension. After jail he is not a normal cop. He maintained sanity by reading Buddhist philosophy and fantasizing about revenge on the people he believes must have framed him, and is driven by these two often conflicting influences. Damian Lewis looks, as someone remarks on the DVD, a lot like Steve McQueen and a lot like Stan Laurel, and at the proper moments he manages to absorb the spirit of both into his performance. I can't say anything about this performance because it's so controlled and contained and cool, and I can't say enough about it because it's so good.

Also fantastic guest actors and supporting players waltzing through; lots of Deadwood alums building up to Titus Welliver fucking owning in the last episode, a surprising brief turn from Jessy Schram (Veronica Mars) that's just strong as anything, nice moments for the First Lady of San Francisco, a sprinkling of Adam Arkin, some sweet scenes with Christina Hendricks (and Adam Arkin), and just lots of actorly goodness. Plus, maybe my favorite recurring actor moment on the series is Sarah Shahi looking at unusual things before we get to see them. Some reviews knock her performance as weak; she's not the best actress at the world (but then who is?) but she's quite good, I think, and she's got her own energy which is the kind of thing you have to respect, and while let's be honest it helps that she's beautiful there's something very particular about the way she gawks at something unusual. I could watch a loop of every moment where Sara Shahi approaches a crime scene, curious and a little surprised. She does a lot of eyebrow acting without it seeming, well, like heavy eyebrow acting. Different energy, but not wholly unlike Mary-Louise Parker in the way a lot gets expressed with posture and by moving the head.

And that leads us to the images; by the end of the season each episode gets at least one memorable, unique, startling and beautiful tableau. Those aestheticized crime scenes feed into the rest of the tone of the show; the CSI's have done their take on beautiful crime scenes for almost a decade now but they're always dark and often prurient. Life shoots for the unusual but not the grotesque, and that's part of the way the show is shot - it could just as well be called Light. This is a relentlessly sunny detective show, not by way of cheerful tone but by way of literal and manufactured sunlight. Charlie Crews spent too long in a dark cell, and now he loves the sun, is drawn to it, and the show follows him into brilliant color. He's always standing by windows, looking up at the sky, positioning himself so he can feel the sun's warmth and bathe in it.

...

"If she shot him through the door, why is there blood on her hands?"
"That's not blood, it's meat sauce."
"Why is there meat sauce on her hands?"
" ... I really don't know."

A Thought, Of A Sudden

2009-07-26T20:34:00.006-05:00

I think perhaps one of the reasons that I struggle to relate with poetry in general is because I struggle to relate to modern poetry in particular, and the reason for that, it just occurred to me, funnily enough, is the lack of rhyming.

Well, not the lack of rhyming per se. The absence of requirement for, or expectation of, some kind of externally imposed metrical or phonetic structure for the poem, which then naturally falls into the distinct lines of poetry, makes the whole line break thing seem rather precious, to me. I've read very little modern poetry that I thought did anything particularly interesting or useful with the convention of the linebreak (let's be fair, I've also in the scheme of things read very little modern poetry, though of course it depends on to whom I'm being compared), and I'd rather just see little evocative prose paragraphs presented as artworks which in my mind (not the mind of the artist, so who'm I to say? and judge?) are more representative of the true nature and form of what's being produced and presented. Maybe what I'm saying is sort of like: "look, if you're going to blow skronky atonal free saxophone solos, it's probably not necessary to do it in fixed 32-bar intervals, because they don't mean anything in the context of what you're doing."

Or I'm just being a wanker.

(Since I don't much anticipate writing a great deal about poetry, I'm going to apologetically stuff this one under my rarely-utilized "Fiction" tag. Sorry, poetry.)

You Should Do The Things I Tell You

2009-07-26T19:51:00.003-05:00

For example: You should watch Spaced. It's available on Hulu right now. It's very good. Very funny, for a few fleeting moments kind of stirring emotionally - the tiny sweet center if you will - really very funny, and you can watch the entirety of the show in about six hours.

Also, Nick Frost, whom I always found entertaining but not as good as Simon Pegg in their movies together, murders every scene he's in. It's phenomenal, phenomenal work.

Plus at one point Simon Pegg says a prayer to Buffy Summers. Also the female lead and co-creator/co-writer was awesome in a very different role, with a very different tone, in two of the best episodes of the revamped Doctor Who. So good people all around.

Lets Make The Michigan Militia's Collective Head Explode

2009-07-25T19:25:00.004-05:00

If you wanted to envision a world in which I was running around the Midwestern hinterland shooting US gov't personnel, this would've been the best possible first step. (Actual hat tip.)

Posse comitatus MATTERS. The closer we come to a world in which The Siege is a prophetic movie, the closer we come to ruin. I'm not particularly joking; not that The Siege was an especially good film - arguably a bad one, really, but I saw it ten years ago so who can recall - but even Bruce Willis' character, the general in charge of the US Army's occupation of Brooklyn, argued against declaring martial law. We have enough problems with the way our law enforcement agencies and agents related to the people they're supposed to protect; if you blur the military and the police, you wind up with a police state that treats its citizens like the enemy. I'm surprisingly humorless about this. I thought John Yoo was an immoral idiot; authoring a memo to the effect that the US government could ignore the prohibition against using the military on American soil, against American citizens, is the work of a monstrous fool or of a monster.

Never sure where to put all this anger.

And In A Semi-Update To the Last Post

2009-07-18T23:09:00.003-05:00

I guess I don't really know what to make of interpersonal interactions. You know, between persons. They're more mysterious, still, than I thought they were. Or I'm really bad at understanding what people say to me. One or the other.

In a related story, I bet I'm going to eat a lot of chocolate tonight. Starting in ... now.

I Was Thinking About Myself, As I Often Do

2009-07-17T23:53:00.001-05:00

... and I've been searching for a word, what is it, it's on the tip of my tongue, I just can't seem to -

oh, there it is. Yeah. Ahem:

LAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAME.

Is the word I was thinking of.

For describing myself. Yeah.

Anyway, that's about the shape of it.

And Besides It Doesn't Sound Like Me!

2009-07-12T18:49:00.001-05:00

In the past few years I've become much more comfortable with my singing voice, such as it is.

The past week of trying to record myself singing is doing a very good job of undermining that comfort. Argh.

Doesn't Bode Well For The Long Term

2009-07-12T18:41:00.002-05:00

In the first thirty minutes I was on Facebook I went crazy trying to figure out how to disassociate my Facebook profile from a photo tagged with my name by a woman who once sent me an email inviting me to be her Facebook friend*. I've never met this woman, she doesn't know me, and the gentleman with my name in the aforementioned photo isn't me.

So yay technology and interconnectedness, right?

*I never got this - people just put a person's name in front of a popular email service provider and assume that's the person they want to talk to? In high school someone I know sent a really long email to what he assumed was the address of his girlfriend, because it was HerName@aol.com, and received a reply saying "I'm almost certainly not the HerName you're looking for, but she sounds like a lucky girl."

Lynchathon III, Part III: Inland Empire, Conclusion

2009-07-11T23:47:00.004-05:00

FINALLY.

Actually, I think I've pretty much sabotaged myself, and probably did so intentionally, by waiting so long to write my reaction to Inland Empire that I'm left without much of anything to say, but in a more justifiable sense than I would've had nothing to say right after seeing it.

I suppose it's convenient at this moment in his career to look at Lynch's oeuvre as a whole and momentarily pretend that he's not going to do anything in the future. I assume that's not the case; in spite of my various misgivings and difficulties with much of his work, I very much hope it's not the case. But what you get by pretending that Inland Empire is Lynch's farewell work is that it's very much a return to the beginning of his career, as though he'd been following a long creative loop away from the example of Eraserhead and finally made his way back to the beginning; back to home. Like Eraserhead, Inland Empire begins with what appears to be an intelligible plot and then dives headlong, deeper and deeper, into a pool of Lynchian filmic dreamspace. It's as difficult to grapple with as every intervening Lynch film combined, and it's twice the length of Eraserhead. (Also, both films took literally years to make, unlike the rest of his works; the ever-unfolding production schedule undoubtedly both stems from and feeds the dreamlike, elusive relationship with normal cinematic storytelling that binds these movies.)

While I wasn't in the best frame of mind to watch it, I was in a more receptive mood than I was for Eraserhead, which is part of why - despite the aformentioned length - I drew more from it and had a better experience. But perhaps more importantly, and if I were going to pretend that Lynch specifically learned something from his sojourn in the relatively more accessible territories he mined for the 25 years between his first film and his most recent one it would be this, Inland Empire presents us with an inscrutable structure and story but marries it to a very scrutable emotional core, based in Laura Dern's astounding performance. The performances in Eraserhead are effective, but they're as inscrutable and outside the waking experience of life as everything else in the movie; we can reconstruct what the main character is going through emotionally - the film is, after all, more or less a dramatization of what's in his head and his heart - but the performances aren't so viscerally engaging because the emotional experience is presented in a way that's detatched from metaphorical viscera (though not literal, gastrointestinal viscera, of course). Whatever Laura Dern's character (characters?) is going through during Inland Empire, she puts that emotional experience onscreen through her own work as much as the film around her dramatizes it; though, as in Wild at Heart, her performance is by the necessity of Lynch's script and his world somewhat off-kilter, it's off-kilter in a way that ties directly back to recognizable human behavior, or rather the way we're used to seeing recognizable human behavior portrayed by modern actors in the Western performance tradition, which is the method of performance I - and most of you! - recognize as "realistic" however artificial its tropes actually are.

Dern pulls the disparate strands together, whether she's playing what seems to be her actual character - a somewhat distant actress - or the character that actress plays, or one of the various mirrors and shadows of those women. It's in some ways one of the most impressive performances I've seen because it really has to stand on its own in a way that very performances do. Not to diminish the quality work done by the actors onscreen with her - it's not that her performance needs to stand alone the way a one-woman show/monologue does, it stands alone because it's the only thing we have to hang our hat on, the only thing that reaches out to the audience and says "here, you can use me, use this, as your entrance into this world." And as someone who's a sucker for good acting that's skating on the edge of near over-the top emotionalism, Dern makes a congenial Constant Companion through the impenetrable (to me, certainly) rooms the film travels through.

(Incidentally, since I spoke at some length about Dern's scorching presence in Wild at Heart, this is why it's all about the performance, and what makes it in some ways more impressive: I think Dern is more attractive as a mature woman than she was as a 21-year old or whatever she was back then, but her performance, and her sex scene with Justin Theroux, isn't burning-the-metaphorical-filmstock [Inland Empire was shot on digital video] hot the way almost every scene in Wild at Heart was because it's not that kind of movie and not that kind of character and so it doesn't call for that kind of performance.)

ANYWAY the point being that after Eraserhead, which was at most kind of an oblique film in emotional terms, Lynch went on to make a bunch of movies that, in tension with the received narrative about his work, are very accessible and recognizable emotionally, and actually wear their joy and sorrow and heartbreak and terror on their sleeve in a way that seems inaccessible simply because we're not used to movies where the emotional experience is so unfiltered, especially in an otherwise challenging context. Inland Empire then closes the (artifical, intellectual, critically-imposed) loop by bringing that heavy emotional attitude to the mystery and dreamstate of Eraserhead. That - the unfiltered, whether it be emotional or visual or structural - is really the throughline, I suppose, of what I've had to say about Lynch and what I ripped from David Foster Wallace's "behind-the-scenes" piece on the making of Lost Highway, that what we get in a Lynch film seems like a more or less unprocessed transference from the man's innermost brain to our screens. The structural conceits we're used to - plots, character arcs, orderly and clever structures - are the detritus of the way our brains help us to make sense of the stimulus around us, an often inescapable imposition of the higher consciousness on direct human experience, one that is arguable necessary for us to live the lives we do, but one which arguable shuts off some potentially valuable experiential real estate, if we can let ourselves go and just feel everything without organizing it. That's, from a different angle, what we're getting when we experience ecstasy in whatever form, be it religious, sexual, social, and of course chemical: a reprieve to some greater or lesser degree from the ongoing wear of having an evolved, social, human brain. Thinking becomes tiring without reprieve.

Of course the catch is that no trigger is universal; not every sexual encounter gives you that release, not every art form moves you in that way. I used to find something hair-raising and exuberant about elements of the Catholic mass when I was a boy, and I don't feel that any more. Music can take me there, and sometimes film or even more likely TV (because what's going to push me over that edge is likely to be a built up reaction to a character or an onscreen relationship, and TV gives me more time to build my own relationship with the people on screen, and more time for them to get into the depths of a character if that what they want to do). Most of Lynch's films, for me, miss the mark of pulling my non-cognitive trigger. There are moments, and in the case of Mulholland Drive (admittedly one of the more accessible Lynch films on a moment-to-moment basis) I'm wrapped up in that world with real investment (and again consider how that movie is tied together by a remarkable performance, or really two remarkable performances, by its central actress), but for the most part the presumably unfiltered products of Lynch's brain miss my personal mark.

But there's nobody doing what he does, that I'm aware of, certainly not with American prominence, neither in his most remote and inaccessible or most inviting and intellectually intelligible works, and I'm certainly a bigger Lynch fan than I expected to wind up being. He's a challenging artist, which is in itself something I respond to; I've said that a Spike Lee failure (and in my opinion there's a fair number of them) is more daring and interesting than most other people's successes, and while Lynch can't really be judged in those same terms, he's equally worthy of respect and consideration even at his most questionable moments. I can't think of a good conclusion here so I'm just going to stop.

But not before I leave you with the credits for Inland Empire. Just get up and go and feel something, for your sake and mine.

I run to the river.

A Modern Perspective On The Iliad

2009-07-11T23:35:00.003-05:00

As of the halfway point. (Please note, all adjectives are used strictly in a gender-neutral sense.)

LONG HAIRED ACHAEANS:

Achilles: HUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGE dick.
Agamemnon: HUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGE dick.
Diomedes: Just a hint of dickishness.
Greater Ajax: Not that much of a dick.
Menelaus: Kind of a dick.
Nestor: Not a dick.
Lesser Ajax: No impression one way or the other, which I guess is the shape of it when the other Ajax is around.
Odysseus: Kind of a dick.

DARDAN TROY:

Paris: HUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGE dick.
Hector: Kind of a dick sometimes.
Helen: Kind of a dick.
Priam: Not a dick.
Aeneas: Not a dick. (Yet? Cause the better part of a millenium later, literarily speaking, he's gonna be a dick.)
Various others: Relatively dickish.

THE DEATHLESS GODS:

Zeus: Pretty major dick.
Hera: HUGE dick.
Athena: Substantially dickish a substantial part of the time.
Aphrodite: HUUUUUUUUUUUGE dick.
Ares: Kind of a dick.
Thetis: Dick.
Apollo: Pretty much a dick.
Poseidon: Kind of a dick; also a whiner.

Cue Up Your Kent Brockman Impressions...

2009-07-05T21:15:00.002-05:00

Now!

Seriously, this is bad. We need to find the - the what? empresses? - and kill them, lest our inaction ensure our doom.

Demon Rum (Vodka/Gin)

2009-07-05T01:07:00.004-05:00

W/all due respect to the Ad Council, which does some fine work (actually, the first page of google results don't show the version of this ad campaign that appears in my neighborhood, and I didn't want to look harder than that, but it's better than this billboard), I haven't been really drunk in maybe a couple of years, despite being buzzed on a handful of occasions. Where I'm personally defining buzzed as "I can definitely feel that I've been drinking, I'm aware of its effects on me, and my tongue and emotions are...lubricated." And where I'm defining drunk as "I see two of things when I try to focus on them."

So anyway, not having been really truly drunk for maybe a couple of years, I'd forgotten that things get weird, like "after spending a few minutes across the street summoning my wilting dignity for one final push, I walked steadily through the lobby of my building, got in an elevator, struggled to get the key in the door, and then spent the remainder of the evening apparently flailing around on the bathroom floor attempting to induce sobriety before I went to sleep from 9PM-1AM. Also the whole seeing double thing, I'd forgotten about that." After being away for a while from that kind of state, it was strange to go through it all again while thinking: "what the fuck am I doing?" Also, after I finish this post I'm going to have to eat something, which will screw up what so far was a reasonably successful attempt at weekend sleep-schedule normalcy.

On the other hand, I think I was fairly successful in my lower level goals at my ex-coworker's July 4th party, these goals being something like:

(1) Be sociable and spend a few minutes talking to people I don't know.
(2) Don't get drunk, but if I get drunk, get the hell out of there before I start stumbling.
(3) Don't get weirdly competitive around [another former coworker's] husband.

Regarding #3, in addition to that former coworker being on the long list of "girls I sort of had a crush on for a period of five days to seventeen weeks that nothing ever happened with," her husband is a more or less professional comedian (and, having seen his act once, a decent one!), and very personally funny, which I think I usually handle well but am always internally afraid of overreacting to. Officially Funny people make me sort of twitchy because if I'm honest one thing I've gotten pleasantly used to in the last ten years or so is people thinking I'm pretty funny (maybe they're just being nice!) in my own peculiar way, and then I really want to make Officially Funny people laugh to prove that I am, in fact, a funny guy. Which to the extent that I might be a funny guy runs mostly counter to the nature and thrust of my funniness because I can't force it with great success, since I'm not that great at telling jokes and would probably be a bad standup comedian. Actually, I know exactly what I'd be like as a standup comedian: unfunny and rageful.

We Make Our Small Steps

2009-07-03T23:34:00.003-05:00

Things I Have Learned And Done Today:

(1) If you buy a new computer and start thinking about using it to finally do some audio recordings, things are going to get very confusing and more expensive than you were planning on faster than you thought it would. Or at least that's the case if you're starting from scratch, which is what I'm doing.

(2) If you are looking for a MIDI controller, and you happen to feel comfortable playing keyboard instruments, then don't buy the neat little 25-key controllers. Even if you think "I'll mostly use it for drum patterns and perhaps some synth bass or whatever, I don't need to play full keyboard parts on it." It feels weird. A two-octave range doesn't sound so bad for those purposes until you look at it and freak out because you're only two-octave range is from C to C, which doesn't necessarily help you if you're playing in Ab. Of course, there's the octave switch key, but that takes its own reorienting. Actually, a few hours ago I was convinced I was going to return the keyboard controller, but I'm going to give it some more thought.

(3) I happen to SUCK REALLY HARD at playing MIDI drums on a keyboard. ESPECIALLY against a click track vs. some other pre-recorded sound. I guess that's a skill I need to pick up; I assumed my keyboard drumming would be better than my real world drumming, and it's ... not. More generally speaking, I know that weak time is one of my problems as a musician, and I have avoided working on it (to my shame!) but I wasn't expecting my first attempt at a drum track to sound so bad.

(4) I don't like the keyboard that comes with new Macs. I mean, I didn't learn that today, I learned it last week when I bought my new iMac. But I can't wait to buy a third party one. Except remember above how I just dropped a bunch of money on recording stuff. And not cool involved recording stuff. The absolute minimal basics. I want keyboards that go clickity clack and have some resistance to them.

(5) After much futzing around I managed to lay down a bassline. With a real bass. Direct into the sequencer. I am James Jamerson, except without the calluses or fluidity. Woo.

(6) Mics aren't sold with mic cords in the packages. So I can't do anything with a mic until I buy a mic cord. I didn't know that when I bought the mic today. I realized as I was buying the mic that I needed a mic stand if I were going to ever record some live instrument sounds (as opposed to direct injecting into the computer), so I ran back to get a mic stand. But I didn't think about the freaking cord.

(7) Sans mic, I decided to direct record some guitar noodling. I won't lie. I was afraid of this moment. A couple of months ago I realized that I'd spent way too much time practicing on an electric guitar, unplugged, and therefore hadn't been noticing all these little ghost noises my deteriorating muting technique was allowing through. It was a difficult moment for me, and in my normal hysterical way for thirty seconds I considered giving up on electric guitar. (I don't have the same issues on acoustic, in part because I do different things on acoustic, in part because I play less acoustic, in part because I play a lot of fingerstyle acoustic and the right-hand muting is a lot easier that way.) And I've never heard myself recorded, and I've been walking around with the fear that if I listened to my own vibrato it'd sound really lame. So I recorded some guitar noodling. And...it wasn't bad! My vibrato, and playing in general, was incredibly timid, more so than it normally is, although not completely unrepresentative because I'm a little less confident in my electric playing than I was a year ago (see beginning of this item). But it didn't sound bad! It sounded decent(ish)! I started laughing. I haven't been that purely happy in months. As always, it didn't last long, but hey. It's gonna be ok, as long as I don't break the bank buying mics and soft synths. Reminder to practice and practice. I've always heard it's advisable to record yourself and listen critically, that it's an essential practicing tool. So here we go?

RESPECT.

2009-06-25T21:26:00.003-05:00

Not Actually Cannonballing Through Literature

2009-06-22T22:55:00.002-05:00

Like Matthew Yglesias, the quietly bubbling hype around the Infinite Summer project was getting me all excited, and making me feel like I should read the book for the 2.5th time. (I read it all the way through the first time, started rereading it last year and set it aside for other things.) Except that:

(1) 75-80 pages a week is nothing. When I read Infinite Jest the first time, I cannonballed through it, probably knocking it out in four or four and a half days. (I was on winter vacation, freshman or sophomore year in college [can't remember precisely at the moment].) Slowly savoring a 1000 page book of dense internal allusiveness doesn't work as well, I think, when you're pacing it out at 12 pages a day, or even knocking it out in bigger chunks every few days. You lose focus and there's something to be said about creating a hothouse in your own head. This is also a big part of why I love (and greatly prefer) watching tv shows on DVD, because I can plow through episodes at a time, and thrive on the continuity and interconnectedness (or, alternately, rave at the incoherence and contradictions).

(2) I'm starting my own cannonball literary run. Maybe I'll say some more another time; but I'm one quarter of the way through the Iliad. So you could say I'm starting way back.

Two Things, I Think

2009-06-15T20:55:00.002-05:00

It's been forever, yo. I still haven't written about Inland Empire and wrapped up my tripartite Lynchathon even though I saw like eight years ago now. Coming. It's hard to gather the energy for frivolously thought-and-reaction arty blogging when you're really tired and overworked, which is what I've been for a couple of weeks. I don't think it's just corporate, uhm, ethnocentrism, because I don't have a great opinion of everyone in the employ of the company I work for, but I do have a high opinion of the people I personally work with. I don't have a high opinion of the work done by a number of the people working for (directly or as contractor) our client. In one case I'm distrustful of motive, and in several I'm frustrated/exasperated by, essentially, the unreadiness of people who are supposed to be managing what is, let's be fair, an unwieldy situation, to manage that unwieldy situation. There's a learning curve for subject matter - I'm on that one with everyone else who hasn't directly worked in this field - but there's a learning curve for managerial competence and there's also a learning curve, I think, for business savvy, and I think our client, the government agency, which is heavily staffed by people who've never been near the top of an income-generating chain, is somewhat oblivious to (a) what it's like to go out and hustle for a dime, or to put it non-metaphorically, what it's like to need to make payroll when your client is several months behind in cutting you the damn check already, and (b) what people who have spent their lives being very good at hustling for a dime are willing to do to get a quarter.

But those weren't my "two things," so my post title has already made me a liar.

(1) A little navel-gazing blogging here: I went on a fairly restrictive, though not crazy-scary, diet last fall, and over the course of a few months dropped from (yeesh, I'm about to put the numbers down for real) 245 to 215. Then for a few months I did well at using the broader principles of the diet to eat intelligently while not depriving myself and sticking around that 215 plateau. I wasn't exercising regularly, and I wanted to lose more weight, so I told myself that in 2009 I'd resume dieting as I asymptotically approached my non-existent "goal weight"*. Instead, in 2009 I bounced back up to about 233 before restarting the diet in late April; I'm back to about 215 and taking a break for June to try and tread water, more or less, before making another concerted weight loss effort. (The highly restrictive diet isn't that restrictive - the more restrictive they are, the more bullshit they seem to be in the long run, I think; but worrying in an active way about what I'm going to eat for every meal becomes mentally exhausting. The broader principles of picking and choosing your spots and indulging here but not there are mentally easier for me, but my willpower was lax, hence the lapse.)

But the point is about psychology, and it's interesting to me that it's only by virtue of having lost weight that I really understand what I was doing when I was heavy. It's been clear that the foremost reason I became fat is because I became habituated to constantly snacking, in the afternoon and evening, before and after dinner, on various chocolate delivery mechanisms, and that this snacking was both a physical habit - I became completely accustomed to the notion that if I were sitting at a computer, one hand would be semi-regularly handling the cookie duties - and an emotional crutch, albeit a pretty poor one. I've had a few occasions in the past two weeks (remember above about the job stress?) where I had a kind of desperate anxiety-attack-by-food of the sort that regularly overtook me before, and what I noticed is not how shallow the emotional relief is - I've always seen that - but how horrible I feel physically, right afterwards. I actually articulated the thought out loud to some of my coworkers: "Oh my god, did I used to feel like this all the time?"

* Supposedly the "ideal" weight for someone of my height, if you go by Body Mass Index, is somewhere in the vicinity of 165 or 170, but I don't think this is a realistic goal for me. I'm not naturally huge, but I'm bigger-framed than that; I weighed 165 when I was 16, which was both when I reached my full height and when I would last be describable as "lanky". When I graduated from high school I was about 185, and while I was already pretty soft around the belly, I was only in the early stages of the normal late-adolescent "filling out" most guys experience, which happened in college, albeit masked by the fact that I was adding fat via my diet way faster than my body was adding muscle via natural testosterone surges. The short version of the above is that I've never had a moment where I was both fit and physically mature, so I don't know what my baseline should be. Adjusting for a slightly bigger frame and the fact that I'd ideally like to wind up a few smidges more muscular than the guy who actually falls into the middle of the BMI chart's "normal zone", I'm guessing I want to see what happens if I drop to about 200, +/- 5 lbs., and then start weightlifting for real. (Which is its own double-bind: weightlifting in and of itself increases muscle, which burns fat, so weightlifting is actually the most effective method for long-term fat loss. But, short-term, you don't build muscle without eating enough for your body to spend the energy necessary to burn it, which in practice means you'll probably gain some fat as well unless you're really, really disciplined.)

OK wow but enough about fatty's delusions of physical fitness shall we?

I do have other delusions.

(2) I realized today, while thinking about Nine Inch Nails and how I'm an idiot for never seeing them live and now they're, basically, done (though Reznor himself isn't, whatever that means going forward), and also thinking about guitars, that my delusional aspirations of instrumental capacity have been all wrong because I've been thinking that I want the same things from the guitar and the piano, albeit in different spheres. What I want from the piano, though I haven't played one in months and I'll have to start from scratch, more or less, when I eventually resume playing, because I did it all wrong for the first seventeen years...what I want from the piano is to be an interesting and personal improvising pianist, in the jazz idiom, which to me implies balancing a heavy dose of individuality and creativity with a broad grasp of jazz (and related styles') piano's history and various conduits and the chops to pull it all off, feeling comfortable in a variety of situations. I know I'll never be a physical virtuoso - if nothing else, I don't have the discipline, and I probably don't have the brute capacity either - but more than anything on the piano I want to be a player, in whatever sense that makes sense to me.

What I want from the guitar isn't, foremost, to be a player. I adore impressive guitarists, especially when they're musically impressive as well as physically impressive, but while I think it'd be awesome to have those abilities, that's not what I want most. I'm more moved, I think, by the electric guitar as (a) song delivery mechanism, and (b) electric noise generator. Playing songs and using effects to create interesting textures is what ultimately grabs me most about the electric guitar, and that's what I want to do with one. I both need and want a reasonable technical and idiomatic facility to make it work the way I want to - Billy Corgan said you need to practice until you can execute the fantasies in your head, and he made clear that for him that took more practice than Billy Joe Armstrong but less than Yngwie Malmsteen - but it really clicked for me today that as much as I think it'd be cool to be able to do what, e.g., professional sidemen and studio musicians do, let alone single-minded guitar virtuosi, I'd rather be a poor man's Kevin Shields or Billy Corgan or Trent Reznor than a homeless man's Carl Verheyen or Allan Holdsworth.

Whatever.

And If You're Wondering About Archie...

2009-06-09T18:32:00.002-05:00

I don't know if my readers are aware that, apparently, Archie is going to marry Veronica. If you want to understand why, look here, and then here. It'll become clearer.

Your Childhood And Mine, On Jimmy Fallon

2009-06-09T18:06:00.002-05:00

This would've been more awesome with a less awkward host.

Also, since the show doesn't apparently have the rights to re-air the promo clip of Raising the Bar that they played on the live broadcast, there's a weird meta effect on top of the actual meta on display here; there's an awkward cut, and indeed it feels as though we, the Online Viewer, have been placed in a Time Out.

Lynchaton III, Part II: Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive

2009-06-06T17:57:00.007-05:00

So.

(This might get more spoiler-y than usual, or at the least, it's going to unfold the commonly understood explanation of "just what the fuck was going on" in Mulholland Drive, which I guess is like a spoiler for watching the film two or three times.)

(Also: I entirely refer to characters in Lost Highway by actor because I don't remember the character names, and because the notable thing in that film is that two actors play what ends up being, sort of, in some ways, the same character. I refer to the characters in Mulholland by character name because I recall them without having to refer to a castlist, and because the notable thing in that film is that Naomi Watts plays what appear to be, in some ways, two different characters.)

I was right to pull The Straight Story out of order because Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive really do share commonalities of style, theme, and structure, and really they stand together, and stand apart from the rest of Lynch's filmography.

Actually, let's break this down real fast: Lynch has made three films that were either written by other people or written by Lynch yet significantly "controlled" in script style by source material - The Elephant Man, Dune, and The Straight Story. The remainder of his work was either completely produced by Lynch or the result of a collaboration (Twin Peaks) or adaptation (Wild at Heart) that Lynch's personality dominated throughout the creative process. And in that group that I consider more or less Lynch's product from genesis to final cut, there are three subgroups: three works made consecutively that have relatively linear and comprehensible plots (Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, and Twin Peaks), two works that at first seem to have linear and comprehensible plots but ultimately subvert that expectation (the two films under discussion here), and two films that are overtly dreamlike and most aggressively "Lynchian" from the get go (Eraserhead and Inland Empire).

Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive not only share a vague similarity in the structural confusion of their scripts, they have in common a theme that seems to animate that structural confusion: sexual jealousy. The details of how each film perverts your understanding of the narrative structure differ, but what really ties them together is that in a very real way it seems that the distorted structure is a result of sexual jealousy (and other stuff, but it's the emotion in common between the main characters). The emotional force of Bill Pullman and Naomi Watts contorts the fabric of reality. Now, in Mulholland Drive it seems clear that most of this stuff happens inside Naomi Watts' head, whereas in Lost Highway it all seems more or less real.

The blemish on the filmstock here is that Mulholland Drive was initially intended to be an ongoing TV show, and the majority of what's onscreen in the film was actually the pilot. When the project wasn't picked up, Lynch reshot some scenes and wrote a bunch of new ones to turn the whole thing into a movie. Now, all along, I've somewhat intentionally underread Lynch interviews and Lynch scholarship, so it's possible that I could have gathered a great deal more information about what was in the pilot and what was new for the film, and how much the overall conception changed from one project to the next. I kind of wanted to just see the films and experience them on their own, and suppress my natural urge to overread on a subject of new interest. I have a suspicion that the real structure of Mulholland Drive was conceived after the pilot was rejected, and that Lynch more or less intentionally drew inspiration from what he'd done in Lost Highway, though the execution is quite different. There's nothing wrong with this, of course, especially since Lost Highway is in my opinion quite the inferior film.

I mean, it's not bad or anything, but in comparison to Mulholland, which I think is a masterpiece, Lost Highway suffers. It's also the more difficult film to understand, as the final line of the film (which turns out to be the same of the first) upends what was already an overtly surreal film world. It sends you back looking for the hitch in time where the film kinked around on itself (or, you know, it would've done that if I'd enjoyed it enough to watch it immediately again, which I didn't). Lost Highway differs from Mulholland also in that it takes place in a world not only Lynchian but supernatural; things happen that cannot be explained away by the shifting narrative, whereas ultimately Mulholland can be easily understood in a realistic context - which should not take away from its magic. I'm not really sure what to say about Lost Highway other than rehashing its story, which isn't really interesting to me and not really why I bother to ramble on in these posts. But to return to what I wrote above, Mulholland Drive is a film where the force of a character's emotions (including sexual jealousy) drive her to murder (via hitman), then suicide, and in her last moments (falling, gasping into the pillow in the film's first moments) she dreams or desperately imagines everything that follows. The characters of Diane Selwyn's real life are reconfigured into an emotionally satisfying fantasy - not precisely wish fulfillment, but the self-satisfied fantasy of someone certain she's been wronged. The fantasy cannot hold, though, and grows progressively darker until "Betty" - Diane's alter ego in the fantasy - finds the dead body of a woman named Diane Selwyn, and not long thereafter the mysterious cowboy tells Betty it's time to wake up, and she does, and we see what led up to those final breaths into the pillow, as the real Diane fell apart.

But Lost Highway is more structurally daring, less easily explained, more sterotypically Lynchian. Bill Pullman's character appears to possibly murder his wife, and might have done so out of what seems like suspicions of infidelity, and then once sentenced to death row transforms himself into another man, played by Balthazar Getty, with a complete life of his own (but an incomplete memory). I'm honestly not sure whether Getty's character is meant to be diegetically real, and an actual transmigration of some sort took place, or if he's meant to be a fully realized fantasy brought on by extreme emotional duress, like the Diane/Betty dyad. I'm not really sure it matters, either, because I can't see how either possibility could make the film's pieces hook up as neatly as Mulholland's do. Balthazar Getty meets Bill Pullman's dead wife, but she's not her, she's her sister, (except there is no sister), and she turns out be everything Bill Pullman was afraid she was. Patricia Arquette ... doesn't quite make this all work. She's attractive enough to believe that men are going to be as drawn to her on first sight as they are, but not a good enough actress - in this role, at least, which let's be honest isn't what I'd call a rich or rewarding one - to sell the seduction necessary for us to believe they'd stick around and do what she tells them. (I should note that I thought she did a nice job in Flirting With Disaster, so it's not like I've got anything against her.) She just seems a little detached from everything, which I guess could come off as alluringly hard to reach, but for me at least comes off as kind of disinterested. On the other hand, her final line is effectively delivered, and effective; at what seems like the moment of sexual climax with Balthazar Getty, she leans down and whispers "You'll never have me," which is the heart of everything Bill Pullman was afraid of. And like the cowboy's gentle invitation for Diane Selwyn to wake, this is the invocation that returns Bill Pullman to Getty's body, so he can do whatever it is he does that brings us back to the beginning.

What Lost Highway lacks - aside from superior, magnetic performances, though Robert Blake is something awesome here - at least for me, is Mulholland Drive's rich, captivating visual imagery. The whole dream of the film gives us a rich tapestry not only of imagery but characters and behaviors and the totality of Diane Selwyn's dream is captivating for me, or to me. I've seen the film too many times, because I wrote a paper on its sound design in college, and had to watch it seven times in a row with nothing better than the occasional fast forwarding to get me to the points I wanted to see, because Lynch apparently doesn't trust DVDs with chapter divisions. But I still think it's a masterpiece, Lynch's most intoxicating and successful film, at least for people like me. Maybe that's in part because it just looks better, for what are likely reasons of technology and the quality of DVD transfers, but Blue Velvet, on DVD at least, seems flat by comparison to the lush and inviting colors - and imagery - onscreen in Mulholland. And invited in I'm completely given up to the weird Hollywood of Diane Selwyn's imagination and the ultimate tragedy it reveals.

By comparison Lost Highway is alternately shadowy and kind of dull, and the Lynchian affect of the performances seems here more narcotized and less genuinely odd. Putting aside the explicitly surreal work of Eraserhead and Inland Empire - coming soon to a blog post near you, since I already saw it a couple of weeks ago - I think the success of Lynch's more "realistic" films, at the least superficially realistic, is correlated with how closely they track to something like a severely tweaked verisimilitude. In Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive we're mostly watching strange behavior in a fairly recognizable world; in Wild at Heart and Lost Highway we're watching in some ways less odd people in an odder world - or we're watching equally odd people who seem less odd by comparison to their surroundings - and unfortunately part of the oddity of those films becomes a decreased focus on the characters. However off-kilter Jeffrey Beaumont and Frank and Betty Elms and Adam Kesher may be as people, they're full people, whereas Bill Pullman and Balthazar Getty are barely character sketches of jealousy and addled lust, respectively. Lost Highway appears superficially "realistic" - by Lynch's standards, at any rate - but is really a long step towards the nightmare logic of Eraserhead. I don't know if Lynch is incapable or merely, so far, disinclined to marry the more extreme elements of his imaginative superstructure with the more interesting depths with which he can endow his characters, but perhaps he believes or recognizes that in some sense those impulses are ultimately incompatible. Real people can be incomprehensible, but people in dreams are outside the ken of the waking.

Since I'm sort of trailing into babbledom, I should stop, because I've basically exhausted what I had to say about Lost Highway, and while I have a great deal more that I could say, both inquisitive and laudatory, about Mulholland Drive, I think I'll let this end here.

Silencio.

Just Saying

2009-05-09T16:50:00.006-05:00

More to come soon, I promise. (Yeah, right!)

Just musing after staying up way too late last night watching dodgy movies on TNT:

(1) The film AEon Flux is not a good film.
(2) The film AEon Flux has almost nothing to do with the source material MTV cartoon, to a degree that serves as another brick in my "why bother with adaptations" argumentative wall.
(3) I get why both fans and the creator of AEon Flux the cartoon were hugely upset by the film. Since I don't really care about AEon Flux the cartoon, I don't really care about their upset-ness, except inasmuch as it bolsters (2) above.
(4) Nonetheless, AEon Flux the film was both visually and conceptually pretty interesting. Were the visual and conceptual notions put to best artistic use? No, but there was a lot of interesting stuff there. The central plot questions of the movie - which as far as I know are entirely unrelated to the cartoon - could've been put to excellent use in a much better film, which is sort of the point of this article, as much as I might quibble with its specifics.

***

There's another point floating around somewhere in my head about Joss Whedon's Dollhouse, which I'm relatively certain I like much more than the majority of the 152 people who have been watching it every Friday night. I think the show is still struggling to find its legs from time to time - no shame in that - which will be unfortunate if it's cancelled (which is more likely than not), but most of the criticisms I've seen people direct towards the show (out of those who are willing to sit down and engage with it in a fair/serious manner) seem sort of beside the point. Not beside the point to whether or not they should like the show - you like what you like and find important what you find important - but beside the point to the goals of the show. I agree that it's difficult to care about the characters, especially the dolls, but I think that's in part by design, because it folds so precisely into Whedon's point; these are individuals - at this point, really, bodies - who have been more or less literally dehumanized; one of the show's conceits is that the procedure is not (cannot be?) 100% effective, so some essential spark remains, at least in the cases of Echo and Alpha, but the spark is elusive and near-ineffable. (Unless Whedon's found God in the last few years I doubt he's literally endorsing Paul Ballard's platitudes about the human soul in religious terms, but the logic of the story so far indicate that Ballard is correct [for once!] about the impossibility of truly erasing the dolls' baseline personality, whatever that means in religious/metaphysical/pseudo-metaphysical/neurological terms.) I'm interested in Echo and Sierra and Victor and Alpha and SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER Whiskey, but I'm not invested in them the way I was in Buffy and Willow and Giles. But that's part of the point. The annoying professor guy at the end of the "Man on the Street" episode who points out that if the technology really existed it would be both used and abused and ultimately spell the end of humanity...he's right, and the show in part makes the point by having its central characters be true ciphers with no dependable or consistent personality from week to week. Obviously, Whedon is interested in working with identity, and since that's a relatively new theme for his television work I don't really know what he thinks about it or where it's going to go (whereas I can pretty much guess that in a Whedon work about family, the family you create will be more important and dependable than the family into which you were born, because that's One of His Things), but so far I think he's going about it in a logical sense.

None of that helps someone who feels the need to relate or invest in a character, of course, and I'm not immune to that sensibility; the easiest way to summarize why I've spent the last few years rolling my eyes at House whenever I happen to watch it is because I think 95% of the time the writers "get" House wrong. That's a ridiculous thing to say, of course, because I didn't create the character and they did, and what I really mean to say is that there's a version of Gregory House I find interesting and compelling, and the guy who's given a wide berth to be a monumental asshole in ways both petty and profound to everyone around him, and indulged (by in-show logic) because he always gets medical results, and indulged (by the writers and I think the fans) because he always gets medical results and because he's also a depressed person whom the show will evoke sympathy for...that isn't the guy whom I find interesting and compelling. That Greg House, the one who stars in 20 out of the 22-24 episodes in a given season, is an asshole who doesn't deserve the indulgences he gets and who I can't stand watching for more than ten minutes at a time because both he and the way he's treated by his "friends" and colleagues are unbearable to me. (My other main issue with the show is that it's demonstrated the ability to create phenomenally good and creative episodes of television, almost always by deviating from its own incredibly well-worn tropes. If there was some sort of feed I could sign up for that would alert me when an episode of House is going to break from the traditional patient-of-the-week structure, I'd watch all of those episodes.)

Anyway, so I get why people don't think Dollhouse works, but sometimes I think they're watching the show with the wrong eyes. Also I, personally, appreciate the lengths to which Dollhouse is willing to be nasty; in series past, Whedon has never shied from going for the emotional gutpunch, but the degree to which Dollhouse wants to make you feel uncomfortable, emotionally and intellectually, is I think new for him. Ballard's affair, Echo's return to Patton Oswalt's character at the end of "Man on the Street," a lot of the Alpha stuff, a lot of the Topher stuff, Victor in the chair with Dominic's personality, SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER Whiskey ... this is just meaner than prior Whedon, and I have to say that I like it.

And Somehow I Now Feel Let Down

2009-05-02T23:20:00.003-05:00

It was a very good game, but not transcendent like the last three. It went the way very good games usually do; both teams kept fighting, but a small lead in the last two minutes has a way of becoming an inevitability, as the desperate measures required to cut into that lead with limited time inevitably fail more often than they succeed, which compounds the problem, which is how a five point game turns into a ten-point loss. As a Celtic fan I'm happy, but as a basketball fan this wasn't nearly the chest-tightening brain-scrambling emotion-effervescing experience the series deserved as a final act. Still one of the greatest series of all time and probably the best I've personally seen.

Side note: whenever possible, the production staff for sporting events like to come up with cutesy names for their informational bubbles, playing off the names of athletes or their teams. Tonight there was a statistical bubble entitled: "Bull-iant Play," or something like that, with the heavily forced pun on "Bull-iant" for "Brilliant." I instantly thought that there was a much better pun they left on the table, for virtue of being less forced: "E-Bull-ient Play," which actually would be spelled exactly like the word being evoked, but then I realized that 85% of the viewing audience would have no fucking idea what "ebullient" meant.

Incidentally

2009-05-02T13:27:00.005-05:00

One of my dad's favorite memories of watching basketball - and he's a lifelong basketball fan, much more so than any other sport - is of watching Game 5 of the 1976 NBA Finals, considered by many the greatest NBA game of all time. A triple overtime Finals game! And for him, of course, involving the Celtics. But the real value of the game for him is that my mother, who never cared about sports other than the occasional Olympic event and international soccer (rooting for Portugal and Brazil), was sort of waiting for the game to finish, and then became amazed that the game hadn't finished, and by the end was in rapt astonishment that both teams could just keep going, struggling on into the night, refusing to give up. In the end she was moved.

Now, the unhappy truth about sports is that most of the serious reasons sports fans would give you for loving sports and for the importance of watching sports (aside from trivial things like "because it's fun" and "it's a safe place for me to express irrationally tribal and xenophobic feelings") are usually not true. Most of the time sporting events aren't beautiful or inspiring or moving. But, as Bill Simmons wrote in one of his columns on the current Celtics-Bulls series, sports fans keep watching because you can never know when a transcendent moment will occur. You can't predict when greatness will reveal itself.

So. I was incredibly happy when the Celtics won the NBA Finals last year, and their series against the Lakers was a very good and exciting series, played by two teams that were very very good teams, near-great teams. But for all the reasons that people will write paeans to the transcendence of sport, that series doesn't exist in the same galaxy as this one. Neither team in this series is remotely as "good" a team as the ones that played in the 2008 NBA Finals. Neither team in this series is going to make this year's Finals. Whichever teams wins this series may well lose the conference semifinals and will certainly lose the conference finals. But: it is, as a basketball and a sports fan, one of the greatest, if not the greatest, sporting events I've ever seen in my life. It's thrilling, not simply because it's exciting but because I am thrilled, in my heart, to watch it. I have no idea what will happen tonight: perhaps it'll be a dull blowout, or perhaps one or both of these teams will finally remember what it's like to play badly. But right now two slightly-better-than-mediocre teams are playing at the absolute peak of their abilities, and bringing out the absolute best in each other, and it's beautiful. I can't promise that tonight's game will be nearly as good as the ones before it, but if you have any suspicion in your heart that you could enjoy watching a basketball game, I suggest you at least check out the fourth quarter to see what's going on.

Somebody wrote (I've read so much coverage of this series!) that in a way what makes it so compelling is laughably simple: both teams just keep making shots. In the end of a close game, somebody always misses a bunch of shots, but in this series both teams keep making shots until the final second. Which is to say: of course, basketball is just a game, and in this case a game played by wealthy men, for no stakes other than the ability to have pride for winning a game played by wealthy men before they go on to lose at the game to other wealthy men. But let's recognize that in that limited and trivial setting, there is no quit in these men. They are not giving up. They do not look at the score, and the time left, and hang their heads, and submit to what appears inevitable; they go out and do their work and set screens for Ray Allen and Ben Gordon to hit impossible shots. Absolutely impossible shots.

Dominance can be impressive: Russell and Chamberlain, Magic and Bird, Jordan, even the impressive defensive dominance of last year's championship Celtics team, the individual and at times invincible dominance of LeBron James. True dominance is a rare and therefore cherished quality for the sports fan to observe, but true dominance almost always prevents moments like this. If somebody someday asks me why sports could be worth watching, I'd cue up the fourth quarters and overtimes of games 1-3 and 4-6 of this stupid first-round basketball series and show them. Because I'm moved, and if I weren't so intentionally deadened to so much around me, I'd be inspired, because these silly men go out and play their silly game and will not lie down and say "enough". I'm, truly, awed.

...OK...

2009-05-02T12:57:00.002-05:00

So despite not being, as far as I can tell, physically ill (has swine flu gone stealth?), and despite knowing that depression can cause you to sleep more - so, like, I'm always depressed, but I'm not always depressed depressed, and right now I'm not depressed, just perpetually peevish - I slept a lot last night.

And by a lot I mean, I got home at 5:15, at 5:30 I lay down (clothed) on my bed and opened a book, and woke up at 7:15. At 7:30 I decided "fuck it," forewent dinner, and just went to bed. A couple of times through the night I woke up and decided to just keep sleeping. (Which by itself is notable; when I wake up, I almost always really wake up, and can't get back to sleep for an hour or two.) Which led to my finally getting out of bed at 10:00 this morning.

So, I think I just slept, including the brief periods of consciousness, for about 16 hours.

I guess I've been running myself harder than I thought.

Oh, Hi There

2009-04-30T22:59:00.004-05:00

Been busy personally, professionally, mentally ... I've had the next two films in my final Lynchathon push in the apartment for a week and haven't watched either one. I'm basically working, coming home, going to the gym, watching basketball, staying up way too late to take advantage of my having gone to the gym, and then doing it all again and again and again.

Some brief thoughts:

Bulls-Celtics has got to be the best NBA playoff series ever in which neither team had a remote possibility of even making it to the NBA finals. It's astoundingly good and entertaining. There will be a seventh game. In the six games so far, there have been two single overtime games, one double overtime game, and one triple overtime game. There have never been so many overtime periods, or games with overtimes, in a playoff series before. I of course want the Celtics to win, and I'm not sure I can even bear to watch game 7 because of it (though of course I almost certainly will) but I almost don't care who wins the series, I just want to watch as much of it as I can. As weird as it sounds, right now these teams are both playing ridiculously good basketball considering that they're somehow overmatched against each other; the Bulls simply don't have the talent and skills (YET - get back to me in a year or two) to hang with the Celtics, but the Celtics are too injured and thin on the bench to be able to hang with the Bulls. I just watched a triple overtime game and then spent five minutes on the phone with my dad detailing my theories about whether or not a player's foot was on the three point line when he made a clutch shot. (My answer: it wasn't when he began taking the shot, but it was when he finished taking it.)

Also of some currency; there was just a training session and test for a lot of the staff working for my employers on a specific facet of what we do. The test was admittedly, by its designers, intended to be easy and passable, and the training session was geared specifically towards the knowledge necessary to pass the test. (Important clarification: I'm, for these purposes, on the QC team [three people], which had to take the test, because we have to be able to QC the work performed by the actual frontline staff [about twenty-five people, more or less].) The person running the training program told me that I had the high score. Apparently a bunch of the frontline staff did poorly on the test. Like, a bunch of them. Now:

I've gotten very good, for a variety of reasons, at reflexively deflecting apparent high achievement on my part when compared to subpar achievement from others; I'm quite facile at finding flaws in methodology and process and explaining away other people's poor performance. Partly because while I'm intellectually confident, I don't think I'm conceited; partly because I don't want people to think I'm conceited; partly because I think some of my deflections are accurate; partly because I honestly believe that a lot of what people perceive as evidence of my intelligence isn't actually evidence of my intelligence. It's evidence of my ability to notice, absorb, and retain much more information across a much broader spectrum of topics than the average person. Now, I wouldn't be surprised if curiosity and strong memory were highly correlated with other traits that I consider more authentically "intelligence," because that's a cluster of skills that complement each other well, but I think I'm smart because I can rapidly assimilate new information that's not just factual but procedural or argumentative, I can perceive different angles from which to view a problem, I'm good at disassembling arguments [better at that than creating them, which is why I hoped to become the poor man's Sidney Morgenbesser], and a bunch of other things, some of which I only notice by comparison to other people, like - in the training session for this test - how frustrated and confused a lot of people seemed to be by having a process they understood in one context presented to them in another context. The point being that people who don't know me that well think I'm intelligent because I know who John Jay was, whereas I don't understand why everyone else who took U.S. History in high school [which is to say: everyone] doesn't remember who John Jay was, since he certainly came up once or twice.

ANYWAY the point being that I can see a whole bunch of reasons why my getting the high score despite first attempting to learn the necessary information a couple of weeks before the test, while people who'd been actually doing the job for years performed poorly, isn't actually a valid indication of our relative ability to perform the task at hand in a real world situation. I've thought of lots of them. Because frankly it's sort of frightening that I should have done better on the test than someone who's had that job for thirteen years. I actually didn't want to be the high score on the test; I wanted to do very well, for a variety of reasons, but I really wanted for entirely selfless reasons to have a score that looked good but wasn't as good as the scores achieved by people who'd been performing the relevant tasks for thirteen years. It's, honestly, kind of scary to contemplate, because those are the people who are actually doing the work, and have been considered competent (well, there are issues there, but) to do the work for years, in some cases. But here we are. (By the way: I scored a 92, so it's not like I rocked the shit out of it. I've actually got a good guess as to what questions I missed and what questions the experienced employees missed; I bet I missed a few of the questions that required knowing all the many details of abstract policy - who qualifies for what deduction - that I could only partially stuff into my head because some of them are honestly so freaking arbitrary, while they missed the complex and crafty calculations stuff that I found easy because all I had to do was follow the damn direections.) Sigh.

Throwing Blog Shit Up Like Crazy

2009-04-14T00:01:00.002-05:00

Because I worry about you and want to make sure that no obvious, widespread, cool internet memes accidentally pass your notice:

It's like a music box.

Helpful hints: sixteen blocks across, of course, for a sixteenth note grid (or an eighth note grid if you want to think of it as a two bar pattern). I haven't checked the absolute pitch, but the notes are a pentatonic scale. Pretending that it's in D (it seems like D when checked against the 65% reliable method of using my voice to find a pitch), the bottom note is A (so's the top note). And it runs from bottom to top: A B D E F# A B D E F# A B D E F# A. Which, it might be nice to have D as the bottom note instead, but there are possibilities.

Go crazy. In addition to more "pure" approaches, I like writing words with it (usually set over a pulsing bassline, like quarter notes on the B, or maybe a clave pattern). Cheesy shit: LOVE, and so forth. LOVE sounds nice. Big block letters make big splashes of color, being more precise and less programmatic lets you get into clever interweavings. As somebody said here, "It feels like it should be possible to work up a little matchbox-sized version of Cliff Martinez’s Solaris soundtrack out of this thing."

Lynchathon III, Part I: The Straight Story

2009-04-13T17:41:00.002-05:00

"What kind of pickup was it?"

That line is the setup for the biggest laugh in The Straight Story, and maybe the biggest laugh I've ever gotten from a Lynch film.

I pulled The Straight Story our of order, watching it ahead of Lost Highway, because of an idea that Highway and Mulholland Drive are giong to have significant commonalities that aren't shared with the intervening film.

Multiple commenters have referred to The Straight Story as un-Lynchian in subject matter and even much less than normally Lynchian in presentation, with punning nods to the layered meaning of the title, one of them supposedly being that in telling the story of Alvin Straight, Lynch has also chosen to "play it straight" for once in his career.

Ehhh, not so much. For one thing, there's a reading of the film - that I won't go into, but you can find the link on the movie's Wikipedia page if you really care - that puts together a fair amount of information to suggest that another layer of the film's title is deceitful: Alvin Straight, through the movie, tells various strangers pieces of the story of his life, but the pieces don't actually fit. When you go back and reconsider the film with all the information you have by its end, contradictions emerge: the story Straight tells doesn't add up - it isn't (excuse me) straight. He's eliding a great deal, especially, this reading has it, his own agency in a domestic tragedy that he speaks of relatively early on, in which "someone should've been watching," but wasn't. The someone was him.

I suspect that this reading is accurate and that the film's script can in fact be decoded for clues to understand more about who Alvin Straight really was, and I suspect that such detective work would be more fruitful than in other of Lynch's works, but I think it's equally beside the point. The purpose of The Straight Story's narrative isn't to provide a mystery for the attentive viewer to unlock - to challenge the implicit flatness of the film's title, affect, and Iowan landscape - but like everything else Lynch has done, it's foremost to provide an experience for the viewer to take in as he goes along. Alvin Straight's contradictory reminiscences, if detected, create a subcurrent of unease that, really, is incidental compared to the more central mystery of the film. Why does Straight decide that he absolutely must journey under his own power to see his brother, even though the limitations of his own power (he cannot drive, he will not accept a ride, he does not care for public transportation) mean that an automobile trip of one day's hard drive takes him six weeks atop a lawn mower (a lawn mower slowed down [!] by the weight of dragging Straight's jury-rigged trailer). The orneriness of an old country man doesn't really suffice for answer, here.

Now, it's necessary to observe that the film is "based on a true story," because there was a real Alvin Straight who spent weeks atop a lawn mower travelling from Iowa to Wisconsin to visit a brother laid low by a stroke. I'm not especially interested in trying to find out how much of the script's detail was drawn directly from the true story (although supposedly the film shoot did follow the actual path the real Straight took), and I imagine that a lot of it is fabricated. Straight was already dead when the movie was made, and while the screenwriters interviewed his family members, they apparently didn't really know much of what transpired, either. (The Straight Story is the first and only Lynch film not written by the director himself, but one of its cowriters, Mary Sweeney, was Lynch's longtime editor, producer, and [romantic] partner; they married and divorced in 2006.) Perhaps I'm wrong and indeed the negative tones - both overt and covert - came from the family, but there are some revelations in the film that they probably could not have known. In any case, I would argue that no matter how much the film's story diverges from the reality, it isn't important; narrative and emotional truth in fiction is not the same as factual accuracy, and often the twain must part.

So back to the experience:

The Straight Story is beautiful. I was moved. I wept. Granted, it's a calendrical period of fraught emotion for me, but I may have never cried so early into a piece of art as I did at The Straight Story. It was the look on the face of the old shopkeeper as Straight mowed his way, molasses slow, out of town. He's sad, and afraid, for his friend and for himself, and the lonely vulnerability of the elderly is the sort of thing that can get to me reliably. (Which is why in addition to it being awesome I also found Bubba Ho-Tep so moving.)

Old people is the key; the film is beautiful and simple and despite some signature flourishes from Lynch's creative personality, it does appear sort of un-Lynchian, and those flourishes are relatively understated. And it's because, I think, the film's subject matter doesn't require an overt imposition of Lynch's personality to get us to see whatever it is Lynch sees or wants us to see in his movies, because the film's subject is inherently Lynchian and strange. Consider first the plot, again: an old man builds a trailer from scrap metal, attaches it to a damned riding mower, and drives a few hundred miles, at a pace you could keep up with by means of a low-key jog. It's just strange. But consider, more importantly, the elderly: old people are Lynchian in and of themselves. The work required to put us into Lynch's head - or, if you like, the experience of being in Lynch's head that comes from watching one of his movies - is generally a reordering of our cognitive processes, showing us new things or old things in a new light. Lynch's worldview is accessible (usually) but unusual (always). And yet old people are like Lynchian people: their preoccupations are strange, their language curious, their pace mystifyingly slow, their gestures and facial expressions bizarre and stylized and out of sorts with our experience of the world.

I'm obviously way overplaying this point, but think about it seriously: think about all the weird thumbs-up-ing and overlong grinning that marks the characters in Twin Peaks, and how weird if endearing that is (recognizable gestures of approval that are stretched out of normalcy into a sort of uncomfortable otherness), and then think about the really really old waiter who's apparently a vessel for the mysterious giant figure, and how when he does it, it seems more natural than when Dale Cooper or the sherriff does it, and think about why. It's because he's really old! Old people do things like that! So do small children - who are also quite Lynchian, which is really the point, I guess. At the margins of everyday society you find entire age cohorts of people who have either not yet been socialized into understanding the appropriate and expected natural behavior of a normal person, or have moved on and been passed by. The people who are currently old and weird by virtue of their oldness weren't weird when they were my age, they're weird because society changed (or they changed) as they aged out of the mainstream; in part I think this is because of the various lamentable degradations in mental acuity that so often come with advanced age*, and in part I think this is just a fact of changing social customs.**

So a lot of the things that seem Lynchian in their out-of-placeness about character behavior in a "normal" Lynch film are natural and don't need to be imposed as part of a directorial vision because he's dealing with a main character who's already kind of prone to seeming a little askew from what the median audience member recognizes as everyday behavior. (I stumbled upon what appears to be a copy of the original script online, including scenes which weren't in the final cut, and in one Straight's daughter asks why he's gluing pesos onto the band of his hat. His reply: "Ballast." Awesome.)

I'm, as alluded to above, overarguing this point, but it's because a lot of what I've read about the film highlights its curiosity in the middle of Lynch's ouevre, whereas I felt that aside from a much more linear and graspable plot than any Lynch film except The Elephant Man (and you could say Dune, which wanted to have a linear and graspable plot, but didn't), it was quite of a piece with the rest of them. More "Lynchian" to me, honestly, than The Elephant Man was. Again, if you get away from the notion that Lynch is putting us on or putting on a show or in any way doing something calculated with the presentation and meaning of his images, and instead just embrace the idea that he's more or less the guy he seems to be, and he's just (I say "just": he's of course and obviously a great technician and a supremely skilled artist who's almost always in command of his craft, however you feel about it) ... he's just putting images into the camera that match the images in his head when he closes his eyes (or keeps them open), the Otherness of Lynch's worlds fades into just another askew perspective, maybe more askew than others, and The Straight Story is askew like the rest.

But also, and most imortantly, I implore you, Reader(s), it's lovely. OK, I've got a thing for vulnerably sad old people, but really: Old people are Lynchian, yes, and they're also sad, yes, but they're also kind of beautiful, and whatever wickedness he may be trying to atone for on his ridiculous pilgrimage, Alvin Straight is beautiful, (played beautifully by Richard Farnsworth, who was incredibly ill during the filming and eventually took his life), and the film is beautiful. You should all see it. All of you. We should all ride for six weeks to go see Harry Dean Stanton on a beleagured front porch, and then sit down and look up at the stars.

* Comedy derives from truth, right? I assume that greater familiarity with technology from a young age will make this less apt as a comedic touchstone going forward (in terms of mere old-age confusion vs. genuine senility), but I giggled for a reason. Plus it's sweet when it could've been mean; sometimes the claws are better when you don't show them.

** Like in my puzzlement over prior modes of emotional display here.

Fucking Eostre

2009-04-12T20:08:00.003-05:00

EVERYTHING is closed on Easter. Shit. I guess we're not quite a godless nation yet. I'll have to get to work on that.

Eostre (or Eostra) herself may be a fabrication of the Venerable Bede, but umpteen cultures had spring festivals of rejuvenation (hello, May Day! let's dance around the spring pole and then fuck ourselves silly!) because that's what you do at the end of a long winter so bad that you're obliged to have a midwinter festival in the middle of it where everybody lights candles and celebrates the promise and hope of a spring to come lest everybody just kill themselves. These things are all part of a cycle. So naturally Christians had to get in on that springtime festival action because the major signposts of European religious experience are predictably similar across cultures and if you didn't provide a Christian method of celebrating those natural cycles you'd have people dancing around the maypole and fucking themselves silly in the spring and sacrificing bulls to Mithras in the winter and whatever it is they were wont to do depending on where they were from and what stories their grandmammies told them.

Funnily enough, though I'm not cogent enough to try and resurrect the amateur religious studies scholar of my early adolescence, I recall that actually it's believed that the early traditions of Jesus' birth place it in the spring, which suggests that if it hadn't been moved to midwinter in the first place Easter - well, the resurrection celebration in the springtime - wouldn't have been necessary for papering-over-purposes (unless the same early tradition also puts the crucifixion in the spring, which would make sense what with the rebirthing and all). I'd like to re-look into all of this someday.

NOOZLES OH MY FUCKING GOD NOOZLES

2009-04-11T20:12:00.002-05:00

NOOZLES

For the last several years I intermittently have tried to remember the name of an animated show I greatly enjoyed as a child. It had something to do with koalas and Australia and children and Uluru/Ayers Rock functioning as a place of great mystical power.

Today the mystery is solved. Today I put the search string "children's animated 'ayers rock'" into Google and I was brought to happiness and joy here, which lead me again to here. (Apparently it aired back to back with another koala-themed show, because the programs were created in Japan which was had recently gone, as seems unsurprisingly likely for the Japanese, absolutely fucking nuts for koalas. It seems quite possible that I have also in part conflated elements of these two programs if they did indeed air consecutively on Nickelodeon.)

NOOZLES

It has to be this; there can only have been one children's program in the late 80s/early 90s that centered on koalas AND ALSO had the mystical properties of Uluru/Ayers Rock as a recurring plot point, right? RIGHT?

And so we come to Youtube. Here. It is important now to observe that absolutely nothing appears to be as I remembered it. The show I remember was much cooler. But it must be this.

It must be, right?

(Noozles?)

Yeah I Got Links

2009-04-11T13:45:00.002-05:00

In general I'm the sort of person who is simultaneously flabbergasted by women who remain in abusive relationships but also who thinks endlessly interrogating them as to why they don't/didn't leave (sooner) is unlikely to be productive or helpful to the woman abused, because I don't think rationality plays into it very much, and I also believe that as the abuse goes on for longer periods of time, psychological conditioning subverts what other people would consider to be normal reasonable behavior and response to that kind of treatment.

Anyway, I found this, from the estimable Hilzoy, to be an excellent consideration of a difficult topic. (So did, apparently, everyone else in the blogosphere.)

In less serious territory, I'm going to humbly suggest that you check out - I will provide the links at the end - the most recent week of Penny Arcade, the online comic that's ostensibly "about" gaming. Despite being roughly a decade out of date with their supposed subject matter (they deviate a *lot*, and the jokes are almost always gettable even if you're not a gamer, I think), I usually love this strip, because I have an affinity for their sense of humor and I also enjoy the writing style of Tycho, the writing-alter-ego of the comic's creative duo. However, one of the most interesting things about Penny Arcade is the evolution of the art, provided by Gabe. The first strip, from (wow) over ten years ago, looks like this. (It also isn't really funny.) A few years later it looked like this. (I'm not selling you on the funniness of the strip, I know; it's gotten better writing-wise as well. I picked this one because I stumbled across it accidentally and it conveniently introduced the Cardboard Tube, which will be relevant later.) Which eventually evolved into this, which is more or less what it looks like today. Except for when they take advantage of Gabe's vastly improved artistic skills to deviate from their normal format and stretch their legs and do things like:

This, and

This. That's from the middle of one of the adventures of the Cardboard Tube Samurai, which is a silly joke they've used to present some surprisingly lovely art and elliptical storytelling. Which brings us to:

(And, yeah, I'm aware that I'm lavishing many more words on a webcomic than I am on domestic abuse.)

The most recent three-part tale of the Carboard Tube Samurai, which is like the one I linked above completely wordless but offers up an unexpected punch at the end. As Tycho said in the accompanying blog post, it's apparently about fatherhood. Shit.

Part One
Part Two
Part Three

So.

And Then One Day A Mighty Oak

2009-04-09T21:14:00.006-05:00

Other stuff to say, but just for the sake of evading the day's real significance for me, I offer you what I've come to believe, over the last few weeks, is an accurate representation of the current preoccupations of that segment (not so small, really, and yet) of the American population that currently thinks President Obama is doing an affirmatively bad job (and btw, Blogger's spellcheck suggests Obama isn't a valid word; might want to get on that, dudes):

ACORN ACORN ACORN ACORN ACORN ACORN ACORN ACORNACORNACORNACORNACORNACORN

ACORN.

Ahem.

Buhfuckwhat?

Also I've been trying to figure out whether the people around Representative Michele Bachmann (again, a name Blogger wants me to correct) who agree with her general outlook on the world (a) don't know that she's incredibly incorrect*, in the "you made a category error and are not talking about what you thought you were talking about" sense, or (b) don't care, because it's meat for the ignorant anyway.

More interestingly: are the people she interacts with - members of the press, fellow congresspeople, witnesses before her committee - who don't agree with her general outlook on the world not disabusing her of these essential misconceptions because (a) they don't care, or (b) it amuses them?

* In case you don't know, I'm talking about Rep. Bachmann not understanding that when the idea of creating an international reserve currency was floated as a hypothetical by the sorts of people who float hypotheticals about international commerce (as part of a broader discussion in which we discuss the possibility of the Chinese getting out of the game of holding the dollar as their primary reserve currency, which is a concept I like to call "Holy Fucking Shit Day"**), what was NOT under discussion was the establishment of an international currency, which is a totally different thing.

** Alternatively: "No: Now We're Fucked Day".

PLUS

2009-04-05T19:54:00.003-05:00

If you have the opportunity to look out a window which is directly several stories above a streetlight when it's snowing after sunset, I recommend it; it's quite something. Normally this is where I'd quote lyrics from the Prince song "Sometimes it Snows in April," except that (in my opinion of course) the lyrics aren't that good and don't make a great deal of sense and are sort of maudlin when they're not sort of clunky. I hope U 4give me.

Closer Than We Remember

2009-04-05T18:40:00.002-05:00

One of the women I work with - about the same age as my boss, which is to say old enough to have been a teenager during Jim Crow - told me that she has two signs she acquired (I'm not sure where) in her house, one in the living room and one in the kitchen, which say "Colored Only". She says people, including her own kids, always ask her why she has those signs; I didn't need to ask (apparently her mind and mine are more in sync than I would've guessed) but she told me: "I won't forget. We can't forget." Given the unfathomable wickedness to which black people in America were subjected in living memory of millions of people alive today, I can't comprehend how fatuous some (white) people (and often by people I mean "fuckwits who are more or less in the media") are when they say things like "slavery ended almost 150 years ago". Yeah, but the Tuskegee experiment only ended 37 years ago.

Random fact to lighten the mood: Laurence Fishburne starred both in the 1997 HBO film Miss Evers' Boys (about the Tuskegee experiments) and the 1995 HBO film The Tuskegee Airmen (about the Tuskegee airmen).

That Appears To Be About The Size Of It

2009-03-31T23:48:00.002-05:00

Obviously not 100% fair, but pretty durned close, when you get right down to it.

Of course, the dread facial expression in question is one that I suspect I make quite a lot, because I'm actually quite bad at smiling.

If By Blind You Mean I'm Going To Look When Your Back Is Turned

2009-03-31T00:09:00.003-05:00

This is interesting, but mostly because I always assumed that the colleges I applied to, most (if not all - I can't remember) of them claiming to be "need blind" were in fact just lying to us and in fact were quite cognizant of how student finances were shaking out. The idea that Chicago at no point, ever, in the process of deciding to accept me, was even aware that my family could afford to not have financial aid, just didn't - and doesn't - seem plausible to me.

More serious thoughts on education and class potentially forthcoming but you'd do well not to hold your breath, if you like that whole "breathing" thing.

And Another Puzzle Piece Finds Its Proper Place

2009-03-26T21:52:00.002-05:00

This post, I swear, is not a complaint.

This post, I swear, is also not a brag.

One of the things that's guaranteed to upset me (OK, this part is a complaint) about artistic portrayals of precocious children (to be fair, often of children who were much more precocious than I was) is the cliche that the child is, culturally, completely out of step with her age cohort - doesn't listen to their music, watch their tv and movies, and is completely lost when confronted with the cultural references relevant to the average N year old. Precocity doesn't entail a complete divorce from your age group and/or its interests.

One thing that I've noticed for a while, though, is that I don't seem to share a lot of the touchstones of children's books that other people have. I'm aware of classics like Goodnight, Moon and Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein and Where the Wild Things Are, but with the exception of some of Silverstein, I didn't engage with any of those books the way my peers did - reading them and having them read over and over again, with care and love. I've never actually read Goodnight, Moon, and I've read one or two Seuss books, I think both in school as part of a class thing and at my younger cousins' house when I was bored. I know I've read Where the Wild Things Are, but I'm 99% certain that I picked it up in the grade school library, read it in three minutes, and put it back on the shelf. For one thing, looking back, I probably didn't connect with the book because I probably didn't like the monsters. It's just an aesthetic sensibility; I'm not captivated by Things that look like the ones Sendak drew.

I presumed, though, that perhaps my general divorce from very young children's literature had to do with my parents (when in doubt, we know who to blame); since neither had been a young child in an English-speaking culture, they didn't have a relation to the classic English language picture books. But it's not like I remember any Spanish or Portuguese classics of kids' lit either.

So anyway, today it hit me: I have a few rogue memories dating back to when I was three years old, but the semi-complete record of my life basically starts when I was five or six (though, since I'm not one of those people who can remember disproportionate amounts of their own life, kindergarten and first grade are pretty spotty). So my very oldest memories post-date my learning to read, and by the time I start having a coherent memory record I was reading way in advance of my age range. I don't remember a period of my life when Where the Wild Things Are - or any other primarily illustrated children's book - would've been pitched at my reading level, and books like that - mostly pictures, few words - wouldn't have been interesting to me because above all else I loved to read, the actual words.

The last bit explains why I was perfectly happy, a few years later, to read bales of the "young adult" type stuff you're assigned from 3rd-6th grade even though it was ostensibly far below my reading level; it was still text, and I was a devourer of text. I also wasn't emotionally or artistically sophisticated enough to really get everything out of the best adult fiction I was reading anyway, so the truly important differences between, say, John Bellairs and John Irving weren't really evident to me. Both authors wrote stories in text, and I got that Irving's stories were more complicated (and more "adult") but they were equally comprehensible to me as stories.

(The idea that Shakespeare is difficult to understand never made any sense to me for this reason: I'd read all his plays by the time I was ten or eleven, and I understood perfectly well what was going on, I was just way too young to appreciate the art or the emotion in them. [I was way too young to appreciate the art or emotion in most things I read at that age, including, I'm sure, A Prayer for Owen Meany, about which I remember nothing.] As an adult, I can't imagine that the emotion isn't understandable to anyone with adult emotional faculties, so I'm left with people being baffled by language that I could more or less decode as a fourth grader.)

So I guess that's why I don't have fierce nostalgic love for Where the Wild Things Are, while the rest of the world either grumbles over or (more often, it seems) shouts joyously over the trailer for the Spike Jonze adaptation.

Thing #71 I Don't Understand About Our Gender Politics

2009-03-25T19:43:00.004-05:00

There's a lot more that I could (and someday perhaps will) say on this topic, but in brief: by the standards of the definition of "manliness" implicit in the idea of the fucking Combos people rating the "manliness" of various cities by metrics that apparently involve NASCAR, hunting, particular attitudes about appropriate attire and grooming, and whatever else you want to lump into the standard definition of nonelite American machismo:

I'm going to keep using colons:

How on earth is it remotely manly for a man to be concerned with what other men think about the level of his manliness? And how on earth is it remotely manly for a man to be concerned with judging the manliness of other men?

This is the sort of thing that I completely understand in one sense (our gender politics make no sense and appear primarily designed to make us anxious by dint of trying to live up to unresolvable contradictions, so it's par for the course) and completely don't understand in another, more immediately relevant sense. If some dude actually questioned my manliness (NB: I think this is highly unlikely for a variety of reasons) because of my drink order or my pink tie or my interest in some forms of art and sport vs. other forms of art and sport, my response would be: "Why the fuck do you care? Why are you spending your attention and energy worrying about strange men?"

I mean, really? Worrying about the guyness level of other guys? What, precisely, is it that you're trying to tell me, again?

Intermède Sans Signification

2009-03-24T21:33:00.002-05:00

Not speaking French, or following French pop music, I have no idea who the hell these guys are, nor what the hell this song is about. But it's a fun video:

Here is something I had no idea existed, and perhaps I wish that I still did not. Embedding was disabled at the request of the Youtube account holder, so I can only provide you this link and suggest that if you click upon it, you might as well watch the whole thing, it's only 5:06 out of your life and I guarantee you that you've never seen anything like it (unless, presumably, you've actually seen it before).

Here.

I do these things because I love.

Does Anybody Remember Shelly Godfrey?

2009-03-21T17:00:00.006-05:00

EDITED TO ADD: According to Tricia Helfer, Shelly Godfrey will be somehow explained in the forthcoming TV movie "we're really done, now, except for Caprica, entitled The Plan (as in, "the Cylons have a"). So I appear to be incorrect that Godfrey - who seemed to me like an obvious tip of the hat that there was a supernatural in the Battlestar universe - was what I thought she was. Still, though, people shouldn't be surprised by the mystical elements of the finale. WE NOW RESUME THE ORIGINAL POST WHERE IT BEGAN:

Without actually spoiling anything re: the Battlestar Galactica finale (not that anybody reading this watches it), which I thought was primarily brilliant with a few missteps, people who are surprised that God comes along and, well, Gods Godself out of a machine, can't have been watching the show I was watching. There's a higher power in the Battlestar universe, despite its impenetrable an ineffable nature, and it's been obvious that this is the case since well nigh the beginning of the show. Or what did you think collective lucid hallucinations and Shelly Godfrey and fulfilled prophecies and Kara Thrace returning from the frakking dead was about, anyway?

Also, I was thinking about writing a post about Dollhouse and how everybody online seems to think it's a massive disappointment (superbrief summary of the unwritten post: dude, go watch the first few episodes of Buffy and get back to me), but I'll hold off and simply observe that last night's episode was, as Whedon advertised, a stratospheric leap forward. It was awesome.

Sláinte Mhaith, As A Matter Of Fact.

2009-03-17T19:02:00.003-05:00

Not that I think it should actually do anything to change the cultural meaning of the day, but I always enjoy pointing out that St. Patrick was actually Romano-British (from the area around Carlisle), captured as a teenager and enslaved by Irish raiders.

That said, I must as ever offer up my kudos to Irish Americans, who've done a really astounding and admirable job of overcoming the intensely bigoted attitudes against which they struggled for the better part of a hundred years in trying to make their way in this country. On the one hand, the overwhelming cultural similarity to the English (and English-descended Americans) should have made this a smooth and simple process, but on the other hand, that fact that the English (and English-descended Americans) hated the Irish more than anybody else did kind of overwhelmed the mutual love of beer for a few decades.

The Italians, of course, have done pretty well in getting accepted by the American mainstream themselves, but lots of Italian things are marked ITALIAN in a way that's more decidedly foreign - dusky, scented with olive oil - than those things marked Irish. Italians had a language barrier to overcome, sure, but on the other hand they were bringing much better food to the dinner table. I think the superior integration of the Irish into the American mainstream demonstrates the advantage of having drunken vaguely Catholic parades which are fueled by beer and images of four leaf clover, instead of drunken vaguely Catholic parades which are fueled by wine and images of the Virgin Mary, weeping.

So even though I tend to ignore the day as much as possible, I say to you: Sláinte.

Of great note: for the first time since I was maybe fourteen, nobody called me out for not wearing green. There's always somebody, and usually multiple people, who will be wherever I am during the day and who will also chastise me for not being sufficiently verdant. On absolutely no evidence, I'm going to use this data to generate a new stereotype: Black people don't give a shit about St. Patrick's Day.

Lynchathon II: Twin Peaks

2009-03-15T23:33:00.005-05:00

One casualty of my schizoid attitude towards blogging (I must write things here/I hate the things I write here/No one cares what I write here/I feel an obligation to try and fail to entertain the people who read the things I write here) is that I didn't blog about Twin Peaks back when (or just after) I actually watched it, which at this point is over a month ago. As I worked through the series I had all sorts of thoughts and reactions, but I guess I'll just (!) confine myself to some bullet points.

BULLET --> I highly recommend that anyone reading this check out the first season of the show. If you dig it, move on to the second season. At whatever point you start feeling like maybe you should get off the train because it seems like derailing is imminent, trust your instincts and get off, because actually the derailing happened before you noticed it. I'd be glad to fill anybody in on what happens after you save your time and patience by taking the remainder of Season 2 off your Netflix queue. That's sort of like the advice my friend Phil gave me when he saw me reading the first volume of the Dune series back in college: "Stop with this one. Trust me, don't go forward. I'll tell you whatever you want to know, but for your own sake, don't pick up the next books." I ignored his recommendations, and people, I was Wrong.

BULLET --> Of course, David Lynch directed the unutterably bad adaptation of Dune.

BULLET --> Special Agent Dale Cooper is one of the greatest characters in the history of filmed media. From his introduction (somewhere between ten and twenty minutes into the pilot) he grabbed me, and I have a hard time imagining anyone wouldn't find him charming. He's actually the best explanation for the fact that

BULLET --> Season 1 of Twin Peaks was ridiculously popular. Watching the show almost twenty years later, the idea that a massive viewing audience tuned in for something that weird just blows my mind. My friend Fay suggests that it's because TV was super shitty back then, so very weird but good shows had a better shot at mass success. I also imagine there was a lot of misunderstanding the show in the same way people misread Blue Velvet and make it all about "darkness in the heart of small town America." But I think a lot of it had to do with Dale Cooper, addressing the mysterious Diane by dictaphone, and exulting about "these magnificent trees".

BULLET --> Dale Cooper is played by Kyle McLachlan, who also played Paul Atreides in Dune (ugh) and Jeffrey Beaumont in Blue Velvet (yay). And actually, Cooper is sort of very like what would happen if Jeffrey Beaumont grew up and became an FBI agent; there's a kind of wide-eyed gumption that the characters share, a fascination for the world and an endearingly sincere, Hardy Boys kind of approach to life and mystery. Cooper seems like what would happen if Jeffrey matured, saw the world, and came to terms with the things he learned about himself in Blue Velvet.

BULLET --> Cooper also reminds me a lot of my aforementioned Phil, completing the little nexus here of mental associations. This is the first time, hopefully the last, and certainly the best possible situation in which I might observe a character in a David Lynch work and think "Hey, I know somebody sort of like that." I mean this in the best possible way, but Phil also has an enthusiastically Hardy Boysish side.

BULLET --> In the things I've read about Lynch, the Hardy Boysishness (and I wish I had a better way to describe it) seems like an undersold element of his aesthetic. David Foster Wallace gestured towards it in his behind the scenes look at the filming of Lost Highway when he observed that it's hard to know whether or not to take Lynch seriously when he says, apparently unironically, things like "Golly" and "Terrif." I presume it's (almost?) entirely sincere, because that kind of American Boy of the Fifties thing is such a big part of Lynch's work. Smiling men who love coffee and give each other thumbses up (which, because it's Lynch, go on a little too long to be truly comfortable), grown up American boys who read adventure comics and never leave home without a pocketknife and dreamed of finding an old Indian arrowhead in the backyard. Consider that (miniscule spoiler) two malevolent spirits at the heart of the Twin Peaks story turn out to be named MIKE and BOB and BOB, in particular, is a greasy middle-aged guy in a denim jacket, the sort of guy who looks like he might brain you with a tire iron behind the gas station and take your money, or leer at children when they make too much noise in the general store. He's creepy in a completely unassuming Americana kind of way, and it's not because Lynch is indicting or exposing the whole gestalt of that aesthetic, it's because he's telling a story he wants to tell (which involves good and evil and mysterious spiritual forces, or in the case of Blue Velvet, about adolescence and corruption) and he's put it into a setting he enjoys or finds interesting (the rural northwest), not because the setting inspires some dissective urge in him, but because he likes it. Again, Lynch's idea of exposing how bad a place can be is Eraserhead, which is among other things about how he hated living in Philadelphia.

BULLET --> The devolution of the show's quality over the second season is pretty sad, both in the filming and the writing. Lynch's idiosyncratic filmic gestures are always motivated by something which caught his painterly eye - even late in the series, you can find meaninglessly meaningful cuts like one that stays with me in particular, where in one instant we're close up on a character's frightening grin and in the next frame we're looking dead on at the side of a pie that's been cut into. The crust and top frame the huckleberry (or whatever) inside like lips frame teeth. It has no story importance, but you walk away for the first time thinking "Wow, it never before occurred to me that from a certain angle, a pie with a few slices missing looks like a smile." In place of that, though, as the series goes on, the camera starts lingering on objects of no especial visual interest, like it's just killing time and trying to seem portentous via the properties of a slow zoom. Look at the black telephone, audience, look at it! It's not ringing! This script was SHORT SO LOOK AT THE PHONE. Also the characters start getting served more and more poorly. By the end of the series, the Indian sheriff's deputy Hawk is talking about the stories of his People and quoting cheesy parables; at the beginning of the series he said something that sounded like a hoary proverb about love, and then instantly clarified: "That's a poem I wrote for my girlfriend: [Girlfriend's Name], Ph.D, Brandeis."

BULLET --> A surprising portion of the cast doesn't actually seem to be any good at acting.

BULLET --> A surprising portion of the cast is sufficiently awesome enough at acting that I can't figure out why they aren't in more things.

BULLET --> I don't even know what to say about the movie, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, other than to note that now I understand why it got booed at Cannes.

BULLET --> If people who make a film actually haven't really thought about what they need to do to make the film work, it's going to be apparent pretty quickly; a film is only so long, you know. If people making a continuing dramatic TV show haven't really thought about what they need to do to make the show work, it can take a whole bunch of episodes before that becomes apparent. I'm not interested in dissecting the contributions and failings of Lynch vs. Mark Frost vs. the involvement of the network in the implosion of Twin Peaks, but these were not people who knew what they were doing. These were not people who thought about how to tell a compelling dramatic story over the course of 30+ hours, nor about how dramatic TV might require different rhythms and techniques than dramatic film, nor about how to engage and satisfy the ongoing requirements of an audience that comes to you with open hearts and willing eyes once a week. I'm not a huge fan of J.J. Abrams these days, and he royally frakked up Alias, but he said of the pilot to that show [paraphrasing]: "I knew I'd eventually want to start taking the show in an overt science fiction direction, but I hadn't worked out the details of it yet, so I made sure to seed some unexplained science fiction-y looking stuff in the pilot episode so that when we returned to the more out-there concepts two months later, the viewers wouldn't be asking where the hell it all came from." That's a guy who's thought more about how to approach making a TV show than the Twin Peaks team did. David Foster Wallace wrote that he thought people became dissatisfied with the show (among other reasons) because (mild spoilers) our moral sensibilities require that Laura Palmer's scuzzy life had to be connected to her death. Maybe, but more to the point it felt like a lot of time had been wasted; it's one thing to say (and accept) that the murder investigation is a MacGuffin because what we're really watching is Dale Cooper interacting with a mysterious set of compelling characters, but it's quite another to say that the murder investigation is a red herring because what really happened to Laura Palmer had nothing to do with what we saw and loved in the first season but is in fact vitally important because the series turns out to be concerned with elemental forces of good and evil (which to be fair is something alluded to about midway through the first season, but doesn't come clearly to the fore until much later).

BULLET --> Goodnight, Diane.

And That Right There...

2009-03-15T01:25:00.002-05:00

...is an example of why I get dejected writing the blog. I had a point to make, both about the Stewart/Cramer interview in particular (I thought I had some points of analysis that were somewhat different than what I found on the blogs I read) and about the market and CNBC in general, but it was lost in a morass of my off-the-cuffness. I also could've just linked you to this, which would've communicated 70% of what I wanted to say in about 15% of the space and time.

Bad Money (Stewart/Cramer/Medrawt Part II)

2009-03-14T01:53:00.015-05:00

Rereading the post from last night, I already spotted a few things I wish I'd phrased differently, and multiple instances ("self-immolate himself") that are artifacts of the kind of sloppy writing you get when you're falling asleep.

Only the most bizarre pastiche of a dream survives into my waking hours with any clarity, but I can report that I actually did have a dream that somehow dealt with the stock market last night.

Also, last night I completely forgot, but this morning remembered, that at the very least I know of two people - espn.com writer Bill Simmons and his friend, "Cousin Sal" from Jimmy Kimmel's late night show - have in fact bet with each other on what the line is going to be for NFL games over the course of a particular season. It's clear, though, that they considered this a sort of ridiculous and esoteric activity. And again it's possible because the bet is an assessment of what an identifiable and rational actor - Vegas - is going to do in response to the activity of the betting market, whereas there is no rational and identifiable actor setting stock prices in response to the activity of the investing market.

***

To the limited extent that I have any sort of economic consciousness, it was born in my 11th grade US History AP class. Over the course of the year I developed what I thought was an understanding, albeit a primitive one, of how the economy developed and how our economy works. I found it all very frightening. There was - is - a central unreality to the economic system that I found conceptually disturbing. Our monetary system functions, I gathered, because of a collective agreement that it does and that we won't think very hard about it.

Now, I'm not a goldbug. (Even the gold standard has serious problems in the "reality" category, and certainly returning to it would be disastrous.) What I really find unsettling when I think too hard about it is the concept of money at all. Yes, I'm finding myself unsettled by over two thousand years of human social development and yes, I know that life as we know it would be impossible without a monetary system. You simply could not seamlessly swap a barter economy into modern society, and many currently viable modes of life - including ones I'm quite fond of - would become unsustainable. So, you know, I'm a fan of the monetary system, it just makes me sort of queasy.

But I'm smart enough to know that I'm not always going to be right (see what I did there?), and I'm especially distrustful of intuition (not just mine, everyone's) when it comes to all sorts of things, so I just assumed that I was wrong to feel the way I did. Intellectually I made my peace with the collective hallucination of "money" and moved on, presuming that what I had was a blind spot, a naive intuition, and that the confidence of intelligent and knowledgeable people in this arena was evidence that they were, on this topic, more sophisticated than I was. In a way, I was really presuming that I didn't truly understand the monetary system, I only thought I did, but there was something I was inherently unable to grasp because if I could have grasped it I would feel comfortable with it.

This is not a story of how I learned to stop trusting the dollar in my pocket. It still makes me queasy when I think about it and I still think that my queasyness about the dollar in my pocket is useless, because I'm much happier living in a world where I can spend that dollar on anything I want instead of a world in which buying a book turns into a Zelda game: I get paid in potatoes, the bookstore owner doesn't want potatoes, he wants cabbage, so I go to the cabbage salesman, but he doesn't want cabbage, he wants rice, so I go to the rice guy, but he doesn't want...you get it. (Instant thought: in a sophisticated barter economy designed to work in something like the modern economic system, banks would have to be the size of warehouses, because they'd need to be warehouses. Not just to hold people's savings - not sure if that concept could translate - but because you'd need a centralized place of exchange to make life manageable, somewhere you could go and say, "Hey, my client paid me in bolts of cloth, can you turn this into ham hocks? Thanks.")

At this same time I sort of learned abstractly how the stock market works, which was an interesting historical moment to do it because I was in 11th grade during the last, enormous, wild lurch of the dot-com bubble before it burst. I think I'm in the middle of a 5-10 year window of kids who were born recently enough that the internet is completely natural but early enough that it's not inevitable, which meant that I'd wander into my parents' bedroom while they watched MSNBC, listen for five minutes to all the internet stock hype, and then inform my parents that those people were crazy. Yes, ladies and gents, I was bearish on investing at seventeen. Because if you explained what was going on to a naive seventeen year old it made No Fucking Sense, especially since I was able to tell my parents interesting facts like: "Uhm, none of these companies is actually making money, and most of them are going to burn through their venture capital and shut their doors before they can start generating income." This turned out to be correct, of course, which meant that while I distrusted my intuitions about money, I became overconfident about my intuitions re: the stock market, namely that it was doubling down on everything I thought was scary about the monetary system. Still, with age comes humility (thankfully) and through college I softened my antagonism towards the stock market until I was almost as credulous towards it as I am towards the idea that the dollar in my pocket has intrinsic value.

Credulous not towards the bubbles, whether they be internet or housing or tulip - but towards the market itself. That doesn't mean that I personally was a big fan of individual stock speculation; as a risk averse guy it just seemed insane to me to believe that an individual who had no connections to the financial industry and a straight job that took up eight hours a day could hope to "beat the market," a phrase that masks the reality of what the market is. You can outperform the market average in the short term, but in the long term almost nobody will because they're not in any possible way separated from the market. The market is us, talking about the market and trying to beat it.

So already I still had a disdain for people like Cramer who peddle stock picks as though offering up investment advice to people like, well, me - or future versions of me who've acquired some more liquid capital to play around with. But here we're wrapping back around to the Stewart/Cramer interview and one of the essential points Stewart makes that Cramer simply can't respond to:

The idea that there are "two markets". The first is "one that has been sold to us as long-term. Put your money in 401Ks, put your money in pensions, and just leave it there, don't worry about it, it's all doing fine." The second market, the "real" market according to Stewart's rhetoric, is "occurring in the back room, where giant piles of money are going in and out, and people are trading them, and it's transactional, and it's fast, but it's dangerous...and it hurts that long term market."

I think Stewart oversimplifies this; the long term market, where people sock away money for their retirement - because what else can they do to plan for their retirement? - is as he describes, and its safety is the sort of thing into which I talked myself; just entrust your cash to a mutual fund and you'll be fine in the long run. The "real" market is more than he describes, though; the "real" market includes all the people day trading in the front parlor as well as the back room, and what they do brings incredible structural instability to the market, but is well understood in its mechanisms if poorly understood in its outcomes (i.e., nobody significantly outperforms the market in the long run except Berkshire Hathaway, and they do it by behaving quite differently than everybody else). What happens in the back rooms is the stuff that no layman can really explain or understand, and is the stuff that led to the ridiculously overleveraged positions which laid the groundwork for this crash. Stuff like AIG buying shitty insurance policies isn't getting directly tracked by the up-and-down ticks of the S&P, but turned out to be hugely important to the global economy (which is one reason why, referring back to last night, confusing the DJIA's shorthand for the status of the economy itself is such a laughable mistake). There are, however, powerful points of intersection between the backroom "shenanigans," as Cramer continually calls them in this interview, and the second-to-second trading decisions made out on the floor, as when in yet another damning video segment Cramer describes how to damage Apple stock because it would benefit a hedge fund to do so.

The backroom deals have a destabilizing effect which is reinforced by the normal fluctuations of the market as both individual investors and major fund managers try to locate painfully brief inequities between the current and anticipated value of a position and get there first to sell it days or even just hours into the future. This is the kind of madness that Stewart gestures towards when Cramer defends CNBC by pointing out that they're filling 17 hours a day with live TV and Stewart replies, "Maybe you could cut down on that." Cramer also defends himself by pointing out that he never claimed to make 100% perfect picks, and that he tries "to make as many good calls as [he] can," which is when Stewart introduces the rhetoric of the real market and the unreal market. I actually thought Stewart was clearer in tying day trading to the more egregious decisions made by major financial institutions a week earlier, when discussing with Joe Nocera how "creating a false urgency every day of profit and loss in microseconds, and that amplification is actually what's hyperinflating bubbles and hyperinflating recessions."

The caution that any halfway reputable public figure - including Cramer - issues about trying to compete with the big brokerage firms in day-to-day profit and loss decisions is completely and utterly belied by the fact that CNBC nonetheless devotes so much of its 17 hours a day not merely to the idea of picking stocks but to slavishly following the ups and downs of the stock market (or its shorthand indicators), period. This is what Cramer can't or won't get, what CNBC can't or won't get, what the various pundits who have criticized Stewart for being unfair or mean-spirited in his one-week attack on CNBC don't get; he's not criticizing them for recommending bad stock picks, he's criticizing them (a) for focusing so much on the idea of stock picks, and (b) for doing so at the expense of trying to do in depth reporting and commentary on how the market really functions. Cramer is chastened, but he doesn't even offer a defense of the short term market - maybe because Stewart in this instance presented it purely in terms of the unsavory conduct of Bear Stearns et al., which Cramer is going to find indefensible, and not putting it the way he put it to Joe Nocera. Defenses of the short term market are possible - people make them in blog arguments about this topic all the time - but the pundits who are actually out there defending CNBC haven't done so that I can see because it's apparently beyond their ken that such a thing should need defending. Of course they have to fill 17 hours of live TV a day, and of course it has to be about hourly market fluctuations (and puff pieces on successful financiers) because that's totally normal and reasonable and what else could there be, anyway? Why can't Cramer provide an answer when Stewart asks him to whom CNBC is supposed to be beholden, or what its purpose in offering "reporting" is? That Cramer, eating crow, seems open to suggestions about what kind of content he should be offering on his show is flabbergasting (if it's not purely disingenuous) because it seems like he's saying he's never previously given sustained thought to the question of what a financial news network should be doing with its time.

Meanwhile the thing that I'd convinced myself wasn't true turns out to be true, and here I do think Stewart articulates the point both clearly and powerfully: "It feels like we capitalized your adventure [with our pensions and 401ks]." The long term market isn't safe (my dad's 401k is worth about 55% of what it was a year ago), because of the short term market, because of the inside baseball bullshit the brokerage houses do, which is simply the logical extension of what everyone who trades does by buying and selling multiple times a day, which is why, I think, the people at CNBC never imagined that the business practices of Lehman or Bear needed to be subjected to scrutiny in the first place. For one, those guys know what they're doing, for two, what they're doing is in the same spirit as what we talk about doing every day - maximizing income by playing the market for short term profit, and even though we caution individuals about thinking they can come out ahead that way, it's just so fucking fun, and lucrative, and because it's taken for granted everybody will tell you that the market is just perception but no one behaves as though they grok, in their deepest bellies, that the market is Just Perception, and that having a frighteningly volatile Just Perception game in the same financial and cognitive space as the Safe Long Term Investment game is going to wind up being a really bad fucking idea.

Which is why when people like Stewart, or me, turn to the people who are supposed to keep us informed about the financial markets, and we say "Why didn't you protect us?" they have no answer, just defiance (everyone on CNBC except Jim Cramer, apparently) and potentially genuine contrition (Jim Cramer). But being sorry is worthless unless you understand what you did wrong, and I don't think anybody in the middle of this clusterfuck is ever going to understand that, truly and deeply, because humans are too handicapped by the narratives in which we find ourselves.

And by the way, if every bank failed tomorrow, it looks like the FDIC actually doesn't have the money to pay us all the money FDIC ostensibly insures, because FDIC hasn't collected its insurance premiums (thanks, US Senate!) in a decade, because banks don't fail.

As my longest arguments generally do, this is falling apart and I'm not going to be able to put it together unless I rewrite it, which I'm not going to do, but I'm glad we wound our way back to one of my predictably pessimistic and misanthropic hobbyhorses, and I'm sorry if you waded your way through my undrunken ranting.

Mad Money (Stewart/Cramer/Medrawt Part I)

2009-03-14T00:12:00.011-05:00

This is going to be long.

I'm sure the people who read this blog are aware of Jon Stewart's attack on CNBC, and how it came to a climax on Thursday when Jim Cramer (unlike Rick Santelli, who originally provoked Stewart's comic ire and then reneged on his acceptance of an invite to appear) had the gonadal fortitude to actually show up and take his lumps. I'd been warned by various of the blog outlets I frequent that the video was pretty awkward and uncomfortable (when I watch The Daily Show I do so online a day or two after the airing), since Cramer basically goes out and gets embarrassed, so I was worried that I'd have difficulty watching given my inherent discomfort with watching other peoples' embarrassment. Not so - I found it gripping and not uncomfortable (from the viewer's perspective, at least), though definitely at times awkward. The whole interview was too long to run on-air, but Comedy Central provides the unedited (fucks and bullshits and all!) thing here (first part of three).

What does come off as maybe painfully awkward to people are the moments when Cramer finds himself strung up by the video clips Stewart airs. (The clips were clearly never imagined by Cramer to become publicly available; I don't know their provenance, so I'm not sure whether or not they're the same clips mentioned in this very long and only slightly deranged article about Cramer. I had heard on prior occasions about some ostensibly private clips of Cramer speaking at a function or being interviewed in which, according to some people, he essentially gave out enough rope for the SEC to hang him if they cared to, but I can't speak to the legal issues or the details of any of these video clips.) He knows they make him look bad, he offers defenses which are upended by the next section of the video, and clearly vitally wishes that there had not been a camera running that day. I do wonder whether the deployment of these clips, which Stewart effectively used to make a number of his points, actually hampered the ability to which Cramer was able to be an open and honest interlocutor:

I don't know how much actual apologizing for error Cramer does on Mad Money, but he's obviously willing to go on The Daily Show, take his lumps, and say: "Look, I was wrong," even "Look, I failed," since that's exactly what he does in this interview, however much or little it personally rankled him to do so. What he's (understandably) not willing to do is say "Look, I was bad." Stewart uses the video to undermine the more mealy-mouthed responses Cramer provides, but they also put Cramer in a position where he can't really talk honestly about what's on screen because the optics are so horrible - he has to evade the reality of what he's on camera as having said, which also means that Cramer isn't as psychologically/rhetorically free to dissect and impeach the practices he describes in the video. If Stewart had made use of video clips involving other people articulating basically the same points (although maybe Cramer is right in one of the clips when he says that no one else would be willing to go on the record with some of the details he's providing about how fund managers can manipulate financial analysts and thereby the market), then Cramer might have felt freer to provide a "safe" explanation of what he observed and even what he did as a fund manager in the 80s and 90s, an explanation that criticized and exposed those practices without precisely setting his own self on fire. I have no inherent sympathy for Cramer, but it's a lot to expect a man to willingly self-immolate himself on national television. Also, the clips of Cramer (and only of Cramer) work against Stewart's (accurate) observation that he initially had no interest in focusing specifically on Cramer, but rather was throwing pie at CNBC as a whole. Of course, while Cramer is willing to boo Santarelli's infamous "loser" rant, there's probably a limit to how much he's willing or able to throw a coworker under the bus; my understanding is that he left the world of fund management in excellent financial circumstances and Mad Money is really a lucrative "retirement," but he probably would really really like to get his contract renewed, and there's limits to how much a personality can go after another personality on the same network.

(Although maybe not: check out this montage of Shep Smith openly shitting on Glenn Beck.)

ANYWAY

The upshot is that Cramer is willing to offer apologies for incorrectness and inadequacy both on his part and CNBC's overall, and he's willing to express a lot of anger (though it's a very sad-eyed anger) at the people who created the circumstances for this financial collapse. What he can't really do, because he lacks the awareness, capacity, inclination, or courage, is engage more substantively with Stewart's critiques of both the market and the network that purports to cover it better than anyone else. He can't or won't answer what is in many ways Stewart's most basic question: what is CNBC's audience? To whom are they responsible? Stewart raises this question on I believe two separate occasions, and both times Cramer doesn't answer. The kernel that so angered Stewart and whomever else on The Daily Show staff in Santarelli's rant against financial assistance for the average homeowner was that CNBC promotes itself as a network than can help the average viewer like me or you navigate these tricky waters of the financial markets, and dispensed a lot of bullshit advice while telling us to trust them because they were the experts, when in fact if the network's coverage served anyone in the end, it was the people who fucked us. This is par for the course with my running (if not previously voiced on this blog) fury at major media outlets for having approximately 0.5% awareness of how they are intimately and inescapably wrapped up in every story they tell by the fact of choosing to tell it, and wide-eyed speculation about what will or won't be an "important" story is insulting coming from the people who make that decision by voicing their speculations in the first place.

This is doubly ironic in the world of the financial media, because what CNBC is doing by reporting in this un-self-reflective manner on the health of the stock market and its constituent companies is (a) exactly what the political media does while also (b) acting as a force multiplier on the vicissitudes of the market. Everyone will tell you that "playing the stock market" is a form of gambling, but it's really a very special form of gambling, really meta-gambling. Allow me a tendentious and over-explained analogy:

Let's say that I want to bet on a basketball game that was played tonight, the Chicago Bulls at the Philadelphia 76ers. The most unsophisticated way to do this is to simply pick the winner - I would've picked the 76ers (and been correct in doing so). That's not how real sports gambling works, though; the people with whom you will place your bets are going to offer you a "line" - I don't know the ins and outs of how this works, but in the US at least lines are more or less standardized by Vegas. The line for tonight's game was probably something like "76ers by three" or "76ers by five", and this is called the "spread". The actual bet is that the 76ers will win the game by at least the amount specified. I would've bet on the 76ers to cover the spread in either case, and I would've won if the spread was three points but lost if the spread was five points, since the 76ers as it happens won by exactly three points.

Now, there's a bit of an art to setting the line; what Vegas wants to do is pick a line such that the amount of money bet on the 76ers to cover the spread is as close as possible to the amount of money bet on the Bulls to either win or lose by no more than x points; they take into account both what they actually think is going to happen and what they think the people who are going to bet on the game think is going to happen - if Chicago fans are known to bet vociferously on their team even when it's not very good, that'll affect the line. In practice, for at least some events up until a certain point in time (or maybe even as the event is ongoing) the line is actually mobile (again, I don't know the ins and outs of this because I don't actually gamble on sports); if heavy money is coming in betting on the 76ers to cover the spread, the sports books will continue to shift the line to make that a more and more unfavorable bet so that they can get equal money on both sides of the ledger. We're getting somewhere sort of like betting on the stock market, but not quite yet, because:

In this instance, the Vegas books actually act as an arbiter of where the line is. They respond to the activity of the people placing bets, but there is a sense in which they provide a semi-externalized authority that determines what is and is not a reasonable opinion to have about the outcome of a particular game. The stock market is only the bettors, collectively setting and resetting the prices of every stock continually throughout the trading day. Setting aside quibbles about ethics and SEC regulations, if I had enough friends and we each had $30 million of money with which to play on a given day, we could radically change the prices of stocks by coordinating our efforts, just for shits and giggles. So when you step into the stock market you're stepping into a constantly fluctuating environment the fluctuations of which are entirely determined by, well, you. My bet to buy Bear Stearns (or whatever) is not in any direct way a bet on Bear Stearns, it's a bet on whether other people are going to bet on Bear Stearns. To return to the tendentious and overextended sports analogy, betting on stocks isn't betting on a line, it's betting on what the line is going to be, placing a bet a week beforehand that at the time of tipoff, the Vegas sports books would be offering 76ers +3. It's gambling on how other people are going to gamble, except since we're all in the same pool, they're gambling on how I'm going to gamble on their gambling. It's meta-gambling.

WHICH IS WHY when CNBC opens its collective yap to talk about "what the market is going to do" they're either stupid or disingenuous if they don't think their discussion of what the market is going to do has a direct and not insignificant effect on what the market is actually going to, because the whole thing is based on what the collective perception of the collective perception is, and if you've got a major media outlet discussing what the collective perception is, that's going to be heavily factored into the actual collective perception (of the collective perception).

Or as Jon Stewart put it a few days ago, mocking pundits' use of the Dow Jones Industrial Average - the Big Mac Index of stock market assessments - as evidence of Obama's job performance:

"I know what you're thinking - isn't the Dow Jones Industrial Average just a short-twitch numerical representation of a bunch of guesses about other people's assumptions about the financial well-being of an arbitrarily chosen group of thirty out of tens of thousands of possible companies?" ("No! You're wrong! It is a real time, cause and effect, precision barometer of how the president is doing.")

This post isn't done, so more will follow after I've slept the sleep of the bitter.

Blogging Bonanza?

2009-03-13T23:24:00.007-05:00

The tension between what I envision this blog being - short, pithy, tossed-off mini-rambles interspersed amongst longer, carefully composed if a bit rambly reflective thought pieces - and what it is - long, pithy, tossed-off rambling reflective thought pieces - continues to frustrate, but isn't the only reason I've gone a month without blogging.

I have in my mind a weekend in which I pump out four or five considerable posts. But I have a lot of things in mind that tend to not happen, so we'll see. Given the amount of thought I put into these posts, and the type of process by which they migrate from my brain to the computer screen, I'd probably be better off podcasting, since all I'm really doing is transcribing what I'd be saying if I were vocalizing my thoughts at the moment I had them.

Up next: Jon Stewart, Jim Cramer, why the stock market isn't gambling, it's meta-gambling, and my weird emotions about how all of that plays into my personal intuitions about the world of finance. (Pronounced, please, in the snooty and possibly British manner.)

It's On Your Face

2009-02-16T23:18:00.003-06:00

Fox's new show Lie to Me, starring Tim Roth, should be fluffily entertaining and satisfying, but it pretty much isn't; it's kind of dull. However, I'm just babbling out loud and surely not the first person to snarkily observe that the show depends on the ability of its main characters to spot miniscule facial movements that are involuntary even in people who are presumably practiced liars who are prepared for the fact that they're going to lie, to the extent that the main characters can also call out when people are faking emotions they're not feeling, like sorrow or surprise. The show isn't un-nuanced about the realities of this - I saw an episode where at first they think somebody's lying, but then they realize that she's using Botox - and I presume that at some point they're going to engage with somebody who's both a practiced and a knowledgeable liar, somebody who knows the tells Tim Roth's character looks for (or is really, really innately good at it). But the show also depends on the ability of a large number of guest actors every episode to accurately sell all these emotions that they're not actually experiencing.

There's any number of directions to take that essential paradox, either to complicate or to resolve it, but in brief I think it's a nifty illustration of one of my hobbyhorses: how what's actually real and what seems to be realistic have a complicated and fractious relationship in a fictional context (if not outside of one as well).

Intentionally Misreading Songs

2009-02-15T03:06:00.002-06:00

Sometimes when I'm not really paying attention to the lyrics of a song, I'll automatically interpret a particular line as having a given meaning, when in fact in the context of the entire lyric I realize it means something quite else. Other times I'll be listening to a song and realize that the whole thing could be put in quite a different light.

An example of the latter would be the Beatles classic, "She Loves You." I've always thought someone should - probably someone has - covered this song but altered the arrangement to highlight the potential sadness of the titular line. (Basically, return to the intro, which repeats the lyric three times over an Em | A | C | G chord progression, and instead play Em | A | C | C over and over and over.) Now it's not simply informative - "hey, dude, she loves you" - but it's more about the singer - "she loves you [and not me, so don't fuck it up because you don't deserve it]". It wouldn't make the song better - though I don't think it'd make it worse - but it's the song I'd have written if I were them, which I'm not, which was just as well for them, because then they wouldn't have written any songs probably to begin with.

Or, to take an example of the out and out misreading, I've several times heard the Foo Fighters song "Best of You". On actually paying attention to the lyrics the song seems to be about overcoming adversity and fighting the things that hold you back. the phrase "is someone getting the best...of you?" seems to mean "the best" in the sense of being defeated, like "he got the best of me in the negotiations, and now I'm broke and the company is in shambles." I like the way the song sounds, but the lyrics I could take or leave - which, barring a few songs, is sort of how I feel about the Foo Fighters; I've never sought them out, but any time I actually hear a few songs I usually think "hey, you know, this is alright." ANYWAY, before I paid attention to the lyrics, all I ever noticed was the line, repeated over and over, "Is someone getting...the best of you?" And I though the song was about romantic jealousy. (Is there, maybe, a theme to my misreadings and rereadings of songs?) In this case, I think I would like that other song much more than I like this - I think it's a nice lyrical way of phrasing the idea I have in mind that Dave Grohl didn't.

And Also There Is Loneliness In This:

2009-02-08T00:06:00.005-06:00

I was taught to how to fold sheets by my father's father, and it's an inherently collaborative method.

In college and thereafter, the first time in my life when the care and changing of my sheets was primarily my responsibility, my general method was to let the dirty sheets sit in my laundry bag until it was time for the change, at which point I'd wash the old ones, put them directly on the bed, and throw the newer ones into the pile, and so the cycle would continue. This is also why despite usually owning three pairs of sheets, I'd get into ruts with only two of them or, even more frequently, I must admit I'd simply strip the bed, wash the sheets, and then put them back on, which I eventually noticed wasn't exactly good for the lifespan of the fabric.

Thus it is that only in the last few months have I assayed the task of actually folding bed linens by myself. It is an awkward activity - especially that fucking fitted sheet - and also, I find, a lonely one. It is a small pleasure to come physically toward someone and make your corners meet.

Violence In The Workplace

2009-02-07T22:24:00.004-06:00

That was the name of a training session which our Government Agency mandates as necessary for all employees, including contractors, and which my immediate coworkers and I finally got around to receiving on Friday. It was interesting, actually; some of the topics were thought-provoking although I'm skeptical about the educational value, although maybe that's my personal jadedness; I felt that I didn't need to "learn" the things in the session, but perhaps some of my coworkers did. Or didn't. One issue I found interesting, although somewhat tangential, was the question of what to do if you believe that a coworker is being abused at home. One of us argued that since that's not a work-related matter, it would be overstepping the boundaries of what is and isn't your business to alert your supervisor. (My initial thought was alerting the police rather than a supervisor, but for a variety of reasons that's not actually a practical idea, which I should have figured out before opening my mouth. So I learned something after all!) There were two interesting counter-examples, though, provided by long-time employees - people who worked at the Government Agency for the previous contractor and in at least one case directly for the Agency itself back in the day.

(1) A woman whose boyfriend came to the workplace, called her into the parking lot, and began beating her there.

(2) A woman whose supervisor documented every occasion when she came to work with bruises, even to the point of taking photographs (I wasn't clear on whether the woman was cooperating with the documentation in this regard or if the photos were taken surreptitiously), so that when finally the woman reported her husband to the police, her supervisor was able to provide evidence that the abuse had been going on for months.

I just thought that was interesting stuff. In my old job, among other responsibilities I read discovery documents in labor cases.* I read about one story where a woman's boyfriend came to the workplace and started a fight with a male employee whom the boyfriend suspected his girlfriend was cheating with, but I never read about a man actually coming to his s/o's job to assault her in the parking lot. I really don't know what to make of it, beyond the obvious.

* A plaintiff suing for wrongful termination needs to demonstrate the he was treated differently than those coworkers with analogous situations. For example, if a man was officially fired for coming to work drunk, but he claims he was fired because of his age, his attorney would like to be able to demonstrate that other employees who came to work drunk were disciplined but not fired. Therefore, in a wrongful termination suit, the personnel files of everyone who had the same rank (at least) as the plaintiff are generally part of the discovery, and need to be Bates labeled (by me). I also tended to read these files because they were the most overtly entertaining part of my job. I was often officially assigned to do specific readthroughs of discovery documents - flag every email with the word "sponsor," highlight every deposition passage relating to the morning commute - but was only once overtly tasked to look for something in personnel files.

Unfortunately, the training session - which had been scheduled a few weeks in advance - had some timeliness, because a few days before, the #2 supervisor at our satellite office was attacked in the ladies' room during work hours. I have heard both that she was attacked by a disgruntled client and by somebody acting on behalf of a recent firee - and also heard some details that are intended to discredit her account, which I have not directly heard. This is the sort of thing I intentionally abstain from: I don't know the details and am not interested in speculating, and am happy for the police to do their job. What isn't in doubt is that she was kept overnight in the hospital, though I don't believe her injuries are serious in the scheme of things.

I also found out today that a friend of mine's brother-in-law was murdered a few months ago, and although I never met him (I did once meet her sister) I was pretty well speechless for a while. I don't really have much to say about it, I guess. The police are still investigating but they believe it was related to his work as a district attorney.

And to close with something much lighter in tone, because it's not all violence and sadness at Medrawt HQ, I have definitive proof of the aging process doing its inevitable work upon me. My beard, when I grow it, has always sheltered the stray red hair - so did my father's before it went salt and pepper, and so did my grandfather's mustache before I was born - but recently I've noted that it contains one or two hairs of a decidedly new color. My youth is slipping away, one dull Saturday night after the next, and I've got the grey hairs to prove it.

Adventures in Telephony

2009-01-28T23:16:00.004-06:00

(1) At work yesterday, called an equivalent Government Agency in another city, a small one, and the provided contact number was actually for the agency director, who happened to be sitting in his office with exactly the people I needed to talk to, having exactly the conversation I had wanted to have. This did not go well. I was on the phone for an hour with some extremely friendly Iowans who were really curious about lots of things I couldn't really answer because (among other reasons) I frankly hadn't really done my homework. I'd gotten complacent after a series of eventless calls where I asked my question and was promised a relevant fax in return, so that this time around I neglected to check our own management software to see what the deal was with the case in question, assuming it was as cut and dried as the others. It was not. I hemmed and hawed and sounded rather foolish, I fear. But the Iowans, being - I take it - Iowan, were extremely nice about the whole thing, and I got to drop some "this is how we do it in the big city, where our program serves 100x as many people as yours does" knowledge on them. Said knowledge being, essentially: "Honestly, we have so many clients that our resources don't really allow us to be quite so investigative or diligent."

(2) At another agency I was transferred four times in order to reach the person I needed to talk to, who let me pose my question and appeared on the verge of answering it before deciding that, hey now, she didn't actually have any way of knowing I was who I said I was, and could I prove it? This threw me off rather a lot, so I took her suggestion of faxing her something with an official coversheet, and I agreed. Unfortunately, our coversheet isn't actually terribly official, so I didn't hear back from her. My boss - and I should have thought of this myself - suggested (after much laughter) that I should email her, because maybe she wouldn't assume I'd spoofed a domain name. This was successful.

(3) Today I called what I can only assume was a very small agency, and received a recorded message that ran as follows: "Thank you for calling the [Local Government Agency]. Unfortunately, we are not able to answer your call at this time. Our hours of operation are [a window within which I was definitely calling]. Please try again later." This is unprecedented. I don't care how small they are, I'll forgive them not having a phone tree or IVR, but they don't have voicemail?

(4) This evening I was in a slightly frazzled mood, my home phone rang, I answered it, a guy with a Mexican accent informed me that he was calling from a survey company in Hollywood, and I promise I usually say something like "Sorry, I'm not interested," or "I don't have time, and a good time to call back would be, well, I'd rather you didn't," but I just hung up without saying anything. Five seconds later my phone rang again. Coincidence, right? No - same guy. Now I'm a little annoyed (well, more so), and I hang up again without notification. I'm walking away when the phone rings again, and I pick it up and say "Hello?" only to have whomever called me hang up on me. And then my phone rang again, and I picked it up without saying anything, and it instantly went to dial tone. And then in the next few minutes there were three occasions where it rang only once, and I didn't answer it. I've been told that random rings can be the result of electrical spikes in the phone grid, but I'd rather think that the telemarketer guy, for whom I do feel some level of intrinsic sympathy (he didn't draw up the business model, and everybody's got to eat) was angered at my rudeness and taking out his frustrations on me. Sorry, ese.

Yeah, Rub It In, Whatever

2009-01-27T07:48:00.002-06:00

Hey, would you like to go to this concert?

Yeah, sure!

Would you like to go by yourself?

Don't really see a problem with that, no.

Would you like to go by yourself, on Valentine's Day?

I ... oh ... sigh. Never mind.

There's one broken and one functional Youtube link at the CSO page, but the functional one is also seven minutes long and starts with a few minutes of stage patter. So instead of Mariza, here's a taste of the true Queen of Fado; this is just scratching the surface, but it's a nice short video if a bit one-dimensional. This sort of thing was on in my house a lot growing up:

Frying Pans, Fires, Overdramatic Metaphorical Cliches

2009-01-25T00:12:00.004-06:00

One of my complaints about my job at the law firm was that in effect I really had two jobs, and I greatly preferred one of them; I was a sorta free agent assistant for the litigation and (especially) labor attorneys doing whatever projects came up as I was free to take them. Some of these came by assignment, sort of like a blind date, but over two years I developed working relationships with some of the attorneys, who would routinely come to me if they needed something done, and I usually tried to accommodate them. My other job was to maintain the filing for the bankruptcy group, a job which I hated intensely (no reflection on the actual people working in the bankruptcy group). There were secondary consequences to the problem, but in essence there you go.

And now I once again have, basically, two jobs; one is doing the monthly reporting to our Government Agency overlords, and one is doing the day to day work of being a compliance analyst (although we still haven't done much that's truly compliance, because of shit I might talk about obliquely some other time). I thought when I took the job that I'd really enjoy the writing and reporting aspects and that the compliance stuff would be kind of a drag. In practice, though, I've come to dread the reporting and if I don't love the compliance work it's more interesting and less...something.

For one thing, the reporting winds up being kind of isolating. I'm fond of my little compliance group, and when I'm working on the reporting I become detached from them because they have nothing to do with my reports. I interact with them much less and worry about my own shit and nag other people to give me information in a timely manner. I sort of like the communal teamwork aspect of what we do; even if we aren't literally working on the same thing, it's all interlocking pieces of a puzzle, and we can commiserate and make jokes about the weird stories we discover and say things like "Wait, who are you working? Jane Johnson? That sounds familiar. Let me...yeah, no wonder she's not returning your calls, she's on my deceased report." You know, good times, teamwork.

For another thing, the reporting's cyclical nature means that my mood, at least as it pertains to work, can be tracked on a predictable monthly swing and since my productivity is directly related to my happiness (at least in a work-focused sense), I'm most productive at the antipode of my reports' due date. Lately I start worrying about the reports even at the antipode, though; the specter of having to start collecting information and synthesizing it into bite-sized information packets so it can fit into the stupid predetermined template I was handed by the powers upon high once again tarnishes the enjoyment of not actually having to do it for two weeks.

There's also a sense of treading water, because if I skim the report for August and compare it to the one for December I don't feel like we substantively covered any new ground, made progress, improved our performance and solidified our position. The concerns feel as repetitive and cyclical as the writing process.

I just wanted to complain for a moment.

On the compliance side, I've been having to call sister Government Agencies in other cities to work out some of our issues, and let me tell you, there are some weird Interactive Voice Response systems out there; there's one that hangs up on me if I don't make my menu selection within five seconds, which is problematic because none of the selections remotely correspond to my needs. You'd think there would be like a special secret phone line that the agencies could use to talk to each other, but there isn't, and "If you're calling from another government agency, please press 8" has not yet manifested as an option. I spend a lot of time on hold and getting transferred by people who don't know who I need to talk to, but are pretty sure it's not them. (And on a pure professionalism standpoint, one of the published numbers for a particular agency in downstate Illinois, a number listed as the appropriate contact information on the website of the federal agency to which we all ultimately answer, goes to a voicemail for "Greg [Lastname]". I hung up assuming I had the wrong number, because "Greg [Lastname]" didn't bother to specify that yes, I'd reached the [Illinois city government agency]. Greg turned out to be a nice guy and I suspect that he might actually have been the boss, though we didn't clear that up.

Put Me In, Coach

2009-01-24T16:46:00.003-06:00

This is interesting.

I don't know if it'll be a positive or a negative or most likely a neutral factor for a Cowboys organization that's not exactly healthy at the moment, but compared to most reality TV shows out there it seems like it could be compelling TV without being embarrassing either to the viewer or the contestant. I also appreciate that despite the pitchline of using "football neophytes" they're actually, it seems, going to focus on guys who played college ball but for some reason or other didn't make it to the NFL, so there's some shot that the winner, having secured a slot in training camp, but actually be able to hope that he could possibly make the cut for the season roster (unlikely, though).

However, I do wonder at the selection of positions for the contestants. There'll be six wide receivers and six defensive backs (the guys who are more or less responsible for defending wide receivers). The offense/defense thing makes sense, and wide receiver/d-back is one of the more glamorous positions out there; an extremely casual fan like myself can certainly name more receivers than offensive linemen. But of various positions on the football field, wide receiver seems like one of the least likely ones at which you could find a body of guys with NFL level ability who haven't already got a cup of coffee in the league. Everybody in the NFL is surprisingly agile for their size, but NFL wide receivers are freakishly quick considering that the prototype right now is probably about 6'4", 215 lbs. Plus they can jump really high. I would think you'd be much more likely to be successful if you were looking for, say, tight ends, who are about the same height (trending taller) but need to weigh something like 250 lbs. An NFL tight end needs to be faster than the average guy his height and weight, but not to the explosively quick degree a wide receiver does; after the sheer bulk requirement, it seems like one of the less demanding positions in terms of the physical restrictions needed to be competitive. There's just a lot more big guys who can hustle quick and hit hard than there are NFL-quality greyhounds.

Actually, I'd expect that there's also a lot of NFL-caliber quarterbacks floating around. Pro teams are notoriously bad at being able to project who will or won't be a successful quarterback, and rely on a lot of physical data that's marginally relevant at best. I'll bet there are a lot of guys who are good enough to be a backup QB in the NFL but aren't because they're 5'10" or had a shitty Wonderlic* score or something like that.

* I took the Wonderlic, which is some sort of weird intelligence assessment test, when I signed up with a temp agency after graduating from college. I don't know what my results were, but maybe I should consider that they never called me for work evidence that I don't look too impressive on a Wonderlic. It was a weird test, but my best understanding is that it tries to measure decision making and pattern recognition under considerable time constraints. That seems like a valuable skill for QBs to have but there are a bunch of great ones who've famously done poorly on the test, and frankly I think the intellectual aspect of being a QB is oversold. Football in general is a pretty heady game considering all the hitting that goes on, but just because the QB has the ball in his hands doesn't mean he's got the most intellectually challenging job. Basically he needs to see the open man and recognize if a defensive back is trying to bait him into making a pass. The guys who actually score highest on the Wonderlic are offensive and defensive linemen, which is funny given stereotypes about football players, since they're by far the biggest men on the field. The adage is that the closer to the line of scrimmage you play the smarter you need to be (at least smart in the ways the Wonderlic cares about) and it makes sense, because the o- and d-lines are always shifting and trying to fool each other into misrecognizing what's going to happen once the play starts. The ability to instantly perceive what's actually going on and put your considerable bulk in the best position to thwart it is what makes a great line, and a great o-line can make mediocre "skill" players look like Pro Bowlers (and a great d-line can make them look like chumps).

The Next Day

2009-01-24T14:37:00.002-06:00

The post right before this is even sloppier, more incoherent, and poorly edited than the usual longer rambles I post here, and probably not worth reading in its current form. Having somewhere to put those thoughts and reactions without having to directly impose myself on somebody else's attention is 65% of why I'd like to keep blogging, but my general process - write the thing in one long go and hit publish, because I don't have the energy or inclination to revise it for coherence and grammar - makes me kind of dejected. Oh well. I have a few other brief comments in mind but I'm going to try and split them up into discrete posts over the course of the day rather than doing my usual Bimonthly Digest schtick.

What You Think You Know...You Don't Know

2009-01-24T00:34:00.002-06:00

One of my college roommates was a huge fan of Alias and in turn he made me into a huge fan of Alias, and the title of this post was one of our favorite lines. This is not a post about Alias.

Now that The Wire is gone from TV, it's pretty commonplace to say that Battlestar Galactica is the most politically relevant show going. Even when The Wire was on, there were many who would say that, and I'd be one of them.* This is not a post especially about the ways in which Battlestar is politically relevant, but rather about how I think it treats of one universally important idea.

*(The Wire's political concerns were as immediately relevant to the 90s as they were to the 00s, and the series drew heavily from David Simon's reporting on the police beat c. twenty years ago. Baltimore on The Wire was at least as much the Baltimore of the late 80s and early 90s as it was the Baltimore of today and also an Every City standing in for Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Newark, Gary, St. Louis, etc. The Wire's political social relevance exists on a much longer timescale than the Bush administration, and really covers everything from the 60s into an unknown future; it's not, thematically, a show that's grounded in the time it was made. Battlestar's political/social questions are going to be worth consideration at any historical moment, but they particularly resonate with the last seven years; there are basically no Americans who are worried about the ethical status of torture or the proper way to think about violent resistance movements who were equally concerned about those topics ten years ago.)

We are, essentially, fundamentally ignorant, of the world around us and of the people we interact with and, maybe most damningly, of ourselves, and this ignorance binds us into blindly held ideological stances we can't see our way out of. One of my perpetual bete noirs is "the idiot plot" - classically, a story which is only made possible by the characters behaving like idiots. This is extremely common on sitcoms; the other day I happened across a Friends rerun in which 90% of the plot was generated by the consequences of Chandler not wanting to admit to Joey that he wrecked one of their recliners, and of course this only makes things worse, or if you will, hilarity ensues. If you think about the sitcom as a genre, you'll realize how much of what we see onscreen relies on one character not sharing information with somebody else for no good and understandable human reason. What bothers me more is when similar things happen in dramas, but what I find incredibly frustrating as a viewer is when a character is simply ignorant for no good reason, and the plot relies on the consequences of his ignorance. This is maybe a failing of mine as a viewer: I find the experience of watching something like this so violently frustrating on a personal level that it disrupts my enjoyment unless that ignorance is elevated to a thematic level.

In the last two years especially Battlestar has absolutely expanded on and expounded on the consequences of ignorance - wholly understandably and justifiable ignorance, no less - both of self and of other. Tonight's episode of the show was entirely about people being ignorant (well, and one example of Adama being very clever, but).

If you step back a few episodes, to the last episode before the long hiatus, the humans and the cylons are engaged in what was, frankly, a ridiculous standoff. D'Anna looked the most ridiculous because she had the most reason, since she'd been out of action for at least six months of in-show continuity-time. She instantly took command of the situation despite being the least caught up of anybody on the status quo. Her justification for the ridiculous standoff was that "The humans will never forgive us for what we did to the twelve colonies." This is actually perfectly logical, and maybe accurate, but the level of her self-absorption is so extreme (and realistic) that it doesn't occur to her that this is actually reasonable of the humans - why should they forgive an attempted (and almost successful) genocide? She also says, "we attempted cooperation on New Caprica, and it failed" - in what frakked up universe can she believe that New Caprica was a cooperation? It was an occupation, by force, and D'Anna's blinders almost led to further catastrophe and possibly the completion of that genocide. She can see that she can't trust humans, but she can't see the human position or understand that she could actually be wrong. She's trapped by her ignorance, and it makes her worse. She has to know that by spacing one hostage every fifteen minutes until the "Final Five Minus One" are released into her custody she's doing something abominable, because she has to know that the humans don't have any control over what the F5-1 do, since she has to know that the don't know who the hell they are. She's pretending to negotiate while actually trying to goad the F5-1 into revealing themselves in the way most convenient to her, all without actually being able to project how the F5-1 might feel about the situation - this capable, intelligent woman is actually surprised that Saul Frakking Tigh would expose himself to the people he loves rather than give in to her demands?

And (applicable both to that episode and to this one) the humans. Good lord. Tory, who I think had the least reasonable response to finding out that she was a cylon, said the smartest thing when she asked Roslin to consider that if she didn't know Tory was a cylon, she ought to wonder what other things she'd been wrong about. This is a question everybody should ask themselves on this show. The funny thing about the last two years especially, when (I think to the show's detriment) the "secret"/"mystery" aspects were hyped beyond their real importance to the overall story, is that the audience is in a state of hungering to know what's really going on and being pained by its ignorance, but we know VASTLY more than the characters do about the world they inhabit, and we can synthesize the new information MUCH better than they can. The human race has in a very short time period (I think the show covers about three years) received a number of completely staggering revelations:

(1) That there are humanoid cylons, the provenance of which remain unknown
(2) That some of these cylons can be programmed as sleeper agents who do not know that they are cylons and are absolutely invested in their fictional biographies and in their very real human relationships
(3) That cylons have completely valid emotional lives
(4) That individual cylons can choose to side with the humans and be trustworthy
(5) That there are models of cylon which the cylons know exist but do not recognize
(6) That these last cylons turn out to be people they've been friends with for years
(7) That the cylons have internal disputes so severe that they resulted in a shaky alliance in which one group helped the humans to a staggering military victory with profound consequences for the development of the cylon race.

And yet with very few exceptions on the part of the people closest to these events (and often not even them), none of the above matters because once the cylons attempted genocide, no new information can be allowed to complicate human hatred and mistrust of cylons. If you don't watch the show - and nobody I know reading this watches the show, I believe - then I'm surprised if you made it this far because a lot of this probably looks impenetrable without a thirty minute primer. But trust me when I say this is tragic, tragic shit going down, and the apparent direction of at least the next few episodes, where it looks like the human fleet is going to erupt into civil war over the issue of whether, essentially people who have risked their lives to fight alongside the humans can actually be trusted and actually, if we're talking about Gaeta, and really most of the humans in the fleet, whether they can even be worth a modicum of shared sapient decency...The commonplace joke about the racist is that he'll say "Black people can't be trusted," and when you ask him about Bob from work, he'll say "Oh, Bob's different, he's a great guy." The tragedy is that all too often, as right now on Battlestar, Gaeta finds out that Tigh from work is a cylon, and this doesn't complicate his thoughts on cylons, it just makes him hate Tigh, who really had no fucking say in the matter and has done nothing but risk his life for the sake of humanity since finding out the truth, let alone his years of honorable service before.

But what goes around come around, right? Because Gaeta sits down with Starbuck and reminds he that she sat on a secret tribunal which nearly executed him for collaborating with the cylons because, essentially, they were being ignorant fools. This was a horrible thing and wrong, and Starbuck to her understandable discredit, can't really hear him on this. Because he feels the need to point out the irony that as it turned out, that tribunal was full of cylons and people who were married to cylons (even though exactly nobody knew it at the time). But does he consider his own ignorance now, does he respect the things he doesn't know? Of course not, he can't, because he's too full of hate at the way the universe has treated him, and all he has is bitterness, so he can't learn from his own mistreatment; he must seek out a way to visit it on others.

I'm fond of saying things like: I'm humbled by the universe, I'm humbled by everything I don't know, by the scope of existence and how far it is from my grasp, etc. I find it, for one thing, a valuable corrective influence on my native intellectual confidence. But I also think it's truly valuable shit to believe those things. The weight of our ignorance should bend our backs from time to time as a reminder to be humble in our doings and our judgments of each other. But - and the thing to remember is that every piece of text I produce which makes it this long is ultimately about my own dissatisfaction with the nature of humanity, because given enough space and time I'll always become a misanthrope - we never do. We're never humbled by our own ignorance, only emboldened by it. Battlestar has an immediate cultural relevance but a universal resonance, because there are going to be many times in our history when we should be open enough to resonate with the horror of two peoples gearing up to destroy each other because they're nothing more than ignorant fools and blind.

Counterpoint

2009-01-19T17:28:00.002-06:00

In lieu of my ill-formed attempt at recounting a conversation with my father about the value or detrimental effect of symbolism in the political sphere, I instead offer for consideration, without explicit or even implicit attempt to align or distance my own thoughts with or from content or symbolism, the following:

It's all right to talk about "long white robes over yonder," in all of its symbolism. But ultimately people want some suits and dresses and shoes to wear down here. It's all right to talk about "streets flowing with milk and honey," but God has commanded us to be concerned about the slums down here, and his children who can't eat three square meals a day. It's all right to talk about the new Jerusalem, but one day, God's preachers must talk about the New York, the new Atlanta, the new Philadelphia, the new Los Angeles, the new Memphis, Tennessee. This is what we have to do.

Now the other thing we'll have to do is this: Always anchor our external direct action with the power of economic withdrawal. Now, we are poor people, individually, we are poor when you compare us with white society in America. We are poor. Never stop and forget that collectively, that means all of us together, collectively we are richer than all the nations in the world, with the exception of nine. Did you ever think about that? After you leave the United States, Soviet Russia, Great Britain, West Germany, France, and I could name the others, the Negro collectively is richer than most nations of the world. We have an annual income of more than thirty billion dollars a year, which is more than all of the exports of the United States, and more than the national budget of Canada. Did you know that? That's power right there, if we know how to pool it.

We don't have to argue with anybody. We don't have to curse and go around acting bad with our words. We don't need any bricks and bottles, we don't need any Molotov cocktails, we just need to go around to these stores, and to these massive industries in our country, and say, "God sent us by here, to say to you that you're not treating his children right. And we've come by here to ask you to make the first item on your agenda fair treatment, where God's children are concerned. Now, if you are not prepared to do that, we do have an agenda that we must follow. And our agenda calls for withdrawing economic support from you."

And so, as a result of this, we are asking you tonight, to go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola in Memphis. Go by and tell them not to buy Sealtest milk. Tell them not to buy—what is the other bread?—Wonder Bread. And what is the other bread company, Jesse? Tell them not to buy Hart's bread. As Jesse Jackson has said, up to now, only the garbage men have been feeling pain; now we must kind of redistribute the pain. We are choosing these companies because they haven't been fair in their hiring policies; and we are choosing them because they can begin the process of saying, they are going to support the needs and the rights of these men who are on strike. And then they can move on downtown and tell Mayor Loeb to do what is right.

But not only that, we've got to strengthen black institutions. I call upon you to take your money out of the banks downtown and deposit your money in Tri-State Bank—we want a "bank-in" movement in Memphis. So go by the savings and loan association. I'm not asking you something we don't do ourselves at SCLC. Judge Hooks and others will tell you that we have an account here in the savings and loan association from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. We're just telling you to follow what we're doing. Put your money there. You have six or seven black insurance companies in Memphis. Take out your insurance there. We want to have an "insurance-in."

Now these are some practical things we can do. We begin the process of building a greater economic base. And at the same time, we are putting pressure where it really hurts. I ask you to follow through here.

And later:

You know, several years ago, I was in New York City autographing the first book that I had written. And while sitting there autographing books, a demented black woman came up. The only question I heard from her was, "Are you Martin Luther King?"

And I was looking down writing, and I said yes. And the next minute I felt something beating on my chest. Before I knew it I had been stabbed by this demented woman. I was rushed to Harlem Hospital. It was a dark Saturday afternoon. And that blade had gone through, and the X-rays revealed that the tip of the blade was on the edge of my aorta, the main artery. And once that's punctured, you drown in your own blood—that's the end of you.

It came out in the New York Times the next morning, that if I had sneezed, I would have died. Well, about four days later, they allowed me, after the operation, after my chest had been opened, and the blade had been taken out, to move around in the wheel chair in the hospital. They allowed me to read some of the mail that came in, and from all over the states, and the world, kind letters came in. I read a few, but one of them I will never forget. I had received one from the President and the Vice-President. I've forgotten what those telegrams said. I'd received a visit and a letter from the Governor of New York, but I've forgotten what the letter said. But there was another letter that came from a little girl, a young girl who was a student at the White Plains High School. And I looked at that letter, and I'll never forget it. It said simply, "Dear Dr. King: I am a ninth-grade student at the White Plains High School." She said, "While it should not matter, I would like to mention that I am a white girl. I read in the paper of your misfortune, and of your suffering. And I read that if you had sneezed, you would have died. And I'm simply writing you to say that I'm so happy that you didn't sneeze."

And I want to say tonight, I want to say that I am happy that I didn't sneeze. Because if I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been around here in 1960, when students all over the South started sitting-in at lunch counters. And I knew that as they were sitting in, they were really standing up for the best in the American dream. And taking the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been around in 1962, when Negroes in Albany, Georgia, decided to straighten their backs up. And whenever men and women straighten their backs up, they are going somewhere, because a man can't ride your back unless it is bent. If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been here in 1963, when the black people of Birmingham, Alabama, aroused the conscience of this nation, and brought into being the Civil Rights Bill. If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have had a chance later that year, in August, to try to tell America about a dream that I had had. If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been down in Selma, Alabama, been in Memphis to see the community rally around those brothers and sisters who are suffering. I'm so happy that I didn't sneeze.

And they were telling me, now it doesn't matter now. It really doesn't matter what happens now. I left Atlanta this morning, and as we got started on the plane, there were six of us, the pilot said over the public address system, "We are sorry for the delay, but we have Dr. Martin Luther King on the plane. And to be sure that all of the bags were checked, and to be sure that nothing would be wrong with the plane, we had to check out everything carefully. And we've had the plane protected and guarded all night."

And then I got to Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers?

Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

-4/3/68, Memphis, Tennessee

Lynchathon I, Part II: Wild at Heart, Blue Velvet, and Being Uncomfortably Turned On

2009-01-12T21:24:00.002-06:00

The truth is that Lynch's stuff so far hasn't been the best blog-fodder because I don't generally have all that much to say beyond an uninvested critical reaction; there's very little yet that I react emotionally to, or am inspired by in some direction or another. These are by and large good movies - The Elephant Man and Blue Velvet are both at least near-masterpieces in my estimation - but they're not really in my wheelhouse and there generally isn't something I can latch onto as a point of self-indulgent departure. I'm not interested, e.g., in telling you whether or not Bones is a good show - watch an episode and decide for yourself. I write flabby and undisciplined rambles like that because I'm interested in some facet of the show or want to work out some thoughts I have about it beyond the thumbs up or down, and Lynch's first five movies don't dig into my brain in that way, the notable exceptions being the apocalyptic badness of Dune, and various aspects of Wild at Heart.

A lot of what's interesting to me in this film is the comparison it provides with Blue Velvet. Eraserhead was bizarre and completely introverted artistically, The Elephant Man was a well-selected project that nonetheless was someone else's and the least Lynch-like Lynch so far, Dune an ill-begotten catastrophe, and then Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart are near-accessible films with discernable plots and characters, but in a decidedly Lynchian mode. Here is where I recognize (and appreciate) the artist behind Mulholland Drive.

The apt comparison between these two films is once again David Foster Wallace's (all DFW references are cribbed from a several months' old rereading of his "on the set" piece about the making of Lost Highway, which was collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. It's a great essay as well as a great exegesis of Lynch's major artistic accomplishments as of the mid-90s): Wild at Heart suffers in comparison to Blue Velvet because where the earlier film had distinctly drawn characters - and in Jeffrey Beaumont a relatively grounded protagonist with whom the audience could ally their emotional responses - Wild at Heart has fuzzily drawn characterish entities that are nearly impossible to relate to as recognizable human beings. Good or bad, they're all as inexplicably weird as Frank Booth. Wild at Heart actually has a more conventionally explicable and digestible plot (barring the wizard of Oz riff/detours). A getaway/chase/road movie winds up feeling kind of aimless even before Sailor and Lula (yes, those are their names) wind up stalled and temporarily doomed in Big Tuna, Texas.

There's an interesting, unsettling relationship between two scenes of sexual violation in these movies. Blue Velvet famously has Jeffrey hiding in a closet, watching Frank rape Dorothy. There's a lot of setup that went into the scene; Jeffrey snuck into Dorothy's apartment, watched her come home, watched her undress, and just when it's getting a little too Porky's, she realizes that she's not alone and goes after him with a knife. With Jeffrey at her mercy, Dorothy first chooses to humiliate him by ordering him to undress, duplicating and reversing the violation he perpetrated on her, and then she starts to treat him (still rather demandingly, still with the knife) as a lover. Whether this was a change in Dorothy's mood or if the initial (justifiably) vengeful humiliation was always meant as prelude to sex I have no idea. Dorothy's perhaps a naturally kinky lady, but she's also in a very bad place emotionally and it's clearly fucking up her sexual proclivities - there are people who like violent sex for its own sake, let's say, but I think Lynch wants us to think that Dorothy likes Jeffrey to hit her because her son is gone. Maybe I'm way wrong and oversimplifying, but it's definitely the case that sweet young naive Jeffrey thinks that's the case.

Anyway, after the foreplay but well before the consummation of Jeffrey and Dorothy's affair, Frank comes banging on the door and Jeffrey is sent back to the closet. Frank comes in, demands a drink, and then has sex with Dorothy. It's clearly rape, and it's also clearly a longstanding arrangement; Frank is verbally threatening but doesn't really resort to physical violence, because the threat of hurting her family is sufficiently coercive. He has a particular game he wants to play and she knows what Frank expects of her. Jeffrey watches all this in fascinated horror and, of course, horror at his fascination. He's in some degree titillated, which is discomfiting for the viewer because Jeffrey kind of is the viewer and we'd rather not be confronted with the fact that watching a sex act under these circumstances could be titillating while also morally repulsive.

But now we've got Wild at Heart, and Lula, who's just cottoned on to the fact that she's pregnant, is holed up sick in the motel room in Big Tuna while Sailor is out doing whatever, and Willem Defoe comes in playing the character of Bobby Peru, and he violates her, again without becoming physically abusive but backed by the verbal threat of physical harm (which he's clearly capable of). He touches Lula sexually and insists that she say "Fuck me." When she tries to pull away he grabs her and threatens to kill her, then continues to insist that she say "Fuck me" while continuing to touch her. It's deeply unpleasant to watch. And then Lula makes a gesture with her hand that we've already seen, earlier in the film, to indicate sexual pleasure, and she does in fact moan "Fuck me." At which point Bobby Peru jumps back, makes a joke, and leaves.

I had to stop the DVD and process that for a while. While nobody has any fun playing misery poker, it was simultaneously true that (a) intellectually, I believe what Frank did to Dorothy was much worse than what Bobby did to Lula, and (b) I was much more disturbed by the Bobby/Lula scene than the Frank/Dorothy one. So why?

First because we know Lula better. The scene happens past the halfway point of the movie and she's been on screen for much of that time. Dorothy is still a new character to us when she's raped, and we're less invested in her. Second because Lula absolutely loves Sailor with a crazy devotion and what Bobby Peru takes from her is an emotional violation as well as a physical one; she's clearly horrified that she could feel physically pleasure (and she clearly does) at Bobby's unwelcome touch, and that she emotionally may have betrayed Sailor somehow. Frank uses Dorothy's emotions to get what he wants, but he doesn't demand anything of her emotionally other than that she play the role he requires; he wants her to act, not to feel. Third because while identifying with Jeffrey's horror and a little bit of arousal in that closet was a discomfiting feeling, Jeffrey still provides a distance, a buffer, from what's going on. We're actually not really watching a rape (although we totally are), we're watching a guy watching a rape. In Wild at Heart it's just us in the room with Bobby and Lula in a scene that started with goofy piss jokes and then got real weird on us real fast. And Fourth because, honestly, the scene is kind of sexy, which is the really daring AND upsetting thing about it (and on the DVD Laura Dern is still clearly a little amazed if not that she was asked to play that scene, which apparently didn't really exist in the script, and one gets the sense that it took her a while to get OK with it). The Frank/Dorothy rape is shot from a distance and dispassionately, whereas Bobby/Lula is shot up close, sweaty, sun coming through the slats of the window, insert shots of hands and lips and people shaking while standing perfectly still. Which works - and the scene, and Lula's journey through it are both "believable" inside the film's world - because, frankly, Laura Dern is a Sex Bomb in this movie and there's no way around it. I've now seen six David Lynch films and this scene - two people in a room, no props, no violence, no funny sound design or prosthetics other than Bobby Peru's grotesque dentures - is easily the most disturbing thing, emotionally, that he's put me through. More than the Frank/Dorothy rape (gasmask and all), more than Jeffrey acquiescing to Dorothy's request that he hit her during sex, more than Naomi Watts' character masturbating while crying in Mulholland Drive...if there's a place where Lynch's introverted psyche does have a sympathetic resonance with mine, it's in his presentation of sexuality; not that I identify with it - whatever weird shit I may or may not be into, Dear Reader, I assure you with all honesty that it's not nitrous oxide, or crying, or blue velvet bathrobes, or bad teeth - but that something in me is going to pick up on these vibrations, whereas all the bulbous growths in Eraserhead and Dune just make me glance at something else. I'd already figured this out from Mulholland Drive and Blue Velvet but I was completely unprepared and unarmed for the possibility that I'd find something like the Bobby/Lula scene hot. You win, David Lynch, you made me embarrassed of myself.

And since I'm arriving at this point, I'm going to shift gears and ignore the ways in which that scene totally fucks with the rest of my reaction to the film, and reiterate against my better judgment that Laura Dern is a Sex Bomb in this movie. I can't overstate this; it's astounding. I really shouldn't talk about this because I'm quite possibly guaranteeing that if I ever want a girlfriend again I should keep her from reading this paragraph. What's especially funny is that I think Dern is someone who's steadily grown into her looks; she's got sort of a funny, equine face, but I think it looks more attractive now than it did when she was a teenager in Blue Velvet, and she's still not completely there in Wild at Heart, when she was in her very early twenties I think. So it was weird watching the movie and registering that in her appearance Dern wasn't even as attractive as she was going to be later in life, and nonetheless she's turning in what is absolutely the hottest performance I've ever seen. It actually made me reflect that there are very few honestly sexy sustained performances from women in film (I'm abstaining from a consideration of male performance). There are lots of performances by actresses who are sexy, but few really sexy performances. And actually I've only seen two that can compare: Marisa Tomei in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead and the young lady in the bookstore in The Big Sleep, but she's only got one scene to work her magic with Humphrey Bogart. Note that, on watching this scene in Film 101 in college, my friends and I readily agreed with no debate that it was the sexiest thing we'd ever seen. The key, I guess, is that actresses appear to tend to play "seductress" when they're supposed to be sexy. They're vamping for male attention, which certainly has its distinct charms, but instead consider that bookstore employee or Marisa Tomei in ...Devil... - they don't need to seduce anyone, they're incredibly attractive people who know that they're attractive AND most crucially they're unabashedly sexual beings, and therefore completely free not to try and turn on their scene partner (and thus the viewer) but rather completely free to be turned on. It's so simple I can't believe I never noticed this before watching Wild at Heart; Laura Dern melts my brain because I completely believed that she was turned on for most of the movie, which is a thing I've almost never believed of any actress for more than five minutes at a time, in a real movie or a pornographic one for that matter. Every shoulder shrug and neck stretch and balance shift and hand gesture screams arousal. If I'd seen this movie at twelve I would either have been desperately afraid of it or sprouted considerable chest hair. It's not nearly as good as Blue Velvet, but it made me think more and has stuck with me harder, despite the shitty ending and attendant weirdness. Now I just need to spend the rest of my life pretending not to be hopelessly infatuated with a Laura Dern performance from twenty years ago and I'll be all set.

Lynchathon I, Part I: Eraserhead - Blue Velvet

2009-01-12T21:13:00.004-06:00

Towards the end of last year I decided that my new Netflix Project would be to watch the complete works of David Lynch. (Well, the complete readily available works representing the main thrust of his career; my interest in seeking out examples of Lynch's painting, his music videos, his short films, his comic strip, or the various other things he may or may not consider essential artistic expressions is nonexistant. I'm interested in the feature films and Twin Peaks.) A Netflix Project isn't simply my decision to watch a TV show, because that's a contained work with a single plot and cast of characters; I don't consider watching all five seasons of Babylon 5, e.g., to be a Netflix Project. (And yes, I have done so. Lots to say about Babylon 5 good and bad [really, really bad] but I think the show raises an interesting quandary that I'll toss out for the moment: if your two best actors, by far, head and shoulders above everyone else, are also the two regulars most saddled with ridiculous costumes and oppressive makeup of the sort that most actors find it difficult to work through, is that on the whole a better or worse thing for your show?) I have engaged in two prior Netflix Projects: watching all the canonical James Bond films (which at the time did not include Quantum of Solace, though I did later see it in theaters) and watching the films of the Coen Brothers (many of which I'd seen before; this project remains officially incomplete since I keep pushing The Ladykillers down in my queue). Both of these projects were undertaken and essentially completed before I started this blog.

SO:

Things I've previously seen by David Lynch:

Mulholland Drive.

That's it. So I'm coming at all of this fresh. I'm also coming at it in pieces, because it's kind of overwhelming and not exactly endearing to my easier aesthetic sensibilities. So naturally being broken into (at least) three chunks, of which only the first has been completed. This chunk consists of the five theatrical films made before Twin Peaks. They are:

(1) Eraserhead

OK, I have to admit that I kind of fast forwarded through parts of this one. I am a philistine, I know. I wasn't really in the right frame of mind to watch it; kind of physically and intellectually tired is not the ideal state for engaging with some really slow moving black and white surrealism. And I mean really slow moving. There were things which made me laugh, but ultimately ... look, the film is a classic, and I can see why, and even muster up a "deservedly so" devoid of the condescension sometimes implicit in the qualifier, because you know there's a "but" coming afterwards. But: especially in his more elliptical and plotless films, Lynch is - as David Foster Wallace, among many, observed - finding ways to transfer his inner emotional/imaginative/psychological state onto a screen for your consideration and, one might hope (though Lynch possibly doesn't give a damn one way or another) sympathetic identification. Eraserhead would seem to be a very deep transition, which is unsurprising given the elongated, isolated process of filming it, with a tiny cast and crew. Though it's surely an exaggeration, Lynch seems happy to let you think that for five years, he ate a grilled cheese sandwich and french fries every day, shot Eraserhead in a barn, and then slept in the barn, and when production had to shut down for some reason or another, he probably just faded into limbo until the finances and personnel were in place to continue, at which point he returned to a more reassuringly tangible corporeality and continued to process images from REM sleep with minimal mediation. There are other works in which I find that I do have an emotional interaction with the projections of Lynch's psyche, but the stuff in Eraserhead just doesn't sync up with my personal wiring - a lot of things Lynch finds fascinating I find either boring or extremely upsetting - so what's left if you don't resonate with the film in that way is a lot of weirdness moving very slowly. Lynch himself attributed the genesis of Eraserhead to his memories of and emotions toward the city of Philadelphia, where he went to art school; this is by itself enough to let you know that we're in the deep matter of one guy's brain, and how you feel about it is really a question beyond the ken and ambit of critial inquiry.

On the other hand, Eraserhead did produce "The Lady in the Radiator Song," the Pixies' cover of which I am quite grateful for. So I owe it that much.

(B) The Elephant Man

The thing about David Lynch's lengthy career that I personally find most bizarre and inexplicable: that Mel "Yes, that Mel Brooks" Brooks, who was looking to produce a script about John Merrick, saw Eraserhead and thought to himself, "That's my guy!" It's actually a pretty startling artistic leap of faith, frankly, to see Eraserhead and think: "This is someone who should make my pet project, an emotional yet emotionally restrained (because British) period film." Somewhat less astonishing is that he was undoubtedly right. The Elephant Man is a great movie and worth spending time with. I have no personal desire to rewatch it at any point - it, again, doesn't really resonate with me, but unlike Eraserhead, where without the resonance I had no purchase, The Elephant Man is sufficiently conventional - maybe the most conventional film of Lynch's career? - that it's easy to appreciate the things one normally appreciates about a film. Plus it's moving, although I don't know if I'm quite with John Hurt when he says on the DVD that if a person isn't moved by the end of The Elephant Man then he doesn't want to know that person.

Positive: Carr Gomm rhetorically asks Treves if he can possibly imagine what John Merrick has gone through in his life. Treves rather dimly replies that yes, he feels he can. Carr Gomm (a wonderful John Gielgud) immediately assures him that no, none of them can imagine what it's like. The look on Treves' face is priceless; Anthony Hopkins throughout this movie delivers a beautiful performance of a man alternately too confident of his nobility and his wickedness. Also he looks really dashing in a beard. He was quite the handsome little man back then.

Negatives: This film was apparently ground zero for the vogue of using Barber's Adagio for Strings as overbearing musical blanket for Emotional Scenes, especially (though for this Lynch cannot of course be blamed) - as Kyle Gann puts it - "so many muted scenes of handsome young men dying in battle". Also there's a slightly snotty little note (at least I read it as slightly snotty) distinguishing the film from stage adaptations of John Merrick's life, which is unfortunate because the film takes just as many liberties with his biography as the (unrelated) play does.

(Gamma) Dune

OhmyGOD you cannot even imagine, without having seen it, how painful Dune is. It's worse if you've read the novel and worse still if you liked it. This is like ground fucking zero for some of the things I said here. You know what? I can't even really write about this here. Maybe I'll talk about it and the book(s) some other time. But to pile on the mindblowingness of Mel Brooks seeing Eraserhead and knowing that he absolutely had to get that guy to direct British actors in Victorian dress, Lynch apparently agreed to do Dune INSTEAD OF RETURN OF THE JEDI. GEORGE FUCKING LUCAS IS SUPPOSED TO HAVE OFFERED LYNCH JEDI ON THE STRENGTH OF ERASERHEAD AND A PERIOD DRAMA. This is in its own way actually more explicable; the mind reels at the possibility of actually witnessing the intersection of Lynch and Ewok, but Lynch's comment on the episode is probably correct: Lucas' vision was so firm that Lynch wasn't really intended to be a creative participant, just a technician to hold the reins. Lucas thought Lynch was a good director and any good director would do, because (a) Lucas's artistic control was viselike and (b) Lucas, clearly, doesn't really understand or respect what it is a director is supposed to do or be, or what he could do or be to a movie, so letting somebody else actually look through the viewfinder would've just been a relief of hassle.

(ZOSO) Blue Velvet

Yeah so you know this is the Big One, and as far as I can tell it's deservedly so. David Foster Wallace posited that Blue Velvet's extreme popularity and success vs. other Lynch films is generally indicative of a trend in his work whereby those films with relatively three dimensional, well and "realistically" drawn characters are the ones it's easiest for an audience to (a) sit through and (b) relate with. Jeffrey Beaumont is the realest of any character in a Lynch film other than The Elephant Man, and what he's going through emotionally is so compelling because universal that it makes what he's going through plot-wise seem halfway reasonable and accessible even though it's actually over the top nuts and doesn't totally make sense. (At least it doesn't totally make sense explicitly; you can color in the gray areas of the plotline, but the plot is a MacGuffin so why bother, you know?) It's almost like an artist playing with the fact that to a small child the adult world is huge by exaggerating the effect past what's strictly accurate. I mean, there are people in the real world like there are in Blue Velvet, although maybe they don't use gas masks as part of their sex play (not in the way Frank does), but the aggressive weirdness of Frank and Dorothy to Jeffrey, combined with the heightened bizarreness of Frank's milieu in general, bolsters the (dis)comfort with which Blue Velvet can be watched as an expressionistic rendering of Jeffrey Beaumont's traumatic entry into adult life, where he finds out that people aren't noble and sex isn't simple. The Rotten Suburbia thing, hammered in the film's opening moments, is a red herring. I think Lynch is too smart and too sui generis in his worldview to think it's interesting to go after suburbia as a mythic ideal. For one thing, Blue Velvet's true target of fear/disillusionment (not the best way to put it) is more daringly and more mundanely (oh ha ha) the adult world itself. Decay happens everywhere, not just under pristine lawns. For another thing, we know what it looks like when Lynch ostensibly sets out to process his feelings about a place in an explicit manner - he had a shitty impression of Philadelphia and produced freaking Eraserhead. Blue Velvet's Lumberton is I think unimportant to the movie overall in that really it could've been set anywhere. Lynch grew up, I believe, somehwere similar, and I would imagine is just interested in and comfortable with that setting.

I just ran out of interesting things to say about Blue Velvet that aren't better served in context with our next film, and besides, more than any other work of Lynch's, this film has been watched, analyzed, and considered both well and poorly for some time. I doubt I have anything original worth adding to the discourse.

"You'd Have Remembered That!"

2008-11-19T00:17:00.003-06:00

So said my doctor after administering a test for certain sexually transmitted diseases during my standard Actually, Your Heart Is Healthy But You Need A Physical physical. Said test involved the brief insertion of, I guess, a swab, or a Q-tip, or something, into a portion of my anatomy I've been known to stress as emphatically having an understood if invisible sign hung over it that says: "Exit Only." I thought I'd been tested for these infections when I was in college, but either I wasn't or the test they administered was different, because I'd definitely never experienced that particular sensation before. Prior to the administration she said, "I'm sure it's not that painful," and I half-shouted "How would you know?! Do you listen when guys tell you pregnancy isn't a big deal?" Dr. G-O made a reasonable point about the relative size of the foreign objects under discussion, so I hastened to make clear that I was referring to the value of the opinion, not trying to engage in misery poker - after all, how the hell would I know? (It wasn't that painful, but it was quite unpleasant. I imagine it's the sort of thing you could get used to.) I've found that in general I have a higher-than usual need, at the doctor's, to lean on the constant wisecracks, probably to deflate the awkwardness of being all but naked in front of a relative stranger. "Are you sexually active?" "Well, in principle." I'd like to be able to pull off the air of a guy who is completely businesslike and unflappable when being poked and prodded, but remember that I can't piss in a cup when people are waiting for it (and this was, in fact, an issue today!), so the prospect of getting checked for testicular cancer by a lady I've met once before in my life is a bit of a stressor, if you will.

More goes on in my life than my boring adventures in routine medical care, but frankly, being in the depths of a severe depressive period is great news for my exhaustion, apathy, and general anhedonia, but extremely bad news for my blogging.

A Wednesday

2008-10-29T20:23:00.002-05:00

(1) Property taxes is a bitch.

(2) I voted today. Early voting is a good thing, at least until we all get like Oregon and just leisurely drop our ballots in the mail. This was the second-to-last day for early voting in Chicago, and I stood in line for about 40 minutes this morning. About a third of the way into my wait, a man approached one of the people in charge of corralling us all and making sure we filled out our forms and such, inquiring about the estimated length before he got to actually vote. Being told that ballot-casting was about 45 minutes to an hour away, the man shrugged and left. Now, possibly he was figuring that he couldn't be that late for work but could skip out early in the afternoon or something, but primarily I thought: "This, right now, is the least crowded this polling place is going to be. It will only get busier during the day, and it will be equally busy, if not more so, and Election Day proper is going to be a right mess." There's a part of me that believes we're immoral if we don't do easy commonsense things to make voting more convenient. (I don't know if we'll cover the other part of me in this post.)

(3) Incidentally, I only filled out maybe 17 sections of a probably 60 section ballot. I made the decision that I was going to vote party line in races I didn't know anything about, and abstain from voting if the race were all Democrats (because this was also a guarantee that I wouldn't know anything about the candidates). Most of the ballot actually had to do with judges, and in addition to not knowing anything about my local judges, the only judge-related vote I'm inclined to cast is one on a hypothetical referendum to end the election of judges, which is something I'm pretty eager to vote for.

(4) Mostly abstaining from chocolate and chocolate-related products for almost two months has, apparently, done nothing to change my relationship with the product. As long as I restricted myself to only ordering the occasional dessert in a restaurant, a highly controlled situation and one I'm not going to be in most of the time, I was fine, but yesterday a coworker was selling cookies on behalf of her kid's school and I thought "what's the harm in eating a little package of Famous Amos? - I don't even like them all that much!" It was like letting an alcoholic have a drink. I turned into a slavering beast and only the greatest strength of will has prevented my complete departure from the wagon. As it was I brought myself some shame with the aggressive manner in which I made sure to get all the loose chocolate chips out from the corner of the bag before throwing it away.

My dark master.

Step Away From Your Son, Ma'am

2008-10-23T22:08:00.002-05:00

Embedded in this - review? exploration? exegesis? - of a NYTimes "Modern Love" column, which is indeed mighty creepy, comes this little gem: "a degree of narcissism masquerading as self-awareness". It so happens that I'm perpetually afraid of that description applying to myself, which probably means that I'm already caught in the self-sustaining loop. Trying to blog doesn't exactly help alleviate the concern.

I don't make a habit of reading "Modern Love" columns, but I do make a habit of reading the aghast comments other bloggers have on them, and occasionally go to the source to drink in the bizarreness myself. Some people seem to think the author of this column is doing the whole thing in an ironic voice, parodying the Jocasta impulse, but I didn't get a sense of that kind of multi-layered self-awareness from my first read through (admittedly a skim) and I really, really have no inclination to reread it and consider multiple interpretations of the narrative voice.

One thing I find perpetually bizarre is the number of people who appear willing to write sticky things about their children and refer to their children and themselves by what are all too often their legal names. A grown woman might feel embarrassed if her mother or father had published accounts of her adorable childhood exploits, but that's not so bad, really. A more in depth, but sensitively imagined and carefully written exploration of a child's life, or a child's relationship with her parents, might be more emotionally difficult for the adult twenty years later, but - and maybe this is just the frozen New England emotional mileu of my childhood (but usually not my family) talking - there are some things you really shouldn't say when your kid's name is attached. Taken at face value, the essay in question is at best bizarre and not the sort of thing I'd want to even know about as a grown man.

The specifics mean nothing to me personally; my parents, I think, probably weren't threatened and driven to psychosis over childhood crushes in either direction even though there was one* of particularly long standing. But I'd say that I responded with some strength to the essay's general thrust because I do take the stuff in the previous paragraph seriously, in that recording the warped attitudes you have toward your child is likely to contribute to the child's own warping. A parent's love is frightening, and I've quite honestly come to feel that expressing that love to the greatest possible extent is not good for the kid. I believe that my dad loves me more than anything in the world, but he's very good at letting me know (frozen New England emotionality was the setting of my childhood, but inside my house we were pretty, ah, expressive) without letting it dominate our interactions to the extent that it could (or at least could have when younger). My mother was not, emotionally, a well person, and while I don't think she had any pathology resembling the one the author of the "Modern Love" essay evinces however ironically or un-, she did express her love for me to the fullest extent possible. The central dilemma of my two abortive stints in therapy was that 75% of my depressive issues can be summed up under the heading "I hate myself," but neither therapist could help me remotely uncover the reasons why. I've since come to a partial hypothesis. My mother's love for me, and her constant, intense, multivalent expressions of it, were warping. She was not bipolar in her depression, in the diagnostic sense, but the mood swings were pretty severe and doubtless exacerbated the intensity of her affection. My mother's love was probably the most important and inescapable fact of my life for its first twelve or so years, and it was probably the most important and inescapable fact of hers, other than perhaps her depression, from the time I was born until her death. This was not healthy for her and in turn it was not healthy for me, and I think this goes back much further than the first adolescent manifestations of my depression. My mother's love (I keep saying those words!) was too much. It was like drinking from a firehose. It was the brightest light I have ever known and it burned me as much as it nurtured me.

* My first crush on someone my own age**, more or less, was on a blond girl from preschool whose name I have on several occasions attempted to remember. My second crush on someone my own age lasted from kindergarten until she went to a different school, in third grade if I recall, and I was in love, or whatever that means to a seven year old. I just googled her name and I think I may have found her, and am about to write an email to confirm or deny. If I'm right, she's a graduate student in a scientific discipline at a prominent university in the northeastern US, and she looks very much like the woman that girl might have grown up to be (or at least one possible such woman), although the picture on her homepage, alas, fails to stir up within me that old magic feeling. I've long felt that my old loves don't wither, they just change (good!) or otherwise lie dormant (bad!) but perhaps if I reach far enough back into the past everything really will fade. I feel old but I'm still young, and I have time to find out, for better or worse.

** My first two crushes period were on (I think I've got them right chronologically) my dad's goddaughter's aunt (the only person not family who ever took care of me as a kid, and she was a longterm houseguest of my grandparents' and honorary family anyway) and my aunt (not by blood). Somewhere in there we also need to throw in Dick Van Dyke Show-era Mary Tyler Moore, although contrary to what you might assume I don't care for capri pants.

Not As Serious As A Heart Attack

2008-10-23T00:09:00.004-05:00

Doctors think I'm fine. Tests look good and all that. Dehydration plus my body adapting to weight loss plus the medical profession not exactly being the most insightful body of individuals when it comes to vague yet troubling symptoms.

I am mostly relieved. Perhaps this is a passing thing related to the issues listed above or perhaps it's a semipermanent quirk of my physiology. That the escalation of my heart rate when standing vs. sitting seems to decrease proportionate with the amount of time since I last went to the gym made sense (and I went tonight, so hoo boy), but the fact that the return to what I'd consider "normal" seems to play out over several days continues to be weird.

On the other hand it's worth noting that without going into details there have been a number of occasions in the past two years when I've been seized by sudden physical exhaustion, shortness of breath, pounding heart, and general malaise, and at those times my confident self diagnosis was: "You're fat, [Medrawt]. This is what happens to fat people who overextend themselves physically." Having an apparent measurable symptom (even though I never felt anything wrong, which was its own psychological assault on what was my increasingly and ludicrously fragile state, the notion that my body was betraying me not once [by not even being healthy enough to handle the task of my making it healthier] but twice [by not giving me any indication that anything was wrong when IT SO CLEARLY WAS {not}] - there's a bunch of conditions that I guess have been melodramatically dubbed "the silent killer," and I became afraid of most of them [not of ovarian cancer]) wow that was a long parenthetical but I'm not going back to edit my approach to this sentence: having an apparent measurable symptom made me recontextualize those events into evidence of some deeper malaise, when the more reasonable course of behavior (dead mother notwithstanding) would've been to consider said measurable physical symptom and render the diagnosis: "You're fat, [Medrawt]. This is what happens to fat people who overextend themselves physically."

So I'm almost certainly fine and I kind of wish I hadn't posted the prior, er, post, but I think that kind of retroactive self-editing is inimical to the spirit of this exercise; given that I'm not inclined to get terribly personal in this space, it's worth noting that something cracked my shell enough that I felt the need to write about it somewhere and do my best/worst to pretend it wasn't freaking me out to the extent that it actually was.

And as a reward for reading all that, please accept this embedded Youtube video of Jamaican jazz pianist Monty Alexander playing "No Woman, No Cry" with his trio. This video makes me happy, and I hope it brings a smile to your face as well. It's also a valuable if somewhat limited lesson on turning "modern" "pop" music into something which works in a "jazz" setting.

Take Care Of Your Heart; Mine Beats In F#

2008-10-19T23:22:00.004-05:00

Or so it would appear assuming I interpreted the screen of the echocardiogram correctly.

There are any number of reasons why I haven't posted in a while, including general business and my predictable ennui, but the most prevalent is that I've been trying to sort out, and freaking out about, some potential medical issues.

I should say up front that I am, in all likelihood, fine, at least for some strong if not absolute value of "fine".

A week ago (Sunday the 12th) I pushed myself pretty hard at the gym and overdid the reintroduction of weightlifting into my routine; as a result, I wasn't feeling so hot and actually cut the whole thing short. A couple of hours later, making dinner, I idly put my hand on my chest and realized that my heartbeat was kind of fast - I timed it and it came out to 110 bpm, which is fine if you're, say, walking briskly, but pretty high if you're standing in front of a stove. I sat down and my heart rate dropped almost instantly to about 72. This pattern more or less stayed constant for the rest of the week - when sitting, my heart was at 65-75 bpm, which is relatively healthy (especially considering that I've just lost a lot of weight and am still relatively overweight), but if I stood up it rapidly jumped to something in the 90-110 range (which is at the high end of "normal" resting rate, pushing into "maybe be concerned"). I understood that the heart might work a little harder when standing, but the disparity between postures, and the fact that standing up often put me just over the "healthy" line, had me worried, which worry continued to escalate as the symptoms failed to decrease.

Relevant at this point, as an insight into my mood, is my letting you know that my mother died at 49 of heart failure; autopsy revealed an enlarged heart (among other things).

I saw a physician on Wednesday, who confirmed that my pulse did indeed jump when I stood, but my blood pressure was better than average, my EKG came back normal, and her stethoscope-driven observations indicated an averagely healthy heart of normal size. They took some blood (no results yet) and she prescribed me the echocardiogram, which is basically an EKG-plus-ultrasound of my heart. I had the echocardiogram on Friday; it took almost an hour, as a cute but all-business technician repeatedly smeared contact gel on her instrument and waved it around on my chest, freezing particular moments for later study by a cardiologist. I also don't have the results on this test, and she seemed like the sort of person who would punt if I asked her general impression. The display appeared to be saying, among lots of stuff that I didn't understand, that my heartbeat was pitched at F#2, but I think that seems high, given that I can sing F#2 (which is, for reference, the second fret of a guitar's low E-string).

So I await results. My (new) doctor, who was very nice, said she thought there wasn't anything wrong with me, maybe I was a little dehydrated, and should resume working out, so I went again yesterday (Saturday the 18th). Prior to that, I'd experienced a significant reduction in the gap between my standing and sitting rates, and my mood eased considerably. Now more than 24 hours after working out again (much more mildly than the previous time) the gap has reestablished itself. Maybe I'm not drinking enough water, or maybe this is something about my physiology I wasn't previously aware of. I'm probably fine. But as the length of this post indicates, I'm really fucking preoccupied and at this point I'm well into the territory where I psych myself out. I've taken my pulse probably 200 times in the past week, and I swear it speeds up the moment I start watching the second-hand of my watch. I don't feel anything wrong, but that has been little comfort to me.

Again, I'm intellectually sure that I'm fine, and I hope test results this week will provide additional clarity - or at least the kind of "we don't know what the deal is but it's nothing to worry about" so characteristic of the medical profession, which previously saw me diagnosed with a mild and intermittent case of prostatitis ("which could actually be any number of things, none of them cause for concern"). My emotional state surely doesn't help; on Monday I had the day off but needed to go to the office anyway; I took the train there and had intended to walk back (a walk I usually take both ways every day) but called it off after a block, when I checked my pulse, convinced myself that it was too fast, and nearly broke down in tears, momentarily convinced that I was, contrary to all physical sensations (other than that damned beat in my wrist), about to collapse on the street.

It's notable that this is the first time I can recall being afraid of death. That it was (99.99999999% certainty) over nothing is worth something, although I didn't do my ever hateful self-esteem any favors with this turn for the melodramatic. I did realize some things in that moment, most of which I still think are true, and I suppose I'm grateful for shedding a little more clarity on those aspects of my feelings which I've yet to untangle. The unhealthy project of overanalyzing myself reached something of an impasse a few years ago, so even the smallest advances become noteworthy. Plus for a long time I've wavered between being proud and being afraid of my usual indifference towards my own mortality; having a moment of clear rejection, an absolute conviction that at least at that moment on State Street on October 13th I did not want to die, is a nice balance for the ledger books, and probably something worth keeping in mind.

Shortcomings

2008-10-08T23:06:00.002-05:00

I wonder if it should count as another of my meaningless peeves that people talk about "ethnic" food. Hamburgers and french fries are "ethnic" food, too; I guess I'm clearly not a fan of indicating Otherness (which I'm intrinsically ok with, when appropriate) by pretending that the native (so to speak) culture is not just as equivalent and relativist as all the others. It's a tiny echo of the blinkered racial thinking we've got in America, where any analysis of what the word "white" means, ethnically, indicates that it's not about picking out one ethnicity at all, but simply marking the accepted from the unaccepted. Although I did greatly appreciate the clever humor of a friend of a friend in college who, on meeting me, asked me, "Are you...cultural? Because you look...cultural." Yes, I am of culture.

The foregoing should probably not be a surprise to those who are familiar with my attitude towards "Mediterranean" cuisine.

In other personal news, I have in my life been compared by friends and family to a number of celebrities. In my youth, the most popular point of comparison was Pete Sampras; one misguided friend identified me with Jeff Goldblum, and not long ago an aunt told me she'd described my appearance to a third party as "kind of like John Mayer." But these are outdated and false comparisons, Gentle Reader, for I have seen the truth, the light, have looked, as 'twere, on myself in a mirror and yet the mirror was another man's face.

Behold the ghastly visage of [Medrawt] in his mid-20s:

Well, to be fair, my legs are way better than hers.

Or, more seriously: yeah, I need to keep losing weight.

Prodigious

2008-10-03T22:35:00.003-05:00

Every couple of years I recall this essay and go reread it. Even if you're not into jazz I think it holds interest as a piece about personalities. The nutshell is that the author, when he was in his mid-twenties, held down the lead tenor sax chair in a big band from Detroit, when all of a sudden a 16 year old kid is invited into the band on second chair. The kid happens to be James Carter, who is now a big time sax phenomenon. It's interesting as an essay just in an exercise in seeing how one guy dealt with meeting someone two thirds his age who was, still in his youth, just flat out superior at their chosen vocation. Music isn't a contest and all that, but there are still tiers - I might enjoy a guy from the third tier more than a guy from the first tier, and for whatever reason, but there are levels of accomplishment and artistry and sheer technical capacity. (I actually do this a lot; Mozart and Charlie Parker are in my opinion among the greatest geniuses of Western music, but I'm not especially fond of either one from an enjoyment-listening perspective.)

The other interesting thing to me this time was noting that according to the author, at sixteen James Carter was essentially the James Carter of 1999 (when the article was written Carter would've been about 30). He's undoubtedly grown as a musician, but the maturity and identity was largely there. I found this interesting because the greatest child prodigy in the history of Western classical music, Felix Mendelssohn, was also essentially done maturing at sixteen. He evolved the way any adult mature artist will, but the formative years were over and mature work was being produced.

Then, of course, comes the observation that Mendelssohn, at 16 or 30, is a great composer, but he's not quite Beethoven or Mozart or (for my money, at least) Schubert. Similarly, Carter, while fantastic and a gas to listen to (I'm not huge on Felix, but every time I've heard Carter on a record I'm knocked out smiling), probably isn't going to go down as one of the absolute greatest or most important players in the history of his instrument. Of course he was many years left to write a legacy and keep growing, but I wonder if it's largely a given that the level of artistic maturity in a teenager I'm talking about here often leads to that kind of..."dead end" is so not the phrase I'm looking for. If you're that good at sixteen, is it possible to really get better?

[INSTANT UPDATE]

Then there's the corollary which just occurred to me: in my opinion the two greatest jazz artists of all are Miles Davis and John Coltrane (I know, I'm going way out on a limb). Other than the fact the Coltrane played in Davis' band during the '50s, the obvious link was that by the standards of their profession, and of people who achieved anything like that level of artistry, they were abnormally late bloomers. Davis didn't really start getting it together until his mid-twenties (and didn't start gathering the accolades indicative of true greatness until he was about thirty), and Coltrane didn't really emerge until he was thirty (and did his most widely acclaimed work between about thirty-four and thirty-seven; at thirty-seven Herbie Hancock was already a few years removed from 95% of his most creative work). And in addition to being late bloomers, they both never stopped moving; Davis' style on trumpet crystallized somewhat by the mid '60s, but he kept finding new situations to put himself in. Coltrane, more radically, kept actually reinventing his approach to how he used the saxophone. So if you have it in you to be a world-historical genius, does blooming late indicate a propensity to continual evolution?

Update Bullets

2008-10-02T23:23:00.002-05:00

(1) My father agreed with me that it was, for us at least, unusual to attend a funeral where part of the ceremony involved watching a video of the deceased oiled up and posing onstage in a skimpy swimsuit. I suppose it's the sort of thing that might happen when the deceased happened to be a successful local figure competitor prior to her first bout with cancer, but it was still strange for me. That aside, it was the first non-Catholic (or nominally Catholic) funeral I've attended, and it was simultaneously nice but well outside my realm of experience and, sometimes, comfort.

(2) Ongoing and interlocking frustrations at work of the sort that I imagine must be insufferably dull to talk about, even by the standards of what I put up on this so-infrequent blog. I will note that working for five months in a government agency has pretty much solidified and etched in stone my nascent convictions that we live in a society where systems seem to operate independently of the individuals who compose them, and work against them. A surprising proportion of my frustration and anger is impotent and directionless because there's no one identifiable at whom to aim it; everyone would appear to agree, whether explicitly or tacitly, that most of the stuff I think is crazy shit is in fact crazy shit. I'm utterly confident that if I had a sit down with the organization's CEO, he'd agree with me. Things calcify and seem to be the way they *are* and the system grinds on. Everyone watching out for their own wheelhouse unknowingly conspires to create the machine they decry.

(3) There was a movie starring Fred Ward (and Kate Mulgrew and Wilford Brimley and Joel Grey in what I'm going to call "yellow-face", somewhere between David Carradine in Kung Fu and Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's on the offensive scale, though I suspect that might've been the point), based on a long-running series of men's pulp novels. The movie was entitled, optimistically, Remo Williams: The Adventure Beings. There were clearly supposed to be multiple sequels. There clearly were none. I don't post here as often as I'd like, but note to a fellow blogger: when your post titles indicate a multi-part series, it's only polite to provide the second installment within a month's time of the first. Just saying. :-P

(4) I just put an emoticon on my blog.

(5) I don't write about direct politics in the horse-race sense, because for the sake of my mental health I like to maintain a heavily mediated distance from the immediacy of all that, but I'd like to be the umpteenth voice noting the absurdity that Katie Fucking Couric was too tough an interview for Sarah Palin. That literally dozens of bloggers on the left can come up with answers that would be 1000% preferable for her own interests than what she can come up with is astonishing. "What newspapers do I read? The Anchorage [Whatever] and/or the Juneau [Whatever-Picayune], and I make sure to read through at least a couple of sections of the Wall Street Journal, plus, of course, whatever press clippings my staff feels it necessary to bring to my attention." Christ, namecheck USA Today. How fucking hard is this? I wouldn't want to vote for someone who claimed their worldview was influenced by the Wall Street Journal editorial page, but I'm not a fucking Republican, am I? - that'd be a perfectly respectable answer for someone coming from her perspective. The early buzz amongst frightened liberals was that Palin was an astonishingly good liar because she didn't flinch while telling you her piss was actually rain, but at least piss is a fucking liquid. Some of her responses are the kind of idiot panic / smug conceit you get from Homer Simpson. Where have you been all day, Governor Palin? Think of something clever, think of something clever! I was at the bar getting drunk at two in the afternoon! Brilliant! What newspapers do you read? All of them! What are your personal accomplishments? I invented the Cobb Salad!

(6) In the month of September I lost twenty pounds (thanks, Dr. Agatstin!). Unfortunately, between May and August I gained twenty pounds, so I'm still c.30 pounds overweight, same as I have been since applying for grad school back in 2006. Sometimes for giggles I measure my weight against basketball players, though, and it's nice that I no longer weigh as much as some NBA power forwards (i.e., muscular guys who are nine inches taller than me).

RIP Valerie P.

2008-09-20T11:12:00.003-05:00

Yesterday a colleague of mine died in the hospital of complications from breast cancer which ultimately spread to her brain.

The government program which my dad's company is contracted to run part of includes a call center, and the call center is under our purview. As part of the proposal process and subsequent negotiations, Unisys was contracted to do an independent analysis of the call center, which was a big embarrassment and one of the central problems (that we were aware of) coming into the job. People were routinely on hold for thirty or forty minutes before getting their calls answered. I think my father and his business partner presumed they'd have to hire new personnel and new management staff. Unisys actually said otherwise; the staff was good and as best as they could tell the management was great, they just didn't remotely have the technical capacity or especially the manpower to meet the call volumes our clientele generates. Upgraded systems and a 50%+ increase in staffing have the call center operating smoothly and admirably.

Valerie, or as I referred to her (as I do most people around the office) "Ms. P______", was the manager of the call center, and she was good at it. I didn't get to know her well over the past few months, but she was always friendly, cheerful, and (lame and unimportant as it sounds) was always responsive and timely when I asked her for data. Now that she's gone I feel great regret that the only concrete thing I can say about her is that she was good at her job, but being good at your job is a good thing, I guess, and I can see from the reactions of those who knew her better as well as my own instinctive fondness for her that there was, of course, much more to her.

I actually went, with my compliance compadres, to visit her in the hopsital yesterday, but I kept getting kicked out of the room so that they could come in and do procedures (suctioning fluid buildup, mostly) before I could say anything to her, or rather gather the courage and thought to do it. She was supported by breathing machines, and putatively unconscious, although we were assured that she could hear us. By the time I'd worked out what I wanted to tell her I'd missed my chance, and ultimately I realized that sticking around and crowding both her family and all the other employees coming by to say hello, say farewell, offer tears and a little humor, I realized it was selfish, that what I had to say wasn't that important in the end and that I wanted to say it more for me than for her. If she could hear us, she had more than enough love around her than to miss my meager offering.

I realized that this was something I'd never seen before; my mother died suddenly and alone, and while the three of my grandparents who are gone died over extended periods of time in hopsitals, I was always away, out of state, and only ever flew in for the funerals. I've never seen anybody dying before, and I started to think about what it would've been like to be there by (especially) my grandfather's (dad's dad) side, post-stroke, as he struggled and improved before finally collapsing in resignation. I thought about that, and then I thought, as I often do, about humanity's twinned hunger to feel empathy and stunted resources with which to do it. I was sad, and then saddened again.

She died a few hours later in the afternoon, and I found out a few hours later still. She seemed to be well loved, as we'd all hope to be, but all I really know was that she was friendly and good at her job, so for me that will have to serve; it is enough. If there's anything after this, I hope it's good for her.

That's all, I guess.

Prickly, Alma Mater

2008-09-16T22:54:00.004-05:00

FIRST: Noticed for the first time this evening that the hanging signs in Chicago's El stops (the ones which indicate whether you're on the northbound or southbound side of the tracks, e.g.) are topped with closely-spaced thin metal prongs, jutting out like a row of Vs. I presume this is to deter birds from perching on top of the signs.

SECOND: I get email updates alerting me to the highlights in the University of Chicago's magazine. I almost always delete them, and when the magazine (which is delivered to my father's house) is in my presence I usually scan the alumni updates at the end and otherwise disregard. Nested amidst emails I did want to read, though, I passed through and noted the teaser: "While pundits debate whether a former Law School lecturer is too University of Chicago to be the next president, the UofC focuses on--what else?--what it means to be UofC."

Good lord. This in a nutshell is 75% of what I didn't like and remember so unfondly about my college experience, this endless self consideration and regard. I don't know what it's like to be a faculty member or a graduate student at Chicago, but I do know what it's like to be an undergrad, assuming you'll grant me the caveat that I only know what it was like for me. My essential and early dissatisfaction was that I felt like I'd been duped: college, and Chicago in particular, was not what I thought it was and not, especially, what I thought I'd been sold. That's largely beside the point here. What built on that dissatisfaction was the endless stream of input you get at UofC that is primarily concerned with the experience of being at the UofC. This input - small talk, formal addresses, merchandising - was almost uniformly categorized by me into one of the following slots.

(1) Self aggrandizement which I found ugly and tiresome.
(2) Self deprecation bleeding into self loathing which I (!) found ugly and tiresome.
(3) Self deprecation masking self aggrandizement which I found ugly and tiresome.

I scanned the article advertised in my email and it's the predictable contentless crap. The closest I thought it came to making an insightful point was Dean John Boyer's assertion that to understand UofC you have to understand that it was founded in the middle of nowhere - it might as well have been, in his words, a farm in northern Wisconsin. He then unpacks this point to say a lot of nice sounding things that might have been a lot truer thirty years ago than they are today - or at least, that separate Chicago from other schools in a way that would've been more accurate several decades ago, because I would imagine that the other elite private institutions have become less class-conscious in the exclusive sense, and more egalitarian, than they used to be. (And Chicago's not so egalitarian that, e.g., a change in financial aid standards didn't cause both of my 3rd-year roommates to set wheels in motion so that they could graduate in three years [one of them decided to stay for four in the end, the other did indeed graduate a year ahead of me].) What I think there is to understand about Chicago is that it has a long and proud (too proud?) history of Not Being Harvard and that it is currently trying to Become Harvard while pretending it's not. Not Being Harvard includes a lot of different ideas I'm not going to enumerate right now, but it's a pretty big gestalt that generates both positive self appraisal and neurotic levels of chip-on-shoulder development.

In the end, UofC is of a kind with pretty much every other academically elite private research university in its tier; I can't imagine that there'd be a radically different experience of attending Columbia such that you could meaningfully talk about "what it means to be Columbia" and come up with a list of substantive attributes (not the enjoyable ephemera you'll recall and reminisce about, but the hard core of what it was like to be in college) that would be markedly different from the one at UofC. There may be adjustments of degree - Chicago may really be harder, and its students may really work harder, and be more academically inclined on a 24-hour, never a bad time to talk Kant kind of way - but you're not going to get a Stanford graduate to say "Yeah, you know, we really don't value the life of the mind here. Sure, we go to class, and we're smart, but once we leave the classroom its all beerbongs and football games and people roll their eyes at you if you want to discuss something learned after sixth grade." If there's something that I imagine might set UofC apart as unique in kind it might be a perversely negative social/academic atmosphere (I know this isn't everyone's experience, but I also know for a fact I'm not alone in perceiving it that way) which manifests, in part, as the incessant self consideration I so despise.

Or maybe I'm wrong, and there is some value to considering "what it is to be UofC" in such a way that it produces different results than "what it is to be Cornell that's not animal husbandry." I'm prickly, and weird, and I'm very prickly about some weird things to be prickly about. I have great difficulty with books and movies which deal with children who are either precocious or affluent or (worse!) both. It's not that I generally don't like them, I have visceral reactions to such portrayals and almost always think there was at best error or at worst dishonesty or even moral turpitude in the work. I am however self aware enough to know that this is because I was a child of extremely considerable precocity (at sub-genius levels) and some level of affluence (at sub-"rich" levels). I'm both fiercely protective of my autobiographical impressions and abnormally (for me) uncharitable to the notion that substantial groups of people who shared one or both of these qualities with me would have such markedly different experiences of them that they would match - even justify - the artistic popularity of examining the precocious child or the rich one.

And since I've wandered down this road I might as well also expand that a great deal of what I rankle against, particularly when it comes to Precocious Kid narratives, is the idea that said precocity is allied somehow to a maladjustment: the nascent stage, if you will, of the various insidious narratives surrounding the connection of "genius" (especially but not only artistic "genius") with depression and dysfunction. And yet note that while not a genius I have certain aspirations to artistic quality, and I am also depressed! Now that I've poked a little further into this terrain I think setting out and untangling the various tightly wrapped strands of this particular region of my autobiographical impressions and the way I do or don't universalize them would take longer than I can take right now, and may not be something I'm prepared to do in this venue anyway. But it was not by accident that my post just below, trying to assemble some instant thoughts on David Foster Wallace's work in the immediate wake of his death, did not engage with or even acknowledge the manner of his demise.

Anyway, I hate the UofC's penchant for turning out articles which ponder what it is to be UofC, but maybe you think it's great; if we're both right, you're probably righter than I am.

RIP DFW

2008-09-14T22:43:00.003-05:00

David Foster Wallace is dead.

He was probably, on reflection, my favorite "contemporary" writer, certainly the only living writer whose work I felt an obligation to purchase on publication. (Michael Chabon is easier to like, and I like him a lot, but my favorite work of his [Wonder Boys] is a success, in my opinion, because of its smaller ambitions; Kavalier and Klay is the sort of novel that wins the Pulitzer, but I thought it a less perfect work. I liked The Yiddish Policeman's Union, but I wasn't excited to buy it; I didn't really like Wallace's last collection of stories, but I was giddy with anticipation when I first opened it.) I can't think of a younger writer whose work I hold in anything like the same esteem, and the living writers from whom I derived something like the same enjoyment and wonder (and sometimes surpassing what I got out of Wallace) are older and not expected to churn out top-level work for several decades more.

I loved his essays* (the easiest element of his oeuvre) and struggled with his short fiction; aggressively experimental and mercurial (except when it wasn't) I thought his stories were brave and inventive but often had to hold them at arm's length, looking for the small moments of breathtaking observation amidst the formal gamesmanship. My favorite of his collections, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, contains several such interviews that made me wince in something like anticipatory recognition; I had not yet had, on first reading, the opportunity to be any of those men, but some of them seemed like people into whom I could develop, and I suppose I'm still struggling against that fear to this day. His more recent work was harder for me; the stories in Oblivion seemed, on the only pass I made through the book, to accentuate the things I liked least about his fiction and diminish what made me love it in the first place, but it's only one step on a journey now sadly cut short.

* (Not that they're all great; several of the pieces in Consider the Lobster, including the title piece but especially the epic engagements with John McCain and grammar, are well written disappointments, in my view; very erudite claptrap.)

His first novel, The Broom of the System is likable and clever but not so great in the end. Infinite Jest is the glittering tower, the mammoth meteorite dropped into our planet to general awe and adulation (or not, but whatever). I've read it only once and have planned to reread it for a long time; I even purchased a second copy (my first is in Tampa) for just this purpose recently, on the logic that I didn't mind funneling a few more cents of royalties Wallace's way. Soon would be a good time to start, I suppose. I offer up the standard, and selfish, wish that he'd left more of a body of work behind, but Infinite Jest is legacy enough for a few lifetimes.

I Assume It Doesn't Mean "Sweet Sea"

2008-09-07T01:05:00.003-05:00

NB: This is going to start with music-wankery and detour into bad philosophy of science and other intellectual masturbation.

So last night I realized that, basically, a piano is a giant mechanical dulcimer. You have strings under tension tuned to a particular, fixed pitch, and then you deploy hammers (manually w/a dulcimer, via the mechanism of the key w/a piano) to strike those strings and cause them to sound. There just happen to be about 220+ strings (depending on the piano) tuned to 88 different pitches (unless you've got either a very very old piano or a Bösendorfer) sitting in a big wooden and metal box, with 88 dedicated hammers to strike them. Big dulcimer, in other words.

As a child I was interested/perplexed by the question of whether to consider the piano a "string" or a "percussion" instrument - and if percussion, is that because you percuss the keys, or because the keys activate hammers which percuss the strings? In other words, is the instrument classified by the mechanism by which its sound is produced (string) or by how that sound is activated (percussion). As far as I was able to tell last night, the common and best accepted method is to classify via the method of sound production first - so the piano (and the dulcimer) are string instruments along with violins and guitars.

The funny thing is that not every keyboard instrument, therefore, would fall under the same category as the piano. The same system alluded to above (the Hornbostel-Sachs) system further divides string instruments - chordaphones - depending on their method of activation: plucked (w/fingers or a plectrum/pick), bowed, and hammered. The piano, and also the clavichord and the clavinet (the electric clavichord [more or less] manufactured by Hohner during the middle of the last century and providing a super-funky, out of production sound most famously featured on the main riff of Stevie Wonder's "Superstitious") are hammered chordaphones. The harpsichord, on the other hand, is plucked by a quill, and therefore would be classed with guitars, lutes, ouds, and mandolins (etc.); the Fender Rhodes electric piano isn't a string instrument at all, but something like an electromechanical glockenspiel (it strikes metal tines); and the pipe organ is of course a wind instrument. The point being that if you categorize by methods of sound production you lose other compelling familial relationships, like "these are all played via keyboard." But if you lump all the keyboards together you get an equally uncompelling organization.

Adding a historical dimension to this endeavor (called organology) just makes it worse; the lute and the oud derive from a common ancestor but converged as influences on the guitar, the oud used to have frets but is now fretless, and various plucked guitar precursors were influences on the development of the viol(a da gamba) family of fretted but bowed instruments.

Consider that we made all these instruments, invented and designed and deployed them, and you can't come up with a clean and logical way of organizing them. Yet we try to, based on intuition and on some very intuition-driven empiricism. When it came to philosophy and philosophy of science, I've long been possessed of strongly nominalist persuasions. No one thinks their own beliefs are crazy, but I'm as nominalist as you can get without being crazy, I'd say. The chain of thought set off by "Is the piano really just a dulcimer?" led me to another illustration of (one reason) why I'm a nominalist. I'm fundamentally distrustful of the apparently deep-set need for humans to provide an organized facade to our world that is unrealistic and I wonder how distorted the view with which we wind up is. My trump card is always that there isn't a single satisfying definition of the concept "species" that covers every place we've chosen to draw a species line. Some humility is in order when we view the world from our vantage.

That's all. Also, my class might have built dulcimers as a school project back in grade school, but I can't remember; I know we played the recorder a lot. They also might've been Appalachian-style dulcimers, which are fretted and plucked, instead of the piano-like hammered dulcimer.

ComicsChrome

2008-09-06T14:52:00.002-05:00

I'm currently reading my way through Google's online manual/exegesis on their new browser, Chrome (hat tip to James Fallows, who's worth reading as well). It's a pretty great piece of work; I can't actually use Chrome yet because the Mac version is still in development, but reading the manual is interesting to me in that I've retained just enough tech savvy to understand 51% of the content. The combination of graphics and text is also fantastic; Google has the clout (or the money, or even just the idea) to get Scott McCloud to illustrate their text. McCloud is not merely a comics author/artist in his own right with respect in the independent comics world, but he's the author of Understanding Comics, which I've never read and is not without its detractors but is largely acknowledged as the preeminent work of comics theory on the market. Understanding Comics is, of course, written as a comic, and McCloud has written other books of comics theory/evangelism which push for expanding and exploiting the unique possibilities of the medium while simultaneously providing an example in his own use of comics techniques to communicate a non-narrative, intellectual argument of the sort you'd normally encounter in a literary journal.

I haven't finished the guide yet, but one of the things I find interesting and (usually) appealing is that Google does seem to have really re-thought the precepts of using a web browser to better suit the uses and developments of browsers that have taken place over the past decade: tabbed browsing, the use of the internet to handle personal information and life management and the corresponding security concerns, and of course "Web 2.0" [gah]. What follows from this but I'm less immediately taken with is the attempt, which shouldn't surprise me coming from Google, to create a browser that will guess what I want to do. I generally don't like it when technology or people try to guess what I want. I don't mean a music service or Netflix tossing me recommendations, I mean making behind-the-veil decisions which constrain my options and make me workaround to do something else. Some day I'll figure out how to control all the different formatting options in Microsoft Word so that I don't need to keep correcting the computer manually just to get bullet points here and indented text there. Somebody, meaning well, was packing stuff in my dad's home to ship to the condo here, but they included all sorts of stuff that we didn't ask for and in fact didn't want here, and some of this stuff was broken in transit. If you just DID WHAT I FUCKING TOLD YOU then my trinkets would be safe and sound where I wanted them in the first place.

On the other hand, maybe Chrome is smart enough to work around this. One of the designer/characters complained about the aesthetic and practical frustrations of the URL bar autocompleting the addresses he starts to type, and how at first he rebelled against including that feature in Chrome, but in fact in Chrome this feature Works Better! because it will only autofill for things you've actually explicitly type. Which means, since I doubt you typed the URL for a specific story on (to use their example) CNN.com, you won't get that prompt. "Fuckers!" I cried, "I use the autocomplete to find shit like that all the time! I like the fact that if I want my last day or two of browsing is preserved and I can find something that was difficult to navigate to the first time around!" But then I read that Chrome will let you hit the Tab key to search within the website whose address is autocompleting for you. We'll see, I guess; this could be cool, or it could suck, or it could just be a more elegant way of executing the search terms I use in Google anyway (if I'm looking for a story on CNN.com, I'll type my search terms and then add the string "site:cnn.com").

So there's that.

Mused While I Should've Slept

2008-09-02T00:07:00.004-05:00

(1) Multi-instrumentalists are really cool and impressive, but even someone like Prince, who plays lots of instruments (but not as many as the often claimed "fourteen" or "thirty" or whatever) extremely well, is basically doing it one bag - Prince is a supergreat multi-instrumentalist at the intersection of rock and r&b, but all that sick funk drumming doesn't mean he could hang with the Mahavishnu Orchestra behind a kit. Really, I would say that from what I've heard of his playing he's a guitar player (I've also seen him so identify himself) who happens to have chops and imagination but not quite so much personality on other instruments; in other words, when I hear Prince play bass, I hear Prince executing his idea of "Funky Bass Player," vs. hearing him play guitar and thinking "that's Prince's guitar style; check out the way he uses diads in his funk comping, that's so him." It's HARD to develop a Personality on more than one instrument.

(2) There's a school of thought that argues even against playing extremely similar instruments; I've seen an interview with at least one saxophonist who argues that you should pick one horn and stick with it; if you're splitting time between alto and soprano, both will suffer, because you have to put all your musical time into developing a relationship with YOUR instrument. On the other hand you get modern phenoms like James Carter who says "I play woodwinds" and busts out on all saxophones plus bass clarinet (dunno if he plays flute).

(3) I'm most intrigued by musicians who play multiple instruments and sound different on them. Wayne Shorter, tenor saxophonist, is a different musician than Wayne Shorter, soprano saxophonist. I wonder if he ever thinks about switching musical processes when, mid-performance (as I've seen him do), he puts down one and picks up the other.

(4) I often wished that I played instruments other than the ones I do. I love both the piano - the instrument my parents chose for me - and the guitar - the instrument I chose for myself - deeply and the idea that I might focus on one to the exclusion of the other is upsetting. The practical fact that right now I can practice guitar but not piano just means that I think things like "Well, I'll get my guitar playing together, and then in a few years when I can have access to one I'll really put my piano stuff together, too". This is probably naive. But the guitar and the piano are, you know, the GUITAR and the PIANO - the most common instruments in the western world. The body of repertoire for both of these instruments is immense, the history of the breadth of what's been done with them can be awe-inspiring to the point of paralysis.

(5) My personal ultimate goal as a person with a relationship with an instrument is to be like Bill Frisell, probably my "favorite" - certainly top 5 - jazz guitarist. Frisell is instantly identifiable, completely himself with his own vibe and sound, but also somehow able to sound at home in any context - rock, metal, mainstream jazz, nonidiomatic improv, country, whatever. To me this is the personal emblem of highest artistry. It's what, in my frustrated and self-defeating and unproductive way, I aspire to. But to do that on the GUITAR? Or the PIANO? Sometimes I wish I'd never started playing guitar, because then I'd only have the piano (and associated keys) and say "This is my instrument, I didn't choose it but I've been playing it, however badly, since I was seven years old". And sometimes I wish I'd only ever played guitar, because then I could say "This is the instrument I chose at a formative time in my life and I know millions of other people want to do something similar with it but it's MINE anyway."

(6) Neither is the case, though. I wish I played something a little more esoteric. I don't mean, like dedicating my life to the veena or the saz. I mean that, given that I don't aspire to be a classical violinist, playing the violin/fiddle would be a little more unique. Pipe dreams of stumbling assbackwards into rock success become a little less plausible, but if I were a fiddler whose goal was to synthesize elements of the classical repertoire with swing violin, Ornette Coleman, Celtic/Appalachian fiddling, and Arabic-diaspora influences (which is exactly what I'd want to be doing if I played the violin) then I'd have a clear goal and an interesting one without quite so fucking much clutter in my way. An hour ago I spent two minutes seriously toying with the idea of abandoning everything I've worked on musically to take up the violin and the mandolin (hey, they've got the same tuning, and it'd be interesting/fun to have two instruments that sounded completely different but occupied similar musical spaces and on which I'd do exactly the same things) as my exclusive instruments. That's crazy, of course; it'd take me forever, I assume, to develop even my current level of guitaristic ability on a violin, but I guess I'll keep on wishing.

(7) I wonder if I will, or could ask to, inherit my grandfather's violin. None of his other immediate descendants play music anymore, and as far as I know he himself barely touches it these days, which is a shame. He isn't a terribly educated musician (he didn't play classical, he played Portuguese folk), though if I remember properly he could kind of read music, but he was an incredibly musical guy. He used to sit next to me while I practiced the piano and offer assistance and advice, despite having no idea how to play the piano. No, he'd say, and then he'd sing to me how it should've sounded, helping my phrasing, working with me on music neither of us had heard before.

Offensive Misreadings

2008-08-29T23:52:00.002-05:00

I went to lunch on Wabash near Madison today, which for those who aren't in the know is where all the diamond emporia, jewelers, etc., are. There's currently a shitload of construction going on and Wabash abounds with places where the sidewalk is temporarily redirected, closed off, etc. There's also an abundance of those sawhorse-style construction barrier/signs. I noticed one of them in particular right outside a diamond dealer's; I assume they were all marked in this fashion, but this one caught my eye; it was stenciled with the letters J E M in big black letters, but that's not what I read; I inverted the final letter and for half a second thought the sign read "JEW". "Wow," I thought, "that's pretty blatant. I'm surprised they haven't taken it down - oh."

In other news: the chicken shawarma in a weird little "Mediterranean" style deli in the back of one of those jewelers is pretty good, and I'm not a big fan of that sort of cuisine, all paprika and hummous. Of course, it might be that I've always objected to the label, since as best as I can tell "Mediterranean" as a cuisine style means something like "Lebanese but sometimes we have spanakopita".

Reminiscences

2008-08-29T19:03:00.001-05:00

On the first night I spent in the condo, which would have been this past Saturday, I grabbed an unearthed binder of dubious provenance to glance through before I went to sleep. It turned out to be a binder I kept during the winter quarter of my final year of college, and I primarily used it for the sketches I was writing for the musical composition lessons I was taking at the time. I didn't put enough energy into the affair, and probably wasn't ready to get as much out of it as I would now, or (hopefully) would in a few months/years, but there were some helpful nuggets tossed my way by my instructor. More to the point, I was surprised to glance through some of the pieces I had been writing. I was quite dissatisfied with them at the time because I felt certain that I wasn't coming close to capturing the sound-ideas in my head, but several years removed from the frustrated fever of inspiration, I thought both of the pieces I was working on at the time had interesting ideas worth revisiting and, furthermore, the execution was a little more interesting and ambitious than I would have guessed. I was, at the time, playing a lot with a way of continuously fluctuating the harmony while keeping an overall tonal center; I've since actually heard a bunch of music that plays in the same ballpark and while I wouldn't just take those sketches and hold them up for comparison, I wasn't embarrassed by the naive effort.

The other thing of note in the binder was some scattered papers from my Philosophy of Science class, namely the proposal and subsequent outline I produced for my final paper. The final paper - on the scientific study of intelligence - turned out, per my memory ... ok. I would've given it a B or B+, but the instructor was a little kinder. If I want to reread the thing - and I suppose I do - it's somewhere in the bunch of notebooks I insisted on packing and bringing to the new location. My father's mild annoyance was overcome by observing, as I glanced through contents, "no, this is great: it's like my education in a little pile." I did reread the proposal and subsequent outline, though, and for the first time since graduation I began to truly, emotionally, miss college, or to be vaguer, being a student / living in academe. I don't have idealistic notions about the purity of the "life of the mind" in an academic setting, but that kind of intellectually supersaturated atmosphere, where everyone around you was theoretically able and often willing to engage in the kind of conversation you can very rarely get in general public life, is rich in a way that I've started to miss. Part of the point, as well, is that it's not "conversation" in the sense of dialogue with a like-interested individual, it's the collective engine of a classroom, microcosm for a community, which spurs every individual to be smarter, in the same sense that the best, sometimes only, way to get better at chess (or basketball, or jazz) is to play chess (or basketball, or jazz) with people who are really good at it, all the fucking time. I'm much much wiser than I was as a college student, and my knowledge-acquisition has continued with strong net gains in both academic and nonacademic fields, but I'm not nearly as smart - not as intellectually nimble, not as acutely and aggressively perceptive - as I was three and a half years ago when I was writing the proposal for a paper on the philosophical implications of The Bell Curve. And I didn't even like the class all that much at the time!

Looking at those papers also got me thinking about my failed attempt at a career in philosophy. I did have a bit of a conceited reaction on rereading my preliminary work - "Goddamn, but I am pretty clever and insightful, aren't I?" - but the way I was self-impressed reinforced certain suspicions I've developed that at least in the modern context it wasn't meant to be and it's probably for the best that I didn't start down the path of trying to get tenure at a prestigious institution. I'm quite certain that I would've either failed miserably or succeeded in such a way that I didn't respect and indeed resented my own accomplishment; the hoops through which one must jump to become an acknowledged member of the philosophical community are disinteresting to me and uncongenial to my aptitudes.

As a sidebar, a mildly commonplace critique of the modern philosophical academy is that, by current standards, Ludwig Wittgenstein would never have achieved tenure. This is a strong gestural point to make, but I'm dubious that it holds much truth; as far as I can tell, by the standards of his day, Wittgenstein probably didn't qualify for tenure either. The idea is that there's no accomodation made today for the eccentric and eccentrically credentialed genius, but Wittgenstein was a very biographically eccentric fellow in his own day as well, and accomodations were made despite the extreme irregularity. In an alternate universe where I'm capable of writing something with the philosophical weight and path-blazing genius of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, I'm inclined to think that the University of Chicago might just go ahead and let me start teaching classes even though I never went to graduate school. Appeals to exceptions are often rhetorically shoddy for this sort of reason; unless you have strong foundation for the belief that there are unnurtured philosophical geniuses running around doing odd jobs and writing brilliant work in their spare time because Princeton wouldn't give them the time of day, there's no evidence that Wittgenstein couldn't succeed today. He was, then and now, a truly exceptional figure in many aspects and in the most literal sense of the word.

(Sidebar to the sidebar: I don't know if there are any living Wittgensteins today, and if there are I don't know their financial circumstances, but if I were one I'd probably be pretty pissed off that my maiden aunts or whomever it was refused to leave their Viennese home in the 1930s and as a result effected the transfer of what was then the largest family fortune in Europe to the Nazis as a gigantic bribe to overlook their Jewish heritage so they could continue living in oblivious familiarity. Further that if I recall correctly, this is not something the ladies did themselves, it was something organized by Ludwig's brother Paul, a famous concert pianist [who became a famous one-handed concert pianist, and for whom most of the notable works for "Piano, Left Hand Only" were composed], on their behalf because they didn't really understand the gravity of the situation and its urgency as concerned their own personal wellbeing.)

ANYWAY (and, yes, I've decided to just wholesale steal that tic from Chuck Klosterman), the bigger point is that the alternate universe Me who writes something akin to the Tractatus wouldn't just need to be massively smarter and more gifted than the real Me, he'd need to have a substantially different personality and mindset, because I have no particular ambition, and never did, to produce work of that nature. My ambitions were more along the lines of being a teacher of philosophy than a "philosopher" per se, in the modern sense of "university professor with some obligations to his teaching load but whose primary directive and primary interest is in doing his research and writing." I believe that in most if not all subfields there is still important, valuable research to be done and ground to be broken, I just (a) never felt it was likely I'd do it or have the drive to try (w/some exceptions, to be fair about my own imaginative hubris) (b) think the overwhelming majority of philosophical work done in service of this goal in the next decade will absolutely pale in importance compared to teaching preexisting philosophical concepts and methods to undergraduates - majors and nonmajors alike - over the same period of time. The incentive structure of the profession does not, however, support this conviction of mine, and I should probably be happy that I'm not gearing up for ten+ years of swimming against the tide to try and get job security and a comfortable income.

What I really wanted to be, in a way, was a poor man's Sidney Morgenbesser, and I still believe that I have the aptitude to be something like a homeless man's Sidney Morgenbesser. Morgenbesser's publication record isn't anything to write home about, but he was intensely valued and respected by his peers for his intelligence, insight, and capability to engage with their research in productive ways. He was also a hugely influential teacher to the philosophers who passed through his classes. Also incredibly funny (NB that the "yeah, yeah" witticism cited by Wikipedia, while one of my favorite witticisms, is hiiiiiiiiighly apocryphal as best as I've been able to figure out, and Morgenbesser/JL Austin is just one of the pairs to whom I've seen this story attributed). I think there's probably be a place for Wittgenstein in modern academia, but there might not be much room left for the occasional Sidney Morgenbesser.

OHMYGODINTERNET

2008-08-27T21:41:00.003-05:00

It's been a long week plus. I am now in my new condo. Miscellaneous thoughts on the move:

(1) Being perhaps overly solicitous of my dad's bad back, I tried to prevent him from picking up anything which weighed more than ten pounds. I failed, but managed to keep most of the heavy stuff to myself. This was on Saturday. On Sunday I was sore in ways I cannot recall ever having been. No specific muscle group, just my entire body. Not the intense, deep soreness of having worked muscles which long went unworked, and nowhere near the refreshing exhilaration I get along with the exhaustion of a good weight-training workout (when I'm weight training, which I haven't in several months). I just felt like I got beaten. By, apparently, heavy boxes.

(2) Three years' worth of spare change weighs something like twenty pounds.

(3) Various women assisting my father and I in the selection of goods for the apartment have been, lets say, overly solicitous of my masculinity. I don't mean overly solicitous of my masculinity in the way I might wish, e.g., certain employees of Restoration Hardware had been. I mean assuring me, when I express distaste for a particular item, that it's "not too feminine," or pointing out a duvet while saying "I think it's nice. It looks masculine." (For the record, it looks taupe.) I eventually asked my father if I gave off insecure-about-my-sexuality vibes; he said that in his experience women tried to be generally sensitive and solicitous of single men my age and pointed out that his girlfriend has no hesitation in pointing out something pink and frilly and telling him it'd go well in his bedroom.

(4) My dad doesn't like to refer to his girlfriend as his girlfriend.

(5) I am capable of being polite after venting to a customer service lady about how in the last 24 hours I'd been misdirected and transferred and for all intents and purposes lied to numerous times by numerous agents of her employer, my putative phone/internet provider, even after the latest transfer (to the very helpful lady) had me waiting on the phone for half an hour. I did not tell her that for this half hour I was made to listen to the same 2:30 of, I'm guessing, a Haydn quartet, over and over, with a really jarring and obvious break in the loop. I don't think this was meant to test my willingness to stay on the line. I think it was meant to test my dignity as a human being.

(6) The apartment currently has a bed (mine), a mattress (my father's, bed on the way) and a couch. We are in dire need of tables or, at the least, trays.

There's other stuff, maybe a little more substantive, but I spent a total of 90 minutes on the phone with AT&T and I am fucking starving and pretty tired and worked until 7:30 and I'm running out of steam.

Unnecessary Apology

2008-08-19T21:01:00.002-05:00

So I think there are only two of you reading now, and you both know how prone I am to lengthy silences, but I'm going to passive aggressively post about my lack of posting.

In brief, I've been an even worse blogger than I was, oh, a month ago; the posting, and impetus to, has been even more infrequent, the inspiration duller, and the coherence ... less?er? Plus the sheer writing has been, in my estimation anyway, even worse than the normal standard I'd established in the first month or two of operation, which was already below my general standards for writing quality. Anyway.

It's been a highly stressful period for me, and will continue to be for the immediate (like, the next week or two) future, encompassing professional demands, the stress and hassle of moving (and dealing with all the people I need to deal with re: the move) and some difficult personal matters of the sort I don't blog about. I intend to blog again, and in not so long from now, but I'm putting up semi-official notice of my hiatus-ing. When I return it'll be with the same pointless maunderings, but they'll be more inspired, better-written, less meandering maunderings. And, yes, I partly wrote this post to justify the phrase"meandering maunderings."

In other news, I also generally don't post celebrity-ish stuff, but great bravos to Christina Applegate for publicly displaying such strength and good humor in the face of deciding to preemptively conquer future occurences of breast cancer by, essentially, getting part of her body amputated, and at such a ridiculously young age to boot. I'd like to imagine that I'd display the same qualities if I had to lose a toe, let alone [imagine your own opinions and commentary about the importance of a given woman's breasts to that woman, and maybe toss in that for Ms. Applegate an expectation held of her by the people who pay her salary is that she remain sexually appealing, and we tend to place a huge element of sex appeal into the breasts, and implants or no very few people are going to find the concept of a mastectomy sexy in an emotionless, uncomplicated way, which is why I find her quip about having the perkiest breasts in the nursing home so endearing].

Confluence

2008-08-13T19:48:00.002-05:00

At Lawyers, Guns and Money (I go back and forth on whether or not to italicize website names, which I would prefer to do but is apparently not the evolved standard) Scott Lemieux has a post up concerning Anthony Kennedy's opinion in Carhart II. The money quote:

While we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon, it seems unexceptionable to conclude that some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained. Severe depression and loss of esteem can follow.

Except, that, per the APA, it is exceptionable to conclude this. Unless you allow the word "some" to do a great deal of mealy-mouthed work (of course "some" women experience depression and loss of esteem after an abortion; "some" women also experience depression and loss of esteem after successfully giving birth, or at least that's what Brooke Shields would have you believe) this is actually a baseless claim. The APA's studies suggest that post-abortion depressive symptoms are about statistically on par with the occurence of the same symptoms among women who proceed with unplanned pregnancies, which is to say that getting pregnant when you weren't trying to is sometimes really shitty whatever you choose to do.

I say it's "baseless" but of course Justice Kennedy's "base" is in his intuition; he writes that it's "unexceptionable" because it seems evident to him and I'll bet it also seemed evident to most people he asked or would have asked if he did take an informal opinion poll. Hell, I would've guessed that there was some significant proportion of women who suffered depressive episodes post-abortion, although I like to think I would've made the logical leap to unplanned pregnancies in general. It's the sort of statement that unless you empirically know it to be false, or have differing intuitions, just "intuitively" seems reasonable.

And I say "confluence" in the post title because two minutes before I read the LGM post above I read this thread (which is actually about the best advice posters received from professional musicians) where one person relates studying with a mathematician who told him, "You rely a lot on intuition. That's good, because it sharpens your insights. Unfortunately, intuitions are usually wrong." The mathematician, of course is right.

My favorite example is the Monty Hall problem, which you can read about in some depth here, or to get an engaging story about the most famous public explication of the problem and insight from Mr. Hall himself, here. Now, as a mathematician in the second link suggests, the human brain seems particularly ill-wired to sort out issues of probability (I wonder if this is why 99.99% of reporters don't understand statistical margins of error). But even if this is an extreme example, not only of the failure of intuition but also the capacity of people convinced of their correctness to be insufferably arrogant and gracelessly self-righteous, the general point really does stand; human intuition usually isn't worth much.

Well, it's worth something because, for one thing, if you're interested in the functioning methods of human cognition it's probably interesting to think about why common intuition is wrong in one instance or another. And, of course, intuition is sometimes right, brilliantly so, transformatively so, although I'd (intuitively!) suggest that most of the great intuitive leaps of human achievement have resulted from the intuitive moment of someone who had spent a significant amount of their time thinking about related problems and not from someone who idly thought about a subject for a few minutes before coming to a radical insight. I'd also (intuitively!) suggest that commonly held intuitions are more likely to be borne out the softer the subject matter; ergo, it's more likely that an APA study would vindicate Justice Kennedy's intuition about the psychological effects of abortion than that someone's intuition about probability games would turn out to be accurate. And yet we're still wrong all the time. One facet of the human condition which has gathered a great deal of philosophical literature about itself (and with which literature I'm not very familiar) is the tricky problem of self knowledge. Sidestepping self knowledge for its own sake, all we have to go on when attempting to intuit human reactions and emotions in others, or in populations, is our lifetime of interpersonal experience, which is created by imperfectly and often incorrectly interpreting a statistically insignificant sample of other people's behavior, and the cautious application of our own self knowledge to others. And yet we frequently don't know ourselves at all! (Actually, I think I know myself pretty damn well, but then I've spent a lot of time thinking about myself, which in the end probably hasn't been good for me.)

Somewhere I had a point, but it's long lost. I just thought the confluence of reading those two snippets so close to each other would be an opportunity to ramble briefly on a subject that interests me. Two related addenda:

(1) I wish I knew more about, or would take the time to learn more about, the relatively new subfield dubbed "experimental philosophy." I could be completely wrong but my impression is that experimental philosophy is largely concerned with actually asking people their opinions of philosophical questions and incorporating the "folk wisdom" of an average collective response into philosophical work. If I've characterized it accurately, and even if my characterization is accurate it's probably insufficiently nuanced to be fair, you can guess that I'm going to take a dim view, unless the purpose of seeking out the "folk wisdom" is to talk about human perception of philosophical issues rather than the issues themselves. To give an example, I mean the difference between (a) describing human intuitions about ethical obligations and (b) describing ethical obligations, or even (b-1) describing the reasons for human intuitions about ethical obligations.

(2) Link-within-a-link! In the Monday Bullets from about six weeks ago basketball blogger extraordinaire Henry Abbott notes that:

It's the job of an NBA GM to take all the available data, interpret it, and make tough personnel decisions. But some of the available data these days is extremely intense. I suspect some of the best research is really not properly understood by the people at the top on some teams. And today I learn that same thing happens in the U.S. Supreme Court.

In general I think the issue/problem of judges and justices basing their decisions and opinions on data which they don't understand is interesting especially because I can't intuit a good solution. Outside of the Supreme Court, probably the most recognized jurist out there in the US is Richard Posner; at the least he's the most recognized jurist within academic circles regardless of discipline, because Posner is an academic and something of a polymath. Actually, despite the highly respected quality of his jurisprudence, his academic recognizability is undoubtedly due as much to his eager and broad pursuit of various intellectual avocations as it is to anything else. The problem is that as polymaths go he's not actually that impressive; at the least, he's not a very good literary critic because he's not actually a particularly sensitive or insightful reader. He may be better than the average adult American, but based on what I've read of his in the field he wouldn't rate as an actual English professor. All of which, tied together with Kennedy's cheerfully confident errors above, point to what is perhaps my ultimate point: lawyers aren't all that smart, as a class, and even though judges are presumably selected from among the smarter lawyers, "the smarter lawyers" is saying very little in the scope of human intellectual achievement.

Story Telling

2008-08-09T20:41:00.004-05:00

When the mood strikes me to randomly watch a DVD I often turn to the first two seasons of Alias (the only seasons I own, or particularly want to). If you dig the schtick of the show, and I obviously do, it's really well made and goes down smooth. Usually, though, when I intend to watch an isolated episode I get sucked into watching an extended run of them, and that's happened this weekend. I noticed something this time, though, the first time it occurred to me consciously.

Alias tends to invert the traditional structure of a television episode. Continuing dramas have evolved through (and evolved into) a number of storytelling formats, but the main story of each episode has a similar dramatic arc which loosely or closely follows the canonical "three act" structure. "Act" doesn't mean a literal act in a play or a complete segment between commercial breaks; a TV show with four commercial breaks or a Shakespeare play has five discrete segments, and the storytelling is molded to invest each act with its own dramatic pulse. The "three act" structure is more of a storytelling principle wherein the dramatic issue is presented, escalated, and then resolved. The Star Wars movies are a good example of how this works, if you imagine each movie to represent one "act". The example has the convenience of illustrating how each "act" - in this case each movie - has its own independent dramatic structure that replicates the presentation/escalation/resolution arc on a smaller scale. This is necessary to provide some sense of resolution and closure to a particular installment; Empire ends with a lot of balls in the air (because by that point it was clear that Lucas would get to make a third film), but it's more tied up than if it was, say, the first part of a two-part television show and ended on a cliffhanger with the words "To Be Continued..."

A show on American network TV is constrained by the imposition of commercial breaks at regular intervals; each between-commercials segment is treated in TV parlance as an act, and many if not most shows attempt to mold all the acts but the last one into a modified miniature of the "three act" structure. A problem is presented and escalated, but we go to commercial before resolution as an incentive to keep you watching through the ad break; when we come back, the resolution of the previous act occurs and we start the cycle again, until the final act of the show wraps up the whole hour's worth of drama. The art of writing scripts that lend themselves to compelling "act outs" is one of the major skills required for television work.

So we've seen how drama, and especially TV shows, take the storytelling concept of the "three act" structure and continually replicate it, with necessary modifications, at every level of division. It's sort of like a fractal in that at each level of magnification it replicates the complexity and (in a Mandelbrot set, IIRC) the actual shape of the larger structure. Television shows that explicitly engage in seasonal arcs, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer or most seasons of The Sopranos, also map this structure over the length of their 22 or 13 episodes. On Buffy, the first third, more or less, of episodes set up the pieces in play for a given season, the middle escalates the dramatic action, and the final third, more or less (usually a little less) drive towards resolution. One of the arts of crafting a season-long story is having all this happen at a satisfying pace; there's a balancing act between on the one hand tying off the resolution too soon or too slowly so that the last few episodes drag, and on the other hand delaying so much resolution that the final hour is overstuffed and feels like its solutions came out of nowhere, abruptly.

ANYWAY. Alias eschews the season-by-season story structure (the single biggest paradigm shift in the show happens in the middle of Season Two) but as a continuous drama it clearly draws from the tradition of similarly-minded shows which meld aspects of the soap opera format (where continuous development of relationship-driven plotlines is paramount) and the anthology show format where each episode is a closed box. The Twilight Zone is the ultimate anthology show since it had no continuing characters other than the narrator, but for these purposes procedural-type shows like Dragnet or CSI can be considered as exemplars. On CSI, with the exception of a few recurring antagonists, the "A" story of each episode is a closed-off arc with a defined resolution, but the sub-plots unfold over multi-episode, sometimes season- or series-long arcs (Grissom's deafness, his relationship with Sara Sidle, etc.) The dominance of this form of storytelling goes back at least to The X-Files and probably also draws from Twin Peaks and various 80s cop shows, neither of which I'm familiar with.

Such with Alias: each episode deals with independent missions, but they weave in and out of longer story arcs - Sidney's relationship with and understanding of her father and her mother, the mysteries around Rambaldi, her relationship with Vaughn, etc. Alias was, however, a somewhat notoriously cliffhanger-driven show, which brings me to the point which instigated this post. Imagine a continuing episodic drama's "A" stories as a sine wave, with the crests as the points of heightened drama and the valleys as their resolutions. In most shows, the episode breaks are aligned with the valleys. Alias' method of generating its incessant cliffhangers (seriously, I've just watched episodes two through eleven of Season One in the last few days, and I think there've been three episodes that didn't end with some variant of "How's Sydney going to escape this dangerous situation?") shifts the episode breaks to happen over the crests of the sine wave. Another way to look at it is that the entire show is structured as though its individual episodes were acts of one episode, the week between episodes were a commercial break, and therefore dramatic resolution were disrupted and delayed until we're back from commercial/back next week. The standard Alias episode runs resolution/presentation/escalation. This works pretty well on DVD, but I can understand part of why the show struggled to establish a solid fan base and why network executives eventually mandated more isolated episodes. The cliffhangers were there on the assumption by the showrunners that they'd drive up viewership, but by continually denying a resolution coterminus with an episode's conclusion, the show frustrates (and undoubtedly alienates) the natural dramatic experience we've all been conditioned to expect and enjoy.

In other words, you've got to really enjoy the show's schtick to deal with the weird inverted way it built its episodes.

I wonder, incidentally, where the breaks were in, say, the serialized publications of Dickens' novels. Did he just write until he reached his page count for a given installation and stop wherever necessary, or did he craft each installment to have its own dramatic arc?

Why I'm Not A Believer

2008-08-09T16:19:00.002-05:00

If you want moral castigation over the Edwards affair revelations you can find them in many many elsewheres.

One particular tack of criticism and disapproval that does catch my eye is the idea, which I endorse, that this retroactively taints the Edwards candidacy. (As someone who was a fan of said candidacy, this matters to me.) If Edwards knew the information about his affair was floating around at the same time he was gearing up for a campaign, he either had to know that it was quite likely this information would eventually come to light, or he was delusional. These things always get uncovered. If he was delusional, that's no good. If he knew there was a great likelihood of discovery, that's no good either. The revelation of an affair would have, most seem to agree, destroyed his campaign had he become the Democratic nominee. To pursue the presidency even when doing so raised the risk that his own personal foibles would submarine an otherwise extremely strong opportunity for the Democrats to regain control of the White House indicates a great deal of arrogance and selfishness. (Or, otherwise, delusions and/or naiveté.)

I'm not interested in discussing whether this apparent reality of our political culture is a good thing (I don't think it is). I'm also not interested in discussing whether this standard is fairly applied; McCain cheated on his first wife, and that doesn't seem to do any harm to his candidacy, but I do believe that he'd be seriously damaged if it was revealed that he was stepping out on his current wife. Fair or not, stupid or not (unfair and stupid), this seems to be the situation we've been dealt. (Clinton is an interesting case/exception. For one thing, he was already the president and already had the fact that a majority of the people liked him being the president in his back pocket at the time of the Lewinsky scandal. Furthermore, as others have been pointed out, Clinton had been so relentlessly attacked for less well substantiated instances of adultery and general lasciviousness, both by serious political opponents and, incessantly, by late night talk show hosts, that the power of the exposure was severely depleted. Even though in fact it was a new revelation, it felt like something we all already knew, anyway, and had learned to live with.)

What I am interested in mentioning is why, despite my disappointment with Edwards' arrogance and selfishness, I'm neither surprised nor disillusioned: I don't trust people who run for president. This is why even though I like Obama, will vote for him, think and hope he'll be more of a good president than not, and honestly think that he can do a lot to improve and advance social ... attitudes in this country, I don't think of him - can't think of him - as a revolutionary figure, as someone in whom to unreservedly believe, a Great Hope, or any of the aspirational - and, some Republicans would say, quasi-messianic - drapery with which he's been provided: he's actually running for president, and I don't believe (in) people who run for president.

It's possible that there was a point in my life when I thought it might be cool to be the president. This definitely would have been before I had any understanding of what it might be like to be the president. I have, today, less than no desire for the presidency. And, even if I had a desire to somehow magically be the president, I look at the process necessary for becoming the president and I can't begin to stomach it. And even if the campaign was no obstacle to my gastrointestinal fortitude (and how could it not be?!) the general and generic compromises and life choices and ways of presenting yourself necessary to even get to the stage of viable candidacy ... it's distasteful, all the way down. I want not part of it. It's, in my opinion, all extremely ugly and dirty and while I'm glad, I suppose that someone wants the job, I can't imagine a normal, well-adjusted person wanting the job.

I always hold room for the possibility that I'm unusual or weird (shut up!) in this regard as in many others. But the idea of running for president is so uniquely foul to me that I can't fathom how it could appeal to anyone except the selfish, arrogant, and frankly the power-hungry. That's not to say that there aren't good people who are selfish, arrogant, and power-hungry, or that the selfish, arrogant, and power-hungry (whether "good people" or not) can't make good presidents. But I can't find it in my to trust in someone so patently different from myself. That Obama even wants to be the president is, in my opinion, the scariest thing about him.

On the other hand: GObama! Si, se puede.

Why I Want Silver Or Bronze

2008-08-09T14:19:00.002-05:00

Well, for one thing, I've always preferred the appearance of silver (and white gold, and platinum) to traditional yellow gold.

But no, I'm here to briefly talk about why I want the US Men's Basketball Team to not win the gold medal they are being widely, if cautiously, favored to win. I think the so-called "Redeem Team" needs to lose, and American men's basketball needs to keep losing, for it's own good. I don't want them to win until they've gotten it right and won for the right reasons.

The original Dream Team, and the only one worthy of the name, was the team we sent to the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, the first time the US had sent a team of professionals to international competition. The Dream Team was, first of all, that; more than any other international team it truly had a near-lock on the consensus best American-citizen NBA players of its era; the current team doesn't compare because it doesn't have guys like Tim Duncan or Kevin Garnett on it. Not only was the Dream Team almost exclusively composed of the very best players of its era, it also happened to represent a moment of particularly rich talent from the 80s/early 90s era of American basketball which hasn't been equalled until the last few years. TEN of the guys on that team were also on the NBA's 50 Greatest Players (from the first fifty years) list compiled in, I think, 1996. So the Dream Team was Dream-y. They also didn't really give much of a damn about their competition, and frankly they didn't need to. Famously, Charles Barkley was asked what he knew about their upcoming opponents, the Angolan team, and Barkley responded something like "I don't know much about them except that they're in trouble." It's vaguely possible that the coaching staff did some scouting, but I highly doubt the players listened to it; the talent gap was so enormous that the concept of having to spend time thinking about the best way to defeat an opponent would have been received as mildly insulting by someone like Larry Bird or Michael Jordan. The opposing players, too, were star-struck. Many asked for autographs, and Toni Kukoc, soon to be of the Chicago Bulls but currently playing for the Yugoslavian team and one of the best non-American players in the world, pissed off a lot of people by claiming that if the American Dream Team played an international Dream Team assembled from the best players from every other country, the Americans would still kick ass and take names (and sign autographs). And he was almost certainly right.

That wouldn't be the case today. I'd have to think more about the composition of a global non-American All Star team, but any team with a starting lineup of, say, Yao Ming, Dirk Nowitzki, Andrei Kirilenko, Manu Ginobili, and Steve Nash, and guys like Pau Gasol, Tony Parker, and Hedo Turkoglu coming off the bench, is at least a fair matchup for the current Olympic team. Over the past ten years there's been a shift in the public attitude of American basketball players, from the continuing casual assumption that they're the best of the best and they don't need to worry about it to the current proclamation that "Hey, these other guys are really good, we believe we're going to win but we absolutely respect these players and can't take them lightly." The problem is that I don't really believe that to be true. NBA players obviously respect their All-Star fellow peers, guys like I named in the imaginary starting lineup, but nobody on the American team in 2004 gave a moment's thought to the burning question of "How are we going to stop Carlos Arroyo?" The result was that the Puerto Rican point guard carved up the Americans and absolutely humiliated them, which was doubly depressing because Arroyo was an NBA player and not an especially good one. (Arroyo continued to play in the NBA, winning bigger contracts but never quite equalling the performance he gave in that game and never cementing his status as starting-quality. He just this summer signed a contract to play in a Spanish league.) I believe that the players actually do read and think about scouting reports now, but I still think there's an attitude on their part that needs adjusting; the mealy-mouthed clichés about how "We've just go to play as well as we can and show we're the best" barely pass muster as media-comment in the NBA, where you're at least expected to drop some Basketball 101 clichés as well.

But really, truly, I think the organization of USA Basketball needs an overhaul. It was apparently getting one four years ago when Jerry Colangelo, a figure of aging respect league-wide, the former owner (and current executive) of the Phoenix Suns, was made basically the American Basketball Godfather. However, all the talk about how they were going to implement a new approach, weren't necessarily going to recruit star player but were instead shooting for the best possible team, how you had to demonstrate a multi-year commitment to USA Basketball not only as a show of good faith and dedication but as a necessary attempt to replicate the chemistry the international teams have built up over years of playing with each other...all this has been overtly upheld but subtly undermined. I could say a bunch more, but I'll confine myself to note that some of the final player selections should be eyebrow-raising in light of the criteria I laid out above, and suggest playing favorites both with Colangelo and the team's coach, Mike Krzyzweski, but also on the part of the team's sponsor. Eleven of the twelve players have Nike contracts, and the sole non-Nike player, Dwight Howard, is marginalized in the semi-official video documentation of this team, and photographed in such a way that he can hide the offending logos on his shoes and, as a concession to his own shoe company, hide the Nike logo on his uniform. Supposedly the shoe companies are leaking some of their juice, but never ever ever underestimate how powerful they are in the world of basketball.

I Can't Even Begin

2008-08-07T20:46:00.002-05:00

I don't even have anything to add to this, but ... wow ... I'm ... what is there to say? This is where I'd normally come up with some sort of clever outlandish comparison, but there isn't one that can compare while staying remotely plausible. We've got the inappropriate appropriation of an exploited and (depending on how you want to look at it, previously) oppressed culture by an element of the culture which did the exploiting: that's pretty run of the mill. Neither is the fact that the appropriations are, apparently, not very good or accurate (I really wouldn't know, personally), but what I can't really begin to wrap my head around is that DeBeers isn't merely an element of the culture which exploited the "African" culture whose art is now being haphazardly and inexpertly appropriated; it was a major agent of the exploitation! In its corner of Africa, DeBeers was THE agent of exploitation! And this isn't past exploitation - I mean, whatever you want to say about the way European-Americans interacted with the Native Americans, and whatever you want to say about the current state of Native American societies as a result, we're not still going around violating treaties and destroying villages and giving them smallpox.

The capstone, of course, is that the medium in which this appropriation is being effected is the very fucking material for which much if not all of the horrific exploitation was done. Okay, I've got an analogy. DeBeers "celebrating" the spirit of Africa by producing these diamond-studded replica-mask jewelry pieces is like if:

We imagine that Hanes was founded by a conglomerate of powerful American slave owners (in actuality, it was founded in 1901 in North Carolina, so Hanes undoubtedly did benefit from share-cropping, so this part at least doesn't have to be totally fictitious). Now imagine that Hanes decided it was going to celebrate the spirit of African Americans' considerable cultural influence on the USA by producing a commemorative line of T-shirts with images of generic and stereotyped African Americans doing things like playing a saxophone or catching a football or dicking around with some peanuts. And these T-shirts were going to be made from ACTUAL COTTON which was hand-picked by ACTUAL SHARECROPPERS who are ACTUALLY SHARECROPPING TODAY. How fucking unbelievable and, frankly, unacceptable would that be? That's what this is.

Wow.

Geese, Shirts

2008-08-03T00:23:00.004-05:00

On Friday night my father and I ate dinner at Café des Architectes. The meal, overall, was fine; the entrees were adequate, the desserts somewhat disappointing. I'm sure there are better things on the menu than what we ate. But. BUT:

The foie gras (which is not on the copy of their menu available online). The foie gras was, simply, the best I have ever had. It was astonishing, life-alteringly good. I was a little shaken. I realized that if this had been the first foie gras I ever tried, then I would have soon after stopped eating it because I wouldn't be able to find anything to compare to this and would have been frustrated into disinterest by what my mother used to call "the strawberry of your mind". I believe the menu described it as "seared" - I could be wrong - but if it was indeed "seared" then that was only insofar as someone had taken the foie gras and waved it in the general direction of a fire several feet away. This was basically paté de foie gras, and from my first bite I was transported. My father, by the way, concurred with my superlatives, down to the "best I've ever had, by far." There are other ways to make foie gras and other directions to go with a paté, most if not all of which I greatly appreciate, but this...

It was so delicate and so creamy. My father suggested that it evolved in your mouth the way a sip of wine would if you delayed the swallow. For literally the first time in my life I offered my compliments to the chef. I stressed to the waiter that I was the sort of person who never expressed praise higher than "very good" in a restaurant, and then told him that this was "amazing". The rest of the meal after that was an inevitable letdown.

.....

As someone who enjoys dressing "nicely" when an appropriate opportunity presents itself, I've been for the most part happy with the expectation that I should wear suit (or jacket) and tie to my job. The only major issue I've had with that notion is that I don't have enough money to instantly buy myself into a respectably sized wardrobe for this purpose, which keeps me rotating the same three suits and one or two jackets over and over. I hope to pick up another suit or two in the near future, both for my satisfaction as well as the lifespan of my clothes.

There has been one other problem, though: the tie. The tie has historically been my least favorite element of the "dressed up" look. (Well, until you get into tuxedos, of which I'm not a particular fan, but I'm restricting myself here to the traditional business suit ensemble - what used to be semi-formal daywear for a professional man, but has become formalwear over the past fifty years or so.) I don't like ties not because of appearance or principle but because of physical discomfort. I don't like having things against my neck. From time to time I've worn a turtleneck, but I can only wear one for a few hours before the constant presence of something in constant contact with the entirety of my neck becomes oppressive. Similarly with the tie. Except in those circumstances where I feel the occasion really demands it (or, now, to please my boss), I enjoy wearing a suit with a shirt open at the collar, sans tie. The problem is exascerbated by the physical coordination of the tie and the shirt. To wit:

With a standard collar on a dress shirt, be it a point or a spread or a button-down*, the tie knot should properly be such that no part of the shirt is visible behind the knot. Otherwise, it seems as though the knot has been either sloppily tied or else loosened, whether or not this is the case. Ensuring that the knot entirely obscures the portion of the shirt over which it is situated provides a sharp, clean look. However, in practice, over the course of the day the tie will inevitably loosen slightly, providing a sliver of shirt over the knot. Thus we tighten the tie. Problem: tightening the tie to this extent tends to require tightening the knot back into the shirt, and hence into the neck, prepetuating and intensifying the discomforting sensation that something is pressing against a delicate and vital segment of my person. My father, who has less throat-discomfort issues than I do, is aware of this problem and suggested a logical technique whereby the shirt-front is pulled away from the body with the same hand which braces the tie while the other tightens the knot. This works, but only so far. Enter a solution, below the "not quite a" footnote.

*(NB: this is a major and unimportant pet peeve of mine - the "button-down" properly refers not to a dress shirt but to a particular sort of collar which you might find on a dress shirt; as a matter of fact, I prefer not to wear a button-down with a tie, it being a less formal collar to begin with. The button-down with tie is a particularly Brooks Brothers-y look - in fact, the button-down as a collar for dress shirts was, I believe, introduced by Brooks Brothers - and kind of Bostonian in a way that I'm not fond of, though otherwise I have nothing against Boston [except the Irish from Southie].)

I recently noted my father wearing dress shirts with a particularly attractive collar. It is basically a spread collar (though the same principle could work in a point) and I can neither find an illustrative picture on the internet nor determine a specific name. I believe that Ike Behar calls it a "Jerry," (if memory serves) but that's just the name for a line of their shirts. (My father will inquire of his favored clothier, from whom he has purchased a number of shirts with this collar, whether it has a specific designation.) The collar is such that rather than the collar-button passing through its hole in a vertical plane - one piece of fabric aligned flush with the neck imposed over another piece of fabric aligned flush over the neck - the two sides of the shirt cross over each other as though one is a hood over the other. It's a subtle effect but, as I said, quite attractive. Noting my appreciation of this design, my father recently gifted me with two shirts which share this attribute. (Both Ike Behar, which aside from the relative prominence of this collar in their line is one of my favorite, if not the absolute favorite, designer of men's shirts, although the much more budget conscious Jos. A. Bank wrinkle-resistant dress shirts have become appreciated workhorses of my job-specfic wardrobe.) And not only does it look fantastic, but I discover an unanticipated benefit:

The design of the collar obviates the need to hide the shirt behind the tie knot, because its very appearance indicates that you're not supposed to do that. The knot should be snug against the shirt, of course, but the collar is clearly intended to be visible above the tie knot due to the specifics of its design. And further, because of the curved, "hooded" effect, tightening the tie into the shirt means tightening it parallel to the body (i.e., moving it further up), and not into it. The added comfort was considerable. It generally takes only a few hours for me to want to remove a tie, but on the first day I wore this shirt it was after 5 PM before the vague discomfort set in.

Now if only I had the funds to purchase a great many of these marvelous shirts.

You Have Get Evil SPAM

2008-07-28T21:28:00.002-05:00

Maybe I've still got too much faith in the day-to-day, cogs-spinning aspects of the US government, but if I were trying to concoct some sort of fake message to fuck with people, I'd maybe copy edit it a few times:

You have get a Tax Refund on your Visa or MasterCard.
Complete the formular, and get your Tax Refund.

I just don't have bought it, fellas. It doesn't match the formular.

Better Phishing, please.

When You're In A Rut

2008-07-24T21:44:00.004-05:00

You're in a rut. Blogging the contents of my Netflix queue won't get me to stop reacting to comic-book superheroes if my Netflix queue is bringing me...comic-book superhero movies. I watched, over the past few days, three classics of the genre.

Taken as a collective, they blow.

Superman, the Richard Donner film with Christopher Reeve and Gene Hackman, is alright. Reeve is really good, actually, and Margot Kidder is some kind of charming, and Hackman belongs in a different, yet highly amusing, film. Actually, Reeve is really good as Clark Kent and merely good as Superman, in my opinion; he handles the bumbling put-on with considerable panache, and the two or three moments across both films where you see him, dressed as Kent, drop the facade, are really cool. (Didn't even notice he was slouching, but he uncoils to full height and takes off the glasses and his whole face changes. I think one time they even cheated a hairstyle change, from Kent's goobery combover to Superman's iconic forehead curl.) Some of the Superman stuff, he comes off as smirking more than, well, Superman-y. Also, I'm not down with bringing Lois back from the dead, but they also weren't originally going to kill her anyway, so it's a pointless zero-sum game.

Superman II is awful. It's a miraculously stupid movie full of some miraculously stupid people, not least of whom include main characters who were not blithering idiots during Superman, which nominally speaking was scripted and partly shot at the same time as this abortion of a film. It's really bad from a storytelling craft standpoint, and salvaged only by some fine work from Hackman and the completely out of place yet enjoyable coda at the end, where Clark Kent returns to a moment of humilation, kicks a guy's ass in blatant Superman-y fashion, and then dorkily mimes doing a bench press while shrugging his shoulders and telling an awestruck onlooker, "I've been, you know [dorky bench press] working out."

Batman was coincidentally summarized by a coworker as "candybutt," which I guess is true. I liked it less than I remembered. Basically, it strengthened my impression that, as a director, Tim Burton is a really interesting production designer. His quasi-famous disdain for actual comics doesn't really help him out here; Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns was apparently highly influential to everyone on set (and it's easy to see why someone who otherwise doesn't care for comics would respond to it), and the movie's tone is basically TDKR crossed with the 60s TV show starring Adam West. Superdark crossed with high camp and we wind up actually in very Burton-y territory: the frighteningly whimsical, or whimsically frightening, that doesn't do much for me, even though I kind of dug Edward Scissorhands. The tone is all wrong because it's all mixed up; a campy Batman isn't what I want to see, but it's a valid and historically grounded take on the character and his world. Michael Keaton (nice job, by the way) isn't campy, but Nicholson is, except he's killing people. Nicholson's Joker murders people, horrifically, left and right, but plays the character for over the top looniness, and what's worse is that the movie follows him. If this movie is supposed to make me laugh, it shouldn't try to make me laugh at the death of innocent people.

Far superior, as a mashup of Adam West and The Dark Knight Returns, is this work of genius. Excerpts:

Housekeeping

2008-07-22T06:50:00.002-05:00

When I started this blog it was my intention to have a bunch of posts which were primarily hidden on the main page - you know, where you can read the first paragraph or whatever and then there's an "click to read the rest" link. I didn't want all the posts to be like that, though, and I didn't like Blogger's options for executing a workaround where only some of the posts would be coded this way. In practice, however, it seems like almost every post I write is a miniature essay between four and seven screens long.

So I ask You, the Three People I Know Are Reading, does the format of my blog make your eyes glaze over? Or is the glazing solely due to content? Should I hide stuff on the main page for better readability? Also: I didn't explicitly say so in the post from last night, but I'm actively wondering if other people feel the same way about adaptations as I do, so I please encourage you to comment on the post directly below. Just scroll down for about fifteen minutes and you'll find the proper link.

Who Watches The Watchmen Adaptation?

2008-07-21T18:16:00.003-05:00

This is, obliquely, another comics-y post, but with much more generic concerns.

I've often said that films should adapt short stories rather than novels. As a matter of course, they do sometimes adapt short stories - I gather that this was more common several decades ago than it is now - and of course a very high profile recent Oscar nominee (Brokeback Mountain) was adapted from a "novella," I don't know how long. The crux of my argument is that it takes, on average, two hours to experience a film, and depending on length it might take anywhere from twenty minutes to two hours to experience a "short" story. A 350-page novel probably takes me about seven or eight hours to read, less if it's breezy or I've read it before, more if it's got any kind of density. You simply cannot put the contents of a novel into a film; there must be abridgements of something. I think there is a real art to adaptation (I'll come back to this in a minute) and recognizing how the strengths of one medium are not the strengths of another, and what must be done to compensate. But when "adaptation" means "cutting out at least 50% of the content" then something is wrong with your conception. Or your source material. One of my favorite movies, Fight Club, was adapted from a novel, but it's not in my estimation a very good novel. Airport books, techno thrillers, and so forth can make compelling source material because much of the content winds up being purely descriptive and/or marking time. A two-page disquisition on the merits of an Uzi vs. a H&K submachine gun may or may not be interesting in text but is ultimately best shed in the transition to film; likewise a lengthy explanation of a tactical team's deployment as they prepare to assault a warehouse/terrorist training center is effectively compressed into three seconds' worth of camerawork.

But for the most part either plot or characterization or dialogue - and the three are all caught up in each other, of course - needs to be severely compromised to make for a bearable running time. And so: why? The market for a particular book is much much smaller than the market for a movie adaptation of same. I can't imagine that Wonder Boys, one of my favorite adaptations of a novel - and yet which cut my favorite scenes from the book - and which lost money while grossing about $33 million, rose or fell based on the book's status as a bestseller (which it was). I can't at the moment find sales stats for the book (Evan? do you know where to look?) but it surely didn't gross $33 million for its publisher, which would imply that it sold well over a million copies. I have a hard time imagining that it sold as many copies as the movie sold tickets, though I could be wrong (call it around 350K tickets?). For the movie to have turned a significant profit its audience would have needed to be much larger than that of the book. So even in the best case scenario, the popularity of a book (unless we're talking about a cultural phenomenon like Harry Potter) can't really have much to do with its success as a film. What's the appeal, then?

I presume it's something like cachet. Film culture is heavily invested (mistakenly, in my opinion) in turning to prose literature for its source material, and the novel is the prestige format for prose material (who reads short stories these days outside of MFA programs? and who writes them except people who went to MFA programs? I'm exaggerating, but only so much), and so that's where the film industry turns. And why do all these books and their publishers/authors want to be turned into movies? Well, $. Excuse me: $$$. But also because the feature film that opened in a cinema was and is the prestige format for the filmed medium. I happen to think that to the extent there should be a prestige format at all vs. a recognition that different things work best in different circumstances, it *shouldn't* be the cinema, but the point isn't worth arguing. I think it should be TV, but that's based entirely on what I perceive to be the potential of television vs. the reality. It's only over the past fifteen or so years that (American) television has started cashing in on its artistic capabilities on a regular basis and routinely turning out product that's easily as strong as the best Hollywood has to offer, if not stronger. Still, the advertising mandates and seasonal structure that continue to undergird network prime time programming are semi-permanent barriers to television's full flowering as an artistic medium; so be it. The point remains that if you're going to adapt a story that took eight or ten hours to read, if you think it's worth adapting to another medium in the first place, shouldn't you want to preserve as much of it as possible? Why did the network TV miniseries die? (because they haven't done an interesting book since Roots, aside from all those late 90s classics adaptations like the Odyssey and Gulliver's Travels?) - why hasn't anyone done before now what the guy who wrote Generation Kill (a nonfiction book about Marines in Iraq) did, and spin it into, essentially, a one-season series for HBO?
...

All of this is in response to the newly available trailer for the movie adaptation of Watchmen, coming out next March:

The trailer says it's the most acclaimed graphic novel of all time, and you might quibble about Maus, which after all won a damn Pulitzer, but I'll quibble back and say that Maus is to some ostensible extent nonfiction. Watchmen was also included in Time's list of the 100 best English language novels since 1923, which is a grossly stupid thing to do, but I guess we're supposed to take it where we can get it. (Watchmen is, in my opinion, better than any number of great novels, but it's not a fucking novel; it's also better than any number of great paintings, movies, albums, and so forth.)

So: Watchmen is really fucking good. It's not my personal favorite work in the comics medium, but I (neophyte fan yet) haven't yet read anything that I would critically argue surpassed it. The trailer also looks pretty good; I'm not crazy about some of the aesthetic updates in the costuming, but several of the shots are ripped straight from the panels as drawn by Dave Gibbons. I'm also, a priori, impressed that they chose to keep the period setting. However, first we can turn to the author, Alan Moore, who is famously curmudgeonly about his work being turned into movies, but if you'd written V for Vendetta, From Hell, and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, all highly acclaimed works in the comics medium, and watched them get turned into, well, V for Vendetta, From Hell, and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, you'd be a curmudgeon too. Moore: "You get people saying, 'Oh, yes, Watchmen is very cinematic,' when actually it's not. It's almost the exact opposite of cinematic...I didn't design it to show off the similarities between cinema and comics, which are there, but in my opinion are fairly unremarkable. It was designed to show off the things that comics could do that cinema and literature couldn't." He's, oh, at least 95% right about that.

I should also say that if they actually manage to get the ending from the book into a major theatrical release, I'll have to tip my hat to them regardless of how shitty the movie might otherwise be. I don't believe they'll do it, but I guess I could be wrong. Supposedly the ending scripted and shot is faithful to the book, but I wouldn't be surprised if the studio "tinkered" with it between now and March. Let me put it this way, in no uncertain terms: I'm fairly certain that if they faithfully reproduce the true ending to Watchmen it will be the most unsettling, morally confounding, dark, potentially divisive conclusion to a (semi) major Hollywood film. Ever.

But anyway: Watchmen was twelve issues of 32 pages apiece. Total of 384 pages. Out of those 384 pages, 46 are primarily prose text (with some illustration), non-story elements inserted at the end of each issue which enrich the overall texture of the work and provide some background, but I guess you could skip them and not miss anything you "needed to know". So that's 338 pages of actual comic. Out of those 338 pages, roughly twelve to fifteen pages' worth tell the intertextual "Tale of the Black Freighter," which is being animated for a feature on the DVD but excised from the theatrical release. This comic-within-the-comic is thematically and aesthetically tied into the rest of the work and comments on it, but you can cut it out and, again, "not miss anything". Let's say we've got an even 320 pages of comic left. I would have guessed that it took about a minute on average to faithfully reproduce the action and/or dialogue of a page, which would leave us with 320 minutes, or 5 hours and 20 minutes, of film. However, I'm obsessive enough on this point that I've actually, on several different occasions, acted out one or more of the twelve chapters, trying to be honest to what I think it would take up if you filmed everything (and, look, in Watchmen, and really in anything of Watchmen's caliber, in my opinion, in any genre or medium, everything is important). I came up with about 20 minutes per chapter, which is a little shorter than the real content of a 30-minute program on network TV (22 minutes and [I think] change, by standard; the "hour" is canonically something like 44:20 or 44:40). That would translate to a total of 240 minutes, or 4 hours. I do think I probably short-changed what you'd need to make some of the quieter passages work effectively. But let's say 4 hours; Zack Snyder's first cut was apparently three hours, and to make the film more topical he introduced a subplot about energy resources. So we're already short of my proposed time for a faithful adaptation and yet there's been other material added. The final cut is supposedly going to be 145 minutes long. That paces out to twelve minutes per chapter. I'm really not kidding about the time it takes to do this justice.

So if Zack Snyder loooooves this material so much, why is he cutting it in half? If he wants to make a movie (and not, say, a miniseries) that reflects his love for this material, why not write and direct his own script where he touches on the things about Watchmen that are important to him? Because Hollywood wouldn't want to bankroll some newly created "superhero" movie? If everyone who's read Watchmen goes to see this movie in theaters twice it will not break even; I can't believe that a clever marketing campaign couldn't create comparable buzz for a movie with no pre-existing source material. Why not just write a fucking movie that captures what you love about this comic in a format and length that works for film? Why butcher the thing you're so in love with you just had to make it into a movie, even if that means you can't make almost HALF of it into a movie?