Monthly Archives: November 2015

In Which The Hero Has A Narrow Escape   (2015Nov24)

Posted by XperDunn on

Tuesday, November 24, 2015                                           8:00 PM

We got new chairs—they’re classy, made out of unpainted wood—not folding chairs, which have been our go-to chairs, mostly. It’s good to have chairs—that way you can have company—uh-oh! Company? Wait a minute….

I started to write a post today, then about three pages in, I realized I was mistaken in my facts. I had to walk away—I hate when I realize I’m wrong about something—it’s not like it happens every day (more like every other, but never mind).

But I walked away with a cigarette burning in the ashtray. I came back just now, hours later, and the smoke-eater ashtray is still on, wasting its batteries, and there’s a butt that’s gone out on the newspaper that I use for a mouse-pad, with a little burned-out circle in the paper. I almost burned my house down because I got upset about being wrong.

It’s partly the chairs’ fault—you don’t usually get a parade of new chairs coming through the front door, which I’m sitting next to. So, stunned by being wrong and confused by a shower of furniture, I walked away from a lit cigarette—but I was lucky. The house abides.

Then I misspelled “Haydn” on my video graphics, and had to go back and correct all that—it’s just my day for screwing up, I guess. Day after tomorrow is Thanksgiving—there’s a pressure (for me at least) building from the approaching holidays—opening ourselves to feelings, in the tradition of the season, makes the thought of trouble more intimidating. When things go wrong during the holidays, they don’t just go wrong—they ruin the holiday. Not that I expect things to go wrong—but bustling shoppers and stressed-out parents and heavy store traffic, all together, just need a little complication, like bad weather for example, and the whole thing becomes a nail-biter. I kinda feel like ducking, until January 2nd makes it all go away—I love January 2nd—it’s like that day you come home from vacation—the good times are over, but it’s nice to just settle in again.

Well, next blogpost, I hope to know what I’m talking about—if that was ever the case.

I’m Lucky That Way   (2015Nov23)

Posted by XperDunn on

Monday, November 23, 2015                                           12:44 AM

I noticed that today’s YouTube-posted improv was exactly one week after the last one—I used to post almost once a day—am I now going to post only once a week? Am I slowing down because my sixtieth birthday is only three months away? I think it’s more likely that I’ve finally accepted that I’m my own biggest fan and other listeners are not eagerly awaiting my next post.

It’s true that I like my own music—it’d be a pretty sad state of affairs if I didn’t, I guess. And I am one of those few people that enjoyed classical music right from childhood, without being told it was important or impressive—or without having to be taught to ‘appreciate music’ in school—though I did enjoy those classes. So I’m used to liking music that doesn’t interest a lot of other people—music that is more (and less) than just something to dance to. So, for a long time I figured that I might just be ‘inaccessible’, like classical music—but now I think I have to give that up—I am not going to draw a crowd—ever.

My big ‘idols’ are Glenn Gould, George Winston, and Keith Jarrett—and since I’ve never surpassed any of them in any way, I can’t really call them ‘influences’. I think I’d have to go past them in some way before I could relegate them to ‘influence’ status—they remain my idols, people far more talented than I. So, if recorded musicians of forty or fifty years ago are still unreached targets—if I still think of myself in terms of someone who’s trying to get started in music—then I take it as given that my dreams of being notable in music will never be more than dreams.

Not that they were ever very promising dreams—I never received the slightest encouragement from parents, teachers, friends or loved ones—more like discouragement, in many cases. I stuck with music through plain stubbornness—I wasn’t about to let myself be excluded from something that great. And if I had to be a lousy musician, then so be it—I was not about to spend my entire life just listening to other people have all the fun.

Anyway, I stuck to it for a long, long time and now I’m liking my own recordings—some more than others, but that’s how that goes—a few I’m quite pleased with. I have the luxury of having my own music—other people aren’t interested in listening to it, but that doesn’t change the fact that very few people have their own personal music soundtrack they can switch on whenever they get tired of pop music. Just another luxury—did I tell you I have my own library? I am so rich—and on so little money—I must be pretty clever.

I used to make a decent wage—we had very big bills back then, but we didn’t have half so comfortable a lifestyle. Sometimes mo’ money is mo’ problems. Sometimes being able to indulge your whims isn’t healthy. I’ll never be wealthy but I’ll always be rich. I’m lucky that way.

There, that’s better–two days in a row….

Now The News   (2015Nov21)

Posted by XperDunn on

Saturday, November 21, 2015                                          10:28 AM

Here we are—all together for the holidays. America, Syria, France, Iraq, Iran, Russia, Israel, Jordan, Mali, Greece, Ukraine, UK, Italy, Turkey, Afghanistan, Mexico, China, Myanmar—well, ‘countries recently in the news’ is a list too long for me to type here. And in some senses, it doesn’t matter—the places unmentioned in the news are experiencing their own difficulties—there’s just no sensational story there—or it’s too hot to report from—but you can find troubles everywhere. Trouble for the holidays—just what everybody put on their Christmas lists!

I’m tempted to stop watching the news on TV—it’s not that I don’t care—I care a lot—it’s just that I don’t approve of the way they’re telling the story. The media leaves out too much of importance and focuses too much (and for too long) on the unimportant. It’s a stupid way to tell a story—and when the story is of civilization’s progress through time, I judge it worthy of some care in the telling.

I see journalists—and whole news networks—filtering their output through self-interest and sensationalism. When the whole point of journalism is to give us ‘just the facts’, these reporters insult our intelligence and abuse our trust by reporting on a bias. News stories often focus on how the people ‘felt’—“What did it feel like to be there?”—“What are your feelings now that’s it’s over?”—that sort of thing—it’s called ‘human interest’. Human interest stories used to be what the newspapers used for filler on a slow news day, when they had no actual facts to report. But now, we’re lucky if any facts get through at all.

Do I care about how people feel? Yes, I do. In a democracy, the ‘feelings’ of the majority determine who is elected and what laws are passed (theoretically). Plus, we all want to know where we stand in relation to the views of the majority. Everyone’s feelings about everything, however, should oughta be based on what we know—and we rely on the news to inform us, not to consolidate our ‘feelings’ about our ignorance.

We have specialty news outlets that lean left or right—catering to our existing emotional biases—or confine themselves to business (the rich people channel, I call it) or confine themselves to sports (adults getting paid to play games). Here are the specialties by which I think the news should be diversified. There should be a Statistics news channel that shows graphs of data, changes over time, projections of future trends, and comparisons of one set of indices against another. There should be a Global news channel that gives the status of every country in the world, whether it’s currently a hot news spot or not—who’s in charge of each country, how their economy is doing, what their human rights status is, and what their least-represented citizens are having to endure. It should also give us a sense of which countries are cooperating with each other, which countries are opposed to each other, and whether that conflict is one of arms, jihad, genocide, economic pressure, or environmental threat.

And there should be a Political news channel—but not for a bunch of speeches and photo-ops—it should report on new legislation being passed on the federal level, the state level, and locally. The overall effect of the legislation should be examined, of good or bad potential—and it should report on which lobby pushed for the legislation and what the motives behind it are—and there should be some notice taken of the effects of any new legislation on the people who had no desire for it, but had it imposed on them. They could even have a ‘fun’ segment that listed all the lies told that day by politicians of either party—and maybe even a ‘heroes’ segment once a week that touts a politician who speaks an unpopular truth (though that may have to be just once a month, or even once a year).

I wouldn’t mind a Disenfranchised news channel, reporting on how things look from the bottom of the heap—the ad revenue for such a channel would be abysmal, but the viewership would be enormous. Science-based news would be good too—but not to report on new gadgets and spacecraft launches—it should report on the connections between scientist and funding, corporations and universities connecting, government and research being influenced by lobbyists—and all that sort of thing. You could throw in some stuff about education too—new educational methods and their implementation, or the barriers against education raised by fundamentalists, prudes, and special interests.

I could go on about all the important content that is presently ignored by the ‘news’, but you get my drift. People have been talking about the monopolization of media by the wealthy; about the surrender of journalism to capitalism, for decades—but now it’s really coming home to roost. Democracy can’t function without free speech and an informed constituency—and while free speech abides, we are no longer being properly informed. The popularity of presidential candidates with no experience in governing and no knowledge of American history gives some small indication of that.

Paul Ryan – What A Jackass   (2015Nov17)

Posted by XperDunn on

Tuesday, November 17, 2015                       10:50 AM

I’m so mad I could spit. Obama spoke at the G20 yesterday, making several sensible points about dealing with Daesh. Among those points was his conviction that humanitarian concern for the refugees was not only a responsibility of the world’s governments, including the USA—but that caring for these helpless victims, without questions about their faiths, is what separates us from Daesh.

In response, a crowd of jackass GOP governors have announced that they will not accept refugees from Syria in their states. That they have no authority to do that is something they choose to ignore—apparently, the political effect of announcing their cowardice and prejudice is enough to satisfy their ostrich-like followers.

Then this morning Paul Ryan was on CNN talking about being ‘prudent’—about how, in the case of Syrian refugees, it is “better to be safe than sorry”. What a cowardly, un-American, xenophobic jackass. He spoke about halting the flow of refugees until we can verify that they are safe to accept into our homeland—ignoring the fact that America’s vetting of refugees is lightyears more involved than any other country’s—that it could not possibly be any more thorough. He just wants to halt the flow—and the rest is all BS excuses.

Is he really afraid of a bunch of dazed, victimized, mostly women and children refugees—or is he simply another GOP knee-jerk, anti-whatever-Obama-wants idiot? Either way, he’s no American. Not the kind of American who leaps, unarmed, to defend a train-full of people from a gun-toting terrorist. Not the kind of American that says, “Give me…the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me…”. Paul Ryan is an elitist, anti-American coward.

And if he and his band of mouse-panicked elephants weren’t bad enough, we have CNN and all the other news outlets making hay out of terror, digging their heels in on the terror aspect of all this and blocking out all the defiance that real men and women feel, far more than any intimidation these thugs wish to engender. I’d rather deal with a suicide bomber than these mealy-mouthed, chicken-hearted, entitled scaredy-cats—they make me sick. And Paul Ryan—you should be ashamed of yourself, you dick.

Time Passes Slowly   (2015Nov15)

Posted by XperDunn on

Sunday, November 15, 2015                                            12:12 PM

“Time Passes Slowly” was one of my favorite Judy Collins songs when I was a teenager—I only wish I could still sense that stillness of time. Here in my aged future, time passes far too quickly—and with less happening in it, to boot. At the moment, it seems last spring was only a few weeks back, that last summer was yesterday, that Halloween came and went while I was glancing at something else—and Thanksgiving is only seconds away, to be followed an hour later by Christmas. That’s what being old feels like (in between the groans and the wheezing, of course) a maelstrom of time that gives not a moment’s rest.

As promised, I purchased Amazon’s only listed biography of Joseph Henry, the American discoverer of electromagnetic induction (Michael Faraday is given the historical credit, in the cliff-notes version). If you remember, I wanted to discover why his name is so unknown today, when he was so revered by scientists for over a century. While that project is still under weigh, I have come up with one thought to share.

Joseph Henry was born in 1797—George Washington was still alive. Henry lived in Albany, New York—recently made the new capital city of New York State. Sloops made regular trips up and down the Hudson River to New York City though by 1807, Fulton’s “Clermont” was steaming over the same route—to be followed by numerous other steam-powered vessels throughout Henry’s youth. As a young teacher-to-be, he made a trip down to West Point to attend a teacher’s conference and learned there of a new invention for the classroom—a black board, which could be written on with chalk, then wiped down and used again—it was a breakthrough in classroom demonstration—the i-pad of its day, if you will.

Henry would continue his experiments with magnetism while teaching Chemistry—Physics would not be recognized as a separate study for some time. And native Americans still lived in the Albany area when he was young—many pioneers passed through Albany on their way west—the North American interior was still very much a separate world. Both the United States and science would grow, slowly but surely, over the years.

It occurred to me that science progresses quite slowly. Euclid’s geometry was written down in the third century BC. Alchemists would work with metalworking, refining, colored dyes, pigments, and other useful materials for centuries, providing the foundation for the Chemistry to come, while being hunted as Satanists. Medical science and astronomy would work through similar resistance from religious institutions to reach understandings of basic human anatomy or the course of the planets through the heavens. Men like Ben Franklin, Alessandro Volta, and Luigi Galvani would spend lifetimes studying electricity without even connecting it with magnetism.

Likewise, it would be almost a century before Henry’s own discovery of induction would produce practical devices such as Morse’s telegraph, Bell’s telephone, or Edison’s dynamo. All of science and technology would crawl along, taking years, or even centuries, to take a single step.

But here’s the thing—as a student in the 1960s and 1970s, I was taught all of these wonders in the space of a handful of semesters. They were not presented as a ‘story of us’—rather as a mere list of rules and functions. It would take me years more to discover the story of humankind implied behind the bare bones of chemistry, calculus, and physics as taught in school.

As I read history, I learned of the life stories of these men and women, of how they lived and died, of the cultures they inhabited while ferreting out these secrets of the universe. I saw the steps taken, one person standing on the shoulders of all who came before—and becoming a foundation for those who would come after. I imagined the changing lives of people who went from caves to indoor plumbing, from horses to steam engines, from papyrus to Gutenberg’s printing-press, from leeches to open-heart surgery.

But I also realized that these giants of human knowledge were all geniuses of some degree—that the principles, the formulas, the mathematics that make up the education of modern children take time to teach because they are all gems of perfect understanding, insights that only our greatest minds could reveal. Their greatness is obvious in the sheer effort required by mortal minds such as my own to grasp what they saw—what they had the genius to recognize and to communicate to the rest of the world (no small feat of its own).

So, yes, it takes time to acquire a good education—because we are climbing on the shoulders of a crowd of intellectual giants. Even so, we are only learning the barest highlights of what they did—without even the names of the people who mined this treasure, much less their stories, or the story of how this knowledge percolated through civilization to yield the wonders of our modern age—no wonder children ask why they need to know these things—they are never told of the richness of humanity’s struggle to wrest understanding from an opaque existence. It’s as if we are loading their knapsacks with gold bars—and never telling them of its value.

So, to begin with, the story of Joseph Henry’s invisibility is the same as the story of the death of a liberal arts education—many people don’t appreciate the context of information as being of equal value to the information itself. We used to teach scholars ancient Greek and Latin—dead languages with no apparent face-value—but when using these old terms, by knowing their origins, we are reminded that some things are as old as ancient Athens or Rome, and that the people of that time were no different from ourselves. Context is its own wisdom—its own information.

Now we are inclined to pare down education even further, by renouncing the creative arts—a sure sign that we don’t appreciate the connection between music and mathematics, painting and chemistry, or dance and physics. We are educating ourselves as if we are machines being prepared to be slotted into a job after our training is over—not as if we want to raise humans with hearts and minds that find fulfilment and wonder in the world around them. Context is everything. I will continue reading Joseph Henry’s biography and I’ll keep you all informed of what I find.

Had a windy day yesterday:

Not Superstitious   (2015Nov13)

Posted by XperDunn on

Friday, November 13, 2015                                              6:23 PM

Pete came by today—we had lots of fun!

Pete and Me On Friday the 13th of November 2015

Five (5) Song Covers:

“A Time For Love”, “The Sweetest Sound”, “Society’s Child”

“Corcovado (Quiet Night of Quiet Stars)”, & “Moon River”

Song Cover:

“Eleanor Rigby”

Two Improvs

And here’s a bit of doggerel:

Let’s make music. Let’s make love. Why we waiting? Let’s get going.

Dance beneath the stars above, Sing just like the wind is blowing.

Shake your body, ring your bell, paint your face with many colors.

Think up stories fun to tell of treasure, travel, first-sight lovers.

Ben Carson is No Democrat   (2015Nov12)

Posted by XperDunn on

Thursday, November 12, 2015                                         4:10 PM

Missouri State University has had some controversy lately, with widely publicized student protests resulting in the resignation of the University’s president. Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson gave his thoughts to Megyn Kelly in a FoxNews interview on Nov. 11, 2015:

“We need to recognize that this is a very dangerous trend. When we get to a point where a majority can say, ‘I don’t like what you’re doing—that’s offensive and therefore I have a right to be violent towards you or to deprive you of rights because I don’t like what you’re doing’, you know, that really goes against the grain of our constitutional rights—and if we don’t see that, we’re in really big trouble right now.”

I’d like to spend a moment unpacking this strange pronouncement because it hurt my ears just to hear someone say it—and I think it deserves to be taken out of the assembly-line of stupid quotes that pass us by each day—and really looked at for the thinking it represents.

Firstly, I want to back-track a bit—when I refer to Carson’s ‘thoughts’ or his ‘thinking’—I’m not entirely sure those are the correct terms—I suspect that Dr. Ben is somewhat delusional. But, beyond that, let’s begin with “We need to recognize that this is a very dangerous trend. When we get to a point where a majority can say, ‘I don’t like what you’re doing’“ –well, that’s called Democracy—and, as our constitutional rights are predicated on an elected body of leaders and representatives, I’d say democracy is kinda constitutional.

When a political party represents the minority, especially as in the case of the GOP, which represents the power elite, they are often put to great pains in finding ways to tell the masses how we should behave—without denying our democratic principles—which they know will upset our feelings. We rarely hear them tell us so baldly how they really feel about majority rule—even when they advocate the new reversals on voting-rights down south.

Carson attempting to dull the pain of his paean against democracy by saying that their decision amounts to “a right to be violent towards you or to deprive you of rights” is a bit of hyperbole, it seems, since asking a college president to resign after he’s offended the entire community is hardly ‘violence’ against him. The whole statement is a masterful example of Republican mirroring-strategy, where the oppressor is called the victim, and the victims are a majority being led astray by shadowy ‘agents of subversion’ that exist only in the conspiracy-nut minds of right-wingers.

Carson concludes with “you know, that really goes against the grain of our constitutional rights—and if we don’t see that, we’re in really big trouble right now.” Now, the decision of the majority sometimes gives us the right to be violent towards someone—as in the case of our many states that still practice executions. Outside of our penal system, it is wrong to be violent—but it is ‘against the law’, not ‘unconstitutional’—as Ben would have it. And that final sentence is pure GOP—i.e., ‘but if you don’t see it my way, you should be very afraid.’

Brain surgeon or not, whenever this man opens his mouth it makes my head hurt—he’s such a dolt. I won’t go into the crowds of mouth-breathers who reverently look up to him as their choice to lead this country—thankfully, I don’t think we’ve gotten ‘to a point where a majority can say’ that—and as long as we remain a democracy, that should keep them from realizing their nightmarish dream.

I played my electric piano for a little while today:

I took some pictures of Fall outside my window today:

SAM_1938

SAM_1937

SAM_1935

And I wrote a bit of poetry the other day:

Tuesday, November 10, 2015        1:43 PM

The Don Quixote Fan Club Theme Song

(Unfinished)

Lovers and heroes and shiny things

Whatever the treasure adventure brings

Lions with faces and ladies with wings

All tales are told when the fall wind sings

You take a sword—I’ve got my bow and arrow

Though the passes be high and the straits be narrow

We’ll battle and tussle and fight our way through—

Whatever adventures adventurers do.

You hop on a charger—I’ll find me a steed

Along the rough road we’ll find else we may need

For nothing can stop us—we ride and we charge

Though troubles be many and monsters be large.

So here’s to our quest

May we all be the best of fellows

Put us to the test

We’ll puff out our chests and bellow

Failure of Leadership / Veterans Day  (2015Nov11)

Posted by XperDunn on

Wednesday, November 11, 2015                                              12:37 PM

Every war we talk about the bravery, the gallantry, of our side’s soldiers—and the perfidy and inhumanity of the other side. And no one with a heart could fail to feel the tragedy of young heroes going to their deaths with honor—or fail to feel disgust at war crimes. But to me, the failure is always on those who allow things to get to the point of war.

The anti-war movement that arose during the Vietnam War was begun by activists—but it attracted many parents of draft-age children, and of children who were currently serving, and of the fallen. They recognized a failure of leadership in a government that cared more for their Cold War ‘chessboard’ than for the men and women being sent into harm’s way. Had they known that Nixon’s advisors had told him the war was unwinnable, they would have had too much ammunition—so they were lied to.

Being the first time that a citizenry had actually opposed its own government’s war plans, the peaceniks made a few mistakes. Their biggest mistake was in demonizing the soldiers, along with their leaders—the horrors of Vietnam were laid at the feet of the grunts on the ground—young boys, mostly, trying their best to survive in a situation that their leaders sent them into without any hope of winning. Whatever savagery was reported as having been committed by US troops in Vietnam (and there was far too much of that, sadly) it was a consequence of boys being sent into hell without any leadership—and that was reflected in the top brass, all the way up to the C-in-C.

Nevertheless, today’s GOP cliché, that liberals don’t ‘support our troops’ was a valid charge in 1972. But the liberals have seen, along with the rest of the country, that our military reflects our leadership—those young people will respond to whatever training and discipline the USA gives them. And with world leaders—and military leaders—that can’t be bothered to think things through, to discuss alternatives, or to make plans before they start shooting—we can’t really expect those leaders to produce an army that won’t immediately descend into bloodlust—the whole idea of war is to suspend civilized behavior for the duration—exceptionally convenient for leaders—not so good for the GIs.

I watched the Iwo Jima Reunion of Honor documentary last night—and I was struck by the refrain of survivors of both sides—that they had nothing against any individual—that they fought only because their country told them to—and because they expected to be killed if they didn’t kill first. I remember the shock I felt, after a Cold War childhood of indoctrination into hating the commies, when I first confronted the truth that most citizens of the USSR were just like us, getting up every morning, going to work, raising a family, trying to live their lives—that they were an ocean away and, outside of a few Politburo members, no more interested in our neighborhood than we were in theirs.

The Cold War was two governments, riddled with fear and ambition, insisting that we citizens share those failings. It was give substance by the nuclear arms race and MAD—but those policies were also confined to our governments—in fact, most information concerning that science was kept secret—we were only supposed to share the fear and hatred, none of the understanding.

I’m disgusted by the fact that humankind is so tantalizingly close to a civilized society in some parts of the world—and our leaders, our military, and our media focus on the trouble spots—trying to treat war as if it were an inevitability. War isn’t inevitable—it is, and always has been, a failure of leadership—we should rename Veteran’s Day to Leaders Should Do Better Day.

Hawks will say this is naïve—that the world is full of evil and it must be fought. Well, evil is everywhere—when it happens here, we call the cops—we don’t declare the neighborhood a war zone—a profit center for arms merchants and black-marketeers. There is a balance to most things—war signifies those places where the powers-that-be have decided ‘balance be damned’. And they don’t do this because they have to—they do it because they’re too damned stupid and lazy to find a better way. Worse, there are those like Dick Cheney, who sees war as good business—how do we forgive ourselves for voting for madmen like him?

Americans have matured—we no longer blame soldiers for the horrors of the wars they are sent into. But when are we going to start blaming the governmental and business leaders whose responsibility those horrors are? When will the ‘Leader of the Free World’ evoke the image of a diplomat, instead of a sniper?

From Ritual to Romance   (2015Nov08)

Posted by XperDunn on

Sunday, November 08, 2015                                            6:21 PM

“From Ritual to Romance” was written by Jessie L. Weston in 1920. It is mentioned by T. S. Eliot in the notes to his poem, ‘The Waste Land’: “Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston’s book.”  Weston’s book, along with Sir James George Frazer ‘s “The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion”, first published in 1890, were hot topics in Eliot’s day. Frazer’s ‘Golden Bough’ did for anthropology what Darwin’s “On The Origin Of Species” did for biology in 1869—it presented academic research indicating that the Christianity of the day was evolved, in many ways, from more-ancient rituals and earlier gods. Further, it showed that religion changes with the times, while it re-tasks older beliefs and traditions. Simple examples include the importance of mistletoe in Christmas tradition—a holdover from Druidic beliefs and rituals—and Christmas itself, a pre-Christian mid-winter festival re-assigned as the day of Christ’s birth, whereas the historical Jesus was most likely born in the spring.

Just as Darwin’s work slowly percolated for decades after its initial publication (the Scopes trial wasn’t until 1925) so too Frazer’s research would not bear the fruit of Weston’s and other writers’ works until well into the beginning of the twentieth century—and this affected T. S. Eliot, scion of a famous Unitarian family and a student of Ancient Greek, Latin, and even Sanskrit (he familiarized himself somewhat with Eastern philosophy—the final ‘shanti’ in The Waste Land is Sanskrit for ‘peace’)—but an intellectual who considered himself an atheist early in his writing career. That he would join the Church of England in his later years, he admitted, was in large part due to his desire for ritual and the focused meditation of prayer.

In his essays on Christianity, culture, and society, Eliot worried that the ending of borders in Europe would lead to an overly homogenous culture, losing the variety of differences between the many nations. His concerns were misplaced, as the United States would handily blanket the globe with Pepsi and Quarter-Pounders soon after the next World War. But the foundation of his concern for cultural diversity, as well as his eventual decision to rejoin a religious community—was at heart a concern for meaning in one’s life and indeed in the lives of everyone.

His masterpiece, “The Waste Land”, was to some extent a gigantic howl at a universe that was losing its old meanings—and having trouble replacing them with modern equivalents. Industrialization, science, and technology were erasing many of the givens—people of different countries were no longer separated by mere physical distance—the secrets of life, of matter, of the universe—all of which had been the province of faith—were now being revealed by scientific inquiry—‘God’ himself had been dethroned.

And Eliot raises a valid point—I spent many years being agnostic, being unsure if my rejection of all religion was based on valid reasoning—but once I decided absolutely on atheism, I’ve spent every moment since in trying to find a way to give life meaning without reverting to any magical improvisations that would simply be religion in another guise. And it’s not easy.

As I watched a PBS documentary on Johnny Carson today, this issue of rituals again raised itself in my mind. In my youth, TVs were made from tubes. This required a TV to be big and boxy—the bigger the screen, the bigger the whole box had to be. So—a very substantial piece of furniture sat in the center of virtually every home—and, at dinner-time, virtually every American turned it on, like a national campfire, and watched either Walter Cronkite or Chet Huntley and David Brinkley tell them the news of the day. Later, at bed-time, Johnny Carson would come on and clue us all in on what was going on, what to care about, what was ‘cool’, and what to laugh off.

The real importance of this was in the following day—our conversations with each other would always have a common context—we all referenced the same ‘source material’. Equally important was our unanimous acceptance of whatever information was received—we talked about how we felt about current events—we never discussed whether we believed what Cronkite or Carson had told us. That’s where the cliché of ‘water-cooler conversation’ comes from—although presently even water-coolers are a thing of the past—now most office workers show up to work with their own individual caffeine drinks from Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts.

Older times saw technology enabling us to be tribal on a larger scale—first radio, then television, gave us a sense that the entire nation, from coast to coast, was all ‘on the same page’. Automobiles allowed us to congregate in public places in larger numbers—and from a larger overall area. The limitations of corded, rotary landlines—mostly always just one to a household—retained the sense that real communication could only be accomplished face-to-face.

And while we are tempted to blame laptops and i-phones for the insularity of modern communication, we should remember that earlier electronics began the change—the advent of touch-tone dialing, call-waiting, multi-party calls, caller-ID, etc.—all made telephony simpler and more akin to an actual conversation. It was around this time that phone cords of exaggerated length became popular—phoning had become easier, and we began to feel a restlessness from still being pinned to one spot in the home.

The differences today are many: we all have our own phones now; we can take them wherever we go now; we don’t have to worry about missing a call—not only do we know who tried to call us, but they can leave a recorded message for us to hear later. Point-of-contact used to be the family kitchen—now each wandering individual is a point-of-contact. Telephone contact is so universal today that we are confronted by situations, as when driving a car, where talking on the phone can actually kill us.

Similar conveniences have stripped away the trials of scholarship—fifty years ago one would inevitably find oneself in need of a public library—specifically the reference section. ‘Mini-reference-sections’, called encyclopedias, were sold door-to-door—mostly to minimize the number of trips to the library. We got to know our librarians; we got to know each other—if we were the kind of people who spent a lot of time reading or studying or researching. Today, I have no need for the reference section of my local library—I don’t even have to cross the room to use my own encyclopedia (yes, I still have a set)—I can just do a Google-search, or check Wikipedia, or find the e-text of a classic tome on the Gutenberg Project website.

Don’t get me wrong—there’s tremendous power there. Not only do I have access to the equivalent of a library reference section—I have access, from right here where I’m sitting, to every university, laboratory, professional association, research society—hell, with the right access codes, I could rifle through the files of DARPA, NASA, or CERN. But my point today is not concerned with the wonders of the Internet—I’m focusing on the fact that I don’t need to break my solitude—I don’t need to open my front door—and I still have access to virtually every bit of information known to mankind.

Convenience in communication, and in scholarship, was welcome progress—but we still needed to get together to have ‘something to do’. Increasing the number of TV channels from three to 300 made it possible to watch a lot more TV—and cable TV made it possible to watch movies without attending a movie theater—but still, there is a limit to how much TV a person can watch. Likewise, there is only so much time that can be spent talking on the phone or studying. In my day, a person always reached a point where he or she simply had to go outside, to mingle with the throng—or simply hang with one’s friends.

Eventually, one way of ‘hanging with friends’ became playing video games—a group of kids would congregate around a TV hooked up to a video game system and take turns using the controllers. And this is where everything came off the rails, in a sense. The advent of multiplayer online gaming, combined with the use of laptops and cellphones, made it possible to both play with friends and socialize with friends—all without leaving the privacy of one’s room. Additionally, one could leave one’s room—could in fact go anywhere—and still remain essentially within that gaming social gathering. This leads, of course, to the phenomenon whereby your kids could be in the room with you, but not really ‘be’ there at all—they’re texting, or IM-ing, or gaming with unseen other kids while their bodies, devoid of conscious awareness, sit in the same room you’re in.

We call this new generation ‘digital natives’—people who grow up with digital, online technology as a given. To digital natives, being physically present is of less importance than online connection—they pay attention to their screens, not to the people in their environment—hence all the car-crashes caused by cellphones. There was once a time when a rainy day was bad news for kids—it meant we couldn’t go outside to play—and that was a major tragedy in our young lives. Nowadays, when parents force their kids to go outside, it is more likely to cut them off from their friends and their playtime.

In a culture that shops online, plays online, watches online entertainment, communicates online, and learns online, we find that something is lost. In Eliot’s time, they felt the loss of religion as an absolute—but they also lost the comfortable patterns of a life where God was central to everyday activities. In our time, we are experiencing the loss an even more elemental aspect of our daily lives—shared physical presence. And the list of rituals being lost in this new ‘normal’ is even greater.

Consider laundry—there are still parts of the world where we could witness the weekly washing of clothes by a riverbank—those people gather and mingle and chat as they do their laundry ‘community-style’—and for centuries, all mankind did their laundry in this way. When washing machines came along, people hung up their wash on clotheslines—often socializing with their neighbors over the back fence—a smaller social group, but still partially a community activity. Then came electric dryers—and homemakers found themselves, at least as far as laundry was concerned, acting in solitude, shut up each in their own homes.

Why are rituals important? Look at it this way—we can strive for success, for achievement, for goals of many types—we can chase after lovers, mates, and romance—we can eat, sleep, and work—but all of it is empty without a context, a continuum, that is the cycle of our daily lives. Humans are a social species—we need the comforting presence of others, we need interaction with our peers. But we are raising children in an environment of solitude—where are they supposed to find meaning and fulfillment in their lives? How can they build a comforting pattern of social rhythms to give their lives continuity?

And make no mistake—we have need of these things. Take the Sabbath day as an example—with the decline of religion, one might ask why bother with a day of interruption? But we need rest as much as we need sleep—however we came up with the idea of a ‘day of rest and prayer’, it fits our biological rhythms—even without feeling obligated to pray to God once a week, we still benefit from the rhythm of taking every seventh day off. Or take another example—the taboos on certain foods, like pork or shellfish, were once considered religious observances—but they were useful in that such foods are health risks if not carefully cooked. Further, in modern America, where a person can eat anything—and as much of it as they please—we find that eating without limits presents greater health risks than any one type of food could ever pose.

Boundaries, rituals, democracy, all the inconveniences of being part of a group, rather than a free, solitary agent—these things have a value to our mental and physical health, to our sense of having a rich, fulfilling life. We may be able to get along without our imaginary friend, God, but we are finding out that life can be even more empty and angst-ridden if we try to live without each other, without community and society. There may come a day when we no longer have prisons—we may come to recognize that everyone is already in a prison, that criminals can be punished and isolated from society by the simple expedient of taking away their online connection.

This may seem rambling and generalizing, but I’m trying to make the point that the rhythms and patterns of community provide a substrate for the discrete pursuits of life—earning a living, raising a family, the arts, the sciences, politics, etc. We focus on these ‘goals’ of life and overlook the fact that life has a context within which all this goal-seeking behavior occurs—that there are moments between these activities—that our consciousness goes in and out of these discrete pursuits, but our awareness is confronted by an unbroken continuum of existence—and that overall ‘existence’, without substance, becomes a void that we fall into whenever we are not consciously busy with a particular aspect of our interest. No matter what our individual interests may be, we still need our overall lives to have texture and substance. Without experience outside of our online connections, life becomes disjointed, disconnected, and begins to lose value or meaning.

The human animal can adapt to many changes—but not to emptiness. It has been noted that a person left in a sensory-deprivation chamber will quickly be driven mad by a nervous system bereft of input. We are in danger of finding our global village trapped in an electronic isolation that will drive the whole world mad—we may find that civilization will ultimately be destroyed, not by fire or ice, but by our lust for convenience.

Four Political Thoughts (2015Nov06)

Posted by XperDunn on

20151106XD-Rijk_LArbre_de_science

Thursday, November 05, 2015                                         3:41 PM

Can You Feel The Warming Now?   (2015Nov05)

Oil and Coal interests have been denying climate change for so long that they are now being investigated by the New York attorney general Eric T. Schneiderman. Since the world outside our borders has accepted climate change as real, there are a mounting number of international agreements on limiting carbon emissions. As the writing on the wall becomes more legible, a new legal strategy presents itself—by obfuscating the unstoppable tide of repression that fossil fuels face in the near future, Schneiderman posits, energy companies have been misleading their investors as to the value of energy stocks—in other words, financial fraud.20151106XD-Rijk_Lectern-Felix_Meritis_Society

Big Energy has been questioning scientists’ concerns over greenhouse gasses since the 1970s—and has been successful, domestically, in carrying the day, partly due to confusion raised by conflicting research—which they paid for. This was a successful strategy insofar as it focused on doubting the details and expanding the questions—difficulties with ‘absolute proof’ are inherent in scientific research, especially in a field as new as climate science. That is the whole point of ‘doubt factory’ lawyering.

20151106XD-Rijk_Mantle_clock

But we have reached a point where doubting climate science only works now in a court of law—finer points aside, only an idiot would question climate change as visible, and worsening. Plus, even if climate change is unprovable, in a legal sense, there is no question that people and businesses are now behaving as if it is true—and this changes the future potential value of energy stocks. In short, economic pressures pushed the energy companies to fight the inevitable—and now economic pressures are going to oppose their interests.

There is sometimes a subtle poetry to politics—if efforts like this new lawsuit can enhance America’s too-slow response to this issue, we may yet have a hope of retaining the polar ice-caps and avoiding sending most of the globe’s coastal real estate where Atlantis went. Of course, there’s still overfishing and rising acidity in the oceans, habitat-loss and species-loss on land, and plenty of other disasters-in-waiting to worry about—but clean-energy conversion would still be something we could all be proud of.

20151106XD-Rijk_Allegory_of_the_science

Some Kind Of Crazy

What is the difference between Trump crazy and Ben Carson crazy? Trump’s brand of crazy comes from ego and avarice—a businessman who feels that defeating the competition is as valuable as succeeding, a boardroom warrior who would rather burn down the building than lose his standing, a financier who would gladly bankrupt his company to protect his personal fortune, regardless of the losses suffered by others. He respects strength and strategy—which is understandably attractive to Republicans, yet Trump doesn’t discard practical knowledge, math, or science because they are too useful—and far more common in business than they ever are in politics.

Ben Carson’s crazy is a whole other animal—Rachel Maddow recently described it as a war on epistemology, or the ‘theory of knowledge’. According to recent quotes, it appears that Carson’s ‘American History’ (as well as his personal history) are simply stories he makes up as he goes along. His fundamentalism makes for some outlandishly screwy quotes that would place most people firmly in the ‘crank’ category—but he is a GOP presidential candidate, so at least during the primary he gets a pass on that particular line of nutcake.

20151106XD-Rijk_Portrait_of_Dr_Gachet

Ben Carson is an iconoclast, i.e. ‘a person who attacks cherished beliefs or institutions’—but where traditional usage refers to those who attack religion and the establishment, Carson is an iconoclast who attacks the cherished ideas of humanism and science. More than that, he attacks many ideals that most of us consider core principles of the American spirit. His statements about barring Muslims from elected office are a direct contradiction of our Constitution. Moreover, I find any kind of fundamentalism or evangelical zealotry to be vaguely un-American—to accept pluralism requires us to be hard-headed about which of our faiths’ finer points should be debated as public policy.

On the surface, it would appear that anyone can believe anything—our thoughts don’t show, our religion doesn’t imprint on our foreheads. Our freedom of religion recognizes that fact—but it also implies that we have to be circumspect in any real-world manifestations of our chosen faith, particularly in public—especially in politics. There is a world of difference between believing that the Earth is only 6,000 years old—and deciding policy based on that belief. If your faith tells you that women have less status than men, you still have to recognize that, in the real world, the rest of us—and the law—don’t agree.

Today’s far-right has embraced the evangelical, ignoring the fact that theocracy by any other name is still anti-American. There are many faiths in this country—and there always will be. To pick just one, and incorporate it into a political platform, should by all rights be political suicide—that this is not true for the GOP is just one of its many dysfunctions. And it is also what makes a delusional nut-job like Ben Carson a viable candidate for their party.

20151106XD-Rijk_Invention_of_the_compass

Why We (Choose To) Fight

I was shocked the other night watching “The Brain with David Eagleman” on PBS—it was the episode about how we make choices. Towards the end, he shows an experiment that measures a person’s ‘disgust’ threshold—that is, how easily they are grossed out. Then he follows that up with another experiment that measures a person’s political bent—conservative or liberal. What was shocking about this was his statement that the tests showed a virtually unanimous correlation between a low ‘disgust’ threshold and a preference for conservatism. Neuroscientist David Eagleman said that he could look at the results of just the first test—and tell a person’s political leanings without giving them the second test.

If you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. What are the things conservatives often deride about liberals?—Gooey things, like long hair, quiche, yogurt, or tofu—just the kinds of things that, at first glance, are somewhat repulsive. There is a ‘disgust’ barrier around these things—and only certain kinds of people will push back long enough to give these things a try. Not all liberals enjoy yogurt, you understand—but liberals are more likely to give it a try.

20151106XD-Rijk_Mécanique_de_Vaisseau-volant

Being hawkish is a conservative trait—perhaps the male ego feels disgust for the idea of not fighting—even when fighting may be a bad idea. Poor people can be kind of gross—and women’s health certainly makes men squeamish—health issues in general can get pretty slimy, repulsing both men and women. Wouldn’t it be funny if conservatism turned out to be regressive—a sign of emotional childishness? Like kids who won’t even try their broccoli. Xenophobia is a form of disgust—perhaps that is what makes liberals more inclusive—they more easily look past the surface strangeness to the human being underneath.

I say we stop considering conservatism as merely another point of view—I say we start calling liberalism what it really is—intellectual maturity. Then again, I don’t need a scientist to convince me that conservatives are often childish—and being childish, nothing anyone says will convince them to change their minds. Only voting them out of office will do that.

20151106XD-Rijk_Lectern-Felix_Meritis_Society(Detail)

Suggestion Box

I have a couple of suggestions. First, we should consider the millions of Syrian refugees as a potential resource. European countries are already seeing the potential benefit of an influx of younger, more energetic citizens. But what about giving Syrians a chance to do something about their own country?

What say the UN offers all young adult Syrian refugees the opportunity for military training—we gear up a few divisions of native sons and daughters, give them the arms and equipment and support they’d need to retake their country, and point them at Assad and ISIL? That way, outsiders like the US don’t have to send troops into a foreign country. Young displaced Syrians have an opportunity to do something other than depend on the charity of the world—and they wouldn’t go anywhere after the fighting is over—they’ll set up a responsive government—maybe they’ll even send for their relatives, old and young, to rejoin them in their native land— a Syria finally free of endless fighting. It’s just a thought.

20151106XD-Rijk_Artilleriewerkplaats

My second suggestion is for Hillary Clinton’s campaign—hey, why don’t you guys rise above the media’s narrative and focus your platform entirely on infrastructure? You could come up with specific projects for most of the fifty states—smart highways, clean energy, bullet trains, wilderness bridges, dam tunnel, bridge and highway refurbishing, underground fiber-optic networks,–hell, I could go on and on—and I’m just one person. I’m sure a room full of people could produce quite a list.

And every one of those projects would make jobs, stimulate our economy, and put America’s infrastructure back to its former place as leader of the world. One of the most telling aspects of a developed country is its ease of transportation and communication—and these are the greatest lacks of underdeveloped countries. Lack of roads and barriers to communication contribute to poverty, hunger, and despotism in all the most bedeviled parts of the world—and those with a plethora of such resources are too busy doing business to have uprisings, insurgents, or to invite the chaos we find in the world’s worst trouble-spots.

20151106XD-Rijk_Book_Printing

Eisenhower’s great post-war push to grow America’s highways was an essential element in our rise to wealth and power in the latter half of the twentieth century—but now we are losing roads, bridges and other key features through neglect and an assumed entitlement that often precedes a great empire’s slide into decline. This stuff won’t fix itself.

We spend a lot of time and money on what we call Defense—it’s more than half the federal budget. Shouldn’t we consider taking some defensive measures against the passage of time? If we don’t have the will, or the spirit, to improve our infrastructure, we should at least defend against the loss of what our forebears have already provided.

20151106XD-Rijk_Windmolen

All images are property of the Rijksmuseum—to whom all thanks are due:

Gazette du Bon Ton 1914, No. 8, Pl. 80: L’Arbre de science /Robe du soir de Doeuillet, Anonymous, George Doeuillet, Lucien Vogel, 1914

Mantle clock (pendule), Anonymous, Benjamin Lewis Vulliamy, c. 1802 – c. 1803

Allegory of the science, Jeremias of Chess, Henry Crown Velt, 1696

Portrait of Dr Gachet, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Ferdinand Gachet, 1890

Invention of the compass, Philips Galle, c. 1589 – c. 1593

Mécanique de Vaisseau-volant, Anonymous, c. 1781 – c. 1784

Lectern of the Felix Meritis Society, Anonymous, c. 1778 – c. 1779

Artilleriewerkplaats, Philips Galle, c. 1589 – c. 1593

Book Printing, Philips Galle, c. 1589 – c. 1593

Windmolen, Philips Galle, c. 1598 – c. 1593

On VOD, Reviewed: Three Films (2015Nov05)

Posted by XperDunn on

Tuesday, November 03, 2015                                           12:40 PM

Pre-Reviews   (2015Nov03)

Okay, I’m an old fuddy-duddy—I added these movies to my “Cart” from the “Just In” menu of my Cable VOD listings: “Best Of Enemies”, a documentary about the 1968 debates between William F. Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal, the then-champion intellectuals of America’s political right- and left-wings, respectively; “The End Of The Tour”, a re-enactment of Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky’s road-trip/interview with the late novelist David Foster Wallace during his 1996 book tour promoting his masterpiece, “Infinite Jest”; and “Inside Out”, the animated Disney feature about the inside of a young lady’s head, populated by characters that represent emotions—Joy, Anger, Fear, etc.—as she experiences the trials of childhood.

As a twelve–year-old, I remember finding the Buckley/Vidal debates excruciatingly boring—they talked of issues I knew nothing about, using words I couldn’t understand—I hope, forty-seven years later, I can understand them a bit better. I’m actually looking forward to watching “Best Of Enemies”—even though my memories of those talks are vague, I still miss their obvious insistence on clarity and correctness—something so absent from the politics of our new millennium. Ironically, it was most likely the entertainment value of their last exchanges, which devolved into anger and name-calling, which brought forth the kind of nonsense we see in modern debates.

I’m not sure whether I’ll enjoy watching “The End of The Tour”. David Foster Wallace’s writing is a beautiful stream-of-consciousness cornucopia of vocabulary and images unmatched by other living writers—but his subject matter was unfailingly dark, disgusting, and full of despair. Add to that the unpleasant highlights of his blurb-biography—and the fact that he committed suicide in 2008—and I’m left with the suspicion that I won’t have much fun watching the film, no matter how well-made. Having plowed through “The Broom Of The System” and “Infinite Jest”, and having read the first few stories of “Oblivion: Stories”, I’m afraid to read any more of his stuff, especially now that he’s killed himself—I have my own struggles with depression and I don’t need my leisure pursuits to reinforce my worst impulses. I think I want to watch the movie just to get close to his beautiful mind again, without having to actually join him there by reading his works.

“Inside Out” should be fun for me—as a kid, I used to run cross-country—and I’d pretend my body was a mechanism, and I was a controller sitting inside my brain, behind my eyes, ‘flying’ myself around the track, or through the paths in the woods behind our school. Besides, I don’t think I’ll ever outgrow Disney animated films—they’re the best—and if the reviews and box-office are anything to go by, this is one of their better efforts.

20151105XD-BestOfEnemies_Movie

Wednesday, November 04, 2015                                              9:51 AM

Post Review   (2015Nov04)

“Best Of Enemies”  is an enjoyable documentary and I found it especially so because it gives impressions of the two-party mind-set just as that paradigm was coming to the surface. Prior to World War II, social friction was between Rich and Poor—easy-peasy, simple as that. During that War, America put on its best overalls and pretended we were ‘all in this together’. Immediately post-war we busied ourselves fighting against ‘Red propaganda’, touting liberty, democracy, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion. Having gone from competing armies to competing ideologies, America’s entitled found themselves in a quandary—many of the free world’s ‘good features’ were populist and inclusive. Unions were acceptable, racial integration had begun in the military, and women were fresh from the workforce—pushed out by returning servicemen and the closing of war factories, but still cognizant of what they had achieved during those years spent in so-called ‘men’s jobs’.

To me, religion is the most elusive aspect of those times—we were claiming that religious freedom was a touchstone of modern civilization, but there were many Americans who assumed that Protestant Christianity was the default American faith. This allowed the establishment (an old term for the rich and powerful) to take exception to some freedoms as ‘sinful’—particularly when talking about women’s roles and rights. As we had seen during the war, women were legally accepted as equal—able to work in factories, offices—even serve in the military as ‘support’—but the Bible gave chauvinists the ammunition to reverse that acceptance. The invention of the Pill brought birth control into the equation—and we were off to the races. Women’s equality saw such a backlash that it would be the 1970s before any pushback from women was heard. Still, theocratic mores had permanently embedded themselves into the toolkit of the rich and powerful.

Law and order was another meme adopted by the establishment—but it was used as code for white supremacy. Any public outcry or demonstration in favor of racial justice was characterized as lawlessness—urban rioting was blamed on the rioters, not on the issues that got them rioting. This double-talk would appear legitimate until the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were adopted—afterward it became increasingly difficult to characterize social progress as ‘troublemaking’. And to this day, police brutality is rationalized by the rich and powerful as ‘maintaining the peace’.

Our half-century of ‘war on drugs’ was also a thinly-veiled attempt to persecute African-Americans. The criminalization of marijuana as a Schedule I drug, the CIA’s involvement in flooding American cities with crack cocaine, our present-day swollen prison population—mostly non-violent drug offenders—are all examples of how drugs (which are a legal, billion-dollar industry) are still being used to persecute minorities. The establishment remains rabidly anti-drug, in spite of evidence that the War on Drugs created an underworld market—a subculture that makes it easier for their own children to get ensnared by addictive drugs than if they were legally sold over the counter, like cigarettes or booze.

Post-war Americans retained many wartime attitudes—‘get it done, no matter what’ was a common phrase while fighting to save the world from Fascism—but after the war, we still felt that a good person would just ‘get it done’. Those who couldn’t ‘get it done’ were useless, rather than helpless—they deserved our derision, not our sympathy. The old, the sick, the poor, the unemployed—these people were useless—they didn’t deserve help—that was the establishment line. Buckley habitually described the poor as ‘lazy’—as if poverty was a choice.

So we see the kernel of modern conservatism in Buckley’s battle of wits with Gore Vidal—biblical fundamentalism, thinly-disguised racism and sexism, and blaming the victims in lieu of social support programs. Buckley’s early work in stymying social progress and maintaining white male supremacy can seem silly to us today—but his fatuous reasonings were acceptable to the staid, close-minded majority of Americans of his time. Today’s conservatism has become far more sophisticated—it has had to, since the majority of Americans today see things more from Vidal’s point of view. We are, by and large, far more open-minded and inclusive about race, sex, and sexuality—and we have documentation proving that social support programs help the whole society, not just those who need them. Yet the philosophical battle rages on—proof, to my mind, that it is what it has always been—rich versus poor, those in power versus those without a voice.

20151105XD-TheEndOfTheTour_Movie

Thursday, November 05, 2015                                         7:39 AM

Post-Review   (2015Nov05)

“The End of The Tour” is well-acted, beautifully photographed, mysterious, engrossing—a surprisingly powerful movie, given the scope of the action—and most importantly, it is not a documentary. We aren’t led through a delving into the details of David Foster Wallace’s life and work—in fact, much of the dialogue displays Wallace’s fear of being detailed and analyzed.

David Lipsky, author and journalist, had just published his own novel when Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” exploded onto the cultural scene—and we see that he is appalled by the rave reviews for Wallace, and then more appalled by reading “Infinite Jest”. I can attest to the impression made by that experience—Wallace’s writing is unbelievably good and can’t help but evince a touch of despair in anyone with pretensions of writing. Rather than being repulsed by such overbearing competition, Lipsky becomes fascinated and cajoles his Rolling Stone editor into letting him interview Wallace as he completes his book tour.

Thus begins a short road trip, an awkward bro-mance between two equally neurotic intellectuals who couldn’t be more different. Lipsky is torn between admiration and envy. Wallace is torn by his sudden celebrity, which represents a sort of pinnacle of all the failings of American culture so deftly deconstructed and demonized in his writing. Few films make such an open-and-shut case for the theory that all great art is the product of suffering—or the irony that subsequent success only adds to the suffering.

Adapted from David Lipsky’s “Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself : A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace”, a book which expands on the original magazine article, this film has a quiet beauty that belies the ugly struggle of creative expression and its practical side-effects. It has a camaraderie that belies the intense rivalry endemic to artists—and it has a peacefulness that belies the internal struggles of extreme, self-conscious intellectualism. For a film that is the opposite of an ‘action’ movie, it is a terribly exciting adventure.

20151105XD-InsideOut_Movie

Thursday, November 05, 2015                                         2:29 PM

Post-Review   (2015Nov05)

“Inside Out” is excellent family fare, as we’ve come to expect from Disney/Pixar. It is packed with humor yet isn’t a comedy—a special formula that had served Disney well for decades. Drama, with all the fear and confusion that is the subtext of childhood, is what elevates their product above the pabulum Hollywood often offers to children. I’m reminded of my own childhood reaction to Mary Poppins—which, for the 1960s, was pretty mature fare for a family film—there is no greater satisfaction for a kid than to be entertained without being condescended to.

The story has complexities that one usually associates with adult drama—there is an interior story—the characters inside the girl, Riley’s, mind—and an exterior story—Riley’s family moves to California. The interior story involves anthropomorphized emotions and other details of the mind’s inner workings that are simplified, but correct, as evidenced by the credit roll’s expression of gratitude to the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute of Columbia University. One learns through the course of the film some fascinating elements of brain function and memory.

As a story, the most telling effects are the back and forth between the inner emotions of Riley and her exterior words and actions—the two stories are not overwhelming in themselves, but the interplay of the two brings a richness to the vicarious environment. There are also hints at the same ‘committee of feelings’ inside the mind of Riley’s mother—and indeed, by the movie’s end, we get a peek inside all the characters’ minds.

As a story-telling ‘frame’ it is a rich vein of original situations that bodes well for an ongoing franchise of ‘Inside Out’ sequels. However, this first movie’s central theme—the necessity, in maturing children, for their joy to accommodate their sadness—will be hard to replace with an equally stout tent-pole in subsequent stories. Still, this cleverly wrought mechanism of interior dialogues will add spice to any tale—and I’ll probably watch as many sequels as they can produce.

If the movie has a valuable message for young viewers, I’d say it was the distinction made between disaffection, or the loss of joy—and sadness, a necessary emotion in life. One hopes that children will see this film and have a better sense of their own emotional states—and be better able to withstand the pot-holes of bad days and rough times. Let’s hope so.

Well, that’s it—three films in three days cost me $16, over and above our monthly cable fee—so don’t expect regular installments of movie reviews—I ain’t got that kinda cash. I admit, though, that if next week’s New Listings on VOD has three equally attractive titles, I’ll probably do it again—it’s not like I’m a Zen-master of self-control or anything.