Life on a Go Board

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I don’t like it when words are used as stones on a Go board, or statements used as chess-pieces—those are combat simulations—since when did communication become combat? For that matter, when did words become the only form of communication? Actions speak louder than words, but words, or perhaps videos’ scripts, are considered a life-connection from you or me to someone halfway round the world. Am I really connected to those people? Funny story (you know I accept friend-requests from anyone) this new Facebook-friend of mine only posts in Arabic—it’s beautiful stuff, but I don’t even know the basic phonemes of that written language—and I had to ask him to tell me his name (or equivalent sound) in Roman script.

I don’t want to get into a debate here about argument. Formal argument, or debate, is certainly useful and productive—as is regular old arguing, when it’s done with restraint or when its goal is an elusive solution or resolution. The Scientific Method, itself, is an implied debate—a conflict between prior theories and the new theories that overthrow them—or that are overthrown thereby—no, I’m not saying that communication isn’t rife with conflict—my purpose here is to discuss other forms of communication and sharing. So, please, let’s not argue (—jk).

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I finally realized that all these unsolicited friend requests from the Mid-East were because I was using a photo of Malala Yousafzaya as my Profile Pic! I’m glad—now I know they’re not shadowy extremists trying to cultivate an American connection—they are instead the liberals of their geographic zone.

Such international friends frustrate me—the lack of words that I don’t type could be just as offensive as any thoughtless words I post—and there are plenty of those. I wish I knew what they were. Whenever someone wants to Facebook-friend me as their American friend, I start right in on criticizing all their grammar faux pas and misunderstood colloquialisms—they love it—that’s what they want from their American friend. I’m afraid geek-dom knows no borders—only my fellow geeks from faraway lands appreciate criticism—I’m sure people with the Cool gene flock together across the datasphere as well (but then, I’ll never know—will I?)

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But communication, as a means of sharing ideas and organizing cooperative efforts, is far more than a battle of witty words. Political cartoons, cartoon cartoons, obscene gestures, and ‘making out’ come first to mind—although there are plenty more examples. The Media (a term I use to denote People magazine, other newspapers and periodicals, radio, cable-TV, VOD, cable-news, talk shows, private CC security footage, YouTube and the omnipresent Internet.) I say… the Media is looking for trouble.

They aren’t broadcasting cloudless summer skies or a happy family sitting around the dinner table or the smoothly proceeding commuter traffic a half a mile from the traffic accident. And I don’t blame them. Their job is to entertain—that’s what pays their bills. And I don’t blame us, either. We are happier watching dramatic thrills than watching paint drying. There’s no getting around that.

And I won’t play the reactionary and suggest that we go back to a time when entertainment was a brief treat enjoyed, at most, once a week. Even the idle rich (and this is where that ‘idle’ part comes from) just sat around socializing when they weren’t at a fox-hunt or a ball. To be entertained was almost scandalous—think of it—in a deeply religious society, such escapism went against the morality of the times—and even as a once-a-week diversion, it was frowned upon not only to be a stage player, but to attend the performance, as well.

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But entertainment, like a gas, expands to fit the size of its civilization—those old scruples took a few centuries to kick over, but once the digital age had dawned it seemed quite natural that everyone should have access to twenty-four-hour-a-day entertainment (call it ‘news and current events’, if it helps). And now we have people walking into walls and driving their cars into walls while they stare fixedly at their entertainment devices.

So, trite as the word may seem, Media is a mandatory entity to include in any discussion of the human condition. And more importantly, it must be a part of the Communication topic, as well—most especially with a view towards a formulation of culture that does not make conflict our primary means of sharing and informing our minds. So let’s recap—Entertainment equals drama equals conflict equals fighting (See ‘Arnold Schwarzenegger’). Information equals scientific method equals discussion equals human rights (See ‘Bruce Willis’—jk).

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To begin, there is one thing that needs to be acknowledged—learning is NOT fun. I’d love it if it was—I know fun can be used to teach some things—It’s a lovely thought—but, No. Learning is a process of inserting information into the mind. People talk a lot about transcendental meditation but, for real focus, learning is the king. To learn, one must be patient enough to listen; to absorb an idea, one must be willing to admit that one doesn’t know everything; to completely grasp a new teaching, one may even have to close ones eyes and just concentrate—nothing more, no diversions, no ringtone, no chat, no TV, no nothing—just thinking about something that one is unfamiliar with—and familiarizing oneself.

We forget all that afterward—the proof in that is that none of us graduate from an educational institution with the ability to ‘sub’ for all the teachers we’ve studied under. We have learned, but only a part of what was taught—it’s implications, ramifications, uses, and basic truths may have eluded us while we ‘learned to pass the class’. Contrariwise, our teachers may have bit their tongues—eager to share some little gem of Mother Nature’s caprice implicit in the lesson plan—and had instead put the ‘teaching of the class to pass’ before the ‘teaching of the class’.

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And that is no indictment of teaching, that’s just a fact—it doesn’t prevent me from admiring great teachers. But I couldn’t help notice that great teachers always color outside the lines in some few ways. Teaching people to learn for themselves, with that vital lesson neatly tucked into the course-plan of the material subject of a course—it takes effort, discipline, and way more patience than that possessed by most of the rest of us—but it also requires an allegiance to the Truth of Plurality, that incubator of eccentricity.

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But we forget our Learning. It becomes something we simply ‘know’, something that we just ‘know how to do’. Part of good parenting is learning to teach well—young people have the luxury of just understanding something, while parents must struggle to figure out how to explain it, or teach it, to their children. And then we forget about that learning—and must scratch our heads again, struggling to explain ‘explaining’ to our grown-up, new-parent offspring. It’s a light comedy as much as anything else.

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So learning is not fun. There is a thrill involved, however, that is almost always worth the ticket price. The internet and the TV blare words at us in their millions, info to keep us up-to-date—just a quick update—and now there’s more on that—and we’ll be hearing a statement from the chief of police….—also, we are seduced by lush orchestrations or driven musical beats, by the gloss and beauty and steel and flesh of literal eye-candy, and that dash of soft-core porn that is the engine under the hood of so many TV series.

We see breaking YouTube uploads of rioting in a faraway land—we believe that our quiet little lives are nothing, that all our sympathy and concern should be spread across the globe to billions of strangers in distress. We are flooded with information by the Media—but because it’s the Media, only conflicts and crises are shown—the peaceful, happy billions of people that pass by those crowd scenes, that seek refuge across the border, that have families and generate love to whomever gets near enough—we don’t need to see them.

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But that isn’t true—it’s true for the Media, but it isn’t true for us. The Media can’t change—but we can be aware of its bias. We can take note of the fact that the Media should not be the major part of our dialogues with one another. Best of all, we can become aware of how much the Internet can teach us—if we can stop IM-ing and web-surfing and MOMPG-ing long enough to notice that the Internet is a hell of a reference book.

No, I’m not saying we should trust the Internet. I’m saying that the real information is there, and finding it and using it will be the road into the future that our best and brightest will walk along. They will pull their eyes away from the Mario Race-Cart, the YouTube uploads of kittens and car-crashing Russians, and George Takei’s Facebook page—and they will throw off the chains of Media and make it their bitch again, back where it belongs.

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In WWII, fighter-group captains and flight-team leaders are always saying ‘Cut the chatter, guys—heads up!’ I think we need the same thing—everyone should have a little devil on their shoulder that says the same thing—“Hey! –so the Internet connects you to the entire civilized world—that doesn’t mean you have to say anything—it just means you can.”

Our high-tech communications infrastructure is no small part of the problem—the digital magic that flings words and pics and music all over the world bestows an importance and a dignity to our messages that many messages don’t deserve. Posting to the Internet is kind of like being on TV—it grants a kind of immortality to the most banal of text-exchanges—it can even be used against you in court—now, that’s very special and important—and now, so am I, just for posting!

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So, yearning for the perennial bloodlust of Law & Order: SVU, our self-importance inflated, and our eyes off the road, we speed towards tomorrow. I hate being a cynic.

[PLEASE NOTE: All graphics courtesy of the Quebec National Gallery]

“The Big Book of Movie Annotations”

I’m gonna write a book about all the historical details of all the movies, just like those annotated Shakespeare books that explain what ‘wherefore’ actually means—and why pouring poison into someone’s ear was a normal method of assassination in the context of “Hamlet”, etc.—I’m gonna include all the details I notice when I watch old movies, such as a modern closed-captioning transcriber’s mistranslation of a certain slang phrase from the thirties because it can be mistaken for something similar, if only phonetically, in the present day.

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Future generations may need it spelled out for them. They may not appreciate the difference between Bill “Bojangles” Robinson dancing down the stairs with Shirley Temple in “The Little Colonel” (1935), say, and the heartbreaking montage of ‘blackface’ film-clips in Spike Lee’s “Bamboozled” (2000). They may miss the tragedy of Bill Robinson appearing, near the end of his life and far past his prime, in one of his very few film appearances—a world-famous dancer whose perception, by white Americans, as ‘inferior’ kept him excluded during what is sometimes called ‘Hollywood’s Golden Era”—the ‘studio system’ movie industry that monopolized filmmaking until the 1950s.

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They may not understand the mournful soundtrack behind Lee’s montage of examples from popular culture of the Jim Crow era’s easygoing dismissiveness of African-Americans’ humanity—the TV executive character may live in more modern times, but his self-regard and his own experience of life have been just as marginalizing, if less overt.

So much of history is subtle. The Looney Tunes of the thirties had blatantly bigoted caricatures of non-whites—absorbed, unnoticed, by most audience-members of that time—that are since aired (and that rarely) with a warning message of introduction that specifies the thoughtless racial profiling as an evil that was part and parcel of the creative culture of its day. As late as 1946, the syndicated comic strip “Walt Disney presents Uncle Remus and Tales of the South” was the basis for the Disney film, “Song of the South” (1946)—the NAACP disapproved of the African-American portrayals in the film even before “Song of the South” was released. This was the first time a Walt Disney movie was criticized for its ethical content (with the exception of Fantasia, for animated ‘nudity’, five years earlier).

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It’s amazing, really, the glacial change in racial attitudes, from slavery, to Jim Crow, to the Civil Rights Movement. The NAACP and the Civil Rights Movement began just after WWII, but racism was still a source of rioting and conflict in the Sixties, and isolated media spikes like the Rodney King beating—caught live on tape yet still exonerating the brutality of the LAPD—to the present day (that vigilante shooting of an unarmed teenager in Florida was less than a year ago).

Our first ‘black’ President was so ahead of schedule that no one my age or older could watch his 2008 acceptance speech without tears in their eyes. We may be forgiven if we mistake that for an end of prejudice in America—it is so certainly the end of any public ambivalence about racial equality that it’s almost as good. Racism has been reduced to marginal personalities and inbred cultural pockets—which, like domestic abuse, religious extremism, and misogyny—can only be changed by the law and time.

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But that is only one of the many threads of history that are woven into our films—not the vicarious world of the movie itself but the techniques, language, artistry, science, and craft of all moviemakers, from starlet to soundstage doorman. The events of their day created mind-sets that varied as the world went on, from Edison’s early forays into cinema theaters to the CGI FX of the now.

Even deeper down, we can see the differences in attitudes towards the shared past—from Sergei Eisenstein’s “Alexander Nevsky” (1938), to Richard Thorpe’s “Ivanhoe” (1952), to Ridley Scott’s “Kingdom of Heaven” (2005)—we see the era of the Crusades, but through three different cultures’ interpretation! It gives a parallax effect to the movies, particularly those with historical settings.

Similar to Shakespeare, who requires translation due to the archaic language which old William was both using and inventing as he went along; similar to Dickens, whose early-Industrial-Era British-isms are as often a search into history as they are dialogue or narration; the movies of the twentieth century include a panoply of annotation-worthy dialogue, motivation, slang, and perceptions, both of their time and their view of past times.

To begin with, there are, of course, the Stars—and they offer so much of interest that, while writing my book, I shall have to be careful not to lose sight of my subject and get lost among the fanatical discourse (so-called ‘news’ of celebrities who are the objects of the ‘Fan’-public’s obsession). Then, there are the producers, the directors, the hundreds of others listed on today’s film credits (which is odd, if you consider that more people probably worked on the old films, when the studio only allowed about twenty or thirty names to be on the credits).

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All those people had family (and/or love-lives) so there are ‘dynastic’ threads, as well, that could be linked chronologically to the shooting schedules of certain films. The same goes for their health—accidents, illnesses, dissolution, stress, mania—all these things are part of the scheduling, the tone, and the final team of filmmakers for any film.

Then there is music—and the films are not shy about the importance of music—biopics of musicians are a significant percentage of all movies made:

There’s “Amadeus” about Mozart, “Shine” about David Helfgott, “La Vie En Rose” about Édith Piaf, “I’m Not There” about Bob Dylan, “Nowhere Boy” about John Lennon, “La Bamba” about Ritchie Valens, “Ray” about Ray Charles, “Coal Miner’s Daughter” about Loretta Lynn, “Walk the Line” about Johnny Cash, “The Benny Goodman Story” (1956), “Rhapsody in Blue” (1945) about George and Ira Gershwin, “Till the Clouds Roll By” (1946) about Jerome Kern, “Immortal Beloved” (1994) about Ludwig von Beethoven, “Impromptu” (1991) about Frederic Chopin….

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— And movies don’t stop at the life-stories—see this link for IMDB’s list of every Chopin piece included in every movie (hundreds !): http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0006004/#Soundtrack .

This is the reason I think movies must have hyperlinks—my “Big Book” of cinematic ‘anatomy’ may be a thing too large to exist as a single book. And movies (and thus their ‘annotation-logs’) are still being made, faster and faster so as to keep pace with the public maw—upturned and opened, like a baby bird’s beak, through the theatres, IMAXs, DVDs, VODs, Premium Cable, Basic Cable, and Network TV media.

And we approach a singularity, as well—the line that distinguishes a film from a television program erodes further with every ‘Sopranos’-style premium cable, cinema-quality series and every independent film that is released the same day both in select theatres and on VOD.

 

Making an ‘Encyclopedia Galactica’ reference-site, online, would be best served by starting now, while the living memories of its constituents can still provide the perspective for what is already becoming an endless pantheon of images, ideas, theatre, and history. And I find it strange that no one has yet popularized a phrase that means ‘all audio-visual media, including the oldest nickelodeon flip-cards, animations, silent films, early TV broadcasts, et, al., all the way up to today’s (tonight’s, really) new prime-time episode or cinema release, or TV commercial or news report. It is an undeniable stream of impactful media that has no single name.

‘Media’ is a word that gets thrown around a lot by people who don’t care about etymology. The Latin word media connotes ambiguity, neutrality, moderate, or middling. Prior to the digital era, it was mostly used as a term for the materials used in a work of art, for example: marble carving, tempura on wood, oil and canvas. The implication (I suppose) was that an artist’s tools were in a neutral state until used in a work of art—that red is merely red, ink is merely ink—and this was, for the most part, accurate. But technology changed that. Marshall McLuhan famously opined, “The medium is the message”—he was referring to Television—but the message applies to movies, Youtube, and video-blogs, as well.

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At present the medium we use most is electricity—but it is a refined, controlled, and programmed type of electricity which allows its use to create music, literature, images, animations, and videos. We can call it ‘electronic media’, but that doesn’t signify much—like the word ‘art’, it has several meanings, and no specific meaning. Post-modern creativity has a real problem with nomenclature—it is so much more intricate a process than early arts that the terminology can end up sounding like the title to a doctoral thesis in physics. But when we attempt a sort of shorthand, we end up calling them images or audios or videos—and, again, it means too much, and nothing in particular.

 

The one aspect that is diligently worked upon is the ‘genre’. In many ways, McLuhan’s quote could be re-phrased, “the genre is the message”. But that’s only part of it—‘message’ is an old-fashioned concept as well. Most entertainment industry ‘art’-work is used to sell ad-time, or charge a ticket for. So, a fully post-modern McLuhan might say, “The genre is the market-demographic”. Genre is also fascinating in that it implies a sensibility, a preference of content—that’s a pretty gossamer concept for a ‘pipe’ which entertainment-producers intend to siphon revenue through.

In some ways, we regular folks ought to consider being annoyed about market-demographics—but Hollywood would just blame sociologists, and rightly so. Ever since Sociology (the science of people in large numbers) proved that, while no individual’s behavior can be predicted, the behavior of people in groups can be predicted accurately —and the larger the sample-size (number of people) the more accurate the predictions are—ever since the 1950s, really—advertisers, marketers, promoters, campaign managers, even insurance salespeople have been finding more ways to use this information to prime their revenue pumps, and keep them flowing.

It’s insulting—the fact that we can be predictable, as part of a group, is almost as dispiriting as if we were predictable as individuals—as if we only thought of ourselves as individuals. Here’s another insulting concept—I heard someone the other day saying something about ‘there are sixty million people in LA—so even if you’re one in a million, there’s sixty others just as good as you.’

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Now that Earth’s population has reached seven billion, we ought to accept the fact that our ‘media-surroundings’ will be controlling our perspectives, our aspirations, and our plans—and that China has a point when it comes to locking down the sources of internet communication. ‘Crowd-sourcing’ is a new, but still primitive, form of getting a group of people to act as a single unit—the evolution of crowd-sourcing and propaganda and news-manipulation in the age of the internet has a massive potential, not just for putting unheard-of power in the hands of an individual, but of taking power away from more plodding, ancient centers of command, like governments and corporate executives.

We don’t study ourselves as much as we study what is in front of us—we always run towards the glamour in the wood—we never stop to question ourselves, our motivations, our priorities. Arthur C. Clarke was fond of pointing out, in the 1960s and 1970s, that humanity was racing to explore space when we had yet to explore two-thirds of our own planet. He was referring to the oceans, of course, and, as always, Clarke was right. We are still a long way from total exploration of our own planet—we are doing a much faster job of destroying it so, if we wait long enough, there won’t be any undersea life to explore.

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By the same token, we don’t study our desires and urges, either. The study of entertainment is as important, and undeveloped, today as psychology was in Freud’s time. Few people took psychology seriously at first, and we still don’t see a whole lot of progress in that area—it is unpleasant to study humanity, ourselves, when it comes to the ‘dirty’ parts, the childish or selfish or cruel parts of our personae. So, too, would we prefer to enjoy our movies and TV shows and YouTube videos without anyone being a killjoy by pointing out what our entertainment choices say about us.

Layers of info are growing thicker and thicker over the sphere of civilization—safety tips, how to do well in school, how to get a job, how to keep a job, how to date, how to marry, how to raise children. Old living rooms never had remote controls—and old folks never had to learn to use them. Old car dashboards never had a buzillion buttons and slides, and old drivers only had to learn how to shift gears and step on the brake. Our lives are hemmed ‘round with protocols, user-manuals, assumptions (such as assuming you know what the ‘don’t walk’ light means when you’re standing on a street corner). We have to key in multiple digits from a number pad to enter our homes, pay with our credit cards, withdraw from an ATM, or log on to a computer. Even total idiots who do nothing but wander the streets are, nowadays, required to know a great deal about our public works and utilities to avoid the ‘death-traps’ that otherwise surround them in a modern city.

What used to be called propaganda is now an immersive experience, from cradle to grave, and if we don’t analyze our input, we will never know how used, manipulated, or conned we are in our daily lives. When our children began watching TV, we were very careful to explain about how it’s all fake, how it’s all trying to sell something, and how it’s ultimate goal is to make money by piquing our interest for an hour or a half hour.