I've seen so few movies in recent years, it's borderline self-destructive. I have a growing list of recommendations from friends that its neglected weight is burying me in Catholic-esque guilt.
But I can't think of a filmmaker who consistently brings me more joy than the creators of Raising Arizona, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, Oh Brother Where Art Thou, and The Hudsucker Proxy. So I best be getting my butt out there to see this one (which is *not* a comedy, but more like Fargo or Miller's Crossing ... though of course there's delightful humor in those, too, if you're of a certain perverse worldview).
Even from the few previews I've seen, the great editing and framing is evident. I can't wait. Clear my schedule!
The "BIG SALE" ads tell me today is Veterans' Day (observed), and I feel much as I did last year at this time: What bizarre creatures humans can be.
But this year I'm alerted to a new music video put together by Mike Coles -- the guy responsible for a lot of classic Killing Joke art (including the Fred Astaire/trench image from my 2006 Veterans' Day post), who now runs the Malicious Damage independent label. The video is for one of Malicious Damage's acts and their song, "Eleven Eleven," which probably needs no further description.
But it's a moving piece.
I'm reminded of the Nixonian complaints that TV news footage of the Vietnam War changed warfare and turned citizens against the war, which is one of the most hilarious examples of out-of-touch government I can think of:
You don't say?! You mean when people see what war is actually like -- instead of the G.I. Joe hero propaganda from "official" sources -- they think, just maybe, "boy, we ought to have a really ironclad reason to subject people to this" and turn them -- if they're lucky -- into veterans?!
One of the quotes in the video is from Wilfred Owen's haunting "Dulce et Decorum Est," which ends with:
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old lie: Dulce et Decorum est Pro patria mori.
So that's what that quote is from! I just got a remastered Killing Joke set from their "Extremities, Dirt and Various Repressed Emotions" album, and it includes a cleaned-up old live bootleg of a performance of "Inside the Termite Mound."
The 1990 song, as one might imagine, foreshadows a sterile age of commercialized, zombified human consumers:
("By day we're dormant ... Because it's too hot outside now Nocturnal notions ... as we leave our cocoons Antennae tuned to ... inhuman vibrations Shading the cities ... of the world that's to come.")
Anyway, at the beginning of this old live bootleg version is a pre-recorded but interrupted quote that I could never quite harness or recall the source of. But by voice and content I knew it was one that catered to my sense of humor.
It goes: "--drug, will make you just like your mother and father."
Listening to the official version today got me searching for the answer after all these years, and a-ha! Of course: it's from Frank Zappa, who had a million such lines (e.g. "Most rock journalism is people who cannot write interviewing people who cannot talk." And "Politics is the entertainment branch of industry."
Anyway, the completed one they played before Termite Mound is:
"I would like to suggest that you not use speed, and here's why: it is going to mess up your heart, mess up your liver, your kidneys, rot out your mind. In general this drug will make you just like your mother and father."
I'm pretty sure I've even heard it in full before, but the context completely threw me. Relief!
One of the priceless things about working at a university -- other than watching youth trends evolve right under your nose -- is the endless stream of visiting speakers, cool indie films and other forums happening on campus. All the better when they're on your lunch break.
We have an upcoming visit from historian John Lukacs, a self-professed "reactionary" who is disenchanted with the last 40+ years of the conservative movement. The guy reminds me a bit of my father: intriguing, sometimes brilliant insight into history mixed with bizarre doses of unwavering ideology.
This "anti-populist" bemoans the populism, hatred and nationalism of conservative movement politics while also holding the Roman Catholic Church as a bastion of what is good and right about Western Civilization.
He rips the lazy intellect and empty symbolism of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush and mourns how "conservatism" has become focused on anti-liberalism rather than goals in its own right:
"Today's politicians of the right, Lukacs writes, have abandoned the conservative values of stability, order, and tradition and instead learned to bind nationalist majorities together by evoking hatred, directed not just against foreign foes but against fellow citizens who are seen as insufficiently patriotic."
On patriotism, he has an interesting personal experience, since he deserted the Hungarian army when it was drafted into German alliance during WWII.
He says liberalism is an outdated movement that accomplished its worthy goals (essentially, equal rights and free speech), while the new "enemies" are "the (outdated) idea of Progress, together with the (thoughtless) belief in Technology."
Oh, and mass populism, which he says is eroding democracy.
The professors who will likely disagree with some of his stances are nonetheless excited to have him on campus. Like talking with my father, it should be fun even when he starts to sound crazy ("Oh, about that wonderful Church ..."). It's great to hear people who -- even if they fail to recognize ambiguity in this world -- at least avoid blind fealty to a Party line.
I don't pretend to comprehend (Okay, I do pretend, but I recognize that I can't) how the world works and know how to achieve peace and happiness for all, but it's fun to keep trying. And interesting to hear a different view from someone who isn't trolling for votes or business lobby concessions.
Speaking of not comprehending how the world works, here is a great list of 13 things about our physical world that baffle scientists. See there's dark matter, and then there's dark energy. To say nothing of the placebo effect and tetraneutrons. Fascinating and maddening questions ...
And speaking of "that sonofabitch Reagan," the NY Times columnists had an amusing fight over whether pre-dementia Reagan (was there such a time?) had a clue that he launched his 1980 presidential campaign with a symbolic gesture that essentially said: "Slavery wasn't so bad."
I used to read David Brooks for an "other side" perspective, but I stopped that quite a while ago because every column seemed to revolve around his armchair social pseudo-science and unacceptable rationalizing for whatever mush-of-the-moment he was on. (Okay in a personal blog, mind you ... not so in a national column.)
I think the final straw was when he went on a truly surreal rant against modern parents and their "pretentious children's names like ... Elijah." Excuse me? Even his old fart's slim point was undermined by the fact he obviously didn't know the people he thought he was talking about, yet he used a litany of cliched examples about "them" to paint an inexcusably universal indictment.
Nonetheless, I had to check out his attempt to "right" a "slur" against Reagan by clarifying why Reagan launched his campaign in a powder-keg location that spit in the face of civil rights. I mean, you know, it's a state's right to look the other way at lynching if'n it wants to.
Happily, Bob Herbert comes back a few days later and -- without calling his Times colleague out directly -- explains just what kind of message Reagan was sending to African-Americans and his white would-be voters.
Still, Reagan could give a heck of a speech, and he was in movies, and he made us feel like proud Americans if we tilted our heads just so, and his administration's crimes weren't his fault because he wasn't really aware of them ... So let's name another national capital airport after him.
I don't often remember my dreams, but the other night, I dreamed that I was biking in the Tour de France.
In my dream I was worried about getting tired because I had a hockey game that day (which was true in real life), but I reasoned that I would be okay because I was in it just to finish -- not to win -- and besides, the race was only 26 miles. Apparently, I'd converted the Tour into a single-day, marathon length. I also, according to the setting, relocated it to Forest Park.
I woke up wondering why what felt like the last few hours of my sleep was consumed by this fake contest -- which made the sleep rather unrefreshing. I also woke up amused that, even in the dream, my brain tried to rationalize my in-dream actions with what I apparently knew to be true even outside the dream (such as the fact I had a hockey game that day, before which I should probably not enter a bike race).
It was in that weird intersecting world where part of you knows you're only dreaming, yet another part of you keeps up the charade. And the more-aware part tried to justify to itself what the deeper-dreaming part of "me" was doing!
How funny that our dream mind and faux "waking" mind can fight, rationalize and try to justify in-dream "behavior" we'd otherwise think insane. Why expend this much effort in my sleep? -- Or so I wondered, as I stepped into the shower feeling mentally fatigued, like I'd biked 20+ miles.
But apparently monkeys and 4-year-old humans, and possibly even lesser-developed animals, practice rationalization and cognitive dissonance, too, leading scientists to propose that this activity (while awake anyway) is actually very basic behavior. It doesn't require highly developed minds at all for us to feel compelled to convince ourselves that, whatever we've done, we've done the right thing.
The article describes the experiment in much better detail, but the conclusion sits well with me: Even putting aside any "moral justification" element in cognitive dissonance, it simply seems easier to move forward when you're not constantly rethinking or fretting every previous little decision.
I was right to bury that body where I did, dammit.
"It's good to be king, and have your own world It helps to make friends, it's good to meet girls."
--Tom Petty, "It's Good to be King" (1994)
Last in football, last in hockey, first in STDs. I wonder if this is a deterrent for out-of-town conventioners who might consider holding their meetings here? Particularly the ones whose members might, say, contain an element of severe self-repression that fails when one is "tested" by the Lord out on the road?
Pros: convenience; price; central location Cons: health risk; awkward questions
No secret that I'm constantly amazed by how music physiologically affects the mind and body. I relish downer, morose music as much as I love happy, bouncy music. Each kind seems equally therapeutic to my soul -- often independent of what mood I actually think I'm in.
On the drive to work, I can suddenly shed a tear to what is a truly cheerful song. Driving home, I can be suddenly energized to move and dance by a song that otherwise leads one to question, "why carry on?" Any given day, I can be driven to simultaneous tears and laughter by a song, which seems to powerfully capture the intense, wild human ride we're all on.
Why They Call it the Blues So I'm naturally intrigued by this study, which examines the effects of music on the brain, and why we seem to "enjoy" sad music.
The article hits a lot of angles and, being Canadian-based, also covers seasonal affective disorder, which I have arrogantly self-diagnosed in myself thanks to my cold-and-short-days-induced funk that hits me each fall. That affect in me seems to be salvaged only by the advent of hockey season and, well -- music!
I'm sure this seasonal funk is also influenced by years of schoolboy associations with the tragic end of summer, but I've also long noticed how I listen more to certain bands (for example, Phish in one season, Radiohead in another) at specific times of the year.
Shadowing all of that is, I think, my own fortunate predisposition for happiness, or at least for overcoming all funks rather quickly. (In contrast, though, my wife seems to be immune to funks and also can go days -- weeks even -- without listening to music. Truly baffling to me, but it does allow me to pick the soundtrack to our time together. Ah, a perfect match.)
I honestly wonder if music's "resonating" power on some level relates to its vibrations and the vibrations of the cells and subatomic particles in the body and nature. How else to explain its near-universal and quite ancient appeal to humans that hits you where words cannot describe?
Why else would a caveman -- be he in the West or the East -- thump his stick on a stone in time, before a marketing company was there to suggest it will get him laid with the lady in the skirt? Like religion, music's appeal must have some biological connection.
Or else I am truly insane.
"Out across the waves I see kaleidoscopic light Holding hands with sunset on the water In between my legs I feel the tickling of the night Distant cries of would-be sons and daughters
Then I turn and see the lovely smile upon your face You can’t tell me that’s just information Entropy will tackle us and drag us into space Sometimes that’s our greatest consolation
...Net the naked impulse to sing love songs to the Moon Flatten it with instant imitation Wound up to survive the danger scratching my cocoon Sensing I’ve outgrown my insulation..."
Although explaining the universe is in many ways maddeningly out of reach, advances in theory, telescope technology and space probes in recent decades keep showing us increasingly cooler stuff. Every new PBS or Nova space special seems to tell something they didn't know 12 months ago.
Which apparently leads me into a blurry sense of what's progressing and what's not.
Every once in a while when I'm watching one of these specials, I find myself briefly expecting, for example, the figure for the age of the universe to have grown. Of course it technically has (by 3 months, or 400 days, or whatever since my last thought). In a new episode, when they say "... when the Universe formed 13.7 billion years ago," the half-tuned, eager-for-news part of me half-expects to hear that number to be different. As if it'd be bumped up to 13.8 now, tacking on another 100 million years since July.
Similar mental U-turn when I read a story about an observed dying star or two galaxies colliding. For example, when a report shows a star that flashes and reveals that it will "soon" become a supernova, my first thought is "ooh, that will be fun!" -- briefly neglecting the fact that "soon," in cosmological terms, could be between 1 and 100,000 years. Maybe (doubtfully) I'll see it. Maybe (also doubtful) my great-great-great-grand-nephews will see it. Or maybe humans will be done when it happens.
Fortunately, though, the Universe is massive and observable enough to see just about every form of star in just about every known stage of development -- somewhere out there, if our space lenses happen upon it.
We, the trio, played at the coffee shop again last Thursday. This time we had more people because, heh, some more family made it out (P-Lisa's side was heavily represented).
Humorously, the coffee shop forgot to post our appearance on their calendar, though a couple of my sister's parent friends had asked about it. How very rock n' roll.
No kids on this night but a ten-song set that included our three-piece covers of U2's "One" (just for you, B.H.), "Time after Time" by Cindi Lauper, and "Burning Ring of Fire."
It was fun, though my annual sinus infection reduced me to just trying to get through the night without zoning out or noticeably screwing up. Reports indicate that I at least accomplished that.
Not sure what's next. But -- and I'm not making this up -- a documentary filmmaker taped our performance with multiple cameras, because he's making a film on underground folk scenes. I cannot tell a lie. He may want to get us into a studio as well, for proper sound recording.
Still inching my way through recorded episodes of "The War" on PBS.
(Also on PBS, I just noticed they have an Austin City Limits episode with Arcade Fire in concert from their current tour. Freaking yay! Oooh, and Transiberian Orchestra gets their own special next week, too. *Sniff* it must be the holidays ... I owe it to their vigilant fans to, ahem, sample them and give them "keep for a moment or two" status on the Tivo.)
Anyway, overheard in one segment of "The War":
"LIFE magazine reported that Japanese-Americans who were sent to internment camps were 'happy to give up their homes.' 'After all,' it read, 'all they were giving up was their freedom.'"
Bejesus. As twisted as our world remains, and as much as S.S. Bushica has attempted to grab power, withhold information, and roll back liberties in the name of protecting liberties, it's still remarkable how our information supply has changed.
Today, we have half a chance of knowing -- and spreading the word -- about what our troops are really going through overseas, or if our president can barely walk on his legs, or if, say, an entire minority has been removed from their homes and sent to an internment camp. Hey, today we even eventually find out if we've kidnapped a Canadian engineer and had him "extraordinarily rendered" to Syria.
While it wasn't exactly joyous spending an hour of every waking day of my high school life in Chinese class, there were some silver linings.
Catch phrases in my teacher's accent -- such as "END of discussion!" and "Why is it so? I tell you..." -- are permanently burned into my brain to a degree future archaeologists would be able to retrieve them from my dust if so inclined.
Such phrases are haunting but worth a laugh. Still today I'm tempted to cut off unproductive work conversations with a Chinese-accented shout of "END of discussion!" before I remind myself that's not cool.
Three Gorges - dammed.
My teacher was a native of democratic Taiwan and a vocal critic of the Party ruling mainland China. One thing she railed about to us was this fabled Three Gorges Dam that was (at the time) likely to be built. I remember her saying it would remove a million people from their homes, dam up the naturally beautiful Three Gorges area, and create who knows what kind of problems.
It almost sounded like fantasy, this grand project, and it was hard to visualize. Not like photos of the affected areas were exactly forthcoming.
She said the consequences were unknown because the project was unprecedented on Earth, and the Party wanted to get it done not just for hydro power but also to show it could be done in that uniquely Communist "look what the Great People's Party can accomplish" kind of way.
Well, they celebrated its completion last year and framed it as a source of renewable power, but of course it kicked 1.3 million people out of their ancestral homes first. In a remarkably frank step, Party officials also now concede they're worried about water pollution, landslides and geological instability in the area, and they may want to displace 300,000 or more new people. Similar though smaller-scale dam projects continue each day, initiating concerns about depletion of the groundwater supply.
Wooh, it's a unique place that can eminent domain a million people out of their homes. I hereby raise a glass to democracy!
But China is in a conundrum, because they're facing the suffocating air of their coal-fueled booming economy, and hydro power looks like one way to try to slow that pollution down. (For a marketing brochure recently, we were looking for decent photos of Shanghai, but all the photos had hauntingly polluted skies. Any photos with a bluer sky?, we asked. "There are no blue skies in Shanghai" was the answer).
But it's such a wild card of unknowns when you're shaping the Earth on this unimaginable scale:
"The worst situation would be a major earthquake induced by pressure from the rising water — a possibility that officials have long discounted. Heavy silt accumulation, if seemingly less alarming, could also pose severe problems upstream as it gradually builds up the floor of the reservoir.
Silt accumulation has steadily reduced the capacity of other Chinese dams to store water, which has also reduced electrical generation. Planners of the Three Gorges Dam estimated that sedimentation could become a problem upstream in the city of Chongqing within 20 years.
But Mr. Fan and other scientists say sedimentation is already happening at a rate that could create flooding and shipping problems in Chongqing much sooner than expected."
It's built, so only time will tell. But I'm feeling alright about not having 1.3 billion other countrymen right about now.
Speaking of the topic of music and the brain/biology, Oliver Sachs has a new book out, "Musicophilia," with reflections and examples from his many cases.
Among the topics:
Dr. Sacks focuses on people afflicted with strange musical disorders or powers — “musical misalignments” that affect their professional and daily lives. A composer of atonal music starts having musical hallucinations that are “tonal” and “corny”: irritating Christmas songs and lullabies that play endlessly in his head. A musical savant with a “phonographic” memory learns the melodies to hundreds of operas, as well as what every instrument plays and what every voice sings.
A composer with synesthesia sees specific colors when he hears music in different musical keys: G minor, for instance, is not just “yellow” but “ocher”; D minor is “like flint, graphite”; and F minor is “earthy, ashy.” A virtuosic pianist who for many years bizarrely lost the use of his right hand, finds at the age of 36 that the fourth and fifth fingers of his right hand have started to curl uncontrollably under his palm when he plays.
Dr. Sacks writes not just as a doctor and a scientist but also as a humanist with a philosophical and literary bent, and he’s able in these pages to convey both the fathomless mysteries of the human brain and the equally profound mysteries of music: an art that is “completely abstract and profoundly emotional,” devoid of the power to “represent anything particular or external,” but endowed with the capacity to express powerful, inchoate moods and feelings.
Now that's what I'm talking about!
The review also links to some excerpts. Apparently Che Guevera was "rhythm deaf, capable of dancing a mambo while an orchestra was playing a tango," and Freud and Nabakov couldn't dig music at all.
Poor Catholic caddy Danny Noonan walks the course with aloof, generally high, underachiever and wealthy golfer Ty Webb (Chevy Chase):
Danny: "I gotta go to college, I gotta." Ty Webb: "Oh, you don't have to go to college. This isn't Russia ... Is this Russia? This isn't Russia."
Man, I remember the heady, post-Iron Curtain early '90s when it seemed -- incredibly enough -- that Russia would finally, truly join the West with a functioning democracy. When I thought some day the "Is this Russia?" joke would no longer resonate.
Looking Westward High school history tells us that beginning with Peter the Great, for much of the last 300 years (we may omit that wee Soviet era), Russia has "looked Westward," trying to be more like Europe with modernized institutions and customs like Europeans.
But Russia is a vast, bizarre landscape. It retained serf labor long after that disappeared from Western Europe (of course, the kettle shall retort to the pot that Russian serfdom ended around the time the U.S. was fighting itself over the right to own slaves). And Peter's reforms deepened a cultural rift pitting Western-looking elites against the vast "masses" (Euros would call them "backward"), which carried on through the last czar. A rift that opened the way for revolution and a positive reception to Soviet Communist ideals.
Of course Soviet "Communism" proved miserable and merely replaced one elite ruling class with another. And when the '90s economic transition from Soviet-ism to capitalism did not go as smoothly as scripted, the setting was ripe for old Kremlinite Putin to take over and steadily increase his grip on politics, media, oil and who knows what sections of the mafia.
So vast, sprawling Russia still has this obstacle. Democracy is a looong work in progress that will evolve into its own uniquely Russian form. In the meantime, Putin's ways make sure it is in many ways still Dostoevsky's Russia. Still Gogol's "Dead Souls" Russia.
Except with the Internet, and rock music, and immense underground black gold waiting to be tapped.
They're no Turks But it's funny: in my graduate research I'm looking at Turkey's case for joining the EU. It's favored by some because it could be a bridge to the Middle East for Europe, and its young, growing economy could be a booster shot for the aging welfare states of Europe in the long run. It's opposed by others as "not part of Europe" (only a sliver of it is in geographic Europe), or an unwelcome Muslim democracy to the EU's "Christian club," or just a tide of immigrants waiting to happen.
But one of the conditions for EU membership is the health of your democracy, and Turkey -- like other recent, Eastern European members -- needs to continue reforms if it wants to get in.
As with Russia's historic Westward movements, it's Turkey's elites and military who are leading the EU charge. It could happen. But in that context, you look at Putin's Russia and -- not that Russia is interested -- its democracy would never qualify for EU membership the way it currently functions.
I dunno. I just wonder which state will look healthier 30 years from now. And I don't shower much.
In addition to the documentary filming of our last coffeeshop gig (that's gig #2, for those scoring at home), the filmmaker wants to interview us in studio at a local radio station. Not to go on air (I don't think), but for audio for his film, which -- as far as I know -- is about the, ahem, local folk scene.
My sister left the details for the in-studio session on my answering machine, prompting my Better Half to ask a question that struck me as hilarious: "Are you okay with all of this?" she asked.
This isn't quite what she meant, but she asked in such a way that sounded like: "Whoa, this is getting big, are you alright with all this attention?" As if "the band" is about to take off, and if you can't handle touring and the constant publicity, paparazzi and fan stalkers, maybe you should jump ship now before the fame brings you crashing down into rehab.
Of course what she really meant was, "This is absurd. Are you sure you want to subject yourself to a potential wealth of unintended humor? When will you have time to put the Christmas lights up?"
But it's A Mighty Wind, baby. And I'm just the drummer, along for the ride: Of course I'm alright with it. If it becomes fodder for friends and family at my 75th birthday, all the better. Life needs such things.
As you may have noticed, the site has changed. Sampa, the free-site host, did a version 2 of some sort.
Despite an FAQ that made it sound like allowing one's site to go through v.2 surgery would be okay, there were several flexibilities that surprisingly disappeared with the click of a button. (e.g. I cannot believe sidebars like this one are even narrower than before.)
And I'm told -- miraculously! -- that the conversion cannot be undone. Truth be told, I'm actually quite pissed. But free is free. Sampa has otherwise been good to me.
So I need to sort through site "features" to see how I can make do. Except that I don't have the time at the moment, in the middle of graduate classes and Lighthousehockey.com. (btw, I've removed that Lighthouse RSS feed so that you're not clogged with random Islanders hockey gibberish).
But I promise to touch up the accessories when I get a chance, and return to irregularly scheduled blogging.
Subscribe to this Site
of "No Country for Old Men" is glowing. 
My sister left the details for the in-studio session on my answering machine, prompting my Better Half to ask a question that struck me as hilarious: "Are you okay with all of this?" she asked.
December, 2007