Fabulous Video

By way of PZ Myers, who rightly raises the question of why the Brits will watch cool videos about statistics and Americans watch Wheel of Fortune and the Apprentice.

It Gets Better

I have never been able to grasp how anyone comes to focus on another person's private, consensual sexual behavior as something that must be systematically and energetically opposed. But here we are.

Well, these videos are consistently moving and a lovely antidote to all the noise and hate.



(It makes me love Pixar even more, if that were possible!)

Another Flashmob Moment

This time in The Hague, a protest against cuts in culture funding.



Whatever the reason for their happening, I think it must be really something to be present for one.

I Get All My Culture From Blogs

Pharyngula, in this case.



Proof you don't need a high concept to write a song.

A Random Act of Culture

I had no idea these little events took place, but the idea is neat, and this one seemed just too much fun! A huge pipe organ situated in the open lobby of an operating department store, noontime shoppers, and a stealthy influx of the Opera Company of Philadelphia (and some 28 other organizations) for a nearly spontaneous outburst of the Halleluja Chorus from Handel's Messiah!

(Random Acts of Culture are an activity of the Knight Arts organization, which is an arm of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. These events are also known as "Flash Opera," though I understand that not all Random Acts are operatic in nature. The event is noted at both the Gothic Records website and also the Knights Arts website.)

Our crew hotel is right next door to the Macy's Department store where the world's largest operational pipe organ is situated. I wrote a post a few years back about my visit for one of the daily noontime concerts, after which I was able to get a tour of the console. But wouldn't THIS have been a fun little way to spend half an hour at lunchtime! It would also be a more uncompromising chance to hear the organ unleashed in that massive space.

(PS, I know the mind of the FSM--we have a personal relationship--and HE forgives this blasphemy because... well, because this was just so cool! And because great music is great music, wherever it comes from.)

Requiem For A Habit

Some of my fondest travel memories are of shopping for classical recordings in my favorite CD stores in the country's larger cities. I had favorite Tower Records franchises with huge classical music sections in both Chicago and Philadelphia, and there were several must-see places in New York (JR's, a couple Tower Records locations, HMV). I would comb the racks for as many interesting titles as I could afford (OK, and a couple beyond that) and then afterward sit at a favorite pizza joint and go through the liner notes & photos. (One of life's perfect days for me involved riding the Blue Line downtown from O'Hare and spending an hour or two at Tower on Wabash, then looking thru my CDs over a spinach deep-dish at Gino's.)

I began collecting in the last waning days of the LP, but LPs were done the minute the CD came along (I had to take out a loan for my first CD player, and I had several discs before I even had a machine to play them on). I remember the CD being so futuristic and daring when it was introduced; and I wonder if anyone foresaw that putting music into a digital format for CDs would quickly spell the end of CDs too. Certainly I didn't.

When my favorite stores began to close a decade ago, I went through a period of mourning. I hadn't fully begun to buy music online, and the rather specialized and obscure stuff I like to listen to was not immediately available for download (in some cases it still isn't). After years of LP and then CD shopping as an event--flipping through the selections in one's favorite sections; looking over the new releases; being drawn to a particular kind of cover art--the business of looking at filenames online was a tough sell. (I'm reminded of people having trouble quitting smoking because the actions and motions of the habit are ingrained and comforting.)

But time marches inexorably forward, and my favorite stores in Minneapolis and St. Paul are all that remain. And even they have thinned and shrunk, with more and more store space being devoted to new and used DVDs. I know that one day very soon I will walk thru the door to find the classical music section gone--and that'll be the end of it. And with downloads and streaming, standard DVD movies are now going the way of the CD; only the huge amount of data on a Blu-Ray disc is keeping the use of discs alive. With hard drive storage and bandwidth on a constant upward trend, this technology is surely not long for the world either.

The print media have been hanging on, but we're obviously hearing the death rattle here as well. Newspapers in the traditional sense are on life support, and magazines are feeling the pinch (and virtually all now have an online presence). Books have been the slowest to digitize--slower anyway than magazines and newspapers--maybe because many established readers love the look and feel of a book. There's something hidebound and comfortable about a physical book. It's a connection to history, to the great thinkers of the past. Unlike audio recordings, the tradition of the written word goes back centuries; writing is one of the key things that marks human civilization.

But as technology has advanced, books have begun to seem a touch, well, antique (heresy!). And the lines between all these media have become quite blurry. An online paper or blog may have video or interactive charts or polls; an excellent sound recording may have accompanying video; your phone's reader lives cheek-by-jowl with your weather apps and your text messaging and your location apps. (In the span of a couple years I suddenly find the yellow pages book seems like something from an archeological dig. I wouldn't even consider using a phone book to find the number or location of a business.) But books are more than just books; there is a bunch of stuff attached to "book culture" that will be hard to lose, stuff that needed the commerce of the bookstore for sustenance: the coffee shop and bakery, the fireplace with comfy chairs and other book-lovers all around. For the non-bar crowd, the bookstore makes for a great, brainy hangout.

Actually, I'm thrilled by so many of the changes, the ability to read magazines and books on a single iPad, with blogs and movies and videos (and so much more) at my fingertips with the same device. But this NYT article makes me a little wistful for what I'm losing in the bargain. This particular place became one of the last places to buy classical music CDs in the city after all the other had closed. And I've bought a lot of books there.



But there's no getting around it. I'm sick of carrying 10 lbs of books around with me on my travels, and the lure of the iPad is irresistible. I'll miss this bookstore (though I shed no tears for the demise of Barnes & Noble generally), but it's time to move on.

Ha!

From Ed Brayton's blog Dispatches from the Culture Wars:

Someone who comments here under the name grasshopper has invented a brilliant phrase for the Rush Limbaughs of the world: ignorexia verbosa. Pass it on.

Happy to do my small part for a most worthy cause.

A Eulogy In Anger

This breaks my heart.

I was going to put up a picture, but I can't bear to look at them.

For some reason, I have always felt much stronger sympathy for animals in distress than for humans. Maybe it's because I know the kind of care of which a person can avail themselves to recover; or maybe it's because animals are so devoid of subterfuge and artifice--they live completely honest lives. Whatever the case, an animal's pain or distress is profoundly upsetting to me.

If that pain and distress comes by way of human hands it's much the worse. And if the human motivation is entertainment, or worst of all, entertainment with an eye toward making money, then that animal's suffering is an outrage, an atrocity. It diminishes us; it diminishes humanity itself.

I'm sure that Eight Belles had people who genuinely loved and cared for her, and that those people are personally distressed by her breakdown in far deeper ways than my generic outrage. And maybe the animals love the competition; maybe they love to run and to vie for the top spot. But it seems more likely that they're doing what they've been trained to do for human purposes, that they're really trying, like a dog, to please their masters. And that means they must run fast, which means they're bred light and trained hard.

But if this is an inevitable part of horse racing, then we should demand the "sport" should be abandoned altogether. And if, like the corporate obsession with stock dividends above all else, any part of our distress with this situation rests with moneys lost, then this vain death is a stain upon us.

I will never watch another horse or dog race.

Bust THIS!

I have a new fetish: Mythbusters.

I know, I know. I bitch and bitch about television and then put up these occasional posts extolling the virtues of some program or other. I don't mean to distance myself from my long-held contention that broadcast network television is a form of societal cancer and that we'd all be much better off if it suddenly were jesused out of existence. But even I have never claimed that scouring the buzillion channels available on cable or satellite will fail to yield SOME things of value. I think if the big networks we all watched were not ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox but rather CNN, TLC, Discovery and Turner Classic Movies then I'd have a lot less to bitch about.

But Mythbusters. First off, I love the generic scientific / baloney-grinder aspect of the show. This seems an excellent general approach for thwarting our natural tendency to favor exaggerated lore as a means of explaining our world. But even better than that, they spend a lot of time figuring out how to simulate and test things, and then eventually everything gets blown up!

Yeah, it's really ALL about explosions (co-host Jamie Hyneman is shown at every show's opening saying "Jamie wants BIG BOOM" and that bedrock desire is almost always satisfied). They come up with a well-defined myth, engage in a brainstorming session to figure out what principles are at stake and how to test them, and then the rest of the episode shows them pulling this off. They begin by testing the myth itself, and finish up by replicating the supposed results of the myth. This is excellent.

My wife doesn't particularly care for the show--it's too technical for her and almost devoid of the requisite hand-wringing of interpersonal drama--but she seems to think that my glee with every experiment is a reason to stick around. The show is apparently so good that my own reaction to it becomes a draw for her. (That's either true love or a form of sickness.)

One of my favorite episodes is from a couple years ago (though I just saw it recently). They test the myth that a water heater with its safety features malfunctioning can blow up your entire house. This is a perfect myth for them to test: it's finite in scope, excellently falsifiable, and it's an idea which we all brush up to closely enough to have a seat-of-the-pants sense about. What I didn't expect was the perfect missile-like behavior of the water heater when it failed. I assumed a seam along its length would give out causing a standard boiler explosion (and wondered what that would look like). But no, on two separate occasions it was the bottom that gave way, causing the hot water--and the huge expansion of the steam made when the water is uncapped--to jet out exactly like a rocket engine. That huge expansion in volume when the heater gives way absolutely obliterated the little building they constructed around it; but if we watch the footage from the high speed camera, we see that the water heater itself departed the scene almost instantaneously--long before the building had a chance to disintegrate. They built the enclosure to California building codes, so there were 2X4 trusses on the roof with regular sheathing and other roofing materials, and these materials slowed down the departing water heater not one whit. And for something not specifically designed for it to fly 500 feet up in the air is fan-freakin'-tastic!

Here. I defy you not to be entertained.



This one is especially fun, but they're all quite entertaining, especially anything requiring the talents of their hugely battered crash-test dummy ("Buster") or any ballistics gel human simulator.

(This video will not play for me at the moment. If the problem persists, try this shorter snippet from the same episode.)

So Much for the Bible (Chastity) Belt

The pot-stirring USA Today had an article yesterday about how Texas is leading the nation in the number of teens who are having multiple children. Texas overall has come to seem like a pretty dysfunctional place (islands of beauty and creativity and enlightenment as revealed by Flow Blue Bud notwithstanding), and it tops the list for many of society's blemishes.

But it's not just Texas, of course. Sam Harris, among others, has hit on this same subject: the places most strongly under the control of the religious right are those furthest from the markers of civilization (and that often applies to countries as well). The numbers for illiteracy, murder, assault, robbery, teen pregnancy, and even abortion seem directly linked to the redness of the state.

Sam Harris talks in his book Letter to a Christian Nation about the church's teaching in sexual matters (and, more specifically, about the policies of an administration bent on mandating the church's views in our schools), and the effect this thinking has on the country as a whole:

American teenagers engage in about as much sex as teenagers in the rest of the developed world, but American girls are four to five times more likely to become pregnant, have a baby, or to get an abortion. Young Americans are also far more likely to be infected by HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. The rate of gonorrhea among American teens is seventy times higher than it is among their peers in the Netherlands and France. The fact that 30% of our sex-education programs teach abstinence only (at a cost of more than $200 million a year) surely has something to do with this.

The USA Today article offers the following statistics from 2004:

• 22-24% of teen births were not the mother's first in the following states: Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia.
• The next tier was for the 20-21% range: Colorado, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Arkansas, Tennessee, Alabama, Florida, the Carolinas.
• The rate was 17-19% for Western states (minus Wyoming), the Midwest, and the Rust Belt.
• The lowest rate, 12-16%, was reserved for North Dakota, Wyoming, and that hopeless bastion of liberalism and moral decay, New England.

The whole issue seems reflective of our schizophrenic interface with sexuality. On the one hand commercial interests are maniacally eager to exploit sexual themes and imagery for monetary gain, while on the other hand society at large remains very squeamish about simply educating kids about the thing that occupies--by design!--a huge part of the teen-age brain. It just all seems an indictment of our educational system, and the state-by-state color map is almost a temperature indicator for how well the nation's schools are working.

This Red State / Blue State stuff was covered brilliantly by James Wolcott a year ago in Vanity Fair. I'll leave off with some statistics culled from the article:

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, of the 10 states with the highest number of total inmates per 100,000 residents in 2003, 9 were red. Of the 10 states with the most female inmates per 100,000 residents that same year, all were red. (Conversely, of the 10 states with the lowest incarceration rates of female prisoners, 9 were blue.)...

Red states have a near monopoly on capital punishment. Since 1976, the highest number of executions have been carried out in red states, with Texas—no surprise—ranking No. 1 on the hit parade...

Red States dominate the rankings of violent crimes despite their emphasis on judgment and incarceration.

Red states...account for all of the top 15 states in rates of death by firearms (2003).

Of the 15 states with the highest adjusted rates of suicide (2003), 14 are red.

The 10 states in the union with the highest divorce rates in 2004 (among the 45 states for which figures are available) were all red.

Illegitimacy rates? According to the National Center for Health Statistics, of states with the highest percentages of births in 2003 to unwed mothers, 9 of the top 10 were red.

According to the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, supported by the C.D.C., in 2004 14 of the 15 states with the highest percentage of obesity were red. Moreover, there is a correlation between corpulence and economic deprivation. Based on a three-year average of obesity rates, "the five states with the highest obesity rates—Mississippi, Alabama, West Virginia, Louisiana and Kentucky—exhibit much higher rates of poverty than the national norm," the Associated Press reported in August. All five states are red states.

It's an open question as to which is the chicken and which the egg: are the states less educated / more religious because they're poorer, or are they poor because they lack good education? One thing seems certain: we will not be lead toward the light by a particular former Governor of Texas.

Restaurant California

In the movie Supersize Me, director Morgan Spurlock rakes McDonald's over the coals for their near-poisonous food. It's no rocket science to conclude that McDonald's is not a place we ought to eat at regularly, though of course they're America's most popular food vendor, and have spread like a virus around the world. (I can't be too hard on them, as they pour the best Diet Coke anywhere; and if Morgan Spurlock takes on Diet Coke he'll have to answer to me.)

But one especially interesting thing to me in the film is his profile of the California chain In-N-Out Burger. Actually, I think this focus comes from Eric Schlosser, who wrote the book Fast Food Nation, and who is interviewed by Spurlock in his documentary. The idea is that while cheeseburgers and french fries may never qualify as health food, it is the way the big chain restaurants cook up the quintessential American meal that makes it such a deadly diet. McDonald's in particular have managed to formulate an entire menu of pointedly harmful nutritive content, and then thru brilliant marketing put that menu within arm's reach of the whole country. (I should say that one of the chief criticisms of the film--most vocally, of course, from McDonald's itself--is that their practices are mirrored by many other companies with whom they compete; McDonald's was singled out because of their high profile, or so the criticism goes.) In-N-Out is held up as an example of how a company can do these foods and not kill its patrons, and make a healthy profit at the same time, putting the lie to the idea that McDonald's ravenous profit motive precludes healthy choices. Indeed, In-N-Out is noteworthy for paying its employees considerably above the industry standard.

In-N-Out were formed in 1948 and have fiddled relatively little with their simple rules. They have a small menu--burgers and fries, shakes and soda--and everything is made to order. You have to wait, but because they do only a few things and have worked the process out to every fine detail, the wait usually doesn't amount to much. Everything is fresh--no freezing. Bread is made simply and daily (though not, I believe, on site), potatoes are received at the stores whole and processed just-in-time. One of the cornerstones involves their beef: they process it themselves in a single plant to ensure high quality control, and they never freeze it; so the restaurants exist only within a truck's driving range from this single plant. The expansion of the chain beyond the West / Southwest would require additional beef processing plants or to let someone else provide the beef, both of which they refuse.

Their french fries are especially interesting to me, though I've only had them once a year or two ago (thanks to my always seeming to be on a low-carb diet when I'm in Ontario). They have used a cholesterol-free pure vegetable oil since day one, and the potatoes are peeled and washed and cut right before going into the fryer. (This is contrasted with McDonald's, where the fries are just jesused to the restaurants from godknowswhere and nobody even seems to know what they're made of. In Supersize Me, Spurlock puts an order of McDonald's fries under glass, and they appear absolutely unchanged weeks later.) It's a common sight for an In-N-Out worker to be putting a pile of a couple dozen softball-sized potatoes thru a hand-powered cutter right next to the fry bins. The diced potatoes fall from the cutter into a sink with running water, and are then quickly drained and put into one of several fry vats, depending on the individual order. Nothing is pre-made, no matter the length of the lines, and the fries are available in a variety of ways, patrons being able to specify the amount of salt, the length of cooking time, and additional ingredients from onions to cheese to a special dressing similar to thousand island (available on burgers and fries).

There are a number of ordering options which are not advertised nor listed on the small menu. The most popular of these is to order your food "animal style." For burgers, this adds a mustard-cooked patty with pickles, lettuce and tomato, the special dressing ("spread"), and grilled onions; for fries, animal style includes the spread, two slices of cheese and grilled onions. Watching my carbs, I order my burger "protein style," which replaces the bread with leaf lettuce (which, if you'd eaten your first burger this way, would seem a really natural and delicious way to eat a hamburger). You can also order your burger "flying dutchman," which is just patties and cheese and nothing else. The Wikipedia site lists several others.

One disappointing thing I learned from the Wikipedia site is that there are little biblical references hidden on the company's packaging, a reference to the founding family's mystical convictions. But hey, everybody's got a little bit-o-nutty in them, and there are so many other virtues that I have to forgive them.

I'm food-obsessed, of course, but the fact that there's an In-N-Out Burger next door to our hotel in Ontario is almost reason to bid that trip. (Now I'm in Tennessee, and all this burger talk has made me hungry!)

More About The Sopranos

Thru seasons three and four, and into five now. I struggle not to hate myself for thinking about these characters as though they were real people, as though I know them personally. Not to cast aspersions on anyone else's blog--god knows my own efforts do not constitute a how-to lesson for effective blogging--but I always cringe to read others' discussions about their favorite television shows as though the show or the characters or the stories amount to anything. But here I am doing the same thing, acting as though The Sopranos or the show's characters or the storylines matter for shit.

Except I'm not really sure that's it. My previous post tried to make the point, buried in there somewhere, that there is something extraordinary about David Chase's soap opera; and now I've watched much of the series, and I find myself moved by the plights of these people. I don't watch anything of the show for my week off at home, and then I watch an entire season in a couple nights while I sit the sort in KY. And that immersion has me spending more time, for a short stretch, anyway, with these characters than I spend with real people. So I spend my time in the dark cockpit thinking about what has transpired on a television show. I guess that's kind of pathetic. So it's not that the story or the characters are important; but if they're well-drawn, they raise larger questions for us, they connect us with some larger thing.

I think part of it is that, either by the skill of the writing or the sheer screen time, the characters are well-fleshed-out. Having the main character in therapy and, more than that, showing the probing nature of those sessions (which would normally not be seen by any other person, so it's a bit like reading someone's private love letters), and having the therapist herself in therapy so that we might learn HER deeper thoughts; these things give us an insight into these characters which we never get on TV, which a movie does not give us enough time or immersion to accomplish, and which we probably don't get even with most people in our real lives. I think that's part of it. Another part is the drama inherent not simply in a criminal life, but in a criminal life which tries to integrate itself into mainstream society. Tony calls himself a "businessman," and the family is very much in the normal world. This is complicated by the Sopranos' attempts to raise normal children with money gained by criminal enterprises. Several really interesting story details arise from the kids' burgeoning awareness of what their father does for a living, and by his attempts to shield them from it. Tony and Carmella aspire for their kids to live in reality the life that the parents strive to APPEAR to be living. And Carmella struggles to be a normal, ethical person and a good mother, without having to capitalize on her husband's power and money, both of which come from things she cannot reconcile with her ethics. This tug of war rather defines her character much of the time.

Lastly, there's the just the circus sideshow aspects of the story, the expected spectacle of mob murders and titty bars and innocents squashed and drug deals gone bad. There's just a certain amount of that stuff that pays off according to schedule. I wonder if men and women watch and / or like the show differently. I don't honestly think there's much I desire to emulate in Tony Soprano's world (though always having several thousand dollars in loose bills in his pocket at any moment seems decadent), but I don't think I feel the same revulsion at many of the plot twists that Susan does. I have no desire for an extramarital affair, but there's a certain wonder / admiration / jealousy as I watch Tony cavort with Annabella Sciorra (who seems just impossibly sexy) which I'd venture many women would not feel. But I also imagine--and the story clearly posits--that Tony's power brings a definite sex appeal, something that's lost on me (and on my wife as well, or so she claims...)

Again I come back to the power thing. It's really what defines Tony's character. There's an amusing scene where the bigoted Tony insults his daughter's new boyfriend for having some African blood, something which gets an angry and indignant reaction from the young man. But later when the boyfriend exclaims "he's lucky I didn't beat the shit out of him right there!" we laugh at his naivety. When Tony's therapist is brutally raped and the rapist is released on a technicality, she is hugely tempted to enlist Tony's help to restore her sense of justice and a feeling of personal safety. She doesn't mention it to him, but she tells her own therapist that she fantasizes about simply giving the word and knowing that the worm who raped her would scream and beg for his life before being ripped limb from limb. And this version of manhood is juxtaposed with that of her husband, another squishy liberal therapist who is, by inference, half a man. The scene of Tony asking the battered woman how she is and of her bursting into tears is extraordinary. It shows Tony at his closest approximation of humanity, and Dr. Melfi as almost superhumanly strong. It plays with stuff rather deep in our psychology to be faced with the choice between justice and revenge on the one hand, and our sense of decency and societal propriety on the other. (An interesting aside, David Chase has said that the "resolution" of Dr. Melfi's rape is one of the most requested storylines. He scoffs at the pat predictability of this [I'll paraphrase]: "That's not the story. She was faced with a very difficult choice, and she chose to keep herself intact. That's the story.")

I realize as I watch that I don't really care about every one of the 15 storylines the show is carrying. Maybe we're not supposed to. Any of the characters I don't like, for example, contribute to my enjoyment only insofar as they push the rest of the story along. Tony's sister Janice is one of the supremely toxic creations of the screen. But she only raises my blood pressure. And I'm not even particularly interested in the criminal activities, which is odd since I generally like crime fiction. There's such an antisocial and un-glamorous facet about Tony Soprano's "business" that I just feel like I ought to shower after watching. But he seems one of fiction's great characters, and he's compelling to watch: if he's on the screen, you have to pay attention (a hypothesis which I confirm with Susan: if I ask her if she wants to watch an episode she'll usually say no; but if I turn one on on my own, she'll inevitably quickly get sucked in).

I find that I'm much more strongly drawn to the female characters than the men, in general. Carmella in particular seems the real human center of the whole enterprise, flaws and blemishes notwithstanding. She is not written to represent some kind of relationship perfection, or some moral apotheosis in the series. But she has the high ground in her relationship with Tony, and she is often the one who speaks the painful truth, and who wears her emotions with the least coverage. Tony strategizes and postures--it's interesting that David Chase characterizes Tony and his friends as almost never telling the truth when they talk, to each other or to anyone else--and Carmella seems much more simply to be in the world, to react and live. This is an inversion of our stereotypes, where men are simple and direct and women are emotionally complicated and between-the-lines communicators.

And this leads me to wonder about a lot of stuff. In some general way, Tony Soprano seems a sociopath. But I think it's a degree thing: he only has more of some quality that many people have (or wish they had), and he brushes up against normal humanity enough that we want to give him the benefit of the doubt. We seem to pull for him, and for him and Carmella. But all the men on the show seem emotionally handicapped, and they relate to their women partners in a way that I can't imagine any self-actualized woman accepting. And this includes Tony, even though by being in therapy he seems at first blush to be nearer to enlightenment than the rest of them. But how near is that? After what he thinks is an acceptable period, he attempts to date his therapist, and he deals with her rejection badly (I felt the writing of this scene was especially effective, more powerful for all that it left unsaid). One can't help feeling a vaporous sense of foreboding at this.

And maybe that's just where the rubber meets the road in this whole enterprise. What does it mean to be sociopathic? Is a mob boss redeemable as a functioning human being? Susan learned from a friend of some shocking development in the sixth season that, she says, will make me loathe Tony Soprano. And I can only imagine that he kills his therapist, probably from her rejection of him. So does one really wish for Tony and Carmella to reconcile? Is it really in her best interest?

Alas, these are yes and no questions for subject matter where such answers are inadequate.
________________________

And one more addendum (at least until the next one).

Extrapolating from my own experience, I wonder if my reactions are what were intended from us all. I suppose that's a lot like trying to define what makes any art great: it's an impossible task in any comprehensive way. But there are several scenes that I come back to again and again, staring off into space in a daydream, my mind not on my work. And this makes me wonder what hole in me is so in need of filling. They're mostly scenes of pain, and I think my reaction to them is what it would be for me to see any friend or acquaintance of mine in this kind of emotional trauma.

As Exhibit A, there's a scene where Tony's nephew Christopher beats up his girlfriend, Adrianna. Christopher has shown plenty of violent tendencies, and his relationship with Adrianna (and with everyone else) is far from serene. They are both quite uneducated, and in their issues and methods they are always up against the stone wall of their ignorance. But one senses that there is genuine affection between them. In this scene he hits her, due in part to a misunderstanding--his anger is a lashing-out at someone who is not responsible at all for his current woes. After he slaps her around, we see her out at Tony and Carmella's, bruised and tearful. Carmella is mortified, of course, and Tony reacts very strongly at the wrongness of it and says he will have a talk with Christopher and "straighten him out." This is said with an ominous tone, and we know that Tony has the resources to make Christopher feel serious consequences for his actions. Adrianna, who knows (more or less) what the "family" does for a living, is very aware of this. She tearfully chokes out "Don't hurt him!" in a little moment of love and pain that caused my eyes to brim instantly. She is trapped between her need to go somewhere for help and her genuine love for Christopher and the desire that no harm should come to him.

Then there is Carmella kicking Tony out of the house as they separate. Her character is strong and independent, but so is he, and he is the indisputable Alpha of the household (and of his whole world). They are two reasonably normal people with their character traits inflated to extreme proportions. But she reaches her wits' end via a behavioral trajectory that very nearly breaks even her strong will, and it's excruciating to see her in this state. She doesn't break, but she is brought to the blubbering brink, and it's a dark cloud that hangs over the franchise when she is.

My last couple of scenes that are haunting me are from episodes I haven't even seen yet. I know that Tony gets shot early in the final season, and that he recovers. But there is a scene on YouTube where Carmella reacts to the shooting as though someone were performing waking heart surgery on her. She tried to leave Tony and didn't, or couldn't, manage it; now, when she is faced with his involuntary removal from her life she looses an animal wail of absolute pain and despair. I don't know her--there is no "her" to know; she's an invention--but the pain of this scene stays with me. Like hearing a baby cry, there is something deeply in me that wants to intervene and do something to ease this uncarryable load.

It's a scene that carries the baggage of all that has come before--all these scenes do; we could not care so much for people we do not know to at least some degree. We feel for her, and for the pact with the devil she's made. An intelligent person from a working-class background, she latched as a young girl onto dreams and promises that, with more exposure, she might have seen through; and now she's trying to do the best she can with the investment in time and emotion she's already made. But she has a tiger by the tail. Having previously faced the decision of whether to let go and start over again in her 40s with nothing--no money, and no career or marketable skills--or to make peace with these irreconcilable things, she has opted to return to the fold, to the man she loves, only to have some external force threaten to undo her decision.

I have to wonder what it takes out of an actress to play a scene like this one. It's just not something you could record, say, 20 takes of to see which one you like best. You get one or two shots, I'd imagine, and that might be about it for Edie Falco for the day.

Lastly, I saw a clip of Tony and Carmella's surly and taciturn son, A.J., attempting suicide. In what I suppose is a classic cry for help, he makes an attempt to kill himself that leaves just enough wiggle room that he can--just barely--call it off. And when Tony happens to find him, A.J.'s life is saved at the last moment. Tony goes thru quite the range of emotions, from blithe oblivion to angry disbelief to an awareness that his son, his flesh and blood, is at rock bottom and is extraordinarily lucky to even be alive. A.J.'s despair quickly becomes Tony's despair, as the two lay on the deck beside the pool, Tony trying to comfort an absolutely despondent young man whose very soul is leaking out of him in a blubbering animal wail. And for the father who has been in therapy trying to figure out how his own parents have figured into his inability to function normally in the world, the weight of the world comes to him, the possibility that the bottomless pit of his son's agony is also the father's doing. It's almost shakespearean.

Again, is it just that my own life exists on a much more serene emotional plane (and thank the gods for it)? It breaks me up to see the love these people have for each other, and the pain caused by that love. Why is that? My own life is not wanting for affection and understanding; so why is this compelling and not repellant? Is this some large part of the series' pull for us, that we first get inside the lives of these people and then accompany them in some measure on a journey of greater emotional vigor than what we see in life generally?

Maybe it will come to me. It hasn't so far.

Bada Bing!

I just finished season one of the HBO series The Sopranos. With all the media attention surrounding the approaching (theoretical) series terminus, I thought I'd start from the beginning and follow the whole story top to bottom in concentrated fashion, letting the arc and detail of the story soak in.

I'd seen these episodes before. A few years ago we had some introductory package with our satellite TV which gave us HBO and HBO On Demand for free for a few months, and I watched the first three seasons. I got sucked into the show at that time, but when our special arrangement ended I was reluctant to pay to keep watching a single series when I knew it would be available on video shortly. And so I lost track of things over the next three seasons (which took five years to elapse).

I've always had a soft spot for crime fiction generally, and mob stories specifically--many of my favorite movies are of this genre: Godfather, Miller's Crossing, Goodfellas, Road to Perdition--but my usual skepticism about television reared its head in 1999 when the series debuted. I was intrigued, but I figured I'd let the dust of critical opinion settle before potentially wasting any time on it. The series turned out, of course, to be a big hit. And to read the hype now (I'm thinking of a recent Vanity Fair article specifically), it might even rise to the level of genius or revolution, taking television to some new and daring place.

My review of the show causes me once again to revisit my probably pathological hatred of television. After all, it's only a transmission medium, however manipulative and brain-sucking it may be in practice. I run across these things from time to time that I'm convinced are separate and apart from television in general, things distinct and superior to all the garbage that you otherwise can't escape on the damn thing. But of course I may be fooling myself utterly. Maybe the things I judge as worthy are just more of the same shit on somebody else's scale. Surely this is my wife's contention: she thinks the two things I now profess to like--Law and Order and The Sopranos--are just more commercial television shit. Maybe she's right.

In any case, I'm reminded that we are a story-telling species, we love gossip and drama and a good yarn; there's undoubtedly a survival advantage gained from this predilection. And there's no inherent reason why a movie's big budget should beget a better story in broad strokes than TV's smaller one, and so especially without the commercial meddling of the big networks there are bound to be good stories which slip thru the inanity and mediocrity filter.

More than my views on TV, though, I'm a little embarrassed to find myself asking some of Life's Big Questions after watching the tribulations of a bunch of fictional characters. Yes, I get that none of this is real, and maybe the story is even interesting in inverse proportion to its realism. But the story reveals a world that brushes up next to the one that I know, but which is so foreign to what I see in daily life, that the questions come rather unbidden.

I think there are a couple things that make mob stories so compelling to us. Chief among these is that we are watching people who have real power. The character of Tony Soprano is a powerful guy. He makes decisions which have a huge impact--often a life-or-death impact--on the lives of a lot of people, and he carries himself in life as a guy whose control over others is proper and natural. Now, this is not part of any world I see much of. Nobody ever concluded that I was a powerful guy. I'm not crying in my beer; I have no desire to be powerful (persuasive, maybe, at times, which I suppose is a kind of power). Indeed, in my job I come across a fair number of people who aspire to be in control of others, and it's hard for me not to see this basic desire as a character flaw. Whatever, it makes Tony Soprano a fascinating guy to watch. I also think that crime stories can speak to some more essential part of the human character. We get to watch a basic morality play about ambition and loyalty and deception, and I think everyone relates to this in some way. We get to lift up a corner of the veneer of civilization that obscures some of the uglier, animal aspects of our natures and peer into the depths. We may abhor and thrill at the mob's lawlessness, but I think it resonates in some little-exercised part of ourselves. I also think that up to a certain point, we like to see simple justice unencumbered by the baggage of the law. Often, the mobster lays down the rules--and they're not always rules we disagree with--and someone's failure to live up to these rules is met with swift and violent retribution. In some cases, we want to stand up and cheer. In the opening scene of The Godfather, Bonasera comes to Vito Corleone because a young man has beaten and raped his daughter and the legal system has failed the family. The Godfather puts a couple goons on the case, and the guy gets the shit beat out of him. We cheer--he absolutely had it coming.

But there's a grotesqueness that always creeps into the story, a line that always gets crossed that makes our stomachs turn to varying degrees. Susan hates to see anybody get whacked, whether they deserve it or not. And that's part of the morality play as well--power corrupts, etc. Anyway, this is hardly comprehensive, but it's useful (to me) to try and find some sources of these stories' power for us.

For The Sopranos specifically, it doesn't hurt that the writing and acting seem really first-rate. The production quality is very good, but the series doesn't really blaze new trails in television production; it's really all about the story, and about the interaction between a small knot of well-developed and really professionally-acted characters. These are people who are often extraordinarily capable and intelligent, but who often have minimal education. Tony and Carmela's expensive house and lavish lifestyle are at odds with their very blue collar origins. Tony, the man in charge in every other aspect of his life, is on his back foot when he puts himself (very reluctantly) at the mercy of a psychiatrist, someone whose education and exposure to the larger world is much more extensive than his and this interaction reveals one of his chief limitations as a person. However thin the premise, David Chase and his writers have done a great job of making the mob boss's going into therapy, and staying there, plausible; and the juxtaposition of these two people, and the civility of working out problems in this way, which stands in such stark contrast to how Tony operates in nearly every other sphere of his life, is one of the story's great pulls. And this craftmanship is on display in several other relationships in the story as well. The sublety in the performances of the key four or six people, and the sophistication in the writing of their interactions with each other, put the story into a stratosphere. With very rare exception, the plot developments and their working-out do not seem contrived or sensational, even when the most basic premise--the daily business of a mafia family--is highly sensational. It's a part of David Chase's accomplishment that he makes a world which our culture sees in a highly romantcized way seem mostly mundane and grimy.

I'm off with season two this week.

Another Enthusiasm

This week I've been revisiting Ken Burns's 1994 documentary on baseball.

I've always had a bit of an antipathy for major American sports (my apologies to Joshua). It begins, I suppose, with the elitist idea that anything that has broad appeal to American society must by definition be mundane and insipid. My wife hates and rejects the snobbery of this sentiment, but I can't help myself: I find it confirmed (or I think I do) daily, everywhere.

Football provides the perfect exempli gratia, providing a never-ending fool's parade of beer-soaked emotional cripples whose deepest commitment is reserved for this ritualized homoerotic warplay. It's an entertainment, people, like lions ripping people apart in the colosseum. Hailing from a Northern climate, I admire the skating involved in hockey and its speed. But the fights, the tolerance of them, puts the whole sport right out of the running. The honest--or naive--devotee doesn't even try to disguise that the fights are their whole reason for liking hockey. And there's a real sense that the audience would fall off alarmingly if the fighting were *gasp* outlawed. And basketball. I don't even know what the fuck to say about that. I can't even get myself to a place where I dislike it; I just don't get it altogether. Not even close. It looks like an exercise in wrist-slicing futility. A sweaty modern dance called (like a Calvin Klein perfume) "frustration." To me it's like watching the 24-hour drowning channel.



Baseball always felt different, though I devoted very little time and attention to the game growing up. I was living in Minneapolis when the Minnesota Twins were working their way up to their two World Series in '87 and '91, and you couldn't help getting caught up in the stream. The Twin Cities were electrified during those post-seasons, and the nights when World Series games were played in the Metrodome were unbelievable. I drove a bus through several of those nights, and I'll never forget sitting in a gridlocked downtown surrounded by a hundred thousand good-natured, frenzied Twins fans. The Ken Burns documentary came out a couple years later, though I didn't watch it until its DVD release.



But even prior to all this I loved the idea of baseball, the whimsical collection of rules and characteristics that mark the game. I love the game's abstraction, the complete arbitrariness of its very concept. It's beautiful to watch, both its setting with vibrant greens and contrasting earth tones and white lines and bags, and the game itself, which is graceful and surprising. It's leisurely, but thrilling when things happen. And it's especially magical on the radio (everything's better on the radio). The actions of a baseball game are quiet and repetitive, and the difference between success and failure in this repetition is often very subtle. I love that.



There's nothing new in these observations, I know. But as a bona fide nostalgia whore I cannot watch the history of baseball without noting--and pining a little for--all that has been lost. This is rather ironic when baseball itself has not changed fundamentally for a century. We recognize and react to the old footage as though we were watching a current game, which is why the statistics which so many baseball fans love remain meaningful. Baseball is a phenomenon of culture--the most impermanent of realms--which holds steady while the rest of the culture changes around it. This seems an inversion of most history where some major change occurs suddenly in front of the backdrop of the day's culture. But baseball's history is still marked by a succession of interesting characters, talented athletes and canny entrepreneurs. And these men were products of the changing world. We see them burst onto the scene, age and depart, their lives and accomplishments condensed like a movie trailer.



There is a good photographic record of Babe Ruth's whole career, and the end of his baseball career and the latter half of his life are represented on newsreel footage. So I feel a bit as though I knew the man, though he was in the ground 14 years before I was even born. There's something almost impossibly magnetic to me about the footage of his funeral procession through the streets of Manhattan in 1948.



However we parse it out, the story of baseball makes a lovely point of condensation, a nice microcosm wherein the changes and upheavals through which the rest of society has lived can be marked and digested.

First, I think our society has become much less patient, an artifact of a television-driven culture. We have become uncomfortable with silence and inactivity, and in very few spheres of life do we luxuriate and linger. Baseball's early days find us in a different place. We celebrated an afternoon at the ball field, and we did not rankle at the long pauses and stately pace of the game. One talked to one's neighbor, ruminated about the game in progress. By contrast, we seem today to need constant superficial stimulation (though in fairness I must note that though attendance and viewership have been falling, ballparks still attract thousands of people who pay to watch the very same game). Interestingly, sources at the time of baseball's birth celebrate the fast pace and non-stop action compared with other entertainments of the time. This makes an even stronger case for how our culture has changed in this regard.



People even look different. There are lots of bad teeth--crooked, missing, stained. Hair cuts are dated, some of them never-coming-back-into-fashion dated. The cut of clothing has changed. Even body types are different, from an age before widespread good nutrition and health clubs and regular medical care. People are smaller, leaner. Dirty-faced children in knickers play ball in vacant lots.



There's a great sense of community, of a collective activity in our early baseball craze. The great old photos--older than these here--reveal such a different world. Most everyone in the stands is male. Everyone wears a hat--every single person, no matter the weather. Row after row, in thousands and thousands. (It interests me that something that was absolutely indispensible in 1900--a felt hat--became in the succeeding hundred years optional at first, and now is almost seen as an affectation.) They're all in suits, mostly of a dark color, making for a uniform sea of black. Everyone is wearing a vest (or a "waistcoat"). As the documentary's decades pass, these things change visibly.



There are great images of huge crowds clogging the streets front of newspaper offices and telegraph stations where huge animated billboards were set up for baseball games. These billboards were sometimes in the form of a baseball diamond diagram with moving pieces showing balls and strikes and the progress of runners, or they were a scoreboard displaying baseball's everpresent statistics which changed moment to moment. Sometimes there were announcers up on a scaffolding reading off the information as it came across the wire, a predecessor to the play-by-play of a radio announcer. These monochromatic crowds would stand in the street in the hundreds or thousands, huddled like cattle in a winter barn, and thrill at a baseball game being played a couple states away. During the playoffs, the crowds in New York's Times Square were just like our present New Year's Eve crowds. There's a palpable sense of a whole culture's budding enthusiasm for a new thing, a thing which has turned out to have lasting appeal.

It was into this environment that radio burst in the 1920s, and the recordings of those early broadcasts which are featured in this documentary are really riveting. The background sounds, the great skill of the announcers in describing the surroundings and the play-by-play action, these things made for a rich and three-dimensional experience for a baseball-mad country. I think of all the isolated farm kids huddled by this newfangled contraption, listening to a gigantic cultural happening in a bustling city far away, and of what seeds the whole experience must have planted in their young minds. I spent my early years in a rural community, and the sense of the big city as the place where life was marching proactively forward has never left me. Radio baseball still does this to me.



This only touches the surface, naturally, of what the documentary takes 20 hours to cover. In a way it's like one of those sped-up films that shows the growing of a plant or the assembly of an airplane, but this time it's the birthing of contemporary culture being condensed, a vision of our society filtered through baseball. World wars, Jim Crow laws, the industrial revolution, the radio and television revolution, all these things and many more are reflected back to us from the remarkably steady societal mirror of baseball. In this light the concept of baseball as our national game hits meaningfully home; the cliché is made good when one sees games played between opponents in the Civil War, or played by our enemies in WW2, or when we see the same game played over a century and a half in spite of changes in the audience and the game's participants and in the society that produces them.



If you want to give your enthusiasm for the sport a shot in the arm--or if you want to discover the sport--this is the best possible place to start.

Human Nature, Vegas-Style

Organized, institutionalized gambling is an odd phenomenon. Especially when it's with a gambling machine. The casinos are stuffed with people sitting slackly at these bleeping money-vacuum droids, and I can't help thinking of Pavlov or Skinner or whoever and their discovery of one of life's little wrinkles:

a behavior will be much more firmly entrenched if reinforcement for that behavior is delivered sporadically or randomly.

I suppose it's because this delivers a simulacrum of reward for toil, or for perseverance, whereas something that rewards predictably at every attempt becomes simply a fact of life, a bedrock thing. But why would that mechanism, whatever it is, not recognize and repel from a drain of precious resources? This setting--the whole town--is like an industry grown up around a quirk in biology, some opportunist's advantage-taking of one of our psychological weak links bloated to obscene proportions. To my mind, anyway, there's just no escaping a sense of maladjustment in our pouring of money into these machines, of some functional mechanism being preyed upon by gaming operators.

I don't mean to be all holier-than-thou about it. (OK, well, yeah, I do.) I always blow a few bucks myself when I'm in town, and I have at least a small inkling of what drives most people, at least for the gaming part of it. I have an addictive personality to some degree, and I have a sense of how this industry, designed to prey on just this part of the psyche, could go badly for me (though I'm fortunate in that gambling just doesn't do much for me). But for every stuff shirt like me who ineptly parts with his $50, there are a zillion people going just a bit over the top, losing a few grand, drinking a bit too much, hitting the all-you-can-eat buffets. It's all mostly good fun, a bit of harmless release, I suppose.

But as with so much in life, there's a continuum. One can see a lot of overconfident young men, mostly, swaggering around thinking they've got the world by the balls, only to wake up the next day with a hell of a hangover and an empty wallet. Guess it wasn't the world's balls in the vise after all. (The guide books say that a $1,000 bankroll can be expected to last for five hours of $5 and $10 blackjack hands or 25-cent slots. At $25 per blackjack hand, your grand will last just under an hour.) And the further out along the bell curve we go, the darker (if, thankfully, fewer) the stories get, people who lose control and come out of extreme benders and find themselves without any money or credit left. And worse--houses gone, cars gone, wives gone. You don't have to look too hard to find these ugly examples.

Given how vaporous a line separates healthy release from self-immolation, the whole business feels a bit like playing with fire to me. (I hesitate to use the word "healthy" in any context when talking about Vegas; perhaps "understandable" or "explicable" works better.) Somewhere in our collective cultural psyche--or some part of it, anyway; the National Organization of Women will not likely hold their next convention here--the whole business seems to find reinforcement, though. All the promotions show men at the table, their hottie girlfriends at their arms showing obeisance and support. Hookers are everywhere. Booze is handed out free. Cigars are readily available to "celebrate." There's some version of what we recognize as male power being displayed.

But back to my main thought: the gambling is the engine that drives Vegas, and it's responsible for one of the world's great spectacles. This two mile strip out in the middle of the desert seems a singularity. Whatever misgivings I have (and always express) about Times Square when I visit New York--that it's all planned out and sanitized, that none of it is spontaneous or real, that it's manipulative of some base television-watching thing in our nature--I have those same misgivings about Vegas--tenfold. And the balance is much the same, the rewards lagging behind in similar proportion. (Vegas is similar to Times Square as well in that neither place has many natives in it--indeed, I'm not sure if there's even such thing as a Vegas native). Except for maybe the Formula One paddock (which is an entirely different can of worms), I know of no place where so much money is concentrated in such a small space as this strip of real estate. And it's all evolved into this near-perfect form of bait and hook. The big resort hotels make the biggest promises with the most outrageously expensive and over-the-top presentations. And it's tough not to stand slack-jawed in awe. The latest darling of the Strip, the Wynn, reputedly cost upwards of $2 billion to construct. Two billion dollars! And the paint is hardly dry and Steve Wynn is adding on already, nearly doubling the property. As is the Venetian next door. As is the Bellagio. Construction along the strip is like a virus in the air. Vegas is a town in continual reformation and rebirth.

But you don't see an opulent hotel without a full casino. The resorts where the casinos are empty, like the Luxor, feel shabby and have a bit of a pall over them. The concept of the Vegas Resort / Hotel / Casino, this adult Disneyland, seems the perfect embodiment of Richard Dawkins's meme, the unit of cultural evolution. It's a concept honed and polished over a few decades to become something of extraordinary draw and power. It's one of those concepts which gets us to act consistently against our own best interests, a magical formula arrived at where people voluntarily give up their money in vast, almost unimaginable sums. A lot of that money goes back into an increase of spectacle in hopes of snaring yet MORE money, on and on in an upward spiral, all going somewhere not to our benefit.

I can't help thinking (getting all holy again and shit) what this money, all given over to no useful purpose whatsoever, might accomplish if applied to a worthier task. But it is what it is. Call it entertainment, I suppose. We all can't sit at our steam irons 24/7 for the rest of our days.

Inconvenient, Hell

We watched An Inconvenient Truth last night.

I'm not quite sure what to do with the information in the movie. Accepted as being exactly correct, I cannot see how the picture it paints is not absolutely dire. And his most basic premises--human population has exploded exponentially in the last hundred years or so; the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere is directly linked to global temperature; the amount of carbon dioxide currently in our atmosphere, and the amounts being added by human sources, are unprecedented in any recorded history and are presently trending sharply upward; corroborating evidence that these things are contributing to a warming of the planet is amply at hand--these seem things which can't be credibly refuted. The consequences of global warming--as opposed to the argument that the planet is, in fact, getting warmer--seem only slightly less certain, but even then he puts together a pretty convincing summary of the effects of acidifying the oceans, of rising ocean levels, and of the effects on vegetation and other lower-tier life forms of these increasing temperatures.

The ten hottest years in recorded history have occurred within the past 14 years. And the recession of the glaciers (at least the dozen he showed before-and-after pictures of) and of the ice caps seem pretty tough facts to counter. He quickly dispatches with the argument that global temperatures are cyclical and that we're currently in a normal upward cycle by showing us exactly what the cycles have amounted to over the last 650,000 years and how completely out of the ballpark we are in our current conditions and our near-term projections. In my own lifetime, I have seen changes in, for example, the amount of snowfall we receive in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Growing up, we rode snowmobiles extensively, and now for the last decade, people have had to trailer their sleds further North to find snow. I used to need a four wheel drive truck to get around in winter; I would not have engaged the 4WD now for five or six consecutive winters, at least here in Appleton.

Whether all of this is responsible for, say, Katrina seems debatable; but when hurricane and typhoon and cyclone activity is looked at worldwide, it's hard not to see Katrina as something other than just another hurricane, as an outcome of measurable things--like increasing oceanic temperatures. In addition to record-setting high temperatures all around the world in the past handful of years, the number and severity of these tropical storms has risen everywhere, and they have begun threatening places previously thought immune to them. It just seems like quite a feat of denial is needed not to see all these elements converging toward a single conclusion.

Blowhards like Rush Limbaugh have long contended that global warming is some kind of hysterical liberal plot, and one can even find people who aren't bloated, self-hyping entertainers obsessed with the sound of their own voices who question the prevailing science. But their views are much harder to find (even if our current warped sense of journalistic "balance" implies that the topic has two equally competing sides, which seems far from the case), and personally I find their arguments less convincing than the case Al Gore is making--not least because his critics mostly concentrate on questioning his conclusions without putting forth a more convincing case for a different one.

The movie ends with a call to action, and an assurance that this problem can be tackled like many other difficult things have been tackled throughout human history, by awareness and by all of us pulling in the same direction. This may be, and in any case I think we must do what we can, but his presentation makes it seem as though we may already be far past the tipping point. We can have little short term effect on world population (and we may be able to effect very little long-term without the influence of certain opposed "moral" institutions), and the amount of fossil fuel being burned--a major contributor to this problem--cannot be curtailed simply. To bring about the kinds of changes he recommends--increasing the fuel efficiency of our cars and homes, for example--will take some time, and, I'm afraid, some more dire consequences felt by people, to bring about; and then the "healing" of the planet will take decades or longer. If, say, coral reefs and plankton are both negatively affected by the higher oceanic temperatures and by higher acidity levels in the water, these things begin to affect the whole food chain from the bottom up; and they'll take probably longer to repair than they took to break.

As I say, we have no choice but to do what we can do, but one wonders if a wholesale retooling of human civilization is not required (and, assuming it is even possible, if it would succeed in saving us from what is in store). The numbers of people who stand to suffer and die from the worst-case extrapolation from his data make Katrina seem like a walk in the rain. Roger Ebert said that after seeing the movie he found himself turning off all the lights in his house. I find myself doing the same thing, but without the optimism that I'm doing anything real to ward off armageddon. It's a useless symbolic act, something nowhere near as inconvenient at what may be in store for all of us.

Grades:

As a compelling entertainment: B+
As a message transmission: A-
As a feel-good flick: F-

You Know What Gets My (pet) Goat?

OK, I suppose it's my conceit to think with any given post that I've brought some unique perspective to bear upon whatever trifle caught my attention. And I suppose I might just as often be an ignorant horse's ass. But this time I'm admitting to being an ignorant horse's ass up front. I'm about to spout off about something of which I admit PREEMPTIVELY I know not a damn thing.

There, I said it.

I was listening to NPR's "Marketplace," a daily show about financial things, and the host, some slick, 30-something dude named "Kai," was pontificating about the day's stock market performance (which they call, with self-congratulatory swagger, ...wait for it... "doing the numbers").

I'll try to paraphrase: "The Dow was pretty flat today on news of the government's pending third quarter productivity reports, which are expected to come in somewhere around half a percent below expectations; that caused an early rally to run out of steam, though some strength was regained at the end of the day after news of Kirk Kerkorian's sale of additional GM shares..." And on and on in similar fashion for the whole hour long show.

And the whole time I was thinking: You know what, dude? You don't know SHIT about what those stock market numbers mean. OK, I don't know shit about any of it, but I don't think you do either, and neither does most everybody else that dabbles in this bullshit. Who gives a fuck about productivity figures (or whatever the hell it was)? What does it even mean in a way that translates to anything human? Who even knows about the existence of these reports except a small group of people telling each other what they should or shouldn't like? One can hear, night after night, this stupid program interviewing one brown-nosed "analyst" after another about what this bevy of arcane flotsam means--because it's all so far from obvious to the rest of us--and it all sounds like a bunch of salesman-slick doubletalk, a mumbling wad of pseudo-speak. One would do equally well to read tea leaves or to gaze into a crystal ball. The whole setup seems like a grand, ritualized, business-suited circle-jerk, a kind of ongoing orgiastic, self-referential congratulatory frat party that appeals to a certain kind of money-grubbing lower tier mind who is convinced that he and his ilk are "players" and are responsible for making the world go round (and should be compensated accordingly).

This little snitty personal moment of mine led me, after breathing deeply from a paper sack, to ponder a reacquaintance I made a few days back. This acquaintance--not a friend, but somebody I kind of knew second-hand thru a close friend--had recently gone in a short span of time from the very edge of bankruptcy to renewed prosperity, a kind of riches-to-rags-to-riches-again story. Last I had heard, a couple years back, he was about to lose everything to a series of shady dealings by which he had backed himself into a corner. When I inquired now about how the fall had come, I was only a little surprised to hear that the phoenix had risen to even greater heights, somehow (yet again) bypassing that inconvenient ashes stage altogether.

This person has always struck me as the quintessential business type, the kind of person who listens to this above tripe and uses the information to bilk somebody. The guy had always been the proponent of the Big Deal, someone who deals with big debts, big risks and big payoffs. And when things went sour, well, the genius was in getting someone else's money to go down the drain, in getting someone else to take the fall. Instead of a pair of striped pyjamas, our hero is suddenly in possession of several impressive new personal properties scattered about the country (including shiny new wheels and strategic investment properties for each of the kids) and a renewed, jet-setting lifestyle. And not surprisingly, I learned that his super-lucrative new job involves titles and duties which are probably arcane and gaseous to Joe Consumer. He is some kind of Portfolio Manger now, some Asset Allocation Blah-Blah Specialist Whatever, whose work commanded an impressive salary.

In my bottomless pit of cynicism, I couldn't help but decide I'd been duped not to expect this all along: the guy whose contribution to society is least comprehensible--and, I might argue, would be least missed if he vanished--is most grotesquely compensated, compensated in a way that breaks entirely from any reality a working stiff could comprehend. During the business downturn of the past five years, story after story finds the top brass making huge salaries and obscene bonuses for heading companies which are losing vast sums of money. Failing executives are let go, punished with cumbersomely bloated severence packages. The guy throwing bags at United Airlines is just shit out of luck.

This all dovetails nicely with my utter incomprehension about the sanctity of stockholders in our present business model (a sanctity reinforced again and again during the hour of "Marketplace"). The stock price--which, near as I can tell, is merely an indicator of the general public's view of the merit of a company (after, that is, the huge initial fund raising of the IPO)--seems to have become the bottom line for business here; everybody--manager and peon alike, though the managers seem to have a nice insulating layer of blubber--appear to be in the service of supporting the stock price. Unless to add an additional set of smoke & mirrors between voting stockholder and overcompensated executive, I have yet to figure out why this business model has taken over from a simple supply-and-demand marketplace.

Is this naive of me? Would a jumbo jet ever get built without this kind of self-proclaimed mover & shaker? Would there be skyscrapers? Is there some seminal dreamer buried in there who has brought us medicine and advanced technology? Or is it just a slice of bell curve mediocrity playing a game of "Make Your Mark"? When the incomprehensibility (to me) of it seems to blur with the line between Have and Have Not, I fear the worst.

Another Incontrovertible (sort of) Communiqué from (well, maybe) Jesus (OK, probably not)

I just heard--under duress--a song on the radio, "Jesus Take the Wheel," a ham-fisted country Wal-Mart anthem about a woman with a little baby whose car skids on the ice. As she sees "both their lives flash before her eyes" (which is itself an oddity, since she's only lived one of their lives) she TAKES HER HANDS OFF THE WHEEL and asks... "Jesus, take the wheel". After they survive the event she thus finds herself obligated to just keep her hands off the wheel of life forever. It seems in that instant it came to her, in what strikes me as a way-fucked-up grasp of cause and effect, that how she'd been livin' was somehow at the root of her god's motivation in threatening the life of her (perhaps very evil, admittedly) little toddler. Or perhaps driving in inclement weather is now a sin and this is how we find out.

Why she did not blame the Jesus figure for making her a shitty driver is a question left unexplored.

Personally, I'm much more ready to believe that letting go of the wheel in a critical automotive situation is a bad idea, that if she wants not to live wrong she might start by learning how to be proactive in her driving. But hey, it's not my song.

I'm always amazed that (presumably) otherwise intelligent people are willing to line up--publicly!--behind this lopsided shell game wherein a god figure is thanked for every positive event but is never blamed for people's misfortune or held otherwise accountable for the world's intense misery, let alone that these same people make sappy songs about the shell game and hordes of other people nod their heads sympathetically in the glow of the righteous pap. Quite apart from what we ought to think about the whole modus operandi of a deity who sends cryptic messages by threatening innocent children rather than, say, a personal visit, how can the god figure be thanked for one's dinner and not held responsible for people elsewhere not having enough to eat? How can we thank the god for steering the tornado clear of our house and not blame him for letting it destroy the neighbor's place? It would seem that The Lord works in ways so mysterious as to be perfectly useless as an explanatory device.

Maybe it just takes a certain kind of mind. I read a while back that substantially larger percentages of Americans believe in a "heaven" than believe in a "hell," as though the concepts were somehow separate. Perhaps this is the kind of mind. Maybe when I grasp the one, the other will make more sense to me.

Anyhow, as I listened to the song I was reminded about a plane crash a few years back where the cockpit voice recorder revealed that the plane was deliberately crashed by a Muslim pilot who was attempting to hasten his journey to Shangri-La-La Land by testing his faith with a convenient planeload of irredeemable sinners in tow. He basically put the airplane in a steep nose-down attitude and then let go, saying over and over again in a frantic voice "I put my faith in Allah" (or some such psalmic hooey) while--big surprise--the airplane crashed in a big fucking fireball, killing everyone, including our boy in his dogma bubble.

I guess Bubble Boy knowingly killed a big bunch of people, so that's one big difference between him and our Wal-Mama of Song. But it's the same delusion, and it's not a huge stretch for me to imagine that woman (whose new tactic for livin' right we are supposed to celebrate) as a pilot in the cockpit responding to an in-flight emergency in the same fashion. Indeed, as we've contemplated before (courtesy of Sam Harris), if we are unable to consider Ms. Wal-Mama as having a kind of mental illness, then we are left with the conclusion that she is a better religious person than we are and... we ought to emulate her. If her religion is right, then she is right and we ought to follow her lead.

OK, it's a work of fiction. A really, really, reallyreallyreally stupid one. But I don't get why the writer & performing artist are not hounded out of town for wanton harmful stupidity.

Maybe The Devil Wears Land's End

Susan and I went a week or so ago to The Devil Wears Prada. If I had any reservations about not having enough estrogen in my blood for this movie, they appear to have dissipated as soon as I saw Meryl Streep on the cast list. There is something in the effortlessness of her portrayals that sucks me right in. I don't know if it's the accent thing or what (I generally hate this little mechanism, as it's so rarely convincing; even Streep's Danish accent in Out of Africa, a fabulous movie which I've been watching again lately, seems to come and go. And she's the acknowledged master of accents). I don't know; maybe the accents are more something to help HER inhabit her characters. But however it happens, she does seem to accomplish the task. In any case she can always be counted on to be interesting.

And to me it is absolutely a feather in her cap that she comes across as utterly normal and unaffected in interviews. Her talents would seem to justify, if any would, her being an insufferable diva; but to hear her talk casually in an interview you would think she was just your kid's friend's mom--smart and animated and friendly, and completely down-to-earth. And I love that in interviews she gestures a lot with her hands and makes (very convincing) vocal sound effects to make her case, whatever she's talking about.

In this movie she plays the czar at the helm of some archetypal fashion magazine. The story revolves around a naive young woman who arrives from a temp agency to be the czar's secretary, and about her trials in the midst of a den of freaks and at the hands of this really reprehensible woman. Of course, the more subtly evil the part, the more for Streep to sink her teeth into, and she delivers the goods without ever, it seems, raising her voice above a purr. Her performance again makes it difficult not to pay rapt attention to her, and I've rarely found a character I so much loved to hate.

The young secretary is played by Anne Hathaway, who seems the right person for the job (I knew who she was, but had never seen her in anything). Her balancing act is to be someone who can believably make what they intend to be an ugly-duckling-to-swan transformation, and to be tough enough to absorb all the vitriol that comes her way from all quarters when she steps, as a non-fashion person, into this high fashion world. The movie would end quickly if she, like a normal human being, shouted "Fuck you!" after the second insult and fled the scene.

It was a fun and engaging story, if a bit thin on some of the details (this seems to be a thing with a certain vein of comedy, and romantic comedy especially: somehow the mold got set such that practical things aren't thought to get in the way of a good story). And maybe these weaknesses, as they seem to me, are simply transferred from the similarly-weak book (it was a best-seller, after all). Or maybe any issues I have are due to the vantage point of my plastic lawn chair placed distinctly outside the rapid flow of the mainstream. The fashion world is portrayed as something freaky and barely grounded, a POV I can absolutely sympathize with. But, exempli gratia, on two or three occasions our naive young secretary is subjected to harangues about why her own dismissal of the fashion world (she is a journalist by trade) is stupid and wrong. And these ringing defenses of haute couture ring flat and false--silly, even. But it would appear they're meant to be convincing. If this were a trial, the fashion world should be looking for better representation. The money and power behind the enterprise of running a top fashion magazine, and the untold millions of dollars that follow the magazine's pronouncements, attempt to show the industry in a glamorous light. Our czar goes everywhere in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes limousine, and is genuflected to, and waited upon by, everyone with whom she comes in contact. Maybe this is all according to plan, as the story line must play out; an irresistible world of high fashion would require a different plot flow--it would be a different story altogether. Still, it seems clumsily handled.

And again--this one is unapologetically my own quirk--they spend a lot of time selling as beautiful things that are just plain ugly. I think any woman when "properly dressed up" in this way is always less attractive to me than in jeans & a t-shirt. And no makeup. I have to assume that the scenes where the latest fashions are worn are meant to be stunning and jaw-dropping, but it just doesn't work for me. Even the scenes where Streep is looking battered and broken, caught off-guard and looking pale and all of her 57 years, look better to me than the fake-skinned, arbitrarily-clad goddess she is supposed to be for most of the show.

In the end, our girl regains her footing just before being sucked into the soulless vortex, walking away from this grotesque world but hanging onto the valuable lessons she picked up along the way (this is a Hollywood movie, after all). So she goes back to her fashionably-sinful ways, though now with a dash of élan and put-togetherness. Whatever.

Grade: B-