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December 16th, 2009
08:57 am - my face woulda been beet red
On Monday night, I stayed out way too late at the ImprovBoston Fun(d)raiser at the Estate in downtown Boston. Rather than narrate a party you didn't attend in droning detail, I'll call out some of the local and rising comics who performed. Keep an eye out for these names.
MC Mr Napkins, a/k/a Zach Sherwin: hilarious, Jew-froed indie-rap backpacker / comedian / anagrammatist from the Boston area. I've heard that he's moving to the West Coast soon to try and Break In, which would be awesome.
"Street Cred" was one of the two songs he performed last night.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=js1QS-MmEZo]
Tony V: legendary local on the Boston scene. A foul-mouthed but friendly old man.
The following video's old material, but it's indicative.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WH1R04dhtEU]
Myq Kaplan: really clever local comedian with a quick delivery. He's going to be on the Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien tonight (Wednesday the 16th). But I already saw his material. Except for the swearing.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gPOhnYI1YY]
Shane Mauss: if memory serves, he did a bit for The Waste Land Comedy Hour Starring T.S. Elliot that went over like a Stratus off a cliff. But the material in this show was all fresh and he delivered it pretty well. Shane has already been on Conan; he is supposedly coming out with a comedy album soon.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFkV__01ijw]
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Current Music: MC Mr Napkins - "Street Cred"
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December 15th, 2009
07:48 am - different strokes for different folks
If you're curious about what I do for a living, or about internet marketing, you might find the following post interesting.
Companies love internet marketing - search engine ads, banner ads, e-mail newsletters, etc - because they can track it with greater clarity than any other form of advertising. Advertisers like Nielsen and ClearChannel may provide estimates of how many users see a TV ad or a billboard. And those estimates might even be accurate to a statistically significant degree. But they can't say with real certainty how many people follow up with the sponsor because of that ad. They can guess, and they've grown really good at guessing. They can post a special phone number or URL that only people who've seen that ad would use. But it's not precise.
Internet marketing stomps on that limitation. We can tell where you were when you saw an ad. We can tell when you clicked on it. If the ad popped up in a search engine (a Google ad, a Yahoo! ad, a Bing ad), we can tell what you were searching for when the ad surfaced. If you click on the ad, visit the sponsoring website and don't buy, we can tell which other sites you visit afterward. All of this, and probably more, we know. Not about your demographic, or about your personality type - about you, personally, the man or woman doing the browsing.
(Clearing your cookies prevents this, though technology to get around that will soon be widely available)
Very few agencies manage all of a company's advertising, however. A company might do SEO in-house, contract out for search ads, buy banner ads direct from the publisher, use e-mail marketing templates and trackers from a small agency, and get one overworked intern to handle social media. So you have data streams pouring in from half a dozen different sources. But these data don't all represent separate people. A lot of these data points might cover the same person.
For instance: you're thinking about buying a new car. You do a Google search for "used sedans in Boston." You see an ad in the Sponsored Links column (on the right) for certified pre-owned Hondas at a dealer in Quincy, MA. The "Honda" grabs your attention, subconsciously, because you've been seeing a lot of banner ads for a Honda year-end sales event. So you click on the dealership ad and poke around at some of the models they list. You visit several other sites that same day, either by searching or by clicking through sponsored links on trusted sites (like the Boston.com/Cars page).
A few days later, you see a banner ad for the Honda dealership in Quincy you clicked on first. This isn't a coincidence. You've been retargeted - cookied and triggered to serve banners from a site you visited but did not buy or sign up from. The ad mentions one of the models you were looking at (the Accord, let's say) and says there are some new cars in stock. You click through and look around. Sure enough, there's an Accord that meets your needs. You fill out the online form to get more information.
A detailed quote is sent to you from the dealership. This puts you on an e-mail list. A week later, the list sends you its weekly e-mail, listing a handful of used cars that have just arrived in the showroom. You click through on one, decide you like it, and call the showroom to arrange an appointment. The customer service rep asks where you heard about the car. From the e-mail list, you say.
For that one transaction - getting you into the showroom - you've touched on the following marketing vertices:- Banner ads (Honda year-end sales event)
- Search ads
- Placement-targeted links (from Boston.com/Cars)
- Retargeting
- E-mail marketing
Five different forms of marketing, advertising or lead generation. The ultimate goal here is to get you into the showroom so the car salespeople can go to work on you. Which ad gets the credit?
The e-mail marketing? That was the last thing you touched before calling customer service. Technically you could have gone to the showroom at any time, but you weren't compelled to until you saw an e-mail you liked. But you never would have signed up for the e-mail if you hadn't revisited the site and filled out the form. And you never would have revisited the site if you hadn't been retargeted - meaning you needed to visit once and get cookied. And so on, and so on, and scooby dooby doo.
Does the last touch get credit? The first touch? Do we evenly distribute credit among all marketing efforts? Marketing departments need to know this in order to know who gets more budget next year. And if they don't get a compelling answer, they'll guess.
In the above example, the e-mail marketing clickthrough was the only behavior that got you to sign up for an appointment. Through a glass darkly, the first banner ad looks useless - you didn't even click on that! No revenue generated by the banner ad, so cut display advertising for next year. But without that Honda year-end sales event banner ad, you wouldn't have clicked on the Google ad. Fewer display impressions means less brand awareness, fewer clicks on search and fewer visitors to the site. Then marketing comes back to you next year, asking why the hell traffic to the Quincy Honda dealership website is down when search volume is higher than ever.
What you (the ad agency) need is a way to integrate data from those five different sources into one single platform. That's called attribution analysis. There are a few companies that offer this as a service. A lot of companies try to do it in house, integrating their display reports with their search reports and their e-mail reports and mixing it into a bowl. There's no definitive method - yet. But the demand is growing. Because after 2008 took a dump on everyone's budgets, every marketing department in America has had to do more with less. They want to spend their budgets where they'll do the most good. For that, you need a holistic look at all marketing data from all sources - online and offline.
What I'm doing currently (among other things) is researching attribution analysis providers. There's no one-size-fits-all program: different companies need different attribution systems. For some clients, we might recommend a trusted partner agency; for others, we might do it ourselves. But we need to know more about the state of display, offline marketing and attribution management before we can recommend anything. That's where I come in.
... I said you might find this post interesting.
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Current Music: Sly and the Family Stone - "Everyday People"
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December 14th, 2009
11:01 am - if you're lonely, you can talk to me
Media blow:
Talk To Me: Uneven biopic. Don Cheadle plays Ralph "Petey" Greene, a fast-talking ex-convict who becomes a DJ in the D.C. area in the Sixties. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Dewey Hughes, the radio producer who takes a chance on the street-smart jiver who talks to The People! And so forth. While the details of Petey Greene's broadcasting career are pretty entertaining, the movie suffers from flat dialogue and stilted pacing.
For instance: when Greene's agitating for a radio job proves too disruptive for Hughes' station to ignore, Hughes proposes to meet Greene at a nearby pool hall. Greene suggests that they shoot a game of nine-ball, with a disc jockey job as the stakes. Hughes agrees. As soon as this happens, we know that it's going to be a close game - because Hughes (the producer) would not agree to offer Greene (the ex-con) a job on the air if he had any doubts in his own abilities at shooting pool. Hughes then proceeds to take off his jacket, unbutton his sleeves and lay a side bet that Greene won't drop a single ball off the break. Not ten seconds have passed, and we know that Hughes is going to run the table. The language of film - dialogue, shot placement, pacing, music - all tell us this for certain.
So this whole scene takes about six minutes. Greene's rise to local stardom, once he finally has a radio job, takes about four minutes.
Add to this the most frequent problem with any biopic - characters commenting on how important they are at This Moment In History, rather than doing important things - and the resulting picture drags. Don Cheadle playing a hustling ex-con soul DJ who talked smack about Berry Gordy, broadcasting from the heart of D.C. during the race riots of '68, should have been captivating, moving and hilarious. Instead I found myself checking the DVD sleeve at the 80-minute mark: "God damn! There's still half an hour left?"
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-eitsutpOc]
The Slutcracker: at long last, a burlesque adaptation of The Nutracker Suite. In this high-spectacle, high-energy production, Clara and Fritz are boyfriend and girlfriend, inviting friends over for Christmas dinner. When Clara's grandmother tries to give her a large pink dildo as a Christmas gift, Clara is horrified and Fritz (feeling a little inadequate) jealously kicks the grandmother out. But she sneaks back in that evening and demonstrates the dildo's magical powers to Clara: it transforms into the handsome and athletic Slutcracker Prince. The two of them dance away to a fairy wonderland, where dominatrices dance en pointe and male pole dancers vault to Arabesque strains.
The Nutcracker is a natural fit for this sort of story ("moreso than Macbeth", I commented to Liz and Hugh, with whom I saw it). A postmodern audience could read the entire ballet, with little difficulty, as the story of a girl's sexual awakening. Adolescent girl becomes fascinated with virile man (the Nutcracker) who takes her on a tour of exotic lands - Spain, Arabia, China - and epicurean delights. It's a natural fit. Maybe they could tackle Swan Lake in the spring?
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Current Music: "Hey Bulldog"
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December 11th, 2009
11:46 am
if your Friday needs uplift.
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10:06 am - I'm giving you a haircut, walking to the sushi bar
Good news, everyone: I've discovered I like sushi.
My first hint that I might enjoy a food I'd written off as pretentious, weird or just inaccessible for so many years came at Hawver's wedding. He served raw tuna steak, which tasted delicious. This planted a seed in the back of my mind: the idea that raw fish could taste good (what the hell is this, Thomas Friedman's op-ed column? fish growing from seeds? fix this before you publish).
Visiting Baltimore for Thanksgiving, my old pal Liz B. took me to XS on the outskirts of Baltimore. I ordered the chef's Sushi Sampler, as it looked standard and unintimidating. It wasn't until the platter arrived, stuffed with tuna rolls and sashimi, that I made my confession.
"I've never had sushi before," I explained.
"Really?"
"I never got around to it. It's one of those things I felt you had to try at a certain age or else it was too late to cultivate a taste for it. Like reading Catcher in the Rye."
Liz was a perfect tutor, giving me just the right combination of coaching and tips to let me discover on my own. And it was all good! Tuna rolls: fantastic! California rolls: still good! Whitefish sashimi: loved it! Shrimp sashimi: incredible!
"Take a little bit of ginger," she suggested. "Just a tiny sliver. Hold it in your mouth but don't chew it yet. It's very potent."
Since then, I've hunted for more opportunities to find and eat sushi. When Misch and I grabbed lunch on Monday, I passed up my usual heaping mound of chicken teriyaki for a sushi platter. It came in a densely-packed plastic bento with a pair of chopsticks that splintered as I pulled them apart. And the soy sauce was a little too tangy for my liking. But I ate everything on the plate and loved it.
I would even have grabbed a sushi takeout dinner from a deli on Mass Ave on Tuesday night, but they didn't look very tightly sealed.
Why do I like sushi so much? Yes, yes, it's healthy, fish tastes good, new and exotic taste expanding my consciousness, etc. But what I really love about sushi is the texture. A well-formed tuna roll blends al dente, firm and chewy textures into a single morsel. It yields to the teeth and then dissolves into sticky bits of rice with a meaty center. My mouth has no idea what's going on.
The guys at The Second Glass said that a good glass of wine should appeal to all the senses: taste, sure, but smell, vision and even the fluidity of its feel. I think sushi appeals to me in the same way. There's the perfect tessellation of tiny rolls in a bento box, with everything arranged just so. There's the wide variety of tastes. There's the mixture of sensations. The meal does more than fill me; it engages me.
So: I like sushi. If only I lived in a country where it were readily available.
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Current Music: Kyle Andrews - "Sushi"
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December 9th, 2009
10:02 am - eight days a week is not enough to show I care
Browsing through random comics on XKCD the other day uncovered this old gem:
No one should expose me to ideas like this.
As much as I love creative ideas, sweeping gestures and damning the details, I also like tinkering with fiddly numbers to make things come out different. So when someone tells me that 6x28 = 7x24, I start doing some additional factoring. So then I wonder: what other weeks can I make?
The Eight-Day Week: Sleep for six hours, then wake for fifteen.
If you start this by going to bed at midnight on Sunday/Monday, you'll be up by 6:00 and at work as usual. Next morning, you'll be up by 3:00 AM, but you can still leave work at 5:00 PM and be in bed by 6:00. Unusual but not unreasonable.
The day-cycle gets a little odd from then on, as you're up at midnight on the third day - what the pagans would call "Wednesday." You'll need to leave work early that day, as you have to be in bed by 3:00 PM. If your boss makes a fuss, tell him you were up at midnight and in work by 1:30 AM. This will be true, albeit unsettling.
Fourth day: up at 9:00 PM, still "Wednesday" to those seven-day slackers. Crank out another fifteen hours of productivity, then pass out at noon. On the fifth day, you'll wake up at 6:00 PM, do a full night's work, and then tuck yourself in at 9:00 AM on the dot. I suggest buying some blackout curtains on the ride home.
But now the true benefits of the eight-day week emerge: a three-day weekend! On day six, you'll wake up at 3:00 PM, just as folks at the office are entering their Friday slump and checking their watches. You can stay up until 6:00 AM, partying with the best of them! Then it's time for another six hours of sleep, waking up by noon on Saturday - just in time for brunch, most of the stores to be open, and a pleasant weekend. Stay up another fifteen hours and go to bed at 3:00 AM. The ability to party late into the night two nights in a row should impress the few friends you have left. You get 9:00 AM until midnight on Sunday to finish off your week, and then start all over.
I'm not sure what the eight-day week improves over the seven-day standard. But it has to do something.
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December 8th, 2009
09:14 am - but when you can't afford a broken nose, how can you afford to fight?
I got to the concert early.
I get to every concert early. Doors open at 8:00, the ticket says, and like a chump I'm there at 8:30. Of late I've grown better at avoiding such foolishness, sitting patiently at home with an improving book until two hours after the printed time. But promoters have changed their game to accommodate me, the crafty rogues, so I still end up sitting through half an hour of some opening act from Jersey called The Mackerlain or Sixpenny Strikers or Chisholm Face or something like that.
The first act (of three) was still on when I slipped into the basement at the Middle East. So I found an open seat at one of the corner bars, ordered a domestic beer, and watched the Kimbo Slice / Houston Alexander UFC fight. Alexander embarrassed himself, dancing in a perpetual circle away from Slice's reach for the entire first round. I sneered, urging a man three time zones away to close ranks, put himself within arm's reach of a brawler, and risk permanent injury in order to inflict some himself. Kind of unsettling, when you think about it. How dare you defend yourself sensibly? Drop your guard! Charge the son-of-a-bitch! GYAAARRGH!
But I won't pretend to be above it. I want blood, and thankfully mixed martial artists provide. We should be glad the UFC exists to give these men an outlet for their aggressions, lest they take up arms and become provincial warlords.
Ted Leo, by way of comparison, is a perfect gentleman.
A lot of acts hide backstage during set changes, letting the roadies do the tuning and the sound check, and save themselves for the big reveal. But Ted was out there plugging in guitars and thumping mics with the best of them. The audience cheered when he first came out; he gave a friendly wave, then went to work. And they cheered again when he came on, officially, and opened up with "Heart Problems."
And after every song, he said, "Thanks."
Ted doesn't sacrifice any of the energy in his songs by being friendly and accessible. You can still hear the anger in his lyrics - not a bitter disillusionment, but a perpetual encouragement to look past the illusion and keep moving.After listening all morning, as I drove down 95
To a story of detainees who were barely kept alive
I could deal with trying to process pigeons acting like their doves
But not with interference from the power lines above I describe Ted Leo to friends as an edgier Elvis Costello: swap out the mod for punk and put him in flannel. But his songwriting combines that same subversive genius with upbeat, catchy riffs. He put that cleverness to work in a few new songs (though he didn't announce a date or title on a new album).
And he closed on a crowd favorite. Because he's a nice guy.But I'm here (but I'm here!), and you're here, and it's true
There's a whole lot of walking to do
And you're cool (and you're cool!), and I'm cool, and it's true
There's a whole lot of walking to do
There's no fuss (there's no fuss!), and I trust, I trust you!
There's a whole lot of walking to do
And you're strong (and you're strong!), and I can be too
There's a whole lot of walking to do
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(Better pics coming later)
Current Music: Ted Leo & The Pharmacists - "Heart Problems"
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December 7th, 2009
09:46 am - wet bus stop, she's waiting, his car is warm and dry
Dear Internet,
What do you mean, "if"?
Cordially,
Professor Coldheart
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Current Music: The Police
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December 4th, 2009
09:58 am - yoga means union
The sports club hides beneath Boylston Street like a supervillain's lair. A narrow doorway leads to a winding staircase, opening into a huge subterranean expanse. Otherwise, it's the same as any BSC: they swipe the membership pass on your keychain, suggest that you have a good workout and send you on your way. A shoe ad confronts you as you enter:
Next season don't care if it's cold! RUN! You wind your way through the ellipticals, stair machines and treadmills to the men's locker room. A printout sign taped near the entrance reminds you that tomorrow (when you don't normally train), the men's and women's locker rooms will be switching so that maintenance and electrical work can be done in the women's room. Precious snowflake that you are, this baffles you for hours. Why would they need to switch locker rooms? Only once you visualize the exchange does it occur to you: because there's no such thing as an all-female electrician team.
Why is that, you wonder? There's nothing about the work a woman could not do. The pay is certainly good enough: median annual wage for an electrician (per the BLS) is $46,420, which you could help support a family on. Then again, electricians are one of the few jobs in this country that still function like a medieval guild, with mandatory apprenticeships and esoteric ritual. Some of the trades still wear special rings. And labor unions have always dragged their feet at admitting new members en masse. So it's not so shocking that you don't see a large number of female electricians, even though women are now common in many traditionally male fields. Labor unions or women's lib; take your pick.
This speculation occupies you from the men's locker room back out into the workout area, down the hall and into the dim yoga studio near the back. Now you pass from a male-dominated field to a female-dominated one. The Boylston Street BSC draws a larger number of men than any yoga class you've ever seen, but you're still in the minority here. You cross to the closet at the far end, taking a rolled-up yoga mat from a stack, and plop onto the floor. Every movement feels ragged and awkward compared to the poised students around you, as if they're expensive vases you might knock over by accident. It's adolescence all over again. You sit down and work on breathing until the instructor arrives.
You will never touch your toes. You accept that. Perhaps if you'd spent every day of your childhood practicing flexibility you could manage. But your hamstrings are like wet towels coiled tight and your lower back screams at you. Wrapping all five fingers around both ankles merits a celebration. Drinks on me, guys: I bent a little today.
But you go anyway. You make time once or twice a week to go to the yoga studio, sit down, and force your body to relax. That's one thing jiu-jitsu has taught you: relaxing in a productive way. People think tension unlocks power. They hold their breath and grit their teeth while they lift weights, or groan and strain at crunches. But that just routes energy to all the muscles in your body other than the ones you want to work. True control consists of relaxing every muscle except the one you want to work.
You know you're bad at yoga. More important, you know that, no matter how hard you try, you'll never be great at yoga. Every day since you were five, you've been looking for things to be great at, or trying to improve at your few strengths. And while growth (for which read life) comes from improvement, you don't always need to be the best. You don't always need to compare yourself to the rest of the room.
One sign of maturity is a willingness to do something you're bad at in front of a crowd. You don't know that you're there yet. But you're closer.
So you go to the dim yoga studio. And you pile your rangy limbs onto the too-short mat. And you breathe.
Original post
Current Music: Ambulance LTD - "Yoga Means Union"
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December 3rd, 2009
07:30 am - and if the law don't get her then I will
To get a car registered in Massachusetts, you will need to do the following:- Acquire auto insurance. This isn't hard; you can do this online. But I should caution that it's not quite as easy as buying a book on Amazon. Every insurance company wants to give you a quote if you enter a few vague details. This draws you in, making you a lead. Once you start the application process, giving your driving history and VIN, shit gets real. "Oh, you're that Professor Coldheart? Yeah; double the quote we just gave you." Seriously.
- E-mail the insurance company to get proof of insurance.
- Presuming you got collision insurance - you're not dumb, are you? - go get a photo inspection of your car. This isn't very hard, but it takes some time out of a busy day. You will receive a form that you need to fax to your insurer, which, given the number of people who still use fax machines every day, won't be a problem at all.
- Go to the RMV and collect a number.
- Spend some time browsing in Best Buy and Target next door, waiting for your number to get called.
- Approach the RMV lady with your title and proof of insurance. What's this? My insurance doesn't take effect until tomorrow? Well, then I guess there's nothing I can do with the rest of my day, is there? Certainly not the nine other errands that hinged on my having proof of registration of the car that I drove here.
- Stomp into the rain.
- Sigh, accept the hand that you've dealt yourself, and go buy groceries.
- Take a nap.
- The next day, go to the RMV first thing. Collect a number.
- Spend some time browsing in Best Buy and Target.
- Approach the RMV lady with your title and proof of insurance.
- Fill out a form to waive any sales tax that you might owe on this car that you bought out of state.
- Fill out the same details on a second form that you already filled in on a first. Whatever.
- Get your plates! And your registration!
- Affix these plates to your car.
- Get your car inspected for the Massachusetts safety and emissions test.
- What's that? My car will fail the test if I don't replace this one $12 light bulb, out of the eight light bulbs in the rear window? Well, go to town, buddy!
- Get a parking permit for your apartment complex.
- Get a parking permit for the town you live in.
- Go home; park your car.
Dear Mr. President,
Remember when you compared mandatory purchase of health insurance to auto insurance? That's not helping.
Yours,
Professor Coldheart.
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Current Music: E.L.O. - "Four Little Diamonds"
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December 2nd, 2009
07:35 am - everything you know is wrong
Jerry Remy, announcer for NESN and the Boston Red Sox, has a local chain of Tcotchkes-style restaurants. This bit of trivia - the existence of the chain and the importance of its owner - lives in a weird limbo between "apropos" and "boring," depending on the audience. People who live in Boston need hear nothing further than the restaurant's name before instantly knowing every item on the menu and the decor. People who don't live in the New England area will nod politely - oh, a sportscaster owns a restaurant; how unlikely - and forget the man's name once the story ends.
Anyhow, there's one in Logan Airport right next to the Airtran terminal. It used to be a Legal Seafood and it's about six months from becoming a Johnny Rocket's. Every space in an airport that's zoned commercial oscillates between just having been or just about to be a Johnny Rocket's, depending on the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the airport's proximity to Chicago. I ordered a hot dog with a Caesar salad (because that makes it okay); I got a 3/4-pound beef log drizzled with cheese, relish, and onions. And the side salad. "That's a big dick," said the 50-something man behind me, "I mean, a big dog." If his stories were to be believed, he was on his way to his third wedding, this time to a 70-year-old woman for money; if not, he was really bad at delivering a joke.
The Departures screen had said my flight was pushed back 30 minutes when I entered Jerry Remy's Sports Bar and Grille; when I exited, it had changed its mind. I have never seen this happen. I have never seen a plane arrive earlier than announced, especially when it had already been posted late. The takeoff window shrank from 60 minutes to 25 minutes, and I had yet to pass through security, and my pre-printed boarding pass reminded me, in its smug little Helvetica, that the plane shut its doors 10 minutes before departure. Trying not to fume, I slipped into the security line, emptying my pockets of metal and slipping off my shoes.
"Put your shoes flat on the belt!", a guard would announce from time to time. "Only things that go in the bins are laptops and loose items. Jackets, bags, shoes - flat on the belt."
Ten minutes before departure, I stepped up to the X-ray machine. I walked through. It beeped. "Do you have anyth--", the guard asked. "My belt," I said, backing up and whipping it off like Jet Li vs. Billy Chow (watch all the way to the end).
Passing security, I scooped up my wallet, cell phone, ring, loose change, belt, boarding pass, messenger bag, jacket and backpack and began padding down the halls of the Airtran terminal at a decent clip. I made it about one hundred feet before I realized how comfortable the ground felt. Turning, I made it as far as a 65-year-old TSA screener, his Orville Redenbacher hair fringing his face like a halo. Had I been charging the security gate at a full sprint, screaming "Surely the Party of God will be triumphant!", he might have tripped me. Maybe. "Are you trying to get out?", he asked.
"I left my shoes there."
"Just go get the man in the blue shirt," he said, blue being the TSA uniform. "He's the supervisor."
I flagged the man in the blue shirt down. "I left my shoes on the belt! Brown? Size 13?"
Fortunately, I was the only person to have made that mistake (that hour), so security quickly reunited me with my shoes. I made it to my gate, discovering that my flight had been pushed 30 minutes back.
The next morning, waking up in the family homestead in Maryland, my father suggested we take the dog for a walk. As I put my shoes on - Merona, Target's in-house brand; brown, leather, worn but sturdy - I noticed an unfamiliar notch in one of the soles. Curious, I turned the shoe over. A ragged slit had been torn in the entire sole from left to right, cutting all the way through the rubber to the very base of the shoe. This wasn't just a hole in the bottom. This was a rough horizontal line that had cut clean through the sole of the shoe and stopped at the leather. The right shoe had been thinking about snitching; the left shoe had made an example of it.
Am I saying that the TSA, in the twenty seconds that I left my shoes unattended, shredded one of them with a government-issue razor blade? No, but I'll imply it with all my might.
I don't spend a lot of time staring at the bottom of my feet, but I would have noticed a tear that size when I put them on in the morning. The only time they were out of my control the entire day was when I put them on a conveyor belt ("flat on the belt! the only things that go in bins are laptops ...") and forgot them. And if I hadn't thrown these shoes in a closet in Maryland, I'd post a picture to show you. This isn't a puncture; this isn't a hole that worried itself wide. This is an even cut that runs between the tarsus and the metatarsals, deep and ragged. My shoes bear the scars of malice aforethought.
By an odd coincidence, these are the second pair of Target shoes to disintegrate catastrophically in 15 months. Am I wrong in suspecting a conspiracy? No. I'm never wrong. Especially not about conspiracies.
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November 25th, 2009
10:14 am - I'll be the fire escape that's bolted to the ancient brick
Charles Stross, author of Accelerando and other sci-fi books, wrote a fascinating post two weeks ago (thanks to Ari for linking it). He talked about the challenge of designing society for posterity: how to make a social order that could run a "generation ship" without falling apart.Generation starships: they're not fast.
If you can crank yourself up to 1% of light-speed, alpha centauri is more than four and a half centuries away at cruising speed. To put it in perspective, that's the same span of time that separates us from the Conquistadores and the Reformation; it's twice the lifespan of the United States of America.
We humans are really bad at designing institutions that outlast the life expectancy of a single human being. The average democratically elected administration lasts 3-8 years; public corporations last 30 years; the Leninist project lasted 70 years (and went off the rails after a decade). The Catholic Church, the Japanese monarchy, and a few other institutions have lasted more than a millennium, but they're all almost unrecognizably different.
[...]
I've been (inconclusively) batting around some ideas with Karl Schroeder — how do you design a society for the really long term? There are a couple of levels to consider: notably, decision-making and economics. And it doesn't look as if we've got any good solutions to either.
You should read the whole post; it's fascinating stuff. And if you think about it, there's a hidden question in there. A society that could remain stable aboard a generation ship - an enclosed biosphere hurtling through space - is, of course, a society that could remain stable aboard Spaceship Earth.
Too bad the question itself makes no sense.
Don't get me wrong: "how do you design a society for the really long term?" makes perfect grammatical sense. You can even start imagining along those lines, as Stross and his friend Schroeder evidently did, for several 'grafs worth of thought. But if you consider what those actual words mean - specifically, design, society and long term - the question becomes impossible. There is no way to answer it.
Let's say Stross, or NASA, or even you, come up with a way to answer the question. And let's say a generation ship - a vessel capable of interstellar travel along a lifespan of hundreds of years - gets built. Here's what it'll look like on Day One.NASA Project Director: Okay, guys, remember what we told you ...
Generation Ship Crew: Right, right, we remember.
NASA Project Director: ... you're an oligarchical commune with rotating leadership roles and multiple redundant judiciaries ...
Generation Ship Crew: Mm-hmm, got it.
NASA Project Director: ... lower the radiation shields every 400 days to prevent genetic drift ...
Generation Ship Crew: It's all in the three-ring binder. We've got it.
NASA Project Director: Okay. Just checking. Good luck, people!
(ship door seals; generation ship takes off)
Generation Ship Crew: SPRING BREAK! WHOOOO!
Okay, maybe things won't fall apart that fast.
But the entire premise of Stross's question ignores an obvious hurdle: if some social scientist theorizes the Perfect Society for a generation ship, who's to say anyone inside the generation ship is going to follow it? Especially once they're light years away from the home world? NASA can tell the crew, "The engineers are in charge; if what they say isn't law, the ship stops spinning and O2 stops filtering and you all die in six weeks." But that doesn't matter, unless every non-engineer aboard the ship also agrees.
To be fair, Stross isn't suggesting that the Perfect Society be dictated from on high. He closes the post with the question, "What sort of governance and society do you think would be most comfortable, not to mention likely to survive the trip without civil war, famine, and reigns of terror?"
But the question is still irrelevant. Stross can prove, using all the equations social science has to offer, that (say) an anarcho-syndicalist state where the Chief Engineer, the Head Gardener and the Captain of the Dodgeball Team act as a non-legislative judiciary is the only stable state for a closed, high-maintenance biosphere that has to have a population greater than x in 450 years. But that proof is irrelevant to the people inside that biosphere unless they believe it. If I scrub the oxygen filters, I might be convinced after a few years that I'm the most important person aboard the ship. After all, without me, everyone dies.
And even if NASA somehow indoctrinates every member of the first generation of the crew in their Perfect Social Theory, there's a reason this sci-fi construct is called a generation ship. It will take more than one generation to get where it's going. Four and a half centuries from here to Alpha Centauri at 0.1c; that's eighteen generations. Who's to say your kids will hold to the anarcho-syndicalist ideal with the same fervor you did? Or their kids? It only takes one generation to decide the reactor only needs sixteen control rods instead of twenty for the entire project to fail.
Far more important than the question of what should happen is the question of what will happen.
So let's say we lock 250,000 engineers, biologists, chemists, physicists and janitors inside an asteroid and slap it toward Alpha Centauri. We tell them, in the strictest language we know, what they have to do in order to stay alive. But once they get airborne, it's anarchy - not in the "jungle savagery" sense, but in the "no recognized law" sense. What form of social order will evolve?
My guess: the same ones we've seen throughout history. The human race evolved in an open biosphere with no set instructions on how best to live. A generation ship changes two of those variables, closing the biosphere off from mutation and leaving a three-ring binder of Best Practices. But otherwise, we'll probably see what we've seen throughout history: warring tribes, dueling factions, a period of disorder that leads to a strong preference for law and a powerful state that arises as a result. A quarter of a million of Earth's best and brightest go in; forty-five decades later, Augustus Caesar steps out.
# # #
I am going to read a little into Stross's post now.
I suspect that implicit in the definition of "Perfect Society" is stability. Stross hopes that the Perfect Society will in fact be so utopian that it will not change, because no one will ever have a reason to change it. Not only will it fulfill everyone's needs, but everyone within it will recognize that it will fulfill everyone's needs. It's a perpetual motion machine, requiring only its own input to keep going.
(The first question - if you discover this perfectly stable social order, why do you even have to leave Earth? - might merit another post)
This implicit premise - if I'm right in ascribing it to Stross - highlights a regrettable belief in technocracy. Technocracy is the belief that if we only put the right experts or the right rules in place, the social order will run itself. Our current problems, like poverty, corruption, ignorance and violence, do not well up from human nature. They're artifacts of an outdated culture. If we pass the right laws, we can get rid of anything we don't like.
Both conservatives and liberals are guilty of this.
Conservatives follow it in the form of "legislating morality." Outlawing abortion springs to mind. "If abortions are outlawed, then no one will have any abortions!", conservatives believe, contra all sense and experience. In reality, outlawing abortions means that women will terminate their pregnancies in dangerous, illegal ways. You cannot change the desire of a woman to own her own body by passing a law.
Liberals follow it in the form of "managerial liberalism." A recent example: the stimulus package! The federal government passes a $787,000,000,000 "recovery package" to distribute money to local agencies and companies. Shockingly, some of this money has gone to waste. The most recent example: four Congressional districts in Hawaii that don't exist received over $40,000,000 in stimulus money. Similar bookkeeping problems exist in Arizona, where the fictitious 86th Congressional District has already received $34,000,000. "That's not what we intended to happen," say liberal economists like Paul Krugman (who argue that there wasn't enough stimulus) and Dean Baker. Of course it isn't. But your intentions are irrelevant. You cannot change the desire of people to scheme for a little extra once the money faucet gets turned on.
Whether on the Left or the Right, technocracy supposes that human nature and cultural trends can be changed by top-down legislation. Draft the right rules, put the right people in charge, and the generation ship that is our world can sail on, untouched and unchanging, until we all turn into Star Children and join the galactic Overmind. In the real world, though, unintended consequences always crop up.
We're all trapped in this biosphere together, hurtling through the galaxy far below the speed of light. And if we don't learn a willingness to rule ourselves, throw out the systems that don't work and take responsibility for our own screw-ups, we're not going to reach Alpha Centauri alive.
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Current Music: "Brand New Colony"
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November 24th, 2009
10:07 am - I lay a puzzle as I backtrack to earlier times
Truly great art makes me want to make art myself. Knowing me for the conceited bastard I am, you'd think the opposite: that I'd be inspired by Dan Brown novels or Oliver Stone movies or Nickelback songs to create my own rebuttals, showing them up. But bad art just depresses me. Good art entertains me. And great art compels me to run and catch up.
I thought I'd have a handle on Sleep No More, the interactive theater installation sponsored by the American Repertory Theatre. The CCE, the premier collegiate-level interactive murder mystery theater troupe, did this sort of thing twice a year. Sure, Punchdrunk Theatre, the British troupe that originated Sleep No More, probably had a higher budget and better actors. And taking Macbeth as inspiration would make things creepy. But I knew what to expect.
I had no idea what to expect.
After idling in a packed bar, Misch and I, along with twenty other audience members, were ushered into a long hallway. We were given white plastic masks, instructed not to talk but to touch anything we liked, and then led up a flight of stairs. What had been an abandoned Brookline high school a moment ago became a decaying hotel, covered with odd photographs, stuffed chairs, marked-up books and other knicknacks. Misch and I poked around the hotel lobby and the adjoining sitting room until a Hitchcock blonde with a pillbox hat hurried through the hall outside. We followed her.
We followed her down two flights of stairs, where she ducked into an office. A dozen audience members crowded along the walls, watching her rifle through a desk for something - a photograph. She stared at it, lost in shock, until a short man with a small mustache, dressed in dinner jacket with suspenders, stalked in. He snatched the photograph from her hands. He glared at her; she smiled at him, pleadingly; no words were exchanged. He seized her in his arms and kissed her. The air filled with feathers.
The two of them separated. I followed the man; Misch followed the woman.
And that's the real genius behind Sleep No More. Not (just) the atmospheric minutiae with which they strew every room in the "hotel" they've created. Not (just) the wordless performances, acrobatic gyrations and haunted looks that recreate the story of MacBeth. Not (just) the nightmarish surreality created by the artful use of light, sound and space. What makes Sleep No More work is that the story changes drastically depending on whom you follow.
And you have to choose, because the characters don't wait for you. The man I followed most of the night (Malcolm, I believe) took off at a sprint several times, forcing me to hurry in turn. This led to the image of a man in a dinner jacket fleeing down the halls of a hotel, pursued by white-masked figures: a bit of theater which the audience helped in creating. I followed Malcolm as he and the other courtiers carried off the King's body, where it lay in state. When Malcolm and the others went to drink in a basement speakeasy covered in sawdust I followed them. Therein they played a card game of unclear meaning, which I endeavored to understand until one of them charged me with a hammer. I backed out of the way, but he wasn't going for me: he was going for the wall behind me, to which he tacked a Nine of Spades.
And this was all before the banquet.
If these proceedings sound like a nightmare, that was the effect intended. Every element - visuals, sounds, staging, timing - contributed to a reality that looked recognizable but jerked to a different rhythm. At times I found myself standing in a crowd, watching one woman try to feed another poison. At time I found myself alone in a room with a woman and an empty crib. Had I been in another room, I might have seen a murder, or a still birth, or a drunken dance. Without a meticulous attention to detail and a genius grasp of the surreal, it wouldn't have worked. But it worked perfectly.
See it with someone you trust.
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Current Music: Nas - "New York State of Mind"
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November 23rd, 2009
09:43 am - I'm in love; what's that song; I'm in love with that song
Last week.
Monday"I'm just not sure if I'm doing the right thing," she said, shrugging.
I thought for a moment, settling back into the couch. Then: "What's the one thing you could do right now that would make you feel in control?"
"Driving somewhere."
"Where?"
"The beach." A pause. "Salem. That would do it."
"Okay," I said. "You want to go?"
"Yes." Then she did a double-take. "Wait; do you?"
I checked my watch. "It's only 10:00 now. There'll still be a bar open when we get there."
Tuesday
WednesdaySomeone on the Davis Square LiveJournal community asked a few months back for volunteers to practice Rubenfeld Synergy on. I volunteered because I thought it would be interesting.
Rubenfeld Synergy relies on gently shifting or pressing the subject's body while they lay back. The subject describes how they feel while this goes on: what parts of their body are in contact with the table, how the realignment of weight affects the rest of their body, and so forth. It's not a massage, or even acupressure. The subject has to remain present and vocal throughout.
It's like assisted meditation. Constantly narrating how your body feels keeps you grounded in the present moment. You focus on sensations and abandon the stream of background chatter we all have in our heads. I came out of the session feeling the opposite of detached: very present, as if continually being told, "I'm standing, I'm walking, I'm sitting." A very Zen type of concentration.
I wouldn't ascribe any more mystical aspects to this than I would to meditation or massage. But it was interesting.
Thursday
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Current Music: The Replacements - "Alex Chilton"
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November 20th, 2009
11:44 am - we'll give ourselves new names, identities erased
As promised, my final thoughts on The Prisoner.
Short Version (Spoiler Free): The ending was better than the original ending (which isn't hard), but the interstitial episodes were worse than the original interstitial episodes (which also is not hard). Final verdict: decent.
Longer Version (Contains Spoilers): Well.
When I wrote about the problem of genius in movies, I referenced Mr. Scott's "transwarp beaming" in the new Star Trek movie. Transwarp beaming is supposedly a genius breakthrough, but it doesn't seem any more "genius" than flying faster than light or teleporting to a planet. In a universe where all tech is handwaved, calling another piece of handwaved tech "genius" tells the audience nothing.
I had a similar reaction to the middle (middling?) episodes of The Prisoner. Everyone in the Village acts weird - including the one "normal" man, Number Six. We don't know who's acting weird because they're crazy, and who's acting weird because they're hiding something, and who's acting weird because that's how they always are. As a result, the moments meant to shock - like 1112 stabbing 909 in the neck - just confuse us. Was that supposed to happen? If so, why? If not, what went wrong? We never know, and the show won't bother to tell us.
Add to this the fact that the Village follows no consistent physical laws and all tension goes out the window. Are Six, Sixteen and the Winking Lady going to find the ocean over that sand dune? Maybe. Is Six going to finish rifling through this apartment before Two shows up? Could be. Is a fiber-optic camera watching Six right now? Probably. There's no situation that can not be changed, as if by magic. So our heroes are either in constant danger or no danger at all. The visual and narrative cues we would rely on to tell us if they were aren't available here.
The best episodes of the original series - and as much a fan as I am, I must admit they weren't all gems - hinged around two compelling questions: why did Six resign? and who is Number One?. Simple questions, but exploring them and their ramifications made compelling drama. Why did Six resign his intelligence agency post? What did he know that was so valuable that he'd be thrust into this Village-prison to uncover it? And why won't he save himself a lot of heartache and just say why? Similarly: if Number Two isn't in charge, then who is? And why do the Number Twos keep changing? Bizarre little enigmas, especially for primetime television.
The new Prisoner briefly addresses both of these questions in the third episode, "Anvil," and then abandons them. Six resigned (we learn in the flashbacks with Lucy) because he learned something he didn't like about Summakor. And there is no Number One in the Village. Problem solved! Next!
Of course, removing these tensions pulls the teeth from the rest of the series. We have no idea why Two is keeping Six in the Village. And we have no idea why Six would engage Two on his own terms, instead of spending every waking minute walking toward those ghostly twin towers on the horizon. So the exchanges between them have no venom, the battles no suspense, and the odd little satires of suburban life no satirical edge.
The finale, "Checkmate," revisits the interesting questions about the social order that the original series was known for. Can you fix someone against their will? If you can, should you? How aware are the Village residents of the "super-conscious" life that Mr. Curtis's wife imagines them in? And what of the people who die in the Village - 1112, Lucy, 147's daughter? This was fascinating. You could have built a whole series around this. Instead, you get protagonists toeing the sand uncertainly or screaming melodramatically.
If I were showing this to someone who'd never seen it before, I would skip "Harmony" and "Anvil" entirely. The rest, keep as they are.
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Current Music: Postal Service - "Brand New Colony"
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November 19th, 2009
09:19 am - someone to hear your prayers, someone to care
Oh, hey, it's my 500th post. Wave hello.
In addition to watching surreal TV and a variety of war movies, I've also been reading. Specifically: a steady diet of thrillers.
Lee Child: a retired British TV producer who turned his hand to the novel, his first book, Killing Floor, introduced the character of Jack Reacher. A discharged Military Policeman from the U.S. Army with a 50" chest, he wanders the country with no fixed address and no permanent ties. He stumbles into trouble and cons, plans, cheats or brawls his way out of it every time.
I've read two books of Child's: Persuader and One Shot. They're formulaic but that doesn't detract from their allure. Reacher may have the unreasonable martial prowess of all action movie stars - in One Shot he takes on five guys at once and kills a man by bear hug - but he doesn't rely on it. Most of his mysteries he solves by outsmarting someone, or at least knowing a little more about the world. Jason Bourne meets Hercule Poirot.
Overthinking It has weaned me off the phrase "guilty pleasure," which I would normally use to describe Child's novels. Instead, I'll say they speak to only one emotion: the laugh of triumph over a defeated foe. Fun beach and airport material.
Harlan Coben: I started reading thrillers on the advice of an agent and an editor, in order to improve my own writing. In that regard Coben's writing has been the most instructional. Every novel of his I've read opens with a first paragraph that hooks me, strings it out to a first chapter that keeps me going, then turns it into a first half that carries me until the plot twist.
His stuff isn't perfect, granted. The most interesting character in each novel is never the protagonist. The plot twists are predictable only in that they're always the one thing that would turn the story most on its head at that moment (she's not really dead!, etc). But his writing grips you and drags you into the heart of the action. It may be a formula, but so is Coca-Cola.
I've read Gone for Good and No Second Chance, and I may yet read more.
# # #
Why is the thriller genre so easy for me to read?
As I speculated earlier, thrillers tap into the lust for revenge we all have: the joy of a brutality sanctioned by polite society.I think it speaks to that fundamental animal rage which all of us – who share more than 95% of our DNA with animals – carry. The “laugh in triumph over a defeated foe” that Orwell talks about: the brutal, pre-rational appeal of nationalism. We want to kill, and we want our killing to be sanctioned by a moral code. He hurt my family, therefore it’s okay if I cut off his fingers. He killed my wife, so it’s all right if I slaughter everyone he knows and burn his house to the ground. No impartial jury or outside observer would think that’s a proportional or fair response – but come on! I’m the Good Guy, so my savagery makes me driven. They’re the Bad Guys; their savagery makes them subhuman.
But ultimately, in stories like that, the tissue-thin distinction between Good Guys and Bad Guys suggests more than it divides. We don’t cheer the Good Guy because he did the right thing by stabbing the Bad Guy in the top of the skull. We cheer the Good Guy because he totally fucking killed that dude! Did you see that? We identify with him because he has his reasons – they took my job, they hurt my family, whatever – but that’s secondary. The chaotic, reptilian roar of victory after bashing someone’s neck seals the deal.
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Current Music: Johnny Cash - "Personal Jesus"
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November 18th, 2009
08:51 am - start by admitting from cradle to tomb isn't that long a stay
Black Book (Zwartboek): One of those movies that the DVD case doesn't do justice to. The plot feels like a cliche: Jewish girl in the Netherlands, separated from her family during World War 2, dyes her hair blonde and seduces a German officer to aid the Resistance. She finds herself torn between her affection for the officer and her desire to avenge her parents. The "seduction-and-betrayal" story has been told before.
What makes Black Book different is Paul Verhoeven (Robocop, Starship Troopers) behind the camera. Verhoeven moves the film along at a breathless pace, catapulting our heroine from placidity to tension to danger to a temporary respite with little pause between. He doesn't skimp on the gore, either, shredding civilians, partisans and Nazis with blizzards of automatic fire. Sex is frequent and graphic. These are bleeding, sweating, fucking human beings.
Verhoeven also assembled a hell of a cast. When telling a seduction-and-betrayal story, directors have to take special care to keep their heroines from looking like prostitutes or victims. Carice van Houten, as Rachel, has no such problem. Rachel is confident, opportunistic and, while capable of deep tenderness, also frank in her sexuality. When Mr. Kuipers, a resistance leader in Amsterdam, asks her how close she'd be willing to get to an S.S. officer, she asks, "You mean, am I willing to screw him?" After a pause: "I'll go as far as he's willing to go. Okay?"
The S.S. officer in question, Captain Ludwig Muntze, is played by Sebastian Koch (who was equally excellent in The Lives of Others a few years earlier). He's not a reluctant Nazi: when he brings Rachel back to his apartment, he brags about having seized it from "the capitalists" (for which read "the Jews"). But it's clear he believes in fighting a more civilized war than his comrades in the Gestapo do and has a touch of poetry in his soul. And the mercy and tenderness he shows Rachel leads the audience to, if not cheer for him, at least hold their breath when things get tense.
War makes monsters of us all, Black Book tells us; even the Resistance is full of betrayals and cruelty. The movie doesn't end with the surrender of Germany. In fact, it's the genius of Verhoeven's tight, suspense-thriller plotting that the liberation of Amsterdam makes things worse for our heroine: once a Jew hiding among Nazis, she's now an S.S. sympathizer hiding from vengeful Dutchmen. Verhoeven goes to deliberate excess here, as he is wont to do, subjecting our heroine to pornographic levels of melodrama. A world of shit rains on her head.
Spiritual and physical brutality aside, Verhoeven turns what could have been a cliched tale of victimhood and prostitution into a tense, compelling and innately real story of heroism. The heroes and villains keep surprising you and the plot twists unload like a Sten gun. The movie keeps you on edge until the very end, when the titular black book that one character has used to document all the others is finally revealed.
(Postscript: I wonder if the subtitlers were having a bit of fun with the English-speaking audience. The German officers refer to the Dutch resistance as "terrorists" instead of a more contemporary term like partisans or guerillas. This leads to a few ironic scenes, like one German officer accusing Muntze of "negotiating with terrorists" when Muntze secures a cease-fire with the resistance. Muntze defends his actions as sparing German soldiers from danger behind the lines; his comrade accuses him of "defeatism."
I don't believe Verhoeven intended to compare the 21st century West to the Nazis; that's a blunt, extreme analogy and the rest of the film doesn't bear it out. And it may just be the choice of the subtitle editors. But if Verhoeven were making the point that monsters exist on both sides of a war, the film succeeds there)
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Current Music: "Life is a Cabaret"
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November 17th, 2009
08:58 am - the horse he kept running; the rider was dead
(Note: as soon as I opened up IMDB on Monday evening to confirm some details about the movie below, I saw that its star, Edward Woodward, had died. A hell of a loss, though he left a full career behind him, including Becket, the TV series Callan, the original The Wicker Man and, of course, the following)
Breaker Morant: A Few Good Blokes. Unpolished but still fiery.
Lieutenant Harry "Breaker" Morant (Edward Woodward) begins the movie in a full court-martial in the last days of the Boer War. He led a small company of irregular colonial soldiers, fighting against the Afrikaaner guerillas (known as commandos) by adopting their tactics. Such tactics have ended with Lieutenant Morant and his fellow officers, Peter Handcock (Bryan Brown, whom audiences will recognize from Cocktail or F/X) and George Wittow, to be charged with six counts of murder.
Major J.F. Thomas, an officer with experience executing wills back in New South Wales but little more law training, is assigned to the case one day before the trial begins. Though he fumbles initially, his insightful questioning ferrets out the truth: that the unorthodox methods the Bushveldt Carbineers used were not only endorsed, but ordered, by the highest levels of British command in the field. When Morant, Handcock and Wittow executed prisoners without trial, they did so under orders.
The movie does not paint Morant as entirely heroic. He and Handcock conduct the war with a casual brutality. They both demonstrate a fiery temper, Handcock peppering the court-martial with sarcastic remarks and Morant being provoked into a tirade: "We shot them under Rule 303!" But these touches merely make the men darkly romantic, not outright villains. Breaker Morant still couches its stars in cloth of gold, depicting Morant as a poet, a singer, a leader and stalwart in the face of death.
Instead, the movie reserves its harshest condemnation for the British Empire itself. Taking its screenplay largely from George Wittow's 1907 account of the trial, Scapegoats of the Empire (did I mention this was based on a true story?), Breaker Morant casts the British command as aristocrats, shielded from the horrors of war by the gentility of their sitting rooms. It's not only implied but stated outright that Lord Kitchener and the Prime Minister would have no problem sacrificing three "colonials" to appease the Boers, thus ending the war sooner and keeping Germany out of it. And the film also depicts how, in sinking to the level of the Dutch commandos, the British Army may have lost its way.
Breaker Morant heralded the start of the Australian "New Wave" of cinema, preceding such films as Gallipoli, Mad Max 2 and The Year of Living Dangerously. The film feels like the early work of a film student, experimenting in camera angles for their own sake. The initial statement of Lieutenant Morant is shot in extreme left profile, dead on and extreme right profile for no obvious reason. At some points in the courtroom the frame holds both the witness and the attorney questioning him, eight feet away, in the same focus - not uncommon in the 80s, but still awful looking today. And while most of the flashbacks are timely and well-staged, some cut in and out of the present moment like misplaced stills.
But, these bits of amateur work aside, the movie's still good. Burra in South Australia stands in admirably for the Transvaal: a green, sweeping country that almost begs to be ridden with rifle in hand. And the dialogue itself is sharp enough, full of rough Australian wit, outrage at injustice and warm poetic sentiment. It's a timeless story and well-told.
But, Johnny, ere we "go to grass" -
Ere angel wings are fledged to fly -
With wine we'll fill a bumper glass,
And drink to those good times gone by.
We've had our day - 'twill not come back!
But, comrade mine, this much you'll own,
'Tis something to have had it, Jack-
That time when we could ride ten stone!
- Harry "Breaker" Morant, "The Day That is Dead", 1893
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Current Music: Johnny Cash - "I Hung My Head"
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November 16th, 2009
08:57 am - I lose a dream when I don't sleep; I'm slumbering
A man wakes up on a desert plateau. The staccato pops of automatic fire draw his attention; looking over a ridge, he sees an old man in an outmoded jacket tumbling down a hill. He picks the old man up and carries him out of the sun. The old man dies; the younger man buries him. Alone, the younger man staggers across the desert until he finds:
The Village.
The notion of a remake of The Prisoner, Patrick McGoohan's legendarily inaccessible 1967 BBC series, thrilled me more than it bothered me. I don't like remakes. I don't like the idea of dredging the same river for new fish. But the original Prisoner, for all the thunder of its premise, lacked something in execution. McGoohan wanted the audience to draw their own conclusions, but a little more explicitness couldn't have hurt ("yes, Patrick dear, but what do the monkey masks mean?"). And toward the end, the show drifted from challenging-weird to just weird-weird. The same ideas, given a fresh start and a proper budget, would devastate.
Number Six (Jim Cavielzel) stumbles through the Village. Exhausted from walking in the desert all day and afflicted by hallucinations of life in New York, he falls off a rooftop. He awakes in a clinic - The Clinic - under the warm gaze of Dr. 313 and the blue-eyed fatherliness of Number Two (Ian McKellen). "Why are you keeping me here?", Six demands. Two shrugs: "I see no locked doors." This is the insidiousness of the Village: it responds to direct confrontation with gentle redirection. Aside from Number Two, no one denies the existence of a world outside - Isaac Newton, Alexander Graham Bell, David Beckham, Manhattan. But they don't understand why it's so important to Number Six. They just want to help.
The beauty of the original Prisoner was the distinct visual and auditory style of the Village. Shot in Portmeirion, Wales, the use of gay colors, cheery announcements and signs in Albertus typeface all contributed to the air of stiff, enforced conviviality. AMC's The Prisoner has a style all its own as well. Identical 60s-era bungalows, duplexes and diners form neat little rows in the middle of a vast desert. The occasional flashback to New York or to static-ridden surveillance footage jars Six out of his attempts to focus. There are no walls and no guards: there are the simple limits of sand and sky. But Number Two keeps control in other ways. He can't suppress every citizen's desire for escape or their search for something more, so he gives it to them: the Escape Resort! The nightclub More! And just to remind you that this world isn't right, there's the occasional touch of weirdness for its own sake, like the soap opera Wonkers or Brian Wilson's "In Blue Hawaii" or the twin therapists, Number 70.
And no, they don't have anything that's not a wrap.
I love Ian McKellen as the new Number Two. He brings a sinister warmth to the bland pronouncements that he bestows on people: "Every day above ground is a good day." He lives in a pristine opulence that the rest of the Village aspires to. And yet behind everything there's an air of instability. Everyone gets very still whenever he enters a room, as if he and Mommy were just having a screaming argument in the kitchen downstairs and it's imperative that we be good. He carries a grenade with him everywhere, pulling it out of his pocket once or twice an episode and tossing it to make a point. He is the capricious tyrant, just as likely to bestow prizes - a free vacation, a medal for service - as punishments. It takes a brilliant actor to pull that off and still appear sane.
Jim Cavielzel as Number Six, I'm not as sure on. He plays crazy very well, while McGoohan was always proud and stiff. This is essential: Number Six is the man on the fringes of society, and people on the fringes are "crazy," even if they're not disordered. When he's trying to convince 313 or Two that his memories of a world before the Village are real, he fumbles for the thread of his own thought. He lacks the thunderous contempt that McGoohan's Six had for the other conspirators in the Village, but that's for the better. Cavielzel's is a more sympathetic Six. He bites back, but he doesn't bark.
What doesn't quite work for me are the slow-mo shots of Six running through the desert, dropping to his knees when faced with some implacable object - the twin towers, the weird anchor - and screaming. They seem a bit too forced. The horror of the Village comes from its cheerful banality and its absolute impermeability to logic, sprinkled with the occasional bit of grotesque: a giant bubble bouncing down the street and absorbing someone. The horror shouldn't be something that we sit and watch with flashing lights: hey kids! Here's where the horror is!
I watched the first two episodes, "Arrival" and "Harmony," last night (and thanks to Sylvia M. for being a gracious host). So far we already know more about Number Six in two episodes than we ever did in the prior series: he worked for a company, Summakor, that collects CCTV footage to analyze trends in human behavior. We already have a hint of why he resigned as well. Interestingly enough, no one in the Village seems to want to know why: a major plot point from the original series. But this cute and accessible woman he picked up on the streets of Manhattan in flashbacks - Lucy - won't let up on it. But if she's the only one who's curious, why can't Six leave the Village? And if Two wants to know, why hasn't he asked yet?
Ultimately The Prisoner is not about Number Six. We are not supposed to see ourselves in Number Six; we are supposed to see ourselves in the rest of the village. The Prisoner is about how the institution of society deals with a man who will not conform. Perhaps he's not conforming because his brain is chemically imbalanced; perhaps it's because no one around him can supply what he wants. Or perhaps he has memories of a past that no one shares and every time he tries to pursue them, a giant bubble attacks him.
Regardless of why he feels that way, he can't fit in. He rejects all attempts to make him fit in. So how do we respond? Some of us watch him with sad compassion. Some of us write him off ("she's a crazy"; "he's an old drunk"). If he gets too loud or violent, we lock him away. And if he persists in being unmutual, we gently nudge him to the far edge of the herd.
Two more episodes tonight and two on Tuesday. Expect my final thoughts on Friday. Be seeing you.
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Current Music: Brian Wilson - "In Blue Hawaii"
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November 13th, 2009
09:55 am - you respect the one who got shot; I respect the shooter
I'm putting the mind-body dichotomy series on hold for a while in order to read some more on the subject. Currently I'm Kindling my way through Stephen Pinker's How The Mind Works, which has astonished me and lost me a dozen times already. You're all disappointed at not getting to hear my half-baked theories on a subject the human race has been debating for thousands of years, I know, but be patient. Some day, the pablum will return.
But I can discuss why this matters to me.
My friends regularly exhort me to open up more, to them and to others. "That's what the website is for," I tell them, but they insist this doesn't count. They insist that I'd meet more interesting people and get less frustrated at my internal dialogue if I "took off the mask." But this suggestion never really speaks to me.
So I've been doing a lot of thinking about masks.
If all behavior arises from consciousness, then we're always choosing to present some face to the rest of the world. In social settings, we put on our charming face; when we're tired and distracted, we put on our bitter face; when we're overwhelmed and confessing fears to the ones closest to us, we put on our vulnerable face. But we always make a choice which side of ourselves to present. There's no "true face" that emerges when we stop choosing to present. It's masks all the way down.
At the same time, though, the idea of a "true self" makes sense to us. We distinguish between the world Out There (people and streets and hot dogs and engraved pens) and the world In Here (memories and fears and imagination and fantasy). That's what it means to be self-aware: to distinguish between Self and Other. It's an experience that everyone who can put thoughts into words has in common. So we all think that there's something true or ideal inside our heads.
But is an experience that everyone calls the same thing necessarily real?
That's what my experiments in auto-epistemology have been about. I'm curious as to whether the notion of an "unmasked self" is part of the same cognitive illusion as the Cartesian homonculus, or whether it's something with a real basis in biology and psychology. As I said, I've got some reading and some thinking to do. Thanks for bearing with me.
"Great," the audience muttered, shifting in their seats and checking their cell phones. "Someone tells the Professor to open up more and his response is to read a book."
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Current Music: Jay-Z - "30 Something"
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November 12th, 2009
07:30 am - we never did too much talking anyway
I would like the following euphemisms excised from polite speech:
"It is what it is." No. I disagree. Now let's fight over it.
It doesn't much help that "it is what it is" most often surfaces as a sort of cheery fatalism, an unwillingness to tackle a problem. We can't change the facts! If I wrap this statement in tautology, it becomes self-evident! It is what it is, and it can't be what it's not, which we'd rather, so let it be.
(We mock "it is what it is" on the Overthinking It podcast pretty often)
"Now, more than ever ..." I find millennialism repulsive in all its forms, but this euphemism dates back centuries. We live in Interesting Times, completely different from any Times that existed in the Past! For one, children disrespect their elders! Illness is rampant in the cities and the lower classes groan in poverty! Also, there are barbarians in the outermost provinces!
I can't think of many crises, ills or challenges that affect me and my friends now more than they ever did a comparable group of people in the past.
"I just wanted to say that ..." Right. I understood that you wanted to say that, as evidenced by the fact that you said it. You don't need to remind me that you're a sentient being, my recent experiments in biological reductionism notwithstanding.
This one doesn't seem harmful. It's the sort of throat-clearing we all engage in before getting to the interesting part of a sentence. But verbiage that doesn't communicate information or mood is harmful. We read or hear it often enough and we start glossing over it. And glossing over speech puts language in the service of evil.
"Society ..." as the subject of a sentence. "Society" is not an agent of action. Society doesn't tell men or women to do things. Society doesn't take away your job. Now while there are impersonal, institutional forces at work that circumscribe the lives of people that no member of that force will ever meet - i.e., I can be limited by the Church's views on marriage even if I never set foot in a church - it aids nothing to call that force "society." No one ever got butter on their bread by talking more abstractly.
"There are two kinds of people in the world ..." The distinction between x and non-x rarely bears fruit outside of pre-school pedagogy, collegiate logic textbooks and high-level programming, yet you can find it in the Washington Post editorial page with sad regularity. This distinction never works. Half the time, it's so tautological as to be useless ("there are two kinds of people in the world: members of The Rolling Stones, and the rest of us"). The other half, it draws a false dichotomy.
A peer educator in my high school once passed along the following wisdom from his grandmother, about the two kinds of people in the world: "those who learn from experience, and those who learn from everyone else's experience." And while it was an interesting point at the time, useful to the moral of the lesson (namely, Don't Do Drugs), it's a false dichotomy. What about people who don't learn and keep making the same mistakes? What about people who learn from fictional experience - who were scared off of heroin by Requiem for a Dream? What about people who expect a situation to turn out poorly, like a midnight road trip to Vegas, but who do it anyway because they want the experience? All of these could be acknowledged and glossed over, if the speaker hadn't framed the story with the "two kinds of people" trope.
"You owe it to yourself ..." Then I default on the obligation. Who's going to come collect?
"Tiny favor" / "Huge favor" Have you noticed that the effort requested by that phrase is inversely proportional to the word used? Moving a couch is a "tiny favor"; answering the phone while you pee is a "huge favor."
"At least I'm doing something!" This sentence only lives in rebuttals. Someone advances a plan: let's hold a bake sale to save our school; let's burn the house down and use the insurance money to pay off our debt; let's bomb villages to catch terrorists, et cetera. Someone else points out that the plan might not work: we won't pay off a ten thousand dollar debt with brownie money; insurance companies employ sophisticated arson investigators; bombing villages will create the sort of dissatisfaction that terrorists arise from, and so forth. The response, "Well, at least I'm doing something. What are you doing?"
Most of us get embarrassed when we realize we forgot a crucial variable in the success of our plan. But "at least I'm doing something!" trumpets your apathy boldly. So what if my plan won't work? Plans don't have to work in order to be good. They just have to be bold! Action trumps thought; all forward motion is progress; idle hands are the devil's playground.
Blog / photoblog / liveblog / vlog / bleg. I mean, come on.
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Current Music: Dylan
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November 10th, 2009
07:49 am - shut the door; have a seat
Monster post on Overthinking It today, overthinking Mad Men Season 3, which just wrapped this past Sunday. Preview:Mad Men is a story about men and women searching for meaning. Mad Men can tell this story because it’s set in an ad agency. Consumer capitalism, which really came into its own following World War II, sells products that add meaning to people’s lives. If Americans don’t believe that their choice of cigarette will make them happy, or that a slide projector can restore the innocence of youth, then Don Draper and his crew are out of a job.
The language of advertising transforms products from the utilitarian to the spiritual. You don’t stay in a Hilton Hotel because of price or convenience. You stay in a Hilton Hotel because it brings the comforts of home to a foreign setting. Pepsi can reinvigorate our tired routine; AquaNet can capture the man who’ll provide for us; London Fog can take us on stimulating romantic adventures.
Most of the characters in Mad Men started 1963 with a brand in lieu of a soul. Roger Sterling was the silver fox with a trophy wife; Hilton was the golden treasure that every ad agency sought to claim; Don Draper, the genius with his finger on the pulse of culture. But we discovered that the brand and the product behind it don’t always relate. Roger is more of a lost boy than a dignified man; consider his Kentucky Derby party, or his growing feuds with his new wife. Conrad Hilton turns out to be a cranky, implacable eccentric. And Don? Behind the mask, what is Don Draper?
Share and enjoy.
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November 9th, 2009
07:36 am - what would you say if I took those words away
Paper or Plastic
Short of a few phone calls with friends, I had no conversations on Saturday that weren't transactional. Spending $7 on a takeout dinner doesn't count as "human contact" in my book, any more than letting someone board the bus in front of you counts as "making a friend." You're pointing to a menu, handing over a few slips of paper, and waiting until your number gets called. A sophisticated machine could replace one or both of the partners in that dance.
I find that solitude - the ability to immerse myself in a city full of people without having to engage them - refreshing, so long as I take it in small doses. I was out late drinking with coworkers, then dancing at the Middlesex, on Friday night. On Sunday I went to see Lynne D's one-woman show at ImprovBoston, then had a few beers with friends. Last weekend was busy (Halloween) and the coming weekends look to fill up my diary as well. So the break doesn't hurt.
But there are thousands of people in this city, and every other, who go like that for a week at a time or more. Get up, get on the bus, punch a clock, take your break, punch out, bus home, watch TV, drink, sleep, repeat. The city does not discourage this lifestyle. Dozens of institutions exist to make such a life of populated solitude possible - even easy.
The Wasted Chance That I've Been Given
Pop music has not lacked for shitty covers ever, so if I wanted to bitch about that I'd have my choice of targets. But lately I've heard enough covers that defy sense, aesthetics or any prediction of What The Market Demands.
Exhibit A: "Careless Whisper" by Seether
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7imqO-OBVk]
That's what George Michael's slow-jazz throwback from twenty-five years ago needed - a groan-rock cover with extra shredding. In the original, the sublimely ridiculous line "guilty feet have got no rhythm" makes some sense - the tidal wave of horns and congo drums suggest a nightclub in the 40s, slow dancing with your best friend's girl, etc. It calls to mind the silver screen. But no one would dream of dancing to a song by a band named Seether, unless standing with your feet shoulder-width apart and headbanging counts as "dancing." It's fun, but it doesn't.
Exhibit B: "More Than Words" by Owen
At least Seether's cover of a George Michael standard justifies itself by changing the song's genre. Translating Wham! to screamo is a poor choice, sure, but it's evidence of thought. But Mike Kinsella's cover of "More Than Words" adds nothing. It's one guy with an acoustic guitar, as opposed to the original, which had two guys - Gary Cherone singing, Nuno Bettancourt playing and harmonizing. It has the artistic integrity of a webcam video posted to YouTube, except the fact that I'm asked to spend $0.99 on Kinsella's version makes it comical.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xRARmrorGU]
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Current Music: la di da, da di da, di da da da, more than worrrrrrds
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November 6th, 2009
09:10 am - I watched the children scurry in circles around the two-way mirror
From a high enough perch, all of us are hypocrites.
Conservatives praise the power of the free market to fulfill desires, then rant about indecently dressed pop starlets and the drunken crowds downtown. Liberals insist that the government "keep its laws out of my bedroom," unless, while in your bedroom, you enjoy consuming trans fats or homeschooling your children. Press either side on the apparent inconsistency and they can argue their way out of it (it's a question of degree; this is an entirely different case; I'm not saying it should be illegal). And in many cases their arguments hold water. But inconsistency isn't hard to find.
And I'm not excluding myself in this. I complain about how easy credit and cheap oil are ruining this country all the time. But I know how long I'd survive without my disposable contacts and allergy meds (smart money says nine months; I'm starting a pool).
So none of us are perfectly consistent.
I don't raise this point to drag everyone down in the mud with me ("we're all bastards; let's own up to it; immanentize the eschaton; WAAAGH"). I raise it because I think consistency is a false flag. It's not a useful tool for weighing ethics.
Break it apart: why is inconsistency such a bad thing? If I accuse someone of inconsistency, I say, "You chose one thing in one context and you chose another thing in a different context." But we've already challenged the notion that there's a single homonculus living in our brains that pulls the levers to make us go. Empirical science and the philosophy of consciousness suggest that our mind consists of multiple calculating modules. There's not one "you" that's "choosing" things, but several.
So if you wrote a six-part article series for the Globe exposing nursing home abuse, then sat on the subway today while an old woman with a cane stood, that's inconsistent. But the latter action doesn't make your former choice a mere posture. Maybe you were wrapped up in your reading and didn't notice her. Maybe you were tired after a long day and decided that someone else ought to offer a seat before you did.
Not offering an old woman your seat is a dick move, to be sure. But it doesn't render all your previous pro-elderly efforts invalid.
We make different choices when hungry, or tired, or surrounded by people we want to impress, than we do when we're writing an essay, or watching the news, or driving past the scene of an accident. We do this because the human brain - the result of evolutionary processes - did not evolve to be consistent. It evolved* to fulfill our needs, safeguard and propagate our genes, and to run a series of complex parallel calculations. But since it evolved into the form we recognize today, humans also invented a thing called culture. Culture changes a lot faster than the genetic makeup of its inhabitants, complicating the process even further.
We have a lot of competing data points that go into our decisions. Our declared ethical code is one of these points.
Consistency simply isn't a natural behavior in the human brain. If it were, morality would be easy. You'd simply make the decision to adhere to a given code of ethics, once, and that would be it. Flip the switch to "Good" and keep walking.
But every code of ethics describes the process of "being tempted" or "acting irrationally" or "losing one's way." This is inconsistency rearing its head. A young priest vows eternal celibacy; ten years later, he takes notice of a statuesque blonde. A finance manager volunteers four hours a week at a soup kitchen; coming out of a train station on a business trip, he shoulders by a man asking for spare change. If we view the ethics as natural and humans as inferior, then these acts are frustrating lapses. It's not useful to call behavior that every human being engages in a "lapse" (lapsing from what?). If we view ethics as an invention and humans as natural, then these acts make perfect sense.
The mind isn't designed for consistency; it's designed to constantly recalculate.
Why am I harping on this? Because I'm still curious about "what's the best way for humans to behave," and I don't think "with perfect consistency" is part of it. Every ethical system has its inconsistencies. And even if someone invented a perfectly coherent and logical system of ethics, no human could consistently adhere to it.
We're all hypocrites. We're all struggling to figure out what's right.
P.S. Of all the posts in the mind-body dichotomy series, I'm least happy with this one. But none of my thoughts on the matter have been fully polished, so why should I feel self-conscious today? That's why it's a weblog, not an article for the Atlantic: so I can get feedback from friends and ill-intentioned strangers. Hitting "Post"; have at it.
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* When I say "it [the brain] evolved," I mean "the human species evolved in such a way as to have a brain which possessed these characteristics." Forgive me the shorthand, as we forgive the shorthand used by others.
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November 4th, 2009
07:55 am - play your part
I saw Girl Talk at House of Blues on Monday night.
I had nothing but good things to say about the venue before visiting on Monday; after, I had my doubts. When we got in line outside, one of the staff checked our tickets and sent Serpico, Kim and I to the upstairs mezzanine, RJ to the floor. We'd arrived early enough that there was still space on the floor, but our tickets dictated otherwise. Having to split up a party bugs me.
Serpico, Kim and I squeezed up to some space near the front of the upstairs mezzanine. Senior Discount, a punk band in that nasal style that the late 90s gave its sanction to, opened for Girl Talk. They rocked through a couple fast and loud covers and a few fast and loud original songs. I liked them better when they were called Lit, I texted.
After a long wait, the stage was cleared save for a long metal table with two rugged, plastic-wrapped laptops on it. Gregg Gillis danced out in a high-stepping jog, complete with cheap white sweatshirt and headband. He fired up one of the laptops. A horde of kids decked out in 80s gear, chosen in advance by the floor staff, swarmed him. Then the music started, and for ninety minutes straight it didn't stop.
Even at the highest energy electronic shows (RJ and Kim later confirmed), you intersperse one or two downtempo songs just so the DJ can stop moving for two minutes. But Gillis kept up the pace of pop hits and fast beats throughout the entire set. I walked out of there aching, sweaty and exhausted.
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Current Music: Girl Talk - "Play Your Part"
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November 3rd, 2009
07:46 am - streets like a jungle, so call the police
Avoiding All Work, 'Cause There's None Available
My new office looks down on the ceiling of a nearby parking garage. Every afternoon, between 2:30 and 3:00, a woman drives her SUV up to the top level. She lets out a small dog and then begins idling her vehicle in a slow circle around the roof. The dog follows her.
At first I thought she had a leash trailing out the window behind her. But when I got the attention of everyone in my office for a second opinion, we agreed she was just waving her hand or snapping her fingers. The dog follows unceasingly. She does one lap of the roof, maybe one and a half, and then lets the dog back into her SUV.
I considered the possibility that she's handicapped.
You Go On Ahead! And Carry Me With You!
I got in an argument on the Boston Livejournal community yesterday about the ethics of requiring credit card machines in Boston cabs. My argument was that there was an ethical question involved; the poster's, that there wasn't.
His post, if you don't want to click through, read as follows:my cabbie last night was all like, "[the credit card machine]'s not working!" then i pointed out that it's illegal for to drive a cab with a broken card terminal in boston and that he either take the $8 in cash i had for the $18 fare, or let me pay with my card.
cabbie: you put the tip on the screen
me: yeah, i know how to do it
---seconds later---
cabbie: you didn't put a tip!
me: yeah, i'm aware. maybe you shouldn't give your fares a hard time when they try and pay with a card
cabbie: they take 8% when you pay with a card
me: that happens in every industry, it's called the cost of doing business. deal with it. I responded:You're not doing a lot to diminish my sympathy for the cab driver here. It sounds like he doesn't particularly want a credit card machine in his car, but was compelled by law to accept one. To which he replied with some variant of, "Whatever; that's the law, tough shit." I realized the argument could not even be engaged, much less won, since anyone who thinks "that's the law, tough shit" is a salient response must have slept through the 20th century. So I made one more cursory response ("convenience is not a sound basis for law") and gave up.
But shit like this is what annoys me about Boston. The cab driver loses a portion of every credit card transaction to charge fees. He clearly doesn't want a credit card machine in the car (since he lied about it being broken). But the law compels him to take one. Then, when he tries to hustle a way around it, some asshole gives him a hard time about it and stiffs him on the tip. And more than half of the people he told this story to agreed with him. I'd say at least three-quarters; someone want to count?
I don't mind Boston's liberal attitude. Hell, I'm more liberal than I was four years ago, so living in Boston suits me just fine. But that frustrating yet common blend of liberal attitude and consumer entitlement drives me up a wall. Consistency is all I seek. I can respect a guy who reads Worker's World because he's been in the IBEW for thirty years, but not if he's a college student. And Boston is mostly college students.
(And I'm not generalizing that far here. I've been a member of the Boston LJ community for years. I know these people; I've seen them argue before)
For thinkers who spend so much time railing against "privilege," Boston progressives loathe to surrender theirs.
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Current Music: Blur
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November 2nd, 2009
07:34 am - it is not dying; it is not dying
I Still Like Him Better Than Steinbrenner
For my Don Draper costume, I had to shave my sideburns off for the first time in at least six years. This took considerable effort, as attacking six years' growth with a disposable razor will, and left the skin underneath a little raw. But it looks fine now. Shaving since then has been disconcerting, however, since I typically start at my ear line by muscle memory alone and have now had to start cutting even higher.
I put little effort into the costume itself (nicest suit I had, dress shirt, conservative tie); the accessories made it work. I showed up at the office Halloween party with a highball glass full of "scotch" (ginger ale) and a cigarette dangling between my fingers (unlit; borrowed). Most people identified me on their first or second try.
Full Dance Card
Counting work, I hit up five Halloween parties this weekend, including:90s Night at Common Ground, which gave away $100 for the best 90s costume. Logistics proved an issue, as management couldn't convince Allston's drunkest hipsters to circulate before the judge's table, parading their wares. A horde of kids surged at the DJ booth, waving their hands and squealing like teenage zombies. I thought the kids in the Nickelodeon GUTS outfits had it locked, but Carmen Sandiego stole it. Joanna and Brian's Halloween party. I knew which subway station they lived nearest, but didn't know if it was on the Cambridge or Somerville side of the border. I guessed Cambridge at first. My GPS promptly led me to a Jewish dorm outside Harvard. Katie and Sylvia's Halloween party. I wore a different suit for the Don Draper costume - double-breasted, even less period than the first. But people still got it, especially after I borrowed another cigarette. Half the party circulated in the kitchen, eating delicious sweets; the other half planted in the living room, watching The Craft. Remember those quaint days when Wiccans and goths were exotic? The Gorefest cast party. I congratulated the players on another successful and blood-drenched show. Our host baked a plate of monkey bread - essentially, a massive pile of butter, cinnamon, sugar and dough. We picked at it like savages until Paul challenged everyone at the table to eat one last piece and then stop. An hour later, three people were sitting on the floor with chunks of butter-soaked dough clenched in their front teeth (but not swallowed) and there was a pot of sixty dollars. Let no one say improv people don't know how to party
The Patriot Marked for Death is Hard to Kill Under Siege
After a brief hiatus, I returned to the Overthinking It podcast last night. We planned to talk about Halloween costumes, haunted houses and the cultural rituals surrounding scaring each other. Then someone brought up Steven Seagal. Guess what we spent most of our time discussing.
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Current Music: "Tomorrow Never Knows" - Our Lady Peace
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October 30th, 2009
09:32 am - bow down before the one you serve
When I wrote last Friday about where my desires come from, I used the example of Laughing Cow cheese. My desire for this cheese went from non-existent (before I tried it) to compulsory (after). I thought that was pretty extraordinary.
Some folks, commenting on my LiveJournal, observed that the manufacturers of Laughing Cow cheese didn't literally create my desire out of nothing. I had to have some predisposition for soft, sweet cheeses before I tried it. It's not, as commenter phanatic put it, as if they handed me a ball of roofing tar and I lapped it right up. And I have been presented with free samples in the past - mango-kiwi juices, pre-packaged cookies, tequila shots served by women in cut-off tees - that have not compelled me to buy. So clearly these new experiences tap into some extant disposition in order to create a desire.
That makes sense but doesn't satisfy. We run into the same problem here that we do with the Cartesian theater. Okay, so desire is created when a new stimulus taps into some extant disposition. Where did the disposition come from? "Evolution" answers some of that - I'm a mammal; I like salt and calories - but not all of it. The human race is similar enough to interbreed but different enough that menus have to warn people about spicy food.
So our predispositions have to come from somewhere. Did they arise in a similar fashion - a combination of exterior stimuli and even earlier predisposition? Let's go with that for now, as I'm not sure what the alternative would be (god or aliens or ancestor spirits, perhaps) and it makes sense. We enter the world as creatures of pure instinct, survive on mothering until we start collating our experiences, and turn into complex calculating libraries. Makes sense.
Ultimately, then, every desire I have - and thus every action I take - comes from either biology or experience. What does this mean for the notion of free will?
"Free will" is one of those subjects that requires a lot of brush-clearing before two people can even start screaming at each other. No two people mean the same thing by it. So let me lay out what I mean when I talk about free will first.
In my head, it certainly feels like I have free will. Every action I take is either to fulfill some desire, which seems to arise as if from nowhere, or to respond to some instinct. I'm either closing the blinds to keep the light out of my eyes or I'm jumping in fear because something in the movie startled me. Instinct I can write off as subconscious reflex, but the choices feel free and uncoerced.
And yet we established a few weeks ago that the brain is an organ, and a hungry one at that. We also theorized last week that there is no mini-self sitting in our brain pulling levers - no central ego, soul or homonculus that's the true core. So when I say "it feels like I have free will," that might not be a useful statement, as "I" might not be a qualified judge. Who is the "I" saying what it feels like in "my" head? Which part of my decision-making process is the "I" evaluating?
Is there such a thing as a decision that doesn't come from the brain? For purposes of my discussion, no. If I'm sleeping with someone and I kick them to stop them from snoring, that's different than if I'm sleeping with someone and I kick them because my legs jerked in a dream. So everything that I intend to do, consciously, has to pass through the brain at some point.
Is there any part of the brain that does not have organic components? No. We can debate souls or homonculi if you like, but if you've followed the series so far you'll know I place little weight on them.
Therefore, is there any decision that does not originate from an organic component? It would seem not.
Does this mean there's no such thing as free will? It depends on what you mean by "free will." If you mean that there's an Aristotelian "unmoved mover" sitting in the brain that makes decisions for us, then yes, your notion of free will is in trouble. But if you mean that there's a difference between consciousness and instinct - that there's a worthwhile distinction to draw between kicking someone for snoring and kicking someone by leg spasms - then yes, "free will" makes sense.
But is the difference one of degree or one of type? Is consciousness a different process from instinct, or is it just a really complicated nest of instincts?
And if what I call "free will" is just an instinct, then what internal instincts and external stimuli are driving me to ask so many questions about it?
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October 28th, 2009
07:54 am - you told me again you preferred handsome men
And Who Are You Supposed To Be?
How good was this past Sunday's episode of Mad Men ("The Hobo and the Gypsy")? So good that I don't know if I want to go as Don Draper for Halloween anymore. That's how good it was.
I probably will, anyway, as I've reached that point in my life where I pick Halloween costumes by cheapness and the breathability of the fabric. I already own an appropriate suit: I just need to shave my sideburns, slick my hair into the part I wore for the first quarter century of my life, get a pocket square and walk around with half a glass of scotch. And I already do half of that the other three-hundred and sixty-four days of the year. You know I'm all about the pocket squares.
"The Gypsy and The Hobo" put me in such a mood that I not only questioned whether I want to adopt this fictional protagonist as a costume, but what I'm doing with my life. But that's what happens whenever I watch a good TV show, or a well-framed movie or a really moving song. Good art has the power to throw me in profound and unexpected moods. I'm a blank slate on which media gets to draw.
Which is ironic, because not only is that what Don Draper's about (advertising and shaping the popular consciousness), but that's what "what Don Draper's about" is about. Jon Hamm's character is popular because he looks like an alpha male who gets to drink all the time, screw around, dismiss his underlings with casual contempt, and luck his way into the halls of power. Every guy wants to be That Guy. Don Draper is selling an image. Matthew Weiner, producer of Mad Men, is selling Don Draper. So I applaud this fictional character's ability to sell because I myself have been so thoroughly sold.
All that aside, dressing as a tormented ad executive for the company Halloween party would be too meta to pass up.
I'm Not Here to Tell You About Jesus
I got my opportunity to play Don Draper at an on-site meeting for TVClient in New York yesterday. Our travel arrangements required that I be up by 5:00 to catch the Acela Express from South Station by 6:00. I've taken Amtrak several times in the last few years, but never the Acela Express, with its unfolding business class tables and spacious cafe car. The four of us did some rehearsing for the work presentation, then shared war stories for the rest of the ride.
My role doesn't put me in regular contact with the clients; I'm more akin to Ken or Peggy than Don. But I still speak in meetings, and yesterday I spoke to a conference room full of website developers on how we could work better with them. I fielded some technical questions, improvised my way through some new slides, and avoided stammering. Things to work on: eye contact, not clearing my throat.
Our cabbie from TVClient to Penn Station murmured something under his breath the entire time he drove us. Every ten seconds, he would click a handheld counter that he cupped in his palm. Prayers? Pedestrians he refrained from killing? We'll never know.
The Acela Express seats aren't quite tall enough to support my head and don't recline far enough to let me slump. I slept with a stiff neck on the train ride back. When I got back to Davis, the sky was as dark as when I'd left.
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Current Music: "Chelsea Hotel #2"
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October 26th, 2009
07:37 am - don't throw stones; you don't know
On Friday I had the neighbors, Ryan and Erin, over for wine and cheese. We sifted through each other's movie piles to find good films to laugh over. Neither Erin nor Ryan had seen Road House, so we put that in first.
If marginal utility theory means anything, then I should get more value out of most purchases than I spend on them. But sometimes the ratio skyrockets so far out of whack that I give thanks to the healing power of capitalism. My Dickies messenger bag, for example: I spent $50 on it three years ago and it has easily brought a thousand dollars of convenience into my life. Or my copy of Mind Performance Hacks. Or the Bed of Ages: a Simmons model that the company no longer makes, that I dropped just over a grand on (including frame and headboard) five years ago. I spent enough on the Bed that it's a close thing, but I still come out black.
Road House has vastly exceeded the $8 I paid for it in the Target discount bin. In the two years I've owned it, I've watched it at least six times. Maybe one of those times I watched it alone. Every other time, I've had friends over, cracked some beers and introduced them to Patrick Swayze's magnum opus.
Why does Road House work on every level? The fight scenes are fun, as I've said before. The hayseed, outdated setting allows for some ironic laughs - particularly when the locals gawk over Swayze's tanned bod. "He looks like he's from a coast!", Erin commented.
But what makes Road House so oddly great is that it's a well-paced film on a picayune subject. You can almost watch the hero's status rising and falling on screen, as if on a stock ticker. Anyone who wants to write an action movie should own this on DVD and watch it until it breaks. I am not kidding in any way.
Afterward, we watched Demolition Man, which has a similarly tight plot even if the setting makes us snicker. Stallone, Bullock and Snipes each have one setting (smart-aleck, perky and cocky, respectively), and the movie suffers whenever it asks them to deviate. The story shepherds our heroes from setpiece to setpiece, even if we have to swallow some improbable coincidences to get them there. Perhaps that's one of the benchmarks for a good action movie: how easily we can believe the transition between car chase and shootout.
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Current Music: this guy who looks like Jon Lovitz is rocking at the start of Road House
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