Category: Culture

Here I Am

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Here. Here I am. My first weekend here in this beast of the city. The snow has fallen and encased the new apartment. The maze of the city closes in around me. I’ve left Elysium for an engagement with the edges. To the West the wave of mountains rises against the plain, houses are sprawled across in patchy subdivisions from here all the way to the northern farmlands. The city is always growing, already too big for itself.

Elysium the Beautiful breeds insanity. One loses touch, drifting into the mind of strange paranoias and bizarre scenarios of good and evil. I’m happy to be away from all that nonsense. The secret life of farmers and suburbanites. Iowa, Indiana, Missouri, Everywhere the Word goes out, “I own this, as far as I can imagine. This is mine. No government or people will take it away.” Yet, wildfires rage, with no satisfactory explanation, for we know no history and only want life to be simple.

I have been assured, by those who claim to know, that I am the victim of a strange conspiracy and here I sit in quiet winter solitude, contemplating that possibility. It occurs to me that I’ve been around for too may lifetimes not to be able to smell evil when I encounter it. After all, evil’s really just a mirror of myself, or a part of me anyway. I know it too intimately not to recognize it in others.

There’s plenty of evil in this world, mostly pushed by ambitious hucksters with boring agendas, something about telling us who to fear and who to hate. Then they sell us books and dvd’s and lure us to their online sites where the major promotion is themselves. They are mostly paid very well by the very people they claim are the ‘adversaries,’ those whose interests are served by turning people against one another. They point at the Jews or the Blacks or the Chinese or the ‘Socialists,’ or whoever is leaving those ‘mysterious’ con trails in the heavens, seeding our precious air with their filthy mind control.

Oh shit, I’m just tired of all this. I’ll just walk away from it now, away from these helpless fears, away from useless arguments that ignore history and are only angry frightened screaming into darkness. The people downstairs are my companions, shouting mindlessly at the t.v. while their Broncos win. There is no place to hide from the world here and it’s somehow soothing to be alone, away from anyone that can be trusted.

You once complained about a teabag that was folded beautifully in a paper pyramid – a waste of paper, time and energy! – you said. You only felt compelled to complain. “Where is the ocean,” you said, “Where are the trees?” “Where is the desert?” What is the real question?

When I came to the city I thought that I was leaving a refuge and returning to the edges of the world. I was wrong to think so, to find out that the vast maze of city provides the only real refuge of anonymity. I am totally submerged in the great darkness that’s civilization with all of its pain and glory. Every face that I see is a lie and there is little possibility for truth, only acceptance, abandonment and perhaps some ultimate contentment while surrendering to the oceanic flow.

I don’t know where this life has taken me. I am both pirate and defender of this realm and I bellow from within a font of night jewels. I no longer need your company or your approval and I will do what I must to see us to the end. Your spies and secret sailors, those who reveal all of the hidden plans are useless now. The plan is older than the wind that blows above the deserts and will continue at all costs and we will either serve or fail given our own particular gifts.

Welcome to the new world order.

Spielberg and Kubrick

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Ever since seeing it for the first time I’ve regarded “A.I.” as Steven Spielberg’s most challenging and interesting film. The creative collaboration between two directors with such different styles (but similar obsessions with detail) is almost diabolical in it’s interweaving. One can almost sense the tension between their approaches in every scene, making every moment a trajectory toward another revelation of the unexpected. Spielberg’s urge toward resolution struggles against Kubrick’s insistence that there are no clear answers to who we are or where we’re going. We never really know whether the affections that surround the protagonist are ‘real’ feelings or merely the programmed responses of an automata, or whether it matters. The unrelenting action of a Spielberg movie becomes the container for a path that leads us toward serious contemplation.

Kubrick very purposefully handed this project to his friend with a very specific outline (including musical scores) to be completed after his death. One of his underlying themes is to question the very emotional agenda informing the majority of films, and certainly those of Spielberg. On one level the movie is a debate over our motivations for going to the movies, whether to open ourselves to unique points of view or merely to have our familiar button’s pushed?
The tension comes to a crest in the last scene, which has sparked numerous debates and harsh criticism, but which embodies the movie’s essential paradox. Some have criticized it for catering to Spielberg’s emotional agenda by leaving us on a note that’s overly sentimental. With the exception of this film, I’ve often thought that Spielberg’s films would benefit by cutting out the last 15 minutes of ‘tying it all up.) I believe, however, that this conclusion is inevitable to the degree that we identify with the character of the automata (played brilliantly by the young Haley Joel Osmet) instead of seeing that the overall outlook of the film, from the beginning shots of a drowned city to the final one of the lights going out, is that humanity is quite likely a species doomed to be a figment of memory in an otherwise indifferent universe..

American Icons

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Whenever I’m feeling down on America, particularly in the midst of what sometimes appears to be an absurd or even pointless political season, rather then allowing myself to be overcome by cynicism and bitterness I’ve found a very effective antidote.

Here is a link to one of the finest audio productions available on the internet. The ongoing series is part of writer Kurt Anderson’s Studio 360 broadcast from PRI and WNYC.

If you need reminders of what in our history has made America great, let me introduce you to Studio 360’s, American Icons. Stories on everything familiar, from “I Love Lucy” to “Mad Magazine” to the “Lincoln Memorial” to “Wizard of Oz” and “Buffalo Bill.” How did we become who we are? And who are we?

Studio 360’s American Icons

It’s a Good Time for Doctor Strange

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(upon leaving Santa Fe)

The darkness intensifies
The mountain no longer calls me up
Fall has arrived
The world descends into chaos
Syrian women screaming at the gates
Children drowning

When we invented the internet
(The children of psychedelia)
We rejoiced to think the world was saved
Through communication
And good will
Peace. Love. Music

Instead we unleashed
All the demons of our forgotten histories
They swarm around us
And above our heads
Threatening our souls
Stealing our eyes

War creeps toward us
Like a fungus
It despoils the land
And crushes hopes
Except for those insane dreamers
Of the Apocalypse

There is no Rapture
No conspiracy
No escaping into worlds of mind
No avoiding our mirrors
There are only the revelations
And awakening

I came to this place for refuge
And respite from the World City
Where mostly we live
I came to recover the questions
And for 28 years I’ve been a fox
An outlaw cast into cause and effect

Now I’m riding the ox
Feet first
Head first
Back to the war and peace zone
Excuse me I mean
The zone where deals are made

America loves the deal maker
Is entertained by the drama
House of Cards
Madmen
Breaking Bad
The guy with the Big Hair

“I can sell you this handy device
With accompanying extras
If you take advantage right now…!”
That familiar hum of gangsta
The power broker
The guy wearing the suit
The thing about demons
They are nourished by our weakness
Our worst qualities
Our fears and angers
Our arrogance our guilt
They steal it from our veins

I believe in heroes
And stories of heroes
When we are lost
Uncertain and facing death
Honestly
They teach me not to panic

The stories help us to navigate
Unless they swallow us
They grow ever larger
The library of earth is always expanding
The record of our existence and imagination
Stored in narratives

We are always on the brink
Of life and death
Of miracles
When we can step back
We see the patterns
And the path

The city is a refuge
Galleries museums bazaars
For trading myths and memories
Separate from the real art of the world
Those inarticulate hearts
Of everyday pursuit

Who is this
What is my purpose
Am I just a ghost
Passing by in site seeing buses
Wandering the narrow streets
Filing through the Plaza

I pass you everyday
I don’t even see you
Whispering all around me
Like whiffs of shadow
Your reality
Only parallel to mine

To you I’m like the ghosts of soldiers
Looking down over the divine city
From the old hill fort
On the bluffs
Constructed out of mud
Now dissolved into mounds of sand

We wonder about Chaco
The ancient villages
The multistoried structures
The trails from everywhere
The total abandonment
What if it were a retirement community

The Spanish overwhelmed the pueblos
Until the villages rose up
A compromise was reached
Leaving saints to be martyrs
Until the soldiers of a white army
Postponed all agreements

While friends are anchors
That hold us to the earth
They are shadows growing more real
Even as they drift
Into the past
Becoming memory

Real cities breed desperation
There is real madness on the streets
Eyes that beg for mercy
In the midst of plenty
Not every part can fit
But every part has purpose

Passages

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From the novel, “Beloved”, by Toni Morrison:

“…Eighteen seventy-four and whitefolks were still on the loose. Whole towns wiped clean of Negroes; eighty-seven lynchings in one year alone in Kentucky; four colored schools burned to the ground; grown men whipped like children; children whipped like adults; black women raped by the crew; property taken, necks broken. He smelled skin, skin and hot blood. The skin was one thing, but human blood cooked in a lynch fire was a whole other thing. The stench stank. Stank up off the pages of the North Star, out of the mouths of witnesses, etched in crooked handwriting in letters delivered by hand. Detailed in documents and petitions full of whereas and presented to any legal body who’d read it, it stank. But none of that had worn out his marrow. None of that. It was the ribbon. Tying his flatbed up on the bank of the Licking River, securing it the best he could, he caught sight of something red on the bottom. Reaching for it, he thought it was a cardinal feather stuck to his boat. He tugged and what came loose in his hand was a red ribbon knotted around a curl of wet woolly hair, clinging still to its bit of scalp. He untied the ribbon and put it in his pocket, dropped the curl in the weeds. On the way home, he stopped, short of breath and dizzy. He waited until the spell passed before continuing on his way. A moment later, his breath left him again. This time he sat down by a fence. Rested, he got to his feet, but before he took a step he turned to look back down the road he was traveling and said, to its frozen mud and the river beyond, “What are these people? You tell me, Jesus. What are they?”

“…he believed the undecipherable language clamoring around the house was the mumbling of the black and angry dead. Very few had died in bed, like Baby Suggs, and none that he knew of, including Baby, had lived a livable life. Even the educated colored: the long-school people, the doctors, the teachers, the paper-writers and businessmen had a hard row to hoe. In addition to having to use their heads to get ahead, they had the weight of the whole race sitting there. You need two heads for that. Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. In a way, he thought, they were right. The more coloredpeople spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human, the more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside. But it wasn’t the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other (livable) place. It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. And it grew. It spread. In, through, and after life, it spread, until it invaded the whites who had made it. Touched them every one. Changed and altered them. Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made. The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own.”

Reading these lines from the remarkable novel Beloved, by Toni Morrison, brought me in touch with the underlying emotions that arise from America’s shadow and have dominated our political debates for as long as I’ve been alive. I wonder sometimes whether we as a nation will ever gain the courage to deal with the echoes resounding from centuries of suffering inflicted on our fellow human beings in the name of wealth and capital. Instead of recompense and reparations we continue to pursue the panaceas of punishment, repression, racism and blaming others for the crimes we’ve committed in the quest for an American dream. Slavery is the crime that largely built our economy during a time when cotton was the most valuable trade currency in the world. It’s the crime for which we refuse to face atonement because it threatens an economy built on the backs of the poor and the disadvantaged. Our feelings of guilt get us nowhere, because we end up projecting our guilt on those whom we’ve victimized, leading to even more injustice and more cruelty. We tell ourselves that those on the bottom of the social and economic ladder somehow deserve to be there. When they protest their position we find someone even more marginalized to point the finger at. Unfortunately, self-rightousness and bigotry continues to be one of the most familiar political tools in our national discourse. Yet, everything is tied together in the body politic, and it’s the original sin of bigotry and violence that obstructs our view of a future shaped from well-being and harmony. It may be that only the passing of generations will lead to healing the wounds that sow the spectacle of distrust and chaos that we witness on our streets, in our prisons and in the halls of “justice”. The only way out of our mess is the path of self-knowledge and compassion. We must ultimately own our mistakes and only then can we forgive ourselves and others before moving on to deal with their consequences.

Lastly, also from “Beloved”, a passage about love.

“She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It’s good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.”

The Victim Thing

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It finally came to me, the reason I haven’t been able to get past the middle of the second season of “Breaking Bad,” the reason I can’t abide conspiracy theories, and the reason some stories draw me in and others bring up in me a barrier of stubborn resistance.

It’s the ‘victim’ thing.

Surely there are real victims in the world, who fall to genocide, starvation, famine, war and general global neglect. These are things I want to know about, because they are part of the truth, and only when we are exposed to the truth can we take any sort of useful action.

We are all ‘victims’ of something. People cut in front of us in line, treat us unfairly, ignore our best qualities, or we are victims of our own mistakes and unrealistic expectations. Fair enough. I certainly belong to that club.

But there’s the kind of victimization that’s solely a product of the mind, which functions as a state of being, a form of self-identification. This sort of victimization has two possible outcomes, both self-reinforcing. Either we surrender to being forever the butt of some cosmic joke in which we are the eternal fall-guy and there’s absolutely nothing that can be done to change the odds, or else we try to turn the tables by becoming the victimizer of others. In either scenario we find ourselves in eternal conflict with the world as it is.

An example of the former strategy is the drama queen. I have myself taken this route on more occasions than I’m proud to admit. For years it seemed that my life was a constant internal (mostly) battle with authority figures and with their ridiculous rules and regulations and unrealistic demands. My attitude was that, as the smartest person in the room, every other agenda should be shifted to accommodate my own particular modes of being. Underneath all of this, of course, was the nagging feeling that I could never be good enough, a feeling from which I could conveniently hide by projecting it onto others.

As you can imagine, this strategy gets no one anywhere useful.

Variations of this strategy include the ‘always complaining’ victim who is more and more seen as a pain in the ass and either gets shuffled out of the way or out of the organization, or else is ‘forced’ to quit, thus completely fulfilling the requirements of victimhood. More common is the ‘passive aggressive‘ strategy where one presents a minimally acceptable face to the people in charge while undermining their authority by engaging in corrosive gossip or kvetching with one’s fellow victims in the lunchroom or behind closed doors.

The other kind of victimhood is much more insidious and ultimately much more destructive. It can be indulged in by whole cultures and used as one of the most effective tools of politics and war. Walter White of “Breaking Bad” is the perfect example of this alternative. Seeing himself as having been rendered powerless by the circumstances of his life, extending to the bad faith and betrayal that he perceives in those around him, he chooses to become the ultimate victimizer, the “one who knocks” as he so aptly puts it. We’re fascinated by his every move as he descends ever deeper into a hell of his own making.

Looking around, I see Walter White in every corner of every awful conflict in the world today. Regard the recent actions of our Republican congress in its dealings with the State of Israel. We have here two political entities who draw considerable energy from their self-portrayal as victims. Republicans see themselves as the lone defenders of the ideals of white christian destiny against the rising hordes of the envious poor, the foreign invaders of our borders, unbelievers, and the practitioners of ‘reverse-racism.’ Israel, finding itself besieged on all sides by people who view it as either an illegitimate state or an undemocratic occupier finds itself caught in a cycle of increasing paranoia (the ultimate state of victimhood) toward just about everyone, even its allies. Desperately, the Israeli Prime Minister engages in the politics of its most powerful ally by appealing to those who most closely share his fearful and apocalyptic (and imperialist) view of the world.

It was the spectacle of an Israeli leader making political hay with Republicans that made me see the wide ranging implications of victimhood and to understand why I find it so repellent. The horror of it all is that those who feel the most victimized ultimately become the worst offenders against human aspiration and the most passionate advocates for war. Just ask yourselves, what nation, and what party have become the driving force toward a wider war in the Middle East?
The position of Israel is not so much different than that of Walter White, in that the more aggressive the stance the more destructive the repercussions. Here Israel has made a very bad bargain, for the people with whom it has invested its hopes are those who tend to view the world in apocalyptic terms, where only the righteous shall survive while the impure unbelievers are condemned to perdition. For them, Israel has little meaning beyond being a symbol of their own global hegemony and as fulfillment of a short-term prophecy.

For every nation and every party that exists in a world of paranoia and victimhood, the world is closing in, while the worst atrocities are committed in the name of vengeance against unbelievers. But we are no longer living in a world where one people can survive by disregarding the rights of others. Ultimately, one person, or one nation, can only make war against the whole world for a limited time, until the tide shifts and the world overwhelms both fear and hope and all of our conspiracies vanish in the tide.

…and one of these days I’ll get around to watching the next episode of “Breaking Bad.”

Painting in Light, Sound, Color and TIME

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Are you interested in what distinguishes a great movie from a mediocre one? Movies are so much more than plot or dialogue – they are magical compositions incorporating geometry, sound and color.

This series by Tony Zhou, called “Every Frame a Painting” illuminates many of the compositional factors that distinguish great movie making from the forgettable (“photographs of people talking”, as Hitchcock frames it).

Well worth subscribing to, if you are interested in the art of film.

Some teasers:

This illustrates some of the reasons that I consider Drive to be very close to a ‘perfect’ movie.

Here are two more shorts illustrating elements that distinguish great directors like Martin Scorsese and Akira Kurosawa from lesser ones.

This one one features a movie I watched for the second time this past week (It’s streaming on Netflix), Snowpiercer.

To appreciate movies as paintings in light, sound, color and time is to open one’s eyes to the magic of the frame, which is the true magic of film.

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“If you want to find pure gold, you must see it through fire.” – Mumonkan

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