"I was the same man inside and outside" is one of the refrains.
So is he betraying erstwhile friends in spilling these beans, or do we know from the get go it's a fantasy?
Gatsby is a self made man, in the estimation of our morbidly alcoholic in patient.
We think our Old Sport gets out, by telling his story, restoring perspective and sobriety.
At least he's learned some self discipline, thanks to a kind doctor who wants to nudge him along.
Like, if you study literature at Yale, what makes you think you're cut out to sell bonds? No, you need to fall in love with your characters.
He's sailed around the world, went to Oxford, a war hero, and now he's at the top of the heap, all for love. He's the hero of his own life, defined by his quest.
Anyway, whatever the critics say, I'm fine with this blending of imaginative, faux reality, with everyday movie-making competence. We saw some of that in J. Edgar, even The Aviator.
The Coal World (a Machine World -- a Matrix) with the all-seeing billboard is clearly the occult unconscious, that feared-yet-attractive place, black and bleak, a place on which the rich project their darkest fantasies.
Our storyteller is initiated into this underground through his mentor's "game world", through a gas station, which for me echoed with eXistenZ and the gas station there. Be a player. Hop in.
What sustains the Gatsby's hope is his dream has come so far. The dream-like quality of the scenery continues to feel like "in someone's head".
The storyteller is in a sanitarium we remember, with a case of writer's block. We're living his dream, of perfection. An alter ego.
Gatsby pushes too hard but who can blame him when he's so close. He kind of blows it, there's a train wreck (metaphorically) and we, the omniscient voyeurs, see the waves of fear coming in.
"The best she could come up with was..." another refrain. We fall short. Tragic.
Operatic, that's the word. The sets seem "fake" only in the sense that all fiction is "fake" -- a forgivable (indeed encouraged) playing with our truths. An exploratorium, this skulletarium.
The grand estate-based aristocratic lifestyle with many servants, a choreographed affair, added to the sense of "a musical" with an all-dancers cast.
The panorama of the parties is very cabaret, like Moulin Rouge. "Very Fellini" said mom, astutely, thinking of Satyricon.
The city is very Gotham. There's even a bat mobile of sorts.
Underwater again... love seems to end this way for DiCaprio.
Slinky Debicki was the perfect glamor girl.
Monday, July 29, 2013
Iron Man 3 (movie review)
Hah hah, I went to Laurelhurst Theater's web site and clicked on trailer for Iron Man 3, and got a notice the trailer was blocked by one or more of the content owners. Blocking their own trailers are they? Well, never mind about the film then. I've heard from enough people that this is a miserable / terrible film to just leave it at that. Fine with me if the "owners" lose money and reputation on this one.
Monday, July 22, 2013
Car Show in Forest Grove
Carol and I went to this after Annual Session. Our red wrist bands got us in. Matt Ryan was there, a car enthusiast. The weather was perfect: bright sunlight with lots of glinting.
Sunday, July 21, 2013
Of Mind and Body
I got in a long talk with David Koski after dinner last night. Annual Session is still going strong (I made it to both Open Mic and most of Community Night -- in time to see the Friend in Residence juggle (he's professional grade, can do five balls etc.)). Great to meet someone who reads my blog at dinner, a novelist (I think of my blog as "like a Russian novel" sometimes -- so many characters).
A night or two before, I'd been watching this interview of Mike Judge by Alex Jones, the guy behind Idiocracy (the movie) as well as King of the Hill and Beavis and Butthead (animations).
I found talking to Koski to be the ultimate contrast. He's still fired up, in a comic book kind of way, (flashing on Crumb) but it's about such cerebral material: vZome and Zome Tool, the upcoming Bridges, dissections of the enneacontahedron and the five rhombic dodecahedrons within (was it five?).
He's also enthralled with that Archimidean set of Eureka! ratios: the sphere and cone in the cylinder, with volumes 4, 1, 6 respectively (cylinder = two "tuna cans" marked by the sphere's equator, each of volume 3). I imagine the animation, veering off into colorful geometry as David holds forth, passionate, weaving together stories with heroes and villains, holding our attention.
David had just finished reading Me & Lee, after I turned him on to Mary's Mosaic (thanks to Lanahan).
In my science fiction (fantasies about some future), there's more walking between centers, hikes through the woods, more like that Girl Scout Camp but even more spread out. This helps with staying in shape and burning calories (as well as not concentrating too much power in any one "lodge" or "HQS").
Here at Pacific University, I have but yards between vast quantities of food, and my dorm room. It's almost as bad as at home, where I can waddle back and forth from mentoring to kitchen. I think of ways to change the environment, such that I keep burning those joules at a higher rate. Sharing the gym membership helps a little. Having the second bike stolen added delays. Food Not Bombs is healthy living.
Speaking of which, Lindsey got a workout pulling those two trailers (I've done that, but only one or two times and for less distance), helping to widen our radius. This neighborhood had probably never heard of FNB. Tomorrow the world (no wait, we've already got that covered -- only thinly).
OK, time for breakfast.
A night or two before, I'd been watching this interview of Mike Judge by Alex Jones, the guy behind Idiocracy (the movie) as well as King of the Hill and Beavis and Butthead (animations).
I found talking to Koski to be the ultimate contrast. He's still fired up, in a comic book kind of way, (flashing on Crumb) but it's about such cerebral material: vZome and Zome Tool, the upcoming Bridges, dissections of the enneacontahedron and the five rhombic dodecahedrons within (was it five?).
He's also enthralled with that Archimidean set of Eureka! ratios: the sphere and cone in the cylinder, with volumes 4, 1, 6 respectively (cylinder = two "tuna cans" marked by the sphere's equator, each of volume 3). I imagine the animation, veering off into colorful geometry as David holds forth, passionate, weaving together stories with heroes and villains, holding our attention.
David had just finished reading Me & Lee, after I turned him on to Mary's Mosaic (thanks to Lanahan).
In my science fiction (fantasies about some future), there's more walking between centers, hikes through the woods, more like that Girl Scout Camp but even more spread out. This helps with staying in shape and burning calories (as well as not concentrating too much power in any one "lodge" or "HQS").
Here at Pacific University, I have but yards between vast quantities of food, and my dorm room. It's almost as bad as at home, where I can waddle back and forth from mentoring to kitchen. I think of ways to change the environment, such that I keep burning those joules at a higher rate. Sharing the gym membership helps a little. Having the second bike stolen added delays. Food Not Bombs is healthy living.
Speaking of which, Lindsey got a workout pulling those two trailers (I've done that, but only one or two times and for less distance), helping to widen our radius. This neighborhood had probably never heard of FNB. Tomorrow the world (no wait, we've already got that covered -- only thinly).
OK, time for breakfast.
Thursday, July 11, 2013
Layers / Anthropology
Those who stare at GIS displays a lot (not me these days) know that data comes in layers. Check out Google Earth or one of those: you can turn the layers on and off. Turn the roads on and off. Check out the I-net. Highlight different features.
I think that meditation was in part kicked off by Applewhite's saying "tomographic" with respect to Synergetics (in The Futurist), a word found in PET, positron emission tomography. Positrons don't last very long but they're integral primitive objects with their key roles. Solar fusion is positronic along one path. CERN is really into positron channeling, not just hadrons.
ESRI's ArcView and related products, give you layers from datasets. Superimpose this and that, learn from the patterns. Like when slime molds define a transportation system, do the math.
Some tribes speak of the ancestors stacked up on one's shoulders, like a totem pole I suppose. Some journal-keepers might have branded that "superstitious" denying them their metaphors for what we in the computer programming business take for granted: the objects have their lineage, their parents.
When a community is stressed, you will see the alchemy at work, as personalities differentiate and assume a foreground. Winston Churchill was the war time leader for Britain, a product of those times. Or does it go the other way? Historians debate these chicken and egg matters. How does one explain Hitler or Napoleon?
Let me point to the TV remote as one of the great equalizers we didn't have back then. We're freer to register "ratings", a level of approval / disapproval. Some people say Hitler would have been that many more times a monster if Nazis had today's TV. But would his series have taken off? Things have to check out to some degree, and with television comes a new level of scrutiny -- or not if the newsies get lazy.
Omni-triangulating and integrity go together. We have a lot of well-placed faith in not coming across utter contradictions. How well placed is that faith? I'd turn that around and ask what else there is to have faith in? Utter capriciousness? How does one "surrender" to that? We'd rather surrender to "eternal laws" I'd usually think, though we do respect freedom and heroic postures.
Anyway, back to layers, we see them in people. Shades come to the foreground, as a new persona takes over, slowly solidifies. We all create / cast each other. Projection is that powerful. It takes a village to have a self, or at least a self of the kind we think social, in shape to interact. We get new levels with greater aggregates or "piles".
The hermit gets tired of social interaction and retreats to a life away from the rat race. We sometimes call that retirement in this country. In India, they see "holiness" in that, but then "holiness" is a chief form of entertainment in the land of Ganesh.
I think that meditation was in part kicked off by Applewhite's saying "tomographic" with respect to Synergetics (in The Futurist), a word found in PET, positron emission tomography. Positrons don't last very long but they're integral primitive objects with their key roles. Solar fusion is positronic along one path. CERN is really into positron channeling, not just hadrons.
ESRI's ArcView and related products, give you layers from datasets. Superimpose this and that, learn from the patterns. Like when slime molds define a transportation system, do the math.
Some tribes speak of the ancestors stacked up on one's shoulders, like a totem pole I suppose. Some journal-keepers might have branded that "superstitious" denying them their metaphors for what we in the computer programming business take for granted: the objects have their lineage, their parents.
When a community is stressed, you will see the alchemy at work, as personalities differentiate and assume a foreground. Winston Churchill was the war time leader for Britain, a product of those times. Or does it go the other way? Historians debate these chicken and egg matters. How does one explain Hitler or Napoleon?
Let me point to the TV remote as one of the great equalizers we didn't have back then. We're freer to register "ratings", a level of approval / disapproval. Some people say Hitler would have been that many more times a monster if Nazis had today's TV. But would his series have taken off? Things have to check out to some degree, and with television comes a new level of scrutiny -- or not if the newsies get lazy.
Omni-triangulating and integrity go together. We have a lot of well-placed faith in not coming across utter contradictions. How well placed is that faith? I'd turn that around and ask what else there is to have faith in? Utter capriciousness? How does one "surrender" to that? We'd rather surrender to "eternal laws" I'd usually think, though we do respect freedom and heroic postures.
Anyway, back to layers, we see them in people. Shades come to the foreground, as a new persona takes over, slowly solidifies. We all create / cast each other. Projection is that powerful. It takes a village to have a self, or at least a self of the kind we think social, in shape to interact. We get new levels with greater aggregates or "piles".
The hermit gets tired of social interaction and retreats to a life away from the rat race. We sometimes call that retirement in this country. In India, they see "holiness" in that, but then "holiness" is a chief form of entertainment in the land of Ganesh.
Sunday, July 07, 2013
Melancholia (movie review)
The special features focus on the two sisters, Justine and Claire, not so much on the other characters, and casts one as the wannabe nurse for the clinically depressed other, the bride, Justine, at the end of the day not truly happy at her wedding, the happiest day of her life in some romance novels.
It doesn't seem that happy to us either though, to our wandering know-nothing camera, "we" the voyeurs. The guy is someone dug up by the boss. The boss is hounding the bride to make him rich, as he squanders money seeking influence, power and control over those around him, eager to corner her talents.
Of course Justine blows a fuse after awhile, fights back, and ends up losing the guy, who was an appendage anyway. She's figuring out the puzzle and not liking what she's finding, and fighting back. Not melancholia and not romantic either. She's just doing the math.
She's ending up a stupid trophy wife and it's not going to be fun. He's got it all figured out and springs it on her ("I wasn't going to tell you until later but..."). Was she consulted in any way? How d'ya like them apples? She doesn't.
As the voyeur audience we're trying to figure it out with her. Who are "these people" we've suddenly intersected with? We do the math too.
For sure these people have all coped in various ways, which makes them appear insane to the know-nothing camera. The stupid dad plays a dumb "trick" with the spoons, putting them in his pocket and bugging the waiter for more. He's an idiot for entertainment and in real life as well.
His wife hates being married to him and is bitterly watching her daughter enter a similar arrangement. She's as comforting as nails, a prototype melancholic. Both parents are present, yet unavailable.
The fighter girl bounces around looking for comfort but ends up proving the stronger one who then gets to comfort the others.
The others have tried to be strong in their various ways.
The men stand for science and some kind of authority. The women look to them for reassurance but then have their intuitions and just know, like the horses. Yes that sounds formulaic but then this film plays with well-known patterns, stitching them together in novel ways.
With the end of the world looming, are we able to trust them to really tell us?
Wouldn't that just mean panic? Why not lie to us instead? Like we do about other stuff?
I'm half remembering science fiction along those lines: a few scientists know but elect not to tell us. Maybe it's some other finding, like a spreading disease with no cure. They'd tell us then, eventually, as it would be obvious soon anyway. But in The Walking Dead, the CDC guy had his secrets, even post Apocalypse.
That brings me to where I was focused at first: seeing this as science fiction and wondering how close this would match a real end of the world catastrophe.
Until the special features set me right, I had the planets reversed and during the overture (tricked into listening to Wagner, tsk) I was seeing Earth as Melancholia, thinking a smaller planet, more moon size, was hitting ours, not ours crashing into something much bigger, more gaseous.
Either way, it would have been a huge calamity.
Something much smaller could do us all in. A moon-sized object hitting the Earth would be "game changing" as they say, plus so much depends on velocity. Cosmic speeds. We sit around a table at what we call the Linus Pauling House (he lived there as a boy for a short while) and consider these scenarios, given so many of us are astronomy buffs of one kind or another.
I'm thinking gravity would have worked rather differently and the weather would have gone much crazier, not just the horses like before an earthquake.
The movie worked hard to create an atmosphere and reached into our psyches more than it tried to lecture us about science. The suspense builds, even though we've peaked at the ending.
Another focus was the living standard these folks were enjoying. Early 21st Century pre cell phone, with palatial estate living complete with butlers, stables, no apparent limit on luxury. Yet there was weirdly no TV, no flat screen telling us about Melancholia.
Claire sneaks on the Internet furtively checking to see if her husband might be concealing something from her. That's more the feeling that they're withholding a diagnosis because you're not considered capable of facing the truth.
What do we hide from ourselves?
Having a giant planet in your face, looming, is like the elephant in the room, a loud reminder of personal mortality in microcosm, a ticking clock no matter how privileged your access to palatial gardens with sundials.
Are we having fun yet?
Suffering from a hatred of life when it's so precious leaves us feeling disloyal, or is it just that we're immortal and are loathe to face up to it, plus we're still mortal enough to have to die and die again, and who knows how many times get married, if not to a person to a company maybe? To a lifestyle?
People posit "Heaven" as "happily ever after" just so they don't have to think about it, Hell the same way. Mark Twain poked at those conventions, poking fun.
It doesn't seem that happy to us either though, to our wandering know-nothing camera, "we" the voyeurs. The guy is someone dug up by the boss. The boss is hounding the bride to make him rich, as he squanders money seeking influence, power and control over those around him, eager to corner her talents.
Of course Justine blows a fuse after awhile, fights back, and ends up losing the guy, who was an appendage anyway. She's figuring out the puzzle and not liking what she's finding, and fighting back. Not melancholia and not romantic either. She's just doing the math.
She's ending up a stupid trophy wife and it's not going to be fun. He's got it all figured out and springs it on her ("I wasn't going to tell you until later but..."). Was she consulted in any way? How d'ya like them apples? She doesn't.
As the voyeur audience we're trying to figure it out with her. Who are "these people" we've suddenly intersected with? We do the math too.
For sure these people have all coped in various ways, which makes them appear insane to the know-nothing camera. The stupid dad plays a dumb "trick" with the spoons, putting them in his pocket and bugging the waiter for more. He's an idiot for entertainment and in real life as well.
His wife hates being married to him and is bitterly watching her daughter enter a similar arrangement. She's as comforting as nails, a prototype melancholic. Both parents are present, yet unavailable.
The fighter girl bounces around looking for comfort but ends up proving the stronger one who then gets to comfort the others.
The others have tried to be strong in their various ways.
The men stand for science and some kind of authority. The women look to them for reassurance but then have their intuitions and just know, like the horses. Yes that sounds formulaic but then this film plays with well-known patterns, stitching them together in novel ways.
With the end of the world looming, are we able to trust them to really tell us?
Wouldn't that just mean panic? Why not lie to us instead? Like we do about other stuff?
I'm half remembering science fiction along those lines: a few scientists know but elect not to tell us. Maybe it's some other finding, like a spreading disease with no cure. They'd tell us then, eventually, as it would be obvious soon anyway. But in The Walking Dead, the CDC guy had his secrets, even post Apocalypse.
That brings me to where I was focused at first: seeing this as science fiction and wondering how close this would match a real end of the world catastrophe.
Until the special features set me right, I had the planets reversed and during the overture (tricked into listening to Wagner, tsk) I was seeing Earth as Melancholia, thinking a smaller planet, more moon size, was hitting ours, not ours crashing into something much bigger, more gaseous.
Either way, it would have been a huge calamity.
Something much smaller could do us all in. A moon-sized object hitting the Earth would be "game changing" as they say, plus so much depends on velocity. Cosmic speeds. We sit around a table at what we call the Linus Pauling House (he lived there as a boy for a short while) and consider these scenarios, given so many of us are astronomy buffs of one kind or another.
I'm thinking gravity would have worked rather differently and the weather would have gone much crazier, not just the horses like before an earthquake.
The movie worked hard to create an atmosphere and reached into our psyches more than it tried to lecture us about science. The suspense builds, even though we've peaked at the ending.
Another focus was the living standard these folks were enjoying. Early 21st Century pre cell phone, with palatial estate living complete with butlers, stables, no apparent limit on luxury. Yet there was weirdly no TV, no flat screen telling us about Melancholia.
Claire sneaks on the Internet furtively checking to see if her husband might be concealing something from her. That's more the feeling that they're withholding a diagnosis because you're not considered capable of facing the truth.
What do we hide from ourselves?
Having a giant planet in your face, looming, is like the elephant in the room, a loud reminder of personal mortality in microcosm, a ticking clock no matter how privileged your access to palatial gardens with sundials.
Are we having fun yet?
Suffering from a hatred of life when it's so precious leaves us feeling disloyal, or is it just that we're immortal and are loathe to face up to it, plus we're still mortal enough to have to die and die again, and who knows how many times get married, if not to a person to a company maybe? To a lifestyle?
People posit "Heaven" as "happily ever after" just so they don't have to think about it, Hell the same way. Mark Twain poked at those conventions, poking fun.
Tuesday, July 02, 2013
Friday, June 28, 2013
Privatizing Public Parks
city contemplates padlocking public facilities to placate vocal private home owners
Free access to Colonel Summers during posted hours, to the rain protection structure in particular, may soon be prevented if neighbors to the park are successful in privatizing this public property.
A vocal minority would like to lower property values for others by behaving as if they lived in a gated community with the right to control public access, a short radius from downtown in a major metropolitan area, with public parks zoned for public use.
That includes sharing the roads, not just the parks, with cyclists and pedestrians, with people looking to get out of the rain sometimes.
At the other end of the spectrum are the more enlightened capitals, which keep municipal restrooms open, well lighted, spic and span during posted hours, with attendants as necessary.
Yes that costs money and yes that's what public funds are for, not locking restrooms and gating kiosks. Civics 101. Yes trash accumulates. Pay to have it removed. It's a park. Remember "park"?
The city's plan to kill its own parks is of course counter-productive as it lowers land values for everyone to have a city that's unintelligently managed and advertising that fact by padlocking the bathrooms it can't manage to operate.
Ugly porta-potties replace stately FDR era public works, more evidence of an Idiocracy in charge, squandering our collective inheritance.
Protecting urban ecosystems and subcultures from gentrification and conformity is part of no one's job description. This is how wetlands get paved over and intellectual hubs get destroyed.
Summers has been a switchboard. Food Not Bombs uses it to serve healthy vegan food to triathletes and marathoners. A youth-knit subculture that helps keep communities in touch runs through here, connecting the Americas by bicycle. It's a migration stop for exotic species -- of human. Some of them make noise.
Enlightened neighbors would (some do) feel blessed and privileged that their park is valued and used in this way. It's not a boring deserted vacant space, a park in name only.
Isn't this close to Hawthorne and Belmont, reportedly cultured?
Doesn't Portland have a reputation for weirdness, self-cultivated, business supported?
Can one have the talk without the walk? Isn't that called hypocrisy?
What a great way to bring death and rigor mortis to a neighborhood. Run a pogrom, by hijacking the city to play the heavy.
I've spent a ton going back and forth between that park an the nearby Barley Mill as well as eating for free, or serving my friends. That's my playground too, a favorite destination by bicycle, sometimes Tri-Met.
Forgive me if I sound pissed. Lets say I despise bullies, especially / including the ones who hide behind the mask of anonymity. We all know that bullies are the worst of cowards.
Monday, June 24, 2013
Sunday, June 23, 2013
Retreat Conversations
Lew Scholl today at Meeting updated me on some of the things happening with Google Earth. I'd noticed that his painstaking rendering of the Pauling House appeared to have been replace with something more sketchy.
Were they over-taxing their computer power, extending beyond their own reach, and now needing to dumb things down a little more?
Speaking of Google Earth, we were talking about "ask not what Dufur can do fer you but rather what you can do fer Dufur", a apocryphal town motto attributed to Dufur, Oregon (not Darfur), and I "flew" there in Google Earth and then started absent mindedly following route 197 in a northerly direction... woah, what's that?
A very space-alien looking facility, something to attract the attention of the paranoid. We checked it out. Ah so, the northern terminal of the HDVC Pacific Intertie twixt the Columbia River and LA.
Europe has a bunch of these links too, with more on the global drawing board. The old mercury arc types are giving way to those using thyristors.
Of such stuff is a Wanderers conversation made, not trying to scare ya off or anything. It's a Nerd Fest you might say.
Were they over-taxing their computer power, extending beyond their own reach, and now needing to dumb things down a little more?
Speaking of Google Earth, we were talking about "ask not what Dufur can do fer you but rather what you can do fer Dufur", a apocryphal town motto attributed to Dufur, Oregon (not Darfur), and I "flew" there in Google Earth and then started absent mindedly following route 197 in a northerly direction... woah, what's that?
Celilo Converter Station off Route 197
A very space-alien looking facility, something to attract the attention of the paranoid. We checked it out. Ah so, the northern terminal of the HDVC Pacific Intertie twixt the Columbia River and LA.
Europe has a bunch of these links too, with more on the global drawing board. The old mercury arc types are giving way to those using thyristors.
Of such stuff is a Wanderers conversation made, not trying to scare ya off or anything. It's a Nerd Fest you might say.
Saturday, June 22, 2013
Solstice Retreat
I returned to the scene proclaiming "BS" to be OK, defending it. That might have been a kind of ice breaker, but the conversation was already rolling.
I think I missed Michael's didj playing. I'd retreated from the retreat earlier, after pizza arrived, to check on my family. This was the Summer Solstice. Wanderers acknowledge these astronomical days.
Glenn is a font of information about the "goal posts" (solstices), and the zig zag path of the Annalemma between them, the lines of the so-called tropics. Many an ancient statue has these goal post arms.
Michelle's group had joined us. Good to catch up. Thanks also to Christine, Helen, David DiNucci.
I started reading about the history of Earlham College today, having invested in the book after my tour of the campus thanks to a student from Kazakstan: Earlham College: A History from 1847 to 1997 by Thomas D. Hamm.
Quakers were found to be subversive by grand juries in some states because of their stance against slavery from the late 1700s forward. The position was nuanced in that some Quakers asserted the slavers' rights on the principle of church and state separation.
As long as the state said it was legal, who were these churches to say otherwise? The War of Independence had been fought for a reason, one being to end the tyranny of church dogmas, be those the Church of England's or any other.
But the fact that Quakers had disowned any of their own who kept slaves, a painful enough process, gave them that "holier than thou" aspect that rubbed slaverholders the wrong way. Plus everyone knew they encouraged escapees to continue north, rather than turn them in to the authorities.
Indianapolis to this day has that central monument to the Civil War, in which it fought on the side of the Union. When Quakers started escaping the South, that future war was as yet prophesied (projected) by only a few.
The split between Orthodox and Hicksites was also still somewhat new, and was rending meetings. The alchemy of these many splits and distillations is not that easily followed, with "Quaker guts" posters telling only part of that tale.
Too often, the tale of slavery gets divorced from the tale of Indian Wars. Indiana was named that for a reason.
Helen, of Jewish heritage, had been quizzing me whether Quakers prayed aloud to God in meeting.
I explained about our silent worship format, and the fact that when Friends break the silence, as moved by the Spirit, they might use any number of formats or templates, including sometimes a spoken request of a singular deity, a form one might label "prayer".
A worship discussion, more like Sunday Morning Adult Discussion (SMAD) allows more in the way of direct commentary and feedback.
Unlike those training in Roman oratory, Friends do not have a direct debate format. Himalayan schools apparently have this and it might be to our benefit to develop in this direction. The say Quakers avoid confrontation sometimes to their detriment.
Also at the Wanderers retreat, we used Google Earth on my Android to circle Breitenbush Hot Springs and Detroit Lake. Christine has helped clear a lot of trails around there, while another of us present had grown up in a dam-building family, like Glenn's did, his dad a chief engineer for the Detroit Lake dam.
I think I missed Michael's didj playing. I'd retreated from the retreat earlier, after pizza arrived, to check on my family. This was the Summer Solstice. Wanderers acknowledge these astronomical days.
Glenn is a font of information about the "goal posts" (solstices), and the zig zag path of the Annalemma between them, the lines of the so-called tropics. Many an ancient statue has these goal post arms.
Michelle's group had joined us. Good to catch up. Thanks also to Christine, Helen, David DiNucci.
I started reading about the history of Earlham College today, having invested in the book after my tour of the campus thanks to a student from Kazakstan: Earlham College: A History from 1847 to 1997 by Thomas D. Hamm.
Quakers were found to be subversive by grand juries in some states because of their stance against slavery from the late 1700s forward. The position was nuanced in that some Quakers asserted the slavers' rights on the principle of church and state separation.
As long as the state said it was legal, who were these churches to say otherwise? The War of Independence had been fought for a reason, one being to end the tyranny of church dogmas, be those the Church of England's or any other.
But the fact that Quakers had disowned any of their own who kept slaves, a painful enough process, gave them that "holier than thou" aspect that rubbed slaverholders the wrong way. Plus everyone knew they encouraged escapees to continue north, rather than turn them in to the authorities.
Indianapolis to this day has that central monument to the Civil War, in which it fought on the side of the Union. When Quakers started escaping the South, that future war was as yet prophesied (projected) by only a few.
The split between Orthodox and Hicksites was also still somewhat new, and was rending meetings. The alchemy of these many splits and distillations is not that easily followed, with "Quaker guts" posters telling only part of that tale.
Too often, the tale of slavery gets divorced from the tale of Indian Wars. Indiana was named that for a reason.
Helen, of Jewish heritage, had been quizzing me whether Quakers prayed aloud to God in meeting.
I explained about our silent worship format, and the fact that when Friends break the silence, as moved by the Spirit, they might use any number of formats or templates, including sometimes a spoken request of a singular deity, a form one might label "prayer".
A worship discussion, more like Sunday Morning Adult Discussion (SMAD) allows more in the way of direct commentary and feedback.
Unlike those training in Roman oratory, Friends do not have a direct debate format. Himalayan schools apparently have this and it might be to our benefit to develop in this direction. The say Quakers avoid confrontation sometimes to their detriment.
Also at the Wanderers retreat, we used Google Earth on my Android to circle Breitenbush Hot Springs and Detroit Lake. Christine has helped clear a lot of trails around there, while another of us present had grown up in a dam-building family, like Glenn's did, his dad a chief engineer for the Detroit Lake dam.
Sunday, June 16, 2013
Mr. Lonely (movie review)
Per the "Making Of" movie in Special Features, on this DVD edition, Harmony had wanted to make a film about communal living, but then also had this Mexican Michael Jackson impersonator kicking around in his head. How could these fit together?
The Marilyn Monroe "from the dead" scene well captures the projection, of a girl idol whom in real life also died (suicide unless you're a conspiracy theorist). Her impersonator is true to the role, with Charlie Chaplin too jealous and brutish. Michael was more kind and shy, and likewise projected upon.
I noted how hammers were used and included that in a subsequent post to Sean's Wittgenstein list.
I confess I dozed off during the sheep slaughter, whereas the slaughter of innocents (innocence) is somehow a theme. I'd had a long day. Some great tree bark in the park (communing with nature).
The impersonators congregate on this commune and stage a show. The innocent sheep are a subplot that connect us to another subplot someplace else in the world where the Werner Herzog character is hoping to meet up with the Pope, thanks to a miracle.
That a Marilyn impersonator would stop a guy from using a fake rubber hammer to pound his own head is a gesture towards the masquerade carnival, the world of unreal identities. There's a high level of faux (farce), a lightness of being.
When an unreal identity encases a real one, might it take over? Wrapping oneself in the mantle of a ready-made persona, that's what actors and actresses do, isn't it? They play at playing themselves playing others. Michael's agent is skeptical he'll ever be "real" (like casting one's sights too high).
The "commune living" scenario was very R.D. Laing.
We each bring our own baggage, hopefully not too much of it. Create something with the people there if you can. It sometimes works. That Greatful Dead clan had a good ride. Tribal villages may be hauntingly surreal and worth haunting if you have the chance. Go in character.
The Marilyn Monroe "from the dead" scene well captures the projection, of a girl idol whom in real life also died (suicide unless you're a conspiracy theorist). Her impersonator is true to the role, with Charlie Chaplin too jealous and brutish. Michael was more kind and shy, and likewise projected upon.
I noted how hammers were used and included that in a subsequent post to Sean's Wittgenstein list.
I confess I dozed off during the sheep slaughter, whereas the slaughter of innocents (innocence) is somehow a theme. I'd had a long day. Some great tree bark in the park (communing with nature).
The impersonators congregate on this commune and stage a show. The innocent sheep are a subplot that connect us to another subplot someplace else in the world where the Werner Herzog character is hoping to meet up with the Pope, thanks to a miracle.
That a Marilyn impersonator would stop a guy from using a fake rubber hammer to pound his own head is a gesture towards the masquerade carnival, the world of unreal identities. There's a high level of faux (farce), a lightness of being.
When an unreal identity encases a real one, might it take over? Wrapping oneself in the mantle of a ready-made persona, that's what actors and actresses do, isn't it? They play at playing themselves playing others. Michael's agent is skeptical he'll ever be "real" (like casting one's sights too high).
The "commune living" scenario was very R.D. Laing.
We each bring our own baggage, hopefully not too much of it. Create something with the people there if you can. It sometimes works. That Greatful Dead clan had a good ride. Tribal villages may be hauntingly surreal and worth haunting if you have the chance. Go in character.
Monday, June 10, 2013
Saturday, June 01, 2013
Saturday, May 25, 2013
The Age of Carbon?
Dr. Mark Hersam posed this "age of carbon?" question as a broad brush heuristic, a way of contextualizing his payload of technical information regarding the work of his lab at Northwestern University. The hominids (two leggeds) have gone through stone, bronze, iron, plastic and silicon ages, maybe carbon is next or the one we're entering? This was a Friday evening, cool and rainy, at First Congregational Church.
Recalling the first international conference on fullerenes, where I was present, rubbing elbows with Kroto and Smalley and maybe that shyer guy (did you ever wonder why academics have elbow patches on their blazers? -- the better for elbow rubbing)), the bottle-neck then was "the yield" as memorialized in Smalley's famous remark "it's the yield, stupid" piggy-backing on Bill Clinton's "it's the economy stupid" sound bite. Buckyballs (Bf, C60 etc.) were much more expensive than gold there for awhile, pound for pound, and much reward accrued to those labs which could supply them in any quantity.
In the nanotube business the problem was much the same, not when it came to synthesis (for balls either -- strike a match and you'll get some) but sorting, teasing apart the some 300+ varieties that all have their specific conductivity, chirality, diameter... quite a hodge podge. Getting to interesting chemistry requires disentangling and for awhile that looked impossible.
Not so, and this is where Dr. Harsam and his lab enter the picture, as pioneers of adding surfactants to give the nanotubes a way to dissolve in aqueous solution and then centrifuge the hell out of 'em. The tubes sort by neutral buoyancy within a density gradient. Big pharma has used this for a long time so equipment was ready off the shelf, and now the industrial correlate of Hersam's lab, founded by one of its grads, produces nanotubes in solution literally by the barrel.
Graphene was the third breakthrough carbon to come along since the 1980s, with another Nobel Prize. Buckyballs were first in line, and I remember that chapter well, as I was in my hay day at CUE, laying the groundwork for a Project Renaissance (at least in Portland). I rented a convertible and took Dr. Nick as far as the Bay Area. I was on the phone with Applewhite and the BFI back then too, tasked with keeping Fuller's relevance to the fullerenes in the picture -- and that reminds me, I need to order another copy of Popko's book (Koski called during the talk -- I'll call him back today). [Later: I got it for "2nd kindle" aka the reader on the Mac Air, good for airports].
Then came nanotubes which I remember from Chalmers (Gothenberg, Sweden).
Then graphene, which Glenn has been reading about (he sat to my left at the dinner).
Was the Nobel Prize pre-mature? The science had been ingenious and skeptics had long held a mono-layer of carbon could not be stabilized. But would this be a "next big thing"? Samsung is forging ahead in this area. When it comes to nanotubes at least, the technology continues to be aqueous, meaning the electronics may be squirted out. These carbons are conductive, but variably. The ingredients are there, but will we evolve the complex structures characteristic of the silicon industry?
During the Heathman dinner (entree salmon) I asked how many allotropes we were were talking about now. Isn't graphene just graphite pared down? But by that reasoning nanotubes are rolled graphite and buckyballs are balled graphite -- the SP2 hybrid bonds, making carbon 3-way with electrons in change is what's common to all but diamond, SP3 with 4-way valency.
Tara joined us, helping with ushering people to their seats and sharing the dinner, then took off for a comedy club. She asked Dr. Hersam about mechanical photosynthesis which he agreed was the Holy Grail right now. Having sunlight directly power some CO2-to-methane chain was the focus of many a lab (Tara has a friend in that field).
I then carpooled with Christine (another usher) back to the hood and she, Lindsey and I all watched American Psycho together at Blue House (Lindsey and I had not seen it whereas Christine had studied it professionally). Before the talk, I'd been snarfing down Starbucks and fumbling with my Amazon Kindle, plowing through Mary's Mosaic (recommended by SL). Along those lines, I found this New York Times headline, at the Starbucks, somewhat sadly & ironically humorous.
Speaking of Applewhite and the naming of fullerene, I did hear back from Sir Harold Kroto after we sent him a group photo from near Mt. Hood Community College (MHCC). I've always thought he'd make a great ISEPP speaker and have said so many times to Terry.
Skip Rung, head of ONAMI (Oregon nanotech) and our tour guide that time, introduced our speaker, after FEI, an electron microscope company, warmed up the audience with some of the best micrographs available from non-optical frequencies. These pictures are somewhat doctored (colorized) to bring out features. Look for the new IMAX movie this November.
Nanotubes may be helping in the microscope business given their high sensitivity, especially in infra-red (so telescopy too maybe?). An incoming generation will need to pick up the torch and carry it. We all need to buckle down and learn our STEM subjects (or STEAM).
Table conversation also ranged into Neal Stephenson's books. Jeff was getting into Cryptonomicon. I mentioned the exhibit at the science fiction museum in Seattle, the quill pen version of his Baroque Cycle. His name had come up earlier during Q&A, no coincidence given The Diamond Age with its nano-technology theme.
Sunday, May 19, 2013
Julien Donkey-boy (movie review)
I'm seeing more patterns in Harmony Korine films. One is what I'll call "closure" where the presence of the camera is explained, not left open. Trash Humpers goes furthest in this direction. It's the Blair Witch Project solution: the people in the film had one or more video cameras and were filming themselves. That's making more and more sense, whereas in the old days the camera's point of view needed no explaining.
Donkey-boy on DVD is good because you get the special features, including an interview with the director himself. They played a lot with strapping cameras to the sides of peoples heads or elsewhere and sending them into scenes where the cameras were unseen. This has a Borat-like aspect in that some of the actors are real people who are clueless about being filmed. Candid Camera. However, we have less than complete closure in Donkey-boy. The camera may be anchored to a first person point of view, but not because they have a camera in the story, and not because the camera's viewpoint has to be explained.
I only got it during the credits that the dad in this film is played by Werner Herzog. He and his voice seemed so familiar, but I wasn't prepared to find Harmony's favorite director starring in one of Harmony's own films. What a coup in a way, how fun for him. Thanks Werner, for a brilliant somewhat dead pan performance (not unlike his narrator voice).
The DVD special feature also makes clear that Harmony was serious about presenting mental illness in an unvarnished, unsentimentalized vein. We are encouraged to have empathy for Julien, whom we follow most closely, but as the reviewer at IMDB points out, for all we know he's guilty of some rather large sins. The church, a mix of Irish Catholic and Black Evangelical, is, I think, portrayed in the story as clueless, e.g. the priest keeps trying to talk him out of the pursuing voices he hears as a consequence, suggests he go see a shrink.
The shrink does not show up in the final cut, but is in one of the deleted scenes. The Julien character, brilliantly played, shows off more of what he can do. An uncle in the mental hospital gets some credit: Harmony insisted the actor spend some time with the role model for this character, the schizophrenic uncle. We get some cuts to the hospital in special features. This feels like Brad Pitt in 12 Monkeys and prepping for One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest combined. Harmony is tossing his hat in that ring, the ring of those who do their own homework where mental illness is concerned.
This movie was made after Gummo, but long before Trash Humpers and Spring Breakers.
One of the patterns in a Harmony Korine film is that an apparent murder or perhaps negligent manslaughter goes by almost as a footnote, not as a major plot point and not as a crime to be solved. We're left to wander through these events, helpless spectators whose opinions and judgements may be of little relevance to the action.
Donkey-boy on DVD is good because you get the special features, including an interview with the director himself. They played a lot with strapping cameras to the sides of peoples heads or elsewhere and sending them into scenes where the cameras were unseen. This has a Borat-like aspect in that some of the actors are real people who are clueless about being filmed. Candid Camera. However, we have less than complete closure in Donkey-boy. The camera may be anchored to a first person point of view, but not because they have a camera in the story, and not because the camera's viewpoint has to be explained.
I only got it during the credits that the dad in this film is played by Werner Herzog. He and his voice seemed so familiar, but I wasn't prepared to find Harmony's favorite director starring in one of Harmony's own films. What a coup in a way, how fun for him. Thanks Werner, for a brilliant somewhat dead pan performance (not unlike his narrator voice).
The DVD special feature also makes clear that Harmony was serious about presenting mental illness in an unvarnished, unsentimentalized vein. We are encouraged to have empathy for Julien, whom we follow most closely, but as the reviewer at IMDB points out, for all we know he's guilty of some rather large sins. The church, a mix of Irish Catholic and Black Evangelical, is, I think, portrayed in the story as clueless, e.g. the priest keeps trying to talk him out of the pursuing voices he hears as a consequence, suggests he go see a shrink.
The shrink does not show up in the final cut, but is in one of the deleted scenes. The Julien character, brilliantly played, shows off more of what he can do. An uncle in the mental hospital gets some credit: Harmony insisted the actor spend some time with the role model for this character, the schizophrenic uncle. We get some cuts to the hospital in special features. This feels like Brad Pitt in 12 Monkeys and prepping for One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest combined. Harmony is tossing his hat in that ring, the ring of those who do their own homework where mental illness is concerned.
This movie was made after Gummo, but long before Trash Humpers and Spring Breakers.
One of the patterns in a Harmony Korine film is that an apparent murder or perhaps negligent manslaughter goes by almost as a footnote, not as a major plot point and not as a crime to be solved. We're left to wander through these events, helpless spectators whose opinions and judgements may be of little relevance to the action.
Wednesday, May 15, 2013
Gummo (movie review)
I am only just tuning in the movies by Harmony Korine. The Lotts have a son Harmony so I'm used to that being a "guy name" but IMDB had it wrong in their Trivia section, which I've subsequently corrected:
I told my friend afterward that I wanted Sam, my late wife's brother, to see it, as he and Dawn grew up in Ohio and coped with poverty.
You should know before starting this film that no cats were harmed in its making. Perhaps they used corpse kitties. They're actually not being drowned, shot or beaten to death on camera, much as it seems that way. It's a story, a couple of boys trying to make a living (and feed their glue sniffing habit) by hunting stray cats, and dealing with competition from another boy.
The characters are shown following their own intuitions a lot, not being told what to do or think by others. Children spontaneously assume the demeanor and vocabulary of adults, as they pretend to shoot and kill a "fag rabbit" (another boy) and otherwise explore their world.
They are self-actualizing, and in that sense high on Maslow's Pyramid, which may seem ironic given what appears to be dire poverty and need. But take a second look. They have plenty of clothes and time to just hang out and workout. Bicycles provide mobility. This is not crowded shanty town living. People enjoy big houses. This is our "land of the free".
The boy we might call Gummo is Solomon in the movie, played by the talented Jacob Reynolds. His voice narrates on occasion, adding depth to his character and turning the movie into a kind of novelesque retrospective, a latter day Tom Sawyer, some midsummer night's dream (between tornadoes).
The camera's eye moves smoothly through peoples lives, not noticed, or else it's stared at directly, someone the person knows, like a home movie. The intentional mix of film types and quality adds to the sense of watching amateur, home brewed stuff, an effective form of immersion. "Intoxicating" says one of the critics, of this widely acclaimed film.
Harmony likes many of the same films I do, e.g. Badlands. I'm not surprised his films grab me the way they do (so far; I've seen two).
Was spotted by 'Harmony Korine' (qv) on a drug prevention episode of _"Sally Jessy Raphael" (1985)_ (qv) called "My Child Died From Sniffing Paint", and cast in his movie _Gummo (1997)_ (qv).I changed "her movie" to "his movie", pending acceptance of edit 130515-205327-871000 re Nick Sutton.
I told my friend afterward that I wanted Sam, my late wife's brother, to see it, as he and Dawn grew up in Ohio and coped with poverty.
You should know before starting this film that no cats were harmed in its making. Perhaps they used corpse kitties. They're actually not being drowned, shot or beaten to death on camera, much as it seems that way. It's a story, a couple of boys trying to make a living (and feed their glue sniffing habit) by hunting stray cats, and dealing with competition from another boy.
The characters are shown following their own intuitions a lot, not being told what to do or think by others. Children spontaneously assume the demeanor and vocabulary of adults, as they pretend to shoot and kill a "fag rabbit" (another boy) and otherwise explore their world.
They are self-actualizing, and in that sense high on Maslow's Pyramid, which may seem ironic given what appears to be dire poverty and need. But take a second look. They have plenty of clothes and time to just hang out and workout. Bicycles provide mobility. This is not crowded shanty town living. People enjoy big houses. This is our "land of the free".
The boy we might call Gummo is Solomon in the movie, played by the talented Jacob Reynolds. His voice narrates on occasion, adding depth to his character and turning the movie into a kind of novelesque retrospective, a latter day Tom Sawyer, some midsummer night's dream (between tornadoes).
The camera's eye moves smoothly through peoples lives, not noticed, or else it's stared at directly, someone the person knows, like a home movie. The intentional mix of film types and quality adds to the sense of watching amateur, home brewed stuff, an effective form of immersion. "Intoxicating" says one of the critics, of this widely acclaimed film.
Harmony likes many of the same films I do, e.g. Badlands. I'm not surprised his films grab me the way they do (so far; I've seen two).
Friday, May 03, 2013
A Meditation on Existence
A Meditation on Existence
(inspired by recent threads)
Greek theater, why not start there, gave audiences a more god-like consciousness, just as movies do today, and novels.
As an audience, you're treated to a form of omniscience none of the characters in the drama contemporaneously enjoys.
You see what no one else sees, you see it all. Except in some plots you're left wanting for information. Whodunnits are like that.
Indeed, novels or films in the first person can leave one in the dark in a more realistic manner than the "omniscient eye" of the all-knowing camera (a camera snooping in bedrooms, quite intimate -- what people would say the angels might see (Wings of Desire)).
Where this goes is towards a sense in which god-like greater consciousness exists (starting in Greek theater), as we sometimes experience climbing a few ladder rungs ourselves (like through films) and posit the ladder stretching on before us. Surely there are higher and higher levels of appreciation for this vista, or... or what a waste, I guess? "At least there's higher than I've been" is a common conceit (an expression of humility and respect), suggesting a vector field towards greater pinnacles.
When you point to "god like" as in "point of view" (a director's point of view), then you attract more believers to your Pin Head Church. Even hard-boned atheists might get on their knees here, asking for greater consciousness, a closer connection with God (their own neural net, their spaghetti monster).
In his Tractatus, Wiitgenstein mentions a "top of the ladder" as if we got to the top. In Philosophical Investigations there's less of an end, as the need to invent (and retire) the partially overlapping language games goes on and on. The need to design and implement stuff doesn't just go away in a cloud. Work still needs doing.
But there is that bit about being able to put it [philosophy] down occasionally, to end the obsession, to "get off the tractor" as it were (but then feel free to get back on again).
How do "we" ("I" + "I") exist more than any "God" we believe in? Are you today the same mind as you were as a child, is your body the same?
They say the child is father to the man (though that's sexist) so are you that man already, that woman you wondered if you'd be?
The point is, you're not proved to exist yet either, no offense, evidence mounting you may not, so lets back off "existence" being what we most care about, just in case it's proven that we don't (really exist). We might praise God for His gracious manner of non-existence, a role model for how we might come to handle it, instead of with despair and sorrow.
Tuesday, April 30, 2013
Friday, April 26, 2013
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