PERSONAL- Christmas in May- The Best Movie Ever

There is seldom a consensus when it comes to the best. The concept itself is so ultimate and yet so abstract as to defy itself as a label for any single work. What is the best? How does one decide, among a multitude of variables, which example is so superlative as to transcend all others? The ultimate, the pinnacle, the absolute epitome of all works of a type. Strangely until a few years ago there was a consensus of the best in two different mediums which I hold dear. And not nearly as strangely just a few years ago the consensus changed. Change is the normal state of the best. Each high point is a new standard for everyone to shoot for. Eventually it is only natural that “the best” is to be bettered. That is the very nature of the human animal- always to strive to beat the best. Look at sports records. They are made, only to inevitably be broken. But some records stand for so long that even after they are broken, they are such examples of enduring excellence that they can be appreciated. And when that elusive status of “best” is applied to a work of art it is even more remarkable that a consensus can be reached and even more astounding when that consensus lasts for decades.

Today’s gift, and tomorrow’s, are two of those works of art that somehow came to be known as the best in their respective areas, and kept that designation for years in spite of continuing advances in technique, changes in society and public taste, and even the artistic aims of the creators working in those media. Such an achievement can be a mark of true quality or it can be a monument to anachronism. Luckily for the aficionado, both of these works are very much the former.

In the 1960s a strange thing happened. Suddenly one poll after another that asked movie critics their opinion on the best movie ever made started coming up with a single answer. This trend would last for over a dozen years and the only thing more surprising than this sudden universal acclaim would be the movie on which the acclaim was being heaped. This movie wasn’t a great artistic or commercial success when it was first released. It didn’t receive an Academy Award for best picture, or best director, or best man in a leading role. It did win for Best Original Screenplay, a pyrrhic victory at best since the real innovation of the movie was the way it was filmed not the script itself. It was a movie that almost wasn’t released. It was made by a first time director who was a mere 24 years old when he started it. It was so controversial before it was released that it was almost never seen in a theater. And for years after than original release it was to disappear into obscurity. Yet it was so unusual, so innovative, so revolutionary, and so far ahead of its time in so many ways that even twenty years after it was released and then almost forgotten it was able to stir the imaginations of so many film critics that it would win poll after poll, beating such affirmed classics as Gone With The Wind, Casablanca, Snow White, Psycho, The Seventh Seal, and, well, every other movie ever made!

Citizen Kane was Orson Welles first move and arguably his magnum opus. It was an unauthorized and unwanted fictionalized biography of William Randolph Hurst, one of the most wealthy and powerful men in America. Hurst was the owner of a network of newspapers and radio stations- the Rupert Murdock of his day- and he was outraged at treatment Welles had given him in the guise of Charles Foster Kane, a fictional doppelganger who shared so many of Hurst’s foibles that it was impossible for anyone familiar with Hurst to mistake Welles’ subject for anyone else. The satire of Hurst was both subtle and gross. From the castle built by Kane, called Xanadu, which opens the movie and introduces the character (a not-so-subtle allusion to Hurst’s San Simeon), to the central conceit of the movie, the meaning of Kane’s dying word- Rosebud (widely reported to be Hurst’s nickname for his mistress’ genitals). Hurst tried to buy the movie before it was presented in theaters and, failing that, put pressure on the studios and theaters to bury the movie both before and after it had been exhibited. No advertising for the movie was allowed on any of the Hurst owned media. As a result, Citizen Kane disappeared from the public consciousness for years after it was made.

In the late 1960s the movie enjoyed a resurgence among the film literati. The controversy involving William Randolph Hurst was lost to the age of yellow journalism to which he belonged. But the artistry and vision of the movie remained. Welles had shown what a director could be. Citizen Kane was the work of a genius auteur in an era where the studio system was still the paradigm. It remains a rousing, funny film that continues to look as much like a modern period piece as a 67 year old film. It pioneered a combination of techniques that today we consider standard- juxtaposition of different time periods, sweeping camera moves that zoom through landscapes and settle on close-ups, use of media other than movies as framing and expositional devices, extreme close-ups and worm’s-eye views to evoke feeling, cynicism and the anti-hero as protagonist, revolutionary makeup, deep focus, special effects that don’t draw attention to themselves but serve the story. The list goes on and on. Welles was an accomplished amature magician and the movie is full of cinematic magic tricks. Environments that, at first, appear small reveal themselves to be huge sets. Montages compress years into minutes and single scenes. The movie is virtually a textbook for modern film making. And it was made in 1941!!!

If you haven’t seen it, you should. If you haven’t seen it in a while, you should see it again. A true masterpiece. A two word answer for anyone who thinks film is not an art form. Many movies are a waste of the two hours of your life that they take to view. This movie is worth multiple repeted viewings because, like any work of art, it is complexly satisfying.

PERSONAL- Christmas in May- Illusions

May 4, 2008

My gift today is a book. There will be many books this month. Yesterday I gave you a blueprint for human interaction. Today I give you a fictional account of a spiritual nature that will send your heart flying and explain why I think that there is more to this world than ever dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.

Richard Bach wrote a short novel in the early 1970s that became a best-seller, Jonathan Livingston Seagull. It was a book about the spiritual life of relatively stupid birds and involved the quest for speed, independent thought, being apart from the crowd, being the best you could be, and sharing what you learned with others. I read it when I was eleven years old and it informed what I would do with my life because it spoke to the desires I had already made for my life. But that’s not the book I’m going to tell you about.

Bach’s next book was more literal, more accessible, and much funnier. I didn’t find it until I was a couple of years older (that being the pre-internet age when finding a book by a favorite author was an act of providence rather than a few seconds of searching the web). Like What Do You Say After You Say Hello, this would be a book that would inform my adolescence and that I would think about for the rest of my life. Its name was ILLUSIONS- THE ADVENTURES OF A RELUCTANT MESSIAH and it told the story of one summer that Richard spent jumping from open field to open field through the midwest, selling 10 minute rides in his open cockpit biplane to the locals in each town. Along the way he meets Donald Shimoda, the first other pilot he’s ever seen doing the same thing. It seems they have a lot more in common than unusual “What I Did On My Summer Vacation” essays. Both are seekers after ultimate spiritual truth, though Donald seems to have found it and decided that he’d rather sell rides in a biplane than bother with it.

Over the course of the summer, Richard and Don will share adventures, discuss a book that Donald gives Richard called The Messiah’s Handbook- Reminders for an Advanced Soul, work on their airplanes, and eat bad panbread by the campfire. By the coming of Autumn each will go their own way, having learned something from the other. And at the end of this short book I too had learned something. Today, the things Bach had to say seem quaint and obvious, but to a thirteen year old boy who couldn’t quite admit that religion and spirituality were different things yet, it was very helpful. And it’s remains a beautiful read despite its aged new age philosophy.

Bach would go on to write more semi-autobiographical fiction. His next book would deal with his courtship with Leslie Parrish, the luscious cutie from ‘60s film and television best known for playing Daisy May in Lil’ Abner and making William Ware Theiss famous by her almost supernatural support of his work on the original Star Trek episode Who Mourns for Adonias. I lost touch with him when he divorced Ms. Parrish and turned back to his only true love, flying. But I thank him for helping a young boy realize that the search for a personal philosophy didn’t have to involve dogma and ritual.

PERSONAL- Christmas in May- What do you say after you say hello?

May 3, 2008

Continuing our 30 days of Christmas in spring, today I’m going to offer you a gift of self-awareness. You will probably have to invest a little money in this one, but, as the feller said, nothing ventured-nothing gained.

I’ve always considered myself an explorer of the human condition. As Socrates said, “An unexamined life is not worth living.” This was my mantra long before I knew that someone who had lived more than a couple thousand years before me had also figured it out. By the time I started high school I had also figured out that most people, myself included, made bad choices for no apparent reason. This puzzled me. Why would people do things that were obviously to their detriment? Why did I do things that on further examination seemed stupid?

Somehow I came on a book by a psychiatrist named Eric Berne. I had read a lot of psychology books by thr time I found this one and like many people I considered a lot of what they had to say silly. Some of it might apply to some people and some it might apply to me but unlike other sciences they didn’t seem to offer a framework for understanding the basis for human interactions. Berne’s book, WHAT DO YOU SAY AFTER YOU SAY HELLO?, did just that. Thomas Harris had written one of the first self-help books in the 1960s from a part of Berne’s work called I’M OK, YOU’RE OK and later John Bradshaw would build a self-help dynasty on just the child ego state paradigm which he called the “inner child” but the only real influence these men had was to belittle the precepts in Berne’s book as “pop” psychology. Instead of these abbreviated versions of the theory, Berne’s magnum opus presents a realistic and workable theory of human behavior was laid out from cradle to grave and in the years since I’ve read it I’ve seen it verified again and again. I don’t think it explains everything for everyone but it is a fascinating viewpoint on human behavior.

I also risk belittling Berne’s theory by condensing it, but I wish to give you enough of a taste to whet your appetite. Simply put, the book posits a trio of mainsprings of human action- transactional analysis, script analysis, and games.

Transactional analysis is the study of human interaction. Berne supposes a trio of ego states: the child, the adult, and the parent. These are roughly analogous to Freud’s id, superego, and ego but go much deeper in explaining the voices everyone hears in their heads.

The Child is the spontaneous, intimate, fun-loving part of a person. It is free of inhibitions but somewhat naïve. It has the domain of creativity and open love. It is engaging and free. It can also be petulant and afraid. It fears a lack of control in it’s life and can act out accordingly.

The Adult is the rational mind. It is the inner computer that, like Freud’s Superego, mediates between the other two ego states. It acquires data and rationally makes decisions. But it is not always in control.

The Parent is the programmed mind. It’s the part of you that tells you to wash your hands before you eat, or wear a seatbelt, or to always be on time. It is what humans have in place of instincts. Early instruction that your parents gave you to get you through life, good or bad, resides here.

Transactions are either complimentary or crossed. An example of a complementary transaction might be lovers in their Child ego states exploring each others bodies, or a group of people playing a game together where each is open to their own feelings and mindless of the score. OTOH, a crossed transaction might be when one person is in their Adult ego state and another is in their Child or Parent ego state. An example of both of these kinds of transactions would be a typical exchange between two people on the subject of dinner:

“When will dinner be ready?”
“In about 10 minutes.”
Both people are in their adult ego state. One is asking for information and the other is supplying data.

“When will dinner be ready?”
“Leave me alone, don’t you see that I’m going as fast as I can?”
Here the first person is simply asking for data (adult) while the second is responding from their child ego state to the first person’s parent ego state. This results in a crossed transaction and both people are frustrated.

The second part of Berne’s theory is called Script Analysis. It deals with the life plan that people make for themselves while still very young. This is often based on a combination of what they see the grown ups around them do (most especially their parents) and the stories they are familiar with while they are making these determinations. This explains a lot of what the bible calls the sins of the fathers being perpetuated on the heads of the children. Berne refers to children as Martians. They are strangers in a strange land trying to make sense of it. As a result, they tend to interpret what they see and hear literally.

An example might be:
Daddy drinks. The young child interprets this as drinking is good since daddy is good. He asks his daddy for a drink of what he’s having. Daddy says, “You’re too young to drink.” Daddy thinks he has told his child not to drink. What he has actually told his child is that he should drink when he gets older. And the child follows this instruction. We wonder why the children of alcoholics are so prone to be alcoholics. We say that it’s a genetic pre-disposition. But that doesn’t explain why a child that grew up in the living hell that constitutes being a child in a alcoholic home would ever take the first drink. Berne gives us a framework to explain that.

Life Scripts easily fall into the plots of familiar fairy tales and myths. (Perhaps that’s why we continue to tell them.) Cinderella finds love in spite of a horrible home life. Little Red Riding Hood is consistently fooled by men pretending to be something they are not, even though the signs are all there. Humpty Dumpty has an event in his life that allows him to give up. Sisyphus takes on impossible tasks. Scripts can result in winners or losers and are difficult to give up even when they are discovered. As the son of a woman who had four long term relationships in her life, all with alcoholics, this made a lot of sense to me.

The third part of this framework for human behavior is game analysis. Games are, simply put, a substitute for real intimacy. (The theory also goes into “pastimes” but to deal with them, just as to do justice to the other two parts of the triad, I’d be taking on a load that would expand this article to the length of the book). These games aren’t the games you might be familiar with but they are interactions that everyone will find familiar on some level. A psychological game has a number of indispensable parts- a come on, a response, and a switch. Games fall into easily categorical types and are numerous. If you have someone in your life that frustrates you, chances are they are addicted to one or more games.

Popular games include:

IGYN, YSOB- I’ve got you now you son of a bitch. Where a person expects the worst of you and always finds it.

NOKTIS- Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen- Where the point isn’t the trouble but the fact that nobody knows. Compelling the person to constantly regale anyone who will listen with their latest catastrophe.

Yes, But- This one goes like this: “Little Bobby is acting out at school.” “Have you tried Ritalin?” "Yes, but he’s allergic.” “Have you tried a time out?” “Yes, but he never stays in his room so it doesn’t work.” “Have you tried taking him to a therapist?” “Yes, but its too expensive.” And so on.

Berne gives a framework for finding what you are doing that is sabotaging your life, your interactions, and your ability to be intimate with another person. There are many more subtleties to his theory. What he calls the tee-shirts people wear (a popular one might say “I’m proud I’m an alcoholic” on the front and “remember, it’s a disease” on the back) is one such insight. The whole “I’m OK, You’re OK” subject of Harris’ book is another. (Bullies have an intrinsic “I’m OK, You’re not OK” mindset, as do criminals. Co-dependants have an “I’m not OK, You’re OK” worldview.)

I’ve read a lot of psychology both before and since. I’ve been trained in psychology, sociology, and psychiatric illness in college. But I’ve never found anyone who could explain why people do what they do as completely and dependably as Eric Berne. Read his book if you want to really know why people do what they do and tell me if you don’t find insight in it, because I’ll be anxious to hear.

(The links supplied to Amazon.com are strictly for convenience and are not sponsored. Berne's books should be available to you from the library as well)

MOVIES- 30 Days of Night

30 Days Of Night is a disgusting gorefest of a movie that isn’t really that bad as far as the genre goes but that’s only because the genre doesn’t seem to go much farther than one can spurt blood out of an artery. The movie is based on a graphic novel that started life as a film treatment and eventually ate its own tail like the worm Oroboros. The movie, directed by David Slade and starring Josh Hartnet and Melissa George (recently featured in HBO’s In Treatment), has an interesting premise- that vampires would migrate north to take advantage of the long nights during the winter near the arctic circle. Beyond that, there really doesn’t seem to be much thought that went into it. Unless you consider artfully splattered tomato juice stains on snow to be interesting.

As the movie starts we find ourselves in Barrow, Alaska. But not the real town, just what looks like a redressed western set with lots of cornstarch scattered around. It is filled with various character actor stereotypes and movie cliché subplots and is approaching the annual month of darkness mentioned in the title. There’s the estranged married couple (played by the leads) who have been drawn inexplicably by fate back to one another. There’s the local color iconoclast (Danny Huston), the teenager dealing with his parents marital problems (Mark Rendall, who makes one consider that the cause of his parent’s marital discord might be rooted in the fact that mom apparently got pregnant with him when she was eight years old), the kindly grandmother who grows pot, numerous other bit players who do nothing to differentiate themselves other than to look slightly different from the other people so you can tell them apart, and the mysterous stranger who is the harbinger of doom. Ben Foster plays the last role in another portrayal that marks him as the Crispin Glover of this generation. (Foster seems to turn up everywhere nowadays. He’s in X-Men- The Last Stand as Warren Worthington a.k.a the Angel. He’s the latent homosexual/homicidal nutbar in 3:10 to Yuma. He’s the Jewish older brother who can kick serious ass in Alpha Dog. Every role different, every role tinged with a kind of madness that makes him impossible to take your eyes off of when he’s on screen.) Of course, none of these people can leave because no airplanes can fly in or out of Barrow under cover of night. As we all know, airplanes can't land in the dark. And thats only the first time in this movie you'll be asked to be stupid.

Horror movies are like science fiction movies. They fall into two distinct categories. Those that have something interesting to say and use the affectations of the genre to make a point, and those that use the affectations of the genre and have nothing to say. Other than the central conceit of the title, this movie has nothing to say. The vampires are simply predatory animals, made ridiculous by their resemblance to a certain paint huffing moron who is infamous on the web. (In fact, if you put “paint huffing moron” into Google’s image search this is the first image that comes up.) The attempts at fright devolve into the purely disgusting (seeing a little (vampire, so it’s OK) girl have her head cut off with an ax, seeing a woman surrounded by a group of vampires cut to shreds (a gang rape analogy), seeing numerous people being fed on) and the “things jumping out of the dark with loud noises” motif. In fact, the soundtrack is indicative of the overall (lack of) quality of the whole production. I don’t remember a musical theme, all I remember is the speeded up sounds of airplanes taking off and landing, and what sounds like oil barrels being hammered with shovels. In addition to being atonal and irritating, the soundtrack is about 10 times louder than the dialog. It seems obvious that another cliché of bad horror movies is being used here, when unable to provide real chills, resort to the kind of sound that frightens babies.

The Blu-Ray disk only shows the ugliness of the film better. I guess I’d recommend it because the scaryest thing about the movie are the pores in the actors faces. Still, it shows the kind of film grain that HD usually eschews. On wonders what kind of low budget stock this gorefest… crapfest…shitfest was shot on. If you think that horror movies are all about being startled and having an interesting backdrop to see the same old same old, please see this movie. If you think that horror movies are a metaphorical playground for the exploration of what the human animal finds truly frightening then read the collected works of Edgar Allen Poe or rent a couple of episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

PERSONAL- Christmas in May

In honor of the coming of spring and in the spirit of renaissance I’m going to have Christmas in May this month. Every day I’m going to give you a little gift of something I find dear in this world. All will be either accessible on the net or through the net. Some will cost a little money but they were wrong when they said that money can’t buy happiness. (It can, but only for about 20 minutes. Then whatever you’ve bought is just another possession and becomes, at best, a part of the environment or, at worst, kipple. This explains the Christmas Afternoon Refractory Period, the letdown you feel after the presents are opened.)

Yesterday my gift was Jonathan Coulton and his wonderful song FIRST OF MAY. Today I give you another treat that is free on the Internet.

I got turned on to ESCAPE POD quite by accident several months ago while doing a search on iTunes for science fiction content. I expected to find a few dozen (hundred, thousand, million) podcasts about science fiction or a few (dozens, hundred, thousand, million) authors self-publishing. I didn’t expect to find a science fiction magazine with the kind of editorial standards you would expect from Astounding or Asimov’s.

ESCAPE POD is the brainchild of Steve Eley, a science fiction author himself who lives in Atlanta, Georgia. Every week it publishes a short science fiction story, usually read by a group of regulars, with introduction and closing comments by Eley himself. Eley is also pseudo-famous for a post to alt.atheism many years ago about invisible pink unicorns:

"Invisible Pink Unicorns are beings of great spiritual power. We know this because they are capable of being invisible and pink at the same time. Like all religions, the Faith of the Invisible Pink Unicorns is based upon both logic and faith. We have faith that they are pink; we logically know that they are invisible because we can't see them."

I’ve been reading SF for just about as long as I’ve been reading anything and I have to say that the genre is like a pile of garbage with diamonds in it. The last bastion of pulp fiction publishing, monthly SF magazines have published piles of mediocre stories over the years. The last monthly I subscribed to was Science Fiction Age over a dozen years ago. It was a magazine sized text publication with pictures and I was lucky if one story per issue caught my fancy. Eley has managed to cull truly interesting stories from the slush pile for the most part and, after hearing over 130 of the 156 stories as of today, I have to say that the clunkers are so far between that I don’t even feel that my time is wasted on them. In addition to his regular fare, he presents most of the HUGO nominees for BEST SHORT STORY every year- a service I have waited a lifetime for. He also has the distinction of making truly interesting comments for the introductions (his metaphor for Windows Vista is astounding, as are his comments on online gaming and the joys and fears of being a new parent). To add to all of that, the stories are read wonderfully. I have long been an aficionado of the spoken word and was always astounded that so many books on tape (or CD or .mp3) are read so badly. Somehow Steve had surrounded himself with a number of readers who are actually able to read aloud without it sounding like they are reading.

Check out ESCAPE POD, and its sister podcasts PSEUDOPOD (horror) and PODCASTLE (fantasy). And send some money to EscapeArtists. They pay their authors and publish under the Creative Commons license so you can share what you’ve found freely as long as you don’t charge money for it or alter it in any way.

MOVIES- The Dark Nut

This is making the rounds online from the folks at College Humor. It is a bit uncanny. So much so that you have to wonder whether its an homage to the original Tim Burton trailer.

See more funny videos at CollegeHumor

Gonna be a good summer for comic book movies at least. Iron Man releases tomorrow and will stand or fall on Robert Downey Jr's performance. But if there was an inspired piece of casting, then Downey as Tony Stark is it. In further casting of actors with real chops to play comic book characters, Edward Norton is in the Hulk. I have higher hopes for Iron Man, partly because we've seen it done so many times before. (Starting in the 70's on TV!)

But the really anticipated comic movie and real actor casting has got to be Christian Bale's reprise of Batman. Despite a few misteps, Batman Begins has to be in the top three comic movies of all time. I'm anxious to see what Christopher Nolan has in store.

PERSONAL- the First of May

Well it’s May first and we all know what that means!



If you haven’t turned on to Jonathan Coulton yet, shame on you. His songs are funny, musically literate, catchy, and beat the hell out of the overproduced plastic crap they play on pop radio nowadays. Jon is a real troubadour. Lot’s of folks try to make a living out of their artistic endeavors over the Internet, but Coulton has actually made it work. He gushed when I told him he was the Paul Simon of our generation but I stand by it. A singer-songwriter, who combines folk with numerous other styles, writes lyrics that are thoughtful, evocative, funny, and touch the heart. And he’s a geek extraordinare! Actually has a song about fractals that includes Mandelbrot’s equation! Other topics include zombies, writing code for a living, the romantic lives of mad scientists, the romantic lives of Octopi, the secret lives of NPR personalities, the life of George Plimpton, the trials and tribulations of Tom Cruse, and perhaps my favorite, Flickr, which is impossible to categorize except to say that it’s about everything.

There really isn’t a song he’s made that I can say I dislike. But try his recommendations page and then go ahead and send the man your money. You won’t be sorry.

MEDICINE- Drug Advertising

There is actually an antacid on the market called "Ass Effects".

VIDEOGAMES- Gran Turismo 5 Prologue

Well, I’ve spent most of the day playing Gran Turismo 5 Prologue and I’ve got a few thoughts that I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere else.

But first, the things you probably already know. GT5p isn’t a full game. It’s a demo that costs $40. The full game is supposed to be released sometime next year. You could say that it’s half a game (for 2/3 the price of a whole one) but honestly I hope that it’s nowhere near half of what GT 5 is going to eventually be. It has only 8 tracks and about 70 cars. The tracks are small and the cars are a decent mix but both of these are woefully sad compared to what we’ve come to expect from Forza or Gotham Racing. This is pretty inexcusable considering Polyphony probably got some of the first PS3 development hardware and yet just a releasable demo has taken over a year and a half of development. The PS3 hardware didn’t take that long to design. And considering how long this has taken, there’s a good chance that we’ll see the PS4 before we get a finished copy of this game. There is also the chance that Sony and Polyphony plan to nickel and dime players to death by dribbling out content online for the next year or more. This wouldn’t be out of character with the kind of contempt Sony has shown for their consumers recently, but would be a terrible mistake. OTOH, Sony has slipped from #1 to #3 in videogames and seen a huge drop in profits over the last couple of years by making just such mistakes.

What is here, however, is pretty great. I use the qualifier because there are a few disappointments that go beyond small tracks and few cars. Not with the play mechanics, thankfully. The game is undoubtedly the finest racing sim ever made for a console or computer. It runs at 1080P with an almost rock steady 60 fps framerate. Only setting yourself into a fast spin can cause any jitter. And all the cars feel different and the few I’ve actually driven feel right. I’ve spent most of my time so far in the Nissan 350Z, since it was the last car I owned and I’m quite familiar with how it drives. I have to say that the game reproduces its handling in an uncanny fashion. The game’s 350 wags its tail in response to throttle inputs like a happy puppy, much like the actual car. Likewise the virtual Acura Integra VTEC has the quirky, high-reving powerband and moderate tendency to understeer down cold. Light cars feel light and heavier cars are planted more firmly.

I started the game with the Sony controller but like all GT games it really starts to sing with a good racing wheel. I use the Logitech Driving Force Pro attached to the bobearlracing.com racing seat. Support for several legacy Logitech wheels is available from the OPTIONS menu and my wheel seems to work flawlessly. Kudos to Polyphony for this since I’m beginning to need a separate closet for all the wheels I’ve bought for various systems over the years. A good wheel is imperative to fully enjoy the game and the Logitech is economical (at less than $150) and allows for 270 degree action rather than the typical 180 degrees lock to lock, making it more like a real car. While I’m on the subject, I highly recommend the Bob Earl seat. It’s firmly built, simple, telescopes for storage, and most importantly holds my 6’6” body without any problems. Money well spent for an aficionado of racing games.

Now for the quibbles. First is the time it takes to get to your first race. If you haven’t kept your PS3 OS updated the game comes with the latest upgrade, which will take several minutes to load. Then the game loads content before it plays. I don’t know how much of the engine is loaded on the hard drive but on my 20GB PS3 I had to delete almost 4GB to give it enough space. Then several more minutes while more data is transferred. Finally you get to the intro movie. There are several movies for cut scenes and loving car views over many of the menus. They are all lovingly rendered and they all cause a few seconds of delay as you switch screens. It isn’t terrible but even small delays are frustrating by the time you get to the menus for the first time. The game doesn’t help this by taking you from each event back to the main menu every time. If you’re racing small tracks and few laps (the defaults at first) you wind up spending too much time navagating menus rather than racing. Still, this isn’t too bad and load times for the tracks are pretty quick.
But before you race for the first time you have to buy a car. You start with 35,000 credits and the pickings are pretty slim. Plus, you have to enter each manufacturers area, click for the showroom, enter each car to get specs, and then back all the way out and do it again for the next manufacturer. There are only a couple or three cars from each brand, so you wind up spending a lot of time choosing your first car before you can race. When you finally do get on the track the graphics are great but don’t expect the kind of busy environments you find in games like Gotham Racing. The tracks are, well, race tracks. The crowds don’t do much, and the distant backgrounds look like paintings. There are also graphical glitches. The lake in one track is reflective and has waves, but the waves don’t move. I also noticed light poles popping in an out of existence occasionally.

But all those quibbles are just quibbles. The game runs and plays great and the driving physics is the best in a GT game yet. I don’t know how a racing fan can pass it up, but we’re still waiting for the full game and will be for a while. Polyphony has done a great job on the basics, now they need to pack the final release with enough content that we won’t feel cheated having to buy the game again in a year.

MOVIES- John Adams

It is a melancholy rainy Saturday in the Tennessee valley today. It has been a week of beginnings and endings and the rain falls like tears to mark the passage of time. Spring ends winter, life is reborn. And yet life is finite. Which brings me to today’s topic.

I finished John Adams, the HBO miniseries, today. HBO has a history of bringing the best to television. They have a novel approach that is so fruitful one wonders why it is novel. It seems what they do is allow creators to create with minimal interference from non-creators who, while their instincts are for business still feel drawn to think they are creators but usually only manage to interfere with real artists. As it has been said, everyone is a critic. HBO at some point decided that deciding on money up front and then leaving the real artists alone was a better plan. The fruits of their labors have been extraordinary: The Sopranos, Rome, numerous comedy specials, Six Feet Under, Real Time with Bill Maher, numerous sports programs, and just lately the John Adams miniseries. High points in television programming that make them simply the best (an old advertising slogan that actually describes the product) network in an era of ubiquitous networks. Their movie purchases from theatrical release are lacking, but their original programming is of such high caliber that I continue to purchase their service every month. I am tempted by the variety of movies at Starz but HBO’s original programming keeps me loyal.

So on to the John Adams miniseries. Rarely has a drama looked at the founding fathers with such an accurate eye. Generally we wish to make saints of our original citizens. Just as we wish to look on history as a reflection of our own imaginary dialog with our lives. We see ourselves as Ptolomy, Socrates, Plato, Moses, Jesus, Newton, Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Dalton, Watt, Einstein. In fact we more likely resemble one of the pitchfork or torch bearing members of the crowd storming the castle Frankenstein. Afraid of change and mired in our own worldview, we rail against the changes that later generations will think of as quaint, as history.

HBO’s miniseries biography of John Adams life showed him as flawed, arrogant, intellectual, and often right. Many things our current society looks on with disdain. We elevate the stupid because it doesn't challenge us. We deride the intelligent because we fear our inadequacies. We long for a simpler time, not realizing that times are never simple for those who live in them. We beckon to a celestial parent who knows that to ever be what we were born to be we must forsake our childhood and rely on ourselves. John Adams feared what we would become if we didn’t heed the better angels of our nature and thus pushed for harsh laws to keep men in line. A counterpoint was Thomas Jefferson who trusted what we were capable of being when we did but was somewhat naïve in his convictions. Washington was quiet and regal, taller than everyone else and virtually toothless at a young age. Franklin was a libertine more beloved in France than even in his own country, the hippie of the founding fathers. All these characters are finely drawn, as is the central relationship in the movie- that of John Adams and his wife Abigail. Despite their 18th century manners they seem more like a real married couple than most you ever see on television. They deeply care for each other and yet they often disagree. Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney breathe life into these characters masterfully. As do every actor on screen. There isn’t a sour note struck by any of the portrayals.

In fact the whole miniseries is endowed with a kind of veracity that draws you into a world long gone. Every detail is as meticulously researched as the actors are inspired. The architecture, costumes, props, set dressing, down to things like saddles and hand tools are all as authentic as possible. And the production values are as good as any theatrical release. In the first episode Adams walks down the street in front of Boston Harbor and past him you first see the warehouses on the landward side and then the camera pans around and you see the harbor with dozens of ships docked. We don’t often stop to linger on the backgrounds but they strongly make the impression that you are in a real place. And never do they appear to be a special effect.

The series begins with Adams home and professional life before he becomes a revolutionary. All the high points are here. We see his defense of the British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre. He is torn between the secessionist leanings of his cousin, Samuel Adams and the favor he has garnered in London by his successful defense of the soldiers. He becomes a member of the Constitutional Congress that drafts the Declaration of Independence. In Europe he makes a fool of himself as a diplomat. Returning after the war is over, he becomes the nation's first vice-president and then second president. The Alien and Sedition Acts are touched on, as are the lives of his children, one of whom would also be president.

The last episode is almost an epilogue. Adams old age and the losses that are the lot of a long life are chronicled. His daughter’s death from cancer, the loss of his beloved wife, and finally his own final contest with Thomas Jefferson to be the last of the founders to pass on end a story that has spanned almost 60 years of a mans life and the birth of our nation. A fitting end to watch on a melancholy rainy spring day.

The final words of the series are from a letter that Adams wrote to Jefferson just before his death and give a fine example of the quality of the entire production:

“My dearest friend,

“Whether I stand high or low, in the estimation of the world, my conscience is clear. I thank God that I have you for a partner in all the joys and sorrows, all the prosperity and adversity of my life. To take a part with me in the struggle. Should I draw you the picture of my heart you would know with what indescribable pleasure I have seen so many scores of years roll over our heads. With an affection heightened and improved by time. Nor have the dreary years of absence, in the smallest degree, effaced from my mind the image of the dreary untitled man to whom I gave my heart. You could not be, nor did I wish to see you, an inactive spectator.

“Now posterity, you will never know how much it cost us to preserve your freedom. I hope that your will make a good use of it. And if you do not, I shall repent in heaven that I ever took half the pains to preserve it. “

MOVIES- There Will Be Blood

In the third of our Oscar Best Picture roundup we look at THERE WILL BE BLOOD. Unlike Atonement, this is truly worthy of Oscar contention. But like NO COUNTY FOR OLD MEN it is for reasons that defy conventional wisdom and the usual that Hollywood has to offer. THERE WILL BE BLOOD is a pure character study. As much as the winner, NO COUNTRY, was driven by plot and image, this movie is just as unique because it is driven by character and character alone. In fact, there are none of the usual movie making conventions. No adversary rears their head to thwart the hero in finding their path to a goal. There is no hero, only a group of individuals vying for their own for their own interests. There is no plot or dramatic structure, only events that happen to each of these monuments to single minded self interest. There is no denouement, only a point at which the movie ends.

The lead characters are the epitome of different kinds of pure horrific cynicism. Daniel Day Lewis gives an unflinching portrayal of the avarice and loathing for humanity that so many businessmen possess in the role of the ironically named Daniel Plainview. Paul Dano plays the charlatan preacher named Eli Sunday, who is interested only in self-aggrandizement and has no faith in anything except the belief that people are fools. The names almost put too tidy a point on the idea that these people are characatures rather than characters. The only person that can be called sympathetic in the whole movie is the son of Plainview, who we see grow from infant to man and thus encompasses the work of four different actors. This too is rather metaphorical I think. While the evil leads are clearly drawn by individual actors, the only role that can be said to represent good is rather nebulous and winds up being a pawn, a cardboard cutout, a set piece for the more interesting main actors. And like all the other names in the movie, his name is also a metaphor in that he doesn’t even have a name. Only initials tacked in front of the ironic Plainview surname. The movie never lets up in beating you over the head with it’s lack of interest in anything but basest of human motivations.

One hint to anyone who views the IMDB.COM page for the movie is the cast list. There are more roles in his movie for people without names than there are with names. Most are MINEWORKER #4, and ELI FOLLOWER #3. And the ones who do have names are literally named for their character traits. Nobody bothered to even pick up a phonebook and find names for the roles. Instead Plainview has only superficial vision, Eli (no doubt short for Elijah the prophet) Sunday is the preacher. We have an Ailman, a Rose, a Bankside, a Hunter, a Blaize, and a Blaut. The supporting cast are inconsequential. So much so that I, who is usually a nut for picking out character actors in brief supporting roles (I picked out John Larroquette under all that Kingon shit on his face in Star Trek III) didn’t even notice Paul F. Tompkins in a rather prominent role (so prominent that he actually got a name- Prescott).

LONG ASIDE AND INEVETABLE DIGRESSION WARNING: (I’ve been looking to see where Tompkins would land since he bombed so impressively and so dependably every week on the first season of Bill Maher’s HBO show. Rarely has a comedian done such good material only to be met with the sound of crickets chirping out in the audience. It’s a shame HBO won’t ever air those shows again, not even as podcasts. It was worth tuning in just to see the look on his face every time he launched into a routine just to have the mikes in the studio pick up the sound of the audience whispering to each other “who is this douchbag?” He wasn’t unfunny, but nothing he did could measure up to his complete and dismal failure with the live audience every week. That was pure hilarity. So I been keeping an eye on his career whenever it crosses my cultural radar. So far it’s been MTV’s shitfest Best Week Ever, where the object is, as far as I can tell, to lower the number of people on the LA unemployment roles since the idea of the show is that people who have no reason to give their opinions do exactly that every week. He also pops up on Keith Olberman’s show- where the primary criteria to be a revolving guest is to make sure you are never (a) taller, (b) prettier, (c) wittier, or (d) more of an egomaniac than the host. I love Keith and never miss his program but I suspect that someday his ego will grow so large that it will collapse in on itself and create a black hole in the solar system that will swallow everything else. One word from a devoted viewer Keith, O’Reilly may be a moron but at least he has somebody new on the show from time to time. I know how many eyebrow hairs Richard Wollffe has at this point. And his gay, pseudo-British pronunciation isn’t helping you in middle America.)

We see the supporting cast the same way Daniel Plainview sees them. Or doesn’t. It doesn’t matter. They don’t matter. He doesn’t see them and neither do we.

By now you may think that I didn’t like the movie. But nothing could be further from the truth. It is a masterfully directed, interesting piece of film. But (to use a phrase I’ve come to hate in other contexts) it is what it is. Supposedly based on Upton Sinclair’s OIL you could just as well make a movie based on Sinclair’s THE JUNGLE by shooting two hours of the fictional biography of a meat packing manager who gleefully orders his workers to sweep the floor of rat feces and dump the refuse into the sausage hopper, while stopping on his way home every night at the local butcher shop for his own dinner. But to do it in the way that THERE WILL BE BLOOD does it you would have to shoot one beautiful, painterly scene after another and do it with a directorial panache that keeps the audience on the edge of their seats to see what happens next.

The film lets the audience know what it’s in for in the first five minutes. The first scene in the movie happens without dialog. We see a silver miner, face always in shadow, making a find, having an accident, falling down into the mine shaft, painfully pulling himself back up while dragging his broken leg behind him, dragging himself along the ground after having extricated himself from the earth, and apparently dragging himself straight to the assay office to lie on the floor while his find is assessed. It’s gruesome and yet riveting, an appropriate introduction to a movie that is gruesome and riveting. It tells you everything you need to know about Daniel Plainview, but makes you want to see the next two hours because despite the fact you wouldn’t want to know him, you can’t help but want to get to know him.

Ultimate Showdown

Another link from G. F. (hey dude, you should be writing this blog). But I am more than willing to take credit for other people's genius (after all I stand on the shoulders of giants, just like Newton) I hope you enjoy this because it's really funny.

A couple questions I throw into the Ethernet.

Am I the only person who remembers Jambi the Jenni?

Who is the blue guy in the bridge? He looks like Frank Oz.

MOVIES- Star Wars and beyond

Over at CBR George Khouri makes one of the most concise and eloquent analyses of STAR WARS that I’ve ever read (props once again to my brother from another mother G.F. in leading me to this). He makes the case for STAR WARS being the pivotal movie, and indeed the most influential cultural phenomenon, in the last generation. It’s hard to argue with. The movie changed everything that would come after it by reaching back to everything that had come before it. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away is so much more than a tagline. It’s a statement of intent, a mission statement, a state of mind. Khouri does a masterful job of placing the original STAR WARS into the milieu of what movies had become when this revolutionary film hit the screens. It was a return to classic moviemaking after an era when movies had become so cynical, so disheartening, and so realistic that a return to what movies had been for most of the history of film was considered refreshing, novel, and revolutionary.

I feel safe in saying that no film has had the impact on film in general that Lucas’ initial foray into space opera had. It’s hard to even count the departures from what was considered the axioms of successful film that STAR WARS embodied. It was released in the summer- at a time when conventional wisdom said that summer was the time to release films that wouldn’t do well to start with- a lull for the industry. Now all blockbusters are released in the summer. STAR WARS literally changed the whole industry’s thinking on what the best time to present films to the audience was.

It was science fiction (not really, but it looked and felt and seemed to be to the mass audience and the industry moguls), a genre that was a niche market at best, a literary and film ghetto at worst. Yet it proved what Ray Bradbury had said for years, that science fiction was the literature of our times. It spoke to people about the world they found themselves in. If Dickens, Poe, Chaucher, or Shakespeare were writing today, they wouldn’t be writing character dramas, or horror, or sundries, or historical plays. They would be writing science fiction. Because we live in a science fiction world. Everyone carries a communication device that links them to everyone else in the world in their pocket. Everyone owns a computer that can do hundreds of millions of calculations a second and links them to a worldwide repository of knowledge. Wikipedia, a constantly updated encyclopedia of all human knowledge with over 10 million articles, exists- something that was impossible and thought to be some flight of fancy only a decade ago. When we go to the doctor we get pictures of our insides made with invisible light, or magnetism, or even antimatter. Our cities are glowing sculptures of glass and steel that anyone from any past epoch would think are the abode of the gods. It goes on and on. And all this in the span of a human lifetime. I grew up on a farm without plumbing, where we grew most of our own food and were tied to the land and our animals for existence every day. I live in a world where everything I use and need to live is of exquisite workmanship and embody technological marvels that I only read about when I was young. Just like everyone else- I live in a science fiction world.

But as a cultural phenomenon, STAR WARS was the breaking point for the last generation. Today, the young can hardly imagine a world without Cell Phones, and the Internet, and Computers. They look at things differently, in just the same way that the last generation could only think of a world without telephones and electricity and automobiles. For most of human history we only had speech. Reading and writing were only for the select few. After Guttenburg we had the written word. Literacy became the entry into human society. A hundred years ago Edison invented a way to store pictures that moved. That way of human communication is nearing an end but it hasn’t yet. The latest generation is still informed by film and television. So what is the latest and perhaps last paradigm shift for our world that will come from film?

That tomorrow.

Well, there's a whole lot to talk about. Obama's quote saying Pennsylvanians are bitter. Us starting to really understand what Issac Asimov called reverse poisons (and we call vitamins) in part 3 of our series on vitamins. My own personal situation (perhaps interesting but not what I'd rather talk about) telling all men what women are really like. The new Iron Man movie. The newBatman movie. Who owns Superman. Why the Bush administration has now been proven to be an attempt to turn the American form of government to pure fascism. Why God is dead and life is pointless. Why the Matrix trilogy are the greates movie series in hisotry. Why logic is better than emotion but emotion is easier. Why we are all going to die and death is the defining truth in our universe. And far more. Stay tuned for real truth. But be warned that real truth is nothing you will find flattering. Most of what you've been told is mostly lies.

POLITICS- Which Elton John song is Hillary Clinton most like?

Wednesday night Hillary Clinton had a fundraiser in New York that netted her 2.5 million. That really isn’t news and perhaps neither was the headliner, that American Patriot- Elton John. Elton was quoted as saying that not supporting Hillary was “misogynistic” which reminds us that being a great writer of pop music doesn’t keep you from being an idiot. Also acting for straight man for the obvious joke, Hillary said in her comments, “What I want you to know is, I’m still standing.” Misogyny aside, the Elton John song I was thinking of was The Bitch is Back.

SCIENCE- Crossville TN's visit from the Flying Spaghetti Monster

About half way between where I live and Dayton, Tennessee (the home of the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925) is the town of Crossville, TN. Crossville is a lovely little town set at the western edge of the Cumberland

Plateau, known primarily as home to a retirement community called Lake Tansi. Recently the town leaders invited the various religions in the area to place their religious icons on the lawn of the courthouse. Quite by surprise to said town leaders (and myself as well) some local decided to take the opportunity to erect a sculpture of the Flying Spaghetti Monster as their chosen icon. I haven't been to see this for myself yet (hopefully tomorrow if the weather is good) but I did catch this editorial reaction in the local newspaper (with picture).

Since this miraculous happening was virtually in my own backyard, I could not resist a reply of my own to the reporter of the story. My first inclination was to adopt the tactics of the redoubtable General J. C. Christian as a response. I quickly realized that such a tact would surely be lost in the flood of similar but non-satirical letters which would certainly be written. So instead I decided on a more direct approach.

Mr Hayes,

I read your online article concerning the Flying Spaghetti Monster with some interest last week. I’m afraid, however, that you have missed the point of the original intent of the FSM and unfortunately taken it as a personal attack on your own religion. I find this an unfortunate and common tendency among some Christians in discussions which attempt to put religion into a larger context.

You state:

“While some may argue the statue was not locally done in effort to mock or belittle Christians, the idea of the spaghetti monster in its original context was proposed to do just that. In other words, the spaghetti monster concept was created to undermine the credibility of Intelligent Design as an alternative theory to Darwinian evolution.”

This is only partially correct. While the Kansas debate over the teaching of Intelligent Design was the impetus for the creation of Pastafarianism, and certainly Bobby Henderson’s tongue was pretty firmly in his cheek when he invented it, the actual point being made was quite salient. It doesn’t apply to Christianity but to all religions who would attempt to use the public schools to foster their personal religious beliefs. Many groups have creation myths, and indeed that is what they seem to any non-believer- myths. Christians take this view about creation stories of all other religions, and vice versa. The proponents of Intelligent Design had stated that their “theories” were purely scientific and not meant to advance any particular religion. If this claim is true then Henderson has a point that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is as likely a motive force for that design as any other deity. That this is taken as an insult by the Christian advocates of Intelligent Design proves that their intent was indeed to promote a particular religious creation story and not simply the idea that some unknown primordial force shaped the universe.

I do think that your points on the impossibility of a devout person not having their political decisions informed by their spiritual beliefs are undeniable. In fact, I cannot imagine that any persons spiritual beliefs would not affect every decision they make, political or otherwise. But that was not the point Mr. Henderson was making. And even if we would extrapolate any point he intended into some larger motive, I can only see that as being the idea that ANY religious dogma taught as science is an imposition on all believers of other faiths who have equally fervently held but different beliefs (to which they are completely entitled) but who are required by law to send their children to those same public schools. Opening the door to Intelligent Design also opens the door to all other sorts of religious creation stories which might be couched in pseudo-scientific terminology but are simply attempts to use public schools for missionary efforts.

Which brings us to another point which you do not seem to realize. Intelligent Design is not a credible scientific theory for a number of reasons. You seem to think that science is some sort of godless religion. I am afraid that this is simply patently wrong. Science is a methodology for understanding the natural causes for events in the natural world. Science is incapable of addressing causes of anything but an observable, quantifiable nature. Attempts to use political means to force ID into science curriculums acknowledge that it is unable to meet the same scientific standards by which any other scientific explanation would be judged. Advocates say this is because of the intransigence of scientific “dogma” but that ignores the fact that the history of science is replete with examples of scientific theories being replaced by newer theories. All scientific knowledge is contingent upon new information and new discovery. The best any science can say is that with the knowledge we have, this seems the most plausible explanation.

The constitution does, contrary to your assertion, insist on governmental neutrality in matters of religion. This does not prohibit people from being influenced by their religious convictions but it does prohibit using the power of government to favor any religion over another. The founding fathers realized, having come from a country where religion and governmental power were inextricably joined, that unless all religions are treated the same and protected from interference can people be free to worship as they wish.

But all that has nothing to do with science. Science is neither democratic nor political, in spite of your attempt to advance the meme that it is just another philosophy or religion. Einstein’s papers on relativity in 1905 and 1915 were considered preposterous by the majority of scientists when first published. But 100 years of further exploration and discovery have shown it to be almost unerringly accurate. Ironically, the greatest error (by Einstein’s own admission the greatest error of his life) was that, faced with the theory’s implication that there had to be a “creation event” for the universe, he added the Gravitational Constant to rectify what he saw as an error. Ironically, a catholic priest, Georges Lemaître, reworked the equations in 1927, found the “creation moment” and corrected Einstein on it. Only a few years later Edwin Hubble was able to prove that Lemaitre was right and the universe did seem to have a beginning. There is no conspiracy to prohibit those of religious beliefs from science. Like anyone else, the ideas of the devout are judged just as any other ideas are- on the basis of their merit.

I hope that you do not interpret this letter as contentious. It is simply an attempt to rectify some misconceptions about the difference between science and religion. Perhaps becoming more familiar with what science actually says about the development of the universe would be informative. Your own article confuses cosmology with evolutionary biology. But I find that frequently people who share your beliefs on the current debate have been misinformed on what science and the scientific method really are. And, as a person with deeply held religious convictions of my own, I realize that whenever in the past religion has attempted to stifle scientific inquiry it has wound up hurting it’s own cause rather than helping it. The problem is also the basic difference between science and religion. Science is simply not dependent on faith to provide answers. It works or doesn’t work whether you believe or not. My microwave heats food with invisible light whether I believe or not. Likewise, evolution happens, whether you believe it or not. In just one of numerous examples, we are currently faced with a number of new bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics and which simply did not exist 100 years ago. To refuse to believe in evolution is to refuse to believe in Doberman Pincher's, who also did not exist a few hundred years ago. To redefine science as a mere belief system is to forget that Galileo was right about the construction of the solar system in spite of the fact that the church locked him up and prohibited him from talking about what he had seen through his telescope.

You are free to choose whatever creation story you wish. Because the constitution prohibits the government from favoring any particular religion over the others. But to be called science, conclusions have to be arrived at in a scientific manner. Saying your religion is scientific does not make it so, and conversely misinterpreting science and calling it a religion does not make that so either. There is no “religion of Darwin” I’m afraid. Merely observations of occurrences in nature and the underlying framework they imply.

Thank you for your time. I hope you have found this letter informative and that it helped to clarify some of the misapprehensions you seem to have on the subject.

I am curious to see if I get any reply (It would be the second miraculous surprise to be associated with this story if I did).

SCIENCE- Vitamins and Diet (Part II)

In part one of our series on vitamins we saw how the voyages of discovery uncovered a hitherto unknown scientific fact about diet- that not getting enough of certain types of foods led to disease. No longer was diet simply a matter of getting enough to keep from starving. Suddenly what you ate could be as important as how much there was to eat. One such dietary disease, scurvy, almost incapacitated the British navy by the end of the 18th century and forced the addition of limes to the diet of the British sailor. Brits are referred to as limeys to this day as a result. They had solved the problem but they still didn’t know why it had happened in the first place.


It wasn’t only the British navy that had problems with disease related to being ship bound. By the second half of the nineteenth century Japan was modernizing and attempting to develop as a maritime power. Japanese sailors didn’t get scurvy. Their diet of fish, rice, and fresh vegetables prevented this from becoming a problem. What they did get was beri-beri. A disease characterized by nerve damage that caused severe weakness and eventually death. (The name comes from a Sri Lankese term for “very weak”) By the 1880s almost a third of the Japanese navy was suffering from beri-beri and, as you can well imagine, this was a cause for some concern among the commanders. The Director General of the Japanese navy was a bright fellow named Kanehiro Takaki who noticed that other navies, such as the British, didn’t have this problem. He also noticed that his officers didn’t suffer from the disease in the numbers that the average sailor did. (See a trend shaping up here?) He was quick to catch on to the fact that it might have something to do with the difference in diet between the officers and regular sailors, since the officers diet was far more varied. Taking a page from the Brits, he introduced meat, evaporated milk and barley to the sailors diet and the beri-beri disappeared. Now science had been marching forward since the voyages of discovery and it was now common knowledge that food was not “just food”. It had been discovered that food was composted of proteins, fats, and carbohydrates. Takaki incorrectly surmised that a lack of sufficient protein had been the problem. And since he was in charge, that was that.

But just like scurvy, beri-beri continued to be a problem among populations on land. (Even today it kills thousands of people and we know what causes it.) An epidemic of beri-beri was occurring in the Dutch East Indies (what we now call Indonesia) and prompted the Dutch government to send a group of physicians to deal with the problem in 1886. By this time the germ theory of disease was all the rage (having been first stated by Agostino Bassi to explain muscardine disease in silkworms in 1835) and one of these doctors, a fellow named Christiaan Eijkman decided some germ must be the cause. To test his hypothesis he brought with him a group of chickens to use as experimental animals. His idea was to breed the chickens, infect them with the disease, isolate the germ involved, and hopefully formulate an antitoxin that could be used on the human populace. This, however, was a total failure. Try as he might he was completely unable to infect the chickens with beri-beri. So he gave up.

And then, a little while later, the chickens came down with beri-beri.

Well, perhaps not actual beri-beri. What they had contracted was a very similar disease called Avian Polyneuritis but this didn’t deter Eijkman since he knew that beri-beri was also a form of polyneuritis. He immediately set about trying to infect other chickens, isolate the germ involved and create an antitoxin. This, however, was again a total failure.

And then to add insult to injury, the chickens got better on their own.

But being a good scientist, Eijkman was not married to his original hypothesis, He realized that if the chickens had gotten sick and then well without the normal signs of infectious disease he must be dealing with something else entirely. He set about to find out what variable in the chicken’s environment had changed that might coincide with their changes in health. Finally he tracked it down.

The hospital he worked in had a new cook.

It seemed that the previous cook had taken to feeding the chickens the leftovers of the human residents of the hospital. And the chickens started getting sick. When the new cook had taken over he had put them back on their old diet they had gotten better. What was the difference? The residents diet was heavy on polished white rice. The same thing that the Japanese sailors had gotten sick eating. Natural rice comes with an oily husk. The oils in that husk become rancid over time so to preserve the rice the hulls are “polished” away, leaving smooth white grains that can be preserved for long periods of time if kept dry. Making it an ideal foodstuff to take on a long sea voyage in which there is no refrigeration. When the new cook had arrived he decided that human food was too good for the chickens and started feeding them rice with the husk on again. As a result, they had gotten better. Just as the Japanese sailors had when barley was substituted for the white rice in their shipboard diet.

And here’s where Eijkman made one of those great intuitive insights that science depends on from time to time. He reckoned that if germs weren’t the culprit, and that something in the diet was responsible but not something commonly known as a staple of life- fats, carbohydrates, or protein, then it must be some trace of another substance that was necessary for life. It was widely known that traces of some substances were deadly if ingested in even small amounts. Arsenic was one such deadly trace substance. They were called poisons. There must be some poison in the white rice which something in the hulls neutralized.

Unfortunately this insight was completely wrong. But the idea that there were traces of poison in common foodstuffs and traces of antidotes to those poisons in parts of the very same foodstuffs set off a flurry of scientific experimentation.

Suffering from ill health himself Eijkman left Indonesia soon after this but an associate of his named Gerrit Grijns was finally able to put the pieces together. In 1901 he published a paper that stated the rice hulls were not an antidote for a toxin in the rice but rather contained something that was itself essential for life.

This was a revolutionary idea. There were traces of something in the diet that humans could not live without. It was the beginning of the idea of a “balanced diet”. It didn’t take long for the idea to catch on like wild fire. If Beri-beri was a deficiency disease, then it was logical that Scurvy was as well, In 1906 English biochemist Fredrick Hopkins suggested that Rickets was also a deficiency disease. Six years later, in 1912, Polish biochemists Casimir Funk would add the disease Pellegra to the list of diseases caused by dietary insufficiency. All this would pay off with the grand prize of science when in 1929 Hopkins and Eijkman would share the Nobel Prize for their discovery of the nature of trace elements in diet and health.

But what were these needed but unknown dietary supplements?

MOVIES- Atonement

Spoilers.

When I write about a movie it’s usually more from the viewpoint of literary criticism than coming from a mindset of a typical movie review. Reviewing is popular because it simply consists of supporting a like or dislike of a movie. That, coupled with the limitation not to give away too much of the film, inevitably leads to superficial examination and highly subjective opinion. As a result movie reviews often fail at their actual purpose- helping the reader determine if a particular movie is worth seeing. Literary criticism, OTOH, supposes that the reader is familiar with the work and attempts to examine the work for theme, subtext, and the success or failure of the artist in conveying more complex themes through less obvious methods such as metaphor. There are drawbacks in attempting to do this with film as well. Film is not literature. It has specific time constraints, its ability to impart didactic information is far more limited, and its ability to evoke emotion makes it perhaps more akin to music than writing. Yet, like all storytelling, it is available to dissection to uncover complexity which is less than obvious.

Atonement pretends to be an adult romance movie but can’t rise above its adolescent romantic triangle (which only one actual adolescent involved). The leads are competent in a sort of period drama way, but the setting is actually the years immediately prior to America’s entry into World War II and the tone is more evocative of the 19th century than the mid 20th. The story is an amalgam of cheap romance novel conventions- ill fated young lovers separated by class, a jealous sister tells a terrible lie that separates them, their undying commitment to each other in the face of years of separation, their eventual reunion, the poor are noble and the rich are selfish. It’s all pretty trite and the storytellers seem to realize it because they reach into the cliché bag for one final non-surprise. Turns out that the whole last part of the movie is just a dream! The heroes are dead and everybody that lied to tear them apart lives happily ever after! See, all that juvenile love is just crap after all. The world is a cold cruel place and then you die.

The movie is pretty and the performances are adequate. But as a whole there isn’t much there. That this got a nomination for best picture is beyond my comprehension.

MOVIES- No Country for Old Men

THAT is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Yeates poem, Sailing to Byzantium, is both the progenitor and the essence of the title for the Oscar winning film from the Coen brothers. The opening monologue is almost a west Texas restatement of the opening stanza. It ends with the words “I’ll be a part of this world”. But the second scene lets you know the heart of the movie. A deputy is strangled by a prisoner with a pair of handcuffs. The camera lingers on the scuff marks on the floor from the deputy’s patent leather shoes. A snow angel in show polish on the linoleum, showing the pattern of the dying mans struggle as his soul leaves this world.

It’s that kind of depth and artistry, visual metaphor and complex theme, that marks all the Coen brothers’ movies. That has almost become a trademark of Joel and Ethan Coen. Rarely has there been such a filmography as varied as theirs. They’ve made slapstick comedy (RAISING ARIZONA), musical comedy (O’ BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU), farce (THE LADYKILLERS), crime drama (BLOOD SIMPLE), drama (FARGO), Harold Hawks 1940s comedy (HUDSUCKER PROXY), sexual politics (INTOLERABLE CRUELTY). They even made THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE, whatever the hell genre that was. But while it’s easy to put each of these into a particular genre, it’s impossible to ignore that each of them turns that genre on its head. Every Coen film is both different and different from all other films that are similar.

And this movie, what is there to say. Rarely has an Oscar winner been such an unusual film. So much of what comes out of Hollywood is just fluff that provides mindless entertainment and bolsters the status quo (in spite of what the conservatives think). This film is entertaining and suspenseful, but is also disturbing in that it doesn’t conform to much of what you expect from a movie, or the conventions of fiction. The main characters never meet, the pacing is steady and the scenes invoke Hitchcock rather than what we’ve become accustomed to for the last 30 years. The violence (and there’s a lot) is realistic but not overly gory. The ending is ambiguous. The themes are death, aging, greed, man’s place in his world. It’s a complex tapestry with many threads woven together yet it can be enjoyed as just a riveting story of a drug deal gone bad. It is a masterful tour de force from a pair of artists who are mature and self-confident in their craft. It is surprising and disturbing and absolutely unthinkable to miss for anyone who thinks cinema is something more than soap opera or a venue for the art of pyrotechnics.

Be careful.

-Always am.

Don’t get hurt.

-Never do.

Don’t hurt no one.

-[pause] If you say so.


That this movie won the Oscar for best picture and best director is a tribute to having a cinema award that is voted for by actual movie professionals. It was certainly not the most popular movie of the year. But it was, arguably, the most cinematic. The story is told almost entirely in images. The subtext is in the dialogue. In fact, you could watch the movie as a silent film and understand the plot without problem. Such is the Coens’ genius. Art is that which is complexly satisfying.

The actors who play the three main characters dissolve and inhabit their respective roles. Tommy Lee Jones is at home here in a type of role he has almost come to epitomize. The aging west Texas sheriff who has seen the worst of humanity. Only by refusing to stare into the abyss does he skirt the edge of cynicism and keep doing his job. But deep down, he knows. In a classic western he would be the good guy, and here he is the closest thing to a hero that there is. But he doesn’t get his man, and eventually all he can take into retirement is the knowledge that things really aren’t any worse than they ever have been. Tommy Lee has played this role in everything from THE FUGITIVE to THE THREE BURIALS OF MELQUIADES ESTRADA and it fits him like a well worn work glove.

Josh Brolin, as Llewelyn Moss, is the down on his luck country boy who stumbles on a windfall of drug money and tries to hold on to it. The fact the character is a Vietnam veteran is only tangential. None of the post war angst of so many earlier period pieces is evident here. His history is only an explanation of why he is able to hold his own with the hard men he has chosen to oppose. But there is none of the altruistic motivation that would make him heroic in the classic sense. This western is post-modernistic in a way that is a quantum leap away from the post-modernism of UNFORGIVEN. It’s almost western-noir. Greed is the only motivation for the character who actually drives the story. Greed and the kind of dogged self reliance that Americans see as noble even in the absence of noble motives. Brolin makes you believe that he is both that Joe Six-Pack that lives down the road, and the kind of independent man who could survive when called upon to do so.

And Havier Barden as Chigurh (not inconsequentially pronounced as the carbohydrate more often than the correct “shoe-garr), the cold-blooded killing machine with a code of ethics that eschews morality, won the Oscar for his portrayal. From haircut to boots, from inside to outside, he gives us a vision of true evil that is as different but just as riveting as Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lector. Almost every clip of the movie inclues his confrontation with the gas station owner. That’s both good and bad. It is the heart of the character. Random violence and the terrible capriciousness of it. But having seen this scene so many times robs it of some of its impact. Nevertheless, watching it play to its conclusion is still something of cinema that will haunt your dreams for years to come.

The supporting cast is also stellar. Darret Gilihunt plays Sheriff Tom Bell’s deputy, Wendell, and somehow stands his own with this extraordinary cast as a bit player the same way he did in THE ASSINATION OF JESSIE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD. He reminds me of Peter Krause in his look and manner and perhaps that prejudices me to like him since I’ve been a fan of Krause since his days on SPORTSNIGHT but he still seems to pick roles that are subordinate yet memorable. Here the deputy he portrays is, as almost everything in the movie, not the typical role. He may be a half-step behind Tommy Lee Jones’ Ed Tom Bell but he is no Barney Fife. He sees what has happened enough to clarify what the audience has already realized, thus making sure that we are carried along.

Likewise Kelly McDonald as Clara Jean Moss, Llewlyn’s wife, is completely convincing in her role. It was surprising to hear her talk in her native lilting Irish brogue on the supplemental materials on the Blu-Ray disk. As a resident of the south for most of my life, I was completely taken in. Such a convincing performance is often overlooked by the Academy as it is by the audience. Sometimes an actor is simply too good and fools everyone. I was fooled. There is no greater imaginable praise for a performance.

In short, Rarely has a film been so profound and poignant. Rarely has a piece of theater rivaled Hamlet and Hitchcock in dealing with the vagaries and themes of life and death, choice and chance, violence and calm. No Country For Old Men is the pinnacle of the Coens’ genius for film and a pinnacle of the art of cinema. When NO COUNTRY is finished you have the sense that you have been carried away to another place, another time, to see the lives of other people. That is what film is all about. The stuff of dreams.

PERSONAL- Where have you been?

I have continued to battle my medical problems but I'm doing better now and want to thank everyone who has inquired as to my whereabouts.

My only question?

Where are the comments?

Oh, yeah. There hasn't been anything to comment on. So following this I hope to complete several posts that I have worked on in the interim but been unable to finish due to my state of health.

Again, thanks for the emails.

SCIENCE- Vitamins and Diet (Part I)

In my business I hear a lot of generally held but blatantly wrong myths about science, health and diet. On of the most common is the idea that the modern diet is terrible. It is true that there are some failings in the diet of the common American- an overuse of preservatives, the addition of high fructose corn syrup into almost every processed foodstuff, the use of steroids and antibiotics on meat animals- but the American consumer has the most plentiful and varied diet in the history of the planet. And yet most Americans use dietary supplements frequently and many would say that their health is in danger without a daily multivitamin. Even though most don’t even know what vitamins are.

Through most of human history the problem wasn’t eating a balanced diet that would promote good health, it was simply getting enough food to continue to live. Food was food, and you either got enough or you didn’t. Most diets were monotonous and unless you were rich consisted of whatever was at hand. If you didn’t starve you were lucky and if you still died of a disease related to dietary insufficiency it was though of as being like any other disease- largely a mystery or the will of the gods.

But some people were not beyond noticing that certain diseases occurred in certain circumstances. One disease, Scurvy, gained notice when it started showing up among sailors during the late 1400’s. Scurvy, a disease characterized by teeth falling out, weakness, joint pain, bruising, and bleeding of the gums, was not unknown by the late 15th century. It had been commented on during the Crusades as a disease endemic to populations under siege. But until that time it had never been a particular problem for sailors.

One of the first instances of this new threat was noticed when Vasco DeGama’s made the first successful trip from Portugal to India in 1497. DeGama’s ship traveled around the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa, following the route pioneered by Bartholomeu Dias in 1488, and nine months later made port in Calicut, India with a significant portion of the crew sick with the disease.

Numerous accounts of a similar nature began to appear. Why was this disease suddenly striking shipbound men? It had never been a problem before and men had been sailing on ships for thousands of years. Now we know it was because the kind of sailing they were doing had changed. Until the 15th century, most ships had never sailed far away from the shore, which allowed them to supplement their usual rations of dried beans, salt pork and hardtack (an dry unleavened bread) with local vegetables from their frequent stops in port. With the advent of the European voyages of discovery, ships were suddenly embarking on much longer journeys, often far from sight of land. As a result, shipboard diets were more sevirely restricted to what could be carried on board.

The first clue to what was causing this pandemic of scurvy among seafaring men was found in 1535 when Jacques Cartier was exploring the St Laurence River. Finding themselves in what is now the Provence of Quebec in the winter of ‘35-36, Cartier’s crew was forced to eat shipboard rations for a prolonged period. The result was that twenty-five men died and over a hundred were rendered incapacitated by an outbreak of scurvy. The local Indians came to the rescue, having the men drink a potion of water and pine needles. Many of the sailors improved under this treatment. Unfortunately this was not enough of a remedy (and probably not very appetizing unless you were already suffering from the disease) so scurvy would remain the bane of seafarers and a not insignificant problem for land bound populations with poor diets for the next two hundred years.

Finally in 1734 another clue to what was causing this ailment was found by botanist J. G. H. Kramer during the War of Polish Succession. He noticed that officers were often immune to scurvy. He also connected the disease to diet, seeing that while officers’ meals included green vegetables, the enlisted soldiers did not. When he suggested that the lower ranks be given a diet more like the officers, he was ignored and undoubtedly laughed at. After all, fresh vegetables were expensive and expenses were not to be wasted on the common sailor. (A military idea that continues until our own time, as recent requests for body armor from our own soldiers might indicate.)

A Scottish medical officer was to find the next piece of the puzzle in 1747. Dr. James Lind took a dozen British navymen suffering from scurvy and divided them into pairs, giving each pair a different dietary supplement. The pair that was fed citrus fruits recovered. But Dr. Lind had no more success than Mr. Kramer when he tried to convince officers to add citrus fruits to the diets of the enlisted.

However, scurvy would soon become impossible to ignore for the British Navy. By the time of the American Revolutionary War, England was losing thousands of casualties to scurvy every year. For a maritime power this was a disaster. Some British captains had caught on to the fact that the monotonous diet of the sailors was the problem. Captain Cook had lost only one man to scurvy during his explorations by supplementing the shipboard diet with malt, sauerkraut, and fresh vegetables whenever possible. (The beer and sauerkraut didn’t do much to help, but he didn’t know that.) But the navy as a whole was still unwilling to give in. Conditions were deplorable overall. During the eighteenth century the British navy lost over 80 men to disease and desertion for every man killed in battle. Samuel Johnson was driven to remark that no man would serve in the British navy if he had the brains to get thrown into jail. He said that the jails had better food and company, more room, and less chance of drowning.

Finally these conditions resulted in a general mutiny in 1797. Through a combination of brutal retribution and minor concessions the navy averted a complete disruption. One of the demands given in to was a demand by the sailors for a ration of lemon juice for each man on ship. Well, it was given into after a fashion. In the time honored military tradition of being loathe to spend money on the enlisted, the navy compromised by supplying each sailor with a ration of limes (lemons being more expensive). And members of the British navy soon became known as limeys, a name they carry to this day.

But why people were getting scurvy was still a mystery. One that would continue into the nineteenth century. The problem was ameliorated for the men aboard British navy ships but scurvy remained a problem for economically disadvantaged people on land. Especially children who were not breast fed.

COMICS- Graphic Novel Roundup II

THE INFINITY WAR and THE INFINITY GAUNTLET- Jim Starlin writer, Ron Lim artist

Jim Starlin started his run on Warlock in Strange Tales back in 1975 and I can still remember buying those comics and thinking it was one of the best things ever done in the medium. Warlock had started out as one of the numerous creations that spun out of the Lee/Kirby FF, had been tried as a Counter-Earth Jesus by Roy Thomas and Gil Kane in a series that lasted only 8 issues, and had pretty much disappeared from the marvel universe after that. Starlin took the characters messianic backstory and built on it to create a complex tale of morality, religion, government, time travel, and surrealism. There were antagonists and protagonists, but no good guys or bad guys, and even after the story of the Magus was finished you still weren’t sure who had actually been right. Starlin reintroduced the character of Thanos from his stint on Captain Marvel in the guise of an ally for Adam Warlock and populated the world with interesting characters such as Pip the Troll (who’s image haunted me when I read Great Expectations in High School), Gamora, the Magus, and the High Inquisitor. There was even had an issue which lampooned Marvel Comics at the time as the Universal Church of Truth attempted to brainwash Warlock. The whole thing reads like something that would come out of DC’s Vertigo line years later. And after all these years have passed I stand by my adolescent assessment. It was one of the finest comics ever produced.

Unfortunately rather than reprint those volumes with better paper and color, Marvel has collected Starlin’s latter day Warlock sagas, THE INFINITY GAUNTLET and THE INFINITY WAR. The old gang is back but they aren’t really given anything to do. I have to admit, while there are several parts of the old Strange Tales Warlock story I remember vividly, after slogging through several hundred pages of these two graphic novels I’m left with only vague impressions of the story. I won’t attempt to give a plot synopsis (I never do) but if I did I think I could do it in a couple of lines. There is nothing that struck me as inventive or inspired, the plot travels ahead at a slow, steady pace with none of the twists and surprises of the old Warlock, and the conclusion is unsatisfying since nothing like a climax is ever reached. Ron Lim does the artwork in a sort of Rob Lefield Marvel house style that is only slightly reminiscent of Starlin’s art, with none of the power or composition of Starlin’s old layouts. But I don’t blame him for the glacial pace. There just isn’t enough story for the number of pages.

POLITICS- Obamanomicon

The press certainly does seem to be making the case for an Obama upset in this week’s primaries, and lots of Democrats have made the case for that being the end of the race. (Even Bill Clinton.) And while we may never know how much of Hillary’s meltdown was actual and how much was the media reporting, she hasn’t come off well for the last couple of weeks. Meanwhile, Obama has been drawing crowds of 20,000 people. According to the media he’s gaining in every group. He’s a blank slate that all these follows are painting their own pictures on. The media is in love. The Obama juggernaut thunders on. Obamamania! The Democratic Reagan! Woooo!

Seriously, I think this misses the point. At the risk of just being another person to take a turn with the paint brush, I think Americans are just in love with the idea of something different. He’s running on a platform of hope and change and that is EXACTLY what America wants. So what if he doesn’t have any experience. Experience got us where we are. The last president we had that wasn’t a state governor was Nixon. Foreign policy experience is rarely needed to be governor. So everybody has to learn foreign policy on the fly in their first term. Obama seems to be a bright fellow and we understand that it’s not like he’s not going to be in the same situation that any other new president. Give him a shot. Bush has so lowered the bar for screwing up as president in the modern world that it’s hard to imagine Obama making things worse. And he is the most likely to respond to problems differently. One thing you can say about both Clinton and McCain is that they are going to respond in the same old ways we have. Health care be damned. Terrorism is the issue and Obama has a chance to reconnect with the rest of the world and if anything is going to be done about terrorism it’s going to have to be by most of the countries in the world working together. Obama is change. And for Americans who need hope, there’s no hope in where we’ve been headed for the last seven years. If Obama is the most different, then he’s the one to put your hopes into. None of them do what they say they are going to do after they are elected anyway.

I hope Obama wins the presidency because I’m sick of what the government has been doing and I’m willing to give somebody new a try. ‘Nuff said.