Bergman

Bergman's frontal assault on Big Ideas would never have worked if he didn't have access to the intensely personal. It was an odd combination really, almost sophomoric psychoanalytic “symbolism” combined with the simplicity of strong feeling. Somehow avoiding the ponderous, he often pulled it off.

What the Times had to say…

Throughout his career, Mr. Bergman often talked about what he considered the dual nature of his creative and private personalities. “I am very much aware of my own double self,” he once said. “The well-known one is very under control; everything is planned and very secure. The unknown one can be very unpleasant. I think this side is responsible for all the creative work — he is in touch with the child. He is not rational; he is impulsive and extremely emotional.”

The Sopranos Redux

The Sopranos never ends — in the imagination — for some, and maybe it is a good thing because the assessments and even introspection it generates are engrossing in themselves. Although more elegiac than insightful, this well-written consideration of the show is fascinating in what it evokes for the writer.

This territory thick with mobbed-up construction sites and toxic waste dumps turned out, unaccountably, to be a wonderland: not precisely Alice's domain but one likewise filled with magical locations (Bada Bing, Vesuvio's, the pork store), dream states and alternate realities, parodies and non sequiturs, ordinary objects turned menacing or disorienting, and devastating jokes that popped up in the midst of social rituals as arcane as the Queen of Hearts' croquet match. Every episode was saturated with allusions—to movies, songs, history high and low, scraps of every creed and cult, the common store of rumor and misinformation—a backbeat of information that might be relevant or meaningless. (Where else would we find a mob guy taking to heart the self-help mantra to “feel the fear and do it anyway”?)

I can't say I felt The Sopranos was anything more than a good TV show with some moments, early on, that were very funny and original.

It Almost Makes You Feel Sorry For Charlie

In searching for a recent Charlie Rose interview a visit to his site didn't have the interview posted yet, but people were already commenting, among the comments:

Please stop interrupting your guests. And try to sit up straight. It sometimes seems your head is about to hit the table. My wife says you resemble a buzzard. I told her to shut up.

It almost makes you feel sorry for Charlie.

Netflix

Sometimes you don't realize you have strong feelings about a company until later. We subscribed for several years to Netflix. It seemed like a brilliant business model, brilliantly implemented. As the pickings got thinner — fewer movies of interest — we continued almost out of habit. The few times we had an issue that couldn't be resolved on their web interface we would have to call customer service. That was something of a hunt as they make it difficult to find the number. The attitude of the customer service reps was frequently a conflation of smug-snarky.

Netflix was super fast getting us new movies on return — during the trial period. After sign-up it was okay, but not great. They didn't consider the weekend a valid mail out day. So if you sent in Friday they often weren't sending back until Tuesday, because they needed a day to process the return, which apparently arrived late Monday.

Then they started offering on demand streaming movies for Windows users. For our plan that would have meant an extra 18 hours of movies — over and above the DVDs we received. They never offered a Mac compatible version — meaning we were paying the same fee for less. Netflix justified this as being a “beta” which was first being offered only on the PC platform.

So when this article indicated that their server went down on the day their stock tanked from some real competition, finally, from Blockbuster, it wasn't a Crying Game for us.

“Netflix has a broken model,” Pachter said. “They aren't used to competition and now someone is competing against them very effectively.”

Clinton and Obama

In the last Democratic debate Clinton said that if elected she wouldn't commit to speaking to dictators in her first year and Obama said that was ridiculous. Hillary was a big winner in that exchange. It should be a turning point but it won't be given the hive mind of the nomination process.

Obama was demagogic in his sweeping commitment and easy judgment — a Neville Chamberlain mindset without nuance. Today Obama dragged out Clinton's vote for the war, another demagogic move and sure sign of weakness. Obama doesn't seem to understand that for thugs street cred is accrued by engagements with power. An open door policy is ridiculous — you pick and choose, when and where.

Although the press is playing up experience as the root of the dispute, that is, Clinton's circumspection, the real issue is Obama's shallow need for easy approval from extremists.

The thing Clinton should be criticized about is her complete failure from a clueless arrogance to move this country toward national health care when she and the country had a chance. Obama doesn't get it — he is missing the real issues and playing to the mob.

Steve Jobs Hearts William Blake

It's something of a show-stopper that CEOs have libraries, let alone read. But that is what this article indicates:

“I used to tell my senior staff to get me poets as managers,” says Sidney Harman, founder of Harman Industries, a $3 billion producer of sound systems for luxury cars, theaters and airports. Mr. Harman maintains a library in each of his three homes, in Washington, Los Angeles and Aspen, Colo. “Poets are our original systems thinkers,” he said. “They look at our most complex environments and they reduce the complexity to something they begin to understand.”

Hope Sidney Harman didn't miss that poets also express the complexity of our buzzing, blooming world, rather than simply providing Cliff Notes about the resplendent ambiguity of reality.

The article says that Steve Jobs is a fan of William Blake.

Barry Bonds

There is a real despair in the spectacle of Barry Bonds coming to bat to the sounds of loud booing. Bonds is at the convergence of issues larger than baseball and so what should be a moment of triumph becomes a sad journey's end. The public's mindless demand for false sports heroes (Charles Barkley: “I am not a role model”), an athlete's desire to satisfy that demand in any way possible (narcissism and unethical ambition), the lusting after records (numbers rather than values), the feeling among athletes that to keep up they have to “do what everyone else does” (conformist, situational morality, making excuses), the focus on a single individual when there is a larger problem (public shallowness and mob mind)…it keeps going.

Bonds is not the only one to have (allegedly) taken performance enhancing drugs (Mark McGuire looked like Bluto as he made his run for the home run record); but Bonds is about to break a sanctified record and the public expresses its ambivalence by rejection — they don't want to think about it — it is just easier to target Bonds. The perfect storm of discord is completed by Bonds' own contribution: his surly personality, which makes people just loathe him. How this privileged, gifted athlete got the idea that his nasty demeanor should be accommodated suggests a dissociated, infantile personality. A sad spectacle.

Outer Space Down Below

Stranger than the strangest creatures invented by Olaf Stapledon in Last and First Men, the creatures in this book, The Deep by Claire Nouvian, reminds you of the morphological genius of Nature. It is almost hard to believe some of these creatures are alive, they seem so fragile, and others so fierce they appear to be horror movie animatronics.

The Lehrer piece about her work. (Make sure to check out the slide show link on the upper right.)

Live Earth

Live Earth, the spectacle for The Good — what could be more important than “saving the earth” — is running full steam now with Madonna belting out a 70s sounding song accompanied by robo-dancers whose tired choreography was just short of self-satire; this was preceded by a 60s sounding duo singing a song that had been better done eons ago. Those two acts aren't likely to save much of anything.

If this concert, an aggregate of stardom and technology, which is pretty much a summing up of popular culture, amounts to something more than an entertainment extravaganza I'd be surprised. It does however make evident the formulas of the current music scene foisted on us by the entertainment industry, useful in an educational sense, if you like parsing formulas about shifts in the Sargasso Sea of pop music.

The most amusing part of course is witnessing the self-important seriousness of indulged celebrities, who in full view of the public, wildly consume more than their share of just about everything, lecturing us on eco-goodness with what often appears to be a challenged intelligence. If you are going to save something you've got to have your preachers though, and those preachers, lordee, are our celebs — our household gods.

I remember both astronomer Alex Filippenko on a Berkeley podcast, and physicist Richard Muller also a Berkeley podcaster, stating a more cautious assessment than the “absolute certainty” of global warming offered by Al Gore. (Gore actually visited Filippenko.) In each of these scientists' estimate global warming has about a 30% chance of being an accurate assessment of current climatological trends. Not enough historical data seems to be the problem; along with our current inability to grasp chaos systems.

Both scientists of course said that we should do something because it would be foolish not to — too much at stake.

The Bright Future of Black Leaves

Freeman Dyson is an optimist. He sees a future where biotech supplants physics — a familiar assumption these days — in the article he indicates biology has already achieved critical mass. He sees big corporation biotech then exfoliating to the general population, the way computers went from huge singularities to a laptop in millions of homes. He thinks this is a good and hopeful thing that will lead to experimentation and generate variety, productivity, and a return of the rural to its former central importance; with it will come an end to rural poverty. Cities would no longer be as important if people could generate their own power and food from clever biological manipulations. Black leaved silicon plants is one bizarro manifestation of this vision. Dyson's model of biological experimentation for the good is that presented in flower shows or a reptile show he attended in San Diego; people devoting their lives to breeding and coming up with remarkable variants of flowers.

The devices necessary for this implementation which could then be manipulated by the average person are possible, he says — he should know, he is a renowned scientist. But the wisdom of a general population, able to intersect with the gene pool, makes me wonder if he has observed the behavior of people in driving a simple-minded tin can on wheels called a car. Human mistakes, foolishness, misunderstanding, maliciousness, psychosis, distractedness, self-centeredness and pranksterism seems certain to infect the bright future he suggests. He says that there could be controls — I'm not sure how.

The article is still wonderful in its hope and kindness of vision. Science fiction written by a smart, goodhearted scientist.

Horgan on Sulloway

It was good to hear John Horgan @ bloggingheads characterize Frank Sulloway's theories about birth order as “slippery”. Horgan pointed out that it really isn't a theory if the definitions are always changing. George Johnson, interlocutor-wearing-funny-3D-glasses in this episode, was as usual amiably moderate, saying there was more nuance to Sulloway's theory.

Sulloway posits what Horgan called a “unified field theory of history”, explaining the past with a simple slogan — first born: conservative; later born: experimenters, rebels. First-born's Newton and Martin Luther are somehow exceptions by Sulloway's tortured logic.

In an interview on NPR Sulloway sounded seriously pinched. Sulloway is an historian of science. Third-born Sulloway also appears to be nursing an industrial strength case of sibling rivalry.