Knocked Up

We have been trying out Blockbuster so Knocked Up was in the queue. We had heard it was funny. It was. The movie was an extended sitcom, with some very good improvisational performances — a warm, friendly haze of a movie.

Apatow is able to focus on character and it helps carry the movie because the plot often sags, and at the end, it just fails. But it doesn't matter, because you like the movie. Sort of the way we elect a president.

When you like something you look up the perpetrators and that means Wikipedia.

Seth Rogen as Ben Stone was given a co-Producer title and the Wiki says he was a standup as a teenager and pretty much sailed into acceptance in Hollywood. He must be one likable guy because Apatow encouraged him to get into the movies in the first place. Rogen is very funny and reminds me — I still haven't figured out exactly who he reminds me of. He is just familiar — a wonderful trait for an actor. His voice sometimes sounds like Chris Farley, but he seems so…familiar.

Rogen has been flowing in the right comedy stream for awhile — he worked for Sacha Baron Cohen for one thing. I think the Wiki said he lived on a Kibbutz, had a social worker mom and father who worked for a non-profit that advocated the use of Yiddish.

The stunner of the movie was Katherine Heigl as Alison Scott. “Stunner” in the many senses of the word. She was just beautiful. According to the Wiki man she really had a tough life, going from a wealthy New Canaan upbringing, to a free ride into modeling via a relative handing out her photos to modeling agencies, and so in her teens becoming a model without hardly breaking a nail. It was one tough bump in the road after another for Katherine.

But the real story is that she is such a terrific comic actress. Her wonderful reaction shots, her human warmth and openness made the movie. No Kathy, no movie. If Judd Apatow has a genius, it is for casting and then letting his kids run free.

And speaking of getting knocked up and around and around:

The Giants / Pats game was basically the Super Bowl. A great game — what the Super Bowl should be but seldom is. You have to give credit to the Giants, fierce to the end, with nothing in the playoff picture at stake. Probably, when all else is tallied, the best game of the season.

Jared Diamond

The spiritual yearning for Oneness has migrated into science. At the beginning of the 20th century, after James Clerk Maxwell unified fundamental forces in nature in four equations, Einstein wove reality still finer — more simply wrought. The implication was that you could keep going.

Einstein tried but his GUT, Grand Unified Theory, never worked. Now string / multiverse theorists are trudging forward despite little encouragement from experimental findings. But the unifying impulse persists in cultural affairs as well…

In this article Jared Diamond's geographical determinism, another academic, innocent, and simple formula, with an aura of scientism (which appears to speak to liberal guilt and gospel environmentalism), has unexpectedly generated criticism not only, as would be expected, from the Right, but from the Left as well.

The Left thinks the machine of the environment doesn't lay enough blame on their fave topic, the “imperialist invaders”. “Diamond in effect argues that no one is to blame,” said an anthropologist at Amherst College. “The haves are not to be blamed for the condition of the have-nots.” And another says, “[ Dr. Diamond ] shifts all of the burden to people and their stupidity rather than to a complex ecosystem where these things interact.”

Diamond's thesis never seemed more than frail postmodernist thinking; a concept ostensibly meant to satisfy prevailing memes, presented with smug assurance, hung callously over a teemingly interesting landscape — so as to point to the theorist; something of an intellectual insult to anyone who thinks half-seriously about the rise and fall of civilizations.

In the above linked article the writer notes that, “As Einstein put it, explanations should be as simple as possible — but no simpler.” The attempt to simplify and “make scientific” a mind-spinningly complex cultural/anthropological reality via academic uni-theory seems doomed to failure; the lens needed must be both larger and sharper — and more forgiving of the ambiguities.

As noted in an earlier post, Woody Allen said it: “Students achieving Oneness will move on to Twoness.”

Undiscover'd Country

The news is filled with terrible death. Bhutto's assassination and the unease we now feel about the tipping point Pakistan has reached; the surreal story of a young California man killed and his two friends mauled by a tiger escaped from a zoo ; a neighbor's story (not to be delineated here) evoking the fractures in families that death can catalyze into visibility; an indigent man we know telling us of his son's death — a pall lingers over this season.

You could say that it is always happening, you just don't hear of it. But it makes a difference when you do.

Christopher Hitchens about Bhutto:

This is what makes her murder such a disaster…She was attempting to make the connection between lack of democracy in Pakistan and the rise of mullah-manipulated fanaticism. Of those preparing to contest the highly dubious upcoming elections, she was the only candidate with anything approaching a mass appeal to set against the siren calls of the fundamentalists. …she perhaps did have a hint of destiny about her.

And then there are the inevitable doubts. Bhutto was physically courageous, but was she also suicidal? Was the tiger attack partly the result of taunting by the teens? Clearly, taunting does not warrant so horrible an end; nor is Bhutto's courage diminished — nor the hope she presented and the credit Hitchens ascribes to her possible growth — to be denied. Things are never simple.

One of fevered Hamlet's many skeptical queries of the persistent spirit — is it only fear that makes us able to overcome despair?

The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?

And in Measure for Measure we are reminded of the glory of existence in the human capacity to express our deepest fears through art:

To be impison'd in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendant world.

The pendant world — a world itself dangling with fragility.

Alone?

Are we alone? Are we freaks in the universe or is the universe bio-friendly?

This fascinating podcast discusses just those issues.

And speaking of podcasts, here is a section of a discussion about metaphor as a tool for expanding knowledge and thereby consciousness.

One point made by John Horgan about metaphor is something that I feel myself. It is that metaphor is an incredibly powerful tool human beings use to understand the world. Although Horgan's reference point is science, I think that metaphor is far more general in its effect — a unifying force inclusive of many disciplines, tying many of the most powerful functions of the mind, the heart and the spirit — that sense of the connectedness of all things; the coiled associations of Shakespeare that spring out in all directions all at once and hook reality into a shockingly beautiful web of insight, or Vermeer's ineffable vision of time as an illuminated pearl.

Lucian Freud

Lucian Freud's ugly, compelling vision is presented in a slideshow of his etchings at Slate. Freud's work lives somewhere in the spectrum between Ivan Albright's grotesqueries and Philip Pearlstein's vacant nudes.

The somewhat glib and obvious “essay” associated with the slideshow doesn't offer much insight, but the work is all that you really need anyway. Artists present an interior world, certainly Freud posits this in his own statements, characterizing his work as “autobiographical” (something that is arguably true about any real art); but the media persist in encumbering artists with the celeb “personality” angle — the faults and oddities of the personality — which has become the default in profiles of entertainers. When Lucian Freud talks about autobiographical reference in his work, it isn't his quotidian experience to which he is referring, but his inner journey.

The poets in the realm Lucian Freud inhabits — the melancholic human spirit contained in a baggy sack of skin — are Francis Bacon and Chaim Soutine. Bacon's images of exploding flesh have an uncanny understanding: Bacon places the tormented self, evoking the horrors of everyday life, in a theatrical context — a brilliant insight into the zeitgeist. Soutine is probably the greatest of the group; his images of melting flesh sums up the misery of the human condition that is at the center of these artist's concerns and makes moving reference to global horrors.

One thing that is noteworthy about Freud is that he stuck to his guns through many “isms”. His great talent and dour spirit are limited in emotional scope, but he is a serious artist, worth looking at seriously.

MoMA's online exhibit

Time Speaks

One of the more comical spectacles in this season is the choice of the Time Person of the Year. This year it is that best-buddy of Iran and head of a crime-ridden country migrating to unabashed dictatorship Vladimir Putin.

More often than not Time chooses someone of dubious credentials and then are left explaining in the following weeks that they “mean that the person had a significance in the year's news” — that it isn't approbation. Maybe Time's editors should consider the connotation as well as the denotation in choosing a title for their “awards” — perhaps the Time Toxic Impact award would in many cases serve better.

Here they go again :

TIME's Person of the Year is not and never has been an honor. It is not an endorsement. It is not a popularity contest.

McCain understood who Putin was in 2000:
John McCain @ YouTube

Hitchens Goes to the Spa

In this Vanity Fair set piece On the Limits of Self-Improvement, Christopher Hitchens manages to tease out some very funny stuff from the warhorse genre, “Boozing, Chain-Smoking Journalist Goes to the Spa”.

Of particular note for its laugh out loud achievement is Hitchens' almost courageously self-deprecatory description of his body as imagined through the filter of a spa intake report:

…Nor do his hands, at the same time very small and very puffy, give any support to the view that the human species does not have a common ancestor with the less advanced species of ape. The nails on the hands are gnawed, and the nails on the feet are claw-like and beginning to curl in a Howard Hughes fashion (perhaps because the subject displays such a marked reluctance to involve himself in any activity that may involve bending).

Viewed from the front when clothed, the subject resembles a burst horsehair sofa cushion or (in the opinion of one of us) a condom hastily stuffed with an old sock. The side perspective is that of an avocado pear and, on certain mornings, an avocado pear that retains nothing of nutritious value but its tinge of alligator green…

Hillary and Barack

Apparently Obama wasn't thinking of his gravitas problem when he gleefully accepted an endorsement from a talk show host. In a way he gets it, campaigns are showbiz. Oprah is best known as a New Age consumerist sprite: she sprinkles pop credibility, you get rich. Now we have it unadorned — the selling of the president.

Hillary pulled out Bill and her daughter/mother and has thereby proven that she is worried. Give her this: when she was interviewed by Charlie Gibson a few days ago she was very impressive. You began to wonder why people hate her so. Unfortunately she also has that Al Gore problem — she listens to her advisors too closely and they are diminishing her focus. The idiotic laughing fits, the cynical PC ingratiations — I'm just a girl attacked by all those boys. She tried to correct the latter, but it leaves a bad taste.

A recent article suggested that Obama is not Gary Hart but Jimmy Carter. Carter's unctuous paternalism would be intolerable in replay. If Obama really is like the clueless do-gooder it would be a disaster for America. The article suggested that Obama will be a moral(istic) leader rather than one of original ideas or meaningful change. Someone like Hart, who was original and bright, but pathetically flawed, might not be so bad, if you could lose the flawed part and the pathetic part.

Obama gives the impression that he was intoxicated by the early applause and wants it back, always. Obama didn't understand that at first the public was just grateful at his announced candidacy — someone who could speak in full sentences and seemed reasonable and fresh. But he has yet to have found any weight in his public persona.

Obama is being sold as good medicine. You know, a new face, a turning of the page — from the Clinton/Bush loop the country is beginning to manifest. “I would like his face to represent our country”, I heard someone voting in Iowa suggest about Obama's most appealing trait.

What about someone who could lead? How about someone who has some original ideas about the many problems the country faces? The US is desperate for real leadership. After all, these are interesting times, in the sense of the old Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.”

Romance in the Jungle

A YouTube romance, of sorts. The enraptured hunter and the indifferent prey, a blessedly unconsummated romance.

Not only that, dogs can drive and stranger still, humans can be turned into pods, inhabited by dog spirits.

Smallville

“Who would name a Tarzan movie Greystoke?”, Pauline Kael once asked.

Who would name a TV show about SuperBoy Smallville? Wrong title. In addition, Smallville had the nerve to diddle with the plot of classic pop mythology — like rewriting the myth so Minerva jumps out of Jupiter's nose. Then they miscast all the male leads except for Lex and Lionel. How wrong could the creators of this TV show be? If they had more time, could they be even wrong-er-er?

But the show, after a rocky start, has been great. The plots, special effects, the fun of the fantasy, are all intact and have been imaginatively expanded. They made all the right decisions; they removed the parents, played down the romance, made Clark a more interesting character, added new characters that have been a boon to the storylines.

I don't know why they won't let SuperBoy fly. When his cousin SuperGirl appeared — a great episode — she was flying with alacrity. Those shots of her hovering above the clouds, one leg bent, like a crane in a pool of water, are classics. Now I trust the show, and Clark will fly. You heard it here first.

Now if they could just call it SuperManChild or Super, The Early Years.

Photography's Decline

This essay about photography's decline is swinging at ghosts; neither photography is understood as the craft that it is, nor is the nature of art fully comprehended.

The reviewer despairs for photography:

…you can't help but wonder if … [photography] hasn't fractured itself beyond all recognition. Sculpture did the same thing a while back, so that now “sculpture” can indicate a hole in the ground as readily as a bronze statue. Digitalization has made much of art photography's vast variety possible. But it's also a major reason that, 25 years after the technology exploded what photography could do and be, the medium seems to have lost its soul.

The reviewer thinks photography had a soul. Digitalization is actually a logical extension of the mechanical, distanced craft of photography. A perfect fit. Pure content, thence manipulated.

The reviewer says,

Art and truth used to be fast friends. Until the beginning of modernism, the most admired quality in Western art was mimesis—objects in painting and sculpture closely resembling things in real life. William Henry Fox Talbot, who produced the first photographic prints from a negative in 1839, immediately saw the mimetic new medium as an art form.

The association of realistic representation with “truth” is a misunderstanding that was clarified in the early twentieth century. (He should have said “the most admired quality in nineteenth century art.”) But it became evident you could do a lot on a canvas that did not parrot the apparent. The pop culture's tendency to find value in mimesis — “it really looks like a duck” — never was connected to truth seeking as the reviewer seems to indicate. It is the craft that is admired in mimetic representation; it is the faux familiarity embedded in simple realism that is reassuring (a requirement for pop culture acceptance — the lack of demand for inner engagement).

As gallery material, photographs are now essentially no different from paintings concocted entirely from an artist's imagination, except that they lack painting's manual touch and surface variation.

The reviewer refers to “painting's manual touch and surface variation.” There is little empathic connection to the expressive power of painting in that formulation; it misses the spiritual, intellectual and emotive powers of painting.

Art presents an individual world — if successful, a fully realized world — which the zeitgeist may or may not find useful. Photography presents a useful — sometimes beautiful — document about a physical moment, devoid of the spirit of the age or the inner journey of a single life.

The War

This NYT review of Ken Burns' PBS epic The War says that Burns' sentimentality obfuscates the story of the greater issues of World War II.

By selectively telling history from below, by highlighting emotion and sketching everything else, Mr. Burns privatizes war. He takes one of the most necessary wars ever fought and leaves viewers wondering whether any public goal can be worth its price…Mr. Burns has suggested that his views of today’s American warfare affected his portrayal of the Second World War. Here too, though, he is letting feelings eclipse history.

“I'm against war” is so easy to say but leaves out so much. “I'm a pacifist” often reveals a speaker checking to see if his or her admirable character is being fully appreciated. Such statements are often a narcissist's assertion of self-goodness without regard to the serious conflict of values that leads to the tragedy of war. By ignoring those larger causes the likelihood of war is increased, the value of what is being fought for callously ignored.

The Quantum Past

In this talk about quantum physics and the possibilities of a retrievable past, the language and ideas are so abstract that although the technical information is beyond any but extreme-specialists, the subject itself is somewhat understandable.

Much of the credit goes to the lecturer, Charlie Bennett, who indicates that there is no way to retrieve the past via some quantum magic (entanglement). Since the universe conserves energy it might seem that if a clever machine could be built, that energy could be reverse engineered to figure out what existed say 30 years ago. Exactly as it was configured — the sand at the beach in 1953 was the example.

This sounds odd, but quantum physics is not exactly intuitive. Bennett indicates that memory (in the physical sense) is retrievable only if fossilized, but if not copied to a medium that can last a long long time, the dissipation of any physical manifestation drains into the sink of the universe itself, at the speed of light.

The 45 minute lecture was fascinating, not only because the ideas are sci-fi fascinating, but because Bennett is an unassuming, clear, humorous and warm individual, which can make all the difference in your efforts to grok his points. In addition, the audience, all experts apparently, give you a feeling for the community involved in one form of serious thinking about reality. Listen to it yourself.