As with many people, the length of my commute depends very much on the traffic between where I live and where I work. The bottleneck in the travel is 495, which is known as The Beltway. The Beltway is a huge loop that surrounds the entire of Washington DC.
There are two major (relative to everything else) highways that lead off from 495. I-95 goes up northeast (at about 2 o'clock on the Beltway) to Baltimore. I-270 goes northwest (around 11 o'clock).
Even on a small stretch of the Beltway between 95 and 270, can get backed up. It usually takes ten minutes to get from those two points. With traffic, it can go up to thirty minutes. Thirty minutes! Thirty minutes to travel ten miles! Every morning, it takes about 25 minutes to travel from my house to the juncture of 495 and 270.
It's a bit better coming back, because I usually come back after rush hour. Still, last night when I came back at around 10 PM, there were still plenty of people on the road. There wasn't the kind of stop-and-go Beltway traffic, but still, it was surprisingly crowded.
Forunately, in order to pass time, I can listen to the radio. If I had to listen to music the entire way, I'd go crazy. Most radio stations have a playlist of like five songs played in endless loop. That catchy song you heard? It's cool. It's got a good hook. But after the hundredth (literally) time of playing it, you want to pull someone's eye sockets out. You promise yourself never to listen to it again.
I listen to talk radio because at least it's different day to day. And on occasion, it can be very funny. Let's face it, though. I wouldn't listen to the radio if it weren't for this lengthy commute. Without the morning commute, shows like Tony Kornheiser and Howard Stern (I can't believe I put them in the same sentence) wouldn't exist.
This commute and my job insulate me from the world. I know that, on a good day, I can be at work in twenty minutes. On a bad day, it goes nearly an hour. Typically, it takes about forty minutes in the day, and thirty minutes at night.
Last night, I listened to someone talk about John Brown. Now, here's a name I've only vaguely heard of. Without the context of the show, it would not have meant anything to me. John Brown was an abolitionist during the middle of the nineteenth century. He despised slavery, and came to a unique, if controversial solution. Violence.
Brown and his followers would drag out white slave owners (he, too, was white) and kill them. This, in front of crying children and wives. He wanted to make a statement. He's been labelled a revolutionary and a terrorist. Both labels fit him accurately. People like Timothy McVeigh have drawn inspriration from his actions.
I mean, mainstream television and radio just doesn't cover Brown, at least, not this sympathetically. The author, whose name I didn't catch, said that this was justified violence, that the institution of slavery was so bad, and was getting worse, that someone had to do something significant. That man was Brown. It takes NPR radio to bring me to this world.
This morning, I heard about the competition between Huntington Beach and Santa Cruz to trademark the name "Surf City". California gave rise to beach songs from the sixties, including the Beach Boys and Jan n' Dean. But you know why these two cities are competing for the title "Surf City". Money. A surfer whose hung ten at both locations said that the people who are trying to get trademark don't even surf. It's about the bling and the more bling.
But, really, what made me realize I live in an insulated world is listening to Tony. Tony realizes there's more to life than sports. There's Hollywood. There's the runaway bride. And there's Hurricane Katrina.
Yeah, I've heard about the hurricane. I haven't seen the pictures of the devastation. I still haven't. Last night, I was at Midnight Madness. No, no, this wasn't the opening basketball practice by the Terps (which was, indeed, invented at Maryland, by Lefty Driesell, who decided to practice at the earliest moment possible, on the first day that the NCAA permits practice. At midnight.). It was IKEA midnight madness.
Very much like the midnight madness in basketball, IKEA's version was aimed at college students. And there were plenty. I wanted to have some IKEA Swedish coffee, which tastes very much like regular American coffee, but the line at 10:30 PM (the place usually closes around 9 PM), was insane. Insane! No coffee for me.
As Dave and I travelled the confines of the IKEA cave, we bumped into his brother and his posse. This posse was three other girls and another guy. I won't go classifying the attractiveness of the lot, because that would be unseemly. Not that unseemly ever bothered me. Dave seemed very much like a puppy dog following his brother, even though he is the older, and his brother is the younger. We discovered Dave can get into very tiny spaces in what has to be one of the most useless IKEA child toy ever.
This toy is basically an egg. You get in this tiny, tiny chair, and pull this curtain-like shade over you. It's meant for tiny kids to, well, hide. This is, I imagine, what Swedish kids do for fun, when it gets too cold to do anything else. Dave stands six feet tall, yet, he discovered that he too, can be a Swedish kid. After being trapped in by his brother and suffering from extreme claustrophobia, he got out. I think I know what to get Dave for his birthday.
As this was going on, Hurricane Katrina was pummeling Louisiana and Mississippi. People have made analogies to the tsunami (which killed at least ten times as many people) and the nuclear bomb at Hiroshima. I've long maintained that Americans simply don't care when it happens overseas.
I know. There was an outpouring of support for victims and survivors of the tsunami. But really, companies saw it as good business sense. Amazon put up a contribution link merely a day after the tsunami. Other companies followed suit. This gave much more play to the sympathy Americans can provide.
Even if the scale is so much different, when it happens here, it's that much more impact. New Orleans is 80% underwater. There's looting. It's Waterworld. Like Costner's movie, it's a disaster.
And yet, I can't conceive of this. Two years ago, there was some storms that knocked out power for three days. But the actual storm wasn't that bad. It was windy. There was rain. But my car was fine. Our house was fine. We weren't flooded.
Perhaps it's good that I can't conceive of this. It means most places, people live well, shielded from the devastation of nature. Even the attacks on the Pentagon seemed, well, far away. I hope that I don't ever have to experience that, first hand.
At this point, we all share hopes that things can get better. Because really, a few weeks from now, we'll forget this. Only those who rebuild will care. Football will start up again. Baseball will be in postseason. And all of us will be back in our safe world.
Wednesday, August 31, 2005
Quiet Riot
Back throughout the 80s, one name among coaches stood out. Nick Bollettieri. It's not because he was the best coach around. What he did do was start a tennis academy in Florida where talented players of the day went. Players like Jimmy Arias, Andre Agassi, Monica Seles, Jim Courier, and David Wheaton. They all attended Nick's.
Nick's background was a bit unusual. He had been a paratrooper before going into tennis. He basically let his players hit they way they wanted. He didn't mold players into holding the racquet in a particular way. Even so, the successful players from his academy seemed to share traits in common. They hit big forehands, but they couldn't really serve, nor volley.
The first phenom to find success was Jimmy Arias. Jimmy was a scrapper. He'd run, dig out shots, and then try to beat you with his forehand. But the serve was eh, His volley was eh. He found success in the summer American clay court circuit, back when there was such a clay court circuit. It's hard to believe it even existed. With the US Open having been played on hard courts since 1978, there weren't that many hard court tournaments leading up to the US Open, until nearly ten years later.
Four big clay court tournaments were held. The first was at the Longwood Cricket Club in Boston. Then, the following tournament was held in Vermont or New Hampshire. Then, Washington DC hosted a clay court tournament. Finally, the clay court championships held in Indianapolis. The big names of American tennis didn't play much on these surfaces. McEnroe and Connors preferred to take the time off.
Even the great players of Europe or South America also took a pass. Wilander and Vilas never really played. Jose Luis Clerc played well one year. Arias once won three of four these clay court tournaments.
Shortly after Arias came out, there was Aaron Krickstein. Arias was an affable, outgoing players. Krickstein, by contrast, was very quiet. While Jewish athletes are uncommon in many sports, in tennis, they were reasonably well-represented. Krickstein, the Gottfried brothers, Brad Gilbert, Harold Solomon, and players from Israel like Shlomo Glickstein. No, really, that was his name.
Krickstein was a bit like Arias. Big forehand, so-so serve, so-so volley. Krickstein, however, had a two-handed backhand, and this meant he was much steadier on the backhand. You could bully Arias on his backhand, which he flung around as if his arm would fall off. In the best year Arias had, he reached the US Open semifinals, where Lendl just bullied him into submission. Lendl hit harder off the ground than Arias, but more important, Lendl could serve. Arias was game, but no match for the more powerful Lendl.
Krickstein would be known for three matches. All three were played at the US Open. Two wins and a loss. One of his wins was against Vitas Gerulaitis in the third round of the 83 US Open. Vitas was a solid player, but he could play nervous. He double faulted fifteen times to give Aaron the match. He also beat then-unknown Stefan Edberg in the first round. Edberg is the only player to have won the junior Grand Slam. Krickstein was only 16 years old. He would lose in the following round to the acrobatic Yannick Noah, who had won his only Grand Slam event earlier that year at the French Open.
In 1991, Krickstein would upset Andre Agassi in the first round, and make it to the fourth round where he faced a resurgent Jimmy Connors. Connors had already pulled a rabbit out of the hat by winning his first round match against Patrick McEnroe, John's younger brother. Patrick had more in common with Krickstein than his brother John. He played baseline. He had a two handed backhand. He didn't serve particularly well. Where John won several Grand Slam titles, the closest Patrick ever got was a semifinal appearance at the Australian. And, much unlike John, Patrick rarely complained on court. He knew how to keep his temper.
Even though it appears, at the age of 39, that Connors would have a quick exit, he kept digging and digging. With the support of the New York crowd, he came back and won a match that lasted til 1 AM. I remember attending the daytime US Open, and seeing Agassi lose to Krickstein, as well as Chang beat Mark Woodforde of Australia. Came back to my brother's, and watched the late match that Connors played.
Connors faced Krickstein. Now, normally, Krickstein had a tough time with Connors. Although Krickstein hit as hard as anyone, Connors was aggressive. He exuded confidence, and could rattler Krickstein. Connors had a pretty good record against Krickstein, but it looked as if Krickstein would win this match. The crowd, whipped on by Connors, kept rooting for Connors, and Connors came back and eventually beat Krickstein in five sets.
Krickstein had a pretty solid career. He's retired from the main circuit, and probably plays the occasional senior event. Still, the Krickstein family has produced another athlete. His sister has a daughter, Morgan Pressel, who was runner up at the US Open this year to Birdie Kim. His older sister Kathy, mother of Morgan, unfortunately, died of breast cancer. His wife also had cancer, but through chemotherapy, she seems to have recovered.
It would be great to find out more about the players that never quite made it to the next stage. Krickstein was maybe the tenth ranked player in the world. He may have been a little higher than that, but not much more so. Yet, history may not remember him so well. The quiet man from Grosse Pointe, Michigan, who started his career off in a big way, and was a stepping stone in Connors one last hurrah. Yet, he prefers to look beyond that one moment that seems to define him.
It's strange how sports can do that. What saves Krickstein, other than memories of many other matches, is simply that tennis is not that well-followed a sport in the US. People just don't watch it that much. But there will be those of us who remember him and say that was a pretty good player in the day.
Nick's background was a bit unusual. He had been a paratrooper before going into tennis. He basically let his players hit they way they wanted. He didn't mold players into holding the racquet in a particular way. Even so, the successful players from his academy seemed to share traits in common. They hit big forehands, but they couldn't really serve, nor volley.
The first phenom to find success was Jimmy Arias. Jimmy was a scrapper. He'd run, dig out shots, and then try to beat you with his forehand. But the serve was eh, His volley was eh. He found success in the summer American clay court circuit, back when there was such a clay court circuit. It's hard to believe it even existed. With the US Open having been played on hard courts since 1978, there weren't that many hard court tournaments leading up to the US Open, until nearly ten years later.
Four big clay court tournaments were held. The first was at the Longwood Cricket Club in Boston. Then, the following tournament was held in Vermont or New Hampshire. Then, Washington DC hosted a clay court tournament. Finally, the clay court championships held in Indianapolis. The big names of American tennis didn't play much on these surfaces. McEnroe and Connors preferred to take the time off.
Even the great players of Europe or South America also took a pass. Wilander and Vilas never really played. Jose Luis Clerc played well one year. Arias once won three of four these clay court tournaments.
Shortly after Arias came out, there was Aaron Krickstein. Arias was an affable, outgoing players. Krickstein, by contrast, was very quiet. While Jewish athletes are uncommon in many sports, in tennis, they were reasonably well-represented. Krickstein, the Gottfried brothers, Brad Gilbert, Harold Solomon, and players from Israel like Shlomo Glickstein. No, really, that was his name.
Krickstein was a bit like Arias. Big forehand, so-so serve, so-so volley. Krickstein, however, had a two-handed backhand, and this meant he was much steadier on the backhand. You could bully Arias on his backhand, which he flung around as if his arm would fall off. In the best year Arias had, he reached the US Open semifinals, where Lendl just bullied him into submission. Lendl hit harder off the ground than Arias, but more important, Lendl could serve. Arias was game, but no match for the more powerful Lendl.
Krickstein would be known for three matches. All three were played at the US Open. Two wins and a loss. One of his wins was against Vitas Gerulaitis in the third round of the 83 US Open. Vitas was a solid player, but he could play nervous. He double faulted fifteen times to give Aaron the match. He also beat then-unknown Stefan Edberg in the first round. Edberg is the only player to have won the junior Grand Slam. Krickstein was only 16 years old. He would lose in the following round to the acrobatic Yannick Noah, who had won his only Grand Slam event earlier that year at the French Open.
In 1991, Krickstein would upset Andre Agassi in the first round, and make it to the fourth round where he faced a resurgent Jimmy Connors. Connors had already pulled a rabbit out of the hat by winning his first round match against Patrick McEnroe, John's younger brother. Patrick had more in common with Krickstein than his brother John. He played baseline. He had a two handed backhand. He didn't serve particularly well. Where John won several Grand Slam titles, the closest Patrick ever got was a semifinal appearance at the Australian. And, much unlike John, Patrick rarely complained on court. He knew how to keep his temper.
Even though it appears, at the age of 39, that Connors would have a quick exit, he kept digging and digging. With the support of the New York crowd, he came back and won a match that lasted til 1 AM. I remember attending the daytime US Open, and seeing Agassi lose to Krickstein, as well as Chang beat Mark Woodforde of Australia. Came back to my brother's, and watched the late match that Connors played.
Connors faced Krickstein. Now, normally, Krickstein had a tough time with Connors. Although Krickstein hit as hard as anyone, Connors was aggressive. He exuded confidence, and could rattler Krickstein. Connors had a pretty good record against Krickstein, but it looked as if Krickstein would win this match. The crowd, whipped on by Connors, kept rooting for Connors, and Connors came back and eventually beat Krickstein in five sets.
Krickstein had a pretty solid career. He's retired from the main circuit, and probably plays the occasional senior event. Still, the Krickstein family has produced another athlete. His sister has a daughter, Morgan Pressel, who was runner up at the US Open this year to Birdie Kim. His older sister Kathy, mother of Morgan, unfortunately, died of breast cancer. His wife also had cancer, but through chemotherapy, she seems to have recovered.
It would be great to find out more about the players that never quite made it to the next stage. Krickstein was maybe the tenth ranked player in the world. He may have been a little higher than that, but not much more so. Yet, history may not remember him so well. The quiet man from Grosse Pointe, Michigan, who started his career off in a big way, and was a stepping stone in Connors one last hurrah. Yet, he prefers to look beyond that one moment that seems to define him.
It's strange how sports can do that. What saves Krickstein, other than memories of many other matches, is simply that tennis is not that well-followed a sport in the US. People just don't watch it that much. But there will be those of us who remember him and say that was a pretty good player in the day.
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
Ivan the Terrible
I began watching tennis in 1982. That's too bad, really, because Bjorn Borg had just taken his "sabbatical". He left the game at 26, claiming he was burned out. Borg had won Wimbledon five times in a row, on a surface he should have had no chance on---grass. Borg was the consummate clay courter. He could twenty, thiry, forty topspin shots in a row. He was a quick mover, and ran down shot after shot after shot. It was said that Borg was a machine. He didn't pout. He didn't react.
John McEnroe, in many ways, was his opposite. He was temperamental. He served and volleyed. He relied on touch, and a wicked left-handed serve. Tennis had never quite seen, nor I suspect, may ever see a talent like McEnroe. It's true that, in today's world of power tennis, McEnroe would simply be outhit. But in his day, he could play with the big boys.
Borg played a historical match to win his fifth Wimbledon. Having lost the fourth set tiebreak 18-16. Realize that tiebreaks in tennis is the first to 7 points, with a lead of two, and you can imagine at what fever-pitch this tiebreak went. Momentum should have shifted to McEnroe, who dodged a bullet. Yet, Borg hung tough, and would not lose serve in the fifth, ultimately winning it 8-6 in the fifth.
McEnroe was to gain his revenge twice. Later that summer, in the US Open, Borg would lose to McEnroe in five sets. Although Borg had his chances, his best chance was perhaps the previous year, where he had the misfortune of facing Roscoe Tanner, perhaps the hardest server on the tour. Had he managed to beat him, he would have played his good buddy Vitas Gerulaitis. He and Vitas would play some twenty times, and Vitas won...what? Never? Never. That would have been the semifinals. He would have met McEnroe in the finals, who was then, just brand new, just making good on his talent that he displayed with a qualifier to semifinal appearance at Wimbledon in 1977 (losing to Connors).
McEnroe would beat Borg in four sets at Wimbledon, the following year, in 1981, and would beat him again at the US Open. Borg never won the US Open.
I began watching tennis in 1982. By that point, Borg was semi-retired. One player that was seeking to be the new Borg was a Czech player, Ivan Lendl. Although people compared Lendl to Borg, they were quite different.
Borg was the best of the steady baseliners that began to dominate tennis in the mid to late 70s. Players of this mold included Guillermo Vilas, Jose Luis Clerc, and Harold Solomon. They were steady, steady players, who beat you by waiting for you to make mistakes. With their heavy topspin strokes, they could keep the ball in play, hitting hard, yet, hardly missing. Connors, by contrast, hit a flat shot, with the ball barely skimming the net, and was prone to errors, if the rallies lasted twenty or more shots. Only a player like Borg could hit that consistently against Connors.
Lendl, on the other hand, ushered in a new era of players, that included the likes of Becker, Agassi, and Sampras. He had a power forehand that had to be seen to be believed. Make no mistake, Borg had a good forehand, and he could pin you back with his forehand, and he passed as well as anyone, but he didn't hit winners like Lendl could. In the late 70s, there were few players that could hit winners past you from the baseline, while you were at the baseline too.
Lendl could do that. Even better, he had a monstrous serve. He would toss the ball some ten feet up, and could ace you left and right. He wasn't exactly Kevin Curren, nor was he McEnroe, but that serve was close to being in their league.
Early in his career, he made a habit of beating McEnroe. He would intimidate McEnroe, until McEnroe would stay back, and try to trade baseline shots. Bad idea. Lendl was too good at that. Yet, Lendl struggled against Connors. Connors could deal with Lendl's serve, and match pace for pace with Lendl. It took Lendl until the late 80s before he figured out a reliable way to beat Connors. Soft slice shots, and slow the pace. Connors worked best if you gave him pace. Not so well, if you pitty pat him. This was the strategy Arthur Ashe used to beat Connors at Wimbledon in 1975 , except Ashe, being a serve and volleyer, did volleys some too.
Lendl had a remarkable record at the US Open, appearing in every final from 1982 to 1990. He appeared in every final of the Masters from 1981 to 1990. As good as he was, he often faced someone who was better that day. If Lendl had the winning percentage of Sampras, he'd go down as the best player the game had ever produced. He might have won nine US Opens in a row.
Yet, he lost to Pat Cash and Boris Becker and Mats Wilander and Pete Sampras, not to mention Jimmy Connors, Bjorn Borg, and John McEnroe.
Lendl didn't have many fans. In a world where beauty brings money and fans, Lendl was an ugly man. People said he played like a robot. He didn't have the dashing looks of Borg. And, he became increasingly irasicble. Learning from McEnroe, he would complain, he would delay games by taking full breaks between points.
Yet, when you look at the modern crop of players, they owe far more to Lendl than they do to McEnroe. People admired McEnroe, but few imitated him. Few could. Lendl was the first of the big forehands. Players like Courier, Agassi, Krickstein, Arias would follow in that mold.
After years of success, Lendl had but one obsession in tennis, and it consumed him. Winning Wimbledon. He reached the finals twice, and semifinals numerous times. This for a man who claimed at the beginning of his career that Wimbledon was only fit for cows. He hired serve-and-volleyer Aussie, Tony Roche, to coach him, and learned to volley after a fashion.
No one I can recall has ever made a similar commitment. Lendl was not a natural serve and volleyer. He never became one. Yet, his effort did pay dividends. He looked much better as a volleyer after years of practice. What eventually hurt him, ironically enough, was that he didn't try it out often enough. He reserved his serve and volley play to grass tournaments which he might play three times a year.
He needed to serve and volley on the hard courts too, yet, due to the need to keep his rankings up, he went and played baseline tennis. Had he truly committed to playing serve and volley year-round, he may have made the most complete transformation of any player, ever.
Look at a player like Venus. She's tall. She serves hard. She even plays doubles. But she rarely serves and volleys. She's like most modern players of today. Hits from the baseline, and comes in as necessary.
Fans should have respected Lendl more. He did as much as he could with the talent he had. He wasn't untalented, but he tried to control as many elements as he could, from diet to workout to training to travel schedule. Most fans are like that. They'll never be great at tennis. But they could have learned a thing or two from Lendl, who did the best he could with what he could do.
John McEnroe, in many ways, was his opposite. He was temperamental. He served and volleyed. He relied on touch, and a wicked left-handed serve. Tennis had never quite seen, nor I suspect, may ever see a talent like McEnroe. It's true that, in today's world of power tennis, McEnroe would simply be outhit. But in his day, he could play with the big boys.
Borg played a historical match to win his fifth Wimbledon. Having lost the fourth set tiebreak 18-16. Realize that tiebreaks in tennis is the first to 7 points, with a lead of two, and you can imagine at what fever-pitch this tiebreak went. Momentum should have shifted to McEnroe, who dodged a bullet. Yet, Borg hung tough, and would not lose serve in the fifth, ultimately winning it 8-6 in the fifth.
McEnroe was to gain his revenge twice. Later that summer, in the US Open, Borg would lose to McEnroe in five sets. Although Borg had his chances, his best chance was perhaps the previous year, where he had the misfortune of facing Roscoe Tanner, perhaps the hardest server on the tour. Had he managed to beat him, he would have played his good buddy Vitas Gerulaitis. He and Vitas would play some twenty times, and Vitas won...what? Never? Never. That would have been the semifinals. He would have met McEnroe in the finals, who was then, just brand new, just making good on his talent that he displayed with a qualifier to semifinal appearance at Wimbledon in 1977 (losing to Connors).
McEnroe would beat Borg in four sets at Wimbledon, the following year, in 1981, and would beat him again at the US Open. Borg never won the US Open.
I began watching tennis in 1982. By that point, Borg was semi-retired. One player that was seeking to be the new Borg was a Czech player, Ivan Lendl. Although people compared Lendl to Borg, they were quite different.
Borg was the best of the steady baseliners that began to dominate tennis in the mid to late 70s. Players of this mold included Guillermo Vilas, Jose Luis Clerc, and Harold Solomon. They were steady, steady players, who beat you by waiting for you to make mistakes. With their heavy topspin strokes, they could keep the ball in play, hitting hard, yet, hardly missing. Connors, by contrast, hit a flat shot, with the ball barely skimming the net, and was prone to errors, if the rallies lasted twenty or more shots. Only a player like Borg could hit that consistently against Connors.
Lendl, on the other hand, ushered in a new era of players, that included the likes of Becker, Agassi, and Sampras. He had a power forehand that had to be seen to be believed. Make no mistake, Borg had a good forehand, and he could pin you back with his forehand, and he passed as well as anyone, but he didn't hit winners like Lendl could. In the late 70s, there were few players that could hit winners past you from the baseline, while you were at the baseline too.
Lendl could do that. Even better, he had a monstrous serve. He would toss the ball some ten feet up, and could ace you left and right. He wasn't exactly Kevin Curren, nor was he McEnroe, but that serve was close to being in their league.
Early in his career, he made a habit of beating McEnroe. He would intimidate McEnroe, until McEnroe would stay back, and try to trade baseline shots. Bad idea. Lendl was too good at that. Yet, Lendl struggled against Connors. Connors could deal with Lendl's serve, and match pace for pace with Lendl. It took Lendl until the late 80s before he figured out a reliable way to beat Connors. Soft slice shots, and slow the pace. Connors worked best if you gave him pace. Not so well, if you pitty pat him. This was the strategy Arthur Ashe used to beat Connors at Wimbledon in 1975 , except Ashe, being a serve and volleyer, did volleys some too.
Lendl had a remarkable record at the US Open, appearing in every final from 1982 to 1990. He appeared in every final of the Masters from 1981 to 1990. As good as he was, he often faced someone who was better that day. If Lendl had the winning percentage of Sampras, he'd go down as the best player the game had ever produced. He might have won nine US Opens in a row.
Yet, he lost to Pat Cash and Boris Becker and Mats Wilander and Pete Sampras, not to mention Jimmy Connors, Bjorn Borg, and John McEnroe.
Lendl didn't have many fans. In a world where beauty brings money and fans, Lendl was an ugly man. People said he played like a robot. He didn't have the dashing looks of Borg. And, he became increasingly irasicble. Learning from McEnroe, he would complain, he would delay games by taking full breaks between points.
Yet, when you look at the modern crop of players, they owe far more to Lendl than they do to McEnroe. People admired McEnroe, but few imitated him. Few could. Lendl was the first of the big forehands. Players like Courier, Agassi, Krickstein, Arias would follow in that mold.
After years of success, Lendl had but one obsession in tennis, and it consumed him. Winning Wimbledon. He reached the finals twice, and semifinals numerous times. This for a man who claimed at the beginning of his career that Wimbledon was only fit for cows. He hired serve-and-volleyer Aussie, Tony Roche, to coach him, and learned to volley after a fashion.
No one I can recall has ever made a similar commitment. Lendl was not a natural serve and volleyer. He never became one. Yet, his effort did pay dividends. He looked much better as a volleyer after years of practice. What eventually hurt him, ironically enough, was that he didn't try it out often enough. He reserved his serve and volley play to grass tournaments which he might play three times a year.
He needed to serve and volley on the hard courts too, yet, due to the need to keep his rankings up, he went and played baseline tennis. Had he truly committed to playing serve and volley year-round, he may have made the most complete transformation of any player, ever.
Look at a player like Venus. She's tall. She serves hard. She even plays doubles. But she rarely serves and volleys. She's like most modern players of today. Hits from the baseline, and comes in as necessary.
Fans should have respected Lendl more. He did as much as he could with the talent he had. He wasn't untalented, but he tried to control as many elements as he could, from diet to workout to training to travel schedule. Most fans are like that. They'll never be great at tennis. But they could have learned a thing or two from Lendl, who did the best he could with what he could do.
Up, Up, and Away
Instant messengers (IM) are the new kids on the block when it comes to new forms of communication. When I started teaching in 1998, it was still relatively uncommon, but even then, high school students and younger were adopting this new form of technology. It had one benefit over the phone. It was basically free. Well, at least, once you paid for Internet access, it was unlimited yap, yap, yap.
Instant messenging has created new protocols when it comes to interaction. On a phone, any pause lasting longer than ten seconds is uncomfortable, and so people are compelled to talk or hang up. Why? Money. You may not think about it much, but when every minute of a phone calls costs something, you say something. Nothing costs. Of course, no one thinks about that anymore. They just feel it's awkward.
There's a second reason you talk. Phones are a pain to hold. Were it some device that's comfortable and sits in your ear and were the cost free, you might decide long pauses aren't a problem, especially if it doesn't interfere with what you're doing. However, phones do interfere.
Those are the two reasons you find people talking all the time on the phone, or hanging up if there's nothing to say.
On the other hand, instant messenging requires a computer. If you're on a computer, chances are you're not using it solely to chat. If anything, you're playing a game, watching a video, listening to music, or most likely, surfing the web. Thus, if someone sends a message, you're inclination, unlike a phone call, can simply be to ignore that person.
Newbies to messenging (mostly older folks) complain that the person being messaged (is that even a verb?) often won't respond instantly to messenging. How dare they! They don't call it instant for nothing. (These folks complain that recipients of email should respond right away, just because they can). Newbies (or noobs) expect the interaction to be much like the phone. In fact, these folks are most likely sitting there waiting for a response, with nothing else to do, eagerly awaiting your reply.
Once you get experience chatting, delays are permissible. In fact, some people just leave. A few are polite enough to tell you, hey, I'm outta here. Talk to you some other time, even if that's just a polite way of saying "I don't want to talk to you in particular, but I don't want to say that since it sounds rude". Since IM windows are likely to stay open for long periods of time, those who leave often put up an away message, indicating what they're up to.
And that finally brings me to the point of this entry. Away messages indicating that you're showering.
It's become common for Generation IM to put their lives on public display. I don't mean they have webcams trained at them 24-7. However, kids these days seem quite willing to tell you what's up with them at all times, usually in the form of away messages. It lets you keep up without actually talking.
My brother, who's more old-school, finds this terribly invasive. Why should anyone know what he's up to? He doesn't want anyone to know if he's at home, at work, watching a movie, anything. It's stalker avoidance syndrome. Yet, it's not that uncommon, if you value some privacy. Yet, many kids don't.
Thus, you know, in particular, that they've decided that they are taking a shower. Now, I suppose this could be completely innocent. After seeing their friends put up similar away messages, it may just seem natural. But my thinking is that it's an attempt to be provocative.
The implicit message is, I want you to know I'm naked, and getting myself squeaky clean. Wink, wink. Oh, I know, I know, you're going to say, it's nothing of the sort. If I'm away, showering, I'll be back in a moment. But how come you never see "pissing", "crapping", "brushing my teeth"? I mean, I'm sure a few people who write that, but by and large, that's too embarassing, yet, in the realm of TMI, you're told about the shower.
Implicit in all of this, I suppose, is that they bathe. Thus, they aren't a complete slob. I won't get into the topic of how people obsess about cleanliness (of course, they would say it's not an obsession, that it's natural to bathe frequently, but that's a topic for another entry).
Now, what takes guts is the "away" message that says you're snogging someone. I know a friend who used to do this. His codeword was "romp". Now, I have to believe that his hidden message was "Hey, I may be diminuitive [he wasn't a tall guy], but I'm getting a lot more than you".
Instant messenging has created new protocols when it comes to interaction. On a phone, any pause lasting longer than ten seconds is uncomfortable, and so people are compelled to talk or hang up. Why? Money. You may not think about it much, but when every minute of a phone calls costs something, you say something. Nothing costs. Of course, no one thinks about that anymore. They just feel it's awkward.
There's a second reason you talk. Phones are a pain to hold. Were it some device that's comfortable and sits in your ear and were the cost free, you might decide long pauses aren't a problem, especially if it doesn't interfere with what you're doing. However, phones do interfere.
Those are the two reasons you find people talking all the time on the phone, or hanging up if there's nothing to say.
On the other hand, instant messenging requires a computer. If you're on a computer, chances are you're not using it solely to chat. If anything, you're playing a game, watching a video, listening to music, or most likely, surfing the web. Thus, if someone sends a message, you're inclination, unlike a phone call, can simply be to ignore that person.
Newbies to messenging (mostly older folks) complain that the person being messaged (is that even a verb?) often won't respond instantly to messenging. How dare they! They don't call it instant for nothing. (These folks complain that recipients of email should respond right away, just because they can). Newbies (or noobs) expect the interaction to be much like the phone. In fact, these folks are most likely sitting there waiting for a response, with nothing else to do, eagerly awaiting your reply.
Once you get experience chatting, delays are permissible. In fact, some people just leave. A few are polite enough to tell you, hey, I'm outta here. Talk to you some other time, even if that's just a polite way of saying "I don't want to talk to you in particular, but I don't want to say that since it sounds rude". Since IM windows are likely to stay open for long periods of time, those who leave often put up an away message, indicating what they're up to.
And that finally brings me to the point of this entry. Away messages indicating that you're showering.
It's become common for Generation IM to put their lives on public display. I don't mean they have webcams trained at them 24-7. However, kids these days seem quite willing to tell you what's up with them at all times, usually in the form of away messages. It lets you keep up without actually talking.
My brother, who's more old-school, finds this terribly invasive. Why should anyone know what he's up to? He doesn't want anyone to know if he's at home, at work, watching a movie, anything. It's stalker avoidance syndrome. Yet, it's not that uncommon, if you value some privacy. Yet, many kids don't.
Thus, you know, in particular, that they've decided that they are taking a shower. Now, I suppose this could be completely innocent. After seeing their friends put up similar away messages, it may just seem natural. But my thinking is that it's an attempt to be provocative.
The implicit message is, I want you to know I'm naked, and getting myself squeaky clean. Wink, wink. Oh, I know, I know, you're going to say, it's nothing of the sort. If I'm away, showering, I'll be back in a moment. But how come you never see "pissing", "crapping", "brushing my teeth"? I mean, I'm sure a few people who write that, but by and large, that's too embarassing, yet, in the realm of TMI, you're told about the shower.
Implicit in all of this, I suppose, is that they bathe. Thus, they aren't a complete slob. I won't get into the topic of how people obsess about cleanliness (of course, they would say it's not an obsession, that it's natural to bathe frequently, but that's a topic for another entry).
Now, what takes guts is the "away" message that says you're snogging someone. I know a friend who used to do this. His codeword was "romp". Now, I have to believe that his hidden message was "Hey, I may be diminuitive [he wasn't a tall guy], but I'm getting a lot more than you".
Monday, August 29, 2005
Where There's a Wilbon
I'd love to credit this title to Michael Wilbon, sports columnist of the Washington Post, and co-host of the ESPN show, Pardon the Interruption. Wilbon (everyone calls him that, or more precisely, Mr. Tony calls him that) has been asked what it takes to be a good writer, and he says to "write, write, and write some more", or words to that effect.
My prodigious blogging is a result of his advice. I believe the more I write, the better I'll get. I've come to the conclusion that it's not happening, at least, not to my satisfaction. My biggest problem is that I write blogs very fast. In thirty minutes, I can crank out ten or more paragraphs, and you'll be reading until the cows come home. This means I don't edit myself very well. I just write and write and write.
Editing. That's my second problem. No one edits me but myself. Frequently, I find I'm blogging about something. I'm four or five paragraphs into the entry when I realize, well, frick, I have nothing profound to say in this entry. I know, I know. I never have anything profound to say in any of my entries.
What I mean is that I write myself into a corner. I have a point, it's weak, I find I have nothing more to say, and yet, it's an awful way to end, so I just rush head-long into any kind of conclusion, and it turns out....awful. I figure, it doesn't matter that much. There's another entry, another thing to write.
Yet, it would be very helpful to have an editor, because when I edit myself, I think, that's wonderful, or if I get stuck, I think, there's no way out. A second or third opinion would give me options. I've never much thought of writing as some kind of game, where you pick one of several potential strategies, and yet I should. My bag of tricks is hardly a bag at all.
The place where my writing suffers the most is writing film reviews. I've read reviews for years, and some of these writers are excellent. Much of that is because they have, you know, an opinion. Well, no, much of that is because they are actually good writers.
Good writers, it seems, are much like the Matrix. You can't explain how they do what they do. You have to see it. (To which, despite his excellent advice, Morpheus begins to explain the Matrix). Why is Mike D'Angelo's prose so much more lucid than mine. Why does Scott Renshaw have so much more to say about a film than I do?
Sure, they've seen ten times the films I have, but there are a few folks that watch films voraciously. These days, I watch one to two films a week, and while that doesn't compare to the five to ten films a film critic will watch in a week, it's still substantive.
My biggest flaw in writing reviews is summarizing. The bane of any review is to summarize what the film's about. It takes no skill to summarize. Well, no, it takes some skill to summarize, to decide which of the many plot points you should reveal, and which should remain hidden. But it takes even more to say something more insightful that "it sucked" or "it rocked", and I frequently find myself wanting to say just that.
For example, I found it difficult to get into The Brothers Grimm. For all its fanstastical set pieces, I was simply not that involved in the story. Part of it were Gilliam's weird excursions, working in plot lines of Grimm fairy tales. Jack and the Beanstalk. Little Red Riding Hood. Cinderella. Gilliam tries too hard to work those in, and for the most part, it doesn't fit. Some of film's problems lie in its tone, of the trickster Grimm brothers in the first half, and the is-it-real-or-not magic in the second. There's a jarring effect as you're questioning whether the magic is real or not. Had it been a better story, I might not have cared. As much as it tries to tell an old story in a fairy-tale way, it is told through modern sensibilities. The tough female trapper is a nod to modern attitudes towards women, as is the scholarly Grimm. It's a mess of a film that has an ending reminiscent of Return of the King, at least, when it comes to towerly collapses.
OK, so that is much closer to what I want. It's still raw and unfocused, but it doesn't summarize nearly as much. At this point, the only way I'm getting better at writing reviews is to write it again and again, until the urge to summarize is excised.
I recall the title of a book called Writing to Learn. The full title (with an Amazon search) is Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All. Writing can be very good for focusing thoughts. But the real key, in the end, is editing. I really need to learn how to edit. Writing isn't enough. Not by itself.
Well, there, I've spent, I don't know how long, trying to explain that I need to edit myself. Yet, I haven't.
I call it The Aristocrats.
My prodigious blogging is a result of his advice. I believe the more I write, the better I'll get. I've come to the conclusion that it's not happening, at least, not to my satisfaction. My biggest problem is that I write blogs very fast. In thirty minutes, I can crank out ten or more paragraphs, and you'll be reading until the cows come home. This means I don't edit myself very well. I just write and write and write.
Editing. That's my second problem. No one edits me but myself. Frequently, I find I'm blogging about something. I'm four or five paragraphs into the entry when I realize, well, frick, I have nothing profound to say in this entry. I know, I know. I never have anything profound to say in any of my entries.
What I mean is that I write myself into a corner. I have a point, it's weak, I find I have nothing more to say, and yet, it's an awful way to end, so I just rush head-long into any kind of conclusion, and it turns out....awful. I figure, it doesn't matter that much. There's another entry, another thing to write.
Yet, it would be very helpful to have an editor, because when I edit myself, I think, that's wonderful, or if I get stuck, I think, there's no way out. A second or third opinion would give me options. I've never much thought of writing as some kind of game, where you pick one of several potential strategies, and yet I should. My bag of tricks is hardly a bag at all.
The place where my writing suffers the most is writing film reviews. I've read reviews for years, and some of these writers are excellent. Much of that is because they have, you know, an opinion. Well, no, much of that is because they are actually good writers.
Good writers, it seems, are much like the Matrix. You can't explain how they do what they do. You have to see it. (To which, despite his excellent advice, Morpheus begins to explain the Matrix). Why is Mike D'Angelo's prose so much more lucid than mine. Why does Scott Renshaw have so much more to say about a film than I do?
Sure, they've seen ten times the films I have, but there are a few folks that watch films voraciously. These days, I watch one to two films a week, and while that doesn't compare to the five to ten films a film critic will watch in a week, it's still substantive.
My biggest flaw in writing reviews is summarizing. The bane of any review is to summarize what the film's about. It takes no skill to summarize. Well, no, it takes some skill to summarize, to decide which of the many plot points you should reveal, and which should remain hidden. But it takes even more to say something more insightful that "it sucked" or "it rocked", and I frequently find myself wanting to say just that.
For example, I found it difficult to get into The Brothers Grimm. For all its fanstastical set pieces, I was simply not that involved in the story. Part of it were Gilliam's weird excursions, working in plot lines of Grimm fairy tales. Jack and the Beanstalk. Little Red Riding Hood. Cinderella. Gilliam tries too hard to work those in, and for the most part, it doesn't fit. Some of film's problems lie in its tone, of the trickster Grimm brothers in the first half, and the is-it-real-or-not magic in the second. There's a jarring effect as you're questioning whether the magic is real or not. Had it been a better story, I might not have cared. As much as it tries to tell an old story in a fairy-tale way, it is told through modern sensibilities. The tough female trapper is a nod to modern attitudes towards women, as is the scholarly Grimm. It's a mess of a film that has an ending reminiscent of Return of the King, at least, when it comes to towerly collapses.
OK, so that is much closer to what I want. It's still raw and unfocused, but it doesn't summarize nearly as much. At this point, the only way I'm getting better at writing reviews is to write it again and again, until the urge to summarize is excised.
I recall the title of a book called Writing to Learn. The full title (with an Amazon search) is Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All. Writing can be very good for focusing thoughts. But the real key, in the end, is editing. I really need to learn how to edit. Writing isn't enough. Not by itself.
Well, there, I've spent, I don't know how long, trying to explain that I need to edit myself. Yet, I haven't.
I call it The Aristocrats.
Sunday, August 28, 2005
Razor's Edge
Perhaps, in some enlightened society, the nerds and geeks will inherit the earth, but more importantly, they will be seen as the coveted. Rock stars, for example, lie in this exalted realm. One only has to realize that Steven Tyler has procreated to realize that anyone, I mean anyone, can get laid if they are a rock star.
I've had a discussion with J. who suggests the reason that some people are unable to woo those they want is because they lack edge. Niceness, while overall a good thing, won't get you what you want. But what is this quality known as edge. It's that quality that makes you less likable in order to make you more likable. In a word, asshole. Well, that's not quite it.
But the formula is more complex. For example, J. has a friend who I think is fairly good looking for a guy, yet, he's quiet. Even so, he's ready to get married. Does this guy have edge? Ah, so there's another factor that's important. How good looking are you? I mean, Ashton Kutcher exudes dorkness, but he's just good looking enough that Demi Moore wants to rock his world. Of course, Kutcher may simply be a rock star, but then, so is Demi.
There's another part of the formula that we're missing, and it's so obvious, yet frequently overlooked. The other person. You see, in trying to meet that special someone, people work on themselves. How can you make yourself more attractive to those you wish to attract?
There's two parts to that question. Being more attractive, which is something you have limited control over. And "those you wish to attract". If you're sufficiently attractive, which doesn't have to be excessively so, there may be people who are attracted to you. And yet, a few of those get dismissed right away, under the theory that "if you're not sexually attracted to person X, don't bother" and not sexually attracted could simply mean "repulsed". Yes, they may be fine, fine individuals who you wouldn't have the heart to say "I would rather lick the back of a great horny toad to give me directions out of an enchanted forest, then stick any appendage, and this includes disposed fingernail clippings, into any orifice you may provide".
I asked someone who's been seeking female companionship whether he knew of any women that wanted him, but whose feelings he was unable to reciprocate. He said, of course, but they were insufferably boring. OK, he didn't use the word "insufferable", but I want to stretch my vocabulary prowess. Even so, there was a potential source of poon tang that he was ultimately rejecting (no, poon tang is not a Thai-flavored artificially sweetened beverage. On the other hand....oh, nevermind).
The point is that, like many things in life, there are things we like and dislike. As much as people complain "Why can't I meet anyone?", they are implicitly saying "Why can't I meet anyone that's absolutely stupedous?". I have a female friend who would make this exact lament to me. I had to point out that she had "dated" two dozen or more men (usually, one date), and that out of the plenty, there were perhaps two or three that would have bedded her were she interested, and of course, she wasn't interested. Implicity in her lament was that she had to minimally, you know, like the person.
Now you may say "Well, duh", but it's a serious point I make. When you eat food, do you eat what's the best tasting food around? Are there not times you will feast on bread and cereal because you're too lazy to make or buy anything better? Of course, unlike love, doing without food will generally kill you, and since food isn't exactly free, at least not without stealing, you will often, often eat whatever, just to suit you. On the other hand, you can afford to do without companionship. It may be painful, but it can be done, for long periods of time.
There's something interesting that I've observed. It's not a deep observation, since most everyone knows this too. People don't want to sleep with their friends. If you do that, then there's the possibility that the ironic act of getting closer emotionally to someone is also likely to wedge you apart, when differences become too much to bear. The real reason people need this distinction between friends and lovers is not so much what happens if friendship gets more serious, but in fact, quite the opposite, when the friendship is the best that one side will allow.
Common scenario. Friend X likes Friend Y. I mean, really likes, but Friend Y doesn't know this. They think "we're just friends". But Friend X can't help the feelings, and so everytime X is near Y, X imagines what it would be like, just once, for there to be more. Y is blissfully unaware. One day, perhaps X lays the smack (verbally, that is) and admits there's more than platonic feelings, and Y gets all freaked out.
If X had merely said "I don't sleep with my friends", then X would be spared such feelings. We're constantly trying to fool ourselves emotionally, to tell ourselves we're not interested, and so forth. We set up rules of protocol such as "tell me if you're attached and happen to be at this party alone, because despite the appearance that I am trying to enjoy myself at this party, I am in predatory mode, seeking bodily euphoria, and if you're off limits, I shall move to another watering hole". Now, tell me, you have to love these metaphors for what amounts to wanting sex.
Anyway, why are there those that have success meeting others, while those that do not? Is it edge? Is it confidence? Is it some mojo quality, some indefinable quantity we can't quite put our finger on? Even if you were told, son, be a little more edgy, that would get you the people you want, would it really?
We spend a lot of time playing this game. Despite generations and generations of people who have come up with solutions that seem reasonable (arranged marriages), we reject advice from those who have gone before us. We claim the rules don't apply to us, then struggle to re-learn what's already been learn. Some anthropologist watching from a distance would wonder why we spend so much effort to do this? Can't we take a pill or do some twelve-step plan that will solve our problems?
In the meanwhile, go practice a few power chords. It's done wonders for Steven Tyler.
I've had a discussion with J. who suggests the reason that some people are unable to woo those they want is because they lack edge. Niceness, while overall a good thing, won't get you what you want. But what is this quality known as edge. It's that quality that makes you less likable in order to make you more likable. In a word, asshole. Well, that's not quite it.
But the formula is more complex. For example, J. has a friend who I think is fairly good looking for a guy, yet, he's quiet. Even so, he's ready to get married. Does this guy have edge? Ah, so there's another factor that's important. How good looking are you? I mean, Ashton Kutcher exudes dorkness, but he's just good looking enough that Demi Moore wants to rock his world. Of course, Kutcher may simply be a rock star, but then, so is Demi.
There's another part of the formula that we're missing, and it's so obvious, yet frequently overlooked. The other person. You see, in trying to meet that special someone, people work on themselves. How can you make yourself more attractive to those you wish to attract?
There's two parts to that question. Being more attractive, which is something you have limited control over. And "those you wish to attract". If you're sufficiently attractive, which doesn't have to be excessively so, there may be people who are attracted to you. And yet, a few of those get dismissed right away, under the theory that "if you're not sexually attracted to person X, don't bother" and not sexually attracted could simply mean "repulsed". Yes, they may be fine, fine individuals who you wouldn't have the heart to say "I would rather lick the back of a great horny toad to give me directions out of an enchanted forest, then stick any appendage, and this includes disposed fingernail clippings, into any orifice you may provide".
I asked someone who's been seeking female companionship whether he knew of any women that wanted him, but whose feelings he was unable to reciprocate. He said, of course, but they were insufferably boring. OK, he didn't use the word "insufferable", but I want to stretch my vocabulary prowess. Even so, there was a potential source of poon tang that he was ultimately rejecting (no, poon tang is not a Thai-flavored artificially sweetened beverage. On the other hand....oh, nevermind).
The point is that, like many things in life, there are things we like and dislike. As much as people complain "Why can't I meet anyone?", they are implicitly saying "Why can't I meet anyone that's absolutely stupedous?". I have a female friend who would make this exact lament to me. I had to point out that she had "dated" two dozen or more men (usually, one date), and that out of the plenty, there were perhaps two or three that would have bedded her were she interested, and of course, she wasn't interested. Implicity in her lament was that she had to minimally, you know, like the person.
Now you may say "Well, duh", but it's a serious point I make. When you eat food, do you eat what's the best tasting food around? Are there not times you will feast on bread and cereal because you're too lazy to make or buy anything better? Of course, unlike love, doing without food will generally kill you, and since food isn't exactly free, at least not without stealing, you will often, often eat whatever, just to suit you. On the other hand, you can afford to do without companionship. It may be painful, but it can be done, for long periods of time.
There's something interesting that I've observed. It's not a deep observation, since most everyone knows this too. People don't want to sleep with their friends. If you do that, then there's the possibility that the ironic act of getting closer emotionally to someone is also likely to wedge you apart, when differences become too much to bear. The real reason people need this distinction between friends and lovers is not so much what happens if friendship gets more serious, but in fact, quite the opposite, when the friendship is the best that one side will allow.
Common scenario. Friend X likes Friend Y. I mean, really likes, but Friend Y doesn't know this. They think "we're just friends". But Friend X can't help the feelings, and so everytime X is near Y, X imagines what it would be like, just once, for there to be more. Y is blissfully unaware. One day, perhaps X lays the smack (verbally, that is) and admits there's more than platonic feelings, and Y gets all freaked out.
If X had merely said "I don't sleep with my friends", then X would be spared such feelings. We're constantly trying to fool ourselves emotionally, to tell ourselves we're not interested, and so forth. We set up rules of protocol such as "tell me if you're attached and happen to be at this party alone, because despite the appearance that I am trying to enjoy myself at this party, I am in predatory mode, seeking bodily euphoria, and if you're off limits, I shall move to another watering hole". Now, tell me, you have to love these metaphors for what amounts to wanting sex.
Anyway, why are there those that have success meeting others, while those that do not? Is it edge? Is it confidence? Is it some mojo quality, some indefinable quantity we can't quite put our finger on? Even if you were told, son, be a little more edgy, that would get you the people you want, would it really?
We spend a lot of time playing this game. Despite generations and generations of people who have come up with solutions that seem reasonable (arranged marriages), we reject advice from those who have gone before us. We claim the rules don't apply to us, then struggle to re-learn what's already been learn. Some anthropologist watching from a distance would wonder why we spend so much effort to do this? Can't we take a pill or do some twelve-step plan that will solve our problems?
In the meanwhile, go practice a few power chords. It's done wonders for Steven Tyler.
Straws and Camels
You know, I like making titles for my blog entries. Most of the times, it allows me to be clever, even if I'm probably the only person who revels in my own cleverness. For example, I'm going to do a no-no and explain the title of this entry. Straws and Camels seems like an unusual combination of words, no?
Ask yourself, when have you heard straws and camels together? If your first thought about straws is drinking straws, then you're on the wrong track. I'm talking about hay. There's a phrase that, unless English is not your native tongue, that you should have heard that goes "the straw the broke the camel's back". I suppose the imagery is that there is some limit at which a camel's back would break, and that this limit can be measured to an individual stray.
In it's popular parlance, it means that there have been a series of things that have been bugging a person, but they've managed to keep quiet. However, this is the "last straw", and the person is going to burst, typically in a fit of rage.
And you'd think that's what I'm going to write about, but it's not.
I'm going to talk about Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain. Ang Lee has had an unusual career. His first well-known film was The Wedding Banquet. This tells the story of a Taiwanese man working in the United States. His parents live in Taiwan and want him to get married. In countries that have a great deal of history, such as all of Asia, marriage is a big deal.
It's such a big deal that marriage is taken out of the hands of the person getting married, and put into the hands of parents. Perhaps the country that still embodies this the most is India (and Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, and all the other countries in the subcontinent). Arranged marriages are still extremely common. Parents pick spouses for their children, based on the goodness of the other family. Are they a good family, of the right caste, of the right educational background?
Even countries like China, Japan, Taiwan, etc. that have long since abandoned arrange marriage still believe in the importance of getting married by the time a person is 30. I remember watching a Chinese variety show (this form of entertainment, which faded from American television, is still popular in Asian television) where a famous woman singer was approaching thirty. The emcee asked when she was going to get married. She was rather coy about the answer, but it begins to show you the kind of societal pressure that's on people to get married.
You'd never see that kind of pressure on a talk show. Could you imagine David Letterman asking, say, Madonna (were she Ritchie-less), when she was going to get married? Maybe once upon a time, this was a big deal, but with divorce rate as high as it is, people are more reluctant to get married, so it's hardly raised, but hardly seen as unusual.
Anyway, The Wedding Banquet deals with how a gay Chinese man lies to his parents, tells them that he's dating a Chinese girl and plans to marry her. They come for a visit, when a chef who served under this man's father insists on making a fabulous wedding banquet. If anything, we have Ang Lee to blame for food-based themes. He followed this film up with Eat, Drink, Man, Woman about a chef who's lost his ability to taste food, and his travails with his three daughters.
Both of these films were made in Taiwan. Most people think of Ang Lee as being from Taiwan, which he is, but he received his training in film in the United States at NYU film school. He even served as an assistant on one of Spike Lee's student films. Thus, Ang is quite familiar with English.
His breakthrough in English-themed films started with Sense and Sensibility, where Emma Thompson was both star and cowriter. He followed this up with the excellent The Ice Storm, Ride With The Devil, a little seen Civil War drama starring singer, Jewel, and Hulk.
Even though Hulk tanked, people are looking forward to Brokeback Mountain, about two cowboys played by Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger. I've only seen Gyllenhaal in Donnie Darko, which is an excellent cult film. I haven't seen that much of Ledger. A little bit in A Knight's Tale. From that, I wasn't sure how good an actor he was. It's the kind of role that many a prettyboy takes on.
However, he showed some acting chops in the generally unremarkable The Brothers Grimm playing bookish, Jacob Grimm.
There has been speculation in the gay community how explicit the sex scenes in Brokeback Mountain will be. Rumor is that Ang Lee wants to hold back from being explicit. It's difficult to say how important love scenes are for the film. Dave despises what Spielberg did to The Color Purple where the lesbian scenes with Whoopi Goldberg were underplayed to make the film more palatable to the viewing public, even if Alice Walker's book is far more explicit.
There are several reasons to add more explicit scenes to the film. The first reason, and most important, is that it contributes to the storyline. For example, one could imagine that it's the kind of passion that the two leads have for each other that keep them in each other's minds. Especially in a repressed setting, showing how far they go may be key to their relationship.
The second reason, which can't be underestimated, is that a gay crowd simply wants to see it. I recently watched Take Me Out. The story could have been told without nudity. It wouldn't have detracted from the story that much, and yet, it would have killed the audience it got. As much as gay play-attending audience loves good plays, it never hurts to have a little eye-candy on the side. It's surprising, really, that non-gay films don't play up the sexuality more. Perhaps the hottest of those films I can recall is Y Tu Mama Tambien, which is nevertheless, a great, great film.
The third reason is for straight audiences. The more gay love scenes are played in mainstream films, the more straight audiences will be accustomed to seeing it. Right now, it's still very common for guys to be squeamish about seeing unclothed guys, and frankly, even women have this problem, too. Yet, the more often it's seen and portrayed, the more audiences get used to the idea, and don't think of it in negative terms. It becomes a countervailing force to the homophobia that surrounds sports and the military.
Ironically, many films that have gay characters are invariably played by straight actors. I watched the British film AKA, often compared to The Talented Mr. Ripley, about a working class teen who pretends to be the son of minor royalty. He hangs around the jet-set, spends other people's money, and what's more, it's a true story.
In one of the scenes, they are at one man's beach house, and Dean, who's the guy pretending to be who he's not, goes into a bedroom, where his sugar daddy and an American hanger-on are in the bed, the sugar daddy having fallen asleep on top of the American. Both are nude. Now, all three are played by straight actors.
In the voice-over commentary, the director pointed out how incredibly uncomfortable the guy at the bottom was lying naked underneath another naked man.
Yet, acting compels people to explore the extent of what will or won't offend them. Good actors can emotionally distance themselves from actions that no other person would even consider. Furthermore, actors learn to be far more emotional than the average person. There's a suggestion that if actors can explore their limitations, that anyone, in principle could.
Now you would think that a conservative Asian country like Taiwan (let's not get into issues of the nationhood of Taiwan for now) would not embrace gay films. Yet, like the German film Maybe...Maybe Not which was apparently hugely successful at the German box office, Formula 17, a gay sex comedy made in Taiwan (and directed by a woman!) was also a box office success.
I don't expect Brokeback Mountain to necessarily be any good. Don't get me wrong. Ang Lee is a good director, but making good films takes a bit of work and luck. He might get it from both ends (so to speak) from conservatives who don't want to see mainstream portrayals of an alternative lifestyle, to the gay community who may complain he hasn't gone far enough. A good story may overcome both.
The film is scheduled to come out at the end of the first week of December, and I suspect the goal is to keep it fresh among Oscar voters. Good films are almost always slated for a December release to maximize the chances of winning an Oscar. Gone are the days when a film like Silence of the Lambs, released in March, wins an Oscar. With no quality films released this year, we're heading to the usual crop of December-released films to make up the bulk of Oscar nominations.
OK, I know the Oscars suck. For the popular audiences, films are nominated that few have seen. For the cinemarati, the truly outstanding films aren't even nominated, for fear they are too difficult, too offensive, or, too non-English. For example, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, director of Tropical Malady, is unlikely to garner any nominations. Tropical Malady is also somewhat gay-themed, though not in the obvious ways that Brokeback Mountain is.
Now that I think of it, there's probably still one community where actors are fearful of portraying gay characters and that's the African American community. While it's not a big deal for Gyllenhaal or Ledger to play gay, it may be a big deal for Jamie Foxx or Denzel Washington to do so. In Six Degrees of Separation, Will Smith plays a young, black gay hustler. Yet, when there's a sex scene, he was advised by friends not to be kissing no guy.
Can Ang Lee work magic in December? We'll see.
Ask yourself, when have you heard straws and camels together? If your first thought about straws is drinking straws, then you're on the wrong track. I'm talking about hay. There's a phrase that, unless English is not your native tongue, that you should have heard that goes "the straw the broke the camel's back". I suppose the imagery is that there is some limit at which a camel's back would break, and that this limit can be measured to an individual stray.
In it's popular parlance, it means that there have been a series of things that have been bugging a person, but they've managed to keep quiet. However, this is the "last straw", and the person is going to burst, typically in a fit of rage.
And you'd think that's what I'm going to write about, but it's not.
I'm going to talk about Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain. Ang Lee has had an unusual career. His first well-known film was The Wedding Banquet. This tells the story of a Taiwanese man working in the United States. His parents live in Taiwan and want him to get married. In countries that have a great deal of history, such as all of Asia, marriage is a big deal.
It's such a big deal that marriage is taken out of the hands of the person getting married, and put into the hands of parents. Perhaps the country that still embodies this the most is India (and Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, and all the other countries in the subcontinent). Arranged marriages are still extremely common. Parents pick spouses for their children, based on the goodness of the other family. Are they a good family, of the right caste, of the right educational background?
Even countries like China, Japan, Taiwan, etc. that have long since abandoned arrange marriage still believe in the importance of getting married by the time a person is 30. I remember watching a Chinese variety show (this form of entertainment, which faded from American television, is still popular in Asian television) where a famous woman singer was approaching thirty. The emcee asked when she was going to get married. She was rather coy about the answer, but it begins to show you the kind of societal pressure that's on people to get married.
You'd never see that kind of pressure on a talk show. Could you imagine David Letterman asking, say, Madonna (were she Ritchie-less), when she was going to get married? Maybe once upon a time, this was a big deal, but with divorce rate as high as it is, people are more reluctant to get married, so it's hardly raised, but hardly seen as unusual.
Anyway, The Wedding Banquet deals with how a gay Chinese man lies to his parents, tells them that he's dating a Chinese girl and plans to marry her. They come for a visit, when a chef who served under this man's father insists on making a fabulous wedding banquet. If anything, we have Ang Lee to blame for food-based themes. He followed this film up with Eat, Drink, Man, Woman about a chef who's lost his ability to taste food, and his travails with his three daughters.
Both of these films were made in Taiwan. Most people think of Ang Lee as being from Taiwan, which he is, but he received his training in film in the United States at NYU film school. He even served as an assistant on one of Spike Lee's student films. Thus, Ang is quite familiar with English.
His breakthrough in English-themed films started with Sense and Sensibility, where Emma Thompson was both star and cowriter. He followed this up with the excellent The Ice Storm, Ride With The Devil, a little seen Civil War drama starring singer, Jewel, and Hulk.
Even though Hulk tanked, people are looking forward to Brokeback Mountain, about two cowboys played by Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger. I've only seen Gyllenhaal in Donnie Darko, which is an excellent cult film. I haven't seen that much of Ledger. A little bit in A Knight's Tale. From that, I wasn't sure how good an actor he was. It's the kind of role that many a prettyboy takes on.
However, he showed some acting chops in the generally unremarkable The Brothers Grimm playing bookish, Jacob Grimm.
There has been speculation in the gay community how explicit the sex scenes in Brokeback Mountain will be. Rumor is that Ang Lee wants to hold back from being explicit. It's difficult to say how important love scenes are for the film. Dave despises what Spielberg did to The Color Purple where the lesbian scenes with Whoopi Goldberg were underplayed to make the film more palatable to the viewing public, even if Alice Walker's book is far more explicit.
There are several reasons to add more explicit scenes to the film. The first reason, and most important, is that it contributes to the storyline. For example, one could imagine that it's the kind of passion that the two leads have for each other that keep them in each other's minds. Especially in a repressed setting, showing how far they go may be key to their relationship.
The second reason, which can't be underestimated, is that a gay crowd simply wants to see it. I recently watched Take Me Out. The story could have been told without nudity. It wouldn't have detracted from the story that much, and yet, it would have killed the audience it got. As much as gay play-attending audience loves good plays, it never hurts to have a little eye-candy on the side. It's surprising, really, that non-gay films don't play up the sexuality more. Perhaps the hottest of those films I can recall is Y Tu Mama Tambien, which is nevertheless, a great, great film.
The third reason is for straight audiences. The more gay love scenes are played in mainstream films, the more straight audiences will be accustomed to seeing it. Right now, it's still very common for guys to be squeamish about seeing unclothed guys, and frankly, even women have this problem, too. Yet, the more often it's seen and portrayed, the more audiences get used to the idea, and don't think of it in negative terms. It becomes a countervailing force to the homophobia that surrounds sports and the military.
Ironically, many films that have gay characters are invariably played by straight actors. I watched the British film AKA, often compared to The Talented Mr. Ripley, about a working class teen who pretends to be the son of minor royalty. He hangs around the jet-set, spends other people's money, and what's more, it's a true story.
In one of the scenes, they are at one man's beach house, and Dean, who's the guy pretending to be who he's not, goes into a bedroom, where his sugar daddy and an American hanger-on are in the bed, the sugar daddy having fallen asleep on top of the American. Both are nude. Now, all three are played by straight actors.
In the voice-over commentary, the director pointed out how incredibly uncomfortable the guy at the bottom was lying naked underneath another naked man.
Yet, acting compels people to explore the extent of what will or won't offend them. Good actors can emotionally distance themselves from actions that no other person would even consider. Furthermore, actors learn to be far more emotional than the average person. There's a suggestion that if actors can explore their limitations, that anyone, in principle could.
Now you would think that a conservative Asian country like Taiwan (let's not get into issues of the nationhood of Taiwan for now) would not embrace gay films. Yet, like the German film Maybe...Maybe Not which was apparently hugely successful at the German box office, Formula 17, a gay sex comedy made in Taiwan (and directed by a woman!) was also a box office success.
I don't expect Brokeback Mountain to necessarily be any good. Don't get me wrong. Ang Lee is a good director, but making good films takes a bit of work and luck. He might get it from both ends (so to speak) from conservatives who don't want to see mainstream portrayals of an alternative lifestyle, to the gay community who may complain he hasn't gone far enough. A good story may overcome both.
The film is scheduled to come out at the end of the first week of December, and I suspect the goal is to keep it fresh among Oscar voters. Good films are almost always slated for a December release to maximize the chances of winning an Oscar. Gone are the days when a film like Silence of the Lambs, released in March, wins an Oscar. With no quality films released this year, we're heading to the usual crop of December-released films to make up the bulk of Oscar nominations.
OK, I know the Oscars suck. For the popular audiences, films are nominated that few have seen. For the cinemarati, the truly outstanding films aren't even nominated, for fear they are too difficult, too offensive, or, too non-English. For example, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, director of Tropical Malady, is unlikely to garner any nominations. Tropical Malady is also somewhat gay-themed, though not in the obvious ways that Brokeback Mountain is.
Now that I think of it, there's probably still one community where actors are fearful of portraying gay characters and that's the African American community. While it's not a big deal for Gyllenhaal or Ledger to play gay, it may be a big deal for Jamie Foxx or Denzel Washington to do so. In Six Degrees of Separation, Will Smith plays a young, black gay hustler. Yet, when there's a sex scene, he was advised by friends not to be kissing no guy.
Can Ang Lee work magic in December? We'll see.
Smile
I realize that I should write more humorous entries in my blog. Funny is good. Funny sells. I just need to tell something funny. However, most people lack a talent for being funny. In order to be funny, you have to try to be funny, and then you need some idea of what works for the audience you're trying to be funny to, and then you have to be able to think on your feet. That's the hardest part of being funny. You can, for example, be a hilarious writer, because you have the time to think about your humor, but not be funny in person, because you don't think quick enough to say something funny.
Obviously, I've blown my chance to be funny with you. You see, if I knew you better, I might be able to rely on easy standbys for easy laughs. I could say, for instance, Gojira! in a bad Japanese accent. Gojira, for those that are Japanese-imparied, is the Japanese word for Godzilla, and let's face it, Godzilla is hilarious. He goes around, stomps Tokyo flat, breathes fire. I mean, c'mon, what's not to laugh about Godzilla? It would be better, I admit, if Godzilla could speak, and utter phrases lie Banzai! and Kamikaze and Miso Horny, but Godzilla's the quite, stoic type. He's not down with no Japanese speaking s**t.
But since you aren't amused by references to Godzilla, I have to actually think of things that are funny.
This reminds me. Last election, there was a referendum on gay marriage, which was up in several states, which primarily said "you agree that gay marriage, which is illegal in this state, is still illegal". Conservative non-voters were told in a fire and brimstone way that a non-vote against gay marriage, was a vote for gay marriage. This reminds me of a joke. If your parents didn't have children, it's likely you won't either.
Seriously though. Conservatives were up in arms about getting the vote out. Say no to gay marriage, because it's going to cause the downfall of the institute of marriage. After all, such stalwarts of heterosexual marriage, such as Henry the Eighth, who was head of the Church of England, merely had six wives: Catherine of Aragorn, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard, and Catherine Parr. He had two of the wives executed. Now, here was a man who heard "til death do us part" and thought "loophole!" and then probably thought that he could hang them with a loophole. Well, you know, Mr. Henry was certainly a man who believed in the sanctity of marriage.
OK, so conservatives were upset about gay marriage, but in the pantheon of things that are affronts to Christianity, you'd think there would be a bigger problem, one that should create scads of opposition and outcry. Judaism. You see, fundamental to being a Christian, as I understand it, is to believe that Christ is indeed God, and also the Messiah, ie, the Messenger of God (though being God, anyway, it gets somewhat confusing there).
Jews, as I understand it, don't believe in this concept, which is what makes them Jews instead of Christians (except Jews for Jesus, who somehow call themselves Jews, even though they appear to be, technically, Christians..it sounds like Democrats for Republicans...you think they'd just call themselves Republicans. I'm sure it was one of those voter registration, butterfly ballot issue, where they misclassified themselves, but I digress). Yet, most Christians seem to let that one pass. Gay marriage is destroying the sanctity of marriage, but those of you who don't believe that Christ is God, that's OK, we're fine with that. We'll deal.
Now I'd love to say that I thought of this myself, but nearly every comedy bit is stolen, and I stole that, except that in the original incarnation, it wasn't funny. Mine was funny. See, even now, you're are smirking. You smirk because you care. You're a generous soul who cares, and finds Godzilla and gay marriage and lesbian biker chicks funny. I know, I know, you love to wear women's silk undies because dammit silk just feels so good as it slides against the boys. I mean, you feel like Mr. F. Winston Churchill himself, who, yes, also insisted on silk next to his crown jewels.
Humor's a difficult subject because it relies on absurdity and non-sequitirs. Drama transcends languages. Humor does not. Let me tell you a joke that I'm told is hilarious in Chinese. A monkey takes a guy's banana, and runs up a tree, and eats it. Bwahahahah! I mean, come on. That's hilarious! TAKES BANANA. UP TREE. EATS! Please, I can barely breathe. That silly monkey! Won't he ever learn?
Either you found that monkey joke funny, or you did not. But if you did not, then a billion Chinese did, and I'm sorry, they outvote you. But, if you can convince a billion Indians that it was not funny, then, of course, you even up the odds. But if you even the odds, then, well, that would make them even, right? I mean, what did you do to the odds? Double them? Add one to them.
One...two....three.... OK, now that you get my "even the odds" joke, I have to tell you, most comedians don't do jokes. They make anecdotal humor. They tell stories. They provide observations. These observations are humorous. And it's all about spin control. Whether a story is funny or not is how you tell it. The Aristocrats, for example, is not a funny joke. But, you add Godzilla to it. Now that's funny. He's stomping arond, He's blowing fire. He's yelling "Banzai". Now that's a great act, what do you call it?
The Aristocats.
No, wait, dammit, the Arisocrats.
(Breathes fire, takes a bow, exit stage left).
Obviously, I've blown my chance to be funny with you. You see, if I knew you better, I might be able to rely on easy standbys for easy laughs. I could say, for instance, Gojira! in a bad Japanese accent. Gojira, for those that are Japanese-imparied, is the Japanese word for Godzilla, and let's face it, Godzilla is hilarious. He goes around, stomps Tokyo flat, breathes fire. I mean, c'mon, what's not to laugh about Godzilla? It would be better, I admit, if Godzilla could speak, and utter phrases lie Banzai! and Kamikaze and Miso Horny, but Godzilla's the quite, stoic type. He's not down with no Japanese speaking s**t.
But since you aren't amused by references to Godzilla, I have to actually think of things that are funny.
This reminds me. Last election, there was a referendum on gay marriage, which was up in several states, which primarily said "you agree that gay marriage, which is illegal in this state, is still illegal". Conservative non-voters were told in a fire and brimstone way that a non-vote against gay marriage, was a vote for gay marriage. This reminds me of a joke. If your parents didn't have children, it's likely you won't either.
Seriously though. Conservatives were up in arms about getting the vote out. Say no to gay marriage, because it's going to cause the downfall of the institute of marriage. After all, such stalwarts of heterosexual marriage, such as Henry the Eighth, who was head of the Church of England, merely had six wives: Catherine of Aragorn, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard, and Catherine Parr. He had two of the wives executed. Now, here was a man who heard "til death do us part" and thought "loophole!" and then probably thought that he could hang them with a loophole. Well, you know, Mr. Henry was certainly a man who believed in the sanctity of marriage.
OK, so conservatives were upset about gay marriage, but in the pantheon of things that are affronts to Christianity, you'd think there would be a bigger problem, one that should create scads of opposition and outcry. Judaism. You see, fundamental to being a Christian, as I understand it, is to believe that Christ is indeed God, and also the Messiah, ie, the Messenger of God (though being God, anyway, it gets somewhat confusing there).
Jews, as I understand it, don't believe in this concept, which is what makes them Jews instead of Christians (except Jews for Jesus, who somehow call themselves Jews, even though they appear to be, technically, Christians..it sounds like Democrats for Republicans...you think they'd just call themselves Republicans. I'm sure it was one of those voter registration, butterfly ballot issue, where they misclassified themselves, but I digress). Yet, most Christians seem to let that one pass. Gay marriage is destroying the sanctity of marriage, but those of you who don't believe that Christ is God, that's OK, we're fine with that. We'll deal.
Now I'd love to say that I thought of this myself, but nearly every comedy bit is stolen, and I stole that, except that in the original incarnation, it wasn't funny. Mine was funny. See, even now, you're are smirking. You smirk because you care. You're a generous soul who cares, and finds Godzilla and gay marriage and lesbian biker chicks funny. I know, I know, you love to wear women's silk undies because dammit silk just feels so good as it slides against the boys. I mean, you feel like Mr. F. Winston Churchill himself, who, yes, also insisted on silk next to his crown jewels.
Humor's a difficult subject because it relies on absurdity and non-sequitirs. Drama transcends languages. Humor does not. Let me tell you a joke that I'm told is hilarious in Chinese. A monkey takes a guy's banana, and runs up a tree, and eats it. Bwahahahah! I mean, come on. That's hilarious! TAKES BANANA. UP TREE. EATS! Please, I can barely breathe. That silly monkey! Won't he ever learn?
Either you found that monkey joke funny, or you did not. But if you did not, then a billion Chinese did, and I'm sorry, they outvote you. But, if you can convince a billion Indians that it was not funny, then, of course, you even up the odds. But if you even the odds, then, well, that would make them even, right? I mean, what did you do to the odds? Double them? Add one to them.
One...two....three.... OK, now that you get my "even the odds" joke, I have to tell you, most comedians don't do jokes. They make anecdotal humor. They tell stories. They provide observations. These observations are humorous. And it's all about spin control. Whether a story is funny or not is how you tell it. The Aristocrats, for example, is not a funny joke. But, you add Godzilla to it. Now that's funny. He's stomping arond, He's blowing fire. He's yelling "Banzai". Now that's a great act, what do you call it?
The Aristocats.
No, wait, dammit, the Arisocrats.
(Breathes fire, takes a bow, exit stage left).
Saturday, August 27, 2005
Eyes on the Prize
Are you dissatisfied with yourself? Do you wish you could be a better you? You don't concentrate hard enough. You aren't passionate enough. You don't have enough confidence. You don't get along with people as easily as you'd like. You don't get enough done in a single day. You're a rotten, lazy, bastard.
I hear this a lot. And the funny thing is how many of us do this, especially those who are smart. The smarter you get, the lazier you get. Or at least, the higher standards you place upon yourself.
I get into this situation all the time. I buy books. I mean, I buy books. Incessantly. I have bought enough books to purchase a BMW. And some books, I've bought two times because either I forgot I had bought them, or worse, I've lost them, and I need another, or even worse still, I bent one, or got it wet, and insisted on a pristine copy.
Most people don't understand why I get books, and I have to admit, I don't fully understand it myself. Except I do. I want to get better. You see, what I really want is for someone to answer all my questions. Every one of them. Even questions I didn't know I wanted to ask. I'm not asking profound questions either. I don't need to know the meaning of life, or the existence of God. I don't need to know truth and justice in the American way.
I want to be better at Excel and Photoshop. I want to podcast, and use RSS. I want to learn this dad-gum technology, and yet, the technology vexes me. Someone should sit and tell me how all this stuff works. I don't want to waste time tinkering with the tool, searching the web for how it works. Why won't my damn digital camera answer my questions? Why must I plod through a manual to figure out how to take g**d*** pictures?
So I buy books, because I expect the books to make me a better person, and yet I hate to read books. I despise it. Too much time. I'd rather sit and blog, or sit and chat with you. I'd rather read about how well the Redskins aren't doing, or pick up the latest Sports Illustrated, or listen to my man Tony on the radio.
The book buying is all about being a better person, wanting to be a better person, throwing money at the problem. And by better, I mean in all sorts of way. More knowledgeable, more compassionate, more friendly. I want to be able to make movies, make gourmet dishes, write my own programming language, take exotic photos, maybe even bungee cord. Nah, not bungee cord. Too much excitement.
I have friends who lament about why they aren't better people. You know what? I bet they get advice. And lots of it. And yet, something in the human brain is set up to reject most advice. Come on. Most of the advice is probably good for you. You need to exercise more! You need to stop talking to your friends all the time! You need to go up to that girl and tell her you like her. You need to ask her out, and not be afraid of rejection.
Lately, for instance, I've been plagued by that problem that many Americans have. Being overweight. Oh yes, I know that being overweight varies from person to person. For me, I'd like to be about 10 pounds lighter, maybe even 15 pounds.
I know it can be done because I did it. I was down to a paltry 138 pounds, from a high of 170. I lost 32 pounds in five months. Diligent exercise, restraining what I ate, and it came off slowly but surely. But then I worked, and 138 became 145 became 152 became 155 became 158 became 162. I've now had a net loss of 8 pounds. Sitting on my ass all day at work and then eating big lunches. That's no good.
For the first time, I decided to use sugar substitutes. This is when you've decided you're fat and want to do something about it. Saccharine or aspartame or splenda. I like the yellow packets, so that's what I use now. Yet, have these sugar substitutes helped? It's funny how anyone I know who uses it doesn't seem to get any thinner. Perhaps eating that pie or whatever doesn't help. The reality is your body works against you. You want to lose weight? It slows down the metabolism so you can't. It latches onto calories. You have to do insane exercise before it starts to come off, or you have to eat like you're anorexic.
Yet, will being thin make me a better person? Have I not simply fallen into the trap of wanting to be thin and beautiful, in a society that thrusts high fat processed foods in my face? You'd think someone would think of opening a truly healthy restaurant, and yet, restaurant owners must say "it won't make money"---when faced with trying to be good, most people sin a little and eat a burger or steak or ice cream".
We're in this rat race to be better people. Only a handful of us are at the top of our professions, and can say they generally like life. There are those, of course, who find the whole rat race abhorrent, and just want out. They want to sit on the beach, and have poolboys or poolgirls come out with tropical drinks with little umbrellas, and have all their basic needs taken care of. Screw being a better person. I want to be a lazier person!
I don't even know where I fall on that. On the one hand, not worrying about anything would give me a chance to do things I could never do, like make movies. And yet, realistically, that's a lot of work done better by others. I fool myself into thinking I can be half as creative as the people who really do make movies, even if there are plenty of them that are just goddawful.
My point, if I had one, is simply this. We would all like to be better, but does it make sense to be better? We're going to constantly disappoint ourselves, each and every day, and yet without these goals, we'd slip further back even quicker, and from time to time, we make forward progress. Maybe we should be Buddhist and give up such desires, and learn inner peace, and yet this is the way I've been raised. To want more for myself. To want more for others. Were it not for that, would I even have anything to blog about?
I hear this a lot. And the funny thing is how many of us do this, especially those who are smart. The smarter you get, the lazier you get. Or at least, the higher standards you place upon yourself.
I get into this situation all the time. I buy books. I mean, I buy books. Incessantly. I have bought enough books to purchase a BMW. And some books, I've bought two times because either I forgot I had bought them, or worse, I've lost them, and I need another, or even worse still, I bent one, or got it wet, and insisted on a pristine copy.
Most people don't understand why I get books, and I have to admit, I don't fully understand it myself. Except I do. I want to get better. You see, what I really want is for someone to answer all my questions. Every one of them. Even questions I didn't know I wanted to ask. I'm not asking profound questions either. I don't need to know the meaning of life, or the existence of God. I don't need to know truth and justice in the American way.
I want to be better at Excel and Photoshop. I want to podcast, and use RSS. I want to learn this dad-gum technology, and yet, the technology vexes me. Someone should sit and tell me how all this stuff works. I don't want to waste time tinkering with the tool, searching the web for how it works. Why won't my damn digital camera answer my questions? Why must I plod through a manual to figure out how to take g**d*** pictures?
So I buy books, because I expect the books to make me a better person, and yet I hate to read books. I despise it. Too much time. I'd rather sit and blog, or sit and chat with you. I'd rather read about how well the Redskins aren't doing, or pick up the latest Sports Illustrated, or listen to my man Tony on the radio.
The book buying is all about being a better person, wanting to be a better person, throwing money at the problem. And by better, I mean in all sorts of way. More knowledgeable, more compassionate, more friendly. I want to be able to make movies, make gourmet dishes, write my own programming language, take exotic photos, maybe even bungee cord. Nah, not bungee cord. Too much excitement.
I have friends who lament about why they aren't better people. You know what? I bet they get advice. And lots of it. And yet, something in the human brain is set up to reject most advice. Come on. Most of the advice is probably good for you. You need to exercise more! You need to stop talking to your friends all the time! You need to go up to that girl and tell her you like her. You need to ask her out, and not be afraid of rejection.
Lately, for instance, I've been plagued by that problem that many Americans have. Being overweight. Oh yes, I know that being overweight varies from person to person. For me, I'd like to be about 10 pounds lighter, maybe even 15 pounds.
I know it can be done because I did it. I was down to a paltry 138 pounds, from a high of 170. I lost 32 pounds in five months. Diligent exercise, restraining what I ate, and it came off slowly but surely. But then I worked, and 138 became 145 became 152 became 155 became 158 became 162. I've now had a net loss of 8 pounds. Sitting on my ass all day at work and then eating big lunches. That's no good.
For the first time, I decided to use sugar substitutes. This is when you've decided you're fat and want to do something about it. Saccharine or aspartame or splenda. I like the yellow packets, so that's what I use now. Yet, have these sugar substitutes helped? It's funny how anyone I know who uses it doesn't seem to get any thinner. Perhaps eating that pie or whatever doesn't help. The reality is your body works against you. You want to lose weight? It slows down the metabolism so you can't. It latches onto calories. You have to do insane exercise before it starts to come off, or you have to eat like you're anorexic.
Yet, will being thin make me a better person? Have I not simply fallen into the trap of wanting to be thin and beautiful, in a society that thrusts high fat processed foods in my face? You'd think someone would think of opening a truly healthy restaurant, and yet, restaurant owners must say "it won't make money"---when faced with trying to be good, most people sin a little and eat a burger or steak or ice cream".
We're in this rat race to be better people. Only a handful of us are at the top of our professions, and can say they generally like life. There are those, of course, who find the whole rat race abhorrent, and just want out. They want to sit on the beach, and have poolboys or poolgirls come out with tropical drinks with little umbrellas, and have all their basic needs taken care of. Screw being a better person. I want to be a lazier person!
I don't even know where I fall on that. On the one hand, not worrying about anything would give me a chance to do things I could never do, like make movies. And yet, realistically, that's a lot of work done better by others. I fool myself into thinking I can be half as creative as the people who really do make movies, even if there are plenty of them that are just goddawful.
My point, if I had one, is simply this. We would all like to be better, but does it make sense to be better? We're going to constantly disappoint ourselves, each and every day, and yet without these goals, we'd slip further back even quicker, and from time to time, we make forward progress. Maybe we should be Buddhist and give up such desires, and learn inner peace, and yet this is the way I've been raised. To want more for myself. To want more for others. Were it not for that, would I even have anything to blog about?
Panic Room
Memories of Murder is a Korean film based on a true story. In the mid 80s, a serial killer was killing women in rural Korea. That was as much as I knew about the film, other than some online critics had rated it very highly.
Asian cinema, formerly of the chop-socky variety, has evolved into some of the best cinema the world has to offer. True, there have been many masters of the far east dating back to the origins of film, including Kurosawa, Ozu, and Mizoguchi. Where the old masters came primarily from Japan, the new modern masters are now spread throughout all of Asia. In addition to Japan, great filmmakers comes from Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, Korea, and now, even Thailand.
Asian art cinema is filled with visual stylists, perhaps none more prominent than Wong Kar-wai and his cinematographer, Christopher Doyle. Wong Kar-wai presents scenes of painterly majesty, with swathes of colors, like some impressionist painting. His story lines are often nearly as impressionist, telling events in people's lives, rather than telling an obvious story plot.
Hong Kong cinema, when it's not Jackie Chan, is all about cool. Characters wear sunglasses, carry themselves with bravado, and in the case of John Woo movies, live on the murky intersection of good and bad. Infernal Affairs, though not directed by Woo, tells the story of a police officer trained to be a mole to infiltrate a Hong Kong gang, and a Hong Kong gang member who enters the police academy, and is a mole for the gang.
Even Wong Kar-wai's aimless characters exude a kind of cool. A guy breaks into other people's shops after hours in Fallen Angels and compels customers to buy products. In his spare time, he exercises with a large dead pig.
Korean cinema, on the other hand, ends up being far grittier than the coolness of Hong Kong films, and to my taste, I think I prefer it. It's not that Koreans don't care about visual style--they do. Witness the gold, windswept grain fields, or green lotus leaves everywhere, or the long stretch of a train tunnel. Director Joon-ho Bong is just as concerned with how scenes are set up visually as he is telling his story.
And that leads me to the story. Memories of Murder starts off as a whodunit. We want to know who is killing the women. Initially, Park and his partner Jo are investigating the murder. A body has been found in a gutter of some sort in a farm. The cops are unable to cordone off the area, and kids and vehicles ruin the crime scene. Standard protocol in rural Korea is to find a scapegoat, beat them to an inch of their life (I've always wanted to write that), until they "confess" the crime. Even as they act like they are real cops, both are incompetent.
It's a credit to the script and the acting that neither of the two cops come across as unsympathetic, despite Jo's penchant to play bad cop, and kick and beat up potential suspects.
If there's anything Korean cinema seems realistic about, it's police brutality. This is at least the third film I've seen that suggest police brutality is quite common in Korea. But it's the first film to suggest why cops resort to it.
A cop from Seoul joins the case, and already, he can tell his new partners are idiots. He quickly observes the victims are all killed in the same fashion, strangled by a purse strap, head covered in panties, in the rain, dressed in red. A woman cop notes that a song always plays on that day as well, and she figures it must be the killer, signalling his intent to kill.
As the film presents one possible suspect after another, I sit wondering, who is it? And, yet, for each possible suspect, it would feel just wrong if they were the ones. Maybe a woman was killing the other women?
What Korean cinema seems to share in common with Asian cinema is that it's still a male society. If anything, it's because the women are not major characters that the rape scenes seem less explotive than it could be. We never know these women, at least, not well. Their deaths are merely evidence that the cops are unable to find the killer.
I was surprised at the amount of graphic sexual suggestion in the film. One man apparently likes to masturbate on women's clothing, and he's brought in as a suspect. Items are found in the women's dead bodies. You wouldn't expect to hear that in, say, a Hong Kong film. If there's anything that I like Korean cinema, it's that it's far less consciously stylish than Hong Kong cinema.
You just wouldn't expect that one of the two leads in a film is simply a bad cop, who works in a police force that is simply bumbling, and yet, you admire the kind of self-confidence this cop has for his own abilities. In the end, he's not a bad guy, though not a terribly good one either.
Because it's based on a true story of a serial killer that was never found, the film must explore other avenues, dealing with the people surrounding the events, and the frustration of being unable to get their man. I, too, desperately wanted someone to get caught, and so I was given to question why I needed familiar solutions, why the mystery had to be solved? The director must have also sensed that he needed a way to end the film, and he does so by rejoining the bad cop fifteen years after the fact. He's left the job, and now sells a product called "Green Power" out of his van.
As he drives, he sees the scene of the crime from fifteen years ago, and sits and ponders about this unsolved case. A little girl asks what he is doing, and he says nothing. She thinks it's interesting because she just met a man who was staring there too. She had asked him what he was doing, and he admitted he had done something many years ago, and wanted to visit. When asked what he looked like, the girl could only say, he looked plain and ordinary, nothing special.
When such crimes occur, especially in film, people desperately want closure. They want to know people can't get away with murder. And yet, sometimes they do. Real life often doesn't give us the pleasure of the ending we want.
Asian cinema, formerly of the chop-socky variety, has evolved into some of the best cinema the world has to offer. True, there have been many masters of the far east dating back to the origins of film, including Kurosawa, Ozu, and Mizoguchi. Where the old masters came primarily from Japan, the new modern masters are now spread throughout all of Asia. In addition to Japan, great filmmakers comes from Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, Korea, and now, even Thailand.
Asian art cinema is filled with visual stylists, perhaps none more prominent than Wong Kar-wai and his cinematographer, Christopher Doyle. Wong Kar-wai presents scenes of painterly majesty, with swathes of colors, like some impressionist painting. His story lines are often nearly as impressionist, telling events in people's lives, rather than telling an obvious story plot.
Hong Kong cinema, when it's not Jackie Chan, is all about cool. Characters wear sunglasses, carry themselves with bravado, and in the case of John Woo movies, live on the murky intersection of good and bad. Infernal Affairs, though not directed by Woo, tells the story of a police officer trained to be a mole to infiltrate a Hong Kong gang, and a Hong Kong gang member who enters the police academy, and is a mole for the gang.
Even Wong Kar-wai's aimless characters exude a kind of cool. A guy breaks into other people's shops after hours in Fallen Angels and compels customers to buy products. In his spare time, he exercises with a large dead pig.
Korean cinema, on the other hand, ends up being far grittier than the coolness of Hong Kong films, and to my taste, I think I prefer it. It's not that Koreans don't care about visual style--they do. Witness the gold, windswept grain fields, or green lotus leaves everywhere, or the long stretch of a train tunnel. Director Joon-ho Bong is just as concerned with how scenes are set up visually as he is telling his story.
And that leads me to the story. Memories of Murder starts off as a whodunit. We want to know who is killing the women. Initially, Park and his partner Jo are investigating the murder. A body has been found in a gutter of some sort in a farm. The cops are unable to cordone off the area, and kids and vehicles ruin the crime scene. Standard protocol in rural Korea is to find a scapegoat, beat them to an inch of their life (I've always wanted to write that), until they "confess" the crime. Even as they act like they are real cops, both are incompetent.
It's a credit to the script and the acting that neither of the two cops come across as unsympathetic, despite Jo's penchant to play bad cop, and kick and beat up potential suspects.
If there's anything Korean cinema seems realistic about, it's police brutality. This is at least the third film I've seen that suggest police brutality is quite common in Korea. But it's the first film to suggest why cops resort to it.
A cop from Seoul joins the case, and already, he can tell his new partners are idiots. He quickly observes the victims are all killed in the same fashion, strangled by a purse strap, head covered in panties, in the rain, dressed in red. A woman cop notes that a song always plays on that day as well, and she figures it must be the killer, signalling his intent to kill.
As the film presents one possible suspect after another, I sit wondering, who is it? And, yet, for each possible suspect, it would feel just wrong if they were the ones. Maybe a woman was killing the other women?
What Korean cinema seems to share in common with Asian cinema is that it's still a male society. If anything, it's because the women are not major characters that the rape scenes seem less explotive than it could be. We never know these women, at least, not well. Their deaths are merely evidence that the cops are unable to find the killer.
I was surprised at the amount of graphic sexual suggestion in the film. One man apparently likes to masturbate on women's clothing, and he's brought in as a suspect. Items are found in the women's dead bodies. You wouldn't expect to hear that in, say, a Hong Kong film. If there's anything that I like Korean cinema, it's that it's far less consciously stylish than Hong Kong cinema.
You just wouldn't expect that one of the two leads in a film is simply a bad cop, who works in a police force that is simply bumbling, and yet, you admire the kind of self-confidence this cop has for his own abilities. In the end, he's not a bad guy, though not a terribly good one either.
Because it's based on a true story of a serial killer that was never found, the film must explore other avenues, dealing with the people surrounding the events, and the frustration of being unable to get their man. I, too, desperately wanted someone to get caught, and so I was given to question why I needed familiar solutions, why the mystery had to be solved? The director must have also sensed that he needed a way to end the film, and he does so by rejoining the bad cop fifteen years after the fact. He's left the job, and now sells a product called "Green Power" out of his van.
As he drives, he sees the scene of the crime from fifteen years ago, and sits and ponders about this unsolved case. A little girl asks what he is doing, and he says nothing. She thinks it's interesting because she just met a man who was staring there too. She had asked him what he was doing, and he admitted he had done something many years ago, and wanted to visit. When asked what he looked like, the girl could only say, he looked plain and ordinary, nothing special.
When such crimes occur, especially in film, people desperately want closure. They want to know people can't get away with murder. And yet, sometimes they do. Real life often doesn't give us the pleasure of the ending we want.
Brotherly Love
Remember Scooby Doo? There were five of them. Fred, the preppy blond, Velma, the nerdy one in the orange cardigan and purple skirt, Daphne, in her one piece purple outfit, Shaggy, the stoner, and Scooby, cowardly, but faithful dog? Each Saturday morning, they'd investigate supernatural occurrences, only to discover it was someone in a mask? I'd have gotten away with it if it hadn't been for those meddling kids?
Remember they decided to slim down the cast so there were only three, instead of five? It was Scooby, Shaggy, and Scrappy? No more mysteries! These were real ghosts and goblins, and mostly consisted of Scooby and Shaggy running around scared, as usual, and Scrappy trying to beat up the baddies?
That's the Brothers Grimm
Really.
There's no denying that Terry Gilliam presents a word as fantastic as any that Tim Burton has created. Yet, Burton seems to be able to keep a consistent tone and genre throughout his film.
If the Brothers Grimm has problems, it's that it mixes all sorts of stories together. The Brothers, played by Matt Damon and Heath Ledger, are con-men, who pretend they can deal with the supernatural, mostly because they are the ones who conjure them up. Now that's an angle that The Mystery Machine never took. What if our beloved gang were the ones causing the ghosts, and solving it?
Yet, then the story veers from con-men to a rural German village where little girls have been kidnapped---ten, so far. The French, who occupy Germany, ask the Brothers Grimm to solve the mystery, except this time it's real. Trees walk. A castle of sorts on top of a large tree. Crows that fly everywhere. An oversized wolf that wanders around. Enchanted forests, a queen who seeks eternal youth, and Peter Stomare playing an Italian torturer. Grazie, signore.
In the end, the brothers learn a valuable lesson. Trust in one another. And kiss the fair maiden.
If the film has a problem, it's that the stories that the Grimm brothers were noted for, are interwoven in the film, and it makes little sense. These stories, so I'm told, were in fact, not so fit for kids, being more gory and black than sweet and innocent. Yet, their presence in this film feels forced. Jack and the Beanstalk is really how Jacob, the younger, took money for magical beans, even as their sister was dying and in need of medicine.
If there's anything positive, it's in the acting. Both Damon and Ledger, and especially Ledger, play against stereotype. Ledger plays a scholarly type, full of twitches, and never as confident as Damon. There's at least some hope that he'll do a good job in Brokeback Mountain which should come out around December. I had read concerns that Heath was too much the pretty boy, and would be unable to play a convincing character.
Peter Stomare plays Calvadi, the Italian, who tortures for the French, who occupy Germany. It's truly an international gathering. All the non-Germans are played with over the top faux accents, including Brit, Jonathan Pryce, as Delatombe, the French commander who compels the Grimm brothers to help, lest they be tortured. Only Monica Bellucci, who presumably is Italian, is speaking in her accented English as she normally does.
On a 1 to 10 scale, it's a 4. Visually inventive, yet, the mishmash of differing tones, makes it tough to accept.
Remember they decided to slim down the cast so there were only three, instead of five? It was Scooby, Shaggy, and Scrappy? No more mysteries! These were real ghosts and goblins, and mostly consisted of Scooby and Shaggy running around scared, as usual, and Scrappy trying to beat up the baddies?
That's the Brothers Grimm
Really.
There's no denying that Terry Gilliam presents a word as fantastic as any that Tim Burton has created. Yet, Burton seems to be able to keep a consistent tone and genre throughout his film.
If the Brothers Grimm has problems, it's that it mixes all sorts of stories together. The Brothers, played by Matt Damon and Heath Ledger, are con-men, who pretend they can deal with the supernatural, mostly because they are the ones who conjure them up. Now that's an angle that The Mystery Machine never took. What if our beloved gang were the ones causing the ghosts, and solving it?
Yet, then the story veers from con-men to a rural German village where little girls have been kidnapped---ten, so far. The French, who occupy Germany, ask the Brothers Grimm to solve the mystery, except this time it's real. Trees walk. A castle of sorts on top of a large tree. Crows that fly everywhere. An oversized wolf that wanders around. Enchanted forests, a queen who seeks eternal youth, and Peter Stomare playing an Italian torturer. Grazie, signore.
In the end, the brothers learn a valuable lesson. Trust in one another. And kiss the fair maiden.
If the film has a problem, it's that the stories that the Grimm brothers were noted for, are interwoven in the film, and it makes little sense. These stories, so I'm told, were in fact, not so fit for kids, being more gory and black than sweet and innocent. Yet, their presence in this film feels forced. Jack and the Beanstalk is really how Jacob, the younger, took money for magical beans, even as their sister was dying and in need of medicine.
If there's anything positive, it's in the acting. Both Damon and Ledger, and especially Ledger, play against stereotype. Ledger plays a scholarly type, full of twitches, and never as confident as Damon. There's at least some hope that he'll do a good job in Brokeback Mountain which should come out around December. I had read concerns that Heath was too much the pretty boy, and would be unable to play a convincing character.
Peter Stomare plays Calvadi, the Italian, who tortures for the French, who occupy Germany. It's truly an international gathering. All the non-Germans are played with over the top faux accents, including Brit, Jonathan Pryce, as Delatombe, the French commander who compels the Grimm brothers to help, lest they be tortured. Only Monica Bellucci, who presumably is Italian, is speaking in her accented English as she normally does.
On a 1 to 10 scale, it's a 4. Visually inventive, yet, the mishmash of differing tones, makes it tough to accept.
Thursday, August 25, 2005
Flavor of the Day
I was talking to a friend last night. He's a professor of computer science, and is scheduled to teach a programming course, which is CS2. In computer science, there are usually two introductory computer science courses that teach the basics of programming. They are often informally known as CS1 and CS2, even if the real designation is something different.
The contents of these courses vary, but it used to be that CS1 would cover basics of functions, loops, conditionals, and possibly recursion, ie, the basics of a programming language, while CS2 would cover basic algorithms (searching and sorting) and basic data structures (stacks, queues, and trees).
With the introduction of object-oriented programming languages like C++ and Java, the amount to learn has increased. While most CS departments are loathe to add a new course, it really makes sense to add a third (and possibly, fourth) programming class. Notions of inheritance, polymorphism, design patterns ought to be covered, as well as software engineering tools such as CVS, Eclipse, a bug tracker, and so forth.
Yet, all of this is merely technology and more technology. From an academic point of view, computer science technology is killing computer science. Every five years, a new language or new ideas percolate in, and that's just one more thing that a student ought to know if they want to be employed. For example, the typical computer science graduate may have to know about J2EE, SQL, Tomcat, various kinds of web services, XML, XLST, and so forth.
An academic would find all those fads of the day, and not worthy of teaching. In five years, it will be replaced by something else, and so it's not worth teaching. Implicit in this belief is that it's not worth learning. It's not as if the academics keep up and say, despite their keeping up, it's not worth learning, but they've decided it's not worth learning, and so, by implication, the students should think so too.
Once upon a time, if you were, say, a blacksmith learning the trade, you'd spend time with a master, learning the craft of shaping iron. Once you learned this trade, your skills were golden. You merely had to repeat and repeat, and perhaps think of ways to make yourself better in the way that only age and experience could offer, solving certain little problems in creative ways.
You weren't told one day to use a hammer of one sort, then a hammer of a different sort, then a different material, then a different way to heat, then a way to deal with two different kinds of metals, and then to go into wood, then ivory, the metal inlaid in wood, and interwoven in ivory. Yet, that's the kind of fleeting knowledge that you have in the real world of computing.
It's true that advances are never made in wild jumps, that they are incremental. The knowledge you accumulate now will help make it that much easier to learn the next thing, but there's no longer a designated path to learn what you need. Thus, you find people whose knowledge about this and that to be encyclopedic, and those who barely know the technology. Both could be equally intelligent, and yet it's one person's desire to embrace technology that makes all the difference.
In the end, there's fear and desire. If you fear technology, it's hard to be a technologist. If you're in computer science, that means, learn math, learn sciences, go into an area of computing that doesn't require nearly the same amount of love of technology. If you love it, then you are set.
Yet, the fragility of technology is vastly depressing. Everything becomes flavor of the day. Sure, the underpinnings may still hold valid. You will still need to know algorithms or references vs. values or some other basics of programming, but it will be far from enough. Car technology may change, but drivers don't have to relearn how to drive every five years. This is what happens to programmers, and it's sad because it gets away from what I like about computer science which is algorithms.
The practical programmer now learns about "architecture", ie, how best to organize large pieces of software, and there are no good answers that I see to this problem. It's not taught because programming teachers don't have answers. They talk about syntax and semantics, and when best to talk about objects.
Yesterday it was vanilla, today it's cookies and cream, and tomorrow, it may be beer-flavored mango lassi delight.
The contents of these courses vary, but it used to be that CS1 would cover basics of functions, loops, conditionals, and possibly recursion, ie, the basics of a programming language, while CS2 would cover basic algorithms (searching and sorting) and basic data structures (stacks, queues, and trees).
With the introduction of object-oriented programming languages like C++ and Java, the amount to learn has increased. While most CS departments are loathe to add a new course, it really makes sense to add a third (and possibly, fourth) programming class. Notions of inheritance, polymorphism, design patterns ought to be covered, as well as software engineering tools such as CVS, Eclipse, a bug tracker, and so forth.
Yet, all of this is merely technology and more technology. From an academic point of view, computer science technology is killing computer science. Every five years, a new language or new ideas percolate in, and that's just one more thing that a student ought to know if they want to be employed. For example, the typical computer science graduate may have to know about J2EE, SQL, Tomcat, various kinds of web services, XML, XLST, and so forth.
An academic would find all those fads of the day, and not worthy of teaching. In five years, it will be replaced by something else, and so it's not worth teaching. Implicit in this belief is that it's not worth learning. It's not as if the academics keep up and say, despite their keeping up, it's not worth learning, but they've decided it's not worth learning, and so, by implication, the students should think so too.
Once upon a time, if you were, say, a blacksmith learning the trade, you'd spend time with a master, learning the craft of shaping iron. Once you learned this trade, your skills were golden. You merely had to repeat and repeat, and perhaps think of ways to make yourself better in the way that only age and experience could offer, solving certain little problems in creative ways.
You weren't told one day to use a hammer of one sort, then a hammer of a different sort, then a different material, then a different way to heat, then a way to deal with two different kinds of metals, and then to go into wood, then ivory, the metal inlaid in wood, and interwoven in ivory. Yet, that's the kind of fleeting knowledge that you have in the real world of computing.
It's true that advances are never made in wild jumps, that they are incremental. The knowledge you accumulate now will help make it that much easier to learn the next thing, but there's no longer a designated path to learn what you need. Thus, you find people whose knowledge about this and that to be encyclopedic, and those who barely know the technology. Both could be equally intelligent, and yet it's one person's desire to embrace technology that makes all the difference.
In the end, there's fear and desire. If you fear technology, it's hard to be a technologist. If you're in computer science, that means, learn math, learn sciences, go into an area of computing that doesn't require nearly the same amount of love of technology. If you love it, then you are set.
Yet, the fragility of technology is vastly depressing. Everything becomes flavor of the day. Sure, the underpinnings may still hold valid. You will still need to know algorithms or references vs. values or some other basics of programming, but it will be far from enough. Car technology may change, but drivers don't have to relearn how to drive every five years. This is what happens to programmers, and it's sad because it gets away from what I like about computer science which is algorithms.
The practical programmer now learns about "architecture", ie, how best to organize large pieces of software, and there are no good answers that I see to this problem. It's not taught because programming teachers don't have answers. They talk about syntax and semantics, and when best to talk about objects.
Yesterday it was vanilla, today it's cookies and cream, and tomorrow, it may be beer-flavored mango lassi delight.
Tuesday, August 23, 2005
The Idiots
I was recently told by a Greek grad student that the word idiot is Greek in origin, and that it's original meaning is someone that does not know anything about politics. While some would declare "if being an idiot means knowing nothing about politics, then I'm an idiot!"
You need to understand politics because politics is all about manipulation. And that's sad, really, that it's come down to that, because it has.
Maybe some of you don't remember this, but before Gorbachev and the breakup of the Soviet Union, plenty of Americans were anti-Communist. Let's face, they had never read Karl nor Marx, nor cared to. They didn't know socialism from fascism, except they hated them both, and that it was un-American. The Ruskies were the bad guys. We were the good guys.
Among the propaganda we Americans spread was that, despite having high voter turnout in communist countries (over 90%), a communist citizen only had one choice, and so that was no democracy at all. Plus, communists rewrote history books, and had a huge propaganda machine that put the communists in the best light.
Frankly, I don't disagree with any of that. The point to make is that American politicians are doing this as well. Tell me, if a party had a chance to totally discredit the other side, so that effectively, you were just voting for that one party, would that not be the same as the one party election?
Political parties don't want you to make an informed decision. For example, during the recent Presidential elections, gay marriage came on the referendum. It's not as if gay marriage was legal or anything, at least, in the states it came up in. Yet, get-out-the-vote conservatives told church going non-voters that if they did not vote, it would become legal, and they would be contributing to the downfall of all that was good in the U.S.
Politicians have learned that fear-mongering works best. People are generally irrational, idiots, if you will. Bush was trying to figure out something that would make his administation distinct. As bad as 9-11 was, it was great for Bush, because it gave him something to base his administration on. That was fear. If Americans were patriotic, they would have to deal with terrorism, and that this would mean sacrifices, a war against Iraq, and so forth.
Never mind that Europe had a history of local terrorism throughout the 70s, which Americans didn't care anything about. Never mind Israel, who really cares about terrorism. It happened over there, and Americans just didn't care. Only now, after thousands of American deaths, and no end in sight in Iraq are a few Americans starting to decide enough is enough, and yet, there are also those ready to spin things towards the President.
If modern politics suggests anything, it's never to admit you're wrong. Even when you're wrong, accuse the opponents of being unpatriotic, and just keep doing what you're doing. No one can say, as Carter did, that the country is in a malaise. You stay positive, no matter what. And people are willing to listen to such optimism.
In the end, both sides (and why aren't there three or more sides), wants the average citizen to pick sides, and be passionate about one side or the other, until rational thought is handed over to those in charge. We've always celebrated democracy, yet, politicians would have the people listen to a shaded version of the truth.
I believe, especially in politics, that truth is not absolute, that it's a matter of your beliefs, and using your intellect to make sense of what's happening. We, as citizens need to do more thinking, more information gathering, because politicians are out their preying upon our idiocy.
You need to understand politics because politics is all about manipulation. And that's sad, really, that it's come down to that, because it has.
Maybe some of you don't remember this, but before Gorbachev and the breakup of the Soviet Union, plenty of Americans were anti-Communist. Let's face, they had never read Karl nor Marx, nor cared to. They didn't know socialism from fascism, except they hated them both, and that it was un-American. The Ruskies were the bad guys. We were the good guys.
Among the propaganda we Americans spread was that, despite having high voter turnout in communist countries (over 90%), a communist citizen only had one choice, and so that was no democracy at all. Plus, communists rewrote history books, and had a huge propaganda machine that put the communists in the best light.
Frankly, I don't disagree with any of that. The point to make is that American politicians are doing this as well. Tell me, if a party had a chance to totally discredit the other side, so that effectively, you were just voting for that one party, would that not be the same as the one party election?
Political parties don't want you to make an informed decision. For example, during the recent Presidential elections, gay marriage came on the referendum. It's not as if gay marriage was legal or anything, at least, in the states it came up in. Yet, get-out-the-vote conservatives told church going non-voters that if they did not vote, it would become legal, and they would be contributing to the downfall of all that was good in the U.S.
Politicians have learned that fear-mongering works best. People are generally irrational, idiots, if you will. Bush was trying to figure out something that would make his administation distinct. As bad as 9-11 was, it was great for Bush, because it gave him something to base his administration on. That was fear. If Americans were patriotic, they would have to deal with terrorism, and that this would mean sacrifices, a war against Iraq, and so forth.
Never mind that Europe had a history of local terrorism throughout the 70s, which Americans didn't care anything about. Never mind Israel, who really cares about terrorism. It happened over there, and Americans just didn't care. Only now, after thousands of American deaths, and no end in sight in Iraq are a few Americans starting to decide enough is enough, and yet, there are also those ready to spin things towards the President.
If modern politics suggests anything, it's never to admit you're wrong. Even when you're wrong, accuse the opponents of being unpatriotic, and just keep doing what you're doing. No one can say, as Carter did, that the country is in a malaise. You stay positive, no matter what. And people are willing to listen to such optimism.
In the end, both sides (and why aren't there three or more sides), wants the average citizen to pick sides, and be passionate about one side or the other, until rational thought is handed over to those in charge. We've always celebrated democracy, yet, politicians would have the people listen to a shaded version of the truth.
I believe, especially in politics, that truth is not absolute, that it's a matter of your beliefs, and using your intellect to make sense of what's happening. We, as citizens need to do more thinking, more information gathering, because politicians are out their preying upon our idiocy.
Monday, August 22, 2005
Heeee's Grrrreat!
This past weekend, Tiger Woods won the NEC Invitational. Again. This is his fifth victory of the year. Tiger did what Tiger does best---win under pressure. With four players within two shots of him including Vijay Singh, Tiger pulled out a victory. Tiger is uncanny in his ability to win close games.
For a while, it was touch and go. Tiger would be tied. Or he'd lead by a shot. Or he was back a shot. Not playing his best golf, he birdied, par, par his last three holes, which was just enough to win by a shot.
Great players in tennis can do this. A great server like McEnroe could knock in three aces or service winners down 0-40. The ability to concentrate and get the points when absolutely needed is unbelievable.
But it must be that harder in golf. In golf, you fight the golf course as much as you fight your opponents. A great tennis player can win ten tournaments in a year. A great golfer would struggle to do that, especially in tournaments of note.
A week ago, Tiger Woods barely made the cut in the PGA Championships. Yet, he put himself in contention on the final day with a 2 under final score. The winner, Phil Mickelson, finished 4 under, two shots ahead of Tiger, but unlike Tiger, Phil lead all four rounds, and still only won by two shots.
Controversy swirled around the win as Tiger left the tournament grounds Sunday evening and headed to Florida. Due to inclement weather, the tournament at Baltusrol Country Club delayed the final leader rounds until Monday, when five
more holes could be played. As some of the leaders fell to 3 under, one shot off
from Tiger, Tiger was in Orlando. Were the leaders to have faltered, Tiger would have had to forfeit the playoff. He assumed that those ahead of him were so good, that at least one would win outright.
Still, some compared this to Randy Moss, who walked away from overtime, with seconds left, even though the odds were extremely slim that the Vikings would recover an onsides kick and score. Moss was criticized by the sports punditry, yet, some have supported Tiger saying the only person he was hurting was himself.
Whatever Tiger's personal flaws are, there's no denying his depths of concentration, which is why we admire athletes like Tiger. There's something about being able to win under pressure that inspires fans. A player can be good, but not great, if they have the stats, but don't have the ability to beat the best when it counts.
For a while, it was touch and go. Tiger would be tied. Or he'd lead by a shot. Or he was back a shot. Not playing his best golf, he birdied, par, par his last three holes, which was just enough to win by a shot.
Great players in tennis can do this. A great server like McEnroe could knock in three aces or service winners down 0-40. The ability to concentrate and get the points when absolutely needed is unbelievable.
But it must be that harder in golf. In golf, you fight the golf course as much as you fight your opponents. A great tennis player can win ten tournaments in a year. A great golfer would struggle to do that, especially in tournaments of note.
A week ago, Tiger Woods barely made the cut in the PGA Championships. Yet, he put himself in contention on the final day with a 2 under final score. The winner, Phil Mickelson, finished 4 under, two shots ahead of Tiger, but unlike Tiger, Phil lead all four rounds, and still only won by two shots.
Controversy swirled around the win as Tiger left the tournament grounds Sunday evening and headed to Florida. Due to inclement weather, the tournament at Baltusrol Country Club delayed the final leader rounds until Monday, when five
more holes could be played. As some of the leaders fell to 3 under, one shot off
from Tiger, Tiger was in Orlando. Were the leaders to have faltered, Tiger would have had to forfeit the playoff. He assumed that those ahead of him were so good, that at least one would win outright.
Still, some compared this to Randy Moss, who walked away from overtime, with seconds left, even though the odds were extremely slim that the Vikings would recover an onsides kick and score. Moss was criticized by the sports punditry, yet, some have supported Tiger saying the only person he was hurting was himself.
Whatever Tiger's personal flaws are, there's no denying his depths of concentration, which is why we admire athletes like Tiger. There's something about being able to win under pressure that inspires fans. A player can be good, but not great, if they have the stats, but don't have the ability to beat the best when it counts.
To Infinity and Beyond
The more your mind thinks about the same task, the more it dances around possibility. Do we need to do it this way? Must we satisfy expectations? How can we change things, yet retain some of what we seek?
Filmmakers must feel this more than most. It was once said that everything that could be filmed has already been done so, and this was during the birth of cinema, perhaps nearly one hundred years ago. Yet, filmmaking proceeds onward.
Most films progress along a narrative. There's a plot. There are characters in the plot. There's a beginning, where we're introduced to the characters, some dilemma that the characters must deal with, and an ending where that dilemma is typically resolved. That outline, for example, describes romantic comedies. Boy meets girl. Boy breaks up with girl. Boy makes up with girl.
Newbie filmmakers, even talented ones, often stick to these conventions because those are the films they've seen and enjoyed. To break away from those conventions means you must think of new ones to replace them. If you don't have a plot, then what do you have instead? Maybe longing looks at vistas you've never seen. There are films like Koyaanisqatsi, meditations on modern day life, shown in images and minimalist Glass music, but no dialog. Or the experimental films of Stan Brakhage.
Just as Picasso's paintings took away from what people wanted, either romantic or realist paintings or even the impressionist paintings, and gave them odd angles, and odd shapes, so some modern filmmakers take away from the usual pleasures in watching film, and challenge viewers to use new criteria to enjoy film. Film need not be happy, or be intellectually comprehensible, or have characters that make sense, or have characters at all.
This shouldn't take away from those who seek to work in the best forms of genre filmmaking. It was said that Bach came along at a time when his kind of contrapunctal music was falling out of favor, and brought it to towering heights, reinvigorating a fading genre of music, and that too is one way modern filmmakers can proceed.
Yet, it's the independent filmmakers that push our world view, or really, our world film view away from what's comfortable, that challenge our notion of what film is, and in so doing, opens our minds to what's possible.
Filmmakers must feel this more than most. It was once said that everything that could be filmed has already been done so, and this was during the birth of cinema, perhaps nearly one hundred years ago. Yet, filmmaking proceeds onward.
Most films progress along a narrative. There's a plot. There are characters in the plot. There's a beginning, where we're introduced to the characters, some dilemma that the characters must deal with, and an ending where that dilemma is typically resolved. That outline, for example, describes romantic comedies. Boy meets girl. Boy breaks up with girl. Boy makes up with girl.
Newbie filmmakers, even talented ones, often stick to these conventions because those are the films they've seen and enjoyed. To break away from those conventions means you must think of new ones to replace them. If you don't have a plot, then what do you have instead? Maybe longing looks at vistas you've never seen. There are films like Koyaanisqatsi, meditations on modern day life, shown in images and minimalist Glass music, but no dialog. Or the experimental films of Stan Brakhage.
Just as Picasso's paintings took away from what people wanted, either romantic or realist paintings or even the impressionist paintings, and gave them odd angles, and odd shapes, so some modern filmmakers take away from the usual pleasures in watching film, and challenge viewers to use new criteria to enjoy film. Film need not be happy, or be intellectually comprehensible, or have characters that make sense, or have characters at all.
This shouldn't take away from those who seek to work in the best forms of genre filmmaking. It was said that Bach came along at a time when his kind of contrapunctal music was falling out of favor, and brought it to towering heights, reinvigorating a fading genre of music, and that too is one way modern filmmakers can proceed.
Yet, it's the independent filmmakers that push our world view, or really, our world film view away from what's comfortable, that challenge our notion of what film is, and in so doing, opens our minds to what's possible.
Sunday, August 21, 2005
Quest for Fire
One of the more memorable characters of science fiction television was Mr. Spock, who was half-Vulcan. Vulcans believed in logic and rationality. I suspect one reason his character was so appealing was that people could relate to emotions getting in the way of happiness. You would think, with intelligence and rationality, we could simply do more with our time than spend it trying to find ways to procreate. Given the difficulties of finding "true love", perhaps devoting ourselves to more intellectual pursuits would serve everyone better.
And, yet, there's the biological imperative to reproduce. A species does not survive unless it can reproduce. Oh, we wrap it in something more meaningful. There is love. There is the goodness of having children. It is the will of a supreme deity or deities. To believe that reproduction is merely wired in our brains, and that our desire is no different than animals offends some, even as, for many others, especially those well-educated, this belief is perfectly reasonable. We are the way we are. That we can't overcome it with intelligence is fine.
It must have occurred to one of the writers of Star Trek that pure logic that rules out love would rule out the reason to procreate. Amok Time addresses that issue. Every seven years, Vulcan males go through pon farr, which is basically heat, where they are drawn back to Vulcan to seek a mate. The only part that isn't mentioned in the episode is the reproduction itself, but, hey, it was the 1960s, and they covered up Shatner's nipples, lest it cause a calamity among the unwary populace. Even so, it deals with the need to reproduce in a logical society.
I find, among the single people I know, which is nearly everyone I know, that much time is spent thinking about how to meet others. I recently watched March of the Penguins, where once a year, penguins go to a nesting ground. The males vie for female attention, and begin to pair off, despite the fact that penguins, to human eyes, look pretty much the same. Of course, if a penguin could comment, they'd probably say the same about humans.
Critics have accused the voice-over narration for too much anthropomorphizing, making penguins seem like people. While I doubt penguins love in the way that humans love, that is with so much thought, and passion, that it is the closest one can talk about love (or possibly lust) in penguin-dom.
This, alas, happens in human-life too, and by that, I mean in American life. Many cultures, interestingly enough, put the burden of mating on the parents, who must approve the woman or the man so that they may marry. Arranged marriages often perpetuate class distinctions. Thus, a family is determining whether the spouse for their son or daughter is worthy enough. They vet the potential mate, believing they, having lived on the earth at least twice as long, have more insight into picking the mate than their own offspring.
Americans, by and large, believe this is hogwash. Despite the enormous amount of effort, and the forced relearning of mating rituals, the average American wants to find their own mates.
Even though Americans have discarded arranged marriages, they have not discarded the need for males to make the first move. I think, males, despite the complaints of having to find women they like, prefer the approach of being the hunter rather than the hunted. I have to wonder how women like this. On the one hand, shy males must learn to overcome their shyness to meet women. On the other, outgoing women sometimes have to wait for eligible males.
Some enterprising women decide that there's no reason to wait for the man to make the move. If they want to have someone to be with, they should make the first move. Yet, I've noticed that this seems rather rare. Now perhaps, because I happen to mostly hang around males, I've yet to notice the woman who is out lamenting about why no men will pay them heed. Instead, I hear, rather frequently, males make this lament.
In this day and age of reasonable equality, women can have an upper hand. Men, desperate to find women, are willing to do what it takes to keep the woman happy. Now, it could be that I've just hung out with men who are not capable of wooing women, and those with great abilities to do so may take women for granted, expecting women to cater to their whims, realizing that they could be dumped at any moment.
I've pointed this out before, but I find it peculiar that men pursue women. I understand there's a biological need to do so, but there are so many differences. Men like action movies, blood and guts, sports where men hit each other. Women prefer making the house presentable, buying shoes and nice clothing. I know, there are a few men who love to cook, and care about the color of the curtains (we call them gay---or metrosexual) and women who can be absolute slobs, or prefer athletics over homemaking.
But by and large, society has certain roles for men and certain roles for women, and on average, men and women tend to follow these roles. How many men love football, and yet find women who don't care about it at all. Or women who want to have a party to decide which candles to buy, where men find an excuse not to be in the house when this happens. Men want to make ribald jokes. Women want to hear the latest gossip.
These are stereotypes, but as with many stereotypes, there are elements of truth. You see it if you observe people. You wonder why men have to act in that way, and why women have to act in that way, and why they can't share the same outlook. Yet, men and men often do share that, and women and women do share it, and yet, the emotional bonding, well, that's too much to overcome. It's funny that friends are friends often because they share a lot in common, but husband and wives do not need to share that much in common, merely a tolerance to put up with the other person's interest.
Movies have often made out the perfect couple. They don't like to show a budding romance that is about two people who are wrong for each other. Dysfunctional families, OK, that's all the rage, but a romance that's wrong? It's not what people want to see. There are relationships that somehow function. Put it on the screen, and you're yelling at the screenwriters for not realizing that a person is in an abusive relation.
I was watching 3-Iron, and while I marvelled at the ability to tell a story where the two leads never say a word (well, almost never), it doesn't explain how this woman got into the abusive relationship to begin with. I'd like to see someone try to film that, because such relationships happen all the time. Guys are manipulative. Women are manipulative. Instead, movies perpetuate a kind of myth, that causes people to want to seek ideal relationships.
How many shy guys do you know who say to themselves, I'm only going to date those that meet exceedingly high standards? I'm not going to settle for less. I'm going to price myself out of the market.
We are on a quest to procreate, and yet, it is a strange quest.
And, yet, there's the biological imperative to reproduce. A species does not survive unless it can reproduce. Oh, we wrap it in something more meaningful. There is love. There is the goodness of having children. It is the will of a supreme deity or deities. To believe that reproduction is merely wired in our brains, and that our desire is no different than animals offends some, even as, for many others, especially those well-educated, this belief is perfectly reasonable. We are the way we are. That we can't overcome it with intelligence is fine.
It must have occurred to one of the writers of Star Trek that pure logic that rules out love would rule out the reason to procreate. Amok Time addresses that issue. Every seven years, Vulcan males go through pon farr, which is basically heat, where they are drawn back to Vulcan to seek a mate. The only part that isn't mentioned in the episode is the reproduction itself, but, hey, it was the 1960s, and they covered up Shatner's nipples, lest it cause a calamity among the unwary populace. Even so, it deals with the need to reproduce in a logical society.
I find, among the single people I know, which is nearly everyone I know, that much time is spent thinking about how to meet others. I recently watched March of the Penguins, where once a year, penguins go to a nesting ground. The males vie for female attention, and begin to pair off, despite the fact that penguins, to human eyes, look pretty much the same. Of course, if a penguin could comment, they'd probably say the same about humans.
Critics have accused the voice-over narration for too much anthropomorphizing, making penguins seem like people. While I doubt penguins love in the way that humans love, that is with so much thought, and passion, that it is the closest one can talk about love (or possibly lust) in penguin-dom.
This, alas, happens in human-life too, and by that, I mean in American life. Many cultures, interestingly enough, put the burden of mating on the parents, who must approve the woman or the man so that they may marry. Arranged marriages often perpetuate class distinctions. Thus, a family is determining whether the spouse for their son or daughter is worthy enough. They vet the potential mate, believing they, having lived on the earth at least twice as long, have more insight into picking the mate than their own offspring.
Americans, by and large, believe this is hogwash. Despite the enormous amount of effort, and the forced relearning of mating rituals, the average American wants to find their own mates.
Even though Americans have discarded arranged marriages, they have not discarded the need for males to make the first move. I think, males, despite the complaints of having to find women they like, prefer the approach of being the hunter rather than the hunted. I have to wonder how women like this. On the one hand, shy males must learn to overcome their shyness to meet women. On the other, outgoing women sometimes have to wait for eligible males.
Some enterprising women decide that there's no reason to wait for the man to make the move. If they want to have someone to be with, they should make the first move. Yet, I've noticed that this seems rather rare. Now perhaps, because I happen to mostly hang around males, I've yet to notice the woman who is out lamenting about why no men will pay them heed. Instead, I hear, rather frequently, males make this lament.
In this day and age of reasonable equality, women can have an upper hand. Men, desperate to find women, are willing to do what it takes to keep the woman happy. Now, it could be that I've just hung out with men who are not capable of wooing women, and those with great abilities to do so may take women for granted, expecting women to cater to their whims, realizing that they could be dumped at any moment.
I've pointed this out before, but I find it peculiar that men pursue women. I understand there's a biological need to do so, but there are so many differences. Men like action movies, blood and guts, sports where men hit each other. Women prefer making the house presentable, buying shoes and nice clothing. I know, there are a few men who love to cook, and care about the color of the curtains (we call them gay---or metrosexual) and women who can be absolute slobs, or prefer athletics over homemaking.
But by and large, society has certain roles for men and certain roles for women, and on average, men and women tend to follow these roles. How many men love football, and yet find women who don't care about it at all. Or women who want to have a party to decide which candles to buy, where men find an excuse not to be in the house when this happens. Men want to make ribald jokes. Women want to hear the latest gossip.
These are stereotypes, but as with many stereotypes, there are elements of truth. You see it if you observe people. You wonder why men have to act in that way, and why women have to act in that way, and why they can't share the same outlook. Yet, men and men often do share that, and women and women do share it, and yet, the emotional bonding, well, that's too much to overcome. It's funny that friends are friends often because they share a lot in common, but husband and wives do not need to share that much in common, merely a tolerance to put up with the other person's interest.
Movies have often made out the perfect couple. They don't like to show a budding romance that is about two people who are wrong for each other. Dysfunctional families, OK, that's all the rage, but a romance that's wrong? It's not what people want to see. There are relationships that somehow function. Put it on the screen, and you're yelling at the screenwriters for not realizing that a person is in an abusive relation.
I was watching 3-Iron, and while I marvelled at the ability to tell a story where the two leads never say a word (well, almost never), it doesn't explain how this woman got into the abusive relationship to begin with. I'd like to see someone try to film that, because such relationships happen all the time. Guys are manipulative. Women are manipulative. Instead, movies perpetuate a kind of myth, that causes people to want to seek ideal relationships.
How many shy guys do you know who say to themselves, I'm only going to date those that meet exceedingly high standards? I'm not going to settle for less. I'm going to price myself out of the market.
We are on a quest to procreate, and yet, it is a strange quest.
History's a Drag
I distinctly remember watching Eddie Izzard on television a few years ago, fascinated by a transvestite Brit making jokes about history, at times oblivious to the fact that he's in a dress with lipstick. It was a hilarious, manic performance and I thought it was ab-fab.
I watched Eddie Izzard's Dress To Kill, which was filmed in 1998 in front of a San Francisco audience, and while he's still funny, it wasn't nearly as funny as I recall. That's the problem with comedy, in particular, stand-up comedy. The freshness of the routine is important, and it often doesn't hold up to repeated viewings.
American humor often talks about the differences between men and women, or between black and white. British humor often veers to the absurd. Izzard discusses European history, the origins of the name Englebert Humperdinck (which isn't his real name), whether Englebert is still alive (yeah, he is, no he isn't). Izzard provides comedy as much with his face and body language as he does with the anecdotes he tells.
His routine is nearly two hours long, and at that length, you can make references to earlier parts of your routine. Izzard refers to the Turks and the Ottoman Empire, as well as "Ciao" by Italian men on scooters. He does a routine where he sneaks in odd phrases he learned in French in French, before summarizing the plot of Speed in French. His mind flits here and there trying to think, what insanity should I talk about now?
If you like history and have never seen Eddie Izzard, he's a complete riot. I wish this were only true upon repeated viewings.
I watched Eddie Izzard's Dress To Kill, which was filmed in 1998 in front of a San Francisco audience, and while he's still funny, it wasn't nearly as funny as I recall. That's the problem with comedy, in particular, stand-up comedy. The freshness of the routine is important, and it often doesn't hold up to repeated viewings.
American humor often talks about the differences between men and women, or between black and white. British humor often veers to the absurd. Izzard discusses European history, the origins of the name Englebert Humperdinck (which isn't his real name), whether Englebert is still alive (yeah, he is, no he isn't). Izzard provides comedy as much with his face and body language as he does with the anecdotes he tells.
His routine is nearly two hours long, and at that length, you can make references to earlier parts of your routine. Izzard refers to the Turks and the Ottoman Empire, as well as "Ciao" by Italian men on scooters. He does a routine where he sneaks in odd phrases he learned in French in French, before summarizing the plot of Speed in French. His mind flits here and there trying to think, what insanity should I talk about now?
If you like history and have never seen Eddie Izzard, he's a complete riot. I wish this were only true upon repeated viewings.
Boil, Boil, Toil and Trouble
What is it about hot tubs and alcholism that leads to the disposal of clothing? I was at a party last night, and apparently, what better way to host a party than to have a hot tub. To be fair, this wasn't the focal point of the party.
The scenery is this. Six to eight people in a tub. 4-6 guys. 2 women. Guess who's clothed? Of the two women, one is clothed, the other wearing nothing. Most of the remainder of the men have done without clothing. Now, unlike women who almost have to be submerged to remain out of sight, a male practically has to be out of the hot tub itself to do the macho preening. Except nerd-style. We're not talking Abercrombie and Fitch, or even Target or Williams and Sonoma.
The complaint, from the guys, is that not enough women wanted to do without their clothing, whereas enough guys were willing to drop trou. What is it about the male psyche that says it's OK to strip, but it's not the same for women?
I suspect part of it, ironically, is that that women aren't as visually aroused by the male reproductive organs as men are aroused by, well, boobies. And furthermore, women are always concerned about being appropriate, and having to be the one that says no, while nerdy males are simply looking to meet with women of any sort, hoping that, well, if the brains aren't doing the trick, then maybe pasty white thin bodies or doughy-round bods will be the magic visual elixir that leads to snogging, or at least, minimal interest.
It's perhaps not surprising that guys whose waists are significantly larger than their chests are reluctant to reveal their manhood on the unsuspecting. But for those who make it to the tub, there's this interesting dilemma. You're more likely to see other guys in the tub than other girls. The only saving grace is the location of the male equipment is beneath sea level, and with so much turbulence, well, who would even know? The only time it makes a difference is entering and exiting the tub, and even then, modesty often rules the day.
Thus, it's the thought of nudity that counts. I mean, sure, opportunities may exist for women to see the guy's you-know but really, a hot tub doesn't encourage male display without being obvious about it, whereas women have to be deliberately prudish to hide their bosoms. Like a Scottish kilt, it's the thought of what's underneath that titillates, even if it's not in clear view. It's being bold without being bold.
In principle, parties are about meeting new people, except, by and large, people hate meeting people. You don't know what interests you'll have in common, if any. There's the insecurity of being judged as inadequate. Maybe you like video games, and she likes skiing in the Alps. Maybe you like to cook, and she likes to fly planes.
When you're presented with dozens of people who you've never met, the criteria for talking to any one of them may boil down to physical attractiveness. Do you like the way they look? Maybe you overhear a conversation and discover something in common? Oh, do you ski, where's a good place to ski around here? I've only skiied in the Alps. Yeah, there's some good places up in Vermont, but it's so far away. And so forth.
But when the attractive ones are too hard to talk to, or unavailable (already with someone, or simply, no attractive people there to begin with), it's just easier to talk to people you know already, because even if you don't know them real well, it's at least a familiar face, there's some place to start a conversation. I ended up talking to a Russian guy (actually from the Ukraine), who I've talked to before since he's the (now-former) roommate of someone I know. That turned out to be fine with me.
This leads to something amusing. Even though the purpose of such a party is to meet people you might be interested in, thus, for most, girls to meet guys and guys to meet girls, in reality, it's far easier for guys to talk to guys, since, at least at a party like this, the number of men exceed the number of women. And men often do have more in common with men than they do with women. Now I understand this may not be a representative rowdy party. Perhaps there are undergrad parties where snogging is the norm, or even grad parties.
In the computer world, we talk about requirements, architecture, and implementation. There is a desire to meet people, possibly to see if it leads to something more. Then, there's the act of trying to do this, which means overcoming fear, raising the interest level in others for ourselves. Humans have often claimed their superiority to others in the animal kingdom, and yet this most primitive of rituals occupies our thoughts. Our intelligence seems unable and even unwilling to do anything about these needs.
So the secret to a good, if not great party, is to invite lots and lots of people, add alcohol and a hottub, and let the uninhibited nature take over. Our intelligence gives way to the biological need to nearly procreate. And when that fails, there's always chips and dip, and discussing fantasy football, or the disadvantages of a representative democracy.
The scenery is this. Six to eight people in a tub. 4-6 guys. 2 women. Guess who's clothed? Of the two women, one is clothed, the other wearing nothing. Most of the remainder of the men have done without clothing. Now, unlike women who almost have to be submerged to remain out of sight, a male practically has to be out of the hot tub itself to do the macho preening. Except nerd-style. We're not talking Abercrombie and Fitch, or even Target or Williams and Sonoma.
The complaint, from the guys, is that not enough women wanted to do without their clothing, whereas enough guys were willing to drop trou. What is it about the male psyche that says it's OK to strip, but it's not the same for women?
I suspect part of it, ironically, is that that women aren't as visually aroused by the male reproductive organs as men are aroused by, well, boobies. And furthermore, women are always concerned about being appropriate, and having to be the one that says no, while nerdy males are simply looking to meet with women of any sort, hoping that, well, if the brains aren't doing the trick, then maybe pasty white thin bodies or doughy-round bods will be the magic visual elixir that leads to snogging, or at least, minimal interest.
It's perhaps not surprising that guys whose waists are significantly larger than their chests are reluctant to reveal their manhood on the unsuspecting. But for those who make it to the tub, there's this interesting dilemma. You're more likely to see other guys in the tub than other girls. The only saving grace is the location of the male equipment is beneath sea level, and with so much turbulence, well, who would even know? The only time it makes a difference is entering and exiting the tub, and even then, modesty often rules the day.
Thus, it's the thought of nudity that counts. I mean, sure, opportunities may exist for women to see the guy's you-know but really, a hot tub doesn't encourage male display without being obvious about it, whereas women have to be deliberately prudish to hide their bosoms. Like a Scottish kilt, it's the thought of what's underneath that titillates, even if it's not in clear view. It's being bold without being bold.
In principle, parties are about meeting new people, except, by and large, people hate meeting people. You don't know what interests you'll have in common, if any. There's the insecurity of being judged as inadequate. Maybe you like video games, and she likes skiing in the Alps. Maybe you like to cook, and she likes to fly planes.
When you're presented with dozens of people who you've never met, the criteria for talking to any one of them may boil down to physical attractiveness. Do you like the way they look? Maybe you overhear a conversation and discover something in common? Oh, do you ski, where's a good place to ski around here? I've only skiied in the Alps. Yeah, there's some good places up in Vermont, but it's so far away. And so forth.
But when the attractive ones are too hard to talk to, or unavailable (already with someone, or simply, no attractive people there to begin with), it's just easier to talk to people you know already, because even if you don't know them real well, it's at least a familiar face, there's some place to start a conversation. I ended up talking to a Russian guy (actually from the Ukraine), who I've talked to before since he's the (now-former) roommate of someone I know. That turned out to be fine with me.
This leads to something amusing. Even though the purpose of such a party is to meet people you might be interested in, thus, for most, girls to meet guys and guys to meet girls, in reality, it's far easier for guys to talk to guys, since, at least at a party like this, the number of men exceed the number of women. And men often do have more in common with men than they do with women. Now I understand this may not be a representative rowdy party. Perhaps there are undergrad parties where snogging is the norm, or even grad parties.
In the computer world, we talk about requirements, architecture, and implementation. There is a desire to meet people, possibly to see if it leads to something more. Then, there's the act of trying to do this, which means overcoming fear, raising the interest level in others for ourselves. Humans have often claimed their superiority to others in the animal kingdom, and yet this most primitive of rituals occupies our thoughts. Our intelligence seems unable and even unwilling to do anything about these needs.
So the secret to a good, if not great party, is to invite lots and lots of people, add alcohol and a hottub, and let the uninhibited nature take over. Our intelligence gives way to the biological need to nearly procreate. And when that fails, there's always chips and dip, and discussing fantasy football, or the disadvantages of a representative democracy.
Friday, August 19, 2005
Mawage
Just saw The Princess Bride for the first time in years. This may have only been the second time I've seen the film.
It wasn't quite as good as I last remember the film. I was told earlier by Dami that it was a "girlie" movie, though I'm not sure what she means by that. On the one hand, it is a romance, of sorts, since it's about "true love", but really, it's of the fairy-tale variety.
When there's no deep relation between the two leads, the relationship only works if they appear sincere, and Reiner does a great job with that, with Robin Wright playing a petulant girl who orders Carey Elwes around. He's infatuated, and she eventually is too. Her character isn't terribly well-developed, but then how many women are in a fantasy setting?
It's the side characters that make the film, from Wallace Shawn playing the dimunitive Vizzini, to Mandy Patinking playing Inigo Montoya, a man seeking to avenge his father's death, to Andre the Giant, playing Fezzik, formerly unemployed in Greenland. There's Billy Crystal and Chris Sarandon and Christopher Guest. So, not only is it a story about "true love", it's a vengeance tale, and even the story of a grandfather talking to his son (even though that's the weakest part of the film, with Fred Savage not even mugging as his best for the camera).
The sword fight that I thought was so amazing the first time I saw it? Eh. It was all right. I suppose the masterful swordplay (though dull) scenes from The Phantom Menace has set expectations so high. It's not bad, but at some point, swordplay doesn't do it for me.
If anything, what Reiner really manages to do well, is to inject just enough odd dialogue, without being completely anachronistic. So while you hear phrases like "there's a shortage of perfect breasts in the world", it's probably nothing that would be uttered in such a setting, yet, not obviously referencing something completely modern (except that "breasts" were once suggested as a replacement for "bosoms" since "bosoms" were too suggestive, except now breasts is suggestive).
For example, "I found you unemployed in Greenland" is one of those modernistic touches. The main reference to modern times is looking for a job (Inigo is in the "revenge" business and doesn't make enough money from it), but it isn't Shrek which knowingly winks at the audience, and will quickly date itself with many modern references.
I found it fun to watch again, but not nearly as thrilling as the first time. Only a few films seem to get to that level, and I think part of getting to that level is indeed watching it over and again.
It wasn't quite as good as I last remember the film. I was told earlier by Dami that it was a "girlie" movie, though I'm not sure what she means by that. On the one hand, it is a romance, of sorts, since it's about "true love", but really, it's of the fairy-tale variety.
When there's no deep relation between the two leads, the relationship only works if they appear sincere, and Reiner does a great job with that, with Robin Wright playing a petulant girl who orders Carey Elwes around. He's infatuated, and she eventually is too. Her character isn't terribly well-developed, but then how many women are in a fantasy setting?
It's the side characters that make the film, from Wallace Shawn playing the dimunitive Vizzini, to Mandy Patinking playing Inigo Montoya, a man seeking to avenge his father's death, to Andre the Giant, playing Fezzik, formerly unemployed in Greenland. There's Billy Crystal and Chris Sarandon and Christopher Guest. So, not only is it a story about "true love", it's a vengeance tale, and even the story of a grandfather talking to his son (even though that's the weakest part of the film, with Fred Savage not even mugging as his best for the camera).
The sword fight that I thought was so amazing the first time I saw it? Eh. It was all right. I suppose the masterful swordplay (though dull) scenes from The Phantom Menace has set expectations so high. It's not bad, but at some point, swordplay doesn't do it for me.
If anything, what Reiner really manages to do well, is to inject just enough odd dialogue, without being completely anachronistic. So while you hear phrases like "there's a shortage of perfect breasts in the world", it's probably nothing that would be uttered in such a setting, yet, not obviously referencing something completely modern (except that "breasts" were once suggested as a replacement for "bosoms" since "bosoms" were too suggestive, except now breasts is suggestive).
For example, "I found you unemployed in Greenland" is one of those modernistic touches. The main reference to modern times is looking for a job (Inigo is in the "revenge" business and doesn't make enough money from it), but it isn't Shrek which knowingly winks at the audience, and will quickly date itself with many modern references.
I found it fun to watch again, but not nearly as thrilling as the first time. Only a few films seem to get to that level, and I think part of getting to that level is indeed watching it over and again.
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