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Clint Eastwood's bittersweet masterpiece - Gran Torino

this isn't really edited, i just threw it up here...

After seeing this movie, I left the theater feeling many things - a deep and overwhelming sadness, hope for a world that seems lost, a nagging wish to return to the days when I would follow my grandfather on his errands, spouting off wisdom in the same tough guy manners Clint Eastwood used.

But the alarming emotion - the one I never expected, and at first didn't really understand, that took the longest to diagnose - was shame.

I'm ashamed of how close the movie has hewn to modern family dynamics, including my own. I'm ashamed for the times I insisted on wearing inappropriate clothes to church, and the times I begged to leave family events early, basically for the entirety of my youth in regard to my familial obligations and general treatment of my elders.

But even more surprising, I became aware of a numb but certain shame for being part of a world that lets this kind of thing play out, for being part of a masculinity that tolerates and even idolizes this dangerous and violent culture, and consequently ruins young lives by the thousands.

I feel guilty for the hours spent on Grand Theft Auto, for the 2Pac and Biggie CDs, (shame for Eminem is a long-established thing), my copy of Scarface. Because the truth is, for kids from strong families and supportive communities, music, video games and movies don't really make a big difference. Its the kids without steady guidance that pay the price of our drugs-and-violence culture- entertainment for us, reality for them. As much as my late twenties have made clear the importance of being a good man, this movie showed me I hadn't even scratched the surface. Because this movie was unapologetically about manhood; about the things it drives us to and from, the ways it is broken and the ways it can be the solution. I want to say it's bigger than manhood, but it's not bigger than that, it's just additional; it applies to things beyond it. This movie may encompass the entirety of what it means to be a man in this world, in simplified, abstracted terms.

But the shame i felt is not the kind you wish you didn't feel - it's the kind you wish you had felt a long, long time ago, and that you are grateful to feel now.

I hope everyone, everywhere sees this movie- its a movie that reminds me of the power of films, and how important they are for our wide-flung world.

not everything is awful!

I heard this on the radio late last night, and could only find it on ABC Australia's website, referring to the BBC news release I had heard on the radio... very mysterious and awesome (not awful). Apparently researchers in Maryland and I forget where else have passed information across an empty one-meter space between two atoms- I suspect it was some kind of basic binary code because they suggest that it's the basis of quantum computing, and in quantum mechanics, particles affect each other instantly across immense distances... which I had heard but never thought of it as something we could apply so directly. It's all the more intriguing because of it's lack of back-up...

the oneironaut

Wikipedia told me that an oneironaut is one who travels through dream worlds and/or explores alternate realities. Another common definition dictates that an oneironaut is one that travels without moving. Moving in this case refers to physical or bodily movement for example daydreaming.

commencement speech by David Foster Wallace

sometimes it all seems so lonely and futile, like no one else gives a flip and who are you to try to care about anything, and sometimes you find something that makes everything seem ok, that reaches you across everything, that makes you feel like you aren't crazy, and tonite, this commencement speech given by David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College that I found on my boy Joey B's blog is just that thing for me.

classicism: idealized ideals

My awesome friend at work found this article about an archaeologist restoring Grecian ruins to their original color, and makes a strong argument that the ancients would have seen bare marble as undesirable. It's funny, because we have embraced these things in their raw simplicity, accepted their luminous marble uniformity as a tenet of their character and idolized them accordingly. We value the elegance and restraint, the appreciation of the material's inherent qualities, the respectful honesty and wisdom of it. I suspect it played a role in our modern love of materials' innate qualities from frank Lloyd Wright's bare bricks to Mies van der Roe's exposed I-beams and polished concrete to Aalto's /Danish Modern wood. It's a fundamental part of our classical heritage, even though it is as imaginary as the 18th century belief in the Egyptian heritage of the British.

It's almost like we don't idealize just the ancient Greeks, forgetting their gaudy and foolish humanity, we idealize their ideals. We cherish an idealized history; as archaeologists flesh out more and more truths about their lives and times they paint the source of our ideals with humanity- and divorce them from the value that we find in them. These painted reproductions are unlikely to attract the reverence of their ghostly originals, splashed with the too-familiar indulgences of humanity, they are not nearly as compelling as their mute remnants. The humanity of it is amply available in ourselves; it's the idealized version of these ideals we need, the restrained, the purified; something other than, better than ourselves, truer even in their deceit as if time has washed away the foolishness of our predecessors and preserved for us only the best hidden within them.

all that 'empire' stuff form last year

The Boston Athenaeum has archived lecture series online and I noticed the author of a book I had seen a while ago, Cullen Murphy on his book Are We Rome?. What a better way to get the thrust of the book without having to wait until I wade through the seven other books I'm currently trying to read?

The author had a lot to say and a fascinating body of knowledge to draw from, and convinced me that the book is worth reading if just for that - a lot of interesting things about Roman cultural identity and the histories they looked back on to form it, details of society that we don't see, etc.

Comparing of the United States and Rome he highlighted a lot of parallels and gave meaningful background to them. Then he started down the road of "we are Rome and will fall like her because the government is too weak" and how we can learn from Rome how to make sure the government can 'work in concert' when it needs to, has enough power, ie is centralized, well-funded, etc... never addressing the obvious contradiction between demanding exhaustive governmental authority and criticizing an apathetic citizenry, and never addressing the danger of corruption in our own government despite mentioning some ripe parallels in the Roman system.

For 30 some years, the current generation has been beating this same drum, concurrently demanding ever-expanding governmental authority and complaining of abusive leadership, never admitting that the two go hand-in-hand. It seems that those that are running our world would sooner hand society over wholesale to bureaucrats, politicians, and the would-be emperors they harbor than concede that their may be some tiny flaw in their government-panacea ideology. If we are talking about emperors, this sounds like new clothes to me.

I was also surprised that he didn't explore the possibility that Rome began to fall as soon as the Republic was compromised, that the gains of the Empire were like the flight of a rocket whose engine has given out - the crash destroys it, but is not the true cause of the destruction. He didn't broach the subject of an American parallel to this might be the greatest danger of all; that the abdication of authority and responsibility to a centralized power, be it emperor or bureaucracy, creates a system ripe for the picking by any megalomaniac. That may be the true lesson from the fall of Rome; maybe we can avoid that fate.