Actual New York Times headline

Afghans Fear West May See Death as the End

There are at least two reasons it's hilarious, and I can't decide which is funnier.

Boorman!

As you know if you've been alertly reading BDR (as you should) or the comments section here, the most exciting world event in recent weeks is that we adopted a cat. We don't know if he has a name for himself, and wouldn't be able to pronounce it even if we did, so for convenience we're calling him Boorman (After the guy who directed the three best movies ever made, not after a Nazi who, you have to admit, spells his name differently, come on people. Oh, by the way, incredibly creepy sex towards the end of that Excalibur clip, be warned.). Here's the best picture taken of him yet, courtesy of the Baronette.



The rest of the pictures in this post are by me this morning, I'm not much for the photography, but hey.

He's about two years old. He's been in shelters for a least a year, which is hard for me to believe considering how beautiful he is, although his initial shyness may have put off any number of potential takers. I don't know what his life was like before he was in the shelters--I know he was found as a stray, but it seems unlikely that he would have been that way from the very beginning. He's a siamese mix--he's shaped just like a siamese (not the skinny little siamese, the bulkier kind, I don't know what the technical term is), but with patches of darker gray tiger stripes in various places on him and a short little raccoon tail, and he's absolutely beautiful. And huge. When he rolls over onto his back or his side and stretches out to his full length (which he spends about 70% of his waking time doing), he's gotta be at least three feet long. I haven't quite managed to get a picture of that, but this is close (though of course you've got nothing for scale there, but whatever):



The Baronette has had cats for most of her life, but this is my first pet outside of the occasional fish in my childhood. I knew it would be intense, but I wasn't prepared for this. I've loved individual humans before, and I've loved animals in general, and I've even been really good friends with individual animals before, but I've never loved an individual animal before, and it's like nothing else. The past couple of weeks have been a wonderful emotional rollercoaster, especially because like so many cats do he had a hard time adjusting to new surroundings and new people at first. He's still often skittish, but for about a week now he's been coming out from his hiding spot behind the couch more and more, and he's getting better all the time; every day he conquers another of his fears (one day he hangs out with us in the kitchen while we're making dinner, the next day he curls up next to us on the couch and falls asleep). Every time he does, my heart explodes. Sometimes it's incredibly, shockingly difficult: a few nights ago I was in tears because after a few days of being very friendly to me he suddenly seemed like he hated me, while being perfectly fine with the Baronette; it wasn't that I was jealous--if he had been scared of both of us I could have written it off as just a day's backslide, but that he was still into her made me wonder if he had just decided to dislike me, specifically. The next morning, I was in my bedroom, saw him sitting in the living room; I beckoned to him and he came to me from that distance for the very first time. We've been friends ever since.



He still has a long way to go to be truly comfortable and happy here, but he's gonna make it, and I think sooner rather than later. He's a total purr machine and extraordinarily affectionate; he's the type to head-butt your hand if you put it near him, and he rolls over for belly rubs at the drop of a hat. For the most part he hasn't been very talkative, but as I was composing this post he started screeching at me to come keep him company and relieve his anxiety at some of the goddamn eternal deafening yardwork that is the bane of his existence and mine. After a while of me petting him he started to feel better, and now he's just staring, fascinated, into the mirror.

Clifford D. Simak, A Choice of Gods

(Cross-posted from Commonplace)

The ability seems to be inherent. Man probably had it for a long time before he began to use it. For it to develop time was needed and the longer life gave us time. Perhaps it would have developed even without the longer life if we'd not been so concerned, so fouled up, with our technology. Somewhere we may have taken the wrong turning, accepted the wrong values and permitted our concern with technology to mask our real and valid purpose. The concern with technology may have kept us from knowing what we had. These abilities of ours could not struggle up into our consciousness through the thick layers of machines and cost estimates and all the rest of it. And when we talk about abilities, it's not simply going to the stars.
page 20

"I don't know why," said Jason, "but when you talk about the People I have the feeling that you are describing a monstrous alien race rather than humanity. Without knowing any of the details, they sound frightening."

"They are to me," said John. "Not perhaps because of any single facet of their culture, for some of these facets can be very pleasant, but because of a sense of the irresistible arrogance implicit in it. Not the power so much, although the power is there, but the naked arrogance of a species that sees everything as property to be manipulated and used."
page 77

And what had she done, she wondered. What had happened to her? Trying to recall it, she could discover only fragments of it and she was sure that when it had happened there had been no fragmentation and that the fragments she could recall were no more than broken pieces of the whole. The world had opened out and so had the universe, or what she since had thought must have been the universe, lying all spread out before her, with every nook revealed, with all the knowledge, all the reasons there--a universe in which time and space had been ruled out because time and space were only put there, in the first place, to make it impossible for anyone to grasp the universe.
page 138

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

(Cross-posted from Commonplace)

Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried. No one had noticed; she wore dark green bubble shades. For a moment she'd wondered if the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the tears simply to go on and fill up the entire lens space and never dry. She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry.
page 10

She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight, onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well-tended crop, from the dull brown earth; and she thought of the first time she'd opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate. There'd seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her (if she had tried to find out); so in her first minute of San Narciso, a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding.
page 13

She could, at this stage of things, recognize signals like that, as the epileptic is said to--an odor, color, pure piercing grace note announcing his seizure. Afterward it is only this signal, really dross, this secular announcement, and never what is revealed during the attack, that he remembers. Oedipa wondered whether, at the end of this (if it were supposed to end), she too might not be left with only compiled memories of clues, announcements, intimations, but never the central truth itself, which must somehow each time be too bright for her memory to hold; which must always blaze out, destroying its own message irreversibly, leaving an overexposed blank when the ordinary world came back. In the space of a sip of dandelion wine it came to her that she would never know how many times such a seizure may already have visited, or how to grasp it should it visit again. Perhaps even in this last second--but there was no way to tell.
page 69

"I came," she said, "hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy."

"Cherish it!" cried Hilarius, fiercely. "What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by its little tentacle, don't let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be."
page 103

Philip K. Dick, "Man, Android, and Machine" in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick (Lawrence Sutin, ed.), several excerpts

(Cross-posted from Commonplace)

Within the universe there exists fierce cold things, which I have given the name "machines" to. Their behavior frightens me, especially when it imitates human behavior so well that I get the uncomfortable sense that these things are trying to pass themselves off as humans but are not. I call them "androids," which is my own way of using that word. By "android" I do not mean a sincere attempt to create in the laboratory a human being... I mean a thing somehow generated to deceive us in a cruel way, to cause us to think it to be one of ourselves. Made in a laboratory--that aspect is not meaningful to me; the entire universe is one vast laboratory, and out of it come sly and cruel entities that smile as they reach out to shake hands. But their handshake is the grip of death, and their smile has the coldness of the grave.
page 211

"Man" or "human being" are terms that we must understand correctly and apply, but they apply not to origin or to any ontology but to a way of being in the world; if a mechanical construct halts in its customary operation to lend you assistance, then you will posit to it, gratefully, a humanity that no analysis of its transistors and relay systems can elucidate. A scientist, tracing the wiring circuits of that machine to locate its humanness, would be like our own earnest scientists who tried in vain to locate the soul in man, and, not being able to find a specific organ located at a specific spot, opted to decline to admit that we have souls. As soul is to man, man is to machine: It is the added dimension in terms of functional hierarchy. As one of us acts godlike (gives his cloak to a stranger), a machine acts human when it pauses in its programmed cycle to defer to it by reason of a decision.
page 212

My theme for years in my writing has been, "The devil has a metal face." Perhaps this should be amended now. What I glimpsed and then wrote about was in fact not a face; it was a mask over a face. And the true face is the reverse of the mask. Of course it would be. You do not place fierce, cold metal over fierce, cold metal. You place it over soft flesh, as the harmless moth adorns itself artfully to terrorize others with ocelli.
page 213

Probably everything in the universe serves a good end--I mean, serves the universe's goals. But intrinsic portions or subsystems can be takers of life. We must deal with them as such, without reference to their role in the total structure.
page 214

Philip K. Dick, "The Android and the Human" in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick (Lawrence Sutin, ed.), several excerpts

(Cross-posted from Commonplace)

Speaking in science fiction terms, I now foresee an anarchistic, totalitarian state ahead. Ten years from now a TV street reporter will ask some kid who is president of the United States, and the kid will admit that he doesn't know. "But the president can have you executed," the reporter will protest. "Or beaten or thrown into prison or all your rights taken away, all your property--everything." And the boy will reply, "Yeah, so could my father up to last month when he had his fatal coronary. He used to say the same thing." End of interview. And when the reporter goes to gather up his equipment he will find that one of his color 3-D stereo microphone-vidlens systems is missing; the kid has swiped it from him while the reporter was babbling on.

If, at it seems we are, [sic] in the process of becoming a totalitarian society in which the state apparatus is all-powerful, the ethics most important for the survival of the true, human individual would be: Cheat, lie, evade, fake it, be elsewhere, forge documents, build improved electronic gadgets in your garage that'll outwit the gadgets used by the authorities. If the television screen is going to watch you, rewire it late at night when you're permitted to turn it off--rewire it in such a way that the police flunky monitoring the transmission from your living room mirrors back his house. When you sign a confession under duress, forge the name of one of the political spies who's infiltrated your model-airplane club. Pay your fines in counterfeit money or rubber checks or stolen credit cards. Give a false address. Arrive at the courthouse in a stolen car. Tell the judge that if he sentences you, you will substitute aspirin tablets for his daughter's birth control pills. Or put His Honor on a mailing list for pornographic magazines. Or, if all else fails, threaten him with your using his telephone-credit-card number to make unnecessary long-distance calls to cities on another planet. It will not be necessary to blow up the courthouse anymore. Simply find some way to defame the judge--you saw him driving home one night on the wrong side of the road with his headlights off and a fifth of Seagram's VO propped up against his steering wheel. And his bumper sticker that night read: Grant Full Rights to Us Homosexuals. He has, of course, torn off the sticker by now, but both you and ten of your friends witnessed it. And they are all at pay phones right now, ready to phone the news to the local papers. And, if he is so foolish as to sentence you, at least ask him to give back the little tape recorder you inadvertently left in his bedroom. Since the off-switch on it is broken, it has probably recorded its entire ten-day reel of tape by now. Results should be interesting. And if he tries to destroy the tape, you will have him arrested for vandalism, which in the totalitarian state of tomorrow will be the supreme crime. What is your life worth in his eyes compared with a $3 reel of Mylar tape? The tape is probably government property, like everything else, so to destroy it would be a crime against the state. The first step in a calculated, sinister insurrection.
pages 194-5

Sudden surprises, by the way--and this thought may be in itself a sudden surprise to you--are a sort of antidote to the paranoid . . . or, to be accurate about it, to live in such a way as to encounter sudden surprises quite often or even now and then as an indication that you are not paranoid, because to the paranoid, nothing is a surprise; everything happens exactly as he expected, and sometimes even more so. It all fits into his system. For us, though, there can be no system; maybe all systems--that is, any theoretical, verbal, symbolic, semantic, etc., formulation that attempts to act as an all-encompassing, all-explaining hypothesis of what the universe is about--are manifestations of paranoia. We should be content with the mysterious, the meaningless, the contradictory, the hostile, and most of all the unexplainably warm and giving--total so-called inanimate environment, in other words very much like a person, like the behavior of one intricate, subtle, half-veiled, deep, perplexing, and much-to-be-loved human being to another. To be feared a little, too, sometimes. And perpetually misunderstood. About which we can neither know nor be sure; and we must only trust and make guesses toward.
page 208

[N]o android would think to do what a bright-eyed little girl I know did, something a little bizarre, certainly ethically questionable in several ways, at least in any traditional sense, but to me fully human in that it shows, to me, a spirit of merry defiance, of spirited, although not spiritual, bravery and uniqueness:

One day while driving along in her car she found herself following a truck carrying cases of Coca-Cola bottles, case after case, stacks of them. And when the truck parked, she parked behind it and loaded the back of her own car with cases, as many cases, of bottles of Coca-Cola as she could get in. So, for weeks afterward, she and her friends had all the Coca-Cola they could drink, free--and then, when the bottles were empty, she carried them to the store and turned them in for the deposit refund.

To that, I say this: God bless her. May she live forever. And the Coca-Cola company and the phone company and all the rest of it, with their passive infrared scanners and sniperscopes and suchlike--may they be gone long ago. Metal and stone and wire and thread never did live. But she and her friends--they, our human future, are our little song.
pages 209-10

SNOW

So much snow the weather channel doesn't know what to do about it!



I've just been informed that what's happening now, which I would describe as "very much snow," is just the front of the storm that's not even supposed to really hit for real until sometime around 9:00.

I love it! I mean, even aside from how beautiful it is, it makes things, at least temporarily, to grind to a halt. As it should.

If you're in a similarly snowy clime, and you have the opportunity, allow it to force you to take some time to slow down. That's my advice.

Maya Deren, "Notes on Ritual and Ordeal"

(Cross-posted from Commonplace)

Originally in Film Culture no. 39; I saw it quoted in the special features of a DVD of her movies.

A ritual is characterized by the de-personalization of the individual. In some cases it is even marked by the use of masks and voluminous garments, so that the performer is virtually anonymous; and it is marked also by the participation of the community...as a homogeneous entity in which the inner patterns of relationship between the elements create, together, a larger movement of the body as a whole. The intent of such a de-personalization is not the destruction of the individual; on the contrary, it enlarges him beyond the personal dimension.

Stanislaw Lem, "Non Serviam" in A Perfect Vacuum page 172

(Cross-posted from Commonplace)

A man may interpret the real world in a variety of ways. He may devote particular attention--intense scientific investigation--to certain facets of that world, and the knowledge he acquires then casts its own special light on the remaining portions of the world, those not considered in his priority-setting research. If first he diligently takes up mechanics, he will fashion for himself a mechanical model of the world and will see the Universe as a gigantic and perfect clock that in its inexorable movement proceeds from the past to a precisely determined future. This model is not an accurate representation of reality, and yet one can make use of it for a period of time historically long, and with it can even achieve many practical successes--the building of machines, implements, etc.

When humans talk about "discovering" things...

...we're fucking stupid.

Turtles swim from Africa to South America regularly, arctic terns go from pole to pole and wherever else they want, pterosaurs used to fly literally halfway around the world without stopping, and we think Columbus was some kind of a big deal.

A Wonder Unlike Any Other...

All considered, I'm not sure you could call the 50 second mark a "punchline", but it is a delightful bonus to this Malaysian treasure.

Taking it slow

Imagine traveling in a time machine back to, say, 1850, giving the first person you see a Tootsie Pop, and telling them that the outside tastes like fruit and the inside tastes like chocolate.

Robert Musil, The Confusions of Young Törless, page 72

(Cross-posted from Commonplace)

It struck him that he had once, standing with his father before one of those landscapes, cried out unexpectedly, "Oh, how beautiful that is" -- and had been embarrassed by his father's pleasure. On that occasion he might just as easily have said: "How terribly said it is." It was a failure of words that tormented him then, a half-awareness that the words were merely random excuses for what he had felt.

And today he remembered the picture, he remembered the words, and he clearly recalled lying about that feeling even though he did not know why. His eye ran through everything again in his memory. But it returned unassuaged, again and again. A smile of delight at the wealth of ideas that he still clutched as though distractedly, slowly assumed a barely perceptible, painful trait...

He felt the need to persist in his search for a bridge, a context, a comparison -- between himself and that which stood silently before his mind.

But however often he had calmed himself with a thought, that incomprehensible objection remained: you're lying. It was as though he had to pass through an unstoppable division of soldiers, a stubborn remnant forever leaping out at him, or as though he was wearing his feverish fingers raw trying to undo an endless knot.

And finally he gave up. The room closed in around him, and his memories burgeoned in unnatural distortions.

Yesterday was a good day

Yesterday was Foo Fest here in Providence, the annual birthday block party for AS220, the open gallery/performance/artist's/living space downtown. The Baronette and I went down a couple of times, first in the early afternoon to visit the Anarchist Book Fair, where we bought a few things from the AK Press booth (I got this and this, she got this and this, if you're wondering). I had a nice, admittedly sort of vapid (my fault) short conversation with the woman working the booth about how all the best writers are anarchists. Then we kind of meandered home and shelved the books and relaxed for a while.

Then, later on in the evening, we walked back downtown, an extremely pleasant three mile walk through about seven different types of city environments, to see fucking ESG, who played to a packed, blocked off street full of people enjoying the hell out of it. From the moment I heard, a few months ago, that ESG was going to be playing Foo Fest, to the moment the sisters got on stage, I had a hard time believing I was going to actually see them. And then I saw them. And they were phenomenal.



The bands I'm used to seeing around here are all kind of the same, and I'm sick of it. It's usually a bunch of self-consciously scruffy 20 or 30-ish white guys* playing an update on either stoner metal or no wave, to my ears adding very little to either field. So in contrast it was refreshing to see a bunch of ordinary women who looked like no one so much as the people I ride the bus with every day creating extraordinary music with nothing but a standard drumset, a hand drum set, a bass, some other various hand percussion objects picked up from time to time, and vocals (and, for one beautiful song, one note on a guitar, over and over).



It didn't sound like their records, and I didn't expect it to. It's thirty years later now, and, obviously, Martin Hannett wasn't there. And he didn't need to be, of course. ESG was there. And they were obviously thrilled to be there, or anywhere, playing to an audience of people who are loving it, who are calling out the names of songs they want to hear, thirty years later, twenty years after releasing an EP titled Sample Credits Don't Pay Our Bills**.



It may seem strange for me to say this while idolizing this one particular band, but: we can all create beautiful things. We don't need to rely on other people to do it for us. I don't mean to say to stop listening to other people's music or looking at other people's paintings or reading other people's books or anything; there should be dialogue, always, and dialogue involves at least two parties, not just one. But one of those parties should always be us.



The best shows I've been to in recent years (The Homosexuals, ESG, the Girls Rock RI show last month that I meant to write about but didn't but which was fucking amazing) have all reminded me of this. Art that only dazzles, that only makes you want to applaud the artist, is shitty art. Art that makes you want to live and create is good art. This was good art.

*Which unfortunately describes me as well.
**Not to say that playing Foo Fest means they're financially set now or anything. But it must feel so wonderful to be recognized for the brilliant people they are.

UPDATE This post of Richard's applies, and I wish I had read it before writing this instead of right after!

Being alive

I was just riding the bus home from work, struggling to read. I say struggling because I kept getting distracted by the noisy conversation the bus driver and a few of the people sitting near the front were having. And when I say "noisy," I mean noisy.

The conversation was wide-ranging. I first started picking up on it when they were talking about the various ways you can get electrocuted during a thunderstorm (we had thunderstorms here today), and the different things you can do to increase or decrease your chances of it. Then, via an anecdote about someone being electrocuted as a result of peeing on a third rail, they seamlessly transitioned to talking about the Acela and in general the viability of Amtrack as an enterprise. I got back to reading again, but then got distracted by some disdainful talk about celebrities who have recently bought property in Rhode Island (Nicholas Cage, Arnold Schwarzenegger on behalf of his granddaughter) and the possibility of turning the Westin Hotel and the Providence Place Mall, to which it is connected by a covered walking bridge, into a sort of refuge-living-space-casino complex for the very wealthy, which idea was met by much hostility (as far as I know, it is not likely to actually happen, and I don't think anyone's even talking about it).

And so on. As I said, I kept getting distracted from my reading, and was finding myself more and more irritated. Why don't they shut up, I thought. They seemed to be having a great time, and they were all manifestly smart and engaged and funny and lively and interested in the world around them, but: they were distracting from my reading, and it annoyed me.

The book I was reading was Derrick Jensen's Endgame, Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization, which I have just started reading at Richard's suggestion. The passage I was so irritated at being distracted from was this one, which I have massively truncated from pages 19-20:

...if we dig beneath [the] second, smiling mask of civilization--the belief that civilization's visual or musical arts, for example, are more developed than those of noncivilized peoples--we find a mirror image of civilization's other face, that of power. For example, it wouldn't be the whole truth to say that visual and musical arts have simply grown or become more highly advanced under this system; it's more true that they have long ago succumbed to the same division of labor that characterizes this culture's economics and politics. Where among traditional indigenous people--the "uncivilized"--songs are sung by everyone...within civilization songs are written and performed by experts, those with "talent," those whose lives are devoted to the production of these arts... I'm not certain I'd characterize the conversion of human beings from participants in the ongoing creation of communal arts to more passive consumers of artistic products manufactured by distant experts...as a good thing.

I could make a similar argument about writing, but Stanley Diamond beat me to it: "Writing was one of the original mysteries of civilization, and it reduced the complexities of experience to the written word. Moreover, writing provides the ruling classes with an ideological instrument of incalculable power. The word of God becomes an invincible law, mediated by priests... symbols became explicit; they lost a certain richness. Man's word was no longer an endless exploration of reality, but a sign that could be used against him..."

[Jensen moves on to his next point, or rather to the next part of the same point]

...I'm not certain that the ability to send emails back and forth to Spain or to watch television programs beamed out of Los Angeles makes my life particularly richer. It's far more important, useful, and enriching, I think, to get to know my neighbors. I'm frequently amazed to find myself sitting in a room with my fellow human beings, all of us staring at a box watching and listening to a story concocted and enacted by people far away. I have friends who know Seinfeld's neighbors better than their own... The other night, I wrote till late, and finally turned off my computer to step outside and say goodnight to the dogs. I realized, then, that the wind was blowing hard through the tops of the redwood trees, and the trees were sighing and whispering. Branches were clashing, and in the distance I heard them cracking. Until that moment I had not realized such a symphony was taking place so near, much less had I gone out to participate in it, to feel the wind blow my hair and to feel the tossed rain hit me in the face. All of the sounds of the night had been drowned out by the monotone whine of my computer's fan... [G]iven the impulse for centralized control that motivates civilization, widening communication in this case really means reducing us from active participants in our own lives and in the lives of those around us to consumers sucking words and images from some distant sugar tit.

Once I got that far and the meaning of the words began, along with my increasing agreement with them, to sink in, I started to become ashamed of my previous irritation. I gave up trying to read, because after all I can do that any time I want*. I closed the book, and while I didn't go so far as to join in with the conversation (I'm shy), I did listen, appreciatively, and did feel part of a community, if only glancingly, and only briefly. It was nice.

Then I got home, turned on my computer, opened all the windows, and was immediately startled by the call of a bird. Not knowing at first how to interpret the sound, unfamiliar in this context, I thought for a moment that it was my computer issuing its death rattles. Baby steps; I guess I can't expect to become a fully functional life-form in an instant.

*Except of course during work hours!!!

Crutches for brains

When he can pull himself away from, for example, being "rather worried" by "violent action against property" (and my god, even if you are going to take that ludicrous construction seriously as something to be worried about, does spray painting a billboard even count?), PZ Myers is occasionally able to say something interesting.

The article is about the limitations of the human brain, many of which I was familiar with already. If you aren't, I don't recommend starting with this brief, snotty article; I'd say go for a book by V.S. Ramachandran or someone like him, who unlike friend Myers is genuinely, consistently interesting, and feels no need to be a dick to make up for his own inadequacies as a human being.

What I like here is this brief passage, ignoring the miserably failed attempt at goofy humor that concludes it:

We even build crutches for brains. Math is a crutch. Science is a crutch. Philosophy is a crutch. Artists, too, use learned heuristics to get their minds to operate reliably in that unnatural mode. We rely utterly on these kinds of intellectual tools to focus our brains efficiently on problem solving, rather than doing what comes naturally, which usually involves snarfing down cheeseburgers and having wild monkey sex with other bipeds.

This might make me dumb, but I had never, ever thought to frame things that way. Leaving aside the art and philosophy for the moment, I was of course aware of the essential incompleteness and blundering nature of scientific inquiry, and I've long had a layman's fascination for the mystery of how it is that math, an abstract, constructed system totally disconnected from reality, seems to be very, very good at describing the way the universe works. But it never occurred to me to think of these things as crutches, with all that implies.

Imagine, being able to see the workings of the universe we live in directly, without the assistance of math and science. To be able to just understand. It's kind of a breathtaking thought.

Stories

Over at Dead Horse, Rob Payne has a great little one-paragraph story called "World Views". It's about a magical creature. As Rob says, stories are a good way to communicate ideas.

Weird

If digby is, as she says, "immune" to speeches, what the heck keeps her so damn snookered?

More on Playtime

Following up on the Baronette's typically brief post on Tati's Playtime, I wanted to be wordier about it.

When people talk about Jacques Tati, they usually just talk kind of vaguely about the alienation of modern life and technology. Which, you know, sure. But Playtime is much much more than that. Most of the running time is, to be sure, about alienation in modern surroundings. And before I even get to my big but about that I want to point out the smaller but that even this alienation is presented with such a degree of playfulness and exhilaration that tells you that Tati's not wandering through this alienation anywhere near as helplessly as his Monsieur Hulot is. The characters in the movie might have emotions ranging from not-unhappy downwards, but the movie itself is filled with joy.

Towards the end of the film we find out explicitly where it comes from, and it's my big but. In an extended sequence, a brand-new ultra-modern nightclub starts getting customers before it's even done being constructed, and then people keep piling in in larger and larger numbers and before long they've literally torn the place to pieces. And as they destroy and remake the modern world they're in, they suddenly become absolutely, uproariously joyous, and dance and drink and laugh into the morning.

And then, here's the great part: the rest of the movie keeps that mood. They're back out into surroundings they haven't remade for themselves, surroundings that just yesterday (just about fifteen minutes ago in screen time) were harsh and alien, but the joy remains. These people have figured out how to take the surroundings they're given and use them for their own purposes, rather than how the places signal them to use them.

Or, as Jonathan Rosenbaum put it (as I see him quoted by Roger Ebert), Playtime

directs us to look around at the world we live in (the one we keep building), then at each other, and to see how funny that relationship is and how many brilliant possibilities we still have in a shopping-mall world that perpetually suggests otherwise; to look and see that there are many possibilities and that the play between them, activated by the dance of our gaze, can become a kind of comic ballet, one that we both observe and perform.

This is why the Baronette says it's nice to learn that Debord loved the movie. It could just as well have been called Psychogeography: The Movie. Except of course that that would take probably the single most wonderfully joyful movie I've ever seen and make it sound kind of dry and intellectual. Which it completely is not. I've seriously never had so much fun watching a movie, nor have I ever been so inspired to face the world differently by a movie.