____________________________________________________________
October 7, 2013
"Gravity" is defined by the Oxford dictionary as "the force that attracts a body toward the center of the earth, or toward any other physical body having mass."
When I refer to the movie theater as my church, I'm only half kidding. It's been clear to me for a long time that a sense of wonder, compassion, gratitude and acceptance often comes to me in the presence of certain art forms: music, poetry, and novels. Since I was a kid, though, it has been film, perhaps more than any other artistic medium, that transports me out of myself and into a state of appreciation. There's a moment in Gravity, Alfonso Cuaron's fantastic new movie, in which an astronaut's single tear floats toward the camera (in 3D, toward the audience) that captures for me the wonderful, ironic marriage of technology and art that is the motion picture industry: the tear is an entirely synthesized yet deeply poetic image.
Gravity might the best "space" movie since 2001. Certainly it pays tribute to that film and many others. It also pays tribute to the most basic human emotions: terror, pain, loss, love and hope. It's both dazzlingly advanced in terms of visual effects and achingly primal in its emotional arc. And it's narratively efficient, whizzing by at 90 minutes like a cloud of accelerating satellite debris.
There are some important themes floating around under all the drama, thrills, and special
effects. Gravity evokes the incredible hope our shimmering blue planet represents, gravitationally perched between the extremes of a burning sun and the cold, enormous backdrop of space. By setting the story in orbit, the film creates a visual distance from, and a larger context for the earth, making life here seem somehow more precious but also less random.
Gravity is full of such paradoxes. Technology is something both fragile and violent, a tool of human curiosity and human belligerence, a source of danger but also the only safe haven. I left the darkness of the movie theater feeling a bit more at home in the world, not just the one with its blue sky and green trees, but also the one in which I pressed a button and stepped into a mass produced automobile that whisked my wife and me away.
Finally, Gravity is unabashedly and refreshingly humanistic; it celebrates what is best and most hopeful in our species. What better exemplars of homo-sapien excellence than astronauts, who have to be physically fit, intellectually engaged, and emotionally balanced to do their jobs? Co-stars George Clooney and Sandra Bullock obviously deserve great credit for the film's warmth and appeal, but then again, so does Cuaron's son, Jose, who co-wrote the script with him, as do all the gifted technicians, designers, programmers, musicians, and others who worked on it. Film is an inherently collective art form, both in its production and its reception.
That is, if you treat yourself to this one at the theater, which I heartily recommend.
September 13, 2013
While browsing the NY Times for an interesting piece of non-fiction to share with my sophomores, I read this article about Voyager 1 exiting the solar system. This story started to circulate around my brain a few weeks ago when I heard a piece on NPR about Carl Sagan's involvement in this project, and the "Golden Record" that is on board the Voyager:
The contents of the record were selected for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University, et. al. Dr. Sagan and his associates assembled 115 images and a variety of natural sounds, such as those made by surf, wind and thunder, birds, whales, and other animals. To this they added musical selections from different cultures and eras, and spoken greetings from Earth-people in fifty-five languages, and printed messages from President Carter and U.N. Secretary General Waldheim. Each record is encased in a protective aluminum jacket, together with a cartridge and a needle. Instructions, in symbolic language, explain the origin of the spacecraft and indicate how the record is to be played. The 115 images are encoded in analog form. The remainder of the record is in audio, designed to be played at 16-2/3 revolutions per minute. It contains the spoken greetings, beginning with Akkadian, which was spoken in Sumer about six thousand years ago, and ending with Wu, a modern Chinese dialect. Following the section on the sounds of Earth, there is an eclectic 90-minute selection of music, including both Eastern and Western classics and a variety of ethnic music. Once the Voyager spacecraft leave the solar system (by 1990, both will be beyond the orbit of Pluto), they will find themselves in empty space. It will be forty thousand years before they make a close approach to any other planetary system. As Carl Sagan has noted, "The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space. But the launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet." (Jet Propulsion Laboratory, CA Institute of Technology Website)
This is an amazing human milestone, it's happening as I write these words, and I'm so moved by the story that I suspect I won't try to use it in class. Something about the idea of this resilient little 1,590 pound probe reaching out into the vastness of space beyond the heliosphere is overwhelmingly poignant and inspiring to me. What must it mean to the thousands of people who have contributed to such a tremendous project?
I don't have a scientific mind. The discoveries of science, for me, translate into philosophy, and even into a kind of vague spirituality. Stories like this remind me that the mystery is so big. They remind me, as the arts so often do, that one of most fundamental human responses to the world is a sense of wonder. Even in the midst of life's suffering and inherent unsatisfactoriness, what Buddhists call dukkha, we have so much to be amazed by. If only we could sustain such a response to being.
I was thinking while driving to work this morning that even if we're mortal in every way, individually, as a species, as a solar system.... the fact that we lived here once can never be erased. It happened. And the fact that we live here now as part of it all makes everything we choose to do matter.
Maybe I can teach this article. I'll check in with Mr. Battles, our earth science teacher, and see if he's had time to talk with the students about it. Maybe I can have my students read it along with Whitman's great poem about launching "forth filaments," and "seeking the spheres to connect them." Or maybe not. Either way, it's nice to have the option. Teaching has its benefits.
A Noiseless Patient Spider
August 8, 2013
July 2, 2013
To know that my story is not exactly mine, but is rather a wave rising up within the sea of stories, is to appreciate my story and everyone else's in a new, wider, and more significant way. Maybe by looking at stories this way we can see them as large and mysterious. Then perhaps we won't need to cling any longer to one particular version of our story as the only true story, the story of victimization or trivialization or despair or boredom; instead we might begin to see our many stories as stories of humanness, of being-aliveness, not just our own small possessions. And then, perhaps, we can be inspired by our own stories, and begin to make use of them in a new way.
- from Sailing Home by Norman Fischer
June 25, 2013
I knew that The Last of Us was going to be a very good stealth/survival/action videogame. Naughty Dog, the company behind the Uncharted franchise, is a passionate team of brilliant developers; their worlds have a lush, painterly depth, and their gameplay is frenetic and fun. Most importantly to me, their work is informed by more than just gaming culture; it's clear that their creations owe a lot to a love of films and novels. These writers and game designers are confident enough in their storytelling skills to eschew the choose-your-own-adventure freedoms of the RPG or Open World genres. Instead, they guide the player down a traditional videogame path, developing the plot through exciting combat, platforming and puzzle-solving sequences, interspersed with extremely well-crafted cut-scenes. Each title is enveloped in a mesmerizing atmosphere of fantastic imagery, convincing voice-acting (a rarity in videogames) and great music.
Despite all this, nothing prepared me for The Last of Us. It is, quite simply, the most powerful videogame I’ve ever played. The writing is layered, the visuals cinematic, the acting superb, and the soundtrack haunting. The gameplay itself is brutal, exhausting, and exhilarating.
In terms of its bleak, harrowing tone and emotional intensity, The Last of Us is a breakthrough piece of interactive media. If you have any interest in what this medium can do, in how it can create uniquely imaginative, immersive experiences distinct from other forms of narrative, you owe it to yourself to sit down for fifteen hours with this digital masterpiece.
The British fellow below has the goods on it. Check out his video.
April 30, 2013
I’ve been watching all of Stanley Kubrick’s films again, and they’ve been blowing me away. In my excitement, I’ve been accosting innocent people with my opinions about them.
February 23, 2013
It's been a good season for controversy at the movies. I had no idea until after I saw Django Unchained this weekend that, like Zero Dark Thirty, it had inspired a lot of discussion and debate in the blogosphere. I believe I remember the same thing happening a few years ago when Tarantino directed Inglorious Basterds, a revenge fantasy about a special-forces platoon of Jews who kill nazis. This time around, Tarantino brings his distinct style of irreverent b-movie schlock to a revenge fantasy about a former slave killing slave owners and other assorted rednecky bad guys, and understandably, some African Americans have taken offense. When asked about the film, Spike Lee, a prominent black filmmaker, said, "All I'm going to say is that it's disrespectful to my ancestors." More recently he tweeted, "American Slavery Was Not A Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. It Was A Holocaust.My Ancestors Are Slaves. Stolen From Africa. I Will Honor Them."
Other African Americans have risen to Tarantino's defense, including the stars of his film, Jamie Foxx, Lawrence Fishburne and Kerry Washington, Denzel Washington's daughter.
My own take is that the film is quite good. It's violent, tasteless, filled with the "N" word, disturbing, funny, over-the-top, ridiculous and serious at the same time. To me, Tarantino has done what good standup comedians do: he's made something entertaining about a part of our history and world that's hard to confront and talk about. There's something refreshing about the way he's dusted off the solemnity that usually accompanies movies about historical atrocities. As I've written before, I'm a huge fan of Steven Spielberg, and I have appreciated his more reverential tone towards the holocaust and slavery in Schindler's List and Amistad, repsectively. But there are many ways to talk about these issues, and Tarantino's approach, while shocking and absurd in some ways, goes further and deeper into the sickness of slavery than anything I've ever seen before. He even manages to get across some thoughtful ideas about intra-racial tensions surrounding the evil institution by providing the black hero with a white sidekick, and the white villain with a black sidekick.
I think this is an interesting film, and in its own vulgar way, good for race relations in America.
January 17, 2013
The controversy surrounding Zero Dark Thirty reminds me of the arguments I remember having with my mom back in the seventies over The Deer Hunter, a film I still think of as a powerful work of art, despite its problems as social or political commentary. She hated what she thought was its racist depiction of the Vietnamese, and its fictional depiction of a Russian Roulette gambling culture that one of its main characters, Nick, gets sucked into. My mom had opposed the war, and was not interested in a film that either leaned right or aimed for a politically neutral stance. While I respected that, I was more interested in the power of a good story with characters I cared about, conflicts to wrestle with, and an immersive experience to partake in.
So it continues to go. I've realized, reading the criticisms of Kathryn Bigelow's take on the last decade's war with al Qaeda, that I'm still more interested in storytelling than political beliefs. Almost everyone concedes that Zero Dark Thirty is a tremendous work of film narrative. It has received glowing reviews (it has a 95 average on Metacritic) and has been nominated for many awards, including the top slot at the Academy Awards. But based on my admittedly limited reading and thinking on the subject, I'd defend its depiction of history as well.
I'll concede that there are legitimate issues to be raised about the way the film avoids addressing the controversies that swirled around the practice of "enhanced interrogation" (or "torture," as Bigelow herself calls it in a recent LA Times opinion piece) in the intelligence community and the larger culture. But to read and listen to critics of the film, many of whom have not seen it, is to come face to face with political conviction trumping all other considerations, even the facts themselves.
First off, the oft-repeated claim that enhanced interrogation played no role in obtaining information in the hunt for bin Laden is simply not settled, according to Peter Bergen's highly regarded Manhunt: the Ten Year Search for bin Laden. According to his book, the development of a theory regarding "the Kuwaiti," a courier for bin Laden, was developed by information extracted from a man named al Qahtani, whose "treatment amounted to torture, according to Susan Crawford, a former federal judge who was oppointed to oversee the Guantanamo military commissions under the Bush administration." Although Qahtani was not waterboarded, he was the recipient of "sustained isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity, and prolonged exposure to cold," as well as water dousing and sharp blasts "of some especially annoying music by Christina Aguilera. He was forced to perform dog tricks..." And so on, ad nauseum. Information concerning the courier was also obtained from other detainees, similarly mistreated, according to Bergen, WikiLeaks, and Mark Bowden, a journalist with many ties to the military and the intelligence community.
Much of this kind of treatment is depicted in Zero Dark Thirty's early, controversial scenes with a fictional, composite character named Ammar, who is also water-boarded, a practice that was used on only three al Qaeda operatives (albeit for hundreds of times). The film actually goes out of its way to show that the information Ammar provides comes too late, after a terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia, which the agents are unable to prevent precisely because of Ammar's resistance to torture. The film also depicts the information being provided outside of the "box" where much of this vile behavior has occurred, over a meal; the agents are playing "good cops" when Ammar yields. Bigelow manages to humanize Ammar; he's never a simple villain, despite his high rank in al Qaeda. She also shows the corrosive effects of the entire process on her protagonist, who's quite a chilly, lonely woman to begin with.
Bigelow has called herself a pacifist and written that she wishes these events "hadn't happened." One does not have to be a supporter of or apologist for these tactics in order to accept that they might have played a role in the gathering of evidence that eventually led to bin Laden. As Bigelow writes in an LA Times piece defending her film, "depiction is not endorsement." Even Andrew Sullivan, who has long taken a very strong position against the Bush administration's detainee policies (he wants arrests made), points out that one of the film's virtues is its clear-cut depiction of what our CIA was up to in the early years of the War on Terror.
Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down and The Finish, which is about this same subject as Zero Dark Thirty, writes the following in The Atlantic:
The criticism is unfair, and its reading of both the film and the actual story seems willfully mistaken. Torture may be morally wrong, and it may not be the best way to obtain information from detainees, but it played a role in America's messy, decade-long pursuit of Osama bin Laden, and Zero Dark Thirty is right to portray that fact.
The truth about torture itself is not clear-cut. Those who argue that it simply does not work go well beyond saying that it is wrong. They may not even consider it a moral question. After all, if threatening or mistreating a detainee will always fail to produce useful intelligence, who other than a sadist would bother? I am not convinced. I think the moral question arises precisely because torture, or fear, can be an effective tool in interrogation. If we as a nation ban it, we do so despite that fact. We forego the advantages of torture to claim higher moral ground. In order for that be to a virtuous choice, as opposed to a purely practical one, it means we must give up something of value—in this case intelligence that might forestall tragedy.
That is not the choice our nation made back in 2001, when this story begins. The fear that contaminated our military prisons in subsequent years became a scandal. It would be very neat to conclude that it was not only wrong, but useless. Zero Dark Thirty doesn't do that, nor should you.
Zero Dark Thirty is a sort of grimly, bleakly patriotic work; it's not a mindless action movie or a feel-good celebration of America. It captures many of the emotions that the awful first decade of the 21st century ushered in for many of us: fear, anger, disgust, and a belated sense of realism (or cynicism) after the brief cheer of the post-Cold War period. It's about some of the ways, many of them disturbing and morally questionable, that U.S. intelligence agents and an elite military force tracked down and killed a mass-murdering religious zealot.It's not pretty, but it's a very compelling story.
January 13, 2013
Here's a piece of music my son wrote, performed, and produced. A little parental pride never hurt anyone, right? His Irish ancestors would be pleased.
January 9, 2013