The Question Lady writes:
How would you describe your memory? Mine is so arbitrary: I can memorize 10,000 words, but can’t remember whether or not I turned off the stove after I leave the house. I have a horrible time with people’s names five minutes after I meet them, but can remember phone numbers for years.
Fabrizio del Wrongo writes:
Kenneth Branagh has directed “Thor” with the sort of gloppy boyishness that I’ve sometimes enjoyed in his acting. The tone is consistently breathless, jaunty even, and not a frame of it is underworked. I took it as an effective antidote to the “realistic” trend in superhero movies, epitomized by Christopher Nolan’s “Batman” films with their square literalism and glowering attitudinizing. By contrast “Thor” is dippy and cheekily hyperbolic; it has a Liberace loopiness, and it might be the gaudiest pop fantasy since the 1980 “Flash Gordon.” As the Norse god of thunder, Chris Hemsworth is all hunk, but he’s surprisingly good with humor. This comes across primarily during his scenes on Earth, where Thor’s father Odin (Anthony Hopkins) banishes him to learn humility. The screenplay milks these scenes for fish-out-of-water yucks, and Branagh and editor Paul Rubell give the gags just the right emphasis — they come in from the side, like wisecracks, then get out quick. The New Mexico town in which the Earth material is set is filled with neon signs and rundown space-age architecture, and there’s a notable absence of chain stores. It’s like a daydream of ’50s-style shagginess, one rendered in strokes so broad that you register it half-subliminally, out of the corner of your eye. This provides an effective counterpoint to the visual bombast of Asgard, the realm of the gods, with its chiaroscuro shadings and riotous Jack Kirby detailing, and for a while the movie maintains momentum mostly by visual means, happily seesawing between its two main locations. It’s a pity that the plot eventually catches up with the art direction. Like so many over-marketed, effects-laden productions, “Thor” feels like it was written by committee and begun before the screenplay had found a satisfying shape. The motivations of Thor’s main antagonist, his brother Loki (a dyspeptic Tom Hiddleston), are many and muddled, and Thor’s group of Asgardian pals has little to do once they show up on Earth to rescue him; one suspects they were conceived in order to round out the line of action figures. It’s also something of a drag that Thor, the mighty god of storms, war, and oak trees, is forced to learn a politically correct lesson in order to assume Odin’s mantle. It eventually leads him into the arms of a bloodless Natalie Portman, who does nothing here to deter me from the opinion that she’s the worst major actress in American movies.
Fenster writes:
The ever-mysterious Question Lady asks how you handle people who disagree with you politically. Fenster wrote in response:
I used to engage, and even argue, more than I do now. That is for two reasons. First, I found that engagement didn’t change much, that it tended to estrange those close to me, and that even if I did change a mind it wouldn’t change as much of the world as my feistiness was seeking for validation. Second, while I believed it was important to point out error, experience proved how often I was myself off-track, and in time I reflected, however uncouthly, that modesty in opinion was also a good policy.
To elaborate on that last point.
It has been noted that the idea of the narrative has migrated from the literary realm and has invaded politics. See this nice Poynter article for a view of the situation.
The Poynter article contains a quote from the London Review of Books which encapsulates the situation nicely:
Back when I was at university, the only people who ever used the word ‘narrative’ were literature students with an interest in critical theory. Everyone else made do with ‘story’ and ‘plot’. Since then, the n-word has been on a long journey towards the spotlight – especially the political spotlight. Everybody in politics now seems to talk about narratives all the time; even political spin-doctors describe their job as being ‘to craft narratives.’ We no longer have debates, we have conflicting narratives. It’s hard to know whether this represents an increase in PR sophistication and self-awareness, or a decrease in the general level of discourse.
We all know the power of the narrative. Our brains are wired to make sense of things, even when the events themselves are complex, disordered and ambiguous. It is one of the things we do best and is a glory of cognition.
The only problems is how often we are wrong, especially when the sensemaking is taking place under pressure, complexity and ambiguity.
Take these poor Romney staffers drowning their sorrows in a hotel bar near the Boston Convention Center after their candidate’s concession speech. In Byron York’s telling:
“I am shocked, I am blown away,” said Joe Sweeney, of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. “I thought I had a pretty good pulse on this stuff. I thought there was a trend that was going on underground.”
“We were so convinced that the people of this country had more common sense than that,” said Nan Strauch, of Hilton Head, South Carolina. “It was just a very big surprise. We felt so confident.”
“It makes me wonder who my fellow citizens are,” said Marianne Doherty of Boston. “I’ve got to be honest, I feel like I’ve lost touch with what the identity of America is right now. I really do.”
Poor dears. And I mean that sincerely. They got it bad and it ain’t good.
A similar situation unfolded this election relative to polling. Sure, some of the polling analysis was done by bought and paid for spinsters like Karl Rove, who was apparently crunching numbers frantically on Fox even after Ohio was called, determined as he was to have events fit his narrative.
But there was a lot of disagreement, too, between the seemingly independent pollsters. Even some of them apparently fell under the spell of the narrative, finding underground currents where there were none. As this Chronicle article points out, the quants won out over the narrative folks where prediction is concerned.
Me, I am not a quant person. I’ve always been a qual person and, in part to compensate for lack of quant chops have a well-developed sense of the narrative. I am typically good at making at least some sense of a situation and finding useful ways to persuade and articulate. That skill has helped me much as a career as an administrator and executive, explaining complex situations to Boards, presidents and staff, mostly in higher education.
But long reflection does suggest that great care must be taken with the narrative.
Sir Barken Hyena writes:
I’ve long found myself frustrated by the musical culture I’ve had to live in, and been drawn to other cultures as a kind of refuge. At home sick for a day recently, I watched three documentaries on Netflix that aptly highlighted my likes and dislikes, and what I think a healthy musical culture can be. And what an unhealthy one never is.
First up was “I’ll Sing For You”, a well-named and refreshingly unpretentious affair, about the Malian guitarist and singer Boubacar “KarKar” Traore, who’s almost an institution in his home country. Part biopic, part travelogue, part music video, we follow KarKar around Mali while he plays his guitar and sings in various impromptu settings: on a boat sailing down a river, on a train, in villages and homes and ruins. This clip gives a good idea of the flavor of the film (that’s Malian superstar Ali Farke Toure on the right)
Some time is spent on KarKar’s glory years when Mali first gained independence – he’s something of a patriotic figure there – and his subsequent travails as an immigrant in France when he dropped out of sight, and his return and rediscovery. But not too much is made of this, he’s certainly never described as any kind of suffering artist struggling to bring his creative visions to the world. Rather he’s shown as grateful for the mere opportunity to sing for us. Which he does with deep feeling and infinite grace, as the clip shows.
Mali is desperately poor and it’s clear that the people struggle daily with their poverty. One result of that struggle is a musical culture that’s bursting with vitality and feeling, and the Malians are clearly damn proud of it. With good reason.
Next up was “Life After Django Reinhardt”, about celebrating the Gypsy jazz great’s 100th centennial. A collection of guitarists who have followed in his footsteps, some of them also Gypsies, explore their love and devotion to this phenomenal musician. Like “I’ll Sing For You”, it’s an unpretentious production, with lots of vibrant playing and scenes of musicians just having a great time doing what they do best, what they love. They relate various fond memories about how the came to know Django’s music and what it’s done for them. There is little to no discussion of money, the music business, how all of these guitarists make a living, or even if they are professionals at all. That’s not what these guys are about. What they’re about comes through loud and clear in every frame: the pure enjoyment of music, for it’s own sake.
See if you can keep your feet still for this clip (the young guy at the end is Django’s grandson):
And lastly, (sigh) we come back home to the US and “Echotone”, a rambling and definitely highly pretentious doc about the Austin, Texas music scene and the efforts of some poor struggling artists to maintain their integrity in a world deeply hostile. Besides some background about the impact of the city’s explosive growth on the music scene, mostly we follow around various hopefuls as they try to build careers out of their music. In contrast to the other two, I didn’t enjoy even one moment of the musical material, which is the usual indie garbage churned out these days. To my ears there’s not one moment of honest music here. It’s all playacting. There is talent, no question. And dedication, hard work, yada yada, all admirable I suppose. But what is it all for? Why do they bother? Unlike the other docs, this one is pretty much always about money, in one way or another. Like how the musicians never have any, and how the city government never wants to spend money on the music scene, which is somehow a goldmine waiting to be dug at the same time it’s unable to pay for the hipster’s guitar strings.
The constant claim is that they just want to do their thing but strangely they never actually act like it. Mostly they talk about their efforts to overcome public indifference to what they’re doing, while very unconvincingly protesting indifference to the same. And the music clips reveal a discomfiting self-conscious aspect. They remind me of the kids in music stores trying out electric guitars, always looking over their shoulders to see if they’re being noticed while they jam out. Rock stars in their own minds, but they can’t bring themselves to admit that’s what they want, because of the strange obsession with “authenticity”, whatever that is, which is the one thing that escapes their grasp. Well, that and money. And that’s what an unhealthy culture, which this is in my view, can’t produce: real music.
All are on Netflix Instantview.
The Question Lady writes:
How do you deal with people who differ from you politically?
Fenster writes:
Ruben Blades’ Primogenio.
1. The opening section is clever, splendid and musical–especially at higher volumes when the bass and percussion come in. The piece starts with bagpipes and sounds almost, but not quite, that it is going to be played straight in Celtic fashion. Then–boom!–it reveals itself in its underlying Latin glory. The continued interplay between the Latin rhythms and the almost Scottish theme is quite nice.
2. There’s a side of salsa-style singing that almost feels like a recitative, with the singer looking you directly in the eye and talking to you. Blades is particularly good at this, especially in the call-and-response middle sections.
3. It is nice to see kind of music that Americans think of as ethnic adopt a world pose. The lyrics to the song are a kind of ode to Africa in terms of human beginnings, but it is less an ode to Africa per se than a celebration of human connectedness. On the one level, it’s a multicultural thing. One another, it is Blades making a forceful statement that Latino culture is large enough, and self-confident enough, to do its own appropriation thing.
Paleo Retiree writes:
After a week of Hurricane Sandy-caused inconvenience, the Question Lady and I are enjoying a return to normal life. Seldom have dependable electricity and running water (let alone wi-fi) struck us as so wonderful. During the adventure, I made some notes and took some snapz, and I’ll be sharing a few of them over the next couple of days.
First up: Man, was I amazed by the number of young women who, during the bad weather, were going around wearing variations on Wellingtons, the British rain boot. We saw hundreds and hundreds of young women in Wellies. I’d had no idea that these boots had become such a popular style in America. A few examples:
Two questions:
Bonus Links
The Question Lady writes:
Whatever happened to political parties?
Paleo Retiree writes:
Paleo Retiree writes:
Young people today seem entirely grossed-out by body hair. My old-codger mind makes sense of the phenomenon this way: Either (for whatever reasons) today’s young adults have remained developmentally at the level of 12 year olds; or they’ve been affected on such a deep level by the glossiness of today’s media (and especially Photoshopping) that real bodies (flesh, hair, textures, etc) don’t look alluring to them, they look like a failure to be fantasy-perfect.
The old push-pull tension between fantasy and reality that previous generations learned to take as an important aspect of real erotic experience seems to elude them entirely. They expect the fantasy, darn it, and nothing but. They can’t even imagine that cultivating a taste for flipping back and forth between fantasy and reality can enhance erotic experience overall. It’d just spoil their fantasy-lovin’ (and, to my mind, solipsistic) fun, I suppose.
Hey, is it a total coincidence that fantasy spectacles (especially sci-fi) are ‘way more central to today’s pop culture than they were to the pop culture of many earlier eras?
All that said, I can definitely remember encountering a few ’70s bushes that even in those funky years struck me as needing a little judicious pruning …
Blowhard, Esq.
Callowman
Sherbrooke
Eddie Pensier
Enzo Nakamura
Epaminondas
Fabrizio del Wrongo
Fenster
Brundle Guy
Glynn Marshes
Paleo Retiree
Atypical Neurotic
Question Lady
Sax von Stroheim
Sir Barken Hyena
The Mistaken
Uncouth Reflections 