I've known a few Hollywood cameramen in my time. I can
assure you both they and the other dozen or so crew members on the set
will agree: During those sweaty bedroom scenes, we're almost as
embarrassed as the stars. And yet movies, like everything else, reflect
their times. Like it or not.
The times usually go by
the name "culture." By which is meant a particular form or stage of
civilization. In America we give them names: The Colonial Age...The
Gilded Age...The Jazz Age...The Age of Anxiety. We haven't agreed yet on
a label for the early 21st C. How about The Animal Age? A time when all
those old post-Victorian repressions have been swept away by the
post-Freudian Sixties: If it feels right, how can it be wrong!
Now
here's what's so ironic. Currently the Victorian novels of the Brontes,
Jane Austen and Mary Shelley are once again selling briskly. PBS's
Masterpiece Theatre features their works along with the Upstairs
Downstairs, Downton Abbey, and Sherlock Holmes series to high praise and
viewership.
What's going on here?
Perchance our sweaty
how-can-it-be-wrong culture can't entirely resist the charm of the
form-and-formality of another and nattier time. No, the young generation
is not about to adopt bustles and spats. Maybe just take a curious peek
at a previous culture which has taken on the charm that many previous
times do. Like watching the Oscars when a string of gutsy guttural
winners are followed at the microphone by the sudden eloquence of a
Helen Mirren or a Christopher Plummer.
Oh My God....! Do people still dress and speak and bear themselves with such articulate dignity? Yes, yes they do.
So....!
Just maybe the old movie fade-outs in the bedroom were more
MRI-exciting than keeping the cameras rolling while naked limbs and
breasts flop and grunt in their own heavy-breathing sweat. Thin here the
pulsed-up thrill of a bikini undulating down the beach versus seeing
her buck naked in the nearby shower stall. It's the tease not the
totality. The hint not the pubic hair. The technicolor dream of a
Renaissance nude versus the black-and-white reality of an actual nude.
But
then I am so old-fashioned Victorian that I suspect Victoria's Secret's
real secret is not laughing at the old Victorians....it's their size-6
models laughing at all those size-16 buyers who actually believe these
exotic items are going to make them look exotic too.
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
LOCATING LONG-AGO-AND-FARAWAY ON YOIUR GPS
Today's GPS systems are one more modern marvel. They seem
capable of locating virtually anything anywhere anytime. Or can they...?
I tried a simple experiment knowing it would fail -- locating that special long-ago-and-faraway in my life. To be sure, neither computers nor satellites promise to do what memory alone can. Which means these marvels cannot conjure up on their screens those special where-and-when's in our lives. The June graduation night embracing dear friends we promised never to leave...the shoreline where first we met....the celebration where all that was you sang and drank with all that had made them so important for so long....the altar where you locked hands, hearts and vows before death did you part.
So it is agreed then! Machines, marvels that they are, have their limits. A formidable thought which came back to mind during a night-long conversation with a geneticist friend. Over Milanese pasta and Tuscany wines, my gifted friend hoped his career would someday prove part of a genetic revolution.
"Our genes are the code to our future," he asserted. "They come down to us from our past intact, but someday we will be able to alter them for our future. A future maybe without the predestination of cancer, diabetes, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's." He spoke with enthusiasm of steroids, growth hormones, genetic engineering, and other enhancements current research is beginning to grasp.
It was more than the wine that heated our usual dinner exchange. I asked: Isn't tinkering with humans tricky? He smiled: Skeptics have grumbled that ever since the ancient Greeks. I insisted: I always sound out-of-step with the times, but who's to say our steps are heading in the right direction? He shook his head the way he usually does when he thinks me hopelessly unaware: If humanity refused to probe the unknown, you and I would still be talking 15th C Spanish about our a flat earth!
Which was of course the classic blade to the heart with which modernists slay medievalists.
Bleeding a bit as I usually am after these long lovely dinners playing rival gods, I couldn't resist my own blade. "I grant your mother and father might theoretically have been genetically enhanced as better workers, bakers, PTA members, and voters. But tell me how this would have made them better parents? Grant me this much. Tinkering with the parts -- like genes and hormones -- can have terribly unintended consequences with the whole. The whole which over these last 84 years has brought who-you-are to this dinner tonight."
He closed his eyes with his you-don't-get-it silence. I closed mine hoping when they re-opened, he would still be the same genetically-imperfect friend he has always been.
I tried a simple experiment knowing it would fail -- locating that special long-ago-and-faraway in my life. To be sure, neither computers nor satellites promise to do what memory alone can. Which means these marvels cannot conjure up on their screens those special where-and-when's in our lives. The June graduation night embracing dear friends we promised never to leave...the shoreline where first we met....the celebration where all that was you sang and drank with all that had made them so important for so long....the altar where you locked hands, hearts and vows before death did you part.
So it is agreed then! Machines, marvels that they are, have their limits. A formidable thought which came back to mind during a night-long conversation with a geneticist friend. Over Milanese pasta and Tuscany wines, my gifted friend hoped his career would someday prove part of a genetic revolution.
"Our genes are the code to our future," he asserted. "They come down to us from our past intact, but someday we will be able to alter them for our future. A future maybe without the predestination of cancer, diabetes, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's." He spoke with enthusiasm of steroids, growth hormones, genetic engineering, and other enhancements current research is beginning to grasp.
It was more than the wine that heated our usual dinner exchange. I asked: Isn't tinkering with humans tricky? He smiled: Skeptics have grumbled that ever since the ancient Greeks. I insisted: I always sound out-of-step with the times, but who's to say our steps are heading in the right direction? He shook his head the way he usually does when he thinks me hopelessly unaware: If humanity refused to probe the unknown, you and I would still be talking 15th C Spanish about our a flat earth!
Which was of course the classic blade to the heart with which modernists slay medievalists.
Bleeding a bit as I usually am after these long lovely dinners playing rival gods, I couldn't resist my own blade. "I grant your mother and father might theoretically have been genetically enhanced as better workers, bakers, PTA members, and voters. But tell me how this would have made them better parents? Grant me this much. Tinkering with the parts -- like genes and hormones -- can have terribly unintended consequences with the whole. The whole which over these last 84 years has brought who-you-are to this dinner tonight."
He closed his eyes with his you-don't-get-it silence. I closed mine hoping when they re-opened, he would still be the same genetically-imperfect friend he has always been.
Monday, May 28, 2012
SO WHAT'S YOUR 3 WORST DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS!
Another campaign. Another time to leak dirty little secrets.
Past affairs, past lies, past deals, past birth certificates &
resumes. But the relevant word, my friend, is "past." All usually in the
person's past. Long ago, far away, and probably totally disconnected
from the current campaign. Besides, if we were to score the two
nominees, their secrets will tend to cancel each other out. So lets
start from here and now, more than then and there.
Next, there's you and me. Running for no public office, but also hoping to keep private a few of our own dirty-little-secrets. Hey, secrets come with the territory. Three of the most universal:
* That PERSON in your life who seemed to come out of nowhere, drifted away to somewhere, but for those few intervening weeks or years made an immortal difference. To your feelings, your beliefs, your visions, or maybe most lasting of all your heart. Funny how we often forget. Even funnier, how often he or she probably still remembers!
* That IDEA in your life which broke into your consciousness one unpredicted day with a swift sure insistence. Birthed perhaps in a classroom, a book, a pulpit, a march. No, you didn't see it coming, for it was so totally foreign to your values. Yet, those values have never quite been the same since!
* That lucky BREAK in you life which remarkably and freely landed there in front of you on a route you thought you had mapped out for yourself. Fate? Karma? Destiny? God? The name makes little difference; the impact does. In our most brutally honest moments, we can ask ourself: why in all the world did that extraordinary turn of events turn up in my life!
And so, my fellow secret-keepers, while the political secrets start to fly thick and furious....maybe a little down-time to remember some of our own. And how they got us here.....
Next, there's you and me. Running for no public office, but also hoping to keep private a few of our own dirty-little-secrets. Hey, secrets come with the territory. Three of the most universal:
* That PERSON in your life who seemed to come out of nowhere, drifted away to somewhere, but for those few intervening weeks or years made an immortal difference. To your feelings, your beliefs, your visions, or maybe most lasting of all your heart. Funny how we often forget. Even funnier, how often he or she probably still remembers!
* That IDEA in your life which broke into your consciousness one unpredicted day with a swift sure insistence. Birthed perhaps in a classroom, a book, a pulpit, a march. No, you didn't see it coming, for it was so totally foreign to your values. Yet, those values have never quite been the same since!
* That lucky BREAK in you life which remarkably and freely landed there in front of you on a route you thought you had mapped out for yourself. Fate? Karma? Destiny? God? The name makes little difference; the impact does. In our most brutally honest moments, we can ask ourself: why in all the world did that extraordinary turn of events turn up in my life!
And so, my fellow secret-keepers, while the political secrets start to fly thick and furious....maybe a little down-time to remember some of our own. And how they got us here.....
Sunday, May 27, 2012
WHAT'S WRONG WITH BEING BEST...? A LOT!
Socrates is always a good guy to quote: "Beauty is a short-lived
tyranny." Ask any Hollywood glamor girl to explain that. Next, consider
this twist to Socrates: "Being best is also a short-lived tyranny."
By all accounts, America is "the best." At least in terms of wealth, power, productivity, and global influence. But where does the tyranny thing come in? In the relentless pressure to remain the best. Like the fastest-gun in the Old West, there isn't a saloon or a hotel bed where you can rest easy. You know there's always someone out there who's hungry to out-draw you and thereby claim the crown.
But now here's where this tyranny is so diabolical. Most of this pressure to produce is self-inflicted. Pride always drives the best to remain the best. And at first that seems so perfectly natural and right. After all, who wants to be second best...?
Before that felicitous cliche is allowed to wobble on its own merits, re-consider those merits. Throughout the history of the modern Olympics, the difference between the winner and the runner up has always, always been in the half minutes, seconds or even mili-seconds. When they return home, Silver eats, sleeps, loves and dies no differently than Gold. More to the point, when a Sicilian farmer tucks his children into bed, he is no less proud or fulfilled than the Wall Street CEO. Really! Unless you're counting their respective number of bathrooms, iPads, cars and migraines.
True, all this is fiercely counter-intuitive to everything in the American DNA! Our impetus is always to go, to excel, to win, to be-the-best. In the light of that arguable wisdom, today most Americans will embrace without question our need to: increase productivity [regardless of layoffs]...slash spending [regardless of who suffers]...compute faster [regardless of how the brain can no longer keep pace] ...build bigger armies [regardless of the military-industrial-complex of which we are all now brutally aware]...oh, and lately this idea of by-passing the intellectual experience of college to go directly into the wealth of Silicon Valley [regardless of how few Steve Jobs there really are out there].
Tyranny, once unleashed, never rests. Like the gunslinger in the Old West, the American Goliath of the New West keeps running faster and harder. Because...well, that's what you do when you're in the lead and have never thought deep enough about what losing the lead might actually mean to you. No, not to your industries and stock markets and missile launchers. But to your less-threatened peace of mind at night tucking your children into a bed few others lust to steal, because your bed and your home is not all that much different than theirs.
You know -- that illusive, counter-intuitive thing prophets and poets have always tried to preach.
By all accounts, America is "the best." At least in terms of wealth, power, productivity, and global influence. But where does the tyranny thing come in? In the relentless pressure to remain the best. Like the fastest-gun in the Old West, there isn't a saloon or a hotel bed where you can rest easy. You know there's always someone out there who's hungry to out-draw you and thereby claim the crown.
But now here's where this tyranny is so diabolical. Most of this pressure to produce is self-inflicted. Pride always drives the best to remain the best. And at first that seems so perfectly natural and right. After all, who wants to be second best...?
Before that felicitous cliche is allowed to wobble on its own merits, re-consider those merits. Throughout the history of the modern Olympics, the difference between the winner and the runner up has always, always been in the half minutes, seconds or even mili-seconds. When they return home, Silver eats, sleeps, loves and dies no differently than Gold. More to the point, when a Sicilian farmer tucks his children into bed, he is no less proud or fulfilled than the Wall Street CEO. Really! Unless you're counting their respective number of bathrooms, iPads, cars and migraines.
True, all this is fiercely counter-intuitive to everything in the American DNA! Our impetus is always to go, to excel, to win, to be-the-best. In the light of that arguable wisdom, today most Americans will embrace without question our need to: increase productivity [regardless of layoffs]...slash spending [regardless of who suffers]...compute faster [regardless of how the brain can no longer keep pace] ...build bigger armies [regardless of the military-industrial-complex of which we are all now brutally aware]...oh, and lately this idea of by-passing the intellectual experience of college to go directly into the wealth of Silicon Valley [regardless of how few Steve Jobs there really are out there].
Tyranny, once unleashed, never rests. Like the gunslinger in the Old West, the American Goliath of the New West keeps running faster and harder. Because...well, that's what you do when you're in the lead and have never thought deep enough about what losing the lead might actually mean to you. No, not to your industries and stock markets and missile launchers. But to your less-threatened peace of mind at night tucking your children into a bed few others lust to steal, because your bed and your home is not all that much different than theirs.
You know -- that illusive, counter-intuitive thing prophets and poets have always tried to preach.
Saturday, May 26, 2012
JOIN ME NEXT TUESDAY NIGHT AT PBS FOR SOME BALING WIRE
Next Tuesday, prominent historian Nial Ferguson hosts Part II of his PBS documentary "Civilization: The West and the Rest." Part
I showed how the West has dominated these last 500 years because of
such assets as capitalism and science. Now he'll have to explain why our
scientifically sophisticated capitalist Goliath is showing signs of
weakness in the face of new rivals like China, Brazil, India.
Just guessing here, but likely the reason is that only one of our 5 national institutions -- the Military -- remains a strong unifying force among our 330 million diverse citizens. The others -- Government, Law, Schools, Media and Religion -- no longer provide the same baling-wire effects they once did.
Our energetically diverse population -- like wild bales of cotton or wheat -- requires something that can hold and bind us together. These 5 institutions have been around these 500 years, performing their job as best they can. But lately not as bast as they could!
Here's guessing Ferguson next Tuesday will tells us what we should already know. Government is now held in suspicion more than admiration...the Law is seen working for the rich more than the rest ...Schools are using more money to produce poorer results...the Media is slanted by whomever owns them... Religion, well it's no longer something we can all reverently agree on as once we did.
This Memorial Day we will witness grand celebrations of Americans coming together in honor of their nation. What we will not see are those same Americans returning home as patriotically bound together as they just were at those events. Four of the five strands of baling wire are simply not holding as well as they once did.
Join me the next night to hear how Ferguson explains our national problem. Lets hope the gang in Washington and Wall Street and Silicon Valley are listening too. Not because Ferguson has all the answers, but because they really need to start thinking historically not just politically. Otherwise, their grandchildren and ours will be reading about the American Empire right along with all thos
Just guessing here, but likely the reason is that only one of our 5 national institutions -- the Military -- remains a strong unifying force among our 330 million diverse citizens. The others -- Government, Law, Schools, Media and Religion -- no longer provide the same baling-wire effects they once did.
Our energetically diverse population -- like wild bales of cotton or wheat -- requires something that can hold and bind us together. These 5 institutions have been around these 500 years, performing their job as best they can. But lately not as bast as they could!
Here's guessing Ferguson next Tuesday will tells us what we should already know. Government is now held in suspicion more than admiration...the Law is seen working for the rich more than the rest ...Schools are using more money to produce poorer results...the Media is slanted by whomever owns them... Religion, well it's no longer something we can all reverently agree on as once we did.
This Memorial Day we will witness grand celebrations of Americans coming together in honor of their nation. What we will not see are those same Americans returning home as patriotically bound together as they just were at those events. Four of the five strands of baling wire are simply not holding as well as they once did.
Join me the next night to hear how Ferguson explains our national problem. Lets hope the gang in Washington and Wall Street and Silicon Valley are listening too. Not because Ferguson has all the answers, but because they really need to start thinking historically not just politically. Otherwise, their grandchildren and ours will be reading about the American Empire right along with all thos
Friday, May 25, 2012
IF YOU'RE SUFFERING FROM ON-SET ADULTHOOD, TAKE THIS WITH A WARM GLASS OF MILK
A Secret Garden...? You had one. I did too. We all did.
But somehow, with on-set adulthood, we lost it. This is how it is with
very serious 21stC rational adults. And yet, somewhere the fragrance of
our childhood's Secret Garden still giggles in our thoughts.
Far too many of us permit those gardens to languish in the mists of ignored memories. Others, like me, recall them with a furious affection. Not embarrassed by them so much as enthused. After all, that Garden was most likely the most rapturous hideaway we shall ever know. May I share excerpts from a colleague [Emily Fox Gordon] whose furious affections help reassure me I do not giggle alone:
"The happiness of childhood is existential. Not psychological. Adults forget that, probably because of envy....As a small child I was wildly, unconditionally happy. By that I don't mean I was 'well adjusted;' I mean that all my receptors were attuned to the world...I was happy because I felt myself to be safe and free, but also because I managed to maintain three happy, if unsubstantiated and mutually contradictory, beliefs...I believed in fairies, in God, and in history....What I feel when I summon up those images is my aboriginal happiness, magically retrieved....It's true my happiness was founded on a childish misunderstanding of reality. Nevertheless, I was happy, and my happiness was real. Only in stories can conflict and sadness be recorded, but when I was small, my life had not yet become a story. It was not made of incidents, susceptible of being linked into a continuing narrative. Instead, life was simply a succession of moments of radiant apprehension...Where I grew up is still in my mind, absolutely intact and eerily accessible. But only to me. The purer the happiness, the less communicable it is....Now as an adult, the story I tell over and over is the one everyone has learned for themselves -- the story about how happiness is lost."
I wish I had written that. But no matter. I once lived that. If you were lucky -- in some tight little neighborhood -- you and your peers lived it too. And if you are extraordinarily lucky, you can still share your garden with special others. After all, what else are special gardens for...?
Far too many of us permit those gardens to languish in the mists of ignored memories. Others, like me, recall them with a furious affection. Not embarrassed by them so much as enthused. After all, that Garden was most likely the most rapturous hideaway we shall ever know. May I share excerpts from a colleague [Emily Fox Gordon] whose furious affections help reassure me I do not giggle alone:
"The happiness of childhood is existential. Not psychological. Adults forget that, probably because of envy....As a small child I was wildly, unconditionally happy. By that I don't mean I was 'well adjusted;' I mean that all my receptors were attuned to the world...I was happy because I felt myself to be safe and free, but also because I managed to maintain three happy, if unsubstantiated and mutually contradictory, beliefs...I believed in fairies, in God, and in history....What I feel when I summon up those images is my aboriginal happiness, magically retrieved....It's true my happiness was founded on a childish misunderstanding of reality. Nevertheless, I was happy, and my happiness was real. Only in stories can conflict and sadness be recorded, but when I was small, my life had not yet become a story. It was not made of incidents, susceptible of being linked into a continuing narrative. Instead, life was simply a succession of moments of radiant apprehension...Where I grew up is still in my mind, absolutely intact and eerily accessible. But only to me. The purer the happiness, the less communicable it is....Now as an adult, the story I tell over and over is the one everyone has learned for themselves -- the story about how happiness is lost."
I wish I had written that. But no matter. I once lived that. If you were lucky -- in some tight little neighborhood -- you and your peers lived it too. And if you are extraordinarily lucky, you can still share your garden with special others. After all, what else are special gardens for...?
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
LIFE'S BIGGEST JOKE ON US
Uncle Harry used to give me a little wink: "Essere
intelligente...! Be smart, kid, and learn it now. You gotta live life
forwards, but really you can only understand it backwards." And yet I
ask you, who's smart enough at 13 to understand one of life's biggest
jokes? The Uncle Harry's of the world can warn us, but to get it we
gotta live it. And somehow we all do, don't we.
Love...? Looking backwards, when she married him he was a time-bomb; now with him ticking even faster but with four kids still in school, she can't really undo what's been done!
Lifestyle...? Looking backwards, why didn't he eat more vegetables and smoke less cigarettes like mom always said; now, fat with emphysema, time's run out!
Career...? Looking backwards, she should have gone to med school even though women back then weren't welcome; now with a dead-end job, it's too late to start all over!
War...? Looking backwards, invading Iraq was like breaking something in the store you now have to own; what was I thinking!
Margaret Mead observed: "It's cruelly arbitrary to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age." Like Uncle Harry told me, if only we could be smarter sooner. And yet here's the thing. They say we only use 5 to 10% of our brain's capacities. So why can't we do better.
A few recommendations. More and better education for children...more and better psycho-therapy for adults....more and better respect for the wisdom of elders. Unlike ages past where humanity dwelled in ill-informed ignorance, today there's no excuse. We have instant, fingertip access to a hundred million information sources from Astronomy to Zeitgeist. No excuse for not better transforming humanity's past regrets into present progress.
Oh wait. A warning!
Too much information can be just as counterproductive as too little. How many different reports are we going to keep getting about coffee and chocolate, vitamin B and vitamin E, good cholesterol and bad cholesterol, PSA and no PSA, inoculations and no inoculations, having children and not having children. With our new Information Age has come a whole new species: The Expert. Generating expert information by the bazillion bytes every day.
Here's a counte-intutiive thought. Instead of giving up coffee and chocolate, maybe it's time to give up reading. At least until the experts can remember: "Essere Intelligente!"
Love...? Looking backwards, when she married him he was a time-bomb; now with him ticking even faster but with four kids still in school, she can't really undo what's been done!
Lifestyle...? Looking backwards, why didn't he eat more vegetables and smoke less cigarettes like mom always said; now, fat with emphysema, time's run out!
Career...? Looking backwards, she should have gone to med school even though women back then weren't welcome; now with a dead-end job, it's too late to start all over!
War...? Looking backwards, invading Iraq was like breaking something in the store you now have to own; what was I thinking!
Margaret Mead observed: "It's cruelly arbitrary to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age." Like Uncle Harry told me, if only we could be smarter sooner. And yet here's the thing. They say we only use 5 to 10% of our brain's capacities. So why can't we do better.
A few recommendations. More and better education for children...more and better psycho-therapy for adults....more and better respect for the wisdom of elders. Unlike ages past where humanity dwelled in ill-informed ignorance, today there's no excuse. We have instant, fingertip access to a hundred million information sources from Astronomy to Zeitgeist. No excuse for not better transforming humanity's past regrets into present progress.
Oh wait. A warning!
Too much information can be just as counterproductive as too little. How many different reports are we going to keep getting about coffee and chocolate, vitamin B and vitamin E, good cholesterol and bad cholesterol, PSA and no PSA, inoculations and no inoculations, having children and not having children. With our new Information Age has come a whole new species: The Expert. Generating expert information by the bazillion bytes every day.
Here's a counte-intutiive thought. Instead of giving up coffee and chocolate, maybe it's time to give up reading. At least until the experts can remember: "Essere Intelligente!"
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)