Or something like that.. Something very 2009 going on here. I think I like it. So much music has been bank-shotting off other genres for a while now. Mash ups, Girltalk, samping. Yeah, yeah. I know. But there's some kinda gestalt-shift thing going on here.
Friday, February 13, 2009
Thursday, January 22, 2009
The Watchmen
I'm loving this viral video for the movie The Watchmen. They've got enough sense to use the original chronology, and give the viewer enough space to insert himself in a very meta kind of way. Ah, superheroes! The happy ending to a nuclear nightmare.
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Statelessness and Tipping Points
The Israeli-Hamas conflict is more than agonizing to watch. It smacks of more than hopelessness and intractability. It's got an awful resonance to it, a sense that the hopelessness is enough to crack the frame through which we view all this. Something is changing for Americans now. Anyone watching CNN during the initial bombardment could see that Israel was finally losing a PR battle with Hamas.
I was especially struck by what Jeffrey Goldberg at the Atlantic had to say in 'Why I'm Not Blogging More about Gaza':
There's a choice to beat your head against the wall or stand back a bit. Mr Goldberg chose wisely. Bret Stephens, not so much. Andrew Sullivan pointed out the basic problem:
There's probably never been an easy solution here. Both sides have a form of justification here. As Mayor Bloomberg pointed out, "We'd handle this the same way in New York". Of course, if New Jersey was attacking with F-16's, I'm sure New York would also be lobbing homemade rockets across the Hudson River if that's all that was available. Reasonable people defend their territory with whatever means are available. Reasonable people are also revolted when innocents die.
In the US we had a reasonably safe filter through which to view this conflict: terrorism and the state. It was easy to lump Hamas together with Al Qaeda and the rest of them after 2001. Hamas were, unquestionably, the bad guys. Then things started to change. The idea of Palestinian statehood moved out of the left's idealist menagerie into the mainstream. And then, in 2006, Hamas defeated the more moderate Fatah movement in Palestinian elections in Gaza. Hamas became, in a real sense, the representatives of Gaza.
I am not saying this should legitimize them. I'm not saying they woke up and ceased to be thugs. They're thugs. I'm talking about how the gestalt shifted. The IDF now look like thugs too, albeit thugs in F-16's. The idea of the Palestinian state brough about this change. Palestinian statelessness made it an even bigger problem. A vacuum was there, and Hamas is more or less blocking the airway.
Meanwhile, we've got an equivalence developing. Israel attacks Hamas' infrastructure, and the Gazans go without energy, food, medical supplies. Israel isn't so much defending itself from terrorists as attacking a vastly weaker, subjugated people. Like I said, nothing's really changed. Just the way we see it.
I was especially struck by what Jeffrey Goldberg at the Atlantic had to say in 'Why I'm Not Blogging More about Gaza':
I have friends in Gaza about whom I worry a great deal; I've seen many people killed in Gaza; I've served in the Israeli Army in Gaza; I've been kidnapped in Gaza; I've reported for years from Gaza; I hope my former army doesn't kill the wrong people in Gaza; I hope Israeli soldiers all leave Gaza alive; I know they'll be back in Gaza; I think this operation will work; and I have no actual hope that it will work for very long, because nothing works for very long in the Middle East. Gaza is where dreams of reconciliation go to die. Gaza is where the dream of Palestinian statehood goes to die; Gaza is where the Zionist dream might yet die. Or, more to the point, might be murdered. I'm not a J Street moral-equivalence sort of guy. Yes, Israel makes constant mistakes, which I note rather frequently, but this conflict reminds me once again that Israel is up against an implacable force, namely, an interpretation of Islam that disallows the idea of Jewish national equality.
My paralysis isn't an analytical paralysis. It's the paralysis that comes from thinking that maybe there's no way out. Not out of Gaza, out of the whole thing.
There's a choice to beat your head against the wall or stand back a bit. Mr Goldberg chose wisely. Bret Stephens, not so much. Andrew Sullivan pointed out the basic problem:
Bret Stephens proposes:
For every single rocket that falls randomly on Israeli soil, an Israeli missile will hit a carefully selected target in Gaza. Focusing the minds of Hamas on this type of "proportionality" is just the endgame that Israel needs.
How is that an "endgame" exactly? Isn't it actually a formula for the war never ending?
There's probably never been an easy solution here. Both sides have a form of justification here. As Mayor Bloomberg pointed out, "We'd handle this the same way in New York". Of course, if New Jersey was attacking with F-16's, I'm sure New York would also be lobbing homemade rockets across the Hudson River if that's all that was available. Reasonable people defend their territory with whatever means are available. Reasonable people are also revolted when innocents die.
In the US we had a reasonably safe filter through which to view this conflict: terrorism and the state. It was easy to lump Hamas together with Al Qaeda and the rest of them after 2001. Hamas were, unquestionably, the bad guys. Then things started to change. The idea of Palestinian statehood moved out of the left's idealist menagerie into the mainstream. And then, in 2006, Hamas defeated the more moderate Fatah movement in Palestinian elections in Gaza. Hamas became, in a real sense, the representatives of Gaza.
I am not saying this should legitimize them. I'm not saying they woke up and ceased to be thugs. They're thugs. I'm talking about how the gestalt shifted. The IDF now look like thugs too, albeit thugs in F-16's. The idea of the Palestinian state brough about this change. Palestinian statelessness made it an even bigger problem. A vacuum was there, and Hamas is more or less blocking the airway.
Meanwhile, we've got an equivalence developing. Israel attacks Hamas' infrastructure, and the Gazans go without energy, food, medical supplies. Israel isn't so much defending itself from terrorists as attacking a vastly weaker, subjugated people. Like I said, nothing's really changed. Just the way we see it.
Monday, January 5, 2009
"Armageddon Week"
The History Channel has a special series this week on the year 2012. Think about that one for a second.
Last night's installment was "Nostradamus 2012". It attempts to link together all sorts of evidence from various cultures and individuals -- from the Maya to Nostradamus and the Freemasons -- purporting to warn us about the end of the world in 2012. There's little that's creepy about this if viewed from an even slightly sober perspective, of course. Great lengths are traveled to make the assumption that Nostradamus was even talking about the year 2012. Much is made of a set of pictograms purporting to represent the end of the earth when sagittarius and/or the sun lines up with the center of the Milky Way. Alas!
It's the great lengths I'm interested in here more than anything. I find it fascinating that Armageddon is such a readily accessible topic these days. The History Channel can devote a week of specials to it. As the old Chinese alien spy guy tells Keanu Reeves in the McDonald's in The Day the Earth Stood Still, the tragedy is that we know it's coming and can do nothing about it.
I suppose none of this is surprising. I'm old enough to remember shivering in my bed at night, thinking that the Soviets might just press the button. I've lived through the worst of the AIDS epidemic, and seen circles of friends die off. And, of course, 9/11. It's hard not to watch George Bush fiddling away while Rome burns and wonder if there isn't something a bit pre-ordainedly (pre-ordainedly?!) doomed about the whole thing.
I suspect that more positive developments also have a way of feeding this. Obama's brought a great deal of optimism to the fore. Of course, much of that optimism will be spent digging us out of the enormous ditch we're in. And no one wants to live their life digging out of a ditch. Especially Americans.
Peter Brooks elaborated brilliantly on Freud's notion of a death drive. The drive, of course, is not so much for death per se as the right death. It's a drive to die in a way that properly frames a life. It's a drive to be a hero -- to live up to the ancestors. Most people would happily die dashing about like Jack Bauer on 24. Stopping the terrorists or fighting cancer or convincing aliens of our right to exist and thereby saving the planet are all versions of the right death.
What stands before us now is not terribly propitious in those terms. We'll be paying off the credit card debt on many levels for years -- geopolitically, economically, environmentally. And yes, personally, on our credit cards. Nobody wants to die like that.
We'd much rather the Mayans were right about this. It's more satisfying on an instinctive level somehow. We didn't kill the earth. Time just ran out. We sat on some pinnacle to watch it go. All the problems we see are somehow gilded with that weird, tinny shine of the end times. It's not chaos we're experiencing. It's just the narrative.
Last night's installment was "Nostradamus 2012". It attempts to link together all sorts of evidence from various cultures and individuals -- from the Maya to Nostradamus and the Freemasons -- purporting to warn us about the end of the world in 2012. There's little that's creepy about this if viewed from an even slightly sober perspective, of course. Great lengths are traveled to make the assumption that Nostradamus was even talking about the year 2012. Much is made of a set of pictograms purporting to represent the end of the earth when sagittarius and/or the sun lines up with the center of the Milky Way. Alas!
It's the great lengths I'm interested in here more than anything. I find it fascinating that Armageddon is such a readily accessible topic these days. The History Channel can devote a week of specials to it. As the old Chinese alien spy guy tells Keanu Reeves in the McDonald's in The Day the Earth Stood Still, the tragedy is that we know it's coming and can do nothing about it.
I suppose none of this is surprising. I'm old enough to remember shivering in my bed at night, thinking that the Soviets might just press the button. I've lived through the worst of the AIDS epidemic, and seen circles of friends die off. And, of course, 9/11. It's hard not to watch George Bush fiddling away while Rome burns and wonder if there isn't something a bit pre-ordainedly (pre-ordainedly?!) doomed about the whole thing.
I suspect that more positive developments also have a way of feeding this. Obama's brought a great deal of optimism to the fore. Of course, much of that optimism will be spent digging us out of the enormous ditch we're in. And no one wants to live their life digging out of a ditch. Especially Americans.
Peter Brooks elaborated brilliantly on Freud's notion of a death drive. The drive, of course, is not so much for death per se as the right death. It's a drive to die in a way that properly frames a life. It's a drive to be a hero -- to live up to the ancestors. Most people would happily die dashing about like Jack Bauer on 24. Stopping the terrorists or fighting cancer or convincing aliens of our right to exist and thereby saving the planet are all versions of the right death.
What stands before us now is not terribly propitious in those terms. We'll be paying off the credit card debt on many levels for years -- geopolitically, economically, environmentally. And yes, personally, on our credit cards. Nobody wants to die like that.
We'd much rather the Mayans were right about this. It's more satisfying on an instinctive level somehow. We didn't kill the earth. Time just ran out. We sat on some pinnacle to watch it go. All the problems we see are somehow gilded with that weird, tinny shine of the end times. It's not chaos we're experiencing. It's just the narrative.
Thursday, January 1, 2009
New Year, New Blog
I've been struggling with the idea of a new blog for some time now. I have a blog, a screenwriting blog, which does what it's supposed to do. I talk about writing. I get a chance to teach, or rather to try out ways of teaching that I'll use in the classroom or with my own students and consultees.
I have a strange feeling that something new is going on with narrative. It's leaping out of the place it's been for centuries. I have no way of proving this. I am ready to be proved wrong, or to stumble across the proof as I scribble thoughts here. I need the chance to be wrong. I need to find others who think this way.
What is it I'm talking about? I'm talking about how McCain's defeat can be ascribed to some bad storytelling. I'm talking about how Obama seemed to rise as a more effective antipode to Bush than Hillary Clinton. I'm talking about Hamas and Israel firing volleys at each other on youtube. I'm seeing story rise up in a new way. I can't put my finger on it. Maybe you can help.
The Russian Symbolists of the early twentieth century foresaw the Russian Revolution of 1917. It's hard not to read Blok's poem "The Twelve" without feeling that. Andrei Bely, author of the monumental novel Petersburg, saw all life and history as a cycle. We move toward structure until it's crystalline, unchangeable, unmovable. Then it shatters into pure energy. You can see this same idea in numerous other thinkers and writers, of course. Bely and Blok have particular resonance for me because I studied and worked in the former Soviet Union just before and after it collapsed. There was something in the air for a few years before. Something I couldn't put my finger on. Something subtler and quieter than glasnost or hunger. Something, well.. read Blok. I feel that same something in 2009 in the United States. Somehow our energy is bound up in structures that don't work. And we're craving and creating innumerable ways of tearing down those structures.
My mother recently gave me an account my grandfather wrote of his experiences in the Battle of the Somme, in World War I France. (He was on the English side). I happened to be reading accounts of the Western Front battles at the same time. The Western Front was frozen for years. Bodies piled up as the line would move back and forth a few hundred meters. It was as hellish a place and time as you can imagine. Verdun, in particular caught my attention. The Germans knew that the French drive for glory would cause them to throw anything and everyone they had against them. They set up a position that the French could not breach, but would die trying. It was nicknamed 'the sausage machine'. Nearly 700,000 soldiers died there.
My grandfather's report is somewhat different. He was a dispatch rider for his brigade. When communication was lost, he was sent back to the British HQ in Amiens to get orders. When he got there, British HQ was nowhere to be found. He headed back to the unit, but encountered a German unit headed toward the road he'd followed in. He took back roads. His account is almost breezy -- much like my grandfather was to the end. He was sure he was getting close when he found a wounded Australian soldier waiting by a road, all alone. The soldier told him he was on the wrong side of the line. He'd accidentally broken through, as it were. He hightailed in back to Amiens. He eventually found the remnants of his own unit. And then, back to the trenches, where he stayed until the Americans showed up.
The war was fought face to face, head to head. That's how war worked. You didn't go around. You sat in the trenches. War was binary. It's was a 19th century war fought with 20th century weapons. It's hard even to imagine that mindset now.
I suspect our culture's in a similar situation. It's a 20th century battle fought with 21st century tools. We're stuck with the polar extremes of reason and ideology. We're starting to implement narrative as a way to, say, win a presidential campaign or root out Hamas.
We've learned to orchestrate narrative. We've brought narrative into the world in a new way. I'm thinking that we can now learn to listen to narrative actively. I'm thinking we can learn to hear what's happening just below the radar.
I have a strange feeling that something new is going on with narrative. It's leaping out of the place it's been for centuries. I have no way of proving this. I am ready to be proved wrong, or to stumble across the proof as I scribble thoughts here. I need the chance to be wrong. I need to find others who think this way.
What is it I'm talking about? I'm talking about how McCain's defeat can be ascribed to some bad storytelling. I'm talking about how Obama seemed to rise as a more effective antipode to Bush than Hillary Clinton. I'm talking about Hamas and Israel firing volleys at each other on youtube. I'm seeing story rise up in a new way. I can't put my finger on it. Maybe you can help.
The Russian Symbolists of the early twentieth century foresaw the Russian Revolution of 1917. It's hard not to read Blok's poem "The Twelve" without feeling that. Andrei Bely, author of the monumental novel Petersburg, saw all life and history as a cycle. We move toward structure until it's crystalline, unchangeable, unmovable. Then it shatters into pure energy. You can see this same idea in numerous other thinkers and writers, of course. Bely and Blok have particular resonance for me because I studied and worked in the former Soviet Union just before and after it collapsed. There was something in the air for a few years before. Something I couldn't put my finger on. Something subtler and quieter than glasnost or hunger. Something, well.. read Blok. I feel that same something in 2009 in the United States. Somehow our energy is bound up in structures that don't work. And we're craving and creating innumerable ways of tearing down those structures.
My mother recently gave me an account my grandfather wrote of his experiences in the Battle of the Somme, in World War I France. (He was on the English side). I happened to be reading accounts of the Western Front battles at the same time. The Western Front was frozen for years. Bodies piled up as the line would move back and forth a few hundred meters. It was as hellish a place and time as you can imagine. Verdun, in particular caught my attention. The Germans knew that the French drive for glory would cause them to throw anything and everyone they had against them. They set up a position that the French could not breach, but would die trying. It was nicknamed 'the sausage machine'. Nearly 700,000 soldiers died there.
My grandfather's report is somewhat different. He was a dispatch rider for his brigade. When communication was lost, he was sent back to the British HQ in Amiens to get orders. When he got there, British HQ was nowhere to be found. He headed back to the unit, but encountered a German unit headed toward the road he'd followed in. He took back roads. His account is almost breezy -- much like my grandfather was to the end. He was sure he was getting close when he found a wounded Australian soldier waiting by a road, all alone. The soldier told him he was on the wrong side of the line. He'd accidentally broken through, as it were. He hightailed in back to Amiens. He eventually found the remnants of his own unit. And then, back to the trenches, where he stayed until the Americans showed up.
The war was fought face to face, head to head. That's how war worked. You didn't go around. You sat in the trenches. War was binary. It's was a 19th century war fought with 20th century weapons. It's hard even to imagine that mindset now.
I suspect our culture's in a similar situation. It's a 20th century battle fought with 21st century tools. We're stuck with the polar extremes of reason and ideology. We're starting to implement narrative as a way to, say, win a presidential campaign or root out Hamas.
We've learned to orchestrate narrative. We've brought narrative into the world in a new way. I'm thinking that we can now learn to listen to narrative actively. I'm thinking we can learn to hear what's happening just below the radar.
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