Category Archives: Cinema and Television

Cinema and Television, General, Politics, World History

Ten Thousand Schools

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29  87%  26%  5mph NNW  bar29.89 rises windchill25  Imbolc

                  Waning Crescent of the Winter Moon

Saw Scarlet Johanssen talking to a group of Minnesota students tonight.  She’s pushing Barrack.  The political firestorm that will sweep the nation tomorrow will have a brushfire here in the Minnesota caucuses.  It remains to be seen whether a strong youth turnout for primaries and caucuses will  translate into votes in November, but I find the youth surge a hopeful phenomenon.  Maybe we’re getting back to a situation where the politics of compassion, not compassionate conservatism, and the politics of economic justice, not unjust foreign policy will prevail.  It’s got my vote.

The snow petered out, a dusting only after the vigor of the mid-morning.  Things did get freshened up.

Watched an anime on the Science Fiction Channel.  Saw why Miyazaki is considered an anime god.  This stuff is much more slapdash, also has a slasher feel to it without the grace of the samurai or wu shu movies like Crouching Tiger. 

I seem to find myself digging deeper and deeper into ancient China, especially the Warring States period when Taoism, Confucianism and Legalism plus many others–the Ten Thousand Schools–emerged.  It is also the time of the Qin unification and Qin Shi Huang Di fascinates me.  After the Qin the Han dynasty began and lasted for four hundred years or so, one of the first golden ages of China.  Later, the Tang, Song, and Ming dynasties would, each in their own time and in their own way, count as golden ages, too.

Cinema and Television, Politics

The Only Place Our Intelligence Community Looks Good

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24  81% 23%  omph EEN bar29.94 steady windchill24  Imbolc

           Waning Crescent of the Winter Moon

Movies move slowly across the 694 pick-up line.  I just watched Breach, the story of the capture of Robert Hanssen, the mole in the FBI.  It’s well done, written by the young agent hopeful who worked as Hanssen’s assistant and put the last pieces together to bring Hanssen down.  After reading some of Legacy of Ashes, a history of the CIA, it became clear to me the role these movies play in the national psyche.  Playing up the clever strategies and cunning skill of guys like Hanssen puffs up the image of the FBI when they finally corner him; but, consider, he worked 22 years inside the FBI and even headed the Task Force looking for the mole. 

Legacy of Ashes shows that when it comes to matters of subterfuge, we don’t get it.  The CIA failed at most of its chaotically designed missions, blundering around in the affairs of other nations like a giant child, flailing and hiding behind parking meter posts.  The only place the intelligence community gets to look good is in movies and books.  I don’t know whether the books and movies are intentional propaganda or if the material that gets a greenlight passes a certain screening.  Or, it may be that we need, as a nation, to believe that in the world of the shadows we can play as well as anybody.  Those who’ve looked into it suggest we can’t.  Thought all the way through movies like Breach show the same conclusion.

Demonstrating the frail line between happiness and horror our neighbor, 55 or so, went to the hospital two weeks ago.  They thought he’d had a stroke.  It would have been a better thing.  He has a demyelinating process at work in patches inside his brain.  A process at the root of M.S. demyelination strips the insulation off nerve fibers and creates electrical storms.  He has some aphasia. It’s not clear how bad the damage is, nor whether it will persist.  He’s at home now, sleeping 44 minutes at a time which keeps his wife and daughter, who just graduated from college, up as he wanders when not asleep.

Cinema and Television

The Confederate States of America

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-7  57%  17%  0mph WWN bar30.33  steep rise windchill-7  Winter

             Waning Crescent of the Winter Moon

Watched a strange and disturbing, but also funny, movie on the Independent Film Channel, “The Confederate States of America.”   Produced by Spike Lee this is a satirical take on American history if the south had won the Civil War.  I’ve not read much alternate history and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a movie version of alternate history either.  This movie manages to do several things at once.  It does show the value of the North having won the Civil War.  At the same time it shows that much of our post-civil war history does have its roots in slavery.  For example, the urban riots of the sixties have a parallel reality in this movie as slave rebellions.  During the rise of Hitler the movie positions the US as the friend of Hitler and the Nazis since both have a race based science at the heart of their politics.

Made for a fictional TV broadcast, this movie also has faux commercials for products like Niggerhair Tobacco, Sambo Motor Oil, and Darkie Toothpaste.  At the end the movie documents these as real American products (Niggerhair was made in Milwaukee.) and their origins.  The movie worked for me.  It reminded me of where we are and how much further we still have to go.  Made me think of the conversation the Woolly Mammoths had at Paul Stricklands, vis a vis MLK day.

Cinema and Television

Mondrian’s Glasses

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19  74% 20%  0mph SSW  bar29.93 rises  windchill19  Winter

          Waning Gibbous Winter Moon

Another workout in the past.  Another pre-trip prep formats my workouts for outside aerobics and a few in the gym activities.

Started rewatching the Emperor and the Assassin, the first of two relatively recent films that feature Qin Shi Huang-Di, the first emperor of China.  He unified the warring states and created Qin-A, or China.  There were dynasties before him, but they had kings, not emperors.  During the Warring States Period, which immediately preceded Qin Shi Huang-Di’s feat of unification, several different philosophical systems arose in an attempt to find a way toward peace.  This was the era of Kong, the creator of Confucian thought, the legendary Lao-Tze, to whom the Tao Te Ching is attributed and the founders of the Legalist school of governance.  Many more systems arose, but these three had lasting impact.

In the Frederick Scheel photography exhibit I went to Henri Cartier-Bresson’s image of Piet Mondrian’s glasses.  Sure enough, they look like the ones I wear now, not surprising, perhaps, since mine are of German manufacture.  Michelle Yates suggested I look at it.  I also spent some time in the Islamic gallery.  The Koran pages and the miniatures that illustrated Persian books reminded me that the illustrated manuscripts of the Middle Ages also marry word and image.  They represent yet another instance in which literary analysis can abet art history.

Cinema and Television, GeekWorld

Yearning for a Time Already Lost

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1 71%  17%  0mph SW bar30.36  falls  windchill1  Winter

            Full Winter Moon

Bill Schmidt commented on the last post, asking how I interpret the data in the box.

My reading of this data is that enactment of stimulus packages can be taken as somewhat reliable indicators that a recession is over, not starting.  I say somewhat because, though I see no data here that contradicts that statement, attaching cause and effect stretches the data.  Even so, it seems to me that history teaches us that recessions strike before any can diagnose them (see my late post on January 17th) and that this data suggests that by the time national concern, especially at the legislative and executive levels of government, reaches an ignition point for action that the recession is either behind us or on its last legs.  That said, everything I can see for 2008 suggests a rocky road, but that is not inconsistent with a recession troughing and beginning to ease into a recovery.  As Captain Piccard used to say, Let it be so.

Watched Rambo II tonight.  Yes, it’s my shadow side, or the side of me that doesn’t get enough real life action, whatever, but I did get a wonderful metaphor from it near the end.  Rambo, of course, gets routinely shafted by the gubberment and this movie is no exception.  Before he leaves on his mission, he’s shown the very latest in technology that exists just to back him up.  At the end, after defeating everybody (Russians, Viet Cong, American Bureaucrats), he goes into the room with a 50 caliber machine gun on one arm, a magazine of shells draped over his other and blasts all the technology.  We could call it rage against the machine or, the man of action versus the man at the computer console, a not unfamiliar theme in today’s movies.  I read it as a contemporary John Henry fable, much the same as Gary Kasparov against Big Blue.  The common thread in all three is that they yearn for a time when particular human skills had not been mechanized or programmed.  The most important point of all three is that they yearn for a time already acknowledged as lost.

Also, Rambo says, I don’t know whether it’s original though I doubt it, “To win at war you must become war.”  Or, was that the Italian Stallion?

Cinema and Television, GeekWorld, Politics

OMG! Bush Lied!

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-1  72%  18% 0mph W bar30.10  steady windchill-1  winter

                       Full Winter Moon

I now have sound going from the DVR/Cable box to the receiver and the 5 speakers.  I also have sound going from the new Blu-Ray DVD player to the 5 speakers.  This is close to total success, but I still have two hurdles remaining.  I have not been able to get any radio signals yet, in spite of connecting the antennas and I have not run the test microphone which will balance the speakers.  Still, I feel largely done with this project.

In order to get Blu-Ray quality movies you have to get Blu-Ray discs.  Not cheap.  I watched one this evening, Beowulf and Grendel.  This movie takes a spare approach to the story and gives a backstory for Grendel.  It is gorgeous, shot in Iceland by an Icelandic director.  I liked it a good deal, though I’d not heard of it.

The big screen, HD TV setup came from my love for movies.  This is a stunning way to watch movies at home and, with the surround sound, surprisingly close to the cinema experience.  Movies are as important to me as literature, music and the fine arts.  I’m glad to have this way to view them.

Now:  It can finally be said.

“WASHINGTON (AP) – A study by two nonprofit journalism organizations found that President Bush and top administration officials issued hundreds of false statements about the national security threat from Iraq in the two years following the 2001 terrorist attacks. The study concluded that the statements “were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.”

The study was posted Tuesday on the Web site of the Center for Public Integrity, which worked with the Fund for Independence in Journalism.”

The life and times of celebrities must be difficult.  Heath Ledger’s death today, whether suicide or accident (and I would wonder if accident isn’t suicide by another name), puts another name in the column of this felled by fame.  To those in the limelight all the time there must be a moment when you either choose life or choose self-destruction, a decision many of us face only obliquely, perhaps at the dinner table.

Cinema and Television, Faith and Spirituality

Shinto and the Tao

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7  75%  19%  0mph WNW  bar 30.38  falls windchill7  Winter

                     Full Winter Moon

Just purchased an online course of Taoism.  This is a subject I want to explore in greater depth and this will add to my knowledge. 

Spent a few hours today writing Transcendent Thinking, a presentation for Groveland UU.  Instead of recapitulating Emerson I decided to write as the free, transcendent mind I am.  This lead me quickly to Miyazaki, the anime master whose features rely on Shinto as their underlying ethos.  I  hopped to Shinto itself, then Taoism (which lead me to the course work).  This is more the direction I’d hoped to go with the Ge-ology, now I’ve got a beginning.

I’ve also written a ritual, a sacrament for the way of nature which I’ll post here at some point.

Woollies tonight.  The retreat.

Cinema and Television, GeekWorld, Politics

Coming Down off a Techno High

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30  96%  30%  omph WSW bar 29.85 rises windchill30  Winter

                     New Moon

Watched an HD movie tonight:  An American Haunting. Sissy Spacek, Donald Sutherland and James D’Arcy provided the core of a good ensemble cast.  This movie tells of the Bell Witch, an early 19th century century haunting in Adams, Tennessee. There is a cottage industry of folks who believe, including debunkers of other believers.  A bit like a snake biting its own tale.  The book An American Haunting: The Bell Witch recounts the supposedly true events which ended in 1821 with the death of John Bell.  The movie suggests incest, but fails, at least to my satisfaction, to link it to the strange occurrences at the Bell House.  Here is a website with further information.

Feel like I’m coming down off a techno high, a sort of cyber electric dream occasioned by optical cables, coaxial cables, HDMI cables, speaker wire, subwoofers and high definition televison.  Alice could tumble through an HDMI cable into a virtual wonderland, I have.  This is an enchantment of sorts, and as such it must be encountered with awareness, not naivete.

Hey, how about that Hilary, huh?  Coulda fooled me.  Looked like Obama was a shoe-in in New Hampshire.  Just what this means for the race is anybodies guess right now.  I love it.  Real candidates in a real horse race.  Jockeying for position, fighting over the issues and over how to organize campaigns for types of candidates who’ve never run before in this serious a manner.  This is (to use a much abused phrase) a historic moment for American democracy.  It can be a time when we win back the world’s admiration if we allow ourselves to enter the process without cynicism.  Hard, I admit, but possible and desirable.  Imagine a campaign about real politics and not weirdo ideologies.