Monthly Archives: January 2008

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.

Art and Culture, General, Travel

Security as the Museum’s Id

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25  66%  20%  0mph  SSW bar29.90  windchill24  Winter

             Waning Gibbous Winter Moon

At the MIA I picked up my old security badge with the grinning face and a patch of remnant frontal hair which looked like a soft, brown green at the 1st hole.  This earned me admission to the basement, the haunt of the security guards.  I went in the basement to get my picture taken because the badges are, after all, a security concern, relegated to the basement, or id level of the museum.  This is the instinctive, protective part of the museum’s body; it strikes without forethought to protect art, then vitrines, cases and stands.  In a pinch they will protect people, too, but mostly it’s about the art.   Makes sense.  After all, the guy didn’t come in and sit on a patron; no, he chose the $500,000 Ming dynasty chair. (Now worth $750,000 after renovation)

Anyhow, I went down the stairs.  On the left was the guards lounge with the artistic funky furniture and guard art on the wall.  On the right was the photo shop.  On the wall next to its door was an old museum sign in bronze, perhaps 3 feet high and 18 inches wide.  It gave the hours and days of the museum.  So, the basement is also where old signage goes to live after its working life is over.

Once inside, more guard art on the walls, there were those little light reflecting umbrellas that photographers use, plus a tilted white board at desk level in front of the stool.  Pauline? had a Canon SLR digital on a tripod.  She took three shots:  I smiled broadly, quirkily, and deadpan. 

“I’ll leave it to you to choose the most winning one,” I said and left the basement.

 Back here at home I’ve also begun my attempt to learn Chinese characters on my own, with the aid of softwared I bought a while back.  Over the  years I’ve tried to learn Welsh, Spanish, German and Greek.  I have some Latin and some French.  Languages are not my long suit, but I keep sticking my head back in the stocks every few years.   Part of me is ashamed I’ve never learned another language.  No, make that all of me.  Very ethnocentric and gauche American.

General, Politics

A Richard Nixon Dream

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25  70%  19%  omph SWS bar29.89 steady  Winter

           Waning Gibbous Winter Moon

“The right moment for starting on your next job is not tomorrow or next week; it is instanter, or in the American idiom, ‘right now.’ ” – Arnold Toynbee

A long time ago I read how Arnold Toynbee worked when writing his history of the world.  He did the research in the morning and early afternoon, then wrote into the evening.  You’d have to be pretty organized to have the right material handy, but it does cut down on short term memory loss.

Forgot to mention here that I had a Richard Nixon dream last night.  I spent several dream hours chasing, catching, securing and locking away old Tricky Dick.  Have no idea what that was about, but it did have a recurring theme:  I’m in a hotel, it’s check out time and I’m not gonna make it.  Have no idea what that’s about either.  It did occur to me that Nixon has entered the national bank of archetypes.  He’s the all purpose bad guy, the psychopath who made it to the Big House.  It felt good defeating him.  Maybe that was the point.

Off to the MIA today to get my photo taken for a new security badge.  I need to do this since the last time I had one was in 2001, when I still had hair.

GeekWorld, Travel, Woolly Mammoths

A Retreat, Then An Advance

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19  82%  21%  omph ENE bar29.90  windchill19  Winter

             Waning Gibbous Winter Moon

A DVR.  Hadn’t planned on getting one, but the hdmi connection with the TV demanded it over the HD converter box alone.  Surprise.  I like it.  Already I’ve taped two movies, Cronicas and Killer of Sheep.  When I’m watching a movie, I prefer to start at the beginning and the start times of movies often don’t conform to my schedule.  In the past I would check the replay schedules and try to find a time that worked or I’d skip it.  Now I can press the record button and the DVR records the movie and I can replay when I wish.  Kate’s also used it to tape a TPT series, Jewish Americans.  Guess you never know.

No more tours until March.  I have ten days before I go to Dwelling in the Woods, days I’ll use to finish the garden planning, edit my sermon for Groveland and produce a 1-page Transcendentalism for Brights, work on my new novel and a short story.  Also, I’ll do the various pre-trip preparations like stopping the newspaper, the mail, reserving a ride on the Airport Shuttle, packing. 

Also have to plan a one-hour presentation to the brothers, something I want to share with them, a passion or a part of my life right now.  Could be anything.  We switched to this format last year and we liked it.  The way we’d done it before involved a focus on a theme and a common thread in what we presented:  Fathers, Mothers, Death, Myth.  Last year we had a theme, Darkness, but the suggestion was to present the theme in a creative manner.  I chose a ritual of darkness which involved reading poetry excerpts (Dover Beach, The Night by Rilke, Stopping by the Woods on A Snowy Evening that sort) and, in a room lit only with candles, extinguishing a candle with each reading.   This year, don’t know yet.

Art and Culture

How Does the Mummy’s Soul Find the Body If You Moved It?

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+20!  71%  18%  omph ESE  bar 30.08 steep fall  windchill19  Winter

               Waning Gibbous Winter Moon

Out of the door early this am.  Wanted to walk my Safari route, check on the objects.  Also wanted to get a fresh look at the calligraphy.

Went upstairs to the second floor and started back in the Americas.  There are some fine additions to the America’s galleries:  an Annishinabe/Lakota blanket with a stunning design on a black field, an Olmec jade mask (it’s been out a while, but it’s still new to the collection.), a wonderful Haida bear-headed dagger and some new Inuit prints.  These last looked very Chinese to me, even down to chops in red.

The Safari tour had a wide ambit since these kids had an interest in many things.  We discussed the art, saw some animals.  Peri, a young girl in a soft white coat, asked questions like:  How did they get the tusk off the elephant?  She also wanted to know, “How does the soul find the body if you moved the body?” (Lady Teshat).

In the couple of hours plus between tours I ate lunch upstairs at D’Amico’s and read a catalogue from the National Museum at Taipei.  It had an excellent chapter on calligraphy.  After lunch, I wandered the galleries, checking out calligraphic styles, trying to learn how to recognize them, distinguish them.  Allison suggested using an abstract expressionist piece to talk about feeling in brushstrokes.  I did that. It seemed to work.  These kids, too, found all manner of things they wanted to see.  The Nevelsen.  The Tatra.  The Wu Family Reception Hall.  The Imperial Robes.  On the robes Darius thought it looked like a place where you hung clothes out to dry and then a place to fold them (the Imperial throne.).

After the tours I hopped over to First Tech to see the Mac Air, but they don’t have any yet.  Not until the first of February or so. 

Home.  Snack.  Write.  Workout.

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?

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel

A Night of Moon Shadows

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-11 61% 16% 0mph  WSW  bar30.34 windchill-11  Winter

                 Full Winter Moon

It is, again, a night of moon shadows, crisp in outline.  In its reflection of the sun’s light moon as mirror gives us a cool, silvered glow for the dark time.  Stripped of its life giving powers, this light instead comes to us as a pure light, with no other purpose than to illuminate.  It is a deep mystery, the moon.  Its light casts fairy dust on trees and shrubs, rocks and snow drifts, otherwise common in appearance during the day, but in the moonlight, marvelous wonderful.  It also pulls us, drags us a bit on our cosmic journey, sloshes our waters.  The moon’s magic spell cast over millennia of human imagination remains the same, strong.

A couple of days ago I signed up for what is in essence a correspondence course in Taoism.  I have had my second lesson from Teacher Jiahan and he has already clarified some things and created questions about others.  This is a five course package so at the end I should have a decent introduction.  Taoism is an ancient trail, by definition.  The Tao is the Way, but the Way that can be known is not the Way.  Teacher Jiahan says this well-known first line of the Tao Te Ching actually means that the Way is not fixed or rigid, since a central tenet of Taoism is the ever changing nature, of, well, nature.  It is the nature of nature to change. 

The smells of jacaranda, plumeria, gardenia and suntan lotion come to me know.  The smell of moist earth and ozone, leis thrown over newcomers, smiles.  All this plus the memories of heiaus, volcanoes, whales, surfers, fish, meals beside the Pacific, quiet time away from the office.  Not far away now. 

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel

Not a Good Sign

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-6  68%  29%  2mph  WNW  bar30.24  steep rise  windchill-8  Winter

                              Full Winter Moon

“Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better.” – Albert Camus

When I went out to get the paper this morning, the full winter moon again hugged the horizon, this time a bright silver coin visible through the bare trees of our woods to the west.  Our paper comes, like most of us in the ‘burbs, to a rectangular box below our mailbox, perched on the road so both paper delivery and mail delivery can happen from the seat of a vehicle. 

The trash man cometh at about the same time I goeth to get the paper.  As I stood and watched, the trucks long robotic arm moved out and away from the truck, gripped our black plastic trash container, moved a bit further out, then swept up and over the truck, inverting our container in mid-air causing the lid to fly open and the trash to spill out, white plastic bags full, into the maw of the truck.  The process reversed; I waved at the trash man as he pulled away, grabbed onto the handle and pulled the container on its ridiculous plastic wheels up the 100 foot incline of our driveway.  It scrunched in the below zero temperatures as it rolled and slid behind me.

On the paper’s front page I could see a picture of our central banker, Ben Bernanke, with his head in his hands.  Not a good sign.

Though I’ve done it less than Kate in recent months, getting the newspaper in the morning is an immersion in the weather and season at a point when it all seems fresh, just as dawn begins to break.  It is a meditation, at least for me, since I do it half asleep and therefore more open to the subtle messages of partially hidden moon, the screech of snow and the bite of the wind as it blows across my ungloved hands.

This morning finds me at work on a safari tour for 2nd graders.  2nd graders are great; they respond and most without an inner censor.  I plan to use:  Moche pelican, Benin leopard, (the mummy, because the teacher wants it), the Cambodian lion, Corot’s deer nibbling leaves in a tree, Copley’s Fishing Party, Gaugin’s Under the Pandanus, Picasso’s Baboon and, perhaps the installation of children’s photographs.  Also today I’ll plan a calligraphy tour for 4th graders who’ve used ink, inkstones and brushes while learning brush painting and calligraphy.  Both should be fun.

General

A Pale Orange Orb

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4  64%  18%  0mph WSW bar30.07  windchill4  Winter

                        Full Winter Moon

The moon hung low on horizon as I came home from the grocery store, a pale orange orb occluded by dirty gray clouds.  It gave off the aura of Samain in the depths of late January.  As often happens with the moon, I felt a pinch of privilege; I saw this and felt it.  A privilege we all share, if only we look up at the sky instead of down at our feet.

Back to Ultimate Electronics to pick up my Blu-Ray player.  I traded in the HD player when Warner Brothers announced they were going with Blu-Ray. Now I have to hook it up.

Worked out in shorts yesterday and it was the first time in years I can recall fitting into the collection of shorts I gathered before I began bulking out.  A proud moment.

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.