-
Scrooge McGroove on the Moon
My new favorite YouTube star, Smooth McGroove has fulfilled what he told me was a very popular request (and one of my requests as well): The Moon theme from DuckTales, the 1989 NES game based on the Disney cartoon.
I remember as a kid playing this game, and being really impressed by this piece. Most of the game’s music, as I recall, was pretty standard happy-Disney-video game fare, and then Scrooge McDuck gets to the Moon, and this oddly moving and nuanced piece of 8-bit symphonics hits your brain (and my 11-year-old brain).
As always, Mr. McGroove, well done.
-
Stephen Fry and the Paradox of Loneliness
Stephen Fry, one of my heroes, recently tried to commit suicide, and has since told the whole tale of his battle with depression in such a way that only he can. One passage in his latest post stands out to me, a very familiar paradox concerning loneliness, especially considering he and I are both performers, stage performers even, who prize our wit and can seem on the surface to be gregarious and light:
. . . perhaps I am writing this for any of you out there who are lonely too. There’s not much we can do about it. I am luckier than many of you because I am lonely in a crowd of people who are mostly very nice to me and appear to be pleased to meet me. But I want you to know that you are not alone in your being alone.
Loneliness is not much written about (my spell-check wanted me to say that loveliness is not much written about – how wrong that is) but humankind is a social species and maybe it’s something we should think about more than we do. I cannot think of many plays or documentaries or novels about lonely people. Aah, look at them all, Paul McCartney enjoined us in Eleanor Rigby… where do they all come from?
The strange thing is, if you see me in the street and engage in conversation I will probably freeze into polite fear and smile inanely until I can get away to be on my lonely ownsome.
I’ve chosen to be more open about my social anxiety at this stage in my life because I simply don’t always have the energy to fake it anymore, smile inanely, etc., and I also feel that I’m at an age where, goddamn it, I have to be able to stop pretending at sometime. This latter principle, however, rarely holds outside the abstract. In real world meatspace, the inane smile finds its way back. Anyway.
-
We Asked for This
The NSA snooping story is fishy. Here’s Ed Bott at ZDNet:
. . . a funny thing happened the next morning. If you followed the link to [The Washington Post‘s] story, you found a completely different story, nearly twice as long, with a slightly different headline. The new story wasn’t just expanded; it had been stripped of key details, with no acknowledgment of the changes. That updated version, time-stamped at 8:51 AM on June 7, backed off from key details in the original story.
Crucially, the Post removed the “knowingly participated” language and also scrubbed a reference to the program as being “highly classified.” In addition, a detail in the opening graf that claimed the NSA could “track a person’s movements and contacts over time” was changed to read simply “track foreign targets.”
David Simon, meanwhile, gauges the reaction:
You would think that the government was listening in to the secrets of 200 million Americans from the reaction and the hyperbole being tossed about. And you would think that rather than a legal court order which is an inevitable consequence of legislation that we drafted and passed, something illegal had been discovered to the government’s shame.
Nope. Nothing of the kind.
And how is that then? It appears that an already-existing, already-controversial program has been given a Hollywood style treatment. Bott again:
The real story appears to be much less controversial than the original alarming accusations. All of the companies involved have established legal procedures to respond to warrants from a law enforcement agency or a court. None of them appear to be participating with widespread surveillance.
So what went wrong with the Post?
The biggest problem was that the Post took a leaked PowerPoint presentation from a single anonymous source and leaped to conclusions without supporting evidence.
And now back to Simon, who tries to put things into sane perspective, reminding us that the collection of call records and the scraping of emails is not the same as surveillance and recording, if for no other reason than that there’s not enough human and computer power to take on such a massive task.
There is a lot of authoritarian overreach in American society, both from the drug war and the war on terror.
But those planes really did hit those buildings. And that bomb did indeed blow up at the finish line of the Boston marathon. And we really are in a continuing, low-intensity, high-risk conflict with a diffuse, committed and ideologically-motivated enemy. And for a moment, just imagine how much bloviating would be wafting across our political spectrum if, in the wake of an incident of domestic terrorism, an American president and his administration had failed to take full advantage of the existing telephonic data to do what is possible to find those needles in the haystacks. After all, we as a people, through our elected representatives, drafted and passed FISA and the Patriot Act and what has been done here, with Verizon and assuredly with other carriers, is possible under that legislation. . . We asked for this. We did so because we measured the reach and possible overreach of law enforcement against the risks of terrorism and made a conscious choice.
Simon does acknowledge in a later post that there is a substantive difference between the Verizon phone records being given to the government, and the kind of monitoring that PRISM does to Internet activity, which requires more oversight than it currently has. But this is still not really news.
I’m trying to keep my own apathy about this in check, as I imagine what my reaction would be if there were a Republican administration running the executive. I assume I’d be presuming guilt and nefarious intent. I hope the fact that I am far less freaked out by the current administration running such an operation (which, again, turns out to be nothing new anyway) will inform and mitigate any future knee-jerks.
We simply can’t each have ubiquitous presence and expression on the Internet and also expect airtight privacy for all of our activity. We just can’t. As Simon says:
We want cake, we want to eat it, and we want to stay skinny and never puke up a thing. Of course we do.
Of course we do. So let’s pick which one is more important to us, or more accurately, let’s adjust the dials to the mix of privacy and security that better suits us — based on what this thing actually is, not simply as it’s portrayed. We asked for this, and maybe we don’t like what we got. So let’s ask for something else.
-
Bernanke on Oxen and Parasites
Ladies and gentlemen, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, at Princeton:
This is indeed an impressive and appropriate setting for a commencement. I am sure that, from this lectern, any number of distinguished spiritual leaders have ruminated on the lessons of the Ten Commandments. I don’t have that kind of confidence, and, anyway, coveting your neighbor’s ox or donkey is not the problem it used to be . . .
I spoke earlier about definitions of personal success in an unpredictable world. I hope that as you develop your own definition of success, you will be able to do so, if you wish, with a close companion on your journey. In making that choice, remember that physical beauty is evolution’s way of assuring us that the other person doesn’t have too many intestinal parasites.
-
A Tendency Away from Certitude: Our Blogosphere Needs the Essay
It had seemed to me that, in the ideal, the chief distinguishing characteristic of the blog format, as opposed to, say, formal print newspaper and magazine article, was that it represented a piece of a larger conversation. Not in the strict sense of point-counterpoint, you-go-I-go, but in the sense of being an individual’s considered musing upon a given topic that contributes to the overall swirl of thought and content going on all around. That’s certainly the picture painted by someone like Andrew Sullivan, who for me is kind of the Foundational Blogger for all intents and purposes.
But I can’t say that this is what I see today in the blogosphere, or the sectors into which I delve on a regular basis. I can speak best, of course, to my perceptions of the skepto-atheist blogosphere and the wider genre of political blogging. In those areas, I see very little of what could pass as conversation. Recently, I’m realizing how much I wish this were not so.
What I see in blogs today (and let’s keep it to the skepto-atheosphere for now) is more or less a competition of zingers, gotchas, and positions asserted as though self-evident, done via polemic, snark, indignant rhetoric, and quote-mining. I see not a conversation, but lines and lines of entrenched infantry, all working to win their war by scoring the most points.
I’m over-generalizing, I realize. Particularly due to my job, I am exposed to a very specific tributary of the vast rivers of online prose that empty into even wider digital oceans. But I am hoping to follow a thread of thought to something.
Sullivan sees the blog as an evolution — or perhaps modern manifestation of — the essay, and draws the greatest influence from Montaigne (as I do now, thanks in large part to Sullivan), the Ur-blogger.
Christy Wampole has written <a href="
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/the-essayification-of-everything/”>a beautiful piece about what the essay form can offer modern discourse; where we are missing out on its benefits, and abusing it when utilized. She presents her thesis as thus:
I believe that the essay owes its longevity today mainly to this fact: the genre and its spirit provide an alternative to the dogmatic thinking that dominates much of social and political life in contemporary America. In fact, I would advocate a conscious and more reflective deployment of the essay’s spirit in all aspects of life as a resistance against the zealous closed-endedness of the rigid mind. I’ll call this deployment “the essayification of everything.”
The “x-ification” of anything as a panacea is a gimmick I often bristle at, but Wampole is on to something here. For clarity, she writes:
When I say “essay,” I mean short nonfiction prose with a meditative subject at its center and a tendency away from certitude. Much of the writing encountered today that is labeled as “essay” or “essay-like” is anything but. These texts include the kind of writing expected on the SAT, in seminar papers, dissertations, professional criticism or other scholarly writing; politically engaged texts or other forms of peremptory writing that insist upon their theses and leave no room for uncertainty; or other short prose forms in which the author’s subjectivity is purposely erased or disguised. What these texts often have in common is, first, their self-conscious hiding of the “I” under a shroud of objectivity. One has to pretend that one’s opinions or findings have emanated from some office of higher truth where rigor and science are the managers on duty.
The shroud of objectivity, an office of higher truth…could there be any better description for the tone of so much of the skepto-atheosphere’s bloggery? She goes on:
Second, these texts are untentative: they know what they want to argue before they begin, stealthily making their case, anticipating any objections, aiming for air-tightness. These texts are not attempts; they are obstinacies. They are fortresses. Leaving the reader uninvited to this textual engagement, the writer makes it clear he or she would rather drink alone.
Case-making, anticipating objections, etc. In other words, winning on points. One part that many of my fellow bloggers might object to is her assertion that the non-essay “leav[es] the reader uninvited,” as most of the blogosphere is open to comments and reaction, but in my experience comments sections and other blog-based responses are usually more of a piece with the original posting. They are still fortresses, just perhaps smaller ones, or constructed on a different front.
There is, of course, a need for plain-speaking. There is a time and place for laying down lines of demarcation, of, yes, building a fortress, because that fortress may be defending something that is genuinely worthy. I would not feel such common case with “New Atheism” and its (to some) stark and uncompromising positions if I did not think that humanity faced moral and existential threats from religion, faith, and dogma.
But I also want the conversation. Rather than dueling blog posts about, say, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and their attitudes toward Muslims (one set of posts says they’re totally on-point for such-and-such reasons, and another set of posts declaring them unforgivable racists for such-and-such reasons), I’d prefer a slower contemplation — I’m talking primarily about text, but also audio, video, or what have you — that tackled the topic from all angles, and allowed space to look inward and question one’s own suppositions and conclusions. Certainly, the quality of the writing could improve if nothing else.
Blogs, from my vantage point, are not doing this. They are not essays. Are essays anywhere to be found? I have one idea. An essay, as suggested by Wampole, is informed by “possibilitarianism,” by
contingency and trying things out digressively, following this or that forking path, feeling around life without a specific ambition: not for discovery’s sake, not for conquest’s sake, not for proof’s sake, but simply for the sake of trying.
To me, this sounds a lot like Tumblr. Tumblogs are often, rather unintentionally I’d guess, explorations of experience, a gathering of encounters, predilections, and bursts of raw expression that might just be in line with what a Wampolian essay is supposed to be. They may or may not be as polished, and obviously they are not always (or often) text-based. But perhaps there’s something here.
But wait! Wampole says:
I would argue that the weakest component in today’s nontextual essayism is its meditative deficiency. Without the meditative aspect, essayism tends toward empty egotism and an unwillingness or incapacity to commit, a timid deferral of the moment of choice. Our often unreflective quickness means that little time is spent interrogating things we’ve touched upon. The experiences are simply had and then abandoned.
Ah yes. And loop Facebook and Pinterest and their ilk into this as well. A running log of oh-well-that-happened. Maybe. What, then? Wampole, one more time:
Today’s essayistic tendency — a series of often superficial attempts relatively devoid of thought — doesn’t live up to this potential in its current iteration, but a more meditative and measured version à la Montaigne would nudge us toward a calm taking into account of life without the knee-jerk reflex to be unshakeably right.
Good, then. Let us demand more of our own essays, be they in the form of blogs or social network posts, podcast episodes or YouTube monologues. Let us begin each piece with so much confidence in our own intellect and capacity for understanding, that we allow that we may be wrong. We allow that we may have our own blinding biases and obstructive obstinacies. And we say so, and we explore that fact as deeply as anything else.
-
Syria, Us, and Nothing
For the sake of my own sanity, I don’t keep up with the day to day developments of the world’s centers of crisis. Syria, however, holds a special fascination for me, given how stark and seemingly clear the lines of conflict are (as opposed to, say, the moral muddles of Iraq and Afghanistan). But the more I read, the more I despair, because it seems Syria’s battle lines are perhaps even more crooked than anywhere else the U.S. might consider involving itself.
Patrick Cockburn at the London Review of Books tells us that, for one, things have not been going the way they were once believed to be:
Assad isn’t going to win a total victory, but the opposition isn’t anywhere close to overthrowing him either. This is worth stressing because Western politicians and journalists so frequently take it for granted that the regime is entering its last days. A justification for the British and French argument that the EU embargo on arms deliveries to the rebels should be lifted – a plan first mooted in March but strongly opposed by other EU members – is that these extra weapons will finally tip the balance decisively against Assad. The evidence from Syria itself is that more weapons will simply mean more dead and wounded.
So by helping, we may be hurting. Sounds familiar. And the more confounding question may be how we could possibly help when it’s not clear what, exactly, we’d be trying to solve. Look at this clustercuss of conflicting interests:
Five distinct conflicts have become tangled together in Syria: a popular uprising against a dictatorship which is also a sectarian battle between Sunnis and the Alawite sect; a regional struggle between Shia and Sunni which is also a decades-old conflict between an Iranian-led grouping and Iran’s traditional enemies, notably the US and Saudi Arabia. Finally, at another level, there is a reborn Cold War confrontation: Russia and China v. the West. The conflict is full of unexpected and absurd contradictions, such as a purportedly democratic and secular Syrian opposition being funded by the absolute monarchies of the Gulf who are also fundamentalist Sunnis.
Okay, so what ought we do, then? Taking into account our experiences in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, here’s the advice of David Bromwich at NYRB:
The day of the Boston Marathon bombings saw seventy-five killed in Iraq, and 356 wounded: just one story, which few Americans will have read, out of dozens about the aftermath of the American occupation. Our rehearsals of our own good intentions, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Libya, and now in Syria, have swollen to the shape of a rationalized addiction. What then should the US do? Nothing, until we can do something good.
Oh, good.
-
Those Funny Germans
Stephen Evans realizes how off-base some myths about the German people are, including the idea that they are somehow humorless (most of my own ancestry is German, not that you’d know it from my Portuguese name):
The other day, I went to the site of an unexploded World War II bomb. They frequently turn up in building work and this one was near the main station in Berlin.
The bomb disposal man was there. He is the chap who walks calmly up to these rusting lumps of danger with a wrench to make them safe.
He had a badge which said in English: “If you see me running, make sure you catch up.”
It’s a black humor, but still.
-
Boxes Checked, Conquests Forgotten
I once began watching a film I had felt was important for me to see. Universally acclaimed to a level seldom seen, it was a cinematic box I knew I needed to have checked, a head to mount.
The film opens with a live performance of some theatrical dance piece, very arty, very heavy. It’s entirely unexpected as the opening of a movie.
But it shouldn’t have been, because I’d seen it before. The film was Talk to Her, and it turned out that I had completely forgotten I’d already seen it. And fairly recently, having watched it with someone and discussed it. At some point, I’d lost this memory, and only recalled that this was one the Movies I’m Supposed to See. Needing to check the box, I’d missed that the box was already filled.
So goodness knows how many other films I’ve forgotten I’ve seen. And if I can forget films, even really, really good ones, I can probably forget books, which is about 50 times as tragic.
Ian Crouch at the New Yorker discovered this problem.
This embarrassing situation raises practical questions that also become ones about identity: Do I really like reading? Perhaps it is a failure of attention—there are times when I notice my own distraction while reading, and can, in a way, feel myself forgetting. There is a scarier question, one that might seem like asking if one is good at breathing, or walking. Am I actually quite bad at reading after all?
Same here. I’m too consumed with needing to have read the book, that I sometimes fair poorly at the actual reading. And then I need to read something about what I’ve read just to understand it in a meaningful way.
So, if it’s a problem, why not just read or watch things again? More from Crouch:
Part of my suspicion of rereading may come from a false sense of reading as conquest. As we polish off some classic text, we may pause a moment to think of ourselves, spear aloft, standing with one foot up on the flank of the slain beast. Another monster bagged. It would be somehow less heroic, as it were, to bend over and check the thing’s pulse.
For films, too. That’s two or so hours you know you’re going to sit passively, and be at the sensorial mercy of others. If you’ve seen a movie already, and don’t crave to re-experience it, there are countless others that await.
But there is no doubt with me, as with Crouch, too much of an emphasis on the completed-work-as-trophy, building one’s Sophisticated Person credentials. Though there is some merit to feeling at least a little beholden to that made-up standard: I gets me to read and see things I might otherwise neglect due to laziness. Moderation is the key, I suppose, in everything.
-
Not That Big a Deal
This comment is my final word on why this blog is here and not at Freethought Blogs. Long and the short: please chill out.
-
Me, Bill Richardson, and Crippling Doubt
A couple of years ago, I resolved to write at length about my four years living and working in Washington, DC. If I did it well, if I was diligent, it might even turn into a book: the story of a professional actor who leaves it all behind to study and practice politics in the nation’s capital, and how that city violently spit him out.
But I wasn’t writing every day for a living at the time I started the project. I was a retail drone, having just left DC, and I used my off time to write. Now that I tap-tap all day on keyboards to earn my bread, and then send the rest of the time wrangling cranky offspring, the book project has severely stalled.
There’s some good stuff there, though, and so for shits and giggles I thought I’d share a short excerpt from what I have so far. It’s February of 2007, the very dawn of the 2008 presdiential cycle. I’m a new intern at ABC News’ political unit (though a year older than my immediate supervisor at the time, Teddy Davis), and I have an assignment involving the then-governor of New Mexico…
* * *
So how was I doing? It as hard to say. I think I made it pretty clear to Teddy that journalism might not be my chosen path, if for no other reason than that I showed no drive to actually cover events or report on things. He would have to offer things up to me, such as a speech by a candidate in town or some convention for a given interest group. I would agree for the sake of being game, but I never sought out opportunities to pound the pavement.
Was this because of a distaste for journalism? I don’t think so. Rather, I think it was my own personal discomfort with other humans, based upon a strong foundation of self-loathing. I consistently felt out of my league, like a child wearing a grownup’s costume, playing pretend reporter. Behind the computer terminal, writing newswire posts, transcribing speeches, or editing HTML, I was safe. No one could see the fraud I was trying to pull off, the fraud that was me.
Perhaps my most uncomfortable moment as a faux-reporter for ABC was when I was sent to cover a speech by Democratic presidential candidate Bill Richardson, then governor of New Mexico, at a hotel in town. One thing to appreciate is that speeches by Dick Cheney or Hillary Clinton, both of which I also covered, were relatively safe events for me: I would go to the event, present my press credentials, hide in the back, take notes, come back to the unit and write my report. There was no expectation by anyone, either by my ABC colleagues or by the subjects themselves, that I would ever get even a half a moment to speak to the politicians I was covering. But with a lower-tier candidate like Richardson, there was a terrifying chance for access.
Teddy knew this, and prepped me with a question for the governor should I get the chance: “How does being the only remaining governor in the Democratic primaries affect the dynamics of the race for you?” Iowa governor Tom Vilsack had only recently (and suddenly) bowed out and endorsed Clinton before most people knew he was running. Richardson was the only chief executive in the mix.
Richardson was an entertaining speaker. Though his campaign passed out written copies of the speech he was giving, he strayed wildly from the text, cracking jokes and enjoying himself. The crowd, comprised of muckity-mucks of medium importance, were clearly with him, and laughing right along. His standard stump speech style was beneath him, I thought, too full of bullet-pointed generalities in an attempt to show gravitas. Indeed, in every debate, about 75 percent of his answers began with the phrase, “Here’s what I would do: One…” accompanied by the requisite finger-counting gesture.
After the speech, is was made known to the small cadre of journalists there (many of them interns and low-on-the-totem-poll young’uns not unlike myself) that the governor would take questions in a side room. It was the last thing I wanted to do. I would have rather wet myself and run crying than go into that room and ask a question of the governor of New Mexico. But I knew that it would be expected, that I would let both myself and Teddy down if I missed the chance.
Interestingly, Teddy would have been able to pick up the phone and speak to Richardson probably any time he wanted. He was an ABC News reporter, after all, and Richardson an under-covered candidate who would have treasured the attention and the free media time. So obviously this was more for me than anything else.
I and the other reporters seated ourselves around a small room into which we were ushered, and many of them unburdened themselves of laptops and cameras. I brought only my notepad, so I simply sat as unassumingly as I could, trying very hard to look like I belonged, and probably failing. The governor took a very long time to make it through the throngs of glad-handlers who populated his path to the side room, but he eventually made it through and sat at a chair in the back of the room, sweating under the heat of the human bodies, the lights from the stage he had just come from, and his own considerable girth.
I have no idea what questions other folks in the room asked him. I could only hear a kind of mechanical humming emanating from my own brain, directly into my auditory lobes, making it impossible for me to think of anything other than how I might muster the courage to raise my hand, get the governor’s attention, and then somehow —somehow — assemble the necessary words into a remedial sentence, preferably in an interrogatory form, that could be answered by the candidate.
I was called on.
“Hi, governor. Paul Fidalgo from ABC News. Right now…”
“Where’s the little guy?!?” Richardson bellowed.
My brain jumped the tracks. I had no idea what was happening. The sweat from my scalp was beginning to dot my forehead, and the sweat from my armpits began to run down my torso.
“The little guy?” This was doubly confusing because I always think of myself as the little guy.
“The one from ABC, you know, the funny guy.”
“David Chalian?” I presumed he meant someone high in the ranks.
“No, the funny little one.”
“Teddy Davis?”
“That’s him! Where’s he?”
“Well, it’s just me, governor,” I said, somehow managing to feel guilty for not being Teddy. “I’m an intern at…”
“Agh,” the governor blurted, deflated. “What’s the question?” He was already bored.
“Sir, with the fact…given that Tom Vilsack has dropped out, um, now you’re the only governor in the race.” Richardson nodded. I went on, “How do you think…you…do you think that will, uh, help you? In the race?”
What had I said? I had no idea what had just come out of my mouth. I was pretty sure it was in the form of a question, at least in the most minutely technical sense, but I was also not at all convinced I had made anyone believe that I belonged in that room.
It didn’t matter. At the close of my broken sentence, Richardson went on autopilot and emitted a prerecorded answer vaguely related to the subject of my question.
“I’m a governor,” he declared, as though that had yet to be pointed out, “and I have the experience of leading an entire state. I’ve also been a congressman, an ambassador, and a cabinet secretary…”
And on he went. I scribbled some notes of what I thought I was hearing. I thanked him for the answer, and as his attention moved to the next reporter, my feeling of relief at the ordeal’s end was muted by the little bit of death I felt in my heart.
Back at the unit, I wrote up a pitiful little piece about the governor’s response. Still saturated with self-hate and humiliation, I felt utterly unable to give my piece a title. One of our other producers tasked with editing the piece slapped “Bill Richardson Stars in “Last Guv Standing” on the top, much to his satisfaction, and added a joke about the Oscars broadcast which had aired the previous night, which I didn’t get. “ABC News’ Paul Fidalgo reports:” the piece began, and I came to hate the sight of that byline.
-
OSIRIS-REx Will Use TAGSAM to Get a NEO
Gesundheit.
But seriously, folks. In 2016 NASA’s going to launch a probe, OSIRIS-REx, to make contact with, and then bring back a sample of — you guessed it — a near-earth object.
The object in question is the asteroid Bennu, and the whole operation is described in this NASA video which, I must say, seems to have been produced by whoever it is that does retail store training videos and airplane safety instructions.
But still.
-
Subscribe
Subscribed
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
Near-Earth Object 