Aug
1
Overheard: On conflict
August 1, 2010 | Leave a Comment
Organizational psychologist Dr. J. Richard Hackman discusses conflict in PBS’s outstanding miniseries This Emotional Life. He laments that people wonder too often what life would be like if we could neutralize all conflicts:
Number one, not possible. Number two, it’d be a bad idea even if it were possible, because it is in the conflict that we really capture the difference of perspective that is the reason for having a group in the first place.
May
25
Overheard: Too-much-ism
May 25, 2010 | 3 Comments
I find it strange and sad that society moves toward regularizing everyone — rather than valuing and helping people with strange, interesting tendencies or abilities, we cram them into a more standard form. The obvious downside is the collapsing of individuality. Beyond that, though, are the consequences of trying to be or simply seem normal and conventional.
A more extreme example of this is hoarding, which is experiencing a strange media heyday at the intersection of disaster-porn and home makeover shows. Salon recently ran an interview with hoarding expert and Smith professor Randy Frost. He put the problem in a way I’d never thought of:
When most of us look at an object like a bottle cap, we think, “This is useless,” but a hoarder sees the shape and the color and the texture and the form. All these details give it value. Hoarding may not be a deficiency at all — it may be a special gift or a special ability. The problem is being able to control it.
People often wonder aloud what may have happened to some of the great artists in history if their esoteric habits and sometimes destructive personalities were chemically regulated. More than that, who knows how many of our most productive mathematicians and scientists experienced mild forms of autism, how many philosophers experienced enlightenment through bouts of depression, and so forth.
There is no reason for people to suffer when we have ways to ease their pain, and I’m not suggesting otherwise. But I do think we can understand and help in moderation, while not unnecessarily squashing anyone’s “special gifts.”
The one-size-fits-all problem shows up in more benign ways that are arguably as offensive. On a new Style Network show called Tacky House, people nominate their loved ones for a makeover of a room the nominator simply can’t stand because of its poor design.
In the episode I watched, a husband nominated his wife of several years who had designed a room in their home around the Martha’s Vineyard locale where they met and fell in love. She filled the room with arrangements of silk roses, flower-upholstered furniture, and all manner of pastel pinks. “I thought you loved this room,” she mumbled sadly. “How am I supposed to watch football in here?” he said.
Yes, the room was overkill, but there was so much love coming from the wife and so little appreciation coming from the husband that it was uncomfortable to watch. The show’s host corrected the woman’s memory in hindsight (“Martha’s Vineyard is a beach, it’s not full of roses,” he’d say. “But I loved the gardens there,” she’d answer) and wedged a new image into the room.
Apr
13
History: Teen People, 1998
April 13, 2010 | Leave a Comment
Yesterday Pajiba ran a column on Elijah Wood by contributor Michael Murray. He tries to put a finger on what’s so fascinating about Wood, and describes what I agree is the most memorable scene in Deep Impact:
As a tsunami is about to wash over the world, Wood — mobile and courageous on a zippy dirt bike — dekes in and out of the doomed motorists jammed on the highway.
My dad hates Elijah Wood and has since Wood starred as the kid in the updated Flipper movie. But I loved that movie (and still do: the statute of limitations on childhood taste has not run out), and countless others he made in the ’90s starting with Radio Flyer.
Deep Impact continued a fundamental shift in my taste. 1997 had come and gone with Titanic, which my friends and I liked a lot . . . then some of those friends saw it twenty times, while others decided a month later that they hated it. The combination of schizo obsession and backlash seemed even more ridiculous after the release of Armageddon, one of the biggest waste-of-time pieces of tripe I’ve ever endured, but for some reason people LOVED it and hated Deep Impact. I began to think about how this quieter, box-office-failing movie was better regardless of its level of commercial success. That’s not to say I didn’t continue to see questionable things and often do now.* But I started to understand the relationship between good movies and entertaining movies and their overlap.
It’s hard to explain the place Wood holds in my pop-culture memory because you just had to be there. In a way, our whole generation grew up on the same trajectory, and I’d seen him in movies from childhood to adolescence and onward, playing various parts that felt really truthful even though they spanned different historical periods, different backgrounds. I flipped through the December/January issue of Teen People — a teen magazine so honestly good I asked to get a subscription — and saw this spread on Elijah Wood:
For some reason, this magazine spread is one of my strongest sense memories to this day: I remembered this exact photo (and spent a lot of mental energy finding it online), the colors of the title font, how the shirt he’s wearing is blue because you see it on the next page. I was listening to a CD I’d just received for my birthday — 1996′s Yourself or Someone Like You by Matchbox 20, one of my first favorite CDs and one I still love for its importance to me then — and one of those songs is embedded in the memory too. The CD rode a continuous wave of successful singles and sold millions and millions of copies. I can’t listen to this album without thinking of this story on Elijah Wood in this magazine, and I can’t think of Elijah Wood without thinking of this album.
There’s some mental coin flip where this particular moment on this particular day won the memory game: An actor I like but don’t love, in a fairly typical photo spread, for an embarrassing movie (The Faculty!), sitting in my room, looking out the window into town, listening to a fairly typical mid 90s pop rock group. I feel a connection to Elijah Wood because of it, and I still think he’s great even though I fell asleep during each installment of Lord of the Rings.
* Here’s a clause to strike fear in your heart: Journey to the Center of the Earth in 3D.
Apr
2
Style: Justification in its own right
April 2, 2010 | Leave a Comment
Will at A Suitable Wardrobe wrote a wonderful little set of instructions for straight men to make their wardrobes friendlier to female borrowers:
I thought it might be useful for us to consider a couple of items that we should have in our closets to make our wardrobes attractive to the fairer sex. Note that it is not necessary that a man wear these things; indeed, they may exist principally to make time spent with him more attractive to the woman in his life. But that is justification in its own right.
Yes! He even includes the repeated washings necessary to soften up an oxford shirt.
For all the character’s bold missteps, one of the best fashion moments in Sarah Jessica Parker’s tenure as Carrie Bradshaw is so basic: A long, oversize dark sweater, paired with a low-maintenance hairstyle and little makeup. She walks around her apartment, moping after a fight with her severe Russian boyfriend, and actually looks comfortable in her clothes for once.
Mar
19
Overheard: Thoughtlessly brutal
March 19, 2010 | Leave a Comment
A.O. Scott’s movie reviews for the Times are entertaining even when I couldn’t care less about the movie:
Remember “His Girl Friday”? “Bringing Up Baby”? “Holiday”? (If not, it’s never too late.) “The Bounty Hunter,” with its whirligig plot and incessant squabbling, shows some genetic connection to those sparklingly silly battles of the sexes. But it is also the latest evidence that, when it comes to romantic combat, we live in a more coddled, a less insouciant and also a more thoughtlessly brutal age than our ancestors did.
Feb
18
Overheard: Ebert scribbles constantly
February 18, 2010 | Leave a Comment
I cannot praise Chris Jones’s deep, magnificent profile of Roger Ebert (in the new Esquire) enough. It moved me in every familiar way and some I never expected. Ebert’s passion for his life’s work shows in every detail:
Ebert scribbles constantly, his pen digging into page after page, and then he tears the pages out of his notebook and drops them to the floor around him. Maybe twenty or thirty times, the sound of paper being torn from a spiral rises from the aisle seat in the last row.
Jones also cleanses the palate of the notion that Ebert has gone soft in his reviews — Yes, he assigns higher ratings to more movies, but Ebert has explained that he judges movies based on what they’re aiming for, not where they fall in an objective continuum of all moviekind. Jones also makes it clear that Ebert’s changing life of surgeries, illness, and steely resolve has effected if not his taste then his attitude. As in all cases, I support people’s publicly changing opinions as their circumstances change, and I appreciate without bounds anyone who is willing to admit a change of heart.
I thought the Jones piece was the end of it, and then Ebert wrote an equally magnificent response. He is more gracious than can really be believed and it is a suitable end to the story Jones began.
Dec
29
News: Inspiration for Rain Man dies at 58
December 29, 2009 | 1 Comment
The New York Times reported that Kim Peek died of a heart attack a week before Christmas. Peek was a savant of nigh unprecedented abilities and the inspiration for Raymond Babbitt in the movie Rain Man:
Mr. Peek had memorized so many Shakespearean plays and musical compositions and was such a stickler for accuracy, his father said, that they had to stop attending performances because he would stand up and correct the actors or the musicians.
“He’d stand up and say: ‘Wait a minute! The trombone is two notes off,’ ” Fran Peek said.
(This is, I think, how my friends imagine I feel when I see typos or grammar errors. They’re wrong, by the way.)
The article is a lovely tribute, and the contrasts in Peek’s mental state — brilliant in some ways, completely incapable in others — create moments of dark humor:
When Kim was 6, another doctor recommended a lobotomy. By then, however, Kim had read and memorized the first eight volumes of a set of family encyclopedias, his father said.
Rain Man is one of my family’s favorite movies, something from which we quote incessantly. Raymond — the character inspired by Peek — communicates almost entirely through nonverbals, and Tom Cruise’s character must learn to read between lines that aren’t present. He undergoes a now-classic Cruise transformation from crass to humbled, from uncaring to involved.
When the economy flounders and so many talented people find themselves out of work or underemployed, I think it can be tempting to lament that we aren’t all a certain way or haven’t followed a certain path. I love Kim Peek’s story because he spent most of his adult life giving presentations and making public appearances, helping to shore up the self-perceptions and confidence of other adults who faced challenging mental circumstances.
With great brain power comes great responsibility, usually at the sacrifice of some other part of one’s life or personality: our most beloved artists, scientists, and any of those who make important waves for humankind have discovered this firsthand.
Dec
14
Overheard: Your friends in the White House
December 14, 2009 | 1 Comment
Obama heavyweight and hometown hero David Axelrod made a funny as a guest on George Stephanopoulos’s first episode of Good Morning America:
[Stephanopoulos] questioned Mr. Axelrod about the health care bill; the president’s plans to badger “fat cat” bankers about bonuses; and the economy. Mr. Axelrod presented him with an alarm clock permanently set to 3:30 a.m., a gift from, as he put it, “your friends in the White House.”
And apparently something’s rotten in the state of cohost rapport between Stephanopoulos and Robin Roberts:
After noting that surveys suggest that women view Mr. Woods less favorably than men do, the new anchor said dryly, “Well that’s a shocker, huh?”
Ms. Roberts, using a “Romper Room” tone that suggested that she didn’t realize he was kidding, replied, “We’re learning something new every day.”
With a name like Robin Roberts, I can see why this person may lack a sense of humor.
Nov
14
Review: Aqua Teen Hunger Force Live
November 14, 2009 | 5 Comments
My original plan was to see now-confirmed-poofest 2012 on my birthday, which happened to be the movie’s opening day, but when I found out it was TWO AND A HALF HOURS LONG and the friend with whom I’d intended to go turned out to be busy, that plan went out the window. Instead, by pure serendipity, I learned ATHF Live was happening and the 7:30 show was not sold out. A prompt excited text message was sent.
The Lakeshore Theater is small, and they packed us in one party at a time to avoid people leaving a seat between themselves. My knees bumped the seat in front of me and a cupholder dug awkwardly into my leg the whole time. They were also rather liberal with some blinding disco lights and a smoke machine. The “preshow” previews, shown on an automatic pulldown screen from a projector in the back, were embarrassingly bad in every way: unfunny comedians, poor video quality, even worse postproduction. They also wedged in a dumb intermission about 3/4 through the show for no reason. In other words, I hated this venue and would have to be lured back with another incredible act or group.
“Why isn’t Frylock here?” Dave Willis and Dana Snyder asked, rhetorically, at the beginning. They said something about appearance fees, and it may have been a joke and maybe not, but really . . . Three out of four ain’t bad. Dave does Meatwad and Carl and Dana does Master Shake, so there was plenty of voice variety, and a Meatwad voice contest at the end of the show where the best contestant was voted out because he admitted that he’s an auditor. Whoops.
There is something wonderful, surreal, and certainly memorable about seeing regular people and hearing your favorite cartoon characters coming out of their mouths — At first I couldn’t stop laughing even when nothing was funny, because of the plain incongruity. Dana (here on the right; picture from online) wore a tuxedo and Dave had on bright green preppy pants and the whole evening had a good feel to it. The Meatwad contest was judged using kazoos.
Dave and Dana showed two brand new episodes that won’t air for a few months, and they were both amazing. A guy in a porkpie hat stalked around the theater yelling at people for taking photos or recording during these, and Dave made a throwaway remark about them ending up on YouTube tomorrow.
There aren’t a lot of things I like or think about that my parents aren’t at least passingly familiar with (recent exception: My Halloween costume was a Fraggle, and they don’t know Fraggle Rock at all), but besides vaguely knowing that Adult Swim exists, they didn’t know anything else about it — so I found myself explaining about Aqua Teen and hearing it in my head and thinking, “This all sounds so ridiculous.” Which is, I think, its appeal.
Nov
12
Review: A Serious Man
November 12, 2009 | Leave a Comment
Those of you who know me know that I am very fond of Jewish literature, mostly American. My friend Nathan is a Twin Cities Jew whose mother grew up in the same suburb as the Coen brothers — St Louis Park, or “St Jewish Park,” Nathan informed me.
Mild spoilers. Read at your own risk.
The Coen brothers set their movie A Serious Man in St Louis Park in 1967, when Nathan’s mom was a girl and would have seen a similar landscape in her everyday life. And after their more spectacular movies, relatively speaking, this is a small character piece. Very little happens — main character Larry, an uber cerebral physics professor, has a sudden onslaught of bad luck and attempts to find a reason why. He ventures through traditional Judaism, the crazy-seeming mysticism of his sad brother, and pure science.
Near the beginning of the movie, a student who has failed Larry’s physics midterm tells Larry he understands all the anecdotes but did not realize physics involved actually doing the math. As Larry struggles to convince the student that physics IS the math, not the stories, it’s clear that he’s about to learn some kind of lesson.
Once my boss described me by saying I hate it when people aren’t logical, and in a way, that’s dead accurate. To dig into it deeper, I am really frustrated when people act without any regard or thought in a world that already makes no sense most of the time. Nathan probably feels the same way, and I think the movie hit home for both of us because we share this attitude. You can see it on Larry’s face when the events in his life confuse him, and he can’t even make enough sense of them to get angry. Near the movie’s end, Larry’s brother has an emotional outburst and says a lot of what Larry hasn’t articulated for himself yet, and it’s a wonderful, purgative moment. Larry’s life perplexes him because he has done everything right, accurately, or at least unexceptionally; when it begins to fall apart, he has to rethink all of his actions.
This movie is thick with references to Jewish life and culture, which I really enjoyed — I told Nathan, no movie I can think of has spent this much loving detail on American Judaism: Hebrew school, bar mitzvahs, Yiddish phrases, a mezuzah in every doorway.