Like an Empiricist prescription or an occult warning, depending on how you take it, Wittgenstein wrote as a coda to the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,  Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.  C. K. Ogden translates this as "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

I have spent the past week trying to learn how to be silent, again.  I unplugged myself from the Internet and went to the beach with my family where I spent several days trying to silence the various voices that constitute a perpetual background cacophony in my head.  The ocean swell helped me to accomplish this quiescence of the noetical Madding crowd, until finally there was nothing left but stillness in my brain and the inbreath and outbreath of the sea as it filled up the new tide pools of my mind, and a gasp escaped my lips and traveled over the waters as I realized that this really was a vacation, at last, and it wasn't what I had expected.

This sense of quietude is what I have always taken Heidegger to be referring to when he discusses Lichtung -- the clearing -- in his writings, for instance in Being and Time where he writes:

"In our analysis of understanding and of the disclosedness of the "there" in general, we have alluded to the lumen naturale, and designated the disclosedness of Being-in as Dasein's "clearing", in which it first becomes possible to have something like sight." -- tr. Macquarrie & Robinson

Except that for me, sight is a place holder for my inner monologue, and the clearing is a place to rediscover my inner voice.  We are all social animals, after all, and when we are with other people our inner voices become drowned out by the various social pressures that sweep us along, whether this is in politics, or at work, or on the Internet, the biggest stream of voices available.  My general strategy in life is to fill my mind with so many voices that they eventually begin to cancel each other out so that my rather weak voice can have some influence within my own head.  But this doesn't always work, and I eventually need to detox in a quiet place.

Heidegger uses a clearing in the woods as his metaphor for this place, but I think the ocean serves the purpose even better.  The ocean is a natural source of white noise, and the way white noise affects human beings is peculiar.  According to some studies, the appeal of white noise seems to be specific to primates, and to humans in particular.  According to the Aquatic Ape theory, human evolution is intimately tied to the coast, and this might explain, in a hand-waving sort of way, our affinity for the ocean and the sounds of the ocean.  It is the music that calms the inner beast.

The inner monologue is a peculiar, though pervasive, phenomenon.  An interesting observation concerning it occurs in Augustine's Confessions.  Augustine expresses amazement at the fact that his mentor, Ambrose, is able to read without moving his lips.  This gives us a strange impression of the Roman world -- apparently it has not always been the case that people read silently in an ALA approved manner.  This in turn has led various philosophers to wonder if the inner monologue existed for these Romans, or if they simply articulated everything they thought.

For Derrida, this became a motif for his philosophical studies.  In an early work, Speech and Phenomena, Derrida tries to find the source of Husserl's phenomenological insight in The Logical Investigations, and concludes that it is due to a basic confusion between observation and speech.  Because in speech we are capable of this inner monologue, Husserl, according to Derrida, made the analogous assumption that we can exist, in some peculiar way, without the world.

"For it is not in the sonorous substance or in the physical voice, in the body of speech in the world, that he [Husserl] will recognize an original affinity with the logos in general, but in the voice phenomenologically taken, speech in its transcendental flesh, in the breath, the intentional animation that transforms the body of the word into flesh, makes of the Körper a Leib, a geistige Leiblichkeit." -- tr. David B. Allision

Just as Derrida saw in the Logical Investigations the germ of the entire Husserlian project, the Husserlian David Carr used to tell us that the germ of Derrida's project could be found in this brief passage.  Taking the problem of authorial intent to a philosophical level, Derrida wants to cast doubt on the meaning of the inner voice, and it's privileged status as the arbiter of the meaning of its utterances.  It is a sort of Neo-Empirical game that resembles the attacks often made by material-reductionists on the folk-psychology of consciousness, which has at its core the notion that for the most part we all know what we are talking about when we talk about something.  Instead, the inner voice is a sort of illusion to be dispelled, like witchcraft and theology.

And yet I can't help but feel that there is something to the inner voice.  For instance what was George Bush thinking about when he was first notified about the 911 attacks?  What was Bill Clinton thinking and intending in that fateful pause between the phrases "woman" and "Monica Lewinsky" that changed the meaning of this statement (skip to end for the good bit)? 

Silence isn't simply a turning off of the mind.  When the lights go out, we may stop seeing things, but when all noise is shut out, we continue to hear ourselves, and it is perhaps the best time to hear ourselves and in the act recollect ourselves.

I leave you with John Cage's composition 3' 44'', which is pregnant with the composer's intent, as well as the performer's in this unique rendition.

The second season of Mad Men begins tonight on AMC.  If you haven't seen it, then I highly recommend that you do and that you also rent the first season on DVD or through your favorite peer-to-peer network and catch up on this beautiful piece of television.

Mad Men is about Madison Avenue advertising executives in the early 1960's, when the 60's looked like the 50's in the same way that what we think of as the 60's is really the 70's.  It is a world in which men smoke and drink, swagger and get things done.  They were veterans of either Korea or WWII, and knew how to accomplish great things.  In the process they created a wonderland that was America at its height, which had within it the seeds of America's decline.  In Mad Men, we are afforded the opportunity to see it all.

There is something peculiar about enjoying Mad Men.  The sleezy misogyny and petty racism of the period is laid out for us to see.  Yet despite this, there is a sense that men were really men back then -- and certainly not Robert Bly-reading tree hugging faux-woodsmen trying to recapture something we didn't realized we had lost.  They are the real deal -- a generation that gave us James Bond as well as a militant communist-hating wing of the Democratic party.  Damn those were the days.

It is, in a sense, an antidote to The Office, the satirical show about office work that makes us feel like we all suck and it's alright -- a show about spin going out of control to the point that the criteria for success and failure are utterly open to interpretation.

In Mad Men, there is no ambiguity about what success and failure entail.  Success means a well-padded expense account, an attractive secretary and a corner office with a bar built into the wall.  Failure means being denied these things.

And yet the world of the mad men have led us to the place where we are now.  They may have been men of character in their own way, but they created a world in which spin matters more than character, and one manages not by example but by personality tests and manipulation.  Perhaps the world of the mad men was no less corrupt, but they attempted to hide it and build something more beautiful, while we tend to cover it up with self-effacing humor ala John Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Conan O'Brien, our contemporary zeitgeist-setters whose humor shares the common conceit that they know they are privileged and have no intention of giving it up, but they are more than willing to feel bad about it.

In Mad Men, no one seems to have regrets, and a bold face is the essence of a moral stance.  The warts are all there to see, and they are ugly indeed.  But at the same time there is a sense of style and elegance that we no longer find in the modern office, and it draws the viewer like a slow seduction into something we know is not good for us.

Tom Wolfe's 1970 essay Radical Chic captured a peculiar phenomenon in American culture -- the courting by wealthy New York socialites of political radicals and revolutionaries like the Black Panthers -- people who, in turn, should have despised the socialites trying to cultivate them.  You can read an excerpt here.  Perhaps it was an example of opposites attracting, or perhaps it was merely an extreme exercise in mauvais fois.

I don't mean to rain on anyone's parade, however.  I mean only to point out that when socialite courtesans like Paris Hilton date the likes of Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, we know that the trend continues, but instead of the Huey Newtons of the world, it is nerds who are now being pursued.

It has been a long time since Robert Carradine and Anthony Edwards (Louis and Gilbert) showed the world back in 1984 that nerds could sleep with cheerleaders.  This was followed up by Val Kilmer's more testosterone fueled portrayal of the nerd archetype in Real Genius.  All the while, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were busy demonstrating to the world and Wall Street the power of Geek culture, and now we find ourselves where we are today, with nerds making inroads into every area of society, and kids wanting to grow up and be like them.  As Eryn Loeb wrote for Salon:

"The information age has been good to nerds. No longer are they relegated to getting sand kicked in their faces by that other familiar archetype, the jock. We've gotten used to watching Steve Jobs grin awkwardly as he announces the latest hot techie toy, and when it comes to pop culture, nerds like Superbad writer/star Seth Rogen are increasingly in control of their own image."

We've come a long way, baby.  But perhaps not as far as we think.

The only way to truly measure the influence of a sub-culture is to compare it with another one.  This month's Ebony has a feature article on the 25 Coolest Brothers of All Time.  When one peruses the list, one realizes how much the accomplishments of nerds fall short, and how fragile their claim to  chic really is.  The mere fact that Ebony can talk about the brothers is insta-cool.  Many a nerd would give up his pocket protector to be called brother by an actual black man.

Billy Dee Williams is on the list.  Like Barack Obama, who is also on the list, he has cross-cultural appeal and stands out as an icon of both Geek culture and Black culture, though for vastly different reasons.  Ebony mentions Billy Dee's swagger, his confidence and his effortless style.  On the other hand, Wikipedia (in case you ever doubted its firm position as a cornerstone of Geek culture) begins its entry on Billy Dee with this:

"Billy Dee Williams (born April 6, 1937) is an African American actor and writer, best known for his role as Lando Calrissian in the Star Wars film series."

The entry for Harrison Ford, interestingly, begins like this:

"Harrison Ford (born July 13, 1942) is an Academy Award- and BAFTA-nominated, as well as Golden Globe-winning, American actor." 

Ford's association with the Star Wars franchise isn't mentioned until the second sentence.

The full list of 25 Coolest Brothers follows, in no particular order.  I find little to quibble about here except for the presence on the list of Obama, with whom I don't naturally associate coolness -- although, like many others, I admire his Dickensian life story.

Barack Obama
Don Cheadle
Billy Dee Williams
Sidney Poitier
Quincy Jones
Lenny Kravitz
Jimi Hendrix
Richard Roundtree
Denzel Washington
Sammy Davis, Jr.
Bob Marley
Ed Bradley
Tupac Shakur
Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.
Gordon Parks
Muhammad Ali
Miles Davis
Walt Frazier
Shawn 'Jay-Z' Carter
Samuel L. Jackson
Malcolm X
Snoop Dogg
Prince
Michael Jordan
Marvin Gaye

We have two in the house.  Passed down through the generations in my wife's family, they currently sit in our living room as decorations, whispering to us of bygone times.

They once played a central role in the cultural life of the Russian emigre intelligentsia.  Alexandra Kropotkin evokes images of this bygone world in her wonderful book on Russian Cooking:

Among Russians who have gone away to dwell in other countries, it is easy enough to arouse mild attacks of homesick longing for Russian life and Russian flavors.  But to launch the expatriate Russian soul on a really unbridled jag of nostalgia, try mentioning our vechernyi t'chai, our evening tea.

There is the magic phrase that reawakens all out dearest memories of home!

When the samovar goes on the dining-room table, usually about 10 o'clock in the evening, the entire family gathers for the most intimate kind of get-together.  This is the hour of comfortable relaxation, with old and young meeting as equals in talk, drinking innumerable glasses and cups of tea while wandering conversationally into all fields of anecdote and gossip, of thought and speculation.

The babies and younger children are in bed.  The adolescents feel grown up.  The oldsters are sure of an audience.  And guests always drop in.  It is perfectly correct for friends to drop in, uninvited, for evening tea at any time between 10 P.M. and midnight.  The lady of the house is not expected to set out anything special for company.  There is no fuss or formality.  The scene is cozy and homelike.  When you come for evening tea, you take potluck with the family.

The dining-room table is covered with an embroidered tablecloth.  Beside the lady of the house, at her right hand, the steaming samovar stands on a little table of its own.  Or if there is no side table, the samovar will be standing directly on the dining-room table, with the hostess peeking around it to see and take part in whatever is going on.

A small china teapot fits into a metal fixture on top of the samovar.  The hostess herself has measured tea leaves into the china teapot, has brewed the tea with boiling water from the samovar, and has set the pot of tea on top of the samovar to keep on brewing.

The tea is made as strong as household supplies permit.  A few drops of this strong tea from the small china pot will be poured into each cup or glass, which will then be filled with hot water from the samovar.

Tea glasses in metal or silver holders that have handles, like American ice-cream-soda glasses, are set out for the men.  In Russia the men drink tea from glasses, adn the women drink tea from cups.

...

On our evening tea table are plates of cold cuts and plates of sliced cheese.  We don't serve fish at evening tea unless the season is Lent, or when times are particularly hard.  The bread basket offers slices of black bread and slices of white.  Unsalted butter is on the table in a pretty dish ... Plenty of sweet things will be arrayed in front of us in any case.  There will be homemade preserves, crystallized fruits, fruit confections known as pastilla, and the semi-jellied fruit candies that Russians call marmelade ...

At vechernyi t'chai, it seemed that the tea was consumed endlessly, most Russians taking it with thin slices of lemon.  The hostess always sliced the lemon herself with a special silver knife.  After cutting the lemon she always held the knife for a moment in the steam from the samovar to prevent the knife from tarnishing.

Everyone at the tea table had a plate and a small saucer, usually of cut glass.  The saucer was for preserves, which you either ate with a spoon or put into your tea.  Many Russians like preserves better than sugar as a sweetening for their tea.  After years in America it still irks me not to be able to find saucers of the right size for preserves to go with Russian tea.  We call these saucers blewdichki dlia vareniya.  They are about 3 inches across.  Very few Russians take milk or cream in their evening tea.  They take it that way on for breakfast.

The best breakfast in the world, of course, is a hot bowl of pho, which is a part of my cultural heritage.  My mother makes it for us whenever she visits, and I generally have it for lunch at least two or three times a month.  Nevertheless, the best time of day for ph? is the morning.  It includes a strong beef broth for protein, noodles for carbs, and spices to help you wake up as well as a variety of herbs, bean sprouts and citrus. 

Andrea Nguyen has written an excellent series of articles about pho for the Mercury News which covers the history and the rituals surrounding the flavorful soup.  She even provides a recipe, though it is a bit of a lark since few people will have the patience to actually try it out.  It requires some unusual herbs as well as long hours of boiling bones and meat for the broth.  My mother typically boils two chickens (either Vietnamese or Thai chickens, since she says American chickens have no flavor) as well as a large beef bone for about 8 hours until the meat has practically disintegrated into the broth.

Garnishing pho is like putting together your own hamburger -- you can have it your way. So, before putting any pho into your mouth, add your own finishing touches. Then dive in with a two-handed approach: chopsticks in one hand to pick up the noodles, the soup spoon in the other to scoop up broth and other goodies.

Your pho ritual may include:

Bean sprouts: Add them raw for crunch or blanch them first.

Chiles: Dip and wiggle thin slices of hot chile in the hot broth to release the oil. Leave them in if you dare. For best fragrance and taste, try Southeast Asian chiles such as Thai bird or dragon rather than jalapeños. Serranos are better than jalapeños.

Herbs: Strip fresh herb leaves from their stems, tear up the leaves and drop them into your bowl. Available at Viet markets, pricey ngo gai (culantro, thorny cilantro, saw-leaf herb) imparts heady cilantro notes. The ubiquitous purple-stemmed Asian/Thai basil (hung que) contributes sweet anise-like flavors. Spearmint (hung lui), popular in the north, adds zip. [For details, see Essential Viet herb page on this site.]

Lime: A squeeze of lime gives the broth a tart edge, especially nice if the broth is too sweet or bland.

Sauces: Many people squirt hoisin (tuong) or Sriracha hot sauce directly into the bowl. I don't favor this practice because it obliterates a well-prepared, nuanced broth. But I do reach for the hoisin and Sriracha bottles to make a dipping sauce for the beef meatballs (bo vien).

I typically do put both hoisin and Sriracha in my soup because this is the way my mother has always made it for me.  Additionally, I squirt some of each into a dipping bowl, pick out thin slices of rare beef out of my soup bowl with chopsticks and alternate between dipping the slices in the chile sauce and the sweet hoisin.

Unlike the Russian tea ritual, the Vietnamese pho ritual is no time to talk about politics or religion.  Eating soup is a serious business, and involves the constant motion of chewing on noodles and preparing carefully for the moment when one swallows one's noodles by synchronized hand motions, with the chopstick hand picking out pieces of meat from the bowl and dipping them in the sauce dish, while the soup spoon hand gathers more noodles to chase the slices of beef.

Talking generally resumes after the meal, as all participants look with satisfaction at the empty soup bowls and the pieces of discarded herbs and sprouts strewn across the table.

The Vietnamese are a coffee rather than a tea people, having been colonized by the French rather than the English.  For breakfast I like a strong cup of coffee with my pho, and I like to sweeten it with condensed milk.  A meal like this generally leaves me full well into the dinner hour.

Hellboy is, at its heart, a conceit that allows Mike Mignola, the comic book author,  to riff on various horror and fantasy motifs by inserting a gun-toting, cigar-smoking modern action hero (albeit one with a tail) into genres where he does not belong.  The payoff in the comic books, sometimes successful and sometimes not, is simply in seeing how events unwrap.

There is a naturalness to adapting Hellboy for the big screen, since this is where this type of action hero was originally born.  In Guillermo del Toro's hands, what occurs is a reversal of the transposition Mike Mignola accomplishes in his graphic novels.  We import into the action movie genre elements that do not natively belong to it and see what happens.  As with the comic books, this is sometimes successful and sometimes not.

The original movie played with themes from H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulu stories.  The monsters were beautifully realized using CGI effects, but the incomprehensible horror that typically drove Lovecraft's stories were displaced.  They simply cannot exist in a world that revolves around an indefatigable hero.

The Hellboy sequel in turn plays, more than anything else, with Tolkien's elves.  The elves in The Golden Army are tall and filled with martial virtue.  They are also masters of magic, and preservers of nature.  Part of the high concept behind Peter Jackson's production of Lord of the Rings was to bring out the nature loving motifs in every elven design, while highlight the industrial aspects of orc culture.  As National Geographic (among others) points out:

Tolkien's concern for nature echoes throughout The Lord of the Rings. Evil beings of Middle-earth dominate nature and abuse it to bolster their own power. For example, Saruman, the corrupt wizard, devastates an ancient forest as he builds his army.

The Elves, in contrast, live in harmony with nature, appreciating its beauty and power, and reflecting a sense of enchantment and wonder in their artful songs.

Orcs, however, always exist in some sense as placeholders for modern men.  In The Golden Army, del Toro asks what would happen if Tolkien's elves ever saw what we have now become.  Del Toro's answer is that they would go to war with us in order to preserve what remained of their world.

Visually, we once again see the Hieronomous Bosch inspired monsters we first glimpsed in Pan's Labyrinth.  They are beautiful and horrible at the same time -- horrible enough to justify Hellboy as a hero as he battles them, but so beautiful at times that it seems a shame.  It is this second aspect of the film, and Del Toro's constant affection for outsiders, that undercuts the film as a participant in the action genre.  Instead, the battles become exhausting over time, and we wish they would go away so we can enjoy the gentle details of Del Toro's exotic world which have always been his specialty.

Hayao Miyazaki's films can be identified as another influence on the visuals and mood of this film.  One of the monsters from Hellboy II seems to be pulled right out of Princess Mononoke.  The bestiary we encounter in the Goblin Market, likewise, recalls the parade of grotesques from Spirited Away.  More than anything else, however, what is borrowed from Miyazaki is the device of placing a child in the middle of the battle between good and evil.  We are forced to see the world through the eyes of a child who finds both good and evil to be ambiguous, which is the emotional location of all fairy tales.  In Del Toro's film, Anna Walton performs this role as Princess Nuala, the sister to the elf protagonist of the story who, with her big yellow eyes and zombie-like complexion, is strangely affecting and sympathetic.

All in all, the film is not successful -- not because it does not know what it wants to be, whether action movie or heroic fantasy, but because there is nothing for it to be.  These genres do not combine easily, and what we are left with instead is a plotline and a set of overlapping genres that provide Del Toro with a canvas upon which he paints detailed images that could not make an appearance in any other way.  Those details were, for me, well worth the price of admission.

The big question is what Del Toro will do when he gets his hands on a real fantasy property.  He is slated to direct the highly anticipated Hobbit movie, with Peter Jackson producing.  There is, of course, what the movie ought to be -- a continuation of the epic fantasy genre, done with the same accomplishment that Jackson achieved with The Lord of the Rings.  If The Golden Army is any indication, however, this is unlikely to be what we will get.  Del Toro's recent interviews point to the same conclusion:

I was never into heroic fantasy. At all. I don't like little guys and dragons, hairy feet, hobbits -- I've never been into that at all. I don't like sword and sorcery, I hate all that stuff.

This is fine with me.  I've always been a fan of the Rankin/ Bass cartoon (with music by Glen Yarborough), and don't see any reason to try to improve upon it.  Seeing Del Toro take another stab at twisting the genre to his own ends is well worth waiting for.