Author: James Ashley

Talking Heads

James Ashley4 Comments

zizek 

I recently rented Children of Men from the corner Blockbuster and, going through the DVD "extras" after finishing the film, was excited to find something billed as Slavoj Zizek’s commentary.

Slavoj Zizek, in case you don’t know him, is a Slovenian intellectual and provocateur who made his mark by analyzing popular culture, especially film noir, in a way that wasn’t completely cheesy.  He has pushed on in the double-naughts to generally pissing off his fan-base by doing what he always does: saying things no one expects him to say.  You may remember him as one of the few big-name intellectuals (besides Barry Smart) willing to contribute to The Matrix and Philosophy, the book which started off the whole popular culture and philosophy series.  His essay is the concluding piece in the anthology, and in typical Zizek fashion, he starts of by discussing how misguided he finds all the attempts to find deep meaning in what is basically a 90 minute animated comic book.

Zizek’s commentary to Children of Men does not disappoint.  He claims that Children of Men is actually a remake of Y tu mamá también, but without the sex.  He continues with a rambling discussion of the sixty-eighters.  Probably the only unexpected thing about the seven minute commentary is its brevity — Zizek’s loquacity is legendary.

For some reason, I had initially thought that the producers of the DVD had hit upon the brilliant notion of replacing the ubiquitous and generally tedious convention of having a "director’s commentary" with a rather clever conceit: placing an intellectual before the screen and recording him as he talks about whatever comes to his mind.

I remember when one of the early selling points of DVDs was that they could hold much more content than videos, and one of the first things that DVD producers tried out was adding the director’s commentary.  It certainly seemed like a good idea at the time.  Who wouldn’t want to hear Francois Truffaut discussing 400 Blows, or Godard explaining Masculin – Feminin?  Unfortunately, what we ended up getting were things like Penny Marshal discussing what she ate on the set of A League of their Own and Michael Lembeck’s commentary for The Santa Clause 2.  In The Lord of the Rings DVD, among others, an interesting twist was introduced by having the film’s actors provide commentary, and it was certainly interesting to listen to Sir Ian McKellen tell his theater stories whenever no one else had anything to contribute.  But even Sir Ian didn’t have enough material to fill 11 hours.

Besides perhaps David Mamet, who is an intellectual in his own right, there aren’t many directors whose opinions I really want to hear concerning … well … anything, and while vocation makes films a seemingly relevant topic for their discourse, experience has shown that most directors are not especially handy at even this.  And actors even less so.

What I would really like to experience is, say, Slavoj Zizek and Barry Smart talking for 90 minutes over a showing of the Matrix, ala Mystery Science Theater;  Christopher Hitchens doing the commentary for The Manchurian Candidate (the original, not the remake); Steven Pinker and Noam Chomsky discussing My Dinner With Andre.

Perhaps the problem is that the country which hosts the world’s largest movie industry doesn’t happen to have a particularly strong tradition of public intellectuals the way, say, Britain, France and Germany do.  When I was living in the south of France for a short while I regularly saw, squeezed in between dubbed versions of Dragon Ball Z and Married With Children, discussion shows in which really smart people were asked about important matters, and they were given enough time to provide full and interesting answers to the questions posed.  (It was also on one of these shows that I discovered that Sigourney Weaver is not only really smart, but also speaks excellent French.) 

After watching a few of these talking head pieces, I began to wonder why we don’t have similar public forums in America.   After pondering it some more, I realized that the really serious question is: even if we had shows like that, who would we invite to appear on them?  There aren’t really that many people in America, despite its size, generally considered to be smart people, and among these even fewer whose ideas we think are likely to change our opinions of things.  Perhaps this is the egalitarian streak in American public discourse — we all consider ourselves to be adequately intelligent to form our own opinions, without help from anyone else.  Consequently, when it comes time to look for interesting opinions, we don’t turn to our intellectuals.  Instead, we turn to actors, to opinion-shapers like Oprah and, in a pinch, when no one else is available, to twice-cooked hacks like Thomas Friedman.

Which is really fine with me.  I am more than happy to surrender our public discourse to entertainers and hacks.  I rarely read the newspaper, anyway.  What I am more concerned about is this: now that we’ve got all the movie actors busy discussing globalization and third-world debt, who are we going to get to do our DVD commentaries for us?

Everything In Its Place

James Ashley2 Comments

guitarstand

There are many ways to make a career in IT, but perhaps the one most often dreamed of is starting your own business.  Lots of programmers get side-jobs that they hope will eventually lead to starting their own IT consulting business (this rarely works out, by the way).  Others wait for that great idea to come along, like a brilliant new Internet search algorithm, or a better way to do business reporting, or maybe even designing an original programming language.

I have heard that the thing that always kept Bill Gates up at night was the thought that some brilliant geeks would come up with the next great idea in their garage and put him out of business.

A colleague of mine has started his own somewhat atypical business building guitar stands in his own garage, and selling them on ebay.  While not the sort of stuff likely to unsettle either Steve Jobs or Bill Gates from his slumbers, my friend has done well enough with his home business that he has launched a web storefront, and is now selling his guitar stands at http://www.measuretwiceproducts.com.

He made a two-way stand for me with blazing pink and orange flames flying up the sides.  I love it, and it keeps me from stumbling over my Rock Band guitar after my kids have played a few riffs.  It ain’t the next great operating system, I know, and it isn’t even The Clapper, but if you find yourself wondering where to put your Guitar Hero or Rock Band guitar, I would highly recommend it.

Forgiveness Sunday

James Ashley

garden_of_eden

A colleague at work, who happens to be a Catholic catechumen, told me about a mass recently held at his church called the Mass of Penance (if I get the particulars wrong, knowing very little about the Western Rite, I apologize), in which forgiveness is granted, en masse, to the congregation.   There is a similar practice in the Byzantine Orthodox Church called the Forgiveness Vespers, which occurs on the eve of the forty day fast leading up to Easter.  The Sunday of Forgiveness commemorates the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden, reminding the faithful of the need to seek forgiveness before entering the holy weeks of Lent.  In practice, each congregant, led by the clergy, lines up and approaches each of her fellows in turn.  From each person she begs forgiveness for all offences of action and thought committed against her neighbor in the past year, and prostrates before her fellow before embracing.  The process is hard on the knees.  The complex emotions of contrition, combined with the physical discomfort, often lead to outright crying.

It is a devotional practice that might be recommended to the denizens of the Internet, where anonymity and the quick, reflexive nature of web-based intercourse tends to lead to easy offense.

Dear readers.  I seek forgiveness for any offense I may have provoked in the past year through careless words.  I apologize for my obscurantist, long-winded, and self-indulgent writing style.  I beg pardon for my tendency toward high-handedness and jargon.  I confess to often not knowing whereof I speak.  I retract any false claims I may have made in the past year, and regret any efforts I have made to mislead or hoodwink my readers.  I cop to being boring.  I wince at my flat attempts at humor.  I lament my misspellings and tortured prose.  I ask that you excuse me for failing to amuse, and for often wasting your time.  Most of all, knowing my own character, I am deeply sorry that, going forward, none of this is likely to change, and that I will put you through more of the same in the coming year.  For all this and more, I apologize.

Big Cash Prizes

James Ashley1 Comment

money

By way of Slashdot, here is a paper from Newcastle University suggesting that big cash prizes can drive technological breakthroughs.  Among successful examples of cash prizes driving innovation are the X-Prize Foundation’s fomenting of research into space rockets, space elevators, and moon landers.   Other competitions have driven innovations from breakthroughs in designing intelligent cars that navigate complex terrains to the successful construction of a half-scale model of an X-Wing that can actually take down a half-scale model of the Death Star.  In the same vein, the James Randy Educational Foundation has a standing one million dollar prize for anyone who can demonstrate, under "proper observing conditions", any paranormal or occult powers (restrictions may apply).

The notion that money can be a motivator is certainly an interesting one.   I myself once wrote an article on software interoperability in order to win an XBOX 360, and can testify to the power of electronics as a motivator for great endeavors.  Is it such a great leap from there to the idea that greenbacks can inspire similar feats of mental strength?

According to the synopsis for the article on cash prizes, the purpose of cash prizes is to drive "revolutionary" scientific breakthroughs, rather than typical scientific breakthroughs, for which the admiration of one’s peers is often sufficient compensation:

Given that revolutionary science is a high risk endeavor which usually fails; it is likely to thrive only when the incentives rewarding the rare instances of success are greater than for normal science. Therefore we would argue that it is insufficient for successful revolutionary scientists merely to get the usual rewards of prestigious professorships, respect from within the scientific profession, and a modestly high level of reasonably secure income. Something more is needed: lots of money.

The pluripotent possibilities boggle the mind.  Here are some of my own humble suggestions for achievable scientific goals and the cash prizes, in today’s dollars, that should be assigned to them.  Feel free to add your own prize suggestions in the comments.

  • A mass-producible flying car — $2 million
  • Pills that have the taste and nutritional qualities of real food — $3 million
  • A rocket to Mars — $5 million
  • A rocket to Saturn — $5.5 million
  • A rocket to Pluto — $1 million
  • Trained apes who will take over our menial tasks, freeing humans to live the good life — $5.5 million
  • Flying monkeys — $6 million
  • Disposable rocket packs (for daily commutes) – $6.5 million
  • Successful cloning of great thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, and Lincoln — $7.5 million
  • Successful cloning of B, C and D-list thinkers like Suetonius, Duns Scotus, and Ayn Rand — $1.5 million
  • Successful cloning of deceased pets — $2.5 million
  • Universal cure for cancer — $10 million
  • Teleportation devices — $11 million
  • Time Travel — $13 million
  • Worm Hole technology — $15 million
  • Hyperspace engines — $25 million
  • Mind-reading devices — $15 million
  • Robot sex-slaves — YMMV
  • Holodecks — $25 million
  • A computer that can defeat all chess grand masters — $1 million
  • Skynet — YMMV
  • A self-aware computer intelligence that will defend us against ape-slave uprisings — $25 million
  • Star Trek Replicators — $26 million
  • A working lightsaber — $27 million

As the paper suggests, if we haven’t achieved any of these goals so far, it may be because we have yet to offer the right incentives.

Memes and Goat’s Milk

James Ashley1 Comment

masterand

What does eighteenth century naval warfare have to do with life today?  Nothing, as far as I can tell, yet one of the pleasures of reading Patrick O’Brian’s novels about Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin — one of the great portraits of male friendship in English literature — is the anachronistic affinities one finds between the bygone world of wood and canvas and quotidian modern life, thanks to Mr. O’Brian’s ingenuity.

Take, for instance, this passage from Master And Commander in which Jack, while at sea, is obliged to sign a legal document drafted by his predecessor, the previous captain of the sloop Sophie:

My Lord,

I am to beg you will be pleased to order a Court Martial to be held on Isaac Wilson (seaman) belonging to the Sloop I have the honour to Command for having committed the unnatural Crime of Sodomy on a Goat, in the Goathouse, on the evening of March 16th.  I have the Honour to remain, my Lord, Your Lordship’s most obedient very humble servant ….

Like the modern reader, Jack is not pleased with the rules and procedures one must comply with in the course of fulfilling one’s duties.  For his friend, Stephen, the matter is simply one that inspires perplexity.

‘It is odd how the law always harps upon the unnaturalness of sodomy,’ observed Stephen.  ‘Though I know at least two judges who are paederasts; and of course barristers … What will happen to him?’

‘Oh, he’ll be hanged.  Run up at the yard-arm, and boats attending from every ship in the fleet.’

‘That seems a little extreme.’

‘Of course it is.  Oh, what an infernal bore — witnesses going over to the flagship by the dozen, days lost … the Sophie a laughing-stock.  Why will they report these things?  The goat must be slaughtered — that’s but fair — and it shall be served out to the mess that informed on him.’

‘Could you not set them both ashore — on separate shores, if you have strong feelings on the moral issue — and sail quietly away?’

‘Well,’ said Jack, whose anger had died down.  ‘Perhaps there is something in what you propose.  A dish of tea?  You take milk, sir?’

‘Goat’s milk, sir?’

‘Why, I suppose it is.’

‘Perhaps without milk, then, if you please.’

The connection to be found between this passage and today’s headlines is no doubt as obvious to you as it is to me, reader.  The notion of contamination which runs thematically through this brief anecdote is a clear analog for the theory of memes.   Terms such as "viral", often used to describe memes, reveal the epidemiological roots of memetic theory.  While the vectors are different, the notion that the sin of seaman Isaac Wilson has somehow been transmitted to the hapless goat, for which reason the goat "must be slaughtered," mirrors the theory that ideas such as "freedom", "God", and "revolution" can be transmitted from person to person, carrying with them certain properties that will affect the behavior of the infected.

At the same time, this anecdote reveals one of the chief problems with memetic theory.  The idea of memes depends on a peculiar notion about the identity of memes when they inhabit different hosts.  But is this identity really something we can take for granted?  Is the "freedom" meme really the same from person to person?  What is missing from the meme theory is an acknowledgement of the inherent ambiguity of all ideas.  One man’s meat is another man’s poison, after all.

For instance, what is the intent behind serving the slaughtered goat, the unwarranted victim of seaman Isaac Wilson’s wantonness, to the seamen who informed on him?  Is it a reward for their dutifulness with regard to the Royal Navy or a punishment for their faithlessness with regard to their comrade?  Is the intent to let them taste a bit of Mr. Wilson’s humiliation, or to fill their bellies with a rare treat?

Memetics seems to completely ignore the much more interesting phenomenon of the association of ideas — perhaps necessarily so, since while the affinity between various notions and concepts, the way one idea leads to another, depends on the malleability of thought, memetics depends on its immutability.

The point is brought across in Stephen Maturin’s aversion toward the goat’s milk.  Why does he refuse the milk?  Because, in his mind, he associates it with Mr. Wilson’s goat.  One idea leads naturally to the other and the properties of Mr. Wilson’s crime are mysteriously transferred to the goat’s milk — an entirely different goat, certainly.

kant Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), normally thought of as a dour man though a great philosopher, is duly famous within certain disreputable circles for inserting the goat’s milk meme into his seminal work, the Critique of Pure Reason, sometimes known as the First Critique.  In Section III of the Second Part of the Doctrine of Elements, after he has explained the meaning of the term transcendental logic,  and after he has assented to the traditional definition of truth as the agreement between knowledge and its object, Kant drops this witty passage:

To know what questions may reasonably be asked is already a great and necessary proof of sagacity and insight.  For if a question is absurd in itself and calls for an answer where none is required, it not only brings shame on the propounder of the question, but may betray an incautious listener into absurd answers, thus presenting, as the ancients said, the ludicrous spectacle of one man milking a he-goat and the other holding a sieve underneath.

Kant alludes to the fact that this particular meme has classical antecedents, and indeed one can find it in Lucian’s (c. 125-180 AD) Life of Demonax (c. 70-170 AD).   That particular version of the meme was later replicated in Erasmus’s (1466-1536) collection of Adages. 

When [Demonax] saw a pair of philosophers, each as ignorant as the other, disputing together, one propounding absurd questions and the other giving crazy answers, entirely off the point: ‘Why friends,’ said he, ‘is not one of these fellows milking a he-goat and the other putting a sieve under it?’ 

To Polybius (c. 203-120 BC), in turn, is ascribed the following version of the trope:

But I fear that the well-known adage may apply to me unknown to myself: "Which is the greater simpleton, the man who milks a he-goat or he who holds a sieve to catch the milk?" For it may be said of me that by confuting in detail what is confessed to be a lie, and doing so at great length, I am behaving in a very similar manner. So I shall be told I entirely waste my time in speaking of this matter, unless indeed I wish to record dreams and take into serious consideration the visions of a man with his eyes open.

Erasmus ascribes this same variation to Diogenes of Sinope (c. 404-323 BC) (aka Diogenes the Cynic).

Another variation can be found in Boswell’s Life of Johnson, though in this case, we move from goats to bovines, and interestingly Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) is mocking the Scottish philosopher (1711-1776) whom Kant credited with waking him from his dogmatic slumber.

Hume, and other sceptical innovators, are vain men, and will gratify themselves at any expence. Truth will not afford sufficient food to their vanity; so they have betaken themselves to errour. Truth, Sir, is a cow that will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.

(I recommend that the curious reader not attempt googling on the phrase "milk the bull", since this seems to have taken on a different meaning in recent times.  "Milk the he-goat", however, is quite safe for searching.)

An obvious question is raised by these variations on a meme.  While they are obviously dependent on one another, and perhaps some sort of history can be traced showing how the trope has been transmitted over time from this thinker to that one, are they in fact the same meme?  Do memes admit of variation, or must a meme always have the same form?  In the latter case, are we then dealing with two memes, for instance the Polybius version and the Demonax version, with the Demonax variation later mutating into the Samuel Johnson version, or is it the case that each host (Demonax, Diogenes, Polybius, Erasmus, Johnson, Kant, O’Brian [1914-2000]) actually possesses a different meme altogether?

The rules by which a meme is transmitted from host to host is a central concern for memetics, and the problem of identity will remain a problem for it.  More interesting, from my point of view, is the problem of similarity.  What are the rules by which we associate certain ideas with other ideas?  Why does Stephen Maturin associate goat’s milk with a seaman’s indiscretion, to the point that he will not drink the milk?  How are we able to find a resemblance between these different variations on the he-goat anecdote, derived from different sources, to the point that we associate them all together?

In the First Critique, Kant raises a similar question about the character of experience.  Why should it be that events happen in a certain sequence?  Why do causes always precede their effects, instead of the other way around?  For Kant — and for you too, perhaps, if you have read the Critique — this is a perplexing and ultimately uncanny feature of our experience of the external world.  That events should happen in a certain sequence, and not in another, Kant calls Affinity (in philosophical jargon, it is known as the transcendental affinity of the manifold of intuition).

While Kant would not — for those interested, this is because according to Kant inner sense is not associated with a manifold –, we might ask the same question about the way in which one idea follows from another in the stream of consciousness.  What are the rules by which, say, the idea of a madeline leads a man to think back on his childhood and wonder about the nature of remembrance?  Like memes, the flow of ideas have a viral, irrational, and uncontrollable character to them.  It is something like the way in which you get on the Internet to look up how to throw a cocktail party and end up, hours later, reading about cooking with monkey.  Whereas memes are objects of a germinal science about how ideas are transmitted between people, shouldn’t there also be a science concerned with the logic by which ideas are linked together within the same person?

But perhaps this is not possible, since a universal logic of how ideas follow upon one another depends on all people being basically the same, and this cannot be guaranteed.  Certain people find affinities and make connections that others simply do not.  The point is well illustrated in T. S. Elliot’s (1888-1965) play The Cocktail Party — again, contamination is a central theme, here.  The setting is simple enough.  Edward and Lavinia host a cocktail party, and Alex, a guest, explains current affairs in colonial Africa.

 

Eliot

Edward: But how do monkeys cause unrest?

Alex: To begin with, the monkeys are very destructive …

Julia: You don’t need to tell me that monkeys are destructive.  I shall never forget Mary Mallington’s monkey, The horrid little beast — stole my ticket to mentone and I had to travel in a very slow train and in a couchette.  She was very angry when I told her the creature ought to be destroyed.

Lavinia: But can’t they exterminate these monkeys if they are a pest?

Alex: Unfortunately, the majority of the natives are heathen: they hold these monkeys in particular veneration and do not want them killed.  So they blame the Government for the damage that the monkeys do.

Edward: That seems unreasonable.

Alex: it is unreasonable, but characteristic.  And that’s not the worst of it.  Some of the tribes are Christian converts, and, naturally, take a different view.  They trap the monkeys.  And they eat them.  The young monkeys are extremely palatable: I’ve cooked them myself …

Edward: And did anybody eat them when you cooked them?

Alex: Oh yes, indeed.  I invented for the natives several new recipes.  But you see, what with eating the monkeys and what with protecting their crops from the monkeys the Christian natives prosper exceedingly: and that creates friction between them and the others.  And that’s the real problem.  I hope I’m not boring you?

Edward: No indeed: we are anxious to learn the solution.

Alex: I’m not sure that there is any solution.  But even this does not bring us to the heart of the matter.  There are also foreign agitators, stirring up trouble …

Lavinia: Why don’t you expel them?

Alex: They are citizens of a friendly neighboring state which we have just recognised.  You see, Lavinia, there are very deep waters.

Edward: And the agitators; how do they agitate?

Alex: By convincing the heathen that the slaughter of monkeys has put a curse on them which can only be removed by slaughtering the Christians.  They have even been persuading some of the converts — who, after all, prefer not to be slaughtered — to relapse into heathendom.  So, instead of eating monkeys they are eating Christians.

Julia: Who have eaten monkeys.

Alex: The native is not, I fear, very logical.

Notes From Terra: Moon Music

James Ashley3 Comments

IMG_0393

Perhaps it happened with the advent of sound in movies — or perhaps with the mass reproduction of music — but it is not uncommon for people to feel an attachment towards a certain piece of music which, over time, becomes the soundtrack for their lives.  In my case, the soundtrack is Curtis Mayfield’s Superfly, though Isaac Hayes’s Shaft will do in a pinch.  (I will defer the topic of my desire to be a powerful and confident black man for another post, but surely I am not the only one…) 

The pertinent point here is that music is one of the modern world’s most prevalent therapeutic techniques for controlling and guiding emotions.  To use more archaic concepts, it is a modern tool for building character — or even spirit.  In his second critique, Kant lauds the reading of Roman histories as a way to build the moral sensibilities of young boys.  And in later times poetry seems to have served the same purpose.  Perhaps it is revealing too much, but before every interview or important meeting, I like to recite to myself the immortal words of Wallace Stevens:

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Actually, what I recite to myself is "I am the emperor of ice-cream, I am the emperor of ice-cream …" which after a few repetitions fills me to bloating with confidence.  Why this is, I cannot say.

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The moon — once worshipped by pagans across the world; to whom the ancient Egyptians are said to have offered human sacrifices — provided a wonderful display this past Wednesday.  The last full lunar eclipse visible from Earth until 2010, it was the occasion for a party in our household.  We invited some friends from down the street to peer at the moon through our Edmund Scientific Astroscan Newtonian reflector telescope, for which we recently acquired a tripod and a 100X magnification lens.  This eclipse was noteworthy in that the moon was positioned in proximity to Saturn, whose rings we could finally see with the new lens. 

This recent party was not as formal an affair as the one we threw for the March 3rd, 2007 lunar eclipse.  That one involved many more guests, and moon inspired refreshments.  Moon pies, moon cakes, Blue Moon beer, naturally, and mojitos, a cocktail said to have been favored by the older Hemingway and, for our purposes, beginning with the same letters as "moon."  It was also a bit different from the way I saw a lunar eclipse as a child in the early seventies from Southeast Asia, where we placed a mirror in a shallow bowl of water in order to view the astronomical event. 

To this day I do not know whether this was meant to enhance the viewing in some way, or whether it was the result of some local superstition about not looking directly at the moon.  In Greek mythology, Actaeon was transformed into a stag and killed by his own hounds when he happened to espy Artemis, twin to Apollo and goddess of the moon, bathing in a pool.  As mentioned above, we used a reflector telescope rather than a refractor telescope to view the moon, and so are unlikely to suffer a similar fate.

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If you’ve never seen a lunar eclipse, I encourage you to leave your houses in 2010 to see this strange phenomenon.  Over a period of about an hour, the moon is slowly consumed by a black shadow.  And as parts of it disappear the remaining part, shrinking like the evaporating smile of the Cheshire Cat, seems to shine even brighter.  Just as the moon looks like it will disappear completely, a sudden transformation occurs, and instead of looking at a dark sky, the shadow covering the moon becomes semi-transparent, and one instead sees a tinted moon.  In the most recent eclipse, the moon was tinged with a coppery hue for about half an hour.  Then slowly, a bright light proceeds across the moon’s face, until she is restored to her original fullness.

Just as we might each have a personal soundtrack, the moon also deserves her own.  This is the music I compiled for the 2007 party, and brought out again for the 2008 affair (should you have any suggestions for enhancing this playlist, I would enjoy hearing from you):

  • Debussey’s Clair de lune — performed by Yakov Flier
  • Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata — performed by Vladimir Ashkenazy
  • Rusalka: O Silver Moon — performed by Renee Fleming
  • That’s Amore — Dean Martin
  • Shine On Harvest Moon — Leon Redbone
  • Mountains of the Moon — Grateful Dead
  • Catch the Moon — Lisa Loeb and Elizabeth Mitchell
  • Bad Moon Rising — Creedence Clearwater Revival
  • Shoot the Moon — Nora Jones
  • By the Light of the Silvery Moon — Ray Noble
  • Moon Over Bourbon Street — Sting
  • Harvest Moon — Neil Young
  • Fly Me to the Moon — Astrud Gilberto
  • Old Devil Moon — Frank Sinatra
  • Blue Moon — Cowboy Junkies
  • Pink Moon — Nick Drake
  • Moondance — Van Morrison
  • Reaching for the Moon — Ella Fitzgerald
  • Oh You Crazy Moon — Chet Baker
  • Moonage Daydream — David Bowie
  • It’s Only a Paper Moon — Benny Goodman and his Orchestra

The pictures above, by the way, were taken of the February 20th lunar eclipse from our backyard, somewhere in the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia.  The third picture was taken by pressing the lens of a digital camera against the view lens of our telescope.  It was then photoshopped to correct for the inversion that the reflector telescope inevitably causes.

ASP.NET AJAX Server Controls and Extenders

James Ashley2 Comments

Following the recent release of Visual Studio 2008, I scribed a new tutorial on ASP.NET AJAX Custom Controls using the new IDE.  I originally estimated two weeks for the project, but in order to put in everything I thought needed to be said about writing AJAX-enabled .NET controls, the effort took over six weeks.  Should you have any inclination to see it, you can find it here at www.codeproject.com.

The tutorial is built around the session timeout monitor I originally described at the Imaginative Universal: http://box5921.temp.domains/~imagipi2/SessionExpiredMonitorWithASPNETAJAX.aspx.  Since the code for the tutorial is intended primarily to be instructive, I still plan to write one more revision of the session timeout control, in order to streamline the functionality and try to incorporate the modal popup behavior from the AJAX Control Toolkit, which I will publish in the pages of this blog.

Hillary’s Knee

James Ashley

knee

In Neil Gaiman’s Stardust, the interlude with Captain Alberic of the sky ship Perdita, a period the narrator describes as “one of the happiest” of the hero Tristan’s life, lasts a mere eight pages of the 300 odd page novel.  In the film adaptation, the passage is expanded to provide copious space for Robert De Niro’s remarkable performance as a cross-dressing sky pirate.  Instead of Alberic, he becomes Captain Shakespeare, and instead of a secret member of the fellowship, an organization that aids and propels Tristan toward his destiny, De Niro is a ruthless pirate who rules his crew with an iron hand and tosses his captives over the sky ship’s gunrails to their dooms.  At least on the surface.

The conceit of the Shakespeare character is that what he appears to be on the outside is the opposite of what he truly is inside.  In private, he is a caring, effeminate transvestite.  The inner man is revealed in a memorable scene, perhaps the most memorable of the movie, in which De Niro prances and preens with a feather boa in front of a mirror, an aria playing in the background.

The scene is a looking glass homage to De Niro’s performance as Travis Bickle, taut with muscles, pistols ejecting from his homemade arm holsters, repeatedly asking of his reflection, “You talkin’ to me?”  Bookends of an amazing career, the violent inner man of Taxi Driver, hinted at before the film’s conclusion only by a frightening inner monologue,  becomes the public face of Captain Shakespeare, while Travis Bickle’s shy and gentle public face inverts and blooms in Shakespeare’s lace and taffeta dance routine.

Both roles play on the popular notion that there is an inner man, in each of us, who hides beneath a mask that conforms to society’s expectations.  But is there really?  Contemporary cognitive philosophy suggests that the inner man is simply an illusion and vestige left over from folk-psychological notions of the soul.  It’s incorrigible persistence is due, among other things, to the fact that we assume our public faces are false, and that consequently there must be something behind it.  Continental philosophers like Michel Foucault similarly reject the notion of a deep truth beneath our masks, and recommend, in its place, a shallow depth psychology that simply reveals more masks beneath the masks we commonly wear. 

Pascal, the pre-eminent philosopher of the personal, suggested that “the heart has its reasons, that reason does not know,”  to which the modern world might reply that whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.  That obscure object of desire, the human heart, constantly escapes our epistemic grasp because, perhaps, it does not exist.  Perhaps.

The heart is a mystery and it is of the nature of mysteries that to reveal them is to destroy them.  We hide mysteries within puzzles and labyrinths, and in dark places, in order to preserve their character as mysteries.  What would we do if we actually captured the Loch Ness Monster, or the Yeti, or Bigfoot in a cage?  They would become mere objects of understanding, at that point, and ruin the aspect that makes them interesting — that the blurry photos may be fake, that the convoluted theories my be pipe-dreams.  It is the gap between theory and understanding that gives each of these mysteries their power to fascinate.  Even more prosaic mysteries, such as the Giant Squid (of which we have captured film and tentacles) and the true identity of Shakespeare, share this peculiar quality.  Obscurity and doubt quicken the blood.

In Eric Rohmer’s Claire’s Knee, Jerome (who shares an amazing resemblance to Ron Silver, the liberal actor with a regular role on The West Wing who in 2004 became the spokesman for a movement called Democrats for Bush), the womanizing protagonist, passes time flirting with one sister by discussing his desire for the other, Claire.  He explains that it is not sexual gratification that he desires from Claire, which, as a man of the world, he has discovered serves only to destroy the desire he feels.  Instead, he has arrived at a new formula, a new object of the heart, that provides him a mystery which will not be destroyed once it is fulfilled.  He substitutes the natural object of male sexual attraction with another target.  Jerome maneuvers and positions himself throughout the film in order to achieve his ultimate desire, to place a hand on Claire’s knee.

In 2001, President Bush made a remarkable statement about looking into Russian president Vladimir Putin’s “heart and soul” and deciding that they could work together.  The statement was remarkable not only in how wrong it turned out to be, but also in how peculiarly it was formulated.  He used the metaphor of the heart in a somewhat archaic manner, or perhaps a folk-psychological manner, that seemed inappropriate to its context.  Is this what high-level politics is about?  We expect interrelations between world leaders to be Machiavellian affairs of manipulation and strategic interests, and President Bush suddenly proposed that this was the wrong model; that instead it was actually about getting to know each other, and coming to see the inner persons behind the political masks.

In 2008, however, the metaphor of the heart appears again as voters and pundits alike attempt to peer into the souls of the presidential candidates and attempt to evaluate their inner natures.  The main stumbling block to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, it appears, is that people do not know who she really is, and in not knowing her, aren’t sure that they can trust her.  Mitt Romney is currently going through the same doubts about his character, and the bugaboo of political character, flip-flopping, is beginning to be associated with his political pronouncements.  Can we vote for these people when we do not know their hearts?

Hillary’s heart has become her Achilles heel — but it is not clear to me that this is a legitimate basis for electing a presidential candidate.  As Gabriel Byrne observes in Miller’s Crossing, “Nobody knows anybody.  Not that well.”  Which returns us to the problem of the obscure nature of the human heart.

In Jean Cocteau’s Thomas L’Imposteur, the hero in the end becomes the character he pretends to be.  This theme is repeated in Roberto Rossellini’s Il Generale della Rovere and Akira Kurasawa’s Kagemusha, in both of which lowly individuals, a thief in the first instance and a beggar in the second, are forced to impersonate important leaders, and in the process become those leaders, acting more heroically than the people they are pretending to be.  The masks, in each of these cases, become the reality.

It is the rare person who admires Ronald Reagan the man rather than the role he performed as president.  It was his ability to step into the role written for him and play it to the hilt that eventually led to the collapse of the Soviet Union — not the man that is now being revealed in his published diaries.  Even in Stardust, the film, Captain Shakespeare’s crew admit that they always knew that he was a “puff.”  But they did not care what he did in his private life.  It was his ability to inspire fear in his crew and accomplish great deeds that they admired — it was the mask, not the man, that they saluted.

The first test of our presidential candidates has become, “Does she look presidential?” (or, as it is phrased among our elites, “Does he have the gravitas to be president?”).  There seems to be recognition, at some level, that we are dealing with appearances rather than essences when it comes to our political candidates.  Why, then, do we absurdly continue to inquire about a candidate’s heart, that least knowable and most treacherous of human faculties?  It is the persistent illusion that we can know the hearts of these vaulted beings, or that they even have hearts, which dogs and confounds the American political process.  We should, instead, look to other ways to gratify ourselves with regard to a candidate’s worthiness to be president, and her potential to play her role adequately should she assume the mantle of the presidency. 

I have a want, an uncommon want, and once you hear it, you may find it hard not to desire it, also.  I seek neither Hillary’s heart — a fool’s errand — nor her virtue — a mirage at best –, but a substitute for these which is both more real and more tangible.  I desire an opportunity to know something which few men have known, to possess a secret that few men possess.  I seek not the populist chimera’s of the politically naive, nor access to the ports of influence peddled by the politically corrupt.  I want, instead, merely to brush the knee of destiny, and the thought, once planted, will not be dislodged from my imagination.  I want to touch Hillary’s knee.

Rock Star

James Ashley1 Comment

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Over the past week my family and I have been playing with an early Christmas present, an XBOX game called Rock Band.  This game one-ups the other popular rock simulation franchise, Guitar Hero, by allowing the player to perform on guitar, drums or with a mic.  A sort of guitar hero meets karaoke, it even allows different players to work together in forming a rock band either over the Internet or in their living room, side-by-side.

I have adopted the guitar as my own instrument for acquiring fame.  I have already mastered Don’t Fear the Reaper (no cowbell, unfortunately), Wanted Dead or Alive, Mississippi Queen and Blitzkrieg Bop, at medium difficulty, and am currently rehearsing Suffragette City, which has a wicked A-X-Y riff (XBOX control buttons, naturally, not notes) that I cannot seem to get the hang of.

The game is wonderful, though as I play through I am flabbergasted by the number of songs I do not recognize.  Who are Vagiant, or Anarchy Club, or Crooked X?  There are other groups I know by name, like Weezer, Radiohead, and Foo Fighters, but until now I couldn’t have named a song by any of them.   My knowledge of popular music seems to have ended sometime in the late eighties, and there is a decade and a half lacuna following that which I am loathe to fill.  Added to this the great number of metal anthems in this game combined with my ignorance of the Bon Jovi catalogue and the Metallica repertoire (though I do know — who wouldn’t — Rush’s Tom Sawyer and Black Sabbath’s Paranoid),  and you may get a sense of the cultural irrelevance that washes over me as each new playlist is thrown onto my screen.

Worse, I believe I threw out my back during the extra points phase of Nine Inch Nails’ The Hand That Feeds, and now rest supine, forbidden to play until my back heals or eventually snaps back into place.  How do aging rockers do it?  Keith Richards apparently has fresh blood transfused into his system every few years, but I believe his case is anomalous. 

Playing at being a rock star does have that element of grasping at one’s lost youth to it.  Like the elixir imbibed by Richards, rock rhythm and tonal inflections are absorbed by the air-guitarist and, for a brief time, he undergoes a spiritual transmutation — one that must be accomplished in privacy, of course, lest reality, or perchance an unfortunately placed mirror, dispel the glamour. 

Much of the current literature — often found in blogs, of course — discusses video games and virtual worlds as a sort of escapism.  The notion is that the unfulfilled middle-manager may find an emotional outlet for his work-induced frustrations in virtual games such as World of Warcraft, where everyone and anyone has the opportunity to be a hero.

I am not sure that this quite captures the phenomenon, however.  With Rock Band, the goal is not so much to escape one’s reality but rather to participate in a different one — more of a pull than a push, so to speak.  Plotinus, though in a different context, spoke of it as a hypostatic union; a union between oneself and a more perfect version of oneself; something that has the character of fulfilling one’s nature rather than erasing it.

Such is my feeling when playing air-guitar on the XBOX.  I don’t want to be someone else, but instead simply want to release an aspect of myself that requires lowering the bar a bit, through technology, and closing the gap between myself and the gods of rock and roll.  Surely this is the origin of all technology since Nimrod’s tower, brought down by Jehovah for its impertinence.  Technology lifts us up, giving us health and the promise of immortality through medicine, cleverness through information technology, courage through online role-playing, and happiness through pharmacology.  Technology removes our frailties, leaving us as we were meant to be before the fall: young and immortal.

Speaking of growing old, I attended a Bob Dylan concert a few months ago.  Bob has been going through a bit of a revival, his U.S. tour coinciding with a documentary by Martin Scorsese and even a feature length biopic.  I have not been able to find an adequate way to write about the event, which I and my companions walked out of.  To say that Dylan couldn’t sing seems to be missing the point, since this charge has always been leveled against him.  And to say that I did not like the new style he was playing also makes me sound like those who criticized Bob for going electric back in the day.

I might draw the contrast between Bob and Elvis Costello, who opened for him.  Elvis played several songs solo, both old and new, only changing guitars on occasion to fit the piece.  He was the Elvis I imagined, comfortable on stage, able to work the audience, singing in his off-key way to perfection.  He was the archetype of the solo college musician, fitting complex lyrics into a structured form meant to invoke interlaced feelings of sympathy and alienation — the alienation of the artist — in his audience.  Like a great beast, the audience responded to his coaxing, and he guided us through a peculiar journey and then deposited us gently when his set was over.

According to Jung, archetypes recur across cultures, and we seek them out, attempting to fill the recesses established in our minds.  Most of all we seek heroes, not because we seek to be heroes ourselves, necessarily, but because we have an inchoate sense that there must always be heroes.  Shakespeare provided heroes, sometimes twisted, sometimes broken, but heroes nonetheless, on the stage.  The modern rock star transforms himself to fulfill this role established for him.  The form required for the hero changes over time, and changes with context; Dylan was always able to adapt to these changing roles.  He served as a cipher, reflecting the image that people required of him.

The Scorsese documentary, built around a ten hour interview with Dylan, portrays a man who sees none of the depth in his own lyrics that others impute to them.  Perhaps he is simply being playful.  He discusses a radio interview in which the host asks Dylan whether — actually, insists that — A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall is about nuclear ash and the madness of nuclear proliferation, to which Dylan responds that the song is about rain, which is sometimes heavy, you know. 

Again and again, however, Dylan was able to capture the spirit of his times, several times, and people found in his lyrics answers to their questions and anxieties.  My favorite Dylan album is Desire, which is a combination of electric protest songs and wild fantasies, all within a cowboy motif.  I can’t say what questions he answers for me in this, but I do know that I return to it again and again, and it puts me in a happy place.

According to Giambattista Vico, the 18th century Neapolitan philologist, the secret of metaphor is that it is not based on similarity, but rather on identity.  The secret of the hero is not that he makes himself resemble the classic hero.  He becomes that hero, transforming himself as needed, internally, until identity is achieved.  “The true war chief … is the Godfrey that Torquato Tasso imagines; and all the chiefs who do not conform throughout to Godfrey are not true chiefs of war” as Vico said.

Dylan accomplished something similar, adopting the argot of protest singers like Pete Seeger when this was required of him.  As the times changed, he transformed himself again into the rebellious Bob, with dark glasses and an attitude, indifferent to the complaints about his going electric and “selling out,” when in fact his ear was simply better attuned than that of those around him.  The Desire period marked him as a reclusive genius, when that was the thing to be.  In the 80’s and 90’s, he identified himself with the Christian revival, while his music turned bluesy in a time when we wanted heroes whose rough voices where inhabited by old wisdom and hard-earned experience.

The new Dylan (which is your favorite Dylan?) doesn’t speak to me, however.  He has a sort of be-bop band in conservative zoot-suits accompanying him, and the music matches the look.  The music is pleasant enough, punctuated by Bob’s gravelly voice hammering out quick phrases like “dondenktwysanizalri” or “juzlikawama.”  But what it means, and who Bob Dylan represents, is unclear to me.  I hold out the possibility that he is simply ahead of the curve once again — but what sort of culture requires a hero who is mostly pleasant and barely comprehensible?  Is this the zeitgeist of the 00’s?

Like my back, my plastic XBOX Stratocaster has also given out.  After only a few hours of playing, the strummer is now mushy, and I am unable to get through the rapid 12 note riffs that seem to infest all the metal songs currently on my playlist like little roaches.  I have gone online and found a fix that requires me to remove the back of the guitar (there are 20 odd screws, and I am grateful for the gift of a Christmas past: a power drill with bit attachments) and than reset a tension bar inside the guitar mechanism, but this seems to only work for about five hours before the strummer becomes mushy again.  Apparently there is a known problem with the early Rock Band Stratocasters, and Activision is allowing people to send their bad guitars in for a replacement.  Since I am currently in a state of rock star disability, I think I may take advantage of this, and with luck by the time my guitar is healed, my back will be, too.

Christmas Tree Blues

James Ashley

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Every family has its peculiar Christmas traditions.  My family’s holiday traditions are strongly influenced by a linguistic dispute back in A.D. 1054, one consequence of which is that we celebrate Christmas on January 7th, 13 days after almost everyone else we know does so.  This has its virtues and its vices.  One of the vices is that we clean up on holiday shopping, since we are afforded an extra 13 days to pick up last minute presents, which gets us well into the time zone of post-holiday sales.  Another is that we always wait until a period somewhere between December 23rd and December 26th to buy our Christmas tree.  We typically are able to pick up our trees for a song, and last year were even able to get a tall frosty spruce without even singing.

This history of vice has finally caught up with us, for this year, as we stalked forlornly through the suburbs of Atlanta, no Christmas trees were to be found.  Lacking foresight or preparation, we have found ourselves in the midst of a cut-tree shortage.  And what is a belated Christmas without a cut-tree shedding in the living room?

We are now in the position of pondering the unthinkable.  Should we purchase an artificial tree this year (currently fifty-percent off at Target)?  The thought fills us with a certain degree of inexplicable horror.  Perhaps this is owing to an uncanny wariness about the prospects of surrendering to technology, in some way.  While not tree-huggers, as such, we have a fondness for natural beauty, and there are few things so beautiful as a tree pruned over a year to produce the correct aesthetic form, then cut down, transported, and eventually deposited in one’s living room where it is affectionately adorned with trinkets and lighting.

Another potential source for the uneasiness my wife and I are experiencing is an association of these ersatz arboreals with memories of our childhoods in the late 70’s and early 80’s, which are festooned with cigarette smoke, various kinds of loaf for dinner, checkered suits, polyester shirts and, of course, artificial trees.  Is this the kind of life we want for our own children?

In the end, we have opted to get a three-foot, bright pink, pre-lit artificial tree.  Our thinking is that this tree will not offend so greatly if it knows its place and does not put forward pretensions of being real.

The linguistic ambiguity alluded to above has led to other traditions.  For instance, in Appalachia there are still people who cleave to the custom that on the midnight before January 6th, animals participate in a miracle in which they all hold concourse.  Briefly granted the opportunity to speak, all creatures great and small can be heard praying quietly and, one would imagine, discussing the events of the past year.  The significance of January 6th comes from the fact that the Church of England was late to adopt the Gregorian calendar, which changed the way leap years are calculated, and consequently so was America late.  Thus at the time that the Appalachian Mountains were first settled by English emigrants, the discrepancy between the Gregorian calendar and the Julian calendar was about 12 days (the gap, as mentioned above, has grown to 13 days in recent years).  The mystery of the talking animals revolves around a holiday that was once celebrated on January 6th , but is celebrated no more — that is, Christmas.

According to this site, there is a similar tradition in Italy, itself.  On the day of the Epiphany, which commemorates the day the three magi brought gifts to the baby Jesus, the animals speak.

Italians believe that animals can talk on the night of Epiphany so owners feed them well. Fountains and rivers in Calabria run with olive oil and wine and everything turns briefly into something to eat: the walls into ricotta, the bedposts into sausages, and the sheets into lasagna.

The Epiphany is celebrated in Rome on January 6th of the Gregorian calendar.  It is possible, however, that even in Italy, older traditions have persisted under a different guise, and that the traditions of Old Christmas (as it is called in Appalachia) have simply refused to migrate 12 days back into December, and are now celebrated under a new name.  Such is the way that linguistic ambiguities give rise to ambiguities in custom, and ambiguities in custom give rise to anxiety over what to display in one’s living room, and when.