Goodby Jon Stewart, sob sob

Americana, Television

Jon Stewart B (1 of 1)Yesterday, I almost went the whole day without thinking about Jon Stewart’s last couple of weeks. I will miss our – almost – daily ritual of watching The Daily Show (usually, except for last week, one day later). More than just funny and topical, Jon Stewart – the Jon Stewart in my imagination, at least – is easy to like, and even easier to admire.

What I most admire about him, even more than his humor and attention to his craft, is Stewart’s generosity. His generosity with the limelight, his generosity in helping people grow-up and move on, his generosity in having obscure – or almost obscure – guests that don’t thrill the crowd but need the exposure.

The person that first came to mind was Doris Kearns Goodwin who, I read, has been on the Daily Show show eight times – no wonder they hugged when she showed up – and who was saluted with an appearance on one of Stewart’s last shows.  But he also had people like Cass Sunstein – billed as an American legal scholar, particularly in the fields of constitutional law – and Elizabeth Kolbert who I never would have heard of if he hadn’t been on Stewart’s show. He had Malala Yousafzai on, twice!

A person who I have heard of and have been reading for a long time is Ta-Nehisi Coates and I was thrilled when I realized he would be honored by being one of Jon Stewart’s final guests. As an aside, a couple of months ago, a friend asked on facebook, This is powerful! My question for Blacks is, How do I show support/compassion/connectedness for/with you without you thinking I am being condescending, ignorant, or offensive? (I’ve edited that sentence twice. Did I do ok? Did I use the “right” words?) and that question has troubled me, off and on, ever since. For anybody asking that same question – or one of its cousins – one place to start, I would suggest, is to watch Jon Stewart’s interview with Coates and another is read Coates’ columns in the Atlantic and best of all, read his latest book, Between the World and Me. End aside.

On sort of the same subject, another one of the things that I admire about Jon Stewart is, a couple days after somebody at SNL said We don’t have any black women on because there are no funny black women – I’m paraphrasing here – Stewart had Jessica Williams on for the first time. I read somewhere that Williams had been working the comedy club circuit in Los Angeles doing OK but not great when Stewart asked her to come to New York where she became the youngest Daily Show correspondent and the Alpha correspondent shortly thereafter.
The last three guests on the Daily Show were all comedians, Amy Schumer, Denis Leary, and Louis CK. I was left with the impression that Denis Leary is a friend of Jon’s and that Amy and Louis were comics that he wanted to honor. i

Now all that is gone and I will miss it.

F1 and the European vacation

Cars

Maserati F1 (1 of 1)The last Formula One race was in Hungary over a week ago and there will not be another race, the Belgium Grand Prix at Spa-Francorchamps, for another twenty days. This is because there is a mandatory vacation, in the middle of the best part of the season, for everybody in F1.

A couple of weeks ago, I read an article – in the New York Times, I think – written by a woman whose company had transferred her to Switzerland for several years. Her biggest surprise was the amount of vacation time she now had and that she was expected, even encouraged, to take it. The Europeans – and, as it turns out all industrialized nations, what ever that means – love their vacations. Germany and Spain have a mandated 34 vacation days a year.

In my old age, I am beginning to think that they might be on to something.

The year of women living dangerously (in movies)

Americana, Film, Psychological Musings

Trainwreck

The game is a men’s game, all the rules are made by men, the feminine is not honored. A remembered, probably badly, quote from Coco Gonzo after seeing Mad Max: Fury Road (in 3D).

Michele and I saw Pixar’s Inside Out  last weekend. It was one of those children’s movies that are as much fun for an adult as for the intended audience. I thought it was excellent and, unusual for Pixar, the protagonist was female (for only the second time, the first being Princess Merida of Scotland in Brave, a movie I didn’t see). I say that the protagonist was female, but she – her name was Riley – could have just as easily been a boy. Her favorite sport was ice hockey and I’m not sure if there was anything particularly feminine about her.

A day before Inside Out, we saw  Amy Schumer’s Trainwreck. If you don’t know Amy Schumer, she is that girl from the television that talks about her pussy all the time – to quote from the opening sequence of the first video below – and she is pushing the limits of comedy and what is sayable in public (BTW, isn’t all  good humor pushing what is acceptable?) The two clips below are pretty typical of what she does and, if you haven’t seen her, these are a good place to start.

 

Trainwreck , is both a parody of a rom-com and an homage. It is also a string of joke set-ups that don’t always go together, but it is very funny. Amy plays the role of a womanizing heavy drinker, commitment-phobic and profane; it is the kind of role that would have been the man’s part five years ago (the body language in the picture on top of the post is a good demonstration). Bill Hader plays what would have been the woman’s part with LeBron James playing her best friend.

A couple of months ago, we saw Melissa McCarthy transmogrify from the Penny Moneyworth part to the James Bond part in Spy and before that it was Charlize Theron being the toughest sonofabitch around in Mad Max Fury Road.

Months ago, over dinner after Mad Max Fury Road, several of us got into a discussion over what makes a feminist movie and if Mad Max Fury Road was one (Mad Max and the other three movies pass the Bechdel test, BTW, if that was a question).  I think Mad Max is a feminist movie, but there was alot of disagreement and I am not as sure as I once was. Charlize Theron is the hero as well as the instigating agent in the movie but much of what she does is a woman acting as a man rather than through the feminine.

The operative words above is much, as opposed to all. Throughout the movie Theron is acting out of empathy for the Brides and she brings a humility and vulnerability that we don’t usually see from a man. When she talks about redemption, we sense it is because she almost lost her soul to become Imperator Furiosa. And Melissa McCarthy isn’t all testosteron either, she is reticent to step forward, a woman who has accepted her station. When she becomes the macha spy, she is still a team player, and – in the end – she shares the glory. In Trainwreck, Amy Schumer is only playing the man’s part in public, at home she is a softer, more feminine, Amy.

These four movies have got me thinking about women in a man’s world. When I say man’s world, I really mean the western, public, world in which the rules are men’s rules and the women have to conform. Both politics and business are basically run by men’s rules. They are combative, hierarchical, the rules are stable, and the main concern is for short-term gain. Women like Diane Feinstein do well because they, essentially, act like men.

What we need, it seems to me, are more feminine institutions (if that isn’t an oxymoron). Modern corporations measure success in how much they contribute to the top officers and big shareholders –  not in how much they contribute to the collective – and that takes perpetual and unsustainable  growth. What we really need today is a model for sustainability and that will require women engendering their feminine characteristics like coöperation and inclusiveness and long-term thinking.

 

 

I’m sceptical of Sceptics

Around home, Psychological Musings

Sceptics (1 of 1)Any new theory of reality is indistinguishable from magic. paraphrased from Arthur C. Clarke

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. Max Planck.

Funeral by funeral, science makes progress. Paul Samuelson

I don’t want to say that  I believe in magic, but I do believe in a world that is much more magical and alive, much more complicated, than that which is accepted by most establishment scientists. Today’s – and, as I think about it, probably any time’s – conventional wisdom is that we live in a world in which we know the basic outline of everything and that all is left is to fill in the details. Calling it conventional wisdom is really a misnomer, in much of today’s science, conventional wisdom is a euphemism for Faith.

Four hundred years ago, in the Western world, the conventional wisdom was that God had created the world in six days and left everything, except humans, to run on automatic, now the conventional wisdom is that the Universe is a Machine, somehow self-created about 14,000 billion years ago at the moment of the Big Bang, and now controlled – unintelligently, rotely, mechanically – by Universal Fields and Constants like  Gravity and The Speed of Light. As an aside, I love Rupert Sheldrake’s quip on this: It’s almost as if science said, “Give me one free miracle, and from there the entire thing will proceed with a seamless, causal explanation.” The one free miracle was the sudden appearance of all the matter and energy in the universe, with all the laws that govern it. End aside. The 500 year old conventional wisdom and today’s conventional wisdom are closer positions than one might, at first, think.

Both are dogmas that are not based on all the available evidence. Both believe that the world is without consciousness except, in one case, for God and we humans created in his image, and, in the other case, just we humans (or advanced life on a planet similar to Earth). The second position, we are told, is based on science and logic and is absent any superstition, any magic. But what we are told is wrong, science, today, is a belief system no different than any other religion. To quote Sheldrake again, For more than 200 years, materialists have promised that science will eventually explain everything in terms of physics and chemistry. Believers are sustained by the faith that scientific discoveries will justify their beliefs.

Dark Matter is a belief. Nobody – on earth, atleast – has seen or measured dark matter any more than anybody has seen a black hole. I’m not saying that black holes don’t exist, they might and I think that they probably do, but we don’t have any direct proof, just conjecture based on observations of light bending. We think that we have come to a logical answer but, people who believe in Jesus as their Personal Savior, think that they have got there by logic also. Are Black Holes, or Dark Matter, more logical that The Resurrection? Maybe, but they are no easier to observe (and the cynic in me says that the postulation of Dark Matter is only a device to make expansion-of-the-universe rates work mathematically) .

My concern is not if Black Holes or Dark Matter are real, it is that they have become part of an established belief system and are not to be questioned. About ten years ago, maybe twenty, I was driving home, listening to an interview with a Skeptic who was pitching his book. About half way through the interview, listeners were invited to call in and ask questions. That devolved into listeners recalling different para-normal experiences and having the Skeptic prove them wrong. I only remember two callers.

The first caller, I remember, told about driving down a winding mountain road with lots of blind corners. He had the top down and the sun was warm, just the kind of day and place to be driving a little too fast and have alot of fun. Out of nowhere, he had a premonition of a skull on fire. It rattled him and he slowed way down. A moment later, he turned a blind corner and there was a wrecked car, lying on its side. The caller thought he would have run into the car if he hadn’t slowed down.

The Sceptic pointed out that the driver might have seen a whiff of smoke, or, maybe, a dust cloud, or some other trigger that didn’t conscientiously register, but triggered the subconscious to signal danger. The answer seemed dodgy but this is the problem with anecdotal evidence, it can’t be tested. It can’t be proven or, really, disproven.

Later, another guy called in to get another debunking. He told about a experiment in which he was a part. A group of people saw two movies together. One part of the group saw movie A first and the other part saw Movie B first. Then they randomly split the two groups into two new groups. One group watched one of the movies and the second group, in a different room or different building away from the movie, meditated on what movie the first group was seeing. When asked which movie, the first group saw, the second group was correct something like 58% of the time.

The caller said that the experiment had been done several different times with a total of about eleven hundred subjects, so 58% is a statistically a significant number. The debunker offered a couple of comments on how the experiment was done wrong and the caller said No, that was covered by…. Finally, exasperated, he debunker said, Well I don’t know the details but something was done wrong because the results are clearly impossible, next question.  I don’t want to argue over whether the experiment proved anything or not because I don’t remember all the detail – and the caller may not have given them – but I do want to point out that skepticism is NOT debunking anything we don’t understand.

Skepticism implies not knowing and the willingness to be open to not knowing, it is what is presumed to be at the foundation of science. However, too often, Skeptics – and I’m talking about professional arbitrators of Reality who say they are Skeptics – have bought into, completely, mainstream thinking. They are only skeptical of ideas out of that mainstream tradition. These are Skeptics are supposed to be my peeps and it bothers me when my peeps act from unsubstantiated Faith, just repeating the old dogmas.

After four years, Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei is free to leave China

Americana, Around home, California, Local events

Ai Weiwei (1 of 1)-2Until I saw Ai Weiwei’s Alcatraz show, I knew him more as a dissenter than as an artist. I am not normally a fan of message art – for lack of a better term – but this show was a surprise.

To back up, last April, we went to Alcatraz – for the first time, Alcatraz being one of the many, many, Bay Area attractions that we would see if we were tourists here, but have never gotten around to seeing because we live here – to see an Ai Weiwei installation. I’ve struggled whether to call it a show, protest, art installation, art show, or what, because it is really all of that.

Ai Weiwei is a Chinese artist and activist who was jailed and released but then confined to China for his art, well, actually for his activism. His show at Alcatraz was put on, in absentia, by the For-Site Foundation, a nonprofit that commissions artwork in public places, and the National Park Service and the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy which run  Alcatraz now that it has been decommissioned.

It was a beautiful spring day in San Francisco and on the Bay when we went to the show and it was easy to feel superior about an art installation – to settle on one descriptor – that is being put on in the United States by a guy who is deprived of his freedom in China. But the show, itself, put a lie to that. After all, the installation was at Alcatraz, one of the most notorious prisons in the world, and the thick walls and ever present bars constantly reminded us that the United States is the World Champion of putting people in prison.     Ai Weiwei (1 of 1)-4Walking around the island with its view of San Francisco, tantalizing close, seemed so pleasant. However, once inside the cellblock, the view shrunk to an unobtainable dream. We are free and can leave on the next ferry and the inside-out fortress still felt oppressive. Ai Weiwei (1 of 1)-5 Ai Weiwei (1 of 1)-6For me, the most powerful part of the installation was…well, here is the description from Weiwei’s website:

This sound installation occupies a series of twelve cells in A Block. Inside each cell, visitors are invited to sit and listen to spoken words, poetry, and music by people who have been detained for the creative expression of their beliefs, as well as works made under conditions of incarceration. 

Ai Weiwei (1 of 1)I listened to part of Study for String Orchestra which was written in Auschwitz by Pavel Haas Terezín, an unknown to me, Jewish composer. The music is disturbingly and beautifully upbeat  and, sitting in the empty cell, I wondered how anybody could keep themselves together in those conditions. A couple of cells over, I listened to Pussy Riot’s Virgin Mary, Put Putin Away, and then Martin Luther King, Jr’s plaintive call for an end to the war in Vietnam, Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.  

Outside the cell, people were talking, some even laughing, and it was frustratingly hard to hear King’s speech. Sitting in that oppressive cell, with the paint peeling off of thick concrete walls and hard steel bars, prison felt real, less abstract. It is not just being locked up, prison is about having our humanity taken away. Prison is about having control of our own life taken away, it is about living without privacy or power or influence; even over ourselves. That is the point.

Michele and I both left the prison subdued. The size of the infrastructure required to sustain that kind of brutality is horrifying. I suspect that a visit to Alcatraz would always be disturbing but Ai Weiwei’s installation has given the passive ruins a new life.