JOLLY DAYS, an artist's journal

Well, WaPo said, snidely, that Michelle Rhee and Kevin Johnson have “downsized their wedding”. Possible conflict of interest in the guest rolls apparently.

Now this would only be of interest if you were following Rhee’s enormously impressive battles to improve the D.C. school system, as it has been presented, segment by segment, on Lehrer (PBS Nightly? What is the name of that show?).

Rhee is so filled with the spirit you root for her and feel her sincerity. The unions are worried about jobs and Rhee is worried about the kids. That’s probably not completely fair to many teachers in that system, but watching the drama play out on the PBS show, it does feel that way.

The reason this news snippet is of interest is that it was astonishing how much support Rhee was getting from the mayor. The man backed her 100%. It was admirable and courageous — very treacherous to go against public unions. It turns out now, it was also a thing of the heart.

Sometimes such emotional connections, frowned on at the workplace, don’t sabotage, but make things possible.

Last night we made the mistake of watching, via a Netflix stream, Surveillance, a 2009 movie that has no saving grace. A NYT critic says , “It seems doubtful that “Surveillance,” …would be taking up space in theaters if its director were not the daughter of a name filmmaker. Jennifer Lynch, spawn of David…”

Sometimes horror movies can be entertaining, but I’m no fan of slasher movies, and this movie is a pretentious drooling blood fest. There is a plausible case to be made that the whole enterprise is the product of the director’s dysfunctional mental and emotional life. That is, the movie is a product of pathology — “art activities” day in the outpatient clinic; because we suspect the director has all sorts of artspeak — camp, ironic, referential justifications — to cover over the psychopathology.

David Lynch was a producer on this movie — a toxic symbiosis between father and daughter, each making the other worse, cascading into the deplorable Surveillance. There is an additional, unfortunate side effect: it points you back to David Lynch — you wonder if, rather than the art school arbitrary affectations in his films, mostly pulled off with some delicacy, the Grand Guignol nihilism of Surveillance was really David Lynch’s subtext all along.

Surveillance is a movie that asks you to identify with, and root for, the psychotic serial murderers.

Sherlock Holmes, the recent (2009) Robert Downey / Guy Ritchie movie, isn’t good for much, even if Downey was given some award nomination (he is good, and art direction did deserve some credit as well), but the end titles are great. I would have liked it slowed down a little actually. And the music is only okay. But the visuals are very well done — they fit well with the movie.

In general the titles are among the best parts of movies these days, like the opening guitar riffs in many rock songs, and then it is downhill from there. The design capabilities displayed in this minor “titles” craft in movie making, done by dedicated separate small workshops, shows a real advance — more so than the movies themselves. In this case they are using that color wash spreading in absorbent paper effect that is now used on a number of commercials. This gives lie to the cliché that “it was about as exciting as watching paint dry.”

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YouTube link to see it larger.

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The movie is a karate-brain, video game looking, magic realism enthralled, karate kicking, story challenged, comic book derived, karate chopping, mixed up mess. The Netflix rental DVD said RENTAL on it. It forced you to watch 10 minutes of what are now old movies. You just let them run through while you try and get back whenever the movie begins, which is guesswork. I don’t think it actually did ever begin.

Wiki says,

A. O. Scott of the New York Times was … reserved: he noted that the director’s approach to films was “to make cool movies about cool guys with cool stuff” and that Sherlock Holmes was essentially “a series of poses and stunts” which was “intermittently diverting” at best.

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The studio that made the titles is Prologue. They deserve applause.

Christopher Hitchens’ sad rhyming with the malady that did in his father — esophageal cancer — was brought to the fore movingly, and in that strange manner of contemporary life, publicly, as Hitchens almost appeared to be making the rounds in this dire moment. He was on video at CNN, at the Atlantic, and discussed at length on Charlie Rose by Martin Amis.

Amis has a natural gravitas and, as usual, was beautiful in his use of language. Hitchens is lucky to have Amis as a friend. We have both our experience, which we define as our life, but also the spirit existence that our presence inhabits in the memory and thoughts of others. Amis’ mental universe provides generous accommodation to Hitchens. Amis made clear how dear a loss Hitchens’ passing would be for him.

Their friendship goes back. Hitchens regards Amis as the greater of the two — Hitchens is the self-described smaller fish. Hitchens is right. Amis is a novelist and artist and Hitchens is a commentator. A wonderful commentator, and fine writer, but still the field delimits the achievement. Hitchens is only 61, far too young for a prognosis he indicates is little likely to be longer than five years. Of course, it is always too young, always too soon.

Hitchens himself, it is gratifying to say, is still at his best in a short, beautifully written recent essay @Vanity Fair about his experience.

On the land of the sick,

Everybody smiles encouragingly and there appears to be absolutely no racism. A generally egalitarian spirit prevails, and those who run the place have obviously got where they are on merit and hard work. As against that, the humor is a touch feeble and repetitive, there seems to be almost no talk of sex, and the cuisine is the worst of any destination I have ever visited.

Hitchens had been a long time smoker and as many who work on their own, at home, driven by a heartless boss,

I suppose, I have been “in denial” for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely that reason, I can’t see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it’s all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me.

On receiving chemo,

You feel swamped with passivity and impotence: dissolving in powerlessness like a sugar lump in water.

Hitchens can be alternately abrasive and oily, true to his upbringing, with a mother who wished he be part of the upper class “if there is to be one,” and a father who disliked the upper and working classes equally. Hitchens brings a respectability and artfulness to dispute and made the debate more meaningful. By nature he is not a rebel, as Amis would have it, but a provocateur. But Amis is correct in saying Hitchens is a brave man.

I write this as if he were gone, but he is here, and if not “fighting a battle,” a phrase he points out is unique to cancer, he is hardy in spirit both in the videos and his writing — may Hitchens have many years before him to contribute and thrive.

In an interview I once heard with a successful scientist he said that one of the more important characteristics of good scientists is conviviality. In order to advance in the field and to advance the field itself, a scientist needed to receive and communicate information freely. Once you hear that, it makes sense. How else would you keep up with the latest research and understand the thinking of colleagues in related fields?

In this discussion at MIT, Robert Horvitz instantiates the affable characteristic. Horvitz won the Nobel Prize for his work on apoptosis — the mechanism of programmed cell death. Horvitz stumbled into biology after meeting a charismatic teacher/mentor.

It is worth listening to the hour long discussion just to hear his description of epigenetics (the heritability in gene expression) — a “larger” genetics. He describes the structure of DNA and histones (yielding order to DNA); it makes you wonder how this incredible complexity could have been sorted out, especially when you take into account that the structural presentation of the DNA also has impact.

One point Horvitz emphasized was the importance of basic research. That is, research with no immediate pragmatic application. Horvitz studied a lint sized soil worm. He was told such a focus would lead to career death. However the little digger helped Horvitz prove them wrong; with its 900 genes and short life cycle, this little worm provided some of the deep secrets of Nature and snagged for Horvitz and colleagues a Nobel.

James Cameron’s Avatar, a conventional Hollywood-animistic-war-movie-with-a-heart-of-gold, is mostly about war. The trees win — Gaia triumphant, by using dinosaur rhinos to trample the heartless destroyers. Using “shock and awe” buzzwords, just so we are clear where Cameron stands, the director/writer provides us with airborne attack craft that look like WWII-flying-tanks. Cameron needed someone with talent and a reasonable set of values to write the script.

Cameron also throws in his Hollywood take on Native Americans, which looks suspiciously like paternalistic aboriginal sentimentality but Avatar presents as pure hagiographic goodness; these cat-eyed fashionably anorexic toy-people are violent, but good violent, because they are innocent in Cameron’s condescending fantasy.

Cameron even lifted an evil fighting machine from the Alien movies: a huge robot operated as a larger than life bad-soldier. This monster truck with arms was used as a tool to give the good guys a fighting chance in Aliens, but now is a tool of evil itself, aka America, as Cameron sees it. Cameron is the Busby Berkeley of the extreme green movement. Human Beings=Evil; deserving to die on their dying planet.

This evil is personified in mind-numbing stereotypes: the American as macho-military-dunce along with a sidekick cold blooded corporate drone, to provide the orders to destroy.

Any close examination of the director would betray Cameron as something of a despoiler himself — a major league exploiter of modern technology, which is a primary source of the ruination of the landscape. It must be nice for Cameron, relaxing in his high end hybrid, lecturing the masses on their evil ways, and later being celebrated by his fellow wealthy entertainment-celebrity pals for his nobility. Cameron must believe what his pals tell him — he is that insulated, in his little forest of self-regard.

In an online discussion about the science of immortality, which I heard some time back, a theoretical scientist made some surprisingly convincing arguments. A book has been written about the theorist, Aubrey de Grey — a perfect name, right out of Poe — and here is the NYT review by a professor of internal medicine.

The theorist feels that since aging is essentially the entropy of a system (healthy body) Nature has evolved, it is simply required that we learn to clean out the refuse the entropy accrues.

The beauty of this view is that “curing” aging requires no special knowledge of design, or any understanding of just how the cellular junk got there in the first place. It only requires that we get rid of it.

The article doesn’t mention it, but Aubrey de Grey is speculating about a boundless future in good health, at a reasonable stasis age for continued productivity. In the online discussion he had worked out the steps — the disease cures necessary and probable, as one big issue — for this prospect to be considered. The many social issues: population growth, endless wealth accrual, well the arena is large and just goes on, but at the very least the idea of immortality as a possibility provides a pragmatic spur to gain some context for our delimited lives.

The arguments made by de Grey are so logical, and his optimism so infectious, it is difficult to reject out of hand, as natural skepticism might have it. Especially since one might already be predisposed — as biological beings are enamored of life (and forget the pain so easily — a state of punctuated amnesia).

Eternal life? Why not? There is a worm in the apple though. Like a Twilight Zone episode, that old bugger unexpected consequences would most likely rear its head. The Twilight Zone episode which comes to mind is the one about a man with terrible vision who just wanted to read but his Xanthippe wouldn’t let him; he survives a nuclear exchange, finally getting to read in peace, only to lean forward for his beloved books and breaks his glasses.

You have to give credit to someone who will make a movie about a font, but that is what the documentary Helvetica attempted. I’d heard positive things about the film and finally decided to sample it via a Netflix stream.

In some ways this is a documentary about taste and about consensus. The Helvetica font was settled upon by large institutions, as an acceptable, non-offensive, bridge from modernism into the contemporary. Helvetica expressed bland authority and unquestioned entitlement.

In some ways, the Helvetica font is the Trajan font of our age — the font you see on Roman buildings and governmental buildings in America — invisible by its ubiquity. A cold and anonymous typeface whose chief attribute is legibility — although Trajan has an authentic beauty of form Helvetica does not. That said, I am sympathetic with the designers who feel that typefaces deliver content but aren’t the content. So Helvetica does its utilitarian job.

The array of designers commenting on the font had its own interest. One overwrought designer likened Helvetica to a glass of fresh water on the desert of awful, terrible, horrible 19th century design. Personally, I like much about 19th century design, although Helvetica is okay as well. It would take an effort to get too worked up about this peripheral realm of design.

One other designer pointed out the push/pull in Helvetica — a Hans Hofmann, abstract expressionist idea — the tension between ground and figure. The sharp insight was that Helvetica had a perfect fit between ground and typeface. Helvetica is of the grid and the machine and it locks in place visually.

The problem with Helvetica is that it is dead, drained of human interest, and purely utilitarian. The strange conflation of ideas that images are always conjuring: Helvetica is both socialist in its aspirations and corporate in its manifestations. Helvetica is not personal, but astringently impersonal. On the other hand, minimalism works very well in graphic and industrial design: witness Apple.

We are planning to see a movie whose plot is…

…disoriented after a 1993 failed attempt on Pakistan’s K2, the second-highest mountain in the world, [an author] took a wrong turn into the village of Korphe, was nursed back to health by the villagers and, in gratitude, vowed to build them a school.

Still more treacly, the author did indeed build schools for girls, who were particularly deprived of educational opportunities.

But we are not done with the unlikely tale. The author then, with a journalist, wrote a book about his experience. The book became a hit among the wives of commanders in Iraq who passed it back and forth and finally to their husbands.

But, treacly or not, it is true. Yada, yada, yada, it is now — establishing good relations with the people of Afghanistan — a focus of our efforts in that county.

…will take tremendous comfort in knowing people like you are helping Afghans build a future

wrote General McChrystal in the last moments of his command — having been recently fired by president Obama — to the author, Greg Mortenson.

Soon to be a major motion picture.

Macbeth struggled with the milk of human kindness; current evolutionary theory is predisposed towards the mechanical survival mechanism as paramount in explaining compassion. If kindness is there, it is there for a purpose, so they say.

In this NYT article about a study of empathy in the young it is suggested that the young are hollow careerist vessels…

In a decisively everyone-for-themselves manner, [the young] are less likely to agree with statements like “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me” and “I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective.” …
Previous studies have documented an increasing narcissism among college students since the late 1980s. And Americans in general perceive decreases in other people’s kindness and helpfulness.

Given that studies like this are at the edges of what could even loosely be called science…and so might only be an expression of a general despair about the way things are going in this age…we can still speculate about the general proposition:

…these days, a transference of empathy is apparent: people love their pets with a fierce empathy. Then again, those pets might not be the real focus, but the extension of ego that the pet represents. A proxy narcissism. And pets aren’t people, which is the real target of meaningful empathy.

…there is tribal empathy: people show empathy towards and make excuses for those they see as members of their affinity group — in our time, conformist partisans are particularly prone towards enabling. But aren’t they affirming the tribe, and their group membership, not their fellow tribalists? Look at what nastiness ensues when the tribal conceptual bond is broken, even slightly. Thought police always lurk in partisan climes, always ready to ostracize and expel from the hive.

The milk of human kindness appears of no benefit in a competitive society — although the appearance of kindness can have its cynical value. But that would not be an empathic insight. Or would it?

I had always been disappointed that Helen Vendler, a wonderful writer about poetry, did not use a more conversational voice in her book about Shakespeare’s Sonnets, which is linked in the navigation column on this page.

Her writing over the years for the NYRB was always accessible, without the lingo of academia, which often obscures more than reveals. Her deep understanding of the mechanics, and she would probably argue, further appreciation therefore of the value of what she discusses, wasn’t for me a great read.

But she is a subtle thinker, an insightful critic, and no small issue, has her own value system which won’t be subsumed to fashion. So even the Shakespeare book had great interest.

In this NYT review of a book by a poet filled with enthusiasm for his subject, Walt Whitman, Vendler once again offers sharp and helpful remarks (the poet C.K. Williams is Vendler’s reference),

Although Williams calls him “compulsively gregarious,” Whitman could hardly have composed his monumental poems without spending a good deal of his time not being gregarious, but rather sitting, thinking, reading, writing, revising.

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Williams knows that the real meat and drink in Whitman’s work lies in the poet’s unprecedented assembling of rhythm, sound, language and images.

But in the end, for Williams, the didactic trumps the aesthetic: we are brought back to the poetry’s moral demand that we be “greater than we are.”

This, however, cannot be the purpose of poetry, which necessarily subsumes even the ethical under whatever it has set up as the aesthetic law governing a particular construction. Ethics — like landscape, or anecdote, or history, or psychology — is part of the raw material of some (but not all) poetry. Like other ingredients it plays a necessarily subordinate part.

Wonderfully said, Helen Vendler. What Vendler calls, “the aesthetic law governing a particular construction,” is what I would call the poet’s sense of the world and ability to express that overriding sense; to weave it into meaning that is felt.