“Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people.” ~yet another unattributed quote

I wish we were all taught to measure intelligence by the rich variety of aptitudes as life exposes us instead of a normal distribution curve, where a small percentage is by an inflexible standard of “higher gifts”. It’s such an impoverished concept of intelligence, it should be trashed. This is especially true while it’s applied in schools.

Perhaps by not being relegated to a minority category, a statistic lending itself to suspicions of abnormality, there wouldn’t be this prejudicial badgering of folks who enjoy the fruits of their studious labors—the casual expert, the opinionated, and happy conversationalists who like their wit even in small talk. If we’re even going to leverage statistics, only 0.1% of people are autistic so it’s wrong to say any relevant number of smart people are also encumbered by “fatal flaws” that “cancel out” their admirability. They are objectively no more unlikeable than anyone else, differing only in their humility in the face of greater things than their own person.

To think that the conceited power plays of the “normal” and therefore socially adjusted and not “weird’ are limited to high school was apparently too optimistic. Why then do the brilliant but obsessive authors, musicians, and artists shake the groundwork of humanity and culture? They that scarcely bother with societal adaptability so that they “may” be unpleasant or strange to be around also happen to know it better. Just as philosophers as Sartre, Foucault, and Barthes attempted to master their concepts by plumbing the margins, so should we all.

Intolerance that persists in spite of years really bares the grit of social solidarity born from false conformity. Clearly this attitude has been encouraged through passive fealty or by more of its own loud and obnoxious ilk.

I absolutely love sitting down with a table of the well-traveled and wise with whatever small ability to contribute that can only come from absorbing facts and anecdotes voraciously just to keep up with their years. How else am I to connect more meaningfully with people outside my orbit of experience? Is it not in fact hypersocial as opposed to asocial to enrich conversational subtext beyond “I agree that this banal but fashionable detail is fashionable to discuss” or “I validate your regurgitation from a shallow body of values that you are no different from everyone else”? If people decide to set a low bar for existence, there’s no reason to bludgeon the rest of us with it.

Perhaps it shows, but I’ve had an awful week and I’m just digging around for peace of mind in some form or another.

Any film with Michael Fassbender as a morally disturbed type yielded good things in the past so I checked out Fish Tank despite my usual disinterest in social realism. Haneke is okay only in that his kitchen sinks are so far down the underbelly of rotted plumbing that they’re unreal. Fish Tank plays off Mia as a troubled 15 year old from the Essex estates in a way that you sympathize with her hostile temperament. After meeting other misguided youths in her area in the 2nd act, you realize social withdrawal was the key to (in high hopes from the ambiguous ending) escaping the fate of her young boozing mother. Unlike her precocious little sister, who we see criticizing the pseudo-glamour reality shows their mother consumes, Mia is naive. Underestimating the intentions of sexual opportunist Connor (Fassbender) for mentoring or a little more than friendship and the local outlets for dancers, Mia stumbles quite painfully. I admire the disquieting scene where she kidnaps Connor’s daughter in revenge, inviting us to condemn her harsh retribution and imagine her as a young mother. Ultimately, the aggressive outbursts that alienate her from school and home towards her passion for dance at least takes her away from her troubles. She’s not strong or clever enough to solve them but she can contest for another direction to go. Fish Tank is layered with ambiguous metaphors that can be positive or pessimistic but the most poignant may be the death of an old horse she grew fond of. 16 is young for a girl but old for a horse; we’re confronted with the reality that kids like her leave their childhoods early to survive. In its moral and symbolic ambiguity, Fish Tank makes for a powerful film without the maudlin sentiment.

Cabin in the Woods made my year.  The last few horror flicks have been so disappointing I began to question my love of the out of place scream and impossibly dodgy frights (The Woman in Black, The Strangers, Antichrist, etc).  The deconstruction of horror as a ritual sacrifice to appease the audience is a nice conversational piece in the genre, whereby flattened archetypes of sin are punished for our social peace. 

Yet I do wonder if this call to discard the formula, the ritual, the moralized chain reaction (a low point being Final Destination) for e.g. conceptual pastiche—The Birds, Silence of the Lamb, Alien—is pretentious or just our growing out of fairy tales? Just avoid the woods, young children.  There’s no denying the thorny thumbprints of Doctor Who and J-Horrors, formulaic but creative reinventions of taken-for-granted possessions into devices of otherworldly entry. When the ghost in the mirror first appeared in Repulsion, was that not good then?  Have our relativist reach retired the simple ritual sacrifice, as some apocryphal barbaric act? Perhaps the horrific process of guilt transfer turned inward like Roman Polanski films or out towards cosmic horror like Lovecraft and Kafka where life is futile for everyone.  By ignoring and subverting the form, Lynch and Bunuel do make films rich for interpretations while still entertaining but not everyone likes irresolution.

Cabin in the Woods is one of the best for gallows humor, self-aware characters, and staged absurdities since Scream less the social commentary.  Shamelessly referential, gore fans would be the aphorised kid in a candy shop meeting gory highs with a much anticipated scene of grand guignol, when all the lab creatures were released with the ding of a timer. A penultimate conclusion served well done.

If I could suggest ideas, I’d recommend taking pointers from How I Met Your Mother, which brought the TV sitcom to its height by borrowing from a literary blend of Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy.  I’m for Neil Gaiman all the way.  Growing out of fairy tales to an emerging adulthood, perhaps our greater fear is not the stranger but that solipsist obsessions make us strange to everyone else, which novelists have spent some time exploring already.

Hunger Games left me awestruck not for its cinematic caliber, which involved  enough shaky cam you need not worry about the fighting or running quality (rightly so since that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon routine is theatrically ridiculous even save the tights).  I was neither intrigued by its polished style.  Battle Royale’s deliverance of carnage had the glossy sophistication of a glamor magazine.  I was struck by the clownish sensationalism necessary to recapture the massive young adult and female audience post-Potterpocalypse, in admittedly enjoying and being repulsed by it.  I didn’t mind the bozo act so much in A Clockwork Orange because the master architect of that absurd universe had the baroque refinements and methodical symmetry of Sir Christopher Wren. But it seems it’ll be a long way before more restrained novels like Lolita or In the Name of the Rose became bestsellers again.

First impressions suggested perhaps Hunger Games is a rehash of Lord of the Flies. However, the series is less interested in the will to power’s disintegration of civilization to primitive savagery but to a sterile hypercivilization of television, sponsors, and viewer who experience their hopes and turmoils vicariously through the contestants.  Cunning is playing to the audience’s desires while burying both your independence and sympathy to others until the rules suited your survival odds.  We are made to root for Katniss, the selfless volunteer against her equally unfortunate and young competitors because she comes from a higher moral ground.  And, using district rebellions as an approval rating of Katniss’ sly insolence towards the Capitol conjured for me a funny parallel with the Jersey Shore cast and a leopard printed, hair greased civil war.

Unlike the intense politics and survival tactics of Predator that has you gripped for the triumph of man (no better than Schwarzenegger) against aliens, Hunger Games features an “insert-your face-through-cutout” underdog struggling with flat caricatures of a Marxist rebellion, trials by temptation in the forest, 1984 newspeak (e.g. Peacekeepers) and Theseus and the Minotaur.  The whole slaughter-fest was topped off by a snared cornucopia where the apple and snake was once sufficient for a memorable tale.

The ending hints that Katniss’s defiance throughout the Hunger Games will lead to a reckoning in the Capitol, in which the Minos-tyrant will fall. Yet this victory of the villagers whose humble talents served well in battle appears desecrated when we consider how we’ve had our cake and eaten it too.  If you can’t stop people from watching the games, then eliminate the games but make yourself a star in the effort?

A new face, you bend
the last page to find nothing
before the w(hole).

Bought myself 10 books. Hmm, bad case of weekend solipsism and possible slow descent into self-induced madness.

Code 2.0 by Lawrence Lessig

Proust was a Neuroscientist

Kant and the Platypus by Umberto Eco

Collapse by Jared Diamond

The Language Instinct by Steve Pinker

Modern Drama

Propaganda by Edward Bernays

Chaos by James Gleick

I am a Strange Loop by Hofstadter

The Psychopath Test

*insert intravenous helping of David Foster Wallace’s writings in between.

The widening reach of David Brooks’ The Social Animal, David McRaney’s You Are not Smart, Steven Pinker’s works, and economists that focus on black swans and tipping points suggest an impetus to move away from the grand narrative of the 20^th century, economic rationalism. The latest, while not the greatest, dive into recession serves as a reminder of that old wound of unaccountable irrationality from 1929 and in consequence disappoints laissez-faire economists and Marxists. Appearing outdated now, both laissez-fairists and marxists subscribe to the assumption that people know their material interests or state and will act effectively upon knowing. Yet not all past figureheads become a fool with age . there is a veracious shine to Walter Lippmann witticisms that relay how susceptible we are to blind spots and how unbounded from rationality craving and action may be.

“For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities and that in many cases they help to create the very fictions to which they respond.”

“For what operates in history is not the systematic idea as a genius formulated it, but shifting imitations, replicas, counterfeits, analogies, and distortions in individual minds.”

It was not meant to be when we aspired to be machines or, in a more distant memory, gods. My interest lies in how we can restructure these humanized readings of life to align with this shifting narrative to optimize happiness in work, love, community, education, and the creative-spiritual flow of soul. When opening up life goals once based on access to wealth as a measure of success to close reading, we may plumb a neglected range of attributes for fulfilling our greater selves knowing that the economic grand narrative cohering higher market values with greater inherent values is as volatile as it is superficial.

While the empiricists and market overseers mine the riches of unknown variables and their contributions to avalanching tipping points, we should cultivate our individual joys and talents and maybe not or maybe so we’ll be swept up with the moving tide ahead of the curve. If not, we’ll still have lived fuller, unmeasurable lives for our selves.

PR AGENTS/SPIN DOCTORS: Phenomenologists with interchanging happy and sad face scorecards.

COLLEGE STUDENTS: Drug-fueled existentialists with obscure albeit eccentric tunnel vision.

REPUBLICAN POLITICIANS: Pragmatists with opinion polls measured only in superlatives.

WEB PROGRAMMERS: German idealists resolving contradictions of being and non-being in browsers of perceived experience.

WALL STREET PROTESTORS: Utilitarians with bad math skills.

STOCK TRADERS: Empiricists with hulk-charged graphing calculators.

…now I can return to my Walter Lippmann book.

An incredible read, profound in its austere style, albeit a puzzling choice to deliver the story of a dictator’s rule from a rape victim aligning Trujillo with the impotent Fisher King. I can grasp the irony where Trujillo values nothing of intellectuals aside from a single speech defining his reign as a continuation of God’s grace. However, reprehension for tortures, repressions, and disappearances is entirely due to him. A reign through violence and terror should end in such for the complicit. In the real world, we don’t need medieval superstitions to draw pity for dictators. The horrors of persecution are softened when framed in a study of sexuality and power.

Seizure of last area of Sirte under Gaddafi loyalist control, photo from The Telegraph

The dictator should be seen fully as an erring human, as no goat or creature of sexual illness, so it can be a lesson for everyone that the weight of an iron rule will be reciprocated in its retraction. Journos from the New Yorker and Economist have done a good job following the fall of Gadaffi and Bin Laden. Those photos of their ravaged hideouts, of how they fought to live and then perished shamefully, are exactly the images we need to be perceptive of the enormity of war crimes and persecution.

For this reason, I’m a stronger admirer of Joan Didion for her talent in identifying exactly what’s wrong with the “air” in a nation under a repressive regime, in her demarcation of signs of stifled humanity in inanimate structures or in minor gestures from the day-to-day.  I think of Didion’s somber and austere revelations about the FMLN and the government-backed death squads in El Salvador without resorting to heavy-handed theatricality.  There is enough of that in politics.   For instance, institutionalized obfuscation of truth and truth-finding processes condone hostile environments for disappearances, body dumps, and dictators. Didion remarked, with great economy of words, “language has always been used a little differently in this part of the world (an apparent statement of fact often expresses something only wished for, or something that might be true).”

I found it alarming to hear Ikea is redesigning bookshelves to accommodate a drop in hard book sales (with e-books and all)… by alarming I mean like the rude misstep that jackhammers your heart at the end of the staircase.

As immaterial as my usual disposition is towards food and clothes and pretty shiny things that all look more and more like Apple products, I am addicted to books. I may not paw at opaline pages of rice paper or deep embossed covers but I read the way a glutton will still smack with glee before sapping the last victual glob. I attack my readings with squiggly pen lines and folded edges until it resembles a psycho-therapeutic journal. You know, just the way I’ve always taken notes at school. And it does help me find a sweetly flowing calm, a bolero expressed in a mood, at the end of my workday. If it’s compulsive, is it a kissing doorknobs (total freak) or dolloping layers of chapstick (raised eyebrow) crazy? Perhaps I’ll have to respond with lowered eyes next time I admit I learned of something from perusing a textbook on a Friday night. Or squeal from girlish glee that Don Dellilo or Pauline Kael would “get” me. Or dream of conversations with Stephen Fry or Martin Amis. Imagine meeting people who speak in perfectly formed and cadenced sentences…

(a nice pic from Fry’s new memoir… although his haircut was quite funny as Oscar Wilde)

A tight budget and a loose mailbox, being highly mobile for a few years, limited my ability to collect all the hard copies I want. Nowadays I am curious if it’s an addiction to be consuming about 2 full books a week and, with my attention span not totally keeping pace, thumbing through a handful of others.

T. S. Elliot captures the wan and feeble face of passivity in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”,

“For I have known them all already, known them all;

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons”.

So I worry books truly are emptied of the fresh meat of stories, as the taxidermal husk of distant conversations with dead or non-contiguous writers. Should I worry about solipsism? Shifting the content of books around in e-readers now, all weightless and formless, seems to detract from it’s ties to the world of bulk and bunk.

Barring a lightened outlook, I should secure my cave now… by Sakura Adachi. A hermit post looks comfy in this bookshelf,

On a lighter note, checkout this DISC WORLD LIBRARIAN mini!

Funny how Woody Allen, who would not deign to encourage religiosity, exploits the animus of evangelical sects— jealousy, idiocy, anguish, contempt, and fear— as the prime mover for his characters.

His figures of grace may be instead from film and literature but it all goes to show one’s life inspiration no matter the philosophy ought to be built from sturdier stuff. Unless you are among a perceptive few who enjoy the comedic in the tragic, in which case you’d make a good show for us all. In the best laid schemes o’ pictures an’ print, it’s still a happier cycle for all it’s promised joys.

Some of us have had the fortune of the gifts of precocity, and the ability to weather the disposition to be emotionally off-key while devoting ourselves to respective geek subjects of interest. In being gainfully informed about a topic, we must trade time usable in charming peers for the lonelier evenings of the autodidact. This is especially true for hobbies in which we must particulate actively such as writing and computer programming.

And, of course, the further our field of esoteric knowledge lies from the center of the venn diagram of general interest, the greater our monologic exposes propel others away like a force field in social circles. In our geekdom, we seek to be kings of our subjects. However, our reach extends to only a few friendly ears while others are content with sharing in trifles of the collective however hackneyed or inaccurate.

It is to no surprise being emotionally off-key persists as a shared trait amongst geeks from the aggressively pedantic but under-emotive Spock, Hermione Grainger or Enid from Ghost World to the indecisively-toned, over-expressive George McFly or Fogell in Superbad who tips the scale of social discomfort with exaggerated facial or vocal rejoinders that modulate a bit too much for the common “how’s the weather” conversationalist. Young children and adolescents also inflect gratuitous volatility in speech. It extends a feeling that you must skim through all that unpleasant fuzz for a single note. Yet when these voices rise and fall like a bee dallying in the fields, it’s partly as a waiver of insecurity in foreign territory and the rest for how far our thoughts have already sped ahead because we’re not as myopic as presumed to be.

Somehow geek diction, and particularly its inflection, always manages to waiver too long or subside too curtly. After such, the effect of the repartee or genial concurrence (“LIKE, I know, I SO get it”) is delivered flat. Greater efforts to communicate vague subjects meaningfully blow out on itself and we are made ineffective or even juvenile.

Or perhaps those who have devoted less time to like topics find it strange when we speak so emphatically of unsympathetic objects like movies or comic books in a manner they reserve for neighborhood gossip or celebrity scandal or stories of themselves.

It just never occurred to me to speculate so much on what to discuss about myself or my acquintances.