Archive for January, 2006
My Political Profile
23 January 2006
Your Political Profile |
| Overall: 45% Conservative, 55% Liberal |
| Social Issues: 25% Conservative, 75% Liberal |
| Personal Responsibility: 50% Conservative, 50% Liberal |
| Fiscal Issues: 75% Conservative, 25% Liberal |
| Ethics: 0% Conservative, 100% Liberal |
| Defense and Crime: 75% Conservative, 25% Liberal |
This Here Thing
23 January 20061. Name:
2. Birthday:
3. Place of residence:
4. Favorite ice-cream novelty:
5. What are you listening to now/have listened to last:
6. Do you read my lj:
7. If you do, what is particularly good/bad about it:
8. An interesting fact about you:
9. Do you have a crush at the moment:
10. Favourite place to be:
11. Favourite lyric:
12. Best time of the year:
13. Best album of 2005:
14. Where would you take me/where would you like me to take you on a date:
RECOMMEND
1. A film:
2. A book:
3. A band, a song and an album:
PLUS
1. One thing you like about me:
2. Two things you like about yourself:
3. Put this in your lj so I can tell you what I think of you.
4. POST A PICTURE OF YOU….
Hollywood, Middle America, and Me
18 January 2006So the Golden Globes have spun around once more, and this year, Christian groups and other conservatives are furious over an apparent barrage of “leftist propaganda”. Three of the night’s bigger awards went to Brokeback Mountain, Capote, and Transamerica, which these folk claim “glorify homosexuality, transsexuality, and every other kind of sexual immorality”.
I’m a little miffed, too. No, not because I feel myself duped by some liberal agenda… What bugs me is the quality of films we’re dealing with. In particular, Brokeback Mountain just… sucks. Ok, that’s a bit harsh, but for a movie about two gay cowboys dealing with their star-crossed romance in the hills of Wyoming, this is a pretty stock art-house film. There’s nothing particularly poignant to it, the ending isn’t thought-provoking, and the characters are one-dimensional–they’re gay, that’s it. The fact that they’re cowboys is entirely situational; were it not for the fact that they’re gay, they would be completely uninteresting, uncompelling characters. (They aren’t much better as it is.)
“Oh, but it’s based on a 35-page short story.” Sure, there’s little room for in-depth character development in a short story, but the process of adapting a screenplay is to embellish such a story and ensure its resonance on screen. Screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana failed to do so, and yet they win the Globe for best screenplay? Miffage. (McMurtry, you’ve done so much better than this.)
Brokeback suffers from what I call “Mona Lisa Smile Syndrome”. (Note: While I hate, hate, HATE Mona Lisa Smile, I feel only indifference to Brokeback, to its credit I guess.) It tries to speak about relevant social issues, but having been set a good four decades in the past, it loses sight of any sort of relevance. Would Ennis and Jake have to sneak around with their love affair this day and age? No. They could buy their fabled tract of land together, live up there, and the worst the neighbors would do is gossip.
Besides, where is it written that two men splitting a ranch MUST be gay? Try telling that to Einar and Mitch from “An Unfinished Life”. Again, two cowboys. Same state. Big ranch. They live there together, and have for years. No gay love. And the only one who even suspects that Einar and Mitch are gay is the granddaughter, Griff. (We can assume she’s been brainwashed by leftist propaganda, correct?)
Enough about Brokeback Mountain. What about the others? Transamerica–and Felicity Huffman’s win–may be out of left field, but I’ve heard very very few people make a stink about the movie except for the conservative naysayers. I see no pushing of agendas going on here. As for Capote… Well, if Phillip Seymore Hoffman played a gay character, it’s because the real Truman Capote WAS gay, but to my understanding, his sexual orientation was a crux of neither the film or his life, so who cares? Personally, I look forward to seeing Capote, as I’ve always been impressed by Hoffman. If it takes a character who’s an eccentric gay novelist to show off the full breadth of Mr. Hoffman’s acting abilities? So be it.
Karaoke and Existentialism
11 January 2006If I have my way, this journal entry’s gonna exist in two parts: first, a recollection of real-life goings on; second, a waxing of philosophical varieties.
First of all, I went out this weekend. “Saw someone.” (The aforementioned Lisa.) Not sure if it constituted a date, but I guess it doesn’t matter. It was nice to be out, as in actually doing stuff… Ate dinner, then went to her family’s favored karaoke bar and watched everyone get drunk and sing. Ok, so I wasn’t myself doing much. :-P But I did sing a round: Turn the Page, the Metallica version. If more bar experiences were like this (read: fun), I could stand to try out the bar scene. Of course, I’d prefer not to have to drive to Camelback and 51st Ave. (approx. 45 minutes with zero traffic) to do so.
So yeah, I met with Lisa. She’s nice. We did have the occasional pang of awkwardness as is inevitable when I meet someone–tried to get through it by acknowledging it and shrugging it off, to mixed results. Ha, the funny thing is when we met up with her family later, I felt abnormally comfortable talking to her sister Naomi… I suppose because she wasn’t the one I was planning on meeting with. So… I need to find a way to trick myself into “accidentally” running into those people I’d like to meet, in order to avoid that awkwardness. But I somehow don’t think it works that way. (Naomi, and their brother Charles, were both also pretty fun folk.)
Other than that, not much is up. I’m enjoying my new job… I just came up with a very neat solution for dynamically templating school sites–it’d take much jargon to explain it, but suffice to say it’ll simplify the way we manage hundreds, and eventually thousands, of user accounts. Pretty cool accomplishment for one’s second-ish week on the job, if I may say so myself.
Ok, now for the philosophical stuff…
In my ongoing Firefly fanaticism, I’ve been reading a book called Finding Serenity. It’s a collection of essays regarding, well, just about anything related to the ‘verse, and one such essay is called “We’re All Just Floating in Space”. It’s about the existential inspirations behind Joss Whedon, Firefly, and the episode “Objects in Space”. I suppose if I wanted to be some literary-minded person, I should be reading Sartre or Camus, but moreso than those authors (Camus, at least), this essay has really allowed me to wrap my head around existentialism in ways I haven’t before.
Particularly, I realize my personal hangups with the widely established view of existentialism: I can very much agree with the notion that all things exist arbitrarily–in other words, that chance could have had them exist differently or not at all. However, I disagree with the notion that things exist with no meaning. No “absolute” meaning, perhaps, but the way I see it, perceived meaning–meaning assigned by people or especially groups of people–is every bit as valid and important as a supposed “absolute” meaning would be. Regardless of how God figures into all this, I do believe there’s a collective unconscious on some level, and that the system of meanings, morals, and ethics promoted by said unconscious exist for some good reason–if nothing else, for the stability of a culture. I also believe we’re all encoded with a set of intuitions–our own personal meanings for life and what not–and it’s probably in our best interests to obey those intuitions, unless common sense or hard life lessons teach us otherwise.
But arbitrariness of existence, that I can relate to.
There are a couple of excerpts I’d like to share, that actually have more to do with Sartre than with anything Firefly related:
First, there is the idea that everything is contingent. Anything that exists might not have… Moreover, if this is true of every individual object, it is true of the universe as a whole.
This… THIS is the scary thought I had running through my head in the fourth grade and never fully understood. For a long time, I thought I was simply overwhelmed by the concept of God, of the depths of eternity and infinity, and that was definitely part of it. But the really mortifying thought that kept me up at night (in the fourth grade! bummer, huh?) was what if eternity, infinity, God, or the universe simply didn’t exist? I tried to comprehend what it was like, imagining the whole universe imploding into a black nothingness (oddly, with fart-sounding special effects)… And part of me was even scared that, if I thought about it hard enough, it might come true.
Apparently, I’m not the first to feel this. Sartre’s character Roquentin–and presumably Sartre himself–felt it, too, and described this overwhelming feeling as “nausea”. Another nauseating observation is on the arbitrariness of choice. Though I do believe there are right and wrong choices, as I do believe in what meaning and order there is in life, I acknowledge that I have such freedom that I could choose to do the wrong thing.
This is disturbing–even frightening. Most of us don’t want our values to be arbitrary. In that case, it would seem, today helping others so that they flourish and are happy is “good,” but tomorrow, torturing them might be. This is why the realization of our complete freedom to make such choices can lead to feelings of disorientation. Sartre liked to compare it with the feeling of vertigo…
That I feel too, sometimes on an almost daily basis. You know that level of concern you have if you see a woman walking through a dimly lit parking lot, or a kid running around unattended in a public place? That concern that something bad could happen, that the woman could get mugged or that the child could get abducted? Take that to the next level… Imagine yourself being the mugger or the abductor. Think about how easily you could do ill, how completely some people put their lives or others’ lives in your hands, if only you were the type of person to choose to do the wrong thing.
Vertigo is an apt description of that feeling. Actually, nausea works for this too, as my reaction is usually twofold: disgust first for the stupid people putting themselves in precarious situations, and disgust for the people who actually DO those wrong things. Disgust because here I am, knowing that I always have the freedom of choice, and always choosing the good action, and yet I’m the one worrying about this crap while many, many of those people hide behind the excuse that they’re desperate or “have issues”. Yes, I know that there are people with serious mental problems, and others who commit crimes out of desperation, but I still believe there are considerably fewer people who actually own up to their accountability than those that could.
Well, I’ve gotten tangential, so I think I’ll wrap it up for now. I suspect most have tuned out by now anyhow, but I hope I’ve offered a few of my friends some food for thought regarding existentialism, and also hope I haven’t transferred over to them any of the negative baggage that comes with it. I’ll wrap with a quote from Neitzsche, which is always cool, right?
He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.