2008.12.18

Do you ever wonder if you have been born onto the right planet? I mean, wonder after having survived the angst ridden teen years of egoistic bravura meant to mask the feelings of loneliness that hit us when we become aware that life's an inevitable quick step to dancing with the worms?

I am well aware that I am an oddball on this planet. But every once and while — usually after having forgotten my out-of-placeness for a while — the breadth of my perversity is reaffirmed. This happened the other day. By chance (or a strange twist of fate, if you want it to appear more ponderous and gothic) I happened upon a movie via my new digital TV package called 'Committed.' This was released in 2000 and stars Heather Graham and an excellent supporting cast. I had no recollection, not even an inkling, of this movie from promos or reviews or word of mouth. So I went into it with blind curiosity.

   

I remember reading, many years ago, a journalist who commented on the value of watching movies without having them contaminated by the pre-judgement of reviews or the false shill of the promos. And I have found from experience that he is absolutely correct — watching movies without any sort of expectation, good or bad, allows for a freer and closer experience between me and the film. I highly recommend that you try it. And this seems to be the single most common source of the critics' negative reaction to the film: it failed to meet expectations of it being a comedy, or a slice of life, or character driven. I had no expectation about the film, and so it was comedic — I laughed several time — without being a comedy because the humour was mostly infused into the film; it was about a person, but so eccentric that it wasn't slice of life; it was about a character, but the character was so intelligently optimistic and trusting of her instinct to life, that it wasn't the angst-driven sentimental melodrama so typical of American 'serious' film — as I wrote that I realized that writer/director Lisa Krueger managed to poke fun at this schlock American sentimentality in the husband! And very cleverly too! And Krueger was able to keep the cloyingly sentimental ending from the screen, when the wayward, not prodigal, husband returned with his tail shrunk between his legs. Bravo, Ms. Krueger, bravo! (Now I will be watching this film again — I looked for it in my nearby all in one super-type store, but to no avail.)

Anyway, without having expectations, 'Committed' exceeded them in a delightfully quirky way. And I found Graham, of whose oeuvre I am almost completely ignorant, capable of a very nuanced performance in a role that could easily have been a flat-lined caricature. I loved how subtly but completely she was able to portray and convey intelligent awareness of her committable commitment to honouring her words and actions — she knew that in keeping her word with a band, or friends, or husband that she was setting herself up to ridicule and/or disappointment in a world that was unable to honour commitment in the way she was able to do. But even with that strength, she was fully connected to humanity, and embraced with a fully committed heart their frailty and failures. The character of Joline was amazingly well acted, and I left the film surprised that I had no recollection of awards nominations for it. Okay, not that surprised, as the American awards go to women in 'serious' roles, filled with angst and the proper amount of nudity, which this film did not have.

 

The writing was deft, too. Joline was human — she smashed her husband's car window, stuffed a banana in his girlfriend's gas tank when that truth hit her. But she holds herself to high standards, and after lapsing to mere mortality here and earlier, she returned to the essence of her strength after taking a deep breath of her inner daemon. All the other characters were kept from being cartoons, too, with very able writing, direction and acting.

  

And here I admit to being a bit of a soft touch for eccentric characters who manage their peculiarities while remaining honest and true to themselves as they move through the minefield of what comprises 'proper' societal behaviour and 'acceptable' interpersonal discourse. So, if people must conform to normality in your world, then this film will not be to your liking. And that was, it seems, one of the threads in the critiques.

  

And I am always a sucker for a good play on words when it raises questions of human behaviour and ethical/philosophical values. Until this movie I hadn't made the emotional connection between being committed (to a cause or honesty or something) and being committed (to an insane asylum). At what point does one's commitment to a personal sense of truth and action in life become a one way ticket to insanity? This sounds like a simple question, or one that is easily dismissed as being rhetorical. But is it? And yet few of the critics — I think maybe two of those I read, commented on this aspect of the film either directly or indirectly. I was so impressed with the movie, and with being surprised that I hadn't the smallest hint of a recollection of it, that I went web trawling to see what others had to say about it. I was surprised that it was largely panned. At IMDb it rates 5.1/10 after 1600+ votes; and at Tomatoes it gets only 46% approval!

I am from a different planet.  And now I will have to make a point of watching films with Graham or Kueger's names attached.  Out of curiosity. Maybe, just maybe, they are from a different planet too.

2008.12.16

What is the purpose of proper education? Or maybe the question is best phrased, 'What is the proper purpose of eduction?'

  

Is the purpose of education to train the individual to be an agent of the society within which s/he finds him/herself? Or is it to train the individual to be an agent of individuated thought and change? The former would be a form of propaganda while the latter that of rebellion. The former is that which propagates a stable and hale society, and the latter that which creates revolution and rejuvenation.

It seems to me that both are required, even while each might abhor the existence of the other and can't be seen together!

Philosophers and thinkers have wrestled with this across the ages.  For example, Aristotle was definitely on the side of stability:

No one will doubt that the legislator should direct his attention above all to the education of youth, or that the neglect of education does harm to states. The citizen should be moulded to suit the form of government under which he lives. For each government has a peculiar character which originally formed and which continues to preserve it. The character of democracy creates democracy, and the character of oligarchy creates oligarchy; and always the better the character, the better the government (The Politics, Book VIII 'On Education' Tr. by Jowett).

Socrates was, if not on the side of the individual, then on the side of the individual questioning the truth of the state. His advocacy of knowing oneself is antithetical to Aristotle's averred purposes of education, and very likely contributed to Socrates being executed by a state that was in a state of trying to stabilize social turmoil and political change.

I have been wrestling with this question for many years, but it has lately come back into immediate focus. That is why, in part, I am reading Aristotle and Epictetus and Socrates at this time.

 

For pecuniary reasons, and a lack of passion for it, I aborted my post grade school university training after two years. I returned to it, several years later, completing a perverse degree in General Studies around the age of thirty-four. A lot of reading went on between when I started university and when I finished I had crossed between twelve departments.

On my return to school it struck me that the young who were sitting in front of the professors were like acolytes in front of a voice of God. This was especially evident in the department of Economics, where with my book knowledge and life experience — limited though it was — I was able to question the economic truths being disseminated. Both the profs and the tutorial aides brooked no questioning of their gospels. Like pre-economic collapse Alan Greenspan of the US Federal Reserve, their belief in the mathematical ideals of economics was absolute.

Is that the purpose of education? To teach unshakeable beliefs in (transient) truths? Or is it to teach that everything is relative, and truth a holy grail lost behind veils of ideological smoke and mirrors?

Or is there a tertium quid, a purpose to education other than these?

  

2008.12.14

New Westminster.  5 p.m. 

I'm sitting upstairs wondering what to write.

  

It is cold outside and my wife has fallen asleep in the chair nearby, in front of the warming fire place that is mantled with creative Santa figures. The small Christmas tree across from me is magazine beautiful. I'm listening to the time shifted broadcast of CBCRadio2's Gregory Charles' 'Secret' theme. This has been a delightful broadcast of music and curiosities. Right now he is talking about ancient philosophers who posited that the universe has a secret melody.  

This, my first blog, and me, a gassy jack stuck without words to write. I have always found it easier to castigate others for their inanity and stupidity than to step out into a word world  of my own verbalized thinking and, perhaps, ideology. And so I have been struggling to move my fingers across this keyboard.    

  

And it struck me that life seems to have taken me in full circle. As a child and young man I said little as I read my way through libraries and used book stores. At some point I entered an age of obstreperously whined opinion. And now, in the age of the blog, I am feeling mute. Muted.  Dumbed by the weight of the googolplex of history's worded ideas.  Funny.

  

I have mixed feelings about blogs/blogging.  Here's a partial list of why:

  

1. I've read enough to know that in humanity's literate history, everything that can be said already has been. That is not, of course, ever going to stop us from egoistically spewing words fraught with hoped for creativity and/or import and/or transformative angst. (And even all that has been said before!  But thank not the stars above, but himself that Shakespeare didn't let fear of repetition stop him from writing!) 

2. Nor will that truth(?) stop the quasi- and business-educated from thinking that humanity is significantly different from our forebears because we abide in a blu-toothed age of text messaged blogs.  Our general ignorance of the lessons great literature and history does not mean that their trite truths are now discountable because we can either google or wikinize them.

3.  And, while I'm not a big blog peruser, many of the blogs I have read degenerated quickly into largely illiterate personal attacks and other puerile silliness. How will this one fair?

  

4.  And with the microchipped/web-world we are as awash in words as we are in radio waves. Our words have become so rife that they now look like TV-snow or, perhaps, a flakes of ash falling from a forest fire stained sky.  

Blogs seem to be a component, along with text messaging and e.mail, of what might be the next significant evolutionary change to literate language and communication. Literate language is returning to orality, but one that is quirkily morphed from the written word. And it appears that I have taken the leap, and will be blogging myself to death, in this evolutionary step in human communications.  (It sounds like / looks like it is time to continue my communications studies.)  

Ah well. You can now see my hypocrisy.  I start by writing that I am dumb and unable to find words to write.  But now I have written a bunch, with more to come.  And more, and more, and more….  And, nothing new to say, to the world.  But, perhaps, just maybe, something new to me to explore and discover.

10:16 p.m. Good night.