The Life and Times of Justin Vickers

It’s late and I’m not going to do much with this, but there were two more things that came out of Be Kind Rewind that I thought I don’t want to forget to write about.

1. There’s talk about Gondry stealing the idea from the movie from a Nickelodean show. This is the kind of stuff that we’ve been talking about in property and it’s a subject that I’ve found interesting for a while. There are lots of questions about what the law should be, how morally obligated we are, and what standards ought to apply when inspiration comes from somewhere other than Heaven. Since inspiration rarely, if ever, comes from Heaven, the task is difficult. I personally come out on the less restriction side of things. Even if Gondry did get his idea from the show (although as I noted in my previous post this is an idea every ten year old has), I don’t think it matters one bit. If he’s aware that he got the idea from the show (he was watching Nickelodean and said, “That’s a great idea; I bet I could do something interesting with it.”) then he should probably put a thank you in the credits. No money need exchange hands. If Nabakov can lift Lolita (something I fully condone), Gondry can lift from The Amanda Show.

2. A big chunk of Be Kind Rewind is about rewriting the biography of Fats Waller. The characters eventually make a film about how Fats grew up in Passaic and how his family was killed in a gang battle and how he broke the scale as a child. All of this is untrue and the town knows it, but it doesn’t matter. This brings up big questions about why we put a premium on truth and what the obligations of artists who purport to tell the truth have to their audience. I don’t really know the answer, but here I tend to lean towards not caring so much about the truth in lots of these circumstances. Do I really think that Bob Dylan’s autobiography is really going to be completely truthful with regards to the facts? No. I expect that he’ll tell a great story that is emotionally true, but the facts will often not be right. This is in part unavoidable due to our incredibly imperfect memories(this is the best show on the radio, FYI). But he’ll also embellish, and I think that’s OK. It’s hard for me to know why we demand truth all the time.

These are just two things floating around in my head and my generally view. I’ll try and write more in the future, but in the mean time please feel free to correct me before I go too far down the wrong road.

Last night some of us went to see the new Michel Gondry film, Be Kind Rewind. At its most superficial level the film does what Gondry’s films always do: play out childhood fantasies of making movies with stuff we all have lying around. Here Gondry’s stand-ins, three people in a small city outside New York, literally make the kind of movies ten year-old Justin wanted to make. No one in my neighborhood had a movie camera, but I organized plays based on my favorite movies. My favorite gag came from our remake of Home Alone. I rigged up comic books with string so that they could fall over the eyes of the burglars. There’s lots of fun to be had just watching Gondry make grown-up versions of children versions of grown-up films.

But really Be Kind Rewind is about community. The reviews, which have been positive but nothing to write home about, have largely missed this fact. I guess it’s not a surprise that people whose lives revolve around watching films with flashlight pens in preview screenings would say Gondry’s latest is a ” somewhat precious celebration of DIY filmmaking and cult-film consumption.” The only problem is that there aren’t any cult-films here. The remakes by the three entruepeurs and eventually the entire town, are of Hollywood favorites like Ghost Busters, The Lion King, and Driving Miss Daisy (with Morgan Freeman playing a character playing his role in a remake of the original; meta is betta’). The films are something for the community to come together over. I feel stupid writing this because the theme isn’t exactly subtle.

Gondry made a hilarious feel-good movie that really wants us to get along. He wants people to create as a group. He wants more local theatre. It doesn’t matter if the art is good; it only matters that we made it together. This is powerful, revolutionary stuff.

I’ll also note that this has to be one of the most racially integrated films in recent American cinematic history. The film takes place in Passaic, New Jersey and as far as I can tell it was shot mostly in town with lots of non-professional actors. Wikipedia has this to say about the demographics of Passaic:

“As of the census of 2000, there were 67,861 people, 19,458 households, and 14,457 families residing in the city of Passaic, New Jersey. The population density was 21,804.7 people per square mile (8,424.8/km²). There were 20,194 housing units at an average density of 6,488.6/sq mi (2,507.1/km²). The racial makeup of the city was 35.43% White, 13.83% African American, 0.78% Native American, 5.51% Asian 0.04% Pacific Islander, 39.36% from other races, and 5.04% from two or more races. The cultural groupings for Hispanic or Latino of any race were 62.46% of the population. Passaic is also known for its Ukrainian enclave.”

There’s no talk about this in the film. If it’s a statement it’s not explicit. There aren’t any racial stereotypes (though the villains all appear as white out-of-towners). I can’t think of a film where race is so prevalent and yet so not an issue. Like I said, this is a movie about how important community is, and communities aren’t homogeneous, nor are they always about schisms. They’re most often about living together and, if in a perfect world, being together. The gimmick is what made me want to see the movie, but the spirit of people creating together and finding each other by laughing together made me love the movie. I need to write about how much I dig contemporary fairy tales, but in the mean time, go see this movie, then grab a friend, go here, and do an assignment together.

I’m a little behind on the Iron & Wine scene. I got his first album when it was all the rage and I’ve heard his album with Calexico, but I was never blown away. But I just listened to the first track on last year’s The Shepard’s Dog and my jaw hit the floor. It’s been a long time since a recording blew me away with virtuosity alone. It was produced by Brian Deck, who also produced maybe the best record of 2000, Modest Mouse’s The Moon and Antartica (Ben and I spent a long time talking about this record our first year of college and we eventually agreed that, if nothing else, it has one of the best opening/closing line pairings in rock history: It starts with “Everything that keeps us together is falling apart” and ends with “[Human beings] ain’t nothing but water and shit” (which only transcendent in the context of the album)). That was a great sounding record, but the stuff happening on “Pagan Angel and a Borrowed Car” is a huge step forward. When you start to track the timbres and rhythms and the way things come in and out of the mix, it seems like it should be chaos. There’s a vibe and cello and then a piano and then a sound I can’t identify; things are backward things; a bass note comes in for one beat. Somehow Beam and Deck and engineer Colin Studebaker have done something truly incredible. The tune is pretty good on its own, Beam sounds more like a contemporary Nick Drake than ever, but you need to hear this recording. Right now. Seriously.

Beki sent me an interesting article about a guy, Dr. Ben Barres, she is trying to get to present at her program.  The short of it is that he’s a transsexual who spent most of his carreer as a leading scientist as a woman.  He got a sex change nine years ago, giving a unique perspective on how gender affects you as a scientist.

Pinker comes off as ridiculous.  It’s hard to know what he’s is looking for.  While it strikes me as absurd to suggest that the disparities amongst men and women’s cognitive abilities accounts for most of the differences in professions, you don’t even need get to that debate to understand why Pinker sounds like a fool.  A cognitive difference doesn’t change the social situation that women are put into in the sciences; it doesn’t help the woman who has whatever aptitude Pinker thinks makes people good at science become accepted as an equal or superior in the field.  Of course, it’s hard to imagine that he, as someone who, based on his sex, is in a field that women are “better” at, had any difficulty getting a job or being taken seriously because of his sex.  Had he been in the situation his ideas on the subject might be a bit more nuanced, which is what makes Barres’ perspective so valuable.

Note Lawrence’s thoughts on pushiness: But even as he played down the role of sexism, Lawrence said the “rat race” in science is skewed in favor of pushy, aggressive people — most of whom, he said, happen to be men.

There is a study that I don’t have the time to track down, but in it they had a male actor and female actor read the exact same script in the setting of asking for a raise.  The language was the same.  The intonation was the same.  Everything was the same except the sex of the speaker.  At an incredibly high rate, male and female viewers afterward said that the man was assertive and knew what he wanted, but the woman was a bitch.   With this in mind, ask your friends and family, supporters or not, what they think of Clinton’s attitude.

*Disclaimer: I don’t care about either of the political figures in the title.  By the time the Florida primary rolled around my horses weren’t even in the race.*

I’ve been surprised to find that most of my peers view all human action as a series of calculations based on “self-interest.” The difficulty with any kind of big topic like this one is that each party needs to use the words the same way, but in order to do that you have to understand where each party is coming from. It’s a chicken or the egg problem that can’t be solved without diving in and fixing confusions as they pop out.

But as I understand the basic argument, it goes something like the following: “Whenever I make a decision I consider what effects it will have on me. These effects might be direct (I get hurt) or indirect (it will make others get hurt and that makes me feel bad). They might be short term or long term. It often comes down to choosing not between things that make me happy or sad, but things that make me more happy or less sad. People make mistakes about this stuff, but their intention is, in the end, about improving their lives; anything thing else is incidental.” There are bunch of words there that need defining to really figure out what’s going on, but I think I can work with any reasonable understanding of the words for the idea I’ll present…

here. There are lots of problems with the above argument (contrary to the facts; makes little sense on a biological or social evolution scale), but what strikes me as most interesting and disturbing is that it requires reductionism that don’t find to be in line with experience. In any hard decision there will be a multitude of considerations: How will this make me feel today? Tomorrow? Ten years from now? On my death bed? (This points to another problem with the idea of “self-interest” because what time of self-interest needs to be asked) How will this effect my environment? My loved one’s environment? What do my abstract beliefs and morals say about this? What are my obligations? (Proponents would likely describe obligations in terms of efficient breach (the punishment for breach isn’t as bad as keeping the obligation), but experience would suggest otherwise)

The self-interest model would have one consideration to rule them all in the form of net benefit (though “net when?” makes even this consideration impossible to pin down). But I want to suggest that this isn’t about a hierarchy. Rather, these considerations often run parallel. I weigh my self-interest (what will make me the least unhappy) along with my social obligations. Daniel Dennett claims that, “The best way to seem altruistic is to be.” Why do we think that our feelings of obligation are based on feeling good about being good? Why can’t we just be good? That seems to be the simpler explanation; the one that matches up best with experience.

I don’t really know what to make of this stuff, but the reductionist model doesn’t make much sense to me.  Explanations are, as always, welcome.

It’s like they don’t have a mind.  I doubt writers have such a different experience of thought than I do.  So why do they always write mind reading like we all narrate our lives in one stream of thought.

Now, I narrate to myself more than most.  I had a rich imaginary world as a child and rather than grow out of those creations I’ve just lumped them together and jammed them back in my head.  My most analytical thoughts, the ones I use to work through tough logical problems and to formulate coherent things to say, come in the form of  a dialog in my head; a question and answer session.  But that’s just one layer of thought.  While I’m having that conversation in my head I’m also thinking about other stuff, but it’s less linguistic; more like fragments.  And below that there’s a layer of thought even more abstract.  At this point I don’t even know that I’m thinking about something till after I’ve done it.  It’s like my thoughts are daydreaming.  And deeper still there’s awareness that shades into unconsciousness.  Then there’s the subconscious (or so I’m told), where I’m making decisions and connections that “I” can’t express.  And then there’s the completely unconscious stuff like breathing and keeping my heart beating; I don’t know if this stuff is thought.  So if you were to read my mind, you wouldn’t hear a voice narrating beliefs and plans, but layers of voices and feelings.  It doesn’t make any sense to think about it as a linguistic stream.  Even the greats like Woolf couldn’t get it right.  She did well with getting the experience down, and that’s all she had to do.  But science fiction writers have to produce art and ideas.  They have to have the guts to play with the implications of reading thoughts that aren’t single narratives.  And it’s not as simple as quickly moving from one topic to another (leave that to the greats and they’ll give you the experience).  It’s much more interesting.  I don’t know how to do it.  So I’m throwing down the gauntlet.

I’ve come to this topic because we’ve been talking about actus rea “guilty act” and mens rea “guilty mind” in property.  The courts have a pre-twentieth understanding of how intent and beliefs and consciousness works.  They are stuck with the idea that we only have binary thoughts.  We either intend to do something or we don’t.  This sets up all kinds of tricky stuff having to do with unconsciousness, guilt, and deterrence.  It assumes all sorts of things about what makes a person a person and why we act the way we do.  I don’t know what makes us people and why we do what we do, but I know from plain introspection that it often isn’t either/or.  Somehow the courts are still thinking Descartes when the should be thinking Dennet.  Now, I know the law is conservative, but it’s been over a hundred years since The Interpretation of Dreams, you’d think my profession could start to catch up.

It was a long weekend.  My draft for my brief is due tomorrow; I got whatever nastiness has been floating around Emory for the past couple of weeks (though luckily it’s not as bad as it was for others (knock on wood)); it was gorgeous all weekend and I spent most of it inside looking out.

I walked to Falafel King for some ramen yesterday and took in one of the finer afternoons in several months.  The sky was as almost as blue as Sarasota this time of year and, while it was a little too brisk for my taste, the breeze made my skin tingle and cleared my head, fuzzy from virus and considerations of copyright infringement.  I had the knew k.d. lang album bumping and everything seemed OK for about 45 minutes.  Walking along a pretty stretch of Emory’s campus, a church on my left and some woods and small canyon on my right, I took a deep breath and was stunned by the absence of salt and the smell of mud and bird droppings and sea creatures left by the tide.  It was like stepping up to stair that isn’t there.  My body was ready for Florida, but all it got was Georgia.

I’ve had this experience quite a bit since I left Sarasota/St Pete for China and then New Mexico and then Georgia.  Two years ago would find me spending a February Saturday at the beach, swimming, wading, or sailing.  I could walk from my house to an empty beach with, waist-deep one of the finest views in the country.  Everything about me is keyed to this weather leading to sand and salt and all I can come up with are leafless trees and the sound of a nice breeze.

The best days in Jinhua had this feeling, but they were few and far between.  Atlanta is a step up.  New Mexico was incredible, but it lacked water and salt and fish.  You can take the boy out of Florida but you can’t take the Florida out of the boy?  True enough.

Today was a bit windier, but even bluer.  I took a break getting toward sunset and walked to forest/lake on campus.  I can’t find the name of it right now, but I’ll write it down when I can.  It’s a beautiful area.  You can only get in on foot.  You go from a busy rush hour traffic to silence except for the train that runs just outside the preserve.  It’s trees everywhere until you hit a small lake.  The weather hasn’t been great lately, so I haven’t been there this semester, but it was lovely today.  It’s a bit of a bowl, so there was no wind, just a light breeze.  The light was splendid at 5:30 and there were lots of people walking and jogging and playing with their dogs.  A fat Labrador here, a swimming mutt there.  Through the leafless trees you could see loads of bird nests.  It was quiet except for the sound of feet in the leaves and wind in the trees and on the water.  It’s the only place that I can sit by water and just look, which often all I really want out of life.  I can’t wait for Spring.

If you ever have the chance to see a performance at Emerson Concert Hall at the Schwartz Center for Performing Arts at Emory University, take it. It’s an incredible space and I’m a fool for not having seen/heard anything there until Friday night. But what an introduction.

The last time I went to a performance at a university concert hall was in China, and while that experience was memorable and valuable (someday you’ll read about in the New Yorker if I ever learn to write; there’ll be a doodle of mouse stealing cheese somewhere in the margins), it didn’t deliver on the music. But Friday night had the privilege of seeing one of the great living jazz composers (he’s written eight standards!), players, and arrangers. I’ve heard Benny Golson on a few recordings and I’m a huge fan of I Remember Clifford and Five Spot After Dark, but I hadn’t ever paid much attention to his playing. He’s amazing.

He was backed by Gary Motley, who I had no idea teaches at Emory?!, and a trio rounded out by Paul Keller on bass (who is my new favorite bass player for the next few months) and Pete Siers on drums (also great, but it’s hard to compete with the other three in that context and I haven’t heard anything else by him so I can’t trumpet him as much).

The Hall is understated and beautiful. It seats about 800 people and features a fantastic looking organ (I need to hear it and I need to hear it soon). The sound is incredible. Probably the best sounding room I’ve ever been in. Seats were comfortable and everyone was really excited about the music. The trio came on first and broke into a nice opener to get the crowed warmed up (I’m going to have a hard time remember tunes three days out and a poor memory to begin with). Motley looks and sounds like Oscar Peterson. I’ve always liked his sound, but seeing him live, so cool and collected was just awesome. He’s not flashy. He looks like he just stumbled on a piano and is idling away a few minutes before moving onto his next engagement. But the sound!

After the first tune Golson came out and started right in with the stories. He went roughly chronologically through his career/life. He would play a tune and then tell a story and then play a tune. We got to here about the first time he heard an 18 year-old Coltrane play On the Sunny Side of the Street in his living room. Then they played Mr. P.C. Golson doesn’t sound a bit like Coltrane, but he sure can play. His town is great, breathy when it needs to be and clear when he’s really swinging. He told stories about Dizzy and Davis and introduced I Remember Clifford with a heartbreaking story about the day he learned from somebody on a hot Harlem day that Brown had died. You got the impression that Golson thinks Brown might have changed jazz as we knew it had he lived past 25.

There was a big guy sitting in front of me who was really into everything. He almost jumped out of his seat when they start playing Mr. P.C. By the end of it he was sweating and fanning himself with the program. Then the story about Brown came and cried out every time Golson would say what a loss it was. By the end of the heart-wrenching opening solo of I Remember Clifford he was weeping. I was choked up myself, but he was almost inconsolable. No assesment of what this means about the power of Golson and the community is necessary.

Eventually Golson left the stage and the trio launched into, of all things, Night Train. It’s traditionally, as Golson put it before he walked off, a throw-away tune, perhaps most famous for it’s moment in Back to the Future. But in the hands of this trio is was something startling and funny and virtuosic. Motley played the principle tune with all ten fingers. Keller played one of the funniest, most inventive bass solos I’ve had the pleasure of seeing. And as a band they created something completely new out of the throw-away tune.

And that’s how the whole evening went. Ninety minutes of making old tunes new. Golson told his stories from the good old days, but the music was nothing that had every been played before. That’s the magic of jazz: you never get the same thing twice.