Month: May 2012

Three sentence movie reviews: Death at a funeral

I took a chance* that this movie would not have poop in it and brought it over to watch with my mom on Mother’s Day.  Alas, there was a poop scene, but there was enough funny in this movie to overlook it, at least for me.  I’ve never heard an actor with such excellent comic timing while reading a eulogy.

*possible web site to be developed:  movies reviewed for poop content.

Sam Adams Political Cartoon

Just as the election of Bill Clinton my Senior year of high school (he was the first president I voted for!) and the eight years of politics that followed shaped me, so did the election of Sam Adams.  Before Sam Adams was elected I described him as “a politician for the right reasons.”  Not long after he was sworn in I, along with the rest of Portland, found out that I was wrong and that Sam Adams was a politician to feed his ego more than anything else.  Four years of a mayor with no political clout followed, which was a great disappointment, not to mention a complete waste of time.  This political cartoon by Jack Ohman will probably not be funny to anyone not familiar with Adam’s political career, but it manages to sum up the last four years in a nutshell.  I laughed reading it, but it was a laugh full of dark humor.
 
 
 
 

Illiterate

I was a history major in college, which is a great major if
you want to be interested in your subject and do well in trivia games for the rest of your life.  It’s not a good major for actually working in
your field.  After graduating, I went off
in the world and was astounded at the amount of Americans I encountered who don’t
know basic US History, let alone European History, let alone World
History.  I’ll never forget the time some
coworkers and I were listening to the song “All That Jazz” from the musical Chicago.  There’s a line in the song where the singer
says, “I bet you Lucky Lindy never flew so high.”  This flummoxed my coworkers.
“Who the heck is Lucky Lindy?” one of them asked the
other.  She shrugged.
“Charles Lindbergh.” I called over.
“Who?” they both said in chorus.
“Charles Lindbergh.” I repeated, to confused stares.  “You know, the guy who was the first man to
fly a plane solo across the Atlantic?” 
Nothing.  I switched to tabloid
media history.  “The guy whose son was
kidnapped from his bedroom, was missing for a while and eventually found
dead?”  Nothing.  I could have gone on about his support for
fascism during WWII, or his wife the poet, but clearly they had never heard of
the man.
Encounters like this are not rare in our country.  In fact, about every five years, someone
publishes a newspaper article and or book about the massive gaps, or complete illiteracy in
the historical realm.  I find American’s
disinterest in history odd as I see history as made up of interesting stories
and stories are the things that we consume in the form of TV shows and movies,
but that’s a topic for another day.
Because lately, I’ve been getting the creeping sensation
that I too, am illiterate. 
It started with the Vlogbrothers Crash Course.  The Vlogbrothers make weekly videos about
whatever interests them.  Last fall, they
started a new series of ten-minute videos with John taking Western Civ and Hank
teaching Biology.  I was ready to watch,
glad to review Western Civ—a course I took in high school and college—and shore
up my biology, a class I avoided both for the dissection of frog and for the
finger prick blood type lesson.
It was interesting to note my differing reactions to each
subject.  With the history course I nodded along. “Yep.  Yep. Oh,
interesting, I had no idea. Yep.”  If the
history course was a review, the biology course was wandering far into the
unknown.  “Huh?  What? 
Wait, what was that word? ” Aside
from the “historic scientist” segments, I didn’t follow much. I’d like to say
that I buckled down,  watched the videos
again, memorized the vocabulary and finally learned all that biology I’d
missed.  But I didn’t.  I just stopped watching.  Without the base of knowledge, I couldn’t
find the topic interesting.  And since
there was no grade attached to the outcome, I didn’t bother to acquire the
basic knowledge to know if I enjoyed the subject.
My realization about illiteracy continued with a letter to
the editor about composting.  Portland
had recently adopted a residential composting system which delighted me and
made a lot of people very angry.  One of
the reasons cited by the city for the adoption of the food composting system is that food
waste thrown away with other trash makes methane.  A letter writer pointed out that the food
waste either made methane with the regular garbage or while being composted, so why do we
have to go through trouble of composting? 
I think that he’s wrong, that food waste composted makes something other
than methane, but I don’t have any idea of going about finding the answer.  Except perhaps the handy google search:  “Does food composting make methane?” [post first draft note:  I googled that phrase and found this article.  It did not answer my question. Ask Ashley had a better answer.]
So I’m a bit dumb in science.  I see this as a bad thing, because it has
closed off careers to me. For instance, there was a brief period of interest in becoming a
civil engineer, but a quick look at the coursework squelched that.  There is a lot of soil science involved with
being a civil engineer.  But this lack of knowledge means I walk through the world not understanding things.  I’ve arranged my life so science is not a
part of it, but am I missing something? 
Do smart science people pity me the way I do people who don’t know the
great stories of history?
I feel like I was exposed to science as a child.  There was a period of intense interest in
Chemistry, mostly fueled by the coveting of a chemistry set I was too young to
have.  When I came of age, (10) I did perform
experiments with the set, but my enthusiasm waned in proportion to how dirty
the test tubes became (there was no test tube brush included with the set*) and
I wandered off. I also checked out books from the library of the “kids explore
science” variety and I did some exploring. 
But it didn’t seem to translate into interest in science as a
subject.  I preferred reading about young
scientists in my biography series about great young Americans.
The other thing that has happened to me is that science seems a
bit made up.  Because I don’t understand
it, I survived my five science classes in Junior High and High School by
memorizing things, nodding along as teachers explained things the same way I do when crazy people are talking to me.  Then they were
promptly forgotten.  So when I encounter
science today it seems rather magical.  I
can see why some people who did understand science back in the day used their knowledge to
perform “magic” for the masses.  I would
be nearly as amazed.
I will say that the subject of Geology seems very real to
me, as I can see it around me. But the science subject that does seem real to me is
also the topic I find the most incredibly boring topic in the universe.  I would rather look at actuary tables than
discuss Geology.  Except for a brief
visit to Yellowstone with someone who had taken a course in the Geology of
Yellowstone, any time someone brings up Geology I get a trapped, panicked
feeling and pray for them to stop talking quickly.
So what will happen with my science illiteracy?  I’m guessing not much will change.  I’m an adult and adults are good at paying
bills and saving for the future and having a better idea of who they are then
when they were 15, but learning new things from scratch is not a big thing
about being an adult.  Plus, most grown
up desire to learn about new things comes from interest, like say, learning to
play the stand-up bass at 50 when you’ve been thinking about it since you were
13, or taking riding lessons so you can finally have that pony.  Because science doesn’t interest me, I doubt
the status quo will change for me.  I
find this troubling, but not enough to do anything about it.
*The lack of a test tube brush frustrated me.  The instructions referred to one, but I was
supposed to procure one for myself. 
Where the heck is a ten-year-old supposed to find a test tube
brush?  And how is she to afford one once
she finds them?  The lack of access to a
test tube brush made the object grow in my mind to something rather fantastic.
When I took chemistry in high school** and encountered my first test tube brush
I felt a great letdown.  This little thing
was all it was?  And why did I never have
one?
**Admittedly, the whole of high school science may have
gotten off on the wrong foot simply because I refused to take Biology as a
sophomore as all sophomores did at my school and vaulted myself straight into
Junior-level Chemistry.  As a sophomore,
I was still developing high school study skills, which most of my classmates
had already probably mastered.  So when
we had to memorize the entire periodic table early on, I flailed and faltered
and it was downhill from there.

Update Satyricon space

So back in July 2011, I posted about the demolition of the building which was the home to Satyricon.  I’ve been watching the progress of the new building and today  it struck me as a very building-like, embryonic building, so I took a picture.  There were two guys in the top floor window, second from left, but one had wandered off by the time I got out my camera.

 

Three sentence movie reviews: Glee season 2 disk 2

Season two is pretty uneven, which was the word on the street before we even started watching this.  Matt even stopped watching for an episode or two before being sucked in again. This DVD will always have a warm spot in my heart for having the episode where Rachel writes a song about her hairband.

Three sentence movie reviews: The Avengers

I was a bit worried that there were too many characters for the plot, but it all came together nicely.  This was a funny and engrossing film, so much so that I was caught up and actually said, “God DAMN you Joss Whedon” rather loudly at a critical juncture.  And people like me, who always stay to the bitter end of the credits, do appreciate a reward at the end.

The past and my own future.

Saturday night, looking for something to do while watching a
four-hour version of Hamlet, I set to combing through my boxes of memorabilia,
shuffling through old bus passes and identification cards, sorting through
pictures, stacking letters, and dipping into and quickly flipping past the
pages of the journals and planners of my twenties.  I got a lot done.  The photos were shifted to a drawer, the
journals and planners tucked away in a different part of the house and the
letters relocated to one box.  Hamlet was
good too.  I found it engrossing in
places, though nowhere near as engrossing as I found my own past.
Saturday night I was astounded—though really shouldn’t have
been—to discover that the same two problems that come up repeatedly for me
today were front and center in the journals of my previous decade.  I also thought about a great many people that
wander through my synapses only in passing, and only now and then.  After sorting my past, I retreated to the
computer, where I teased out information about those same people. The
information I found astounded and excited me: a previous coworker runs a successful business overseas, a sister of a former friend is a florist, a
not-surprising, (but-still-incredible-to-me) number of my former classmates are
ecstatic about their children, and a person I always assumed to be gay is apparently
not.
On Sunday, I thought about all these people, imagining
myself in some of their places.  I worked
hard to stay in my own present, a skill I’ve been building for some time now,
with still no mastery in sight.  But my
mind zoomed around to various points in the past, to what I imagine other’s
futures are, and refused to settle anywhere near my own present.
On Monday, I hit a high. 
I was in a fabulous mood because I was
not in my twenties any longer. 
Though I still have far to go to be the person I strive to be, I had
seen a massive amount of evidence of how far I had come.  The two recurring problems?  They are clearly a part of me and something
to be happily integrated and not a point of weakness.  I felt ecstatic and light and liberated and
happier than I had been in a long time. 
Some part of my conscious nudged me that this wasn’t a good place either
and I had better pull back, but I was unable and unwilling to leave that
feeling.
Monday night I awoke and stayed awake for hours, thinking
about connections between people, the present, the departed and the long gone
and mostly forgotten.  I wanted to sleep,
to be rested for my day, but sleep eluded me as people from my past wandered
through my brain.
Tuesday I crashed. 
Groggy from lack of sleep, I woke up to my own, ordinary life.  A life that seemed less shimmering and
satisfying than the one I lived only the day before.  Thoughts of my past began to fade and my
present loomed before me, the same as it ever was.  I was exhausted.  I stumbled home from work and into bed,
desperate for rest and oblivion.  I
didn’t sleep very long, but I awoke feeling better and unsure what to do with
this episode.  Essay writing time called
and so I sat down and wrote.
Over the past few months I have experienced this cycle to
lesser degrees again and again.  I fixate
on something for a day or two and it becomes a way to ignore my present.  I think I have engaged in this
pattern for years, with the object generally being a book I can’t stop
reading.  I seem to struggle with the
monotony of day-to-day life.  The daily
shower, the finding of food, the keeping house, the daily grind of the
job.  I want to make these things
rituals, but I push them away, again and again. 
I chide the boyfriend for constantly living in the future or the past,
but I am guilty of escaping from my own present.
I’ve come a long way from the rampant poor choices of my
early adulthood.  I’ve managed to build a
solid relationship, a community of people, a steady income and a home I
love.  But I probably need to pay
attention to the times I still seek to escape all of these things.  This is what I learned this weekend.

Books read in April 2012

A lot of book group selections, reading projects and YA stuff here.

Read
Whiteout
Greg Rucka and Steve Lieber
Matt and I read aloud.
I wish I read the afterword before I read the book because in it Lieber discusses the various ways he used to depict the Antarctic.  That would have been interesting to observe while I was reading the book.

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children
Ransom Riggs (no really, that’s his name)
A great combination of good storytelling influenced by old photos.  It feels like there is probably a sequel coming, but this is still a good stand-alone book.

Rilla of Ingleside
L.M. Montgomery
I read the edition edited by Benjamin Lefebvre and Andrea McKenzie.  I had to special order it from Canada as American booksellers don’t have it yet.

I’ve now read all eight books in the Anne series, and I can say that this is by far the best one.  I liked the Anne books only somewhat as I found Montgomery strong on character and incredibly weak on plot in most of the books.  This, however, was an actual novel that was gripping to read.  Clearly World War I had a great impact on the author and she channeled her feelings into this novel, with great results.  It has such a clear plot, it could even be read without reading the other seven books in the series.

This edition also includes a handy glossary to define WWI era things that have gone out of our collective memory.  My favorite entry is “soup tureen.”  I figured people still knew what that was.  However, I saw one at the Goodwill the other day and asked Matt if he knew what it was and he did not.  Granted, he’s probably not the best representative as he continues to put “salad roaster” on shopping lists.

The Human Experiment: 2 years and 20 minutes inside Biosphere 2
Jayne Poynter
One of the crew of the initial Biosphere 2 mission tells her story.  This was interesting to read after reading Dreaming the Biosphere  as Poynter gives her view of the split that happened with the eight-man crew.  I also got a better picture of her work at Synergia Ranch and around the globe in various Synergian ventures.  Now to read the book written by the couple in the other faction.

Trask
Don Barry
Read for Kenton Book Group
This is a really fabulous early settler/Indian Oregon narrative that is also a gripping story. It’s slow to start (in fact, several people in the book group commented that it was a bit slow, but they liked it even though they hadn’t yet finished it.  Every single one of them had stopped around page 50) but picks up rapidly after that. The book included great characters, what I felt was a sympathetic portrayal of Oregon cost Indians circa 1840.  I’m not sure why this is not required reading in various high schools around Oregon, but it should be.

The Silent Boy
Lois Lowry
I grabbed this one day to read during lunch because I forgot my newspaper. It uses historic photographs to supplement the story.  Lowry is a darn good storyteller so this is a good story and with a non-standard character as it includes an Autistic boy in the early 20th century.  When I was younger, I never saw anything but “regular” children in the books I read, so I came away with the impression that people with cognitive disabilities didn’t exist except in the present.

The Magician’s Nephew
C.S. Lewis
And I’m off on another children’s series.  I can’t say I loved this book as it was fairly paternalistic, but it went quickly and had some memorable images, notably Jadis standing on top of the handsome cab whipping the poor horse through the streets of London.

Blue Pills
Read for Kenton Book Group
As mentioned several times before, the graphic novel is not my genre.  However, it was very nice to have a book group book I finished in about three days (rather than three weeks) and which explored an interesting topic.  Because the Kenton Book Group is made up primarily of people who don’t read graphic novels, we had quite a lively discussion, where I found myself championing the genre.  There’s some really great “early relationship” stuff in here and though the woman in the group who identifies herself as an artist said she would have given the author a bad grade because he couldn’t draw, I loved the art.

Happily, one member had never read any graphic novels before and was so taken with the genre he made it a priority to select another graphic novel for us to read next year.

Started and did not finish
Blackbringer
Lani Taylor
I like fantasy, I think.  But the I read something like this and wonder.  Do faeries (even somewhat bad-ass ones) sink the story for me?  Perhaps.

I want my MTV
Marks and Tannenbaum
This is the second book every which I have desired to read in some electronic format with internet connection (the first being 1Q84 because the darn thing was HEAVY.)  Reading this book, I greatly desired the internet as I was reading because I wanted to watch the videos as they discussed them.  Because watching videos while reading a paper copy involved me getting up out of my chair and booting up the laptop (which is chained up so I can’t bring it to my chair)I didn’t watch as many videos as I would want to.  Once I get that whole issue worked out, I will happily finish this book because it is FAN-TAS-TIC especially for me who came of age watching MTV during the time period the book covers (1981-1992)

The format is excerpts of interviews with people involved in MTV, the creation of the station, the VJs, the bands, the people making the videos.  It is very hard to stop reading, especially when you get multiple viewpoints of a single event.  This is pure delightful candy.