favorite spoons

Everybody has a favorite spoon to eat their cereal with in the morning. This is mine:

Some people use the spoon, wash and dry their bowl and spoon, and put them away to use again the next morning. In this way, they use their favorite spoon every day.


Some people use the spoon, then put the dish and spoon in the
dishwasher or in a pile of dirty dishes in the sink. When next they wash their dishes, they put everything away and use their favorite spoon the following morning. In this way, they use their favorite spoon whenever it happens to be clean. This is how I use my favorite spoon.

Some people let all their dishes stack up in the sink, or in the dishwasher until there is a full load, except for their favorite spoon, which they wash every morning, either immediately before or immediately after eating their cereal. In this way, they get to use their favorite spoon every day.

Some people use a different spoon every day of the week, and only occasionally use their favorite spoon to eat their cereal. In this way, using their favorite spoon becomes as a special occasion or a reward, and makes the spoon even more attractive.

Some people buy seven spoons exactly like their favorite spoon, use one every morning, and let them pile up in the sink or accumulate in the dishwasher. In this way, there is the appearance of using their favorite spoon every day, but very soon they lose track of which particular spoon was their favorite spoon in the first place, until eventually all the set of spoons becomes somewhat better than all other spoons, but not as good as the favorite spoon was originally.

Some people never use their favorite spoon. Just the fact that the spoon is in the silverware drawer and can be used at any time is enough. In this way, there is the constant anticipation of being able to use their favorite spoon, like Christmas eve, or being next in line for a roller coaster.

Some people take their favorite spoon and put it away in a safe deposit box at the bank. In this way they always know where to find their favorite spoon if, indeed, they ever want to use it for their cereal, and have the security and peace of mind in knowing that all their favorite and most valuable implements are safely locked away and can never be taken from them.

Some people remember their favorite spoon from when they were children, but which was tragically lost in a move from their childhood home. In this way, it makes no matter what spoon they use to eat their cereal in the morning; they will always be disappointed and full of resentment because it is not as it was when they were young. They could come into possession of a magic spoon made of clouds and fairy wings, that makes every bowl of cereal taste exactly as if it were milled in god's own cereal factory, and yet they would still scrunch their faces up and turn their mouths down, as if they were eating a bowl of ashes.

Some people give their favorite spoon to their children or their grandchildren.

For some people it doesn't matter which spoon they use to eat their cereal in the morning. It is always as their favorite spoon. In this way, they carry their favorite spoon around with them, wherever they may be, and whichever spoonish implement they happen to be using.

The Conversation

Just watched an interesting movie last night. I've been on a Francis Ford Coppola kick the past few weeks, so I picked up The Conversation; I had heard of it before, but not a lot; just that it was a minor classic that was well-known to cinophiles. The fact that it came out the same year as Godfather II must have something to do with its limited visibility. (though of course it was nominated for Best Picture that year, when Godfather II won, so what do I know?) Leonard Maltin called it one of the best movies of the 70s, however, high praise considering that decade is one of the golden ages of Hollywood cinema.

Gene Hackman plays Harry Caul, a surveillance expert who has been hired to record the conversation of a young couple walking around in a crowded San Francisco square. His mantra throughout the movie is "don't get involved"; he's not paid to care about who the people are or what they're talking about, or (most importantly) what might happen to them when their private conversations are heard by the people who pay him. All he cares about is making the best recording he can. It's part game and part obsession; he is interested in the challenge of figuring out how to make clean recordings without being discovered, but he is also obsessed with his own privacy, with always being The Watched instead of The Watcher.

Like any good piece of art, a discussion of this movie could go in any number of directions: questions of perspective and interpretation; the culpability of those who are 'just following orders' or 'just doing their jobs,' when the outcome of those actions lead to immoral acts; the unreliable narrator/protagonist, in this case one who descends further and further into delusional paranoia; even a Kafkaesque bureaucracy (mirroring the theme of personal responsibility) headed by a shadowy figure known only as "The Director." These are all interesting topics; a suitably inspired individual could write a book about this movie, with each of those themes composing its own chapter. For now I'm going to try to narrow in on the theme that I think is at the heart of the movie, that the other scenes eminate from, in a way.

The Conversation has often been compared to Hitchcock; it is a suspenseful psychological thriller in the vein of Vertigo (and one of its most famous scenes involves a large quantity of blood in an extremely white bathroom). One of the ways in which it most mirrors Hitchcock is the use of Watcher and Watched to represent movie audiences and (most specifically) movie directors. Hitchcock's two most widely acknowledged masterpieces are Vertigo and Rear Window, and both of them play extensively with this dynamic. Hitchcock called Vertigo his most autobiographical piece; it's a fascinating study in (among other things) controlling every aspect of a person; how they dress, move, speak...with being the director of a movie, in short.

The Conversation mirrors Hitchcock's themes most specifically in this way. (If you were to catch me in the right mood, I might even argue that the aesthetic choices that reflect Hitchcock's cinematography are included to point towards these more general thematic resonances.) Harry Caul is a perfect representation of the obsessive, reclusive filmmaker (Coppola himself?) who never wants to stand in front of the camera. His life is to create high quality recordings of other people, to pass on intimate details about their lives... but nobody in the movie knows anything about his own life and history, including the audience. The one scene in which we all (characters and audience) learn something of his history is also one that highlights his paranoia with being watched... this is an amazing, understated acting job by Hackman. We watch as he struggles to overcome his own paranoia and let himself be vulnerable, while at the same time realizing that, because of who he is and what he does, lowering his guard even for an instant will result in him compromising himself and his job.

Also of interest is the cast. A short list includes:

A VERY young Harrison Ford (five years before Star Wars), who still manages to turn in one of the most menacing performances of his career:

Robert Duvall and Teri Garr in what amount to cameo roles:

Cindy "Shirley" Williams:

And the old Coppola favorite, Fredo himself, John Cazale, second-billed to the master Gene Hackman:

The pacing is slow at times, and there's this mime who desperately needs to get his ass kicked (if you don't know why everyone hates mimes, this movie will show you), but overall it's an intriguing movie that works on a lot of levels. AND it's pretty funny to see what passed for high-technology surveillance equipment in 1974. Well worth a peep.

The Theory

Check it out, I wrote a guest blog for my friend Tara...

http://terrasplayground.blogspot.com/2006/04/theory.html

It's about a Theory that I've developed over the years. I won't go into it in detail here.

dum

It's always a good thing when the universe conspires to keep you humble. And by 'you,' of course, I mean 'me.'

Last night I finally sat down to do my taxes. Not the final possible hour, but pretty damn close. The IRS has gotten rid of telefile this year, which is the only way I've ever done my taxes before (tells you something about my financial portfolio, another good way the universe helps me stay humble). They have replaced it this year with free online filing. This is achieved through third party companies that work in partnership with the IRS (i.e., they make a deal with the devil) and file your taxes for you for free. So I choose the first company on the list, go through the rigamarole, answer all the questions, and click the "figure out my taxes" button. It kicks back that I am owed almost 6 grand (about $800 more than my total income tax paid last year).

So what went wrong? I'm still wondering about that. Now I have one day less to figure it out and get everything filed so I can collect my actual return... of course, there's that small part of me that wanted to push that button and see what happened. How quickly would the red lights flash and the claxons blare at IRS central were I to file that return? But the obvious issue with that idea is... if I'm too feeble to complete a free online tax filing service, with a single W2, no assets, and no dependents... why would I think I could outsmart the IRS? Like I said, it's good when the universe decides your ass is outgrowing your britches. I obviously needed to get knocked down a peg.

If only that were the end of the story...

Because today I went to dig out my sandles for the first time this year. I was going to walk down the street to the mailbox and return some Netflix movies (Godfather and Anchorman) and, since it was nice and sunny out, I decided it was time to grab the tevas from the back of the closet.

Okay, to complete this story effectively I actually need to give a little backstory here. At the beginning of the year, early January I guess, I lost a pair of boots. Yes, that's right... LOST BOOTS. I have always been a loser of things...sunglasses, jackets, books, hats... but this was the first time I'd ever lost something that you would almost invariably need to have with you when you left the place you brought them to. You'd have to get prrrretty wasted to wake up in the morning and say to yourself, "ah hell... where did I leave my shoes last night?" I was never that wasted so I didn't know what had happened. I checked through my entire apartment (it's a one bedroom, not a lot of places for a boot to hide), then I checked at my gym on the assumption that it was really the only place I could leave a pair of shoes (since it's the only place to which I bring a change of shoes). No luck. I called my friends who I had stayed with for a weekend at the end of December. No shoes for you. I gave up the ghost.

A quick aside to this aside: I LOVED those boots. Super comfy John Fluevogs that they don't even make anymore. The best pair of shoes I've ever owned, the perfect mix of style and utility... I was bummed to lose those boots.

Here, I'll show you:

They were this style:

And this color:

See how cool that is? The seamless front, but in the soft warm brown? Yeah, that's right... I owned the last pair of "Brown Angelic Chelseas" in the known world... and I lost them.

The worst part is that they were the warmest, most durable, most waterproof pair of shoes that I owned. And I walk two miles to and from work almost every day. I spent an entire Seattle winter wearing tennis shoes whenver I went outside.

I think you see where this is going. I dug out my sandles and found my boots. I SWEAR TO GOD I looked in the exact place I found them a dozen times when I first lost them. I access that particular cubbyhole in my closet literally daily.

It was just such a shock when I found them... feeling around in the back of the closet, rest my hand on one of them... the slow realization spreading over my body like sunshine... I remember the episode of The Tick (the old animated series, not the live-action one a few years back, starring Puddy from Seinfeld... seriously, when they gonna release the cartoon version on DVD? Sorry, too many asides to asides to asides here, I know) that featured the supervillian The Ottoman Empress... she controlled furniture, and was amassing an army of couches and tables to take over the world... the way she neutralized the Tick was to trap him in The World's Most Comfortable Chair, so he didn't care about fighting crime anymore... anyways, the point is, when this guy who had sat in the World's Most Comfortable Chair for something like 20 years but escaped gets caught in the chair again, he says, "Hello... old friend..." Which is a line I still use fairly often. Usually just in my own head, but whatever. It amuses me. And I said it to my boots today.

The funny thing is, I KNEW I was going to find those boots again. I went shopping several times determined to buy a new pair, but never found any that worked save one pair of Merrells... and they didn't have my size in any store in Western Washington. So I just had a feeling the Brown Angelic Chelseas would come back to me somehow. Little did I know, they never even left me.

So yeah, back-to-back days that the universe kicks me down a notch. How's that for a double-play? "Boy can't even do his taxes... then loses a pair of boots in his own 400 square foot apartment for four months." But honestly? I'm so stoked to get those boots back I don't care. They're tall boots, too, so even though I feel stupid I also feel taller than I have in months, which pretty much evens it all out. Oh yes, that's right. I'm wearing the boots right now. Surprised?

A Scanner Darkly

When I first saw the trailers for A Scanner Darkly, the new Richard Linklater movie, I became immediately geeked out. Linklater is one of my favorite filmmakers, and Waking Life one of my favorite of his films. To see that he was taking a Philip Dick novel (who is the subject of Linklater's monologue at the end of Waking Life... yes, that's Richard himself playing pinball) and treating it w/ the rotoscope effect that he used for Waking Life (and that is also used to great effect in Yellow Submarine, another of my favorites)... well, it seemed a benevolent group of people, who I didn't know but who obviously had great fondness for me, had gotten together to make a movie just for Jerod.

I decided I should read the novel first in preparation.

It was an interesting experience; good book, certainly, but one that left me conflicted. (Check out the Wikipedia entry for a great overview and discussion; as the site itself says, there are a lot of spoilers in the entry. I treated it like I do Cliff's Notes; perfect for augmenting the book itself, not so effective as a replacement.) It all made sense, however, as I researched a bit before writing this entry.

The thing that most confused me about the book was how completely dated it is. It is so obviously set in Dick's own milieu, the San Francisco Bay area in the late 60s/early 70s, but is well known as a futuristic sci-fi novel. Turns out it's because Dick didn't think he could successfully publish a non-sci-fi novel, so he had an editor assist him in moving the book forward a couple decades in some specific ways. The main setting of the book, however, is San Francisco during the height of the hippy era. The cover to the right, obviously from an early edition of the book, is the perfect representation of what I'm talking about... If there had been a DEA agent in The Village People, I think he'd have looked like that...

It seemed to me as I was reading that Dick was just suffering from the common ailment of artists who try to set their pieces in the future. (Most noticably authors and visual media creators. A perfect example is the Star Trek series; Captain Picard, for instance, is still a hero of the modernist school--believes that rational thought and discourse can solve any problem, that history is progressing linearly-- many millennia in the future.) All the characters still talk the same, think the same, act the same, as the people in the era in which the piece of art was created. In Scanner, they even still listen to the same music, drive the same cars (complete with 8-track tapes), and reference the same cultural icons. What actually happened was that Dick wrote a book about his direct experience, set it just far enough in the future to sell it as sci-fi, added a few invented gadgets to make it believably futuristic, and then planted little clues throughout to show the reader that it is indeed autobiography.

The thing about the book is that the themes are universal, which is the sign of any good work of art. I talked in a previous post about the idea of surveillance, about being watched constantly; in this context, it's the police/CIA/government who are the watchers. Like in 1984, there are real citizens who are "converted" to spies (interesting that Scanner is set exactly 10 years forward from that book...). The twist in Scanner is the idea that the individual himself is brainwashed in such a way that he actually spies on himself... initially just as part of the group that he has infiltrated, by reviewing videos from camaras planted in their home. But then, as the specific psychotropic aspects of the drug take hold more and more, the agent becomes less aware of his dual role (undercover agent vs. member of the surveyed) and actually begins to report on himself as a separate entity (his undercover role is unknown even to the bureau for which he works).

The means for this transformation is the drug that the narcs are trying to trace to its sources: Substance Death, Substance D... SD. The fact that it ruins the brain if abused extensively clearly links it to LSD. Also, SD is "Scanner Darkly," which refers to the means of surveillance used by the narcs.

In any case, the aspect of the book that really appealed to me was the religious/spiritual undercurrents (not surprising if you read my other blog entries). There is the obvious reference to the bible's "mirror darkly," but for me, the following line in particular--near the end of the book when it's revealed that Substance D is organic and the specific Latin term for the plant is named--stood out:

"Mors ontologica. Death of the spirit. The identity. The essential nature."

From the small amount I actually have studied Philip K. Dick, his life, his work, etc., I know that he ws a mystic, in the William Blake sense: someone who actually had direct conversations with a projected entity that, for lack of a better word, we call God. Much of Dick's work was inspired by revelatory experiences/visions. Much of his personal system of belief is based on the ideas of projected reality, the universal mind...check out this R Crumb representation for more details, it's fascinating...

This is in line with the mystical aspects of all religions. And the end goal of all these religions is exactly what is described in the quote above: death of the individual identity, the 'essential nature' that we cling to, which makes us think we are different, special, isolated from others, etc. Which, of course, lends a whole new layer to the many themes of the book. The major overriding emotion of the book is something like rageful regret, I think; anger and sorrow at all the people who have lost their lives or minds by abusing drugs such as LSD. But there is also something of the Timothy Leary in there, the idea that psychedelic drugs can be used to achieve the death of the ego that is aspired to...

I personally believe that psychedelic drugs are roadsigns, but that they are often mistaken for the end itself, or at least the path to the end. As I understand it, both through personal experience and study, the spiritual path is steep and fraught with challenges. The challenges become more and more difficult to overcome as you progress up the path (culminating, I suppose, with some version of being tortured, nailed to a wall, and then spending three days in metaphoric hell). But, also as I understand it, all of the potential, all of the revelations, everything we perceive and experience, is projected from our own mind. The individual mind that is part of the universal mind. There is that holy spark in each of us that we can kindle and grow until it expands out of our selves and affects others, joins us to them and spreads the fire.

So for me, drugs such as LSD are simply neon signs that remind us of the potential we all have in our own heads. The drug itself isn't doing anything but pointing out our own ability to reach other planes of existence. The MIND, not the drug, is the tool. The ways to enlightenment the sages have always discussed invariably include some form of intense meditation; just imagining that ingesting the drug by itself is all that is necessary to achieve what-we-may-as-well-call-heaven, without the requisite self-study, is a funamentally flawed concept, to my way of thinking.

So I'm even more excited about the movie now than ever. From what I can tell after reading the book, the casting is spot-on: Woody Harrelson as Luckman and Robert Downey as Barris are inspired, not only because they seem perfect for the roles but also because they're playing druggies... in fact, all of the cast choices seems to have a tongue-in-cheek metafictional quality. Choosing Keanu to play Arctor/Fred mirrors his role as Mr. Anderson/Neo, for example, and Winona Ryder as the beautiful but crazy female lead...

NEWS FLASH: I just discovered that Rory "Slater from Dazed and Confused" Cochrane is playing Freck, a minor but significant role in A Scanner Darkly!!! Glory be. I love Richard Linklater, heh. And he seems, without my prior knowledge, to love me, too.

Horoscopes and King Nasty

Business first: check out the latest horoscopes.

Now pleasure. I went to my first live Mariners' game of the season last night. Had to see Felix Hernandez's first start of the year. If you haven't heard of this guy, check it out. He's the hottest pitching prospect to come along in years... some would say decades. In all fairness I'd argue that he's the biggest TEENAGE prospect in decades, probably since Doc Gooden. Those two guys for the Cubs were plenty hyped, but not til they were in their early 20s. Here's hoping the careers of those three guys aren't any indication of what the future holds for young Senor Hernandez.

His nickname is King Felix, but I've taken it upon myself to dub him "King Nasty" instead. Cause this kid is NASTY. 19 years old, with a fastball approaching 100mph (some have clocked him above that but I've seen him in person five times now and he's gotten as high as 97-98), a mid 80s change-up, and a 12-6 curveball that makes big league hitters look absolutely stupid. AND he's got pinpoint control of all three pitches, solid mental makeup, buckles down with men on base... all the cliches are true in this case.

(Quick aside: 12-6 refers to the face of a clock that is metaphorically superimposed in front of the hitter; as in, the 12 is around his armpits and the 6 his knees. A 12-6 curve is one that starts around the shoulders and, at a certain point, breaks straight down and crosses the bottom of the strike zone, around the hitter's knees.)

Anyways, it's definitely an event every time this kid pitches. And it seems the Ms are really developing him the right way, not letting him pitch too much and hurt himself when he's young, focusing on the near and distant future instead of the immediate moment, etc. He is clearly on a strict pitch count; he hit 99 after 5 innings last night and they took him out. They would have had a better chance to win if they'd left him in a couple more innings, but that's not the point. It was a relief to see.

I have always been a "wake me up in 80 games" baseball fan, but this year I'm already pretty amped about the Mariners. Not only is Felix always great to watch, but Ichiro is my all time favorite player. Unlike any other baseball player I've ever seen... and the new Japanese catcher, Kenji Johjima, looks like the real deal. And even though it's only been 5 games, all five starting pitchers look solid through one start... and they've been able to score some runs, too. The bullpen is going to cost them some games, definitely, which is the most painful way to lose a game (in my opinion), but I think this team is going to be fun; I don't expect them to win 90 games and make the playoffs this year, but I'm still excited.

Thoughts from an evening at the University of Washington

As I was walking across campus to class tonight I saw a homeless man pushing a shopping cart towards me... it was deep into campus, at least a quarter mile from any outlet onto the main streets and uphill, and this guy's cart was stacked high with his belongings. You don't usually see guys like that with the super loaded carts that far into campus, but he'd made the trek for some reason.

He was pushing his cart away from another homeless guy... this guy had a sort of backpack hanging down in front, like a baby bjorn but full of god knows what... and he was yelling, alone, speaking in tongues even, just babbling to himself really loudly. It appeared that the first guy, the guy with the shopping cart, was leaving him behind. He kind of looked at me as if to say, "damn man, this guy is nuts even for ME." It was an interesting encounter.

Then in class, the lecturer made some comment about Sheboygan... traveling there for some reason or another, not that he was going but as a funny city name to drop in the middle of class or whatever...so this guy is DRY, and his subject is DRY (Introduction to Computer Software User Assistance, yikes), so it's really hard to pay attention to what he's talking about. I literally couldn't focus on what he was saying, what his PowerPoint slide show was slide-showing me, anything... but the positive aspect of this is that it's super easy to daydream through a whole class. In any case, his mentioning of Sheboygan started me off on a whole mental tangent... what's that? You want me to share it with you? Okay, okay. It's late but I have a few minutes.

You can take the boy out of Sheboygan, but you can't take the Sheboygan out of the boy

This, for reasons that shall remain safely in my own head for the time being, spawned the following math equations to test the validity of my theorum:

Sheboygan-boy=Shegan
boy-Sheboygan= -Shegan

And then my favorite Hall n' Oats song, "She's Gone," started going through my head. THAT'S what happens when you take the boy out of Sheboygan, I guess.

Googlezon is the best... DOUBLE TRUE

This is by now several years old but it's still pretty neat: http://epic.makingithappen.co.uk/

This particular link has both versions of the EPIC flash animation; the original (and superior in most aesthetic ways), set in 2014, and the updated one set in 2015.

It's a testament to the telescoping of history that, in the year or so between these versions, enough changed that fundamental and completely ingrained aspects of our social/media landscape such as ipod and GPS weren't even mentioned in the first go-round.

Although this is obviously a distopian vision in many ways (note the name on the Googlezon ID card), several of my friends, upon first viewing the video, responded with some variation on "hell yeah." This was their vision of the future, what they wanted for the world... and, like any good distopian vision, there are many aspects that are exciting to contemplate. I think the ending of the second version was added to balance the presentation somewhat. Young people everywhere using technology to connect to each other and form digital communities around the world. Which is one of the things about the internet that has always been so exciting.

Incidentally, one of those techno-friends is also the best data miner I know. Also discussed in the Googlezon video, in a way that echos Hiro's job in Neal Stephenson's novel SnowCrash: People getting paid based on the number of hits to the information they dig up and make readily available for consumption.

I think the most compelling metaphor I take from the EPIC video is the idea that someone is always watching. This, of course, is a central concept to 1984, and it's becoming more and more appropriate with the Office of Homeland Security, the struggle between Google and the Justice Department for the records of our internet traffic, ad infinium. This has actually been true for several years... in the first class in this University of Washington certificate program I'm currently taking, someone in the class said something to the effect that every email you write can be read by any number of people at any time after you write it.

To me, however, this is just a reminder of something that has been true for all times and will continue to be true as long as humans are around to ponder their existence. One of my favorite books is The Way of Man by Martin Buber, which is a short description of Hasidism--a form of Jewish Mysticism--presented as several short essays deconstructing some old Jewish parables. The one that sticks out in this context is the first chapter of the book, "Heart-Searching." The core parable of this essay is from Genesys, in the Garden of Eden. After Adam has eaten the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, he tries to hide from God; God calls out, "Where art thou?," which of course has been fodder for skeptics ever since. How is it that an omniscient being could lose track of something? Buber explains:

"In so asking, God does not expect to learn something he does not know; what he wants is to produce an effect in man which can only be produced by just such a question, provided that it reaches man's heart--that man allows it to reach his heart."

If we may ignore for the present moment the obvious sexism of the language (that's for another blog entry), the metaphor that is present in 1984, the EPIC films, and our lives today becomes clear. We have always been, and always will be, watched. Someone is always watching us... and whether you want to project that watcher from out of the self and call it God, or just call it something like the conscious, the ego, etc., is immaterial, in my opinion. Buber again:

"Man cannot escape the eye of God, but in trying to hide from him, he is hiding from himself...This question is designed to awaken man and destroy his system of hideouts."