Playing Post Office

So, whenever I open my mailbox, most of what I find is junk mail and bills. But I haven't lost that sense of excitement checking to see if the mail has come, and looking through the daily delivery to see if something interesting or informative, or something personal perhaps, maybe even something unexpected (a present?!) has arrived.

Daily mail delivery, with the exception of Sundays and holidays, is something that most people I know take for granted. There may even be some among us who recall a time when mail was delivered more than once a day. It's just a part of life, as we know it.

The Season 8 Seinfeld episode entitled "The Junk Mail" had Kramer bricking up his mailbox in the apartment building where he and Jerry lived, and going down to the post office demanding that his mail be canceled permanently. The joke is that the request is absurd, and that in response Newman and Postmaster General Henry Atkins, played by Wilford Brimley in a parody of the film Absence of Malice, treat Kramer's actions as a major threat to our entire way of life. It is, of course, part of the Jerry Seinfeld brand of humor to question the seemingly common sense arrangements of everyday life, which are quite arbitrary conventions peculiar to our culture and times. The Seinfeld series is in fact a great course in media ecology microanalysis (along the lines of Erving Goffman, Edward T. Hall, and Paul Watzlawick).

But in thinking the unthinkable, Kramer actually makes it thinkable, and the program does reflect changing attitudes towards mail delivery. We rail about all the junk mail we receive, and about the increasing cost of postage, and if anything were to get lost in the mail, well, forget about it. We ridicule and denigrate postal service which is limited by the speed of physical conveyance, calling it snail mail. And we adopt as a metaphor for rage and insanity the term, "going postal," thereby talking about postal workers in a manner similar to the way people spoke about Vietnam vets (that's what Rambo was all about, after all). So we don't love the mail, and it seems that the mail may not love us either. Are we on the verge of a messy break-up? Consider the following Associated Press article dated July 6:

What's next for the US Postal Service?

By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Could mail one day go the way of many pizza chains, where customers can pick it up or pay extra for home delivery?

Will the mail still arrive six days a week? Will the government still be involved?

The Postal Service is facing big questions as it struggles to cope with rising costs and major changes in the way people communicate.

Nations' mail systems vary. England's Royal Mail, for example, is a government-owned business, while Germany's Deutsche Post is a publicly traded stock company. All are much smaller operations than the U.S. Postal Service, which handles more than 40 percent of the world's mail.

Few doubt there will be adjustments in the U.S., but what those will be remains to be seen.

In 1993, Postmaster General Marvin Runyon drew a barrage of criticism for suggesting mail delivery might be cut to four days a week.

That was a bombshell then, but it's something postal experts say may still be a possibility.

"If you have hard copy delivery, you might have it six days a week, or three days a week or one day a week," William Burrus, president of the American Postal Workers Union, said in an interview.

And, he added, it may not even be delivered; the recipient may have to go retrieve it.

Already, hiring private delivery contractors is an issue, prompting informational picketing by letter carriers in Florida to protest contracting out new routes in developing areas.

"I think within the next six to eight months the Congress of the United States is going to decide an issue that's going to determine whether or not we have a reliable, efficient postal service in the future," said William H. Young, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers.

"What I'm referring to is the decision that's been made at the highest levels of the Postal Service to give all the new growth, and the new deliveries that are springing up, to private contractors," he said.

But such changes may be necessary, says Gene Del Polito, president of the American Association for Postal Commerce, which represents advertising mailers.

If the Postal Service is to survive, it will to have to consider outsourcing more of its activities, he said.

It's conceivable, Del Polito said, "that a postal system in the future could evolve into something which I would call the master contractor, where it maintains its government identity by the government being the master contractor but that it puts things out competitively on bid...."

"At the end of the day, what you need is a universal mail delivery system, you don't need a universal mail delivery enterprise," Del Polito said.

Burrus points out that "the world is changing dramatically in terms of instant communications. We as a species have discovered the ability to have instant communications. That's not consistent with hard copy. I would suspect that over time hard copy will play less and less of a role in our communications."

Not so sure is Rep. John McHugh, R-N.Y., who believes hard copy will always have a place in the mailstream.

"Clearly, the way Americans communicate on a day-by-day basis is changing," he said, citing computers and cell phones. But there will still be core requirements such as hard copy that the post office will be needed for, said McHugh, a longtime congressional leader on postal issues.

Tony Conway, a longtime postal manager who now heads the Alliance of Nonprofit Mailers, said he expects the Postal Service to "evolve, probably into more of a focus on the strength of the organization, which is its delivery network. That's the heart and soul of the organization, no current private carrier can compete with it."

But, he added, "it may or may not be a government organization."

"The $64,000 question is how to keep the delivery network affordable," Conway said, noting the decline of first-class mail.

The only significant growth area is standard mail, which is primarily advertising, he said, and as the cost of postage rises, "at what point do you start losing that volume growth."

"The days of reckoning are coming sooner than people probably now appreciate," Conway said. The post office is adding 2 million new delivery points every year, raising costs on a declining revenue base. "That's not a pretty financial model."

As the article continues, it is worthwhile to note that the junk mail that we all hate is keeping the postal system solvent. When was the last time you sent a letter to a friend or relative? How many of your bills are you paying online now? It's just a fact of life that we have been transferring more and more of our interpersonal communications to the electronic media, and have not been thinking about the consequences. Anyway, the article continues:

And both postal service and mailers fret about "do not mail" bills proposed in several state legislatures. Designed to mimic the "do not call" rules, the bills would allow people to opt out of receiving what many call "junk mail."

Since that mail, advertising and solicitations, is the main postal growth area, passage of such bills would strike a financial blow at the post office, perhaps forcing it to raise rates again.

That worries Del Polito.

"We're already seeing signs that we're at the point now where people are seriously measuring the effectiveness of mail against alternative mechanisms, such as e-mailing or retailing or telemarketing to your known customer base, shifting to direct response TV or any of the other channels that previously one would have looked at and said, 'God, these are expensive venues.' Now, all of a sudden, they're looking at them and they're saying, 'Well, the cost of those venues are coming down but the cost of mail is going up.'"

That means there are a lot of unknowns about what the system will look like in the future, he said.

"Sooner or later we're probably going to have to make a decision as a nation as to whether or not the core services that are provided for free are going to be done the way that they are today, or whether they're going to be offered in a more restricted capacity and in a more cost efficient capacity," he said.

For example, he suggested the possibility of requiring centralized delivery and allowing the consumer pay something extra to get actual delivery service to the door.

"Now, when you do that, that means you must also give the consumer the opportunity to say what I want to get and what I don't want to get, and that could change the nature of the postal system," Del Polito said.

Burrus noted that last year's postal reform legislation set up a system to pay down the post offices' $70 billion to $80 billion unfunded health care liability.

Once that is done, he said he expects pressure for privatization to increase, perhaps with some legislators calling for limited or partial privatization.

American society guarantees delivery of messages to people wherever they live, but if private companies are allowed to skim off the easiest, least costly routes, the government cannot subsidize delivery only to the expensive places to reach, he said.

Dan Blair, chairman of the Postal Regulatory Commission, agrees that there will be changes.

"It certainly will be different from the post office we know today. If you look at the post office of 50 years ago, it was significantly different from the one we have today, so it will evolve just like other government institutions."

"It will be interesting to see what it will look like, even in 10 years," he added. "We don't know where it's going to end up, but people will always need hard copy delivery."

Postmaster General John Potter has repeatedly said he is "bullish" on the mail, but the post office declined to make him available for an interview on the future of the service.

Does it matter if we have reduced or no mail delivery? If you rebel at the thought, is it just nostalgia? Or something more?

How intrinsic is the postal system to our sense of identity as a nation? From the point of view of Harold Innis, and James W. Carey (who I wrote about in an earlier post), it was first the postal system and then the telegraph (which functioned in tandem with the mail) that really bound together the modern nation-state in the late 19th century. And even before that, well, look what it says on the United States Postal Service website:

When the Continental Congress named Benjamin Franklin the first Postmaster General in 1775, the United States was a weak confederation of colonies scattered along the eastern seaboard. The postal system that the Congress created helped bind the new nation together, support the growth of commerce, and ensure a free flow of ideas and information.

In the more than two centuries since, the United States and the Postal Service have grown and changed together. Today, the Postal Service fuels the nation's economy and delivers hundreds of millions of messages and billions of dollars in financial transactions each day to eight million businesses and 250 million Americans. The Postal Service is making history, too, as it helps lead the way in making the federal government more businesslike and responsive to customer needs.

Yes, it's self-serving public relations promotional material, and I left that second paragraph in to make that clear, but hey, Benjamin Franklin, come on, the man who gave us electricity, who was a newspaper publisher in the colonies, there should be no question that he was a pivotal person in media history (not to mention, in the words of the Firesign Theatre comedy group, "the only president of the United States who was never president of the United States"). His association with the US Mail, his status as the archetype of the Postmaster General, should tell us something about the significance of postal delivery for the republic.

So, ok, the post office was vital for 18th and 19th century America, but so were horses and buggies, sailing ships, etc. We particularly mourned the loss of the romance of the rails, I grew up hearing all about the magic of trains from the older generations, but life goes on, right? And nobody seems all that broken up about the recent demise of the typewriter. To coin a phrase, "where's the beef?"

And maybe this is a strictly vegetarian diet I'm serving up, but I am reminded of the 1997 Kevin Costner film, The Postman, based on a novel by David Brin. Brin's science fiction story about a post-apocalyptic future United States is an excellent book, and I highly recommend it. But Costner's film, much maligned and in my opinion vastly underrated, gets to the heart of the matter in a more direct and powerful fashion (as is common, the novel's strength is ideas, the film's is dramatic impact). Here are two plot summaries for the movie listed on the Internet Movie Database:

In the year 2013 civilization has all but destroyed itself. After a war that decimated the government and most of the population of the United States (possibly the world) people struggle to survive against starvation and rogue groups of armed men. One such group is called the Holnists. This group is bigger than any other and their leader, General Bethlehem, has delusions of ruling the country. A drifter (Costner) is captured by the group and forced to join. He escapes at the first chance and happens on a mail jeep with a skeleton in it. The skeleton is wearing a postal uniform and the drifter takes it to keep him warm. He also finds a mailbag and starts conning people with old letters. The hope he sees in the people he delivers to changes his plans and he decides that he must help bring the Holnists down. Written by {KingVegeta8@yahoo.com}

Set in 2013, after the war has destroyed most of USA, including the government. A solitary traveler (played by Kevin Costner) is captured by a fascist military group called the Holnists led by Hitler-like General Bethlehem. When he escapes from the Holnists he finds an abandoned mail Jeep and uniform, and starts to travel through small cities, telling them he is a postman, a representative of the restored United States. No one believes him at first, but soon he has followers, and they start to prepare a revolt against Holnists. Written by Gustaf Molin {gustaf.molin@usa.net}

Perhaps one reason for the hostility expressed towards this film is its patriotic sensibility. Fundamentally, the story is about community. America, as a community, has been broken, shattered, seemingly beyond repair. Costner's character is an actor just trying to survive, who takes on the role of a postman as a con at first, but people believe in him, and he in turn starts to believe in what he represents. And it all revolves around the simple act of trust, faith, and service, in delivering the mail from one locality to another, and thereby binding seperate outposts, each with their own selfish concerns, into a greater commonwealth, a great community, one capable of standing up to and ultimately overcoming the threat of force and fascism.

A romantic story, yes. But does it have something to say about our own times, about what is happening to us, and where we are heading? It would be altogether appropriate to mention Neil Postman given the topic of this post, and when it comes to change brought on by technology, are we, as Postman argued, all to eager to give it an automatic stamp of approval?

Lucky Numbers

So, did you get lucky today?

As you probably heard, lots of people are seeing special significance in the fact that the date today is 7/7/07, or for the purist, 7/7/7. It's an especially big day for the wedding industry, as the following report from the Washington Post, dated June 30, describes:

Lucky in Love? Couples Book 7/7/07 Weddings
Reservations Are Up For Auspicious Day

By Kendra Marr
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 30, 2007; A01

It's unclear whether July 7, 2007, will be the luckiest wedding day of the century, but it will certainly be one of the busiest this year.

Hotels, wedding planners, caterers, florists and bakers are scrambling to accommodate the flood of couples rushing to the altar on 7/7/07. They're juggling more events than usual. Some are hiring extra help. Old hands say the crush will exceed the number of millennium marriages or those celebrated on a typical Valentine's Day.

There are no official numbers for this day. But one indicator is TheKnot.com, a popular wedding Web site. More than 38,000 couples in TheKnot.com's registry are planning to wed next Saturday -- more than triple the average number of couples that signed up to marry on Saturdays in July 2006, said Christa Vagnozzi, a senior editor.

The date is popular for many reasons, as seven is considered an auspicious number in a variety of cultures.

"It's a little extra luck for a happy, long marriage. Any little bit helps," said Deepak Baskaran, 30, of Baltimore, who will be getting married next Saturday in the District. "Plus I'll never forget that anniversary date, or I'll be in big trouble."

In the Orthodox Jewish tradition, the bride circles the groom seven times when she arrives at the chuppah, a canopy used in weddings, symbolizing in part the seven days of creation. Seven candles are lit during Kwanzaa. There are seven wonders of the world. The Big Dipper is formed from seven stars. Buddha is said to have walked seven steps upon his birth. The Islamic tradition involves seven levels of heaven. The ancient city of Rome was said to be built on seven hills. There are seven deadly sins, as well as virtues, in some Christian traditions. And gamblers hit the jackpot with the slot machine combination 7-7-7.

Triple sevens simply amplify the numerological meaning for those tying the knot.

Brides and grooms snatched up wedding venues more than a year in advance. Richard Markel, director of the Association for Wedding Professionals International, did a survey of 2,000 hotels and wedding facilities and discovered that 75 percent were already reserved by December for 7/7/07.

"The good news is that nobody raised their prices," Markel said. "They really didn't expect it."

One wedding planner managed to persuade a bride to get married seven minutes after midnight when she couldn't book the triple sevens.

"There were a lot of brides who actually started looking to buy the date from other brides," Markel said.

Las Vegas, the land of economical and impromptu weddings, is particularly hectic. Travel Web site Vegas.com is booking about six times as many hotel rooms as normal for that weekend. Some hotels and casinos are touting "lucky" deals, such as a chance to win a $777 meal and a mass wedding at 7 p.m.

Creative Cakes in Silver Spring stopped taking orders this week because it was so swamped. Bakers and decorators there will be churning out 21 wedding cakes on July 7 alone. On average, the bakery creates 28 cakes in an entire weekend.

Mercedes Marnay, 39, of Fairfax Station, said she felt a lot of pressure to book wedding vendors before other July 7 brides nabbed them. In the frenzy, she said, she put down a deposit on one wedding vendor, who skipped town and shut down his Web site and e-mail.

"I made a lot of harsh, quick decisions because I didn't want to be without a photographer or a wedding planner," she said.

Soiree Special Events in Reston is planning five weddings for the day. Laura Auer, the owner, said she's hiring about three times as many assistants as normal to help wedding coordinators on July 7.

Independence Day weekend has also created staffing problems for some wedding companies. July's humidity, with its wilting flowers and melting cakes, has typically been as undesirable time for weddings and perfect for long Fourth of July vacations.

"It's as hot as can be," said Leslie Poyourow, owner of Fancy Cakes By Leslie in Gaithersburg. "Who wants to be sweaty in a heavy bridal gown?"

Apparently, a lot of brides. Poyourow has hired extra hands to replace her vacationing staffers.

The trend in personalized and unique-themed weddings has sevens showing up everywhere. Seven-tiered wedding cakes. Seven-course meals. The Tropicana Casino & Resort in Atlantic City is celebrating with deluxe hotel packages for $7,777 and $7 drink specials. The date has also inspired gambling-themed slogans, such as "We hit the jackpot on our wedding," to accompany "777" on chocolate poker chips, hats, buttons and jackets for puppies.

Tammy Barrick, 26, Baskaran's fiancee, is offering M&Ms and candy bars stamped with three sevens as party favors. And there's more: An ice sculpture with the bride's and groom's names intertwined with the date. Mini wine bottles labeled with the triplicate. Seven bridesmaids and seven groomsmen.

"We didn't want to overdo it, but we do have it on a lot of things," she said.

The cost of all this good fortune can be steep.

"That's the unlucky part for the bride's father," said Colleen Evans, a spokeswoman for Ritz-Carlton in the District.

A few companies, such as Wal-Mart and the theme park chain Six Flags, are hosting special wedding celebrations on their premises.

"We go to Wal-Mart on average once, sometimes twice, a week," said Ella Glass, 25, who will be walking down the aisle at the Wal-Mart lawn and garden center in her hometown of Louisville, Ky. "We often window-shop at Wal-Mart together, so it makes sense to extend the Wal-Mart date to a Wal-Mart wedding."

Perhaps Washington weddings will be particularly lucky. After all, the city is at 77 degrees west longitude.

Wedding professionals are now hoping that another triplicate, 8/8/08, will be a popular date, as well as consecutive numbers like 6/7/08.

Somehow, 6/6/06 didn't arrive with the same fanfare.

It's also a big day for the gambling industry, as the following Associated Press article I found on the MyWay website, dated July 4, explains:

Everything's Coming Up 7-7-07

Jul 4, 4:51 PM (ET)

ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. (AP) - With apologies to Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry, this Saturday you've got to ask yourself one question: "Do I feel lucky?"

Lots of people do, for one simple reason. Saturday will be July 7, 2007, or 7-7-07. In numerological terms, that's about as big as it gets for the superstitious.

People are booking gambling junkets, casinos are offering "7"-themed promotions, and about three times the normal number of couples plan to get married that day, including Eva Longoria and basketball player boyfriend Tony Parker.

Nearly 100 couples will tie the knot atop roller coasters or inside revolving teacups at amusement parks at 7 that morning, a California yogi plans to achieve massive harmony through gong meditation at 7 that night, and Christians will gather in a Tennessee football stadium to pray on a day that has good Biblical implications for many.

Experts are quick to point out that Saturday is no more or less likely to be lucky than any other day. But try telling that to Allen Windrim, a 20-something entrepreneur from Philadelphia who owns a real estate management firm, a collection agency and a construction company.

"Hopefully I can get all my vacancies filled that day, all my collection cases settled without going to court, and get seven jobs for the construction company worth seventy-thousand each," he said.

"And then I'll take all that money and put it on Number Seven," he said. "I'm definitely in Atlantic City that day."

Casinos across the country are rolling heavy doses of sevens to attract superstitious gamblers, everything from $7 drink specials to luxury watches selling for $777. The Tropicana Casino and Resort in Atlantic City is offering a $7,777 package that includes a bi-level suite, two tickets to a show and the spa, and dining and shopping credits.

Craps players - among the most superstitious gamblers - have been buzzing for weeks about Lucky 7 Day, said Mario DiGuiseppe, the Tropicana's vice president of casino operations.

Asked if he believes in luck or superstition, DiGuiseppe responded with the certainty of one who knows that the odds always favor the house.

"I believe in math," he said with a chuckle.

Math is no obstacle for William Mobley of Philadelphia, who plans to be in Atlantic City on Saturday.

"I got a feeling about that day," he said. "I'll win over $700. Everything will go people's way that day. At least hopefully mine."

Gambles of a different sort will take couples down the aisle. Kathleen Murray, deputy editor of The Knot - - said 38,000 of the company's members are getting married that day, up from the normal 12,000 for a Saturday in July.http://www.theknot.com/

"This is a true phenomenon," she said. "I've never seen anything like this before. Seven has always been considered the luckiest number, and with three sevens in a row brides and grooms feel they're hitting the jackpot that day."

One of them is Jennifer Dybas, 27, of Channahom, Ill., whose fiancee, Jeff Michalek, 34, is a fanatical poker player. Their wedding theme: Lucky In Love.

"We're giving out instant lottery tickets as favors, and we have little chocolate poker chips with '777 - Lucky In Love' written on them," she said. "Our cake has dice on top and a roulette wheel on the bottom, and the king and queen of hearts on it."

"We got the last ballroom at the country club, the last DJ available at the place we went to, and the last photographer at the photo studio we wanted," she said. "So the luck is starting already."

Other brides chose the day for a more practical reason. "Some brides say their husbands will have no excuse to ever forget their anniversary this way," Murray said.

The Six Flags amusement park chain is hosting seven wedding receptions at 7 a.m. at each of its 12 U.S. facilities. They're calling the event "Thrilled Ever After."

The Ritz Carlton Hotel's Central Park location in New York is offering a July 7 wedding package with a reception for 77, a seven-tier wedding cake, seven Tiffany diamonds for the bride, and a seven-night honeymoon at any Ritz in the world for $77,777.

The day has big noncommercial potential as well. Harijiwan, a yoga instructor in Santa Monica, Calif., who uses only one name, plans a gong meditation course at 7 p.m.

"The numerology on this day - 7-7-07 - is phenomenal," he wrote on his Web site. "Seven represents the aura. Three sevens equals 21 (2+13). Three represents the positive mind. Add the 7 p.m. hour and you have four sevens, which equals 28 (2+810). Ten is the radiant body."

Christians will gather in the Nashville football stadium where the Tennessee Titans play to pray and fast on the 7th.

"The number is significant in the Bible because seven represents a covenant," said Julia Richardson, a spokeswoman for the event, titled The Call. "We feel we want to make a covenant with the Lord to pursue him. Whether it's 1,000 people or 100,000 people, we feel we can bring about a change through prayer and fasting."

Now, it is no doubt true that some of these people take the numbers more seriously than others, but all in all, this is pretty superstitious behavior on the part of citizens of the most technologically advanced society of the Century Number 7+7+7 (do the math!). Sure, 7 is an interesting number. It's a prime number, after all, and the hardest one to learn on the multiplication table. It stands out, which makes it a useful mnemonic device, hence it's popularity within societies in which writing is not known, or not widely used, so that memory is the main means of preserving knowledge. But is 7 especially lucky?

If you're from Great Britain, 7/7 is the equivalent of 9/11, the date of a massive terrorist attack. That was 7/7/05, actually, but not a very lucky day, nonetheless.

And writing the date as 7/7/07 takes away from the magic, even more so if we write 7/7/2007. Then it's not very special at all.

Our calendar itself is fairly arbitrary in the way it divides up months, and the way it numbers the days of each month. There are cultures in which other calendars are used, not to mention cultures in which no calendar exists, so is this day still lucky in such societies?

The reason July is the seventh month is that Julius Caesar altered the Roman calendar, naming a month after himself and inserting it in the 7th position. His heir, Augustus, followed suit with the eighth month. That's why September, whose name actually indicates that it is the seventh month is now the ninth, and October, whose name literally means the eighth month, is now tenth, and the same is true of November (nov = 9) and December (dec=10). And let's not forget that the two Caesars each a stole a day from the hapless month February and added it to their namesake months. Had this not happened, the date we marked as 7/5/07 would have been 7/7/07.

So our days and months are a Roman invention, while the year is a Christian invention that has no cosmic significance for non-Christians. And even for Christians, the number it is supposed to represent, the years since the birth of Jesus Christ, is considered erroneous, which means that this should probably be the year 2011, 2012, or 2013.

But the bottom line is that this is a great example of how people react to symbols as if they were things, that is, responding to representations as it they were the reality they represent.
We devise means by which we measure our world, we invent systems of measurement in the same way that we invent tools and machines. These techniques for measuring the world are extensions of the body, based on arm and foot, for example, extensions of man, to use McLuhan's phrase. In other words, the measurement is the medium.

We create methods of measurement, and then forget that they are human inventions, and act as it they came from on high. Moreover, we forget that they are inventions at all, and act as if the measurement is the thing measured.

Worse yet, sometimes we take measurements not knowing what it is we are measuring, and then convince ourselves that we have measured something real and tangible. A great example of this are the various forms of intelligence testing that have been employed over the years, providing measurements for an abstract concept that no one has ever been able to define in a definitive manner. No one is entirely sure exactly what intelligence is, but once we have the measurement we can talk about it as if it were a concrete and tangible phenomenon. This is a point that my mentor, Neil Postman, frequently made, I should add.

General semantics is all about trying to get people to recognize the difference between symbol and reality. Media ecology is all about trying to understand the relationship between the two. If you can get a chance to work with these ideas and perspectives, well, that's lucky! I certainly consider it my good fortune.

Computer Animation Wars

Just a couple of videos today, on the subject of computers, cartoons, and conflict. The first one was brought to my attention by son, who told me I should put it on my blog, so here goes. It's a clever combination of the South Park animated television series (which was the focus of a post a while back entitled SOUTH P24K) and those highly creative Mac vs. PC advertisements that Apple's been running. This is from YouTube, and what it says there is the following:

A parody of the Mac vs. PC commercials with South Park characters. Created as the final project for a multimedia production class at California State University Northridge (CSUN).

There's an error in the credits: South Park studio is at www.sp-studio.de .

Software used for animation: Flash 8 Pro
Software used for sound: Cool Edit 2000

Check out my MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/southparkmac

So, kudos to writer and creator Gabriel Schwarzer, along with Thomas Gilbert for his assistance on the project. You have really captured the essence of the computer wars, and identified who the real enemy is. So now, without further ado, here's South Park Mac vs. PC:







And now for something just a little bit different. Now that we have met the enemy, here's one that Beth Cioffoletti recommended on the MCLUHAN listserv run be Peter Montgomery. It's from the deviantART site, created by Alan Becker, and it's called Animator vs. Animation. Here goes:





And may all your wars be virtual.

An Uncertain Independence Day

So, today, July 4th, is my daughter's own independence day, as she was released from the hospital and is back at home (see my two recent posts, Autism and Seizures and Seizure Synchronicity).

Night before last, she had to stay up the entire night in order to take a sleep deprived EEG the following morning. Here's what it says on Web MD:

To detect certain types of abnormal electrical activity in the brain, you may have to be asleep during the recording. As a result, you may be asked not to sleep at all the night before the test or to reduce your sleep time to 4 or 5 hours by going to bed later and getting up earlier than usual. If your child is going to be tested, try to keep him or her from taking naps just before the test.

So, my wife stayed up with her, and it wasn't much of a challenge for my daughter to stay up, more of one for my wife. Anyway, the results were inconclusive. They saw some abnormalities, but nothing major, neither at that time nor for the rest of her stay--she had the electrodes glued to her head, covered by a bandage, for the duration of her stay, except for a few hours in the early morning of the all-nighter, when my wife dozed off and she pulled a few of them off.

If they had seen spikes, which are associated with seizures, on the EEG, they would have put my daughter on medication, and of course they would have is she had had an actual seizure there. But with only some abnormalities, whatever that means, the neurologist recommended forgoing the anti-seizure medication for now. We're fine with that, since the medication does have side effects and can interfere with learning. Our daughter was on the stuff for a few years following her 3 seizures at the age of 18 months, and it certainly didn't help her working with her teachers.

We did get a prescription for medication to give her in case she has a seizure. As it turns out, it's in the form of needle and syringe, which is a little scary. The idea is to administer it while waiting for an ambulance. And if she does have another seizure, she will definitely go on the medication.

The other recommendation is that she have a set bedtime that we observe religiously. She can go to bed earlier, and the bedtime can be as late as we like, we just are not to let her stay up past that point. In point of fact, my daughter has very irregular sleeping habits, another characteristic of autism, and sometimes stays up most of the night.

I was on my way to pick up my wife and daughter from the hospital when there was another incident. As I understand it, my daughter complained of a tummy ache, and then suddenly acted strangely, like she was out of it, drugged, or sleepwalking, kind of like when we found her on Friday morning, in the aftermath of her seizure. By the time I got there, she was back to normal, and when an internist and doctor finally came and took a look, there didn't appear to be anything wrong with her. They called the neurologist as well, but there was nothing to do.

And so, we brought my daughter home, to an uncertain future, or rather, a future that's become even more uncertain than before. But she was begging to go home from the hospital for days, and she is so very happy to be home now. No fireworks for her, she hates them, they totally freak her out, just a quiet night at home, and anyway we've had more than enough excitement and interesting times. And, if she's up for it, she has school tomorrow.

And thanks to all who wished her (and us) well.

Rise of the Silver Surfer, Fall of the Fantastic Four

I'll post a family update tomorrow. In the meantime, I've been meaning to add an entry about the Fantastic Four sequel, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, which my son and I went to see last week. He was reluctant to go, I might add, because the first Fantastic Four movie was a disappointment, and he didn't expect this one to be any better. His verdict, after seeing the sequel, was that it was terrible. Me, I just thought it was mediocre, not awful, but not terribly good.

I've discussed the great challenges that exist in trying to make movies out of comic book series in a previous post, Spider-Man 3 and the Limitations of Adaptations. For example, in the superhero genre, origin stories are usually weak, mere formalities that provide a pretext for an ongoing set of adventure stories, and this is certainly the case in the Fantastic Four comic book, where in the original version scientist Reed Richards is a cold warrior concerned with winning the space race, and in order to speed things up, decides to take a rocket ship up into space himself, piloted by his friend, old college roommate, and former World War II fighter pilot Benjamin J. Grimm, with his fiancée Sue Storm and her kid brother, teenage hot rod enthusiast Johnny Storm along for the ride (ah, the innocence of 1961). Unexpectedly, however, they are bombarded by mysterious cosmic rays (can you say Van Allen radiation belt?) that have a disabling effect on them, forcing them to abort the mission and land as best they can.

In good fifties and early sixties science fiction tradition, radiation leads to mutation, turning Reed Richards into the pliable, stretchable, Mr. Fantastic, turning Sue Storm into the Invisible Girl (later also able to create invisible force fields, a much needed power upgrade, and still later given a name upgrade to Invisible Woman), turning Johnny Storm into the Human Torch (thereby recreating a character from the forties, although the original was an android), and turning Ben Grimm into the monstrous, super strong and all but indestructible Thing.

This super team was introduced by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in the same year that Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man to orbit the earth, and Alan Shepherd followed by becoming the first American in space, although it wasn't until 1962 that John Glenn was able to fully orbit the earth. The Fantastic Four origin story was very much a part of the times, and continued to resonate throughout the sixties. With the space race won at the end of the decade, the story lost some of its power, but the bigger problem emerged as the years wore on, because the characters were not allowed to age naturally. Instead, Ben Grimm's WWII background was deemphasized and disappeared, and the space race theme was also phased out, replaced by a vaguer sense in which Reed Richards was simply anxious to test an experimental spacecraft.

So, the Fantastic Four had a weak origin story to begin with, as there is simply no good explanation for taking his girl and her brother along on a dangerous test flight, let alone the improbability of Reed and Ben launching a rocket by themselves. Why not, then, just forget about the origin for the film, start us off in medias res, with the characters already empowered, and just do a quick flashback or even just a verbal explanation in passing? Why not, well, because movies rely on linear narratives that move us from beginning to middle to end, and filmmakers want to begin at the beginning, something epic poets knew never to do (and comics are closer to epos than cinema ever will be). And filmmakers want to focus on the actors, on the personalities and faces, which means, for superhero narratives, spending too much time on the secret identity and/or personal history prior to the point of origin. The result is, shall we say, unfortunate.

But the problem of dealing with the origin can be a minor one, if the origin is especially poignant, as is the case of Spider-Man, or mysterious and complicated, as is the case for Batman, or even otherworldly, as it is with Superman. It also helps to keep in mind that, for the comic book series, the origin is not meant to set up the story's conclusion as would be the case in linear narratives, but rather its function is to set up a situation out of which an ongoing series of stories can be told--it's the episodic format that also prevails among television programs (as discussed in several previous posts). Filmmakers on the other hand feel the need for closure too strongly, and this tends to have negative effects on comics adaptations.

But even a first movie that messes up on the origin in all of these ways can still set up a sequel that, because the origin is now over and done with and we can therefore move on, is far superior to the original. The Fantastic Four sequel had this potential, and while I will grant that it is an improvement on the first movie, it is a relatively small improvement, not enough to save the film. One reason for the failure of the sequel is that the first movie introduced certain flaws that the second could not overcome, in particular regarding the characters.

Fundamentally, the Fantastic Four was a product of 1961, a time when the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant reigned supreme, and like much of popular culture, the Marvel superhero comic represented an ethnic take on WASP characters, in particular a Jewish (both Stan Lee néeLeiber, and Jack Kirby, being Jews) take on WASPs, following in the footsteps of the Hollywood motion picture industry, a respectful and reverent representation of those quintessential Americans. WASP culture was dominant back then, and WASP characters held a monopoly on heroic iconography, so it all was taken for granted. Today, there has been such a reversal of fortune that it is hard for us to take the old WASP image seriously, we tend to find it hokey or play it for laughs (take Leslie Nielsen for example, or Tim Allen).

I never really thought about this before, but now it occurs to me that this extreme reversal has gone too far. There was something admirable about the stiff upper lip seriousness and confidence of the old fashioned WASP character types, so maybe today we ought to make room for them as part of a spectrum of ethnicities, restoring the WASP hero as a serious alternative heroic character type. And the filmmakers should have allowed for the fact that the Fantastic Four works as a team of white bread types, and deviating from that formula can only undermine the characters.

To be specific, let's start with Reed Richards. At first glance, the Welsh-born actor, Ioan Gruffudd has the right pedigree, but he's just too much of a nebbish. In the first film, he's pushed around by Victor Von Doom, in the sequel by General Hager. What's missing is the good old WASP self-confidence, the pipe-smoking, patriarchal, father-knows-best calm assurance, that characterized the comic book character. Reed Richards is a genius, a regular Einstein, arguably the world's smartest person, and he knows it. He doesn't brag, but he doesn't sell himself short. He's not egotistical, he's more like the absent minded professor, as played by Fred MacMurray, and like many of us professors, he's used to running the classroom and not used to answering to anyone; maybe a Gary Cooper type would do. If he has any weakness, it might be that he's too self-assured, so much so that he takes his best friend, girlfriend, and her little brother on a risky mission to space, but the point is that he has that dispassionate ability to get things done that Tom Wolfe called the right stuff, the stuff of astronauts and test pilots. That same characteristic accounts for his choice of code name, Mr. Fantastic, a rare overtly flamboyant display. Bottom line, he is Mr. Science, the man with all the answers or failing that, insatiable curiosity. He is serious, running counter to type as a superhero in the mold of Plasticman, but his stretching is often a way to work with technology more effectively, rather than a fighting style. All this is missing in the wimpy character we see in both movies.

Sue Storm was miscast from the start by giving the part to the ethnic Jessica Alba, whose tinted contact lenses I found quite disturbing in their weird shade of blue. And they went for cheap laughs in both movies by including scenes in which she winds up naked in public (not that the camera shows us anything, this is a kid-friendly film). But the bottom line is that there is no there there with Alba, which may be in keeping with the code name Invisible Woman, and it's true that the comic book character was not very impressive in the early issues, being just a girl who turns invisible, but the essence is of the WASP blonde before being blonde became a joke about being dumb. She would put honor and duty above personal gratification, unlike the movie version who has Reed so cowed about their upcoming marriage that he turns down urgent requests for his help in dealing with alien phenomena (and winds up helping anyway, behind her back). The comic book Sue was sometimes to selfless as a consequence of being stereotypically feminine, but the movie Sue is too selfish, and the matriarchal qualities of the character are absent. They both grapple with the team's sudden celebrity, but the comic book Sue handles it with the grace and dignity of the WASP, while Alba seems overwhelmed by the acclaim.

Johnny Storm played by Chris Evans is the most popular character from the movie, and his egotism and willingness to sell out for endorsements is entertaining. But what's lost is the sense of youthful enthusiasm of the comic book character, as we get a more mature sexuality going with Chris Evans, and the comics Johnny Storm was a hot head, and also very self-confident, but not conceited like the Chris Evans character, not ruled by his libido in the same way, more like the kid sidekick. But of course, kid sidekicks are hard to take seriously these days as well, and teenagers are no longer kids, they're adults. Still, the answer would be a significantly younger Human Torch.

Ben Grimm as played by Michael Chiklis almost works, as Chiklis in heavy make up and prosthetics looks the part of the man-monster, and sounds sort of like Grimm would sound, which is a working class New York City street dialect from before the time of hip-hop, a lower east side, essentially Jewish manner of speech, although it would reflect the confluence of Italian and Irish ethnic influences as well. Kind of like Bugs Bunny on steroids. The Thing is at once a tragic character, being the only member of the Fantastic Four to suffer a mutation that leaves him disfigured and alienated from society, and Chiklis does get across some sense of depression, but the fundamental sadness and frustration of being trapped in that frightening body that also gives him the power to be a savior is not communicated well in either film. In contrast to Richards and the Storm siblings who are middle class WASPs, Grimm represents a working class ethnic stereotype, and that contrast does not come through all that well in the films. As such, in the comics he sometimes plays comic relief, both in his lack of sophistication, but also in his down-to-earth common sense. This is the most powerful, compelling, complex character in the comic series, but all of that is lost in the films.

The Thing gains a girlfriend, Alicia, who is blind (therefore not frightened by his visage, able to see the goodness in his soul), and a sculptor (representing the truth of art). In a very truncated role, Kerry Washington gives us an African-American in place of a WASP for this character, and it's not that there is anything wrong with an interracial relationship, nor is there a problem with making this particular substitution, but it does seem at least questionable to inject race into the films in this way, almost as a token, and associated with blindness.

What makes for a good superhero story is a good supervillain, and the comics version of Dr. Doom is one of the best. A megalomaniacal dictator of the fictional Eastern European country of Latveria, Dr. Doom is the evil genius foil of Reed Richards, and reflects the traditional American suspicion of foreign influences. He is the mad scientist of horror movies, the absolute ruler seeking world domination, with an old world sense of nobility and honor (if he gives his word, he won't go back on it), an elitist loner in opposition to our democratic foursome. The film version, inexplicably, gives us a completely American Von Doom, a genius who wants power, but mostly lusts for money and Sue Storm. He's a capitalist, not a fascist, and therefore is more ordinarily greedy rather than representing the height of evil, a kind of surrogate Hitler. Then in that drive for closed narrative, the first movie has him gaining powers along with the Fantastic Four, through exposure to cosmic rays, losing the sense that he employs weird science, a mixture of high tech and sorcery. He make the main conflict in the first film less than compelling, and is thrown into the second movie with little reason. He is shown in Latveria, with no explanation why an American would wind up there, he agrees to help the US Army and cooperate with Reed Richards, in a way that the comic book dictator never would, he steals the power of the Silver Surfer, a plot element taken from the comics, but he doesn't do much with it, there's not much sense of threat or evil, and he loses it all too easily in what really should have been a separate story.

The Silver Surfer was one of the most compelling characters ever introduced by Jack Kirby, and written by Stan Lee. He was the herald of Galactus, devourer of planets, and in this sense appears as the angel of death, harbinger of doom. But he agonizes over his role, commenting on humanity's base impulses and our innate nobility, ultimately persuaded to abandon his role and fight on our behalf by Alicia. In the film it's Sue who turns him, and while his CGI image is impressive, the character simply does not communicate the moral struggle that it at the core of his story. Ultimately, the Silver Surfer emerges as a Christ-like character, but you can't see that in the film.

And then there's Galactus, a god-like being, a space-god, who is totally amoral. In the comics, he appears as a giant, who explains that he doesn't care about whether we live or die, just as we are unmindful of whether we are stepping on ants as we walk along the ground. He is a higher being who works to insure his own survival, and to survive he must eat, and what he eats is the life energy of planets. Nothing personal, we're just lower down on the food chain,, and he's here to eat us and our world. The Fantastic Four are able to gain his attention and communicate with him, but to no avail in the comics. The movie abandons all sense of Galactus as a person, however, and turns him into a cloud (Marvel's Ultimate comics line, which presents a revised, simplified, more realistic version of the Marvel Universe, did a story with Galactus as an impersonal swarm of ravagers, I'm not sure if this influenced or more probably was influenced by the film script), and this loses much of the drama of the confrontation. And while it retains the idea that the Silver Surfer serves Galactus as part of a deal he made to have Galactus spare his home world, my son picked up on the problem inherent with an impersonal version of the big guy--if it doesn't appear to communicate, how did the Surfer make a deal with it? A big loss here, and I can't help but wonder if there wasn't some fear about offending the Christian conservatives by giving us an image of Galactus as a personified, godlike being.

In the comics, Galactus transformed Norrin Radd, an ordinary human or humanoid, into the Silver Surfer who wields cosmic power, granting him a small fraction of his power. So, when the Surfer chooses to oppose Galactus, it's not much of a battle, he's doomed to failure. In the movie, somehow, inexplicably, the Surfer appears to be a match for the planet-sized cloud that is Galactus, and is able to defeat it. Not only does this not make much sense, but it effectively takes the heroes of the film, the Fantastic Four, out of the story in any significant way, at the climax of the film. They play no role in defeating the threat and saving the world. In the comics, they actually are the ones who save the day, as another cosmic being, the Watcher, helps the Human Torch locate a weapon that can defeat Galactus, and Reed Richards threatens to use it, even though that weapon would also destroy the one who wields it, along with his target. This forces Galactus not only to withdraw, but to concede that we may be more than just insects unworthy of notice.

Look, much of what has been published in comics is unexceptional, but the story of the Fantastic Four's first encounter with the Silver Surfer and Galactus was a landmark achievement on the part of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, and the filmmakers should be ashamed of themselves for mutilating the classic. So I guess my son was right, the movie was terrible. If there are going to be any more Fantastic Four films, my sincere hope would be that they would hit the reset button, rethink the whole adaptation business, and start over again. Or else, just leave sleeping dogs lie.

Grok Around the Clock

So, with no new developments to report (see my last two blog entries if you don't know what I mean), here's something different.

I set up a page on MySpace not too long after I started this blog, which has been an interesting experience in and of itself, but I won't go into that right now. But, in my explorations through those uncharted realms, I came upon a blog with a spiritual emphasis, written by Cristina Smith, and in particular to the following blog entry (you can click here to go to that page, but I'm reproducing the post here):

Aha Moments of Sublime Grokking

Last night a visual artist was telling me about how he works with his blank canvas. He knows there a vision is ready to manifest on it. Sometimes he can even name it. It is just a matter of invoking it, courting it, waiting for it. Nurturing it like a seed. Finding ways to nourish the dance of creation without birthing it prematurely and not being attached to what it looks like when it does appear.

Another friend describes what he does as 'making stuff from crap'. When I asked him what he meant by that he said that he can usually surmise the way a device is used based on a handful of parts because they kind of resonate and have an affinity for each other. They love to be part of the harmony. He is talking about mechanical things. I find this approach to life to be an art form and a wonderful spiritual experience...being open to, as Heinlein called it in Stranger in a Strange Land, awaiting fullness.

This kind of experience takes patience, perseverance and dedication to being in a co-creative process with the Universal Force. The result of achieving fullness is grokking, another Heinlein term meaning innate knowledge, quintessential understanding beyond intellectual reason. Grokking transcends the physical plane context of the application~ what matters is the process.

One way I regularly experience aha moments of sublime grokking is with food. Sometimes I can be at sitting with an abundance of homegrown produce or wandering around a grocery store awaiting inspiration for a dish. Then a picture, smell and flavor enter my mind. The entire alchemical process of creation unfolds symphonically within me as I move in a space of mergedness to gather the ingredients and/or write down the concept. These are moments in food alchemy that I live for. And then it gets even better as I prepare the dish and feel the dance moving me. The result of that blending often culminates in culinary ecstasy.

In what parts of your life do you practice achieving fullness?
Is there a specific medium in which you have a natural talent for grokking?

Oh, and if you would like a recipe for Green Goddess Soup, the result of one of my grokkings, I will be happy to share it with you.

Those of you of a certain age may recall that Robert Heinlein's science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land was enormously popular during the sixties and into the seventies, the title alone becoming emblematic of the sense of alienation associated with the counterculture, and the Heinlein neologism grok became popular as well at that time. It referred to understanding in a very deep and complete way, and it complemented the use of rap back then, which didn't mean reciting poetry to hip hop music, but rather referred to a very deep, meaningful, intimate and honest dialog, one that opened the door to the participants really grokking one another. Wikipedia has an entry on grok, of course, and they include a quote from the novel where a secondary character defines it:

Grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed—to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science—and it means as little to us (because we are from Earth) as color means to a blind man.

The entry also notes that, in the novel, the literal meaning of grok is to drink, and given that it's a Martian word, and Mars is pretty much hurting for water, that says a lot. So, anyway, I decided to post a comment to Cristina's entry, and the first part went like this:

Heinlein based much of his SF on general semantics, including the idea of grokking, which does refer to understanding that goes beyond intellectual reason, but not to innate knowledge, per se. Both intellectual reason, in the sense of deductive logic, and innate knowledge in the sense of turning inwards into our own thought worlds which are dominated by the language and symbols we use, would be examples of what's known as an intentional orientation in general semantics. Instead, what's recommended is an extensional orientation, opening ourselves up to the outer world, opening the doors of perception, getting past symbols and labels that lead us to prejudge and categorize reality, getting as close as possible to direct contact with the phenomena we experience, with the human lifeworld.

Another general semantics based concept that appears in Stranger in a Strange Land is the fair witness, a person so well trained that they will always describe exactly what they see, and never contaminate his or her statement of fact with a judgment, opinion, or inference. The example Heinlein gives in the book is that if you ask a fair witness what is the color of the house he or she is standing in front of, the answer will be along the lines of, "white, on this side" (because you can't be sure for a fact that it is also white on the other side if you can't see it and have never been there before, to assume that it is would be to make an inference, and the distinction between fact and inference is essential in general semantics, and law for that matter, and an inference is an assumption you know, and after all we all know what happens when you assume, you make an ass out of u and me, thank you Felix!).

So anyway, I quoted Cristina's post with the original wording above, but she very graciously responded on her blog with the following comment:

Thanks for the further definition of grok. I've changed the word innate to gestated.

And if you go back and read the post, you'll find that it now reads:

The result of achieving fullness is grokking, another Heinlein term meaning gestated knowledge, quintessential understanding beyond intellectual reason.

Now, I'm not saying that it's of earth-shattering importance for anyone to grok grokking, but holding that aside, I think the new phrase, gestated knowledge, is much improved, and actually quite evocative. In fact, I wrote another comment in response:

I like that, gestated, it's very pregnant with meaning.

And we can grok around the clock here, but I had a second part to my first comment, which went like this:

I very much like the question you raise about the relationship between specific media and grokking. Different media lead us to different understandings of the world, or as Marshall McLuhan put it, the medium is the message. Much of my own grokking comes through the medium of words, by working with and playing with words. But I rely on the interplay of the verbal media of speech, writing, printing, and electronic text. And I try to balance all those words with nonverbal perception, ritual and art, and a variety of other media. I find that grokking often comes by way of the juxtaposition and joining of different media, as opposed to reliance on one specific medium.

It's very interesting to see here a kind of nascent media ecology applied within a spiritual context. It's not surprising, as I have long maintained that media ecology does allow for religious and spiritual approaches that does not just reduce things down to some sociological or psychological effect. And, of course, media can be communication technologies, or any other kind of technology or technique, or any mode or code of communication, or any situation, context, or environment.

McLuhan referred to media as extensions of the human body, but the body itself is also a medium, and for this reason I found it interesting to read the following in an earlier post by Cristina:

Perhaps the only thing every person on this planet has in common is that they inhabit a body. These bodies are the medium through which we engage the Earth. No matter what the individual shape, color, size, or life condition, bodies are born and will die.

I think of my body as the temple in which I practice the ritual of life. It is the vessel through which I manifest the form and force of the Universe and the vehicle through which my soul enacts this chapter in its evolution. My body is my constant companion; I carry it with me wherever I go. I am not my body, though we have a mutualistic relationship~ when I serve it well, it serves me well. It's the only place I have to live right now, so I like to listen to it, nourish it and consciously interact with it.

My point in bringing this up is that the concept of medium is more than a topic or object of study, it is a method, approach, a way or tao if you like. In any given context, we might ask what is the medium here, and what is its content, and in this way gain new insight into whatever we're studying.

And on a related topic here's an except from one other post from her blog:

Magickal shapeshifting is a great way to transform your world. Think of Madonna and the different ways she has intentionally shifted the public's perception of her as an icon. She has exercised her right to express herself as a changeling…someone you can't pin down or box up or hold into any preconceived role. She has done this quite intentionally, masterfully crafting each shift intricately.

When I use the term magick it means the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with your will. And, what follows is that every intentional act is a magickal act. Magick is an external manifestation while mysticism is internal. I have found the alchemy of the self to be the blending of the two through practice of both.

When I think of magickal shapeshifting, I think of the chameleon. Although the chameleon adapts its appearance to its surroundings, I also have experimented with not adapting…being proactive and outrageous as a matter of fact. Both seem to have their place.

Or course, Madonna is a favorite subject of Camille Paglia, who sees the icon as representing a kind of pagan magic. And in Part Two of Echoes and Reflections: On Media Ecology as a Field of Study I wrote that media ecology is about transformation and metamorphosis, be it symbolic or material. For that matter, I wrote on the topic of Magic Ecology in a previous blog entry.

I'm not trying to advocate anything here, mind you. Nowadays, we're all seekers, although some of us try to hide it. So, with the clock ticking away, we might as well rock around the grok, don't you think?

Seizure Synchronicity

Here's an update on my daughter's condition, which I discussed in yesterday's post. She is still in the hospital, still hooked up for an EEG, looking like a little old lady wearing a robe and her head bandaged up to keep her from pulling the wires out. My wife has been staying with her, and there's been a bunch of visitors today. No seizure activity has been detected since she's been admitted, although the neurologist told my wife this morning that they did detect some abnormalities, which is to be expected after a seizure, and which, I suppose, confirms that she did have a seizure at home yesterday, as we were not 100% sure since we didn't witness it. But nothing more specific than that. And my daughter seems to be pretty much back to her old self, although it's hard to tell in that situation. She did say that she wants to go home.

As my son and I were leaving, walking through the lobby of the children's building, we ran into in his old Little League coach, who is also the father of an autistic child. In fact, his son played baseball with my daughter in the Challenger League, a division of Little League set up especially for children with disabilities, whose season was recently concluded, and which was a great success I might add. And as it turns out, his son had a seizure on Thursday night, and was also hooked up to an EEG monitor! As I mentioned in my last post, this has been hitting a number of children in my daughter's general age group, the onset of puberty being the main correlation.

But, thinking about happier times, here are some pictures my wife took of my daughter playing at Challenger League games. In this first one, she's out in front in the orange T-shirt, posing with her teammates:


And here she is in the field:




She loved the idea of playing baseball, but was not very happy about the hot and humid weather we were having at time. Anyway, here she is up to bat:









And running the bases with the wonderful young volunteer who was serving as her shadow:














And coming home, I hope it's soon:

Autism and Seizures

So, I am writing this from Hackensack University Medical Center, where my daughter has been admitted after having a seizure (we believe, we did not actually witness it) early this morning. She's staying in this wonderful new building devoted to children and women (i.e., pregnancy and childbirth), and this room has full internet access displayed on a hi-definition widescreen TV, and we were watching Barney on YouTube (her love for Barney has been going strong for a decade now), and she thankfully fell asleep for a while, giving me a chance to do some stuff online.

But now, my wife has returned with my son in tow, Sarah's awake again, so I think I will have to continue this later. . .

Okay, so I'm back at home now, after having a late dinner at the Arena Diner in Hackensack with my son. My wife is staying overnight at the hospital with my daughter.

So, what happened is that early this morning, my wife looked in on our daughter, and called me in frantically. There was an irregular circlular blood stain, still somewhat wet, about six inches or so in diameter, under her face as she lay on her side. We tried to rouse my daughter, but she was like a sleepwalker, seemingly awake but unresponsive. She made almost no acknowledgment when we were speaking to her, like she could barely hear us, and could not understand what we were saying. This sort of response is not unusual for children with autism, but out of character for our daughter, who at least knows to pay attention when we talk to her. She seemed to drift off, like she wanted to go back to sleep, and her eyes partly rolled up into her head.

The blood had come from her mouth, and she didn't respond when I told her to open her mouth, so I opened her mouth myself. It was pretty shocking to see what appeared to be her teeth looking mangled, like she had been punched or fallen on her face, but that turned out to be an overreaction. It was just one tooth, one of the two front teeth on the bottom, that was turned forward, sticking out almost at a 90 degree angle, and that was the source of most of the bleeding we were later told, although her bottom lip was also swollen and bloody. The injury apparently occurred as a consequence of the seizure (and thank God that was the worst of it!).

So, my wife sprang into action and got her ready, I threw some clothes on and drove them to Hackensack Hospital, where there's a pediatric emergency room. In the meantime, our daughter had snapped back to consciousness, and fortunately there were no recurrences of the seizures. In fact, because she was pretty much back to normal, she was not a happy camper in the emergency room, what with them taking her blood, hooking her up to monitors, putting in an IV tube, etc. And she was especially perturbed when they took her to the emergency dental suite--we were with her, of course--where they cemented the tooth back into place until she can see a pediatric dentist--it took them several attempts because she was so uncooperative, and screaming like a banshee. The tooth may not survive, the hospital dentist wasn't sure.

Afterwards, it was decided that she would be admitted for observation, I left because my invalid mother was out of food and was counting on me to go good shopping for her (we are the generation that's squeezed at both ends, how many times have I heard that!), ran home to check on my son, and back to the hospital, where a nurse was gluing electrodes to my daughter's head for a Video EEG, which she was not happy about either, trying to rip them out, screaming, sobbing, etc. She'll be wearing them for an extended period of time while they look for abnormalities that would help them identify the nature of her problem. We don't know how long that will be, a day, two, or more?

After her new hairdo was cemented in place, my wife left for a bit, and I stayed with my daughter and continued to play the short segments of Barney on YouTube. A rabbi came by and we chatted for a little while, but there really wasn't much to be said. One day at a time, do the best that you can, there is no other choice. I did fell better, because I had intended to go to Shabbat services at Adas Emuno tonight, and wasn't able to.

So, we watched more Barney YouTube videos, and during one I dozed off for a minute, and in that time my daughter ripped off a bunch of the electrodes, so the nurse had to come in and redo them. After that, my daughter started to get drowsy, and fell asleep, and that's where this entry began.

Something like 20-30 percent of people with autism also suffer from seizure disorders. As if it wasn't hard enough dealing with autism! It does demonstrate, in a very dramatic fashion, that autism is a neurological disorder. That's well known and solidly established now, but a few decades ago psychiatrists were treating autistics through psychoanalysis, and blaming the disorder on refrigerator mothers! What a travesty, and tragedy that was!

Autistic children who also have seizures often have them for the first time around the time of the onset of puberty. Over the past year, a number of children that we know in the autism community here in Northern New Jersey, and who are around the same age as Sarah, have suddenly had seizures. So, it happens at the point when parents have pretty much accepted their situation and worked things out as best they can for their children, then, BOOM!, something new.

For us, though, seizures are a very old story. Our daughter had 3 seizures in one day when she was 18 months old. She was put on medication immediately afterwards, and the seizures never came back, and after a few years she went off the medication. When she first had those seizures, she had not been diagnosed as autistic, so that was our first major indication that there was something wrong with her. The doctors who treated her for her seizures never said a word about the possibility of autism, part of the great conspiracy of silence that parents in the autism community often experience prior to diagnosis.

For the record, I wrote about these early experiences in Part Two of Echoes and Reflections: On Media Ecology as a Field of Study.

The Roman poet Lucan said, "I have a wife, I have sons: all of them hostages given to fate." And no ransom is ever enough.

I know people my age, and older, who have no children, and somehow they seem quite youthful--as Indiana Jones said, "it's not the years, it's the mileage." Right now, I don't even want to look at the odometer.

The Spectacle Speaks Again

In a previous post, I wrote about Thus Spoke the Spectacle, which combines rock music and video to provide artistic commentary in a media ecology vein. Well, Peter Fallon in a blog post has alerted us to a new video posted by The Spectacle, aka Eric Goodman. This one is entitled, "The Tragedy that Remains," and here's the write-up on YouTube:

"The Tragedy That Remains" documents the global media frenzy surrounding the death of Princess Diana. It has something for everyone: a fairy-tale princess, heaps of celebrities, overindulgent media, brain-sucking ghouls (oops, that's the same thing).

The video speaks to our society's deeply ingrained cult of celebrity. Beyond portraying the excesses of the scripted celebrity death extravaganza, it explores the responsibility we spectators bear for enabling such media events. As the recent "10 Years Later" Diana retrospectives indicate, mega-spectacles like "Death of a Princess" never truly disappear, but are rerun at opportune moments across various media to wring more profits from the production. Ten years later, in response to those who find the Diana material "dated," we stand by the main premise of the video: that the Spectacle itself is the tragedy that remains.

The video is part of the live music video media critique "Thus Spoke The Spectacle." For information, more videos, or to book a screening or performance, go to

http://thespectacle.net

Music and lyrics by Eric Goodman
live performance by Eric Goodman and Mike Stevens

LYRICS:
We sellers and buyers of souls make ghosts of the living, and the death of princesses not only inevitable, but necessary.

The Spectacle is the tragedy that remains long after it commands us to shift our gaze away from dead princesses onto newer obsessions.

While momentary tragedies flit through our lives, the cult of celebrity and the Spectacle it feeds voraciously hover above our battered reality, ever awaiting its opportunity to transform life into non-life.

The Spectacle is immune to contradiction. When a princess dies, the spectacle of her death bemoans the spectacle of her life, and the absurdity of it all serves only as fodder for another story. . . (more)

And now, this:



And, kudos to you, Eric, for another compelling bit of media ecological music video.

Pirates of the Revolution

So, my son and I went to see the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie the other day, which is Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. If you're not familiar with this or the other two movies, you can check out the official Disney site.

And here I am transformed into a pirate, courtesy of the official Disney site. Arrrhhh, mateys, shiver me timbers, yo ho ho and a bottle of RUM!!!!



Anyway, these are movies based on the popular ride first established at Disneyland, later supplemented by a variation at Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom, and you can also play and battle in a virtual reality version at DisneyQuest in Walt Disney World's Downtown Disney, I've done all three multiple times and they're all worth your while. But I have not, so far, gone on the other versions of the ride in Disneyland Paris, Tokyo Disneyland, and Hong Kong Disneyland (which has an entire Pirateland!).

Anyway, the ride is a classic, as is the theme song, which goes like this:

YO HO (A PIRATE'S LIFE FOR ME)
Lyrics by Xavier Atencio and music by George Bruns

Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me.
We pillage, we plunder, we rifle, and loot,
Drink up, me 'earties, yo ho.
We kidnap and ravage and don't give a hoot,
Drink up me 'earties, yo ho.

Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me.
We extort, we pilfer, we filch, and sack,
Drink up, me 'earties, yo ho.
Maraud and embezzle, and even high-jack,
Drink up, me 'earties, yo ho.

Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me.
We kindle and char, inflame and ignite,
Drink up, me 'earties, yo ho.
We burn up the city, we're really a fright,
Drink up, me 'earties, yo ho.

We're rascals, scoundrels, villans, and knaves,
Drink up, me 'earties, yo ho.
We're devils and black sheep, really bad eggs,
Drink up, me 'earties, yo ho.

Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me.
We're beggars and blighters, ne'er-do-well cads,
Drink up, me 'earties, yo ho.
Aye, but we're loved by our mommies and dads,
Drink up, me 'earties, yo ho.

It's a fun song, a song that makes pirates seem childlike, or rather that's about children pretending to be pirates. Which is what kids did, sometimes, when I was growing up, and still do some extent. Back then, pirate costumes were a popular alternative on Halloween, but then again so was dressing up like hobos--ho boy, you couldn't get away with that today, now that hobos are known as the homeless.

The romanticized image of the pirate is odd, when you think about it, as pirates were basically criminals, the Sopranos of the sea, I guess you could say. But maybe it's not so odd to be celebrating an ocean-going mafia when we also celebrate the western outlaw (such as Billy the Kid), the Prohibition-era gangster (such as Al Capone), and of course the modern mobster.

But, how about if we called them aquatic terrorists? No more yo ho then, eh hobo? If you've ever gone on the ride, then you'll know what I mean when I say that the attraction makes light of a scenario where pirates are, in fact, terrorizing a town. In fact, they had to make some changes to take the edge off of scenes where the pirates are chasing women, which if you really think about it reflects the reality of sexual assault, although a scene where women are being auctioned off remains in tact, made humorous by the fact that it's a chubby lady who's being offered, one who presumably is pleased at the prospect of finding a man. (I'm just reporting what I've observed, mind you.)

But look, I'm not here to argue for political correctness. The generalized image of the pirate, which is occasionally parodied in the popular cartoon, SpongeBob SquarePants, for example, has been reduced to a children's character. And the Pirates of the Caribbean ride is a part of our popular culture, charming and amusing, yo ho! Moreover, in the film adaptations, the imagery has been brought up to date so that there are strong assertive women, some of whom are pirates themselves, even pirate captains in this third movie, even the pirate king, er, queen.

I should add that it is hardly news, but worth mentioning nonetheless, that it came as an unexpected but altogether pleasant surprise that Disney was able to make an adaptation of a ride (a film adaptation of a ride!) into an entertaining and successful feature film, Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl. They then were able to surpass the original with a very funny sequel, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men's Chest.

A third film was obviously pushing their luck, and as I've mentioned in other posts (Spider-Man 3 and the Limitations of Adaptations, Shrek It Up, Baby), it's pretty much a rule that the third film in a series is the weakest of the bunch in quality, and popularity. And what I had read of the initial reviews of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End seemed to be consistent with that rule. I recall the criticism that the film is too long, too much action that accomplishes little in the first hour or so, etc. Of course, I also knew that, with lowered expectations, I'd probably enjoy the film just fine, albeit with the understanding that it would not match the quality of the first two.

Well, rules are made to be broken, and my son's verdict is that this is the best of the 3 Pirates movies. I'm not that certain myself, but I will say that it is at least as good as the other two. The second, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men's Chest, was funnier, and the first was the biggest surprise, because who knew what to expect? But this one was equally entertaining in its own way, and had the best action and adventure (in a fun sort of way, not in the sense of a movie like Die Hard) of the three, yo ho! It was long, it's true, but it wasn't a problem as the pacing of the movie was just fine, so it was long in a Lord of the Rings sense of long but I didn't mind.

What makes all three Pirates movies so entertaining is the absolutely brilliant performance of Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow. I am confident that this character will be recognized as one of the all-time greats of film comedy. He is the movie, and that's no yo hokum. Geoffrey Rush as Captain Barbossa is fine as his rival, an older and more straightforward kind of pirate. Orlando Bloom as Will Turner moves the plot along, but adds little to the film. And Keira Knightley as Elizabeth Swann is interchangeable with any number of attractive young actresses. Jack Davenport is fine as the elitist British bad guy.

And I could go on, but the point is that it's Depp's movie, and there even are a few scenes where there are multiple copies of Jack Sparrow, albeit all in his head as he converses with himself (call it Depp psychology). Hey, the more Depp the better, yo ho! And seeing as Depp used Keith Richards as his model for creating the character of Captain Jack, it was great to see the Rolling Stones guitarist (whom I met a few times when I was a graduate student working for a store called Video Shack in Manhattan circa 1980-1982) as Sparrow's father, however briefly (and it was way cool when he played guitar, and broke a string!).

I should add that the cinematography and effects make the film easy on the eyes, and there's lots of light-hearted action, capped off by having Captain Barbossa conduct an impromptu wedding ceremony for Will and Elizabeth in the midst of a massive sword fight on board which they all take part in--cute choreography there, as they fight off attackers and take their vows at the same time. And there are interesting scenes of the world's end, which leads to a otherworldly limbo known as Davy Jones' locker. For those familiar with the rides, there are a couple of magic moments, one when the Black Pearl goes over the massive waterfall at world's end, and we go to black and hear sounds from the ride, and one where the little dog with the key that you see towards the end of the ride appears in the film.

There was a plot element about Will's desire to save his father, and their ultimate reconciliation, which should have been moving but came across as fairly bland, as well as an interesting storyline concerning the love, and betrayal, between Davy Jones and the goddess Calypso, that also did not excite. But the film became a bit poignant at the end with the parallel love between Will and Elizabeth. The connection between Elizabeth and Calypso, referred to in the middle of the film, and implied in its ending, was never fully spelled out, however, and it seems to me that something significant was left out, or more likely, cut out of the film, some bit of verbal explanation, if not a more substantive scene. It's as if they got to the end, and the movie was already so long that they had to edit out something, so they decided to leave the final bit of exposition on the cutting room floor. I wouldn't be surprised, though, to see something reinserted in a director's cut or expanded edition on DVD.

Ultimately, though, what make this pirate story palatable for a popular audience is that it becomes a reenactment of the American Revolution, a theme that we long for, as can be seen in movies like Star Wars, Red Dawn, Independence Day, even Die Hard, and on TV shows like Jericho (as I discussed in a previous post). In this case, the bad guys have British accents because they really are the British, and the Redcoats represent an overwhelming force that is threatening to wipe out all of the pirates and anyone who is at all sympathetic to them (the movie begins with multitudes of civilians being hanged, including women and children, for being in some way associated with the pirates). The Brits are once more the evil empire.

It is a bit of a stretch, of course, to turn pirates into rebel freedom fighters, but that's what this movie accomplishes, as a multicultural, international fellowship of pirates reluctantly unites to defend, you guessed it, FREEDOM!!!! That they are thieves, and cutthroats, is all cast aside, or overboard, as they are shown to have a higher code that they answer to--they respond to the rule of pirate law, while the British military have suspended all of their citizen's legal rights. The problem for the pirates is to find a way to overcome their excessive individualism (which manifests itself as selfishness, greed, and cowardice), and come together as a community. Into this mix comes the character of Jack Sparrow, who is a classic self-centered rogue in the mode of Humphrey Bogart's Rick from Casablanca, and Harrison Ford's Han Solo from Star Wars, claiming to only look out for number one, but in the end putting ego aside for the greater good.

And, yo ho!, the British are defeated, the pirates preserve their freedom, and freedom for all, and a new world's end order is established. Just in time for the 4th of July, mateys.

Yo ho!