Category: Arts and Culture

Last night watched Burt Lancaster’s 1968 The Swimmer — Ned Merrill decides to “swim home” — visualizing a “necklace of azure blue swimming pools stretching across the county.” He jogs in a proto-Speedo through upper crust neighborhoods and forest land to the swimming pools of people he’s known or barely known through the decades of his life. He crashes their pool parties, trespasses with presumption into the backyards of their lives, as they become a mirror for the examination of his own life. As is slowly revealed, he is a boob, a loser of a man laboring under delusions of adequacy.

1968 must have been the year the “pull focus” technique was invented. Every other shot starts blurry then glides into focus, or vice versa. And every time he’s having a particularly insightful moment the camera zooms in on his perfect blue eyeballs, as refracted diamonds of light dance on the lens.

The conclusion is a “twist” that’s supposed to make you leave the theater feeling blown away, but today just seems absurdly, wonderfully ham-fisted.

“What’s this weird connection between fans of Star Trek, S&M, and the Renaissance Faire?”

This is Margaret Cho, apparently describing my next-door neighbors. Had never seen her before; rented both of her shows and watched with Amy this weekend. “I’m the One That I Want” by far the funnier, more cohesive, more involving. “Notorious C.H.O.” more like straight stand-up, less funny. But she is so honest, so gregarious, just so … willing to mock her family, it’s mesmerizing.

Remember what it was like back when you were obsessively ironic? Before 9-11 allegedly killed off irony for good? Remember when you could actually and genuinely enjoy movies and records that were so bad they were good? Let me guess – now you just think they’re plain old bad. Hrm. Me too. In fact, kitsch fatigue seems to be a common symptom of … something. Everywhere I turn, people are enjoying things that are actually good and seemingly disinterested in things that are bad. It’s tragic.

“I used to be able to take great pleasure in not enjoying things,” Erdman said. “But these days, the only things I like are things I like. Christ, I feel so old.”

n.b.: I never bought the idea that 9-11 made a lick of difference in the overall carrying capacity of the nation’s irony glands. I’m talking more about the weight of the mortgage than culture shift here.

Thanks Max.

Did I miss the memo, or did parents stop teaching their children to allow people exiting (a building, room, elevator, bus, etc.) to finish exiting before attempting to enter? I don’t think I’m hallucinating here — it seems that people under the age of around 25 are completely unaware of basic (sensible, not arbitrary) etiquette. Feel like I’m continually wrestling with people trying to muscle their way in while on my way out.

Read a piece in the SF Chronicle this morning about how infant car seat installation manuals are being rewritten to make them more understandable. “That’s good,” I thought. I read on. Turns out the manuals are considered too difficult to understand because they are written at a 10th-grade reading level, and include really hard words like “automobile” and “collision” and “remedied.” Turns out that health-related information is best digested when written at a 5th-grade reading level, so they’ll be changing these words to “car” and “crash” and “fixed.” Okay, whatever it takes, I thought. Then I digested the kicker:

“… data suggest that nearly a quarter of U.S. adults read at or below a fifth-grade level, and at least 25 percent read at about an eighth-grade level.”

Read that sentence again (if you can). This is the most prosperous country on earth and one quarter of our citizens are leaving the educational system reading like 5th graders? Fully one half graduate as if they had never been to high school at all? I knew illiteracy was a problem in the U.S., but I had no idea we were talking about levels like this. I am dumbfounded. Blown away.

Next time you get confused about how the country can be in such an unthinkable political quaqmire, don’t forget: These people vote.

Saw a Segway “in the wild” today in Rockridge (Oakland) on the way to breakfast with Amy. Dude balancing at a stoplight waiting for it to change, then leaned forward slightly and went zipping across the street and up College Ave. like floating, a personal hovercraft. Smooth, quiet, and utterly elegant. Just a few months ago it seemed everyone was wondering what the heck this Ginger thing was going to be that was supposed to “revolutionize” cities and the way people got around in them. Now here we are, the Segway not yet common but no more obtrusive than a bicycle and only noticeable for its new-ness. Seeing it like that, not as an oddity but as a plain old fact of life made it seem so sensible. I kind of want one.

So London has shown the cojones to do something about the worst traffic congestion problem in Britain: Levy a £5 fee on anyone who wants to drive within the 8-square-mile core of the city during business hours.

Harsh… but the problem isn’t going to clear itself up and medicine can taste pretty nasty. The rest of Great Britain is watching to see how the plan goes, planning to roll out similar plans elsewhere if it makes a difference. Early reports say that downtown London looks “like Christmas day” (i.e. deserted).

It’s such a simple solution, really, but so hard to utter without offending car-centric sensibilities: Car use must be disincentived. Not banned. Not punished. Just made less attractive. Cars have taken over the world and it’s going to be hard work to take it back. But it has to happen, one small step at a time. It’s almost impossible to imagine an American politician risking a plan like this — political suicide. But eventually, I think, similar plans will become a virtual inevitability all over the world.

Update: Ongoing reports on how the first days of the charge are actually going.

Frank Boosman on contemporary attempts to design a symbolic warning system that will last 12,000 years. What, humans 12 millenia hence won’t intuitively understand that a hill festooned with lovely blue ivy actually means “Get back, we’re radioactive” ???