A couple weeks I got an email out of the blue from an administrator at Wikipedia, someone I didn't know. The email was a semi-automated communication informing that because of my longstanding absence from any participation in the project, my account would formally de-sysoped (i.e. removed from administrator privileges) within thirty days if there were no further edits made from my account.
Ironically I had assumed that I had long-since been stripped of my sysop privileges (which for the uninitiated include such privileges as banning users, locking pages, and rolling back changes by other uses). Other than a minor edit to my own user page, I hadn't made any real edits since 2006.
Reading the email brought a flood of memories. I had joined Wikipedia in January 2004 right after a rather traumatic personal episode had left me hollowed out and nearly unable to function. For the next six months living in New York, I went crazy with Wikipedia, spending nearly every waking minute editing and adding pages. I thought it was keeping me sane, although my wife (now ex-wife) thought I was going nuts. I probably was.
Back then Wikipedia was much smaller than it is now, so there were many fundamental topics that didn't have pages yet. When I noticed this, I went on a page-adding binge. When I last counted, I had started over a thousand new pages, many of them having to do with American rivers, a topic that became my specialty of sorts. I also researched and wrote a lot of articles on American history, including the history of the various territories, and how their borders changed. As part of the fun of it all, I organized my created articles into a cascading list, a tree of sorts, showing how each one linked to another.
Later that year when I left New York and drove across the country to Oregon, I traveled back roads and stopped at every river and in every little town to take a photograph with Nikon Coolpix 990. I later added these photos to Wikipedia in the appropriate article for that place. At one point I reckoned I was one of the most widely published photographers on the web.
Being an admin had come early. I had been nominated in the Spring of 2004 by a "Wiki-friend," a woman named Jennifer who lived in Los Angeles and who wrote for an online entertainment magazine, and who had just been on the game show Jeopardy. She was one of the most widely known and respected admins at the time. We had run across each other while editing articles on American history. Ironically it was the Golden Spike article about the completion of the transcontinental railroad. As a Stanford grad, she had been interested in the article because of Leland Stanford of the Central Pacific Railroad, whereas I had been editing the Union Pacific article (I can't tell you how ironic that would become in later years, but that's a whole different story).
Jennifer had particularly liked the way I organized my articles into a tree. She nicknamed it the "Decumanus tree" (after my user name) and made one for herself.
We eventually met up in Los Angeles a couple years later, although by that time she had gotten married, so nothing "came" of it (she was sort of wistful at that). Nevertheless we had a good time sharing martinis at Musso and Franks on Hollywood Boulevard.
All this seems like ancient history now. In the summer of 2006, for various other reasons, including general fatigue, I decided I couldn't take it anymore and just quit Wikipedia for good. I became one of those legendary admins who just disappears one day and is never heard from again. My user name went into some list of long-lost admins.
Almost instantly, as abruptly as it all had begun, I went from being a Wikipedia power user to simply being a regular user. I still used Wikipedia as anyone did, but only to read it, and never to edit it. It was like that whole phase of my life just stopped in an instant.
I never thought of going back. I knew it was over completely. But then I got that email a couple weeks ago, and it occurred to me that some part of me didn't want to relinguish my admin privileges. It was like a badge of honor, especially considering how longstanding they were, and how popular Wikipedia had become in the meantime.
So after having my forgotten password reset, I logged back into my old account for the first time in years. It was like coming back into a room in one's house that has been sealed off. It felt eerie to see the Wikipedia page with all my user details and options in the menu across the top again.
But I had no desire to go back to the kind of editing I used to do. Instead I figured I just become one of those obscure admins that contributes random minor fixes. My first edit was simply to fix a typo, and then one night a couple weeks ago, I actually made several edits to expand the plot description of a Star Trek episode as I watched on Channel 3 ("Errand of Mercy", to be exact).
It was tremendous fun, but it did not inspire me to want to edit more than occassionally. In any case, the notice about my pending de-sysoping was removed from user page, so I guess I'm safe for now.
Nevertheless I guess it will a small part of my life again for now. Back in 2004, I had used Wikipedia as a leverage to learn about American geography and history in preparation for what would be a series of road trips across America. Now I have other interests. Over the last year I've been reading through the entire Bible rather slowly, and doing my own Bible study of sorts.
This week I was reading through Acts and thinking about of the voyages of Paul, trying to map them out in my mind while reading the text. I had read about Paul and Barnabus visiting Perga and wondered where it was in modern-day Turkey, so I looked it up in a search engine and read the Wikipedia article about. I noticed that the article mentioned Paul's visit, but did not provide a proper citation to the passage in Acts. Back in my day, we didn't have citations in the pages, so I took the opportunity to learn how to make the minor edit to include the citation.
It made the knowledge of that passage more concrete in my mind. It occurred to me that maybe this will be my own form of Bible study, to add scriptural citations to Wikipedia page. Maybe I'll even go back to Turkey, as I did in 1985, when I stood on a pillar in Ephesus and recited Ozymandias from memory, to the delight of the Episcopal priest who had become my traveling companion for the day. I could so many more places to visit now!
I also enjoy thinking how after I make my small edits, there is some eagle-eyed admin or power user coming the ever-changing Recent Changes log on Wikipedia, scouting for vandalism, as many users do, in order to roll it back. I enjoy the idea that they see my user name and wonder "who is this?" and then go to my user page and realize that they stumbled upon an obscure long-long admin who came and went from the project years before they created their own account.
And of course I learn about things I wouldn't have known about it. When hitting the front page of Wikipedia, as one does while editing, I get to see the list of obscure news items that I wouldn't never have known about. For example, today I read that "Hungarian mathematician Endre Szemerédi wins the Abel Prize for his contributions to discrete mathematics and theoretical computer science." Now that's news I can use!
Monday, March 26, 2012
Saturday, March 24, 2012
The Hunger Games
The days of the pre-apocalypse are upon it. I know it for sure now.
Like many people, for the past several years, I have been watching as things have been falling apart---civility, liberty, democracy, the rule of the law. Along the way I have felt a deep need to share my alarm with other people, as if to warn them, to spread an awareness, as if somehow the trend could be stopped or reversed.
But I know now that it cannot be reversed. I know that things must get must worse before they get better. There are dark times ahead for all of us. There is nothing that can be done to stop it now.
This profound sad awareness has been growing in me steeply over the last six months. But tonight I think it hit full force. I can't pretend anymore.
I hadn't even heard of The Hunger Games until two weeks ago. I had a vague consciousness of it from walking through Barnes and Noble. Then I started to see it mentioned everywhere on the Internet. I learned that it was a book series. It was a movie, I learned, about to premiere.
So about two weeks ago I sought out a plot synopsis of the series. Nothing prepared me for what I read. Sure, it was post-apocalypse, a brutal dystopia.
But nothing so brutal and bleak had ever been as popular as this, as popular as the Twilight or Harry Potter series, which seem so tame and innocent by comparison.
The parking lot of the Cinemark was packed full. The movie was showing in six auditoriums. There were lines outside the theater organized by showtime by the staff, the demand was so large. When I drove up, there were probably two hundred people waiting for the five o'clock show.
The auditorium was packed. I sat crammed in the third row between a teenage girl with her mother, and a group of three college women. Behind me was a row of high school students.
I won't belabor the movie. Go see it for yourself if you want to know. As a sci-fi movie, it was certainly very good. I have nothing against it as a production. It certainly as a good story. It kept me interested from the start to the end.
But none of that matters. What matters is that this is the most popular movie in the country, and will be the most popular movie of the year.
Afterwards I sat in my car in the parking lot for about fifteen minutes just staring off through the windshield.
At least I don't have to deal anymore with the manic feeling of having to tell people what I see. There is no point in it.
So this is 2012, I thought. This is where we are right now...
Like many people, for the past several years, I have been watching as things have been falling apart---civility, liberty, democracy, the rule of the law. Along the way I have felt a deep need to share my alarm with other people, as if to warn them, to spread an awareness, as if somehow the trend could be stopped or reversed.
But I know now that it cannot be reversed. I know that things must get must worse before they get better. There are dark times ahead for all of us. There is nothing that can be done to stop it now.
This profound sad awareness has been growing in me steeply over the last six months. But tonight I think it hit full force. I can't pretend anymore.
I hadn't even heard of The Hunger Games until two weeks ago. I had a vague consciousness of it from walking through Barnes and Noble. Then I started to see it mentioned everywhere on the Internet. I learned that it was a book series. It was a movie, I learned, about to premiere.
So about two weeks ago I sought out a plot synopsis of the series. Nothing prepared me for what I read. Sure, it was post-apocalypse, a brutal dystopia.
But nothing so brutal and bleak had ever been as popular as this, as popular as the Twilight or Harry Potter series, which seem so tame and innocent by comparison.
The parking lot of the Cinemark was packed full. The movie was showing in six auditoriums. There were lines outside the theater organized by showtime by the staff, the demand was so large. When I drove up, there were probably two hundred people waiting for the five o'clock show.
The auditorium was packed. I sat crammed in the third row between a teenage girl with her mother, and a group of three college women. Behind me was a row of high school students.
I won't belabor the movie. Go see it for yourself if you want to know. As a sci-fi movie, it was certainly very good. I have nothing against it as a production. It certainly as a good story. It kept me interested from the start to the end.
But none of that matters. What matters is that this is the most popular movie in the country, and will be the most popular movie of the year.
Afterwards I sat in my car in the parking lot for about fifteen minutes just staring off through the windshield.
At least I don't have to deal anymore with the manic feeling of having to tell people what I see. There is no point in it.
So this is 2012, I thought. This is where we are right now...
Thursday, March 22, 2012
The Walking Dead (AMC)
A couple months ago I had been saying that I was done following any new television shows. The last new show I tried to watch was Kings a couple years ago on ABC, and LOST had really left me feeling empty. I had picked up Mad Men for a while, but I hadn't seen any of the last season, which was a year and half ago.
But then last Sunday night I'm sitting in front of the television counting down the minutes on the screen until the season finale of The Walking Dead on AMC. I'd been discussing it on Facebook with a friend who watches it, and had been following the subreddit dedicated to the show like a groupie. So what happened?
It was purely a whim, I suppose. About a month ago, AMC announced a marathon of The Walking Dead, starting with the first episode of Season One. Having nothing better to do that weekend, I sat down and watched the whole run of the marathon in two segments over two days. Fortunately there wasn't that much to catch up on, since there had only been one and half seasons so far, and the AMC seasons are only thirteen episodes long.
But a zombie show? That was the surprising part to me. I really had no interest in seeing any more zombie stuff. During my run of seeing all the movies that came out, I truly got sick of zombies. They seem to have taken over our culture, and are everywhere.
Last Halloween it really hit me how far we've come. In mid-October I went downtown one evening and encountered the modern day phenomenon of "the zombie crawl," which is, I learned, an open-air spontaneous Halloween parade/walkabout where everyone is dressed as a zombie of some kind.
It caught me off guard and was quite horrifying. There were zombies of all kinds, including an Alice in Wonderland zombie with her throat cut walking with a Mad Hatter zombie also with his throat cut. There were political figure zombies. There were monster zombies. There were adult zombies. There were little children zombies. There were every people zombies. By far the most common type of zombie were the women dressed in wedding gowns, usually blood splattered.
"What the hell has happened to our country?" I thought, staggering away to drive home. Later I spoke to my friends Agnes and Thor about this. They were equally disturbed when I described the parade.
"Why would I want to volunteer to be an extra in Satan's Army of the Damned?" I said. That got a laugh out of them.
"All Halloween costumes have to be zombie costumes now," said Agnes. "My niece wanted to a cheerleader for Christmas," she explained. Then she said her sister suggested a "zombie cheerleader" costume.
"Why does everything have to be undead now?" Agnes complained.
Why indeed. Using the premise that Halloween costumes reflect the "shadow" nature of personalities and cultural sensibilities, then idea that we all must be walking dead figures now has an obvious cultural message, one that dovetails with nearly every observation I've made about America lately.
We are a Zombie Nation, we seem to be saying. And by zombie, we mean naturally the canonical zombie as introduced by George Romero in Night of the Living Dead in 1968. All zombies follow that pattern of cannibalistic, rotting corpse types who can kill people with their bite and turn them into zombies of the same kind.
So we are all braindead cannibals now, corpse-like representations of the human beings we once were? Yup, that sounds like America in 2012.
That being said, I've really enjoyed The Walking Dead more than I thought, perhaps because it acknowledges how far deep into the baroque phase of zombie culture we are. In many ways, it does not try to be original. It uses all sorts of zombie tropes and shorthand of recent zombie culture, including things borrowed from not only the Romero movies, but quite obviously from the British movie 28 Days Later and even from LOST, which was not about zombies, but had similar themes as a science fiction work. This makes it very accessible in a way, and allows it to skip to themes behind simple zombiedoom.
In fact the zombies often fade into the background of the post-apocalyptic world of the show. This indicates how normalized zombie culture is. We all know what it is by now, and we are all living it, to some degree, in shadow form.
Instead, as I wrote about in a friends Facebook post:
That's why the show is refreshing. This is especially true concerning the male characters, and many of the Internet discussions are about whether the male characters are sufficiently "men" considering the demands being made on them (LOST had this as well, to a high degree). These are discussions that one is simply not allowed to have about most male characters on television these days, who buy and large are depicted as irrelevant man-boys who are mostly obsessed with boobs and beer. Or they act manly but they work as enforcers for the Police State in some form. Even then there power is challenged and equalled by strong female characers and thus it is no longer considered to be "masculine" in nature.
The post-apocalypse scenario of The Walking Dead cuts right to the chase: men need to be men. They need to be strong and decisive. They need to protect the women and children. There is no arguing about this. The women can be strong too, but for them it is an option. If they want, they can choose to be feminine. For the men, it is not an option. It is mandatory. There is no dicussion. It is simply known and assumed by all the characers.
It's very caveman level in some ways. I think this is why the show is so popular.
In any case, I'm hooked. But shucks, now that I'm caught up, I have to wait six months or more for the next season, like all the rest of the poor suckers for follow the show.
In the meantime, there's a new season of Mad Men coming up. Hmmm....
But then last Sunday night I'm sitting in front of the television counting down the minutes on the screen until the season finale of The Walking Dead on AMC. I'd been discussing it on Facebook with a friend who watches it, and had been following the subreddit dedicated to the show like a groupie. So what happened?
It was purely a whim, I suppose. About a month ago, AMC announced a marathon of The Walking Dead, starting with the first episode of Season One. Having nothing better to do that weekend, I sat down and watched the whole run of the marathon in two segments over two days. Fortunately there wasn't that much to catch up on, since there had only been one and half seasons so far, and the AMC seasons are only thirteen episodes long.
But a zombie show? That was the surprising part to me. I really had no interest in seeing any more zombie stuff. During my run of seeing all the movies that came out, I truly got sick of zombies. They seem to have taken over our culture, and are everywhere.
Last Halloween it really hit me how far we've come. In mid-October I went downtown one evening and encountered the modern day phenomenon of "the zombie crawl," which is, I learned, an open-air spontaneous Halloween parade/walkabout where everyone is dressed as a zombie of some kind.
It caught me off guard and was quite horrifying. There were zombies of all kinds, including an Alice in Wonderland zombie with her throat cut walking with a Mad Hatter zombie also with his throat cut. There were political figure zombies. There were monster zombies. There were adult zombies. There were little children zombies. There were every people zombies. By far the most common type of zombie were the women dressed in wedding gowns, usually blood splattered.
"What the hell has happened to our country?" I thought, staggering away to drive home. Later I spoke to my friends Agnes and Thor about this. They were equally disturbed when I described the parade.
"Why would I want to volunteer to be an extra in Satan's Army of the Damned?" I said. That got a laugh out of them.
"All Halloween costumes have to be zombie costumes now," said Agnes. "My niece wanted to a cheerleader for Christmas," she explained. Then she said her sister suggested a "zombie cheerleader" costume.
"Why does everything have to be undead now?" Agnes complained.
Why indeed. Using the premise that Halloween costumes reflect the "shadow" nature of personalities and cultural sensibilities, then idea that we all must be walking dead figures now has an obvious cultural message, one that dovetails with nearly every observation I've made about America lately.
We are a Zombie Nation, we seem to be saying. And by zombie, we mean naturally the canonical zombie as introduced by George Romero in Night of the Living Dead in 1968. All zombies follow that pattern of cannibalistic, rotting corpse types who can kill people with their bite and turn them into zombies of the same kind.
So we are all braindead cannibals now, corpse-like representations of the human beings we once were? Yup, that sounds like America in 2012.
That being said, I've really enjoyed The Walking Dead more than I thought, perhaps because it acknowledges how far deep into the baroque phase of zombie culture we are. In many ways, it does not try to be original. It uses all sorts of zombie tropes and shorthand of recent zombie culture, including things borrowed from not only the Romero movies, but quite obviously from the British movie 28 Days Later and even from LOST, which was not about zombies, but had similar themes as a science fiction work. This makes it very accessible in a way, and allows it to skip to themes behind simple zombiedoom.
In fact the zombies often fade into the background of the post-apocalyptic world of the show. This indicates how normalized zombie culture is. We all know what it is by now, and we are all living it, to some degree, in shadow form.
Instead, as I wrote about in a friends Facebook post:
Yes, the show is really about manhood and womanhood. The main discussions on the Internet are about the characters living up to, or not living up, various demands on them as men and women in a very traditional sense.
I agree about the writing, Betty. It has dawned on me that the show isn't really about zombies, or a post-apocalypse society. From my view, a lot of the show seems an exploration of male-female roles and relationships outside of the evolved canons of contemporary post-feminist society. What does it really mean to be a man or a woman? The apocalypse scenario largely forces contemporary men and women into "traditional" roles and contemplates how they cope with that. In a sense, it truly is the same show as Mad Men, which has much of the same underlying theme, but uses the lens of the pre-feminist past instead of an apocalyptic future.
That's why the show is refreshing. This is especially true concerning the male characters, and many of the Internet discussions are about whether the male characters are sufficiently "men" considering the demands being made on them (LOST had this as well, to a high degree). These are discussions that one is simply not allowed to have about most male characters on television these days, who buy and large are depicted as irrelevant man-boys who are mostly obsessed with boobs and beer. Or they act manly but they work as enforcers for the Police State in some form. Even then there power is challenged and equalled by strong female characers and thus it is no longer considered to be "masculine" in nature.
The post-apocalypse scenario of The Walking Dead cuts right to the chase: men need to be men. They need to be strong and decisive. They need to protect the women and children. There is no arguing about this. The women can be strong too, but for them it is an option. If they want, they can choose to be feminine. For the men, it is not an option. It is mandatory. There is no dicussion. It is simply known and assumed by all the characers.
It's very caveman level in some ways. I think this is why the show is so popular.
In any case, I'm hooked. But shucks, now that I'm caught up, I have to wait six months or more for the next season, like all the rest of the poor suckers for follow the show.
In the meantime, there's a new season of Mad Men coming up. Hmmm....
Monday, March 12, 2012
The Last Cruise of the Enterprise
"We have the right---"
"To wage war on a planetary scale, captain? To slaughter millions of innocent lives?"
Sometimes a weird theme will take over my life in some coincidental way for a while. Lately it seems to revolve around the old television show Star Trek.
It started a couple weeks ago when, finding myself bored one evening, I was flipping through the television (something I don't do much anymore) and landed an old rerun of the original series of Star Trek, showing on Channel 3. I hadn't watched an episode of that old show in years, but all of a sudden it seemed like exactly what I wanted to see.
Partly it was the fact that it was showing on Channel 3, which is an old station that used to broadcast out of Sterling, a town far out on the Eastern plains of Colorado. Back in the old days, one could pick the Sterling channel with the right antenna orientation. These days, the channel now broadcasts from Denver (I guess) but it retains the format of an old-time independent tv station that just shows old reruns, game shows, and infomercials. It's sort of like what Channel 2 (KWGN) used to be like in Denver in the old days, for folks that remember that.
Thus watching Star Trek on Channel 3 has almost the same campy old-time t.v. feeling as watching it back in the late seventies. They even show the closing credits all the way through, like they used to for old reruns.
Almost immediately it became a staple of my evening routine. Shortly before eight, I could turn on the tv to Channel 3 and catch the last few minutes of a rerun of Magnum P.I. before Star Trek would come on. The opening few minutes of the teaser felt like sinking into a warm bath---a rational world of the crew of the USS Enterprise in outer space, as imagined in the years 1966-1967 (all the episodes I've seen so far have been from the first season).
I'm particularly enjoying the episodes that revolve around the idea of war and peace. For example, a couple days ago they showed "A Taste of Armageddon," which is one of my all-time favorite episodes (Season 1, Episode 24 link). In that episode, two planets are at war with each other, but it is a "fake war," with all of the action generated by computers in a virtual reality which calculates the casualties. The population of both planets must voluntarily submit to execution chambers in order to satisfy the death calculations. They believe it is more humane to do this, because there is no actual physical damage. When Kirk puts a stop to the process by destroying their computers and their execution chambers, the inhabitants of the planet realize to their horror that they are going to have confront the idea of staging an actual real war with other planet. Suddenly peace seems like it might be a good idea after all.
I've long meditated on this episode in relation to our current state of war in the U.S., which is so "clean" in that with the exception of those actually involved in th e military, we don't suffer any apparent damages our casualties. It is all happening elsewhere, to other people. This is why we can keep doing it year after year, without any apparent effects.
But there are always effects of war. I believe that we suffer from it collectively in some deep psychological way, despite our believe that we don't. Somehow the "casualties" will be taken, here at home, despite our belief that we are far removed and immune.
Tonight's episode was "Errand of Mercy," which is about an impeding war between the Federation and the Klingon Empire (Season 1 Episode 26 link). The two sides about are about to start a galactic-sized conflict over a small planet on the edge of the space territories, but they are stopped and forced to negotiate peace by a super race of ethereal thought beings, who have been masquerading as helpless primitive humanoids. The super beings disable all the weapons of both sides, leaving them no choice but to make peace. The quote on the top of this post is from the leader of the super beings, refuting Kirk's attempts to assert his right to wage war.
In a way, thus, it's the same concept as "Taste of Armageddon," but on a much bigger scale, with the humans now cast as the race in need of schooling in the ways of peace.
Both episodes, as well as so many other in the original series, reflect the "enlightened" American values of the late 1960's. We saw ourselves as a muscular, masculine culture, unafraid to fight when it was called for, but we sought peace whenever possible, and always strove to fight with honor and a code of fairness.
How much more complicated it would be now. How much darker we would be. So many of the values of the old Star Trek now seem like quaint relics of another era. Now we torture. We bend the rules. Codes of honor are for idiots. Peace is elusive and never really possible. Is it even desirable?
We make one war after another. Even as one war fails, we go on to the next one, as if this time "we'll surely get it right." Our failures only seem to make us want to feed our addiction.
You might say "it's a different world," but 1967 wasn't exactly the cleanest and most noble year of American history. In fact the reality of the Vietnam War was as messy and disgusting as anything happening right now in Central Asia. Yet nevertheless we could assert cultural values that expressed our desire for fairness, justice, and honor. We could strive for the higher ground of our souls. What is honor now? It seems to be nothing more than reflexive bravery in combat. How debased we are.
Like I said, I like when a theme of my life unfolds with a certain degree of coincidence. For example, I wasn't surprised when Nick, the guy whom I gave a ride up to Nederland a couple weeks ago, patted the the dashboard of my BMW sedan and reminisced about his old family car, saying they called it "Captain Kirk." It felt like a blessing somehow.
Just today I was reading how the real-life USS Enterprise (link), the first and oldest nuclear air craft carrier in the US fleet, first launched in 1961, just set sail on what will be its last ever cruise. Back in 1967, when my uncle Dick was serving aboard that ship as a radio operator while it operated off the coast of Vietnam sending bombing sorties. My father once said that his brother made a vow that if he were ever supposed to relay orders for deploying a nuclear weapon, that he would personally refuse and accept whatever consequences it meant. Thankfully he didn't have to do that. He was honorably discharged and went on to own a chain of recording studios in the upper Midwest.
Yesterday the Big E, as those in the Navy call it, left Norfolk on its way across the Atlantic to a mission in the Persian Gulf. It's part of the American fleet that is being assembled there in possible preparation for the coming war with Iran, the war that everyone in the media seems to think is inevitable. We keep hearing how it just has to happen. Some think it could be the start of World War III (or IV, depending on how you're counting). Or maybe it will all just blow over, like it has before, and we'll be talking about the same things a couple years from now.
It goes without saying that I hope that Enterprise comes back home safely, without having to fire a shot in anger. I wish I could say that I believe that this view is being shared by the powerful people who are moving these chess pieces around the world. I wish I could say that they believe in honor, fairness, and justice. I wish there were a little more of 1967 left alive in our culture.
But heck, I'd settle for a 1984.
Hielten sich für Captain Kirk...
"To wage war on a planetary scale, captain? To slaughter millions of innocent lives?"
Sometimes a weird theme will take over my life in some coincidental way for a while. Lately it seems to revolve around the old television show Star Trek.
It started a couple weeks ago when, finding myself bored one evening, I was flipping through the television (something I don't do much anymore) and landed an old rerun of the original series of Star Trek, showing on Channel 3. I hadn't watched an episode of that old show in years, but all of a sudden it seemed like exactly what I wanted to see.
Partly it was the fact that it was showing on Channel 3, which is an old station that used to broadcast out of Sterling, a town far out on the Eastern plains of Colorado. Back in the old days, one could pick the Sterling channel with the right antenna orientation. These days, the channel now broadcasts from Denver (I guess) but it retains the format of an old-time independent tv station that just shows old reruns, game shows, and infomercials. It's sort of like what Channel 2 (KWGN) used to be like in Denver in the old days, for folks that remember that.
Thus watching Star Trek on Channel 3 has almost the same campy old-time t.v. feeling as watching it back in the late seventies. They even show the closing credits all the way through, like they used to for old reruns.
Almost immediately it became a staple of my evening routine. Shortly before eight, I could turn on the tv to Channel 3 and catch the last few minutes of a rerun of Magnum P.I. before Star Trek would come on. The opening few minutes of the teaser felt like sinking into a warm bath---a rational world of the crew of the USS Enterprise in outer space, as imagined in the years 1966-1967 (all the episodes I've seen so far have been from the first season).
I'm particularly enjoying the episodes that revolve around the idea of war and peace. For example, a couple days ago they showed "A Taste of Armageddon," which is one of my all-time favorite episodes (Season 1, Episode 24 link). In that episode, two planets are at war with each other, but it is a "fake war," with all of the action generated by computers in a virtual reality which calculates the casualties. The population of both planets must voluntarily submit to execution chambers in order to satisfy the death calculations. They believe it is more humane to do this, because there is no actual physical damage. When Kirk puts a stop to the process by destroying their computers and their execution chambers, the inhabitants of the planet realize to their horror that they are going to have confront the idea of staging an actual real war with other planet. Suddenly peace seems like it might be a good idea after all.
I've long meditated on this episode in relation to our current state of war in the U.S., which is so "clean" in that with the exception of those actually involved in th e military, we don't suffer any apparent damages our casualties. It is all happening elsewhere, to other people. This is why we can keep doing it year after year, without any apparent effects.
But there are always effects of war. I believe that we suffer from it collectively in some deep psychological way, despite our believe that we don't. Somehow the "casualties" will be taken, here at home, despite our belief that we are far removed and immune.
Tonight's episode was "Errand of Mercy," which is about an impeding war between the Federation and the Klingon Empire (Season 1 Episode 26 link). The two sides about are about to start a galactic-sized conflict over a small planet on the edge of the space territories, but they are stopped and forced to negotiate peace by a super race of ethereal thought beings, who have been masquerading as helpless primitive humanoids. The super beings disable all the weapons of both sides, leaving them no choice but to make peace. The quote on the top of this post is from the leader of the super beings, refuting Kirk's attempts to assert his right to wage war.
In a way, thus, it's the same concept as "Taste of Armageddon," but on a much bigger scale, with the humans now cast as the race in need of schooling in the ways of peace.
Both episodes, as well as so many other in the original series, reflect the "enlightened" American values of the late 1960's. We saw ourselves as a muscular, masculine culture, unafraid to fight when it was called for, but we sought peace whenever possible, and always strove to fight with honor and a code of fairness.
How much more complicated it would be now. How much darker we would be. So many of the values of the old Star Trek now seem like quaint relics of another era. Now we torture. We bend the rules. Codes of honor are for idiots. Peace is elusive and never really possible. Is it even desirable?
We make one war after another. Even as one war fails, we go on to the next one, as if this time "we'll surely get it right." Our failures only seem to make us want to feed our addiction.
You might say "it's a different world," but 1967 wasn't exactly the cleanest and most noble year of American history. In fact the reality of the Vietnam War was as messy and disgusting as anything happening right now in Central Asia. Yet nevertheless we could assert cultural values that expressed our desire for fairness, justice, and honor. We could strive for the higher ground of our souls. What is honor now? It seems to be nothing more than reflexive bravery in combat. How debased we are.
Like I said, I like when a theme of my life unfolds with a certain degree of coincidence. For example, I wasn't surprised when Nick, the guy whom I gave a ride up to Nederland a couple weeks ago, patted the the dashboard of my BMW sedan and reminisced about his old family car, saying they called it "Captain Kirk." It felt like a blessing somehow.
Just today I was reading how the real-life USS Enterprise (link), the first and oldest nuclear air craft carrier in the US fleet, first launched in 1961, just set sail on what will be its last ever cruise. Back in 1967, when my uncle Dick was serving aboard that ship as a radio operator while it operated off the coast of Vietnam sending bombing sorties. My father once said that his brother made a vow that if he were ever supposed to relay orders for deploying a nuclear weapon, that he would personally refuse and accept whatever consequences it meant. Thankfully he didn't have to do that. He was honorably discharged and went on to own a chain of recording studios in the upper Midwest.
Yesterday the Big E, as those in the Navy call it, left Norfolk on its way across the Atlantic to a mission in the Persian Gulf. It's part of the American fleet that is being assembled there in possible preparation for the coming war with Iran, the war that everyone in the media seems to think is inevitable. We keep hearing how it just has to happen. Some think it could be the start of World War III (or IV, depending on how you're counting). Or maybe it will all just blow over, like it has before, and we'll be talking about the same things a couple years from now.
It goes without saying that I hope that Enterprise comes back home safely, without having to fire a shot in anger. I wish I could say that I believe that this view is being shared by the powerful people who are moving these chess pieces around the world. I wish I could say that they believe in honor, fairness, and justice. I wish there were a little more of 1967 left alive in our culture.
But heck, I'd settle for a 1984.
Hielten sich für Captain Kirk...
Thursday, March 8, 2012
The Truth about Orkans
Let me explain: last summer when I was living on the Hill I sometimes cut across campus on the way home from work and noticed that the Psych building was right next to the CU football stadium, Folsom Field.
It made me remember, in a humorous way, the old ABC television show Mork and Mindy (link), which is the only network sitcom ever to be set in Boulder, and which debuted right at the time that my family moved to Colorado in the late 1970s.
The premise of the show, as you may recall, is that an extraterrestrial alien being Mork (Robin Williams) travels from the planet Ork to Earth to study the habits of Earth people. Mindy (Pam Dawber) is a young woman in Boulder who finds him and takes him in. They live together in her apartment (I always remember the Jackson Browne album on the wall of Mindy's apartment in the show---that was the epitome of Bohemian living to me back then).
There's a scene I remembered in the opening credits of the show, in which Robin Williams is standing on the goal posts of Folsom Field. Pam Dawber is standing on the field in the end zone trying to coax him down. Here it is (I love Mork sitting in his rainbow down vest next to Boulder Falls in this clip!):
Last summer when I noticed Muenzinger Hall next to the football stadium, it suddenly hit me: Oh, Mork really wasn't an alien being at all. He was a crazy homeless person from Boulder who was in some observational experiment at Muenzinger Hall in the CU Psych Department. One day he escaped, went off his meds, and Mindy found him on the football field and took him home. Now it all makes sense! OK, I realize that probably doesn't fit with the plot of the show, or that particular episode, but I'm going to keep it as my pet theory.
In any case, just to continue my review of Slacker 2011 briefly, I certainly got a kick out of the fact that 9/11 "conspiracy theories" were mentioned quite copiously in the movie. This was appropriate in many ways, since discussion of the Kennedy assassination was part of the original Slacker in 1990.
The discussion about 9/11 was a bit satiricial in the context of the movie, but I didn't mind at all, or take it personally.
But just for balance, and in tribute to the psychologists of Boulder, I'm including the Youtube video at the top of this post, which I also greatly enjoyed, and which made me feel like I'm in good company with the other "crazies" walking the streets of this town.
Slacker 2011
Has it been thirteen years? I guess it has.
Looking for my next-thing-to-do in Boulder after last week's climate science lecture, I read a notice in the printed version of the Onion, of all things, for a showing the following Wednesday on the CU campus for Slacker 2011, which I immediately discerned must be an updated version of the famous film Slacker by Austin film producer Rick Linklater. Given that I had just been reminiscing about Austin, this seemed like the obvious next step.
Slacker (link) came out in the summer of 1990, at the end of my first year in graduate school in Austin. I remember the guerilla marketing for it all around West Campus and the Drag that spring. It soon became a local cult classic. One of the most notable actors in it was later in a film shot in my own house on Duval Street in the spring of 1992, produced by my roommate James Froeschle as part of his master's thesis at UT (imdb entry).
In the original Slacker, the rambling stream-of-consciousness style that dragged the viewer haphazardly from one conversation to another, following various people who crossed the screen, seemed to be the perfect style for Austin. Say what you want about it, somehow it captured the goofy spontaneity of Austin and its weird inhabitants right on the cusp of the 1990s. I was looking forward to seeing the "update," although I knew there would be a bit of poignancy in that it would remind me that I had not been back to Austin since the spring of 1999, and in most ways, it was no longer my place to call my own, or my home at all anymore.
I noticed the showing would be at the Meuzinger Auditorium on CU. That was just a little bit further up the hill from the Institute for Behavioral Sciences. Could there be anything more perfect for my next step?
I drove to Boulder a bit early and stopped for dinner at a Tibetan take-out place at the corner of Folsom and Arapahoe. What could be more Boulder than a Tibetan take-out place? It was the first time I'd been there. I'd driven by it repeatedly and thought of going. It seemed like the time to start new things. I asked the Tibetan-looking guy at the counter for a recommendation for Tibetan food, and he suggested a spicy beef dish. As I ate it, sitting at the window counter with my back turned, a young couple that had just moved to Boulder from Detroit chatted with the owner about Tibet and Tibetan food. The owner went into a history of Tibetan independence and non-independence. He said Tibetan food was a cross between Indian food and Chinese food, as one might expect. He discussed how he had come to America from India, where Tibetan exiles live these days. He talked about times long past in Boulder---the old days and how they differed from today. It took me a while to realize that he was talking about 1992.
I parked down by the high school and walked up the hill to campus on 17th Street. It's the nicest way to approach campus. Some of the buildings remind me so much of UT at times. I got to the auditorium a few minutes early and killed time staring up at the CU physics building across the street, a mini-high rise that also recalls the physics building in Austin.
The film was being shown as part of CU's international film series (link). The auditorium is in the psychology building, and was a nice place to see a movie for seven bucks. The girl at the table gave me a torn paper ticket from a roll. The auditorium was almost entirely empty. Only about a dozen people were in attendance. All were men in their forties and fifties. With exception of one pair, they all had come alone.
It took me until the end of the movie to realize that Slacker 2011 was not in fact made by Linklater himself. He had gone on to much bigger fame, of course. Rather this sequel is the collaborative product of the Austin Film Society, with different film makers contributing various scenes to the stream-of-consciousness tapestry. The style is true to the original---we follow a character for one scene, and then follow another character randomly into a completely different scene. There were a few distinct homage scenes, including a reprise of the most famous scene from the original where the late John Henry Faulk, an Austin legend, narrates his experiences on the day of the Whitman tower shooting in August 1966. In the updated version, the dialogue is exactly the same, but the roles are played in a humorous inversion by new actors that gives it a surreal flavor.
But most of the material was fresh in content. Right in the first scene, I was pleased to recognize streets I had once walked on years ago. In those same scenes I noticed how cell phones, which did not exist in 1990 in their current from, now played in important part in so many of the mini plots.
It was fun to reminisce and to see places of business that I recognized---old signs---and "have it all come back to me." But there were plenty of new things too, places I didn't recognize at all, but which I knew must have become new well-known hangouts. A new Les Amis!? I was prepared for this kind of zeitgeist shock. Like I said, I knew Austin wouldn't feel like home to me anymore. If I wanted it to be home, I'd have to go back and reclaim it all anew.
But there was more dislocation in my reaction than this personal element. In many of the scenes, I noticed that a strong current of something akin to nihilism, something which was not in the original at all. It made me realize why I don't actually want to live in Austin anymore. It was as if, on the one hand, nothing had really changed there, only that the dysfunctions of the trends of 1990 had been blown up and amplified over the years to the point where the character sketches were no longer whimsical and fun but downright sad.
The characters were mostly young people in their twenties---barely just babies when the original came out. I felt sorry for them. It was as if they were wandering around in anger and confusion looking for the Austin that existed long ago, the Austin they had heard so much about back in Brooklyn, etc., but which had been overrun and tapped out long ago, and now consists of a stream of new arrivals and refugees trying to find "Austin verification" from each other. Many of them expressed the dead-end nature of their lives, a frustration at the apparent meaningless of their existence. There was an undercurrent in many of the stories of a desire to escape their lives. Only a few characters seemed to have the goofy life force of the ones of 1990.
The interactions between the young men and the young women were highly indicative of this ennui among the youth. Repeatedly we saw aimless, weak young men attempting to curry favor with (and hit on) angry, recalcitrant, disdainful young women, who by and large scorned them and rebuffed them with jaundiced eye and flippant phrases. There were only a few strong male characters who seemed to be on anything that could be called a "path" in life (one character ironically expressed a desire to go to Detroit and start anew by urban homesteading amidst the ruins there). Such is the post-millennial generational update of what it means to be a "slacker." And I thought my generation had it bad trying to emulate the hippies of the 1960s!
A few of the characters expressed downright dark apocalyptic visions of life and America, including one by a flamboyant gay man riding a bicycle, who seemed to yearn and look forward to the destruction of our entire culture and way of life. Despite his prophecy, his clarity in expressing this made him one of the most dynamic characters in the movie, and seemed to prove the cultural maxim we have arrived at, that (straight) men, devoid of purpose in their lives, are reduced to sexual beasts enslaved by their craving need for women (who flee from them naturally), and the only path to freedom for a man is to be a homosexual.
In a way this gay character seemed to speak for all the other characters, as if giving voice to the unspoken things in their souls. I felt like I was watching an End Times parade of the damned, a cataloging of a soul-deprived way of life that is no longer sustainable, not because of our material consumptions, but rather because of our inability to connect with each other, and to find meaning in our lives.
It was quite an X-ray. It left me somewhat depressed, despite the humorous and worthy update of the "throwing the camera off Mt. Bonnell" scene that closes the original. Yet artistically it was certainly a success, and thus gave me hope underneath it all. Hope comes from recognition of issues, and there was certainly recognition in this movie, even though the only solution seemed to be darkly apocalyptic.
After the movie, I came back out in to the cold of the CU campus. There was a brilliant full moon in a clear sky above the physics building. As I walked back down towards 17th Street, I passed a parking lot where a young woman was talking on a cell phone. The first words I heard her say, loud and clear, were: "Staten Island...he's a big guy..."
Looking for my next-thing-to-do in Boulder after last week's climate science lecture, I read a notice in the printed version of the Onion, of all things, for a showing the following Wednesday on the CU campus for Slacker 2011, which I immediately discerned must be an updated version of the famous film Slacker by Austin film producer Rick Linklater. Given that I had just been reminiscing about Austin, this seemed like the obvious next step.
Slacker (link) came out in the summer of 1990, at the end of my first year in graduate school in Austin. I remember the guerilla marketing for it all around West Campus and the Drag that spring. It soon became a local cult classic. One of the most notable actors in it was later in a film shot in my own house on Duval Street in the spring of 1992, produced by my roommate James Froeschle as part of his master's thesis at UT (imdb entry).
In the original Slacker, the rambling stream-of-consciousness style that dragged the viewer haphazardly from one conversation to another, following various people who crossed the screen, seemed to be the perfect style for Austin. Say what you want about it, somehow it captured the goofy spontaneity of Austin and its weird inhabitants right on the cusp of the 1990s. I was looking forward to seeing the "update," although I knew there would be a bit of poignancy in that it would remind me that I had not been back to Austin since the spring of 1999, and in most ways, it was no longer my place to call my own, or my home at all anymore.
I noticed the showing would be at the Meuzinger Auditorium on CU. That was just a little bit further up the hill from the Institute for Behavioral Sciences. Could there be anything more perfect for my next step?
I drove to Boulder a bit early and stopped for dinner at a Tibetan take-out place at the corner of Folsom and Arapahoe. What could be more Boulder than a Tibetan take-out place? It was the first time I'd been there. I'd driven by it repeatedly and thought of going. It seemed like the time to start new things. I asked the Tibetan-looking guy at the counter for a recommendation for Tibetan food, and he suggested a spicy beef dish. As I ate it, sitting at the window counter with my back turned, a young couple that had just moved to Boulder from Detroit chatted with the owner about Tibet and Tibetan food. The owner went into a history of Tibetan independence and non-independence. He said Tibetan food was a cross between Indian food and Chinese food, as one might expect. He discussed how he had come to America from India, where Tibetan exiles live these days. He talked about times long past in Boulder---the old days and how they differed from today. It took me a while to realize that he was talking about 1992.
I parked down by the high school and walked up the hill to campus on 17th Street. It's the nicest way to approach campus. Some of the buildings remind me so much of UT at times. I got to the auditorium a few minutes early and killed time staring up at the CU physics building across the street, a mini-high rise that also recalls the physics building in Austin.
The film was being shown as part of CU's international film series (link). The auditorium is in the psychology building, and was a nice place to see a movie for seven bucks. The girl at the table gave me a torn paper ticket from a roll. The auditorium was almost entirely empty. Only about a dozen people were in attendance. All were men in their forties and fifties. With exception of one pair, they all had come alone.
It took me until the end of the movie to realize that Slacker 2011 was not in fact made by Linklater himself. He had gone on to much bigger fame, of course. Rather this sequel is the collaborative product of the Austin Film Society, with different film makers contributing various scenes to the stream-of-consciousness tapestry. The style is true to the original---we follow a character for one scene, and then follow another character randomly into a completely different scene. There were a few distinct homage scenes, including a reprise of the most famous scene from the original where the late John Henry Faulk, an Austin legend, narrates his experiences on the day of the Whitman tower shooting in August 1966. In the updated version, the dialogue is exactly the same, but the roles are played in a humorous inversion by new actors that gives it a surreal flavor.
But most of the material was fresh in content. Right in the first scene, I was pleased to recognize streets I had once walked on years ago. In those same scenes I noticed how cell phones, which did not exist in 1990 in their current from, now played in important part in so many of the mini plots.
It was fun to reminisce and to see places of business that I recognized---old signs---and "have it all come back to me." But there were plenty of new things too, places I didn't recognize at all, but which I knew must have become new well-known hangouts. A new Les Amis!? I was prepared for this kind of zeitgeist shock. Like I said, I knew Austin wouldn't feel like home to me anymore. If I wanted it to be home, I'd have to go back and reclaim it all anew.
But there was more dislocation in my reaction than this personal element. In many of the scenes, I noticed that a strong current of something akin to nihilism, something which was not in the original at all. It made me realize why I don't actually want to live in Austin anymore. It was as if, on the one hand, nothing had really changed there, only that the dysfunctions of the trends of 1990 had been blown up and amplified over the years to the point where the character sketches were no longer whimsical and fun but downright sad.
The characters were mostly young people in their twenties---barely just babies when the original came out. I felt sorry for them. It was as if they were wandering around in anger and confusion looking for the Austin that existed long ago, the Austin they had heard so much about back in Brooklyn, etc., but which had been overrun and tapped out long ago, and now consists of a stream of new arrivals and refugees trying to find "Austin verification" from each other. Many of them expressed the dead-end nature of their lives, a frustration at the apparent meaningless of their existence. There was an undercurrent in many of the stories of a desire to escape their lives. Only a few characters seemed to have the goofy life force of the ones of 1990.
The interactions between the young men and the young women were highly indicative of this ennui among the youth. Repeatedly we saw aimless, weak young men attempting to curry favor with (and hit on) angry, recalcitrant, disdainful young women, who by and large scorned them and rebuffed them with jaundiced eye and flippant phrases. There were only a few strong male characters who seemed to be on anything that could be called a "path" in life (one character ironically expressed a desire to go to Detroit and start anew by urban homesteading amidst the ruins there). Such is the post-millennial generational update of what it means to be a "slacker." And I thought my generation had it bad trying to emulate the hippies of the 1960s!
A few of the characters expressed downright dark apocalyptic visions of life and America, including one by a flamboyant gay man riding a bicycle, who seemed to yearn and look forward to the destruction of our entire culture and way of life. Despite his prophecy, his clarity in expressing this made him one of the most dynamic characters in the movie, and seemed to prove the cultural maxim we have arrived at, that (straight) men, devoid of purpose in their lives, are reduced to sexual beasts enslaved by their craving need for women (who flee from them naturally), and the only path to freedom for a man is to be a homosexual.
In a way this gay character seemed to speak for all the other characters, as if giving voice to the unspoken things in their souls. I felt like I was watching an End Times parade of the damned, a cataloging of a soul-deprived way of life that is no longer sustainable, not because of our material consumptions, but rather because of our inability to connect with each other, and to find meaning in our lives.
It was quite an X-ray. It left me somewhat depressed, despite the humorous and worthy update of the "throwing the camera off Mt. Bonnell" scene that closes the original. Yet artistically it was certainly a success, and thus gave me hope underneath it all. Hope comes from recognition of issues, and there was certainly recognition in this movie, even though the only solution seemed to be darkly apocalyptic.
After the movie, I came back out in to the cold of the CU campus. There was a brilliant full moon in a clear sky above the physics building. As I walked back down towards 17th Street, I passed a parking lot where a young woman was talking on a cell phone. The first words I heard her say, loud and clear, were: "Staten Island...he's a big guy..."
Monday, March 5, 2012
Nederland
It was such a fun time going to the lecture at CU that after dinner, I didn't feel like going home quite yet. When I got back to my car I wasn't quite sure where I might go, but after starting it up, I remembered that Nederland, a small town up the canyon of Boulder Creek, was having a festival that weekend, starting on Friday afternoon, and that it might be fun to check it out.
Normally I'm a sucker for smalltown festivals. Driving across the country, I love stumbling upon them by serendipity. If a parade is involved, then it gets an extra bonus.
In this case, however, I had mixed feelings. The name of Nederland's spring festival is "Frozen Dead Guy Days," so called in honor of a specific frozen dead guy (here's the background if you want to know). The logo shows a skeleton wearing a ski cap and holding a popsicle with a frozen corpse inside it.
It's not that I have anything particular against festivals of the dead, especially when they occur around Halloween time, but lately I've come to believe the skull image is way, way overused lately in our culture. A couple years ago, you couldn't go into the mall and buy anything from the casual men's clothing stores that didn't have a skull image on it. Nevertheless, I thought it might be worthwhile checking it out, if nothing else just to wonder around among the musical venues and, of course, see the parade on Saturday, which would no doubt feature lots of death/skull/corpse costumes. I wasn't sure if I wanted to see the "coffin races" that were soon to follow. It seemed like bad luck, all in all.
Since it was still Friday afternoon, I thought I might just skip ahead, and instead of going to the corpse parade, I go up to Nederland on the first night of the festival to see what was happening. All this went through my mind as I came up to the first stoplight on Arapahoe, and in a spontaneous decision, I put on my blinker, headed down to Canyon, then took a left heading up the creek into the canyon itself.
Right as I turned the corner, I saw a young man standing at a bus stop, no doubt waiting for the bus to Nederland. He was wearing a winter coat and a stocking cap, the kind that everyone wears for skiing and hiking, and which the skeleton is wearing in the Frozen Dead Guys Days logo. He was holding out his thumb, begging for a ride.
Without even thinking much, I decided to pull over and offer him a ride. He hopped into my passenger seat and introduced himself as Nick. He looked to be college age.
"Wow, what they said is true about Boulder," he said. "Hitchhiking is easy." Turns out he had just put out his thumb about thirty seconds earlier.
"Where you from?" I asked him.
"New Jersey," he said.
"Ah, the Great Megalopolis of the East," I replied.
He asked me why I was going up to Nederland. "Purely on a whim," I said.
He told me what he knew about Nederland. "They say that if you take Boulder, it's even more Boulder than Boulder is."
"I've heard that too," I said.
As we drove up Boulder Canyon in the last strains of daylight, he told me how much he loved my car.
"We used to have a BMW almost exactly like this when I was a kid," he told me. "Everything looks almost exactly the same."
I told him that it was a solid car, and even though I'd had to put a bunch of money into it last year to get it even in this good of a shape, I was hooked on BMWs and didn't ever want to own anything else, if I could help it.
"Yeah, I know what you mean," he said. "We used to call our car 'Captain Kirk' when I was a kid."
Somehow that made me feel better.
About halfway up the canyon, Nick let it spill that he was the grower and seller of a specific kind of herbal medicine product that is only partially legal in Colorado. He offered me some of his product as compensation for the ride, and being in a whimsical mood, I said yes.
"I've got to pull over though, for safety's sake," I told him. So I parked at a pull-out along the road beside an informative sign about a forest fire in the canyon many years ago. We shared some of his product, something I hadn't done in a while. As usual, whenever I'm in that state, I started running my mouth off about the history and geography of the area. He didn't seem to mind as I paced around. He said he enjoyed looking at my car, because it brought back so many memories.
After a couple minutes we got back in the car and started up the canyon. As I do when I'm in that state, I was super paranoid about driving and could hardly talk because my eyes were riveted on the road. Since I'd nearly lost my life the week before in the Poudre Canyon, all I could think about was how I didn't want to die now.
I told him that I had mixed feelings about going to the festival. "I'm not so into death imagery, I told him. I usually try to avoid anything with skulls." I told him what I knew about the background of the festival, and the real "frozen dead guy" that the festival was named after.
By the time we got to Nederland, the sun had gone down. I had driven the last half of the drive with a horrible cotton mouth, so much that I could barely talk at times. Also I was running low on gas---the reserve light had come on halfway up the canyon. So I pulled over at the gas station as soon as I got into town.
Nick hopped out and thanked me. We shook hands and he walked off to find his destination. I told him I'd remember his face and look for him around Boulder and Fort Collins, where he said he spends lots of time.
After filling up on gas and buying a bottle of Perrier water in the convenience store, I parked in the RTD parking lot and walked around town for a brief time in the dark.
It was thirteen degrees, according to the bank clock by the creek. I didn't want to drive back down the canyon yet, in the state I was in. But I didn't feel like going inside anywhere for very long either.
It turns out there was nothing go on, festival wise. The most interaction I had was buying some hot tea at a diner. With my mind finally calmed down, I thought I was in a state enough to drive again, so I headed back down the canyon. A half hour later I was back in Boulder where I had begun.
So even though I didn't really do anything, I guess I technically had a good time at Frozen Dead Guy Days by the fact that I avoided becoming one.
Normally I'm a sucker for smalltown festivals. Driving across the country, I love stumbling upon them by serendipity. If a parade is involved, then it gets an extra bonus.
In this case, however, I had mixed feelings. The name of Nederland's spring festival is "Frozen Dead Guy Days," so called in honor of a specific frozen dead guy (here's the background if you want to know). The logo shows a skeleton wearing a ski cap and holding a popsicle with a frozen corpse inside it.
It's not that I have anything particular against festivals of the dead, especially when they occur around Halloween time, but lately I've come to believe the skull image is way, way overused lately in our culture. A couple years ago, you couldn't go into the mall and buy anything from the casual men's clothing stores that didn't have a skull image on it. Nevertheless, I thought it might be worthwhile checking it out, if nothing else just to wonder around among the musical venues and, of course, see the parade on Saturday, which would no doubt feature lots of death/skull/corpse costumes. I wasn't sure if I wanted to see the "coffin races" that were soon to follow. It seemed like bad luck, all in all.
Since it was still Friday afternoon, I thought I might just skip ahead, and instead of going to the corpse parade, I go up to Nederland on the first night of the festival to see what was happening. All this went through my mind as I came up to the first stoplight on Arapahoe, and in a spontaneous decision, I put on my blinker, headed down to Canyon, then took a left heading up the creek into the canyon itself.
Right as I turned the corner, I saw a young man standing at a bus stop, no doubt waiting for the bus to Nederland. He was wearing a winter coat and a stocking cap, the kind that everyone wears for skiing and hiking, and which the skeleton is wearing in the Frozen Dead Guys Days logo. He was holding out his thumb, begging for a ride.
Without even thinking much, I decided to pull over and offer him a ride. He hopped into my passenger seat and introduced himself as Nick. He looked to be college age.
"Wow, what they said is true about Boulder," he said. "Hitchhiking is easy." Turns out he had just put out his thumb about thirty seconds earlier.
"Where you from?" I asked him.
"New Jersey," he said.
"Ah, the Great Megalopolis of the East," I replied.
He asked me why I was going up to Nederland. "Purely on a whim," I said.
He told me what he knew about Nederland. "They say that if you take Boulder, it's even more Boulder than Boulder is."
"I've heard that too," I said.
As we drove up Boulder Canyon in the last strains of daylight, he told me how much he loved my car.
"We used to have a BMW almost exactly like this when I was a kid," he told me. "Everything looks almost exactly the same."
I told him that it was a solid car, and even though I'd had to put a bunch of money into it last year to get it even in this good of a shape, I was hooked on BMWs and didn't ever want to own anything else, if I could help it.
"Yeah, I know what you mean," he said. "We used to call our car 'Captain Kirk' when I was a kid."
Somehow that made me feel better.
About halfway up the canyon, Nick let it spill that he was the grower and seller of a specific kind of herbal medicine product that is only partially legal in Colorado. He offered me some of his product as compensation for the ride, and being in a whimsical mood, I said yes.
"I've got to pull over though, for safety's sake," I told him. So I parked at a pull-out along the road beside an informative sign about a forest fire in the canyon many years ago. We shared some of his product, something I hadn't done in a while. As usual, whenever I'm in that state, I started running my mouth off about the history and geography of the area. He didn't seem to mind as I paced around. He said he enjoyed looking at my car, because it brought back so many memories.
After a couple minutes we got back in the car and started up the canyon. As I do when I'm in that state, I was super paranoid about driving and could hardly talk because my eyes were riveted on the road. Since I'd nearly lost my life the week before in the Poudre Canyon, all I could think about was how I didn't want to die now.
I told him that I had mixed feelings about going to the festival. "I'm not so into death imagery, I told him. I usually try to avoid anything with skulls." I told him what I knew about the background of the festival, and the real "frozen dead guy" that the festival was named after.
By the time we got to Nederland, the sun had gone down. I had driven the last half of the drive with a horrible cotton mouth, so much that I could barely talk at times. Also I was running low on gas---the reserve light had come on halfway up the canyon. So I pulled over at the gas station as soon as I got into town.
Nick hopped out and thanked me. We shook hands and he walked off to find his destination. I told him I'd remember his face and look for him around Boulder and Fort Collins, where he said he spends lots of time.
After filling up on gas and buying a bottle of Perrier water in the convenience store, I parked in the RTD parking lot and walked around town for a brief time in the dark.
It was thirteen degrees, according to the bank clock by the creek. I didn't want to drive back down the canyon yet, in the state I was in. But I didn't feel like going inside anywhere for very long either.
It turns out there was nothing go on, festival wise. The most interaction I had was buying some hot tea at a diner. With my mind finally calmed down, I thought I was in a state enough to drive again, so I headed back down the canyon. A half hour later I was back in Boulder where I had begun.
So even though I didn't really do anything, I guess I technically had a good time at Frozen Dead Guy Days by the fact that I avoided becoming one.
Sunday, March 4, 2012
The Science and the Politics of Disasters and Climate Change@CU
Attended: Mar. 2, 3:30 pm at the Institute for Behavioral Sciences, Boulder.
After my visit to the Boulder International Film Festival to see The Big Fix two weeks ago, I wondered what cosmic directions I would receive for my next steps in Boulder. It didn't take long to get my directions, because a couple days later I noticed a web posting for a lecture to be given on the CU campus by Roger Pielke, Jr. on the subject of climate change. It was a perfect transition. Having graduated from Boulder High, so to speak, I could right up to the hill, and continue in the theme of environmentalism as well.
Pielke is rather a famous name in the "climate debate," mostly because of Roger Pielke, Sr., a longtime professor of atmospheric sciences at Colorado State who is now at the CIRES climatology institute in Boulder, as is his son, Roger. Jr. The senior Pielke is one of the most famous "skeptics" of "global warming," and his credentials and career alone should be enough to put to shame anyone who derides as "deniers of science" those of us who refuse to swallow the ideologically-driven "consensus" that ones hear about so often in what passes for news.
The younger Pielke is known more as a "lukewarmer," that is, someone who accepts that man-made carbon emissions are driving climate change, but who is not fully on board with all of the conclusions about what actually will happen.
So I wasn't quite sure how much I'd enjoy the talk, but I thought it would be good to expose myself to the debate. I want to be open to all sides and gather as much information as possible.
The lecture was entitled "The Science and the Politics of Disasters and Climate Change," as was presented as part of the colloquia series of the Geography Department at CU (link). I looked up the location on the map. It turned out to be in the Institute for Behavioral Sciences, on Grandview Avenue, on the lower part of the hill of campus, just a on the other side of the Boulder High School athletic fields. How could it be a more perfect transition from my last Boulder outing?
I hadn't been in that part of campus in a long time, but found the building on Grandview quite easily. The room was quite full by the time I arrived, with over a hundred people in attendance. By the time of the start of the lecture, every seat was taken, and people were lining up alongside the walls.
When Dr. Pielke was introduced, I realized that in fact he is not in atmospheric sciences, but rather received his doctoral in political science, and studies the politics of science as his field of research. Nevertheless he seemed top notch in his work. I could tell by the way he spoke. I thought he was younger than me, until he talked about doing post-doc work at CSU in the early 1990s.
The talk was impeccable and persuasive. Dr. Pielke presented an extremely compelling case for his conclusion, namely the following: the apparent extreme weather events one hears about---be they tornadoes, hurricanes, floods---cannot be ascribed to climate change but rather to societal changes and development of cities.
I was delighted at how sound and persuasive he was. I'm sure it was not a conclusion that many in the audience wanted to hear. It basically put to the sword any attempt to use the recent spate of "bad weather" as proving anything about climate change.
He was especially hard on the IPCC, the United Nations organization that has been spewing the reports about manmade carbon causing the end the world, and driving the politics of climate change. He basically said that they have been lying outright and misrepresenting the science of disasters. He didn't say why they did this. But his detective work was amazing. I was in awe.
Towards the end of the lecture I began to understand his entire approach. Indeed, his is "lukewarmer" and "accepts climate change." As a non-climatologist, he can stand outside the debate. But by taking the stance he does, he can then be free to take the stance he does about the politics of the climate debate without being accused of "denying the science." Like I said, I was in awe.
Overall, it was a splendid way to spend a Friday afternoon. During the talk, it occurred to me that the last time I'd been at a colloquium of any kind was probably 1997 in Austin. It felt like coming back to life, with all kinds of dormant parts of my brain suddenly springing back into action.
There was a nice reception with wine and hors d'ouevres afterwards. I grabbed a salami slice with bread, and thought of sticking around to talk to the lecturer, but decided I could drop by and see him later in his office if I were inspired to do so. Instead I slipped out of the IBS building and walked down the path by the BHS athletic fields, where the girls soccer team was practicing in cold weather gear. I ate an early dinner at Mustard's Last Stand---a double hamburger with a black cherry natural soda, and perused the Colorado Daily for my possible next assignment. Boulder just keeps getting better and better.
After my visit to the Boulder International Film Festival to see The Big Fix two weeks ago, I wondered what cosmic directions I would receive for my next steps in Boulder. It didn't take long to get my directions, because a couple days later I noticed a web posting for a lecture to be given on the CU campus by Roger Pielke, Jr. on the subject of climate change. It was a perfect transition. Having graduated from Boulder High, so to speak, I could right up to the hill, and continue in the theme of environmentalism as well.
Pielke is rather a famous name in the "climate debate," mostly because of Roger Pielke, Sr., a longtime professor of atmospheric sciences at Colorado State who is now at the CIRES climatology institute in Boulder, as is his son, Roger. Jr. The senior Pielke is one of the most famous "skeptics" of "global warming," and his credentials and career alone should be enough to put to shame anyone who derides as "deniers of science" those of us who refuse to swallow the ideologically-driven "consensus" that ones hear about so often in what passes for news.
The younger Pielke is known more as a "lukewarmer," that is, someone who accepts that man-made carbon emissions are driving climate change, but who is not fully on board with all of the conclusions about what actually will happen.
So I wasn't quite sure how much I'd enjoy the talk, but I thought it would be good to expose myself to the debate. I want to be open to all sides and gather as much information as possible.
The lecture was entitled "The Science and the Politics of Disasters and Climate Change," as was presented as part of the colloquia series of the Geography Department at CU (link). I looked up the location on the map. It turned out to be in the Institute for Behavioral Sciences, on Grandview Avenue, on the lower part of the hill of campus, just a on the other side of the Boulder High School athletic fields. How could it be a more perfect transition from my last Boulder outing?
I hadn't been in that part of campus in a long time, but found the building on Grandview quite easily. The room was quite full by the time I arrived, with over a hundred people in attendance. By the time of the start of the lecture, every seat was taken, and people were lining up alongside the walls.
When Dr. Pielke was introduced, I realized that in fact he is not in atmospheric sciences, but rather received his doctoral in political science, and studies the politics of science as his field of research. Nevertheless he seemed top notch in his work. I could tell by the way he spoke. I thought he was younger than me, until he talked about doing post-doc work at CSU in the early 1990s.
The talk was impeccable and persuasive. Dr. Pielke presented an extremely compelling case for his conclusion, namely the following: the apparent extreme weather events one hears about---be they tornadoes, hurricanes, floods---cannot be ascribed to climate change but rather to societal changes and development of cities.
I was delighted at how sound and persuasive he was. I'm sure it was not a conclusion that many in the audience wanted to hear. It basically put to the sword any attempt to use the recent spate of "bad weather" as proving anything about climate change.
He was especially hard on the IPCC, the United Nations organization that has been spewing the reports about manmade carbon causing the end the world, and driving the politics of climate change. He basically said that they have been lying outright and misrepresenting the science of disasters. He didn't say why they did this. But his detective work was amazing. I was in awe.
Towards the end of the lecture I began to understand his entire approach. Indeed, his is "lukewarmer" and "accepts climate change." As a non-climatologist, he can stand outside the debate. But by taking the stance he does, he can then be free to take the stance he does about the politics of the climate debate without being accused of "denying the science." Like I said, I was in awe.
Overall, it was a splendid way to spend a Friday afternoon. During the talk, it occurred to me that the last time I'd been at a colloquium of any kind was probably 1997 in Austin. It felt like coming back to life, with all kinds of dormant parts of my brain suddenly springing back into action.
There was a nice reception with wine and hors d'ouevres afterwards. I grabbed a salami slice with bread, and thought of sticking around to talk to the lecturer, but decided I could drop by and see him later in his office if I were inspired to do so. Instead I slipped out of the IBS building and walked down the path by the BHS athletic fields, where the girls soccer team was practicing in cold weather gear. I ate an early dinner at Mustard's Last Stand---a double hamburger with a black cherry natural soda, and perused the Colorado Daily for my possible next assignment. Boulder just keeps getting better and better.
Friday, March 2, 2012
Ultralighter than me
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