Gone Fishin'

Not exactly. The blog will be on a bit of an irregular hiatus for the next week or five, though. Family and work obligations require more of my attention than usual, leaving very little to devote to other pursuits, notably the blog. A couple of guest posts are lined up, and I may appear randomly; regularly scheduled posts will resume sometime in May.

Behave yourselves. I still know where to find you.

Movies Since Last Time (Again)

It’s been busy in and around Castle Schadenfreude, so movie watching took a bit of a hit. What we watched was good, so there’s that.

Legends of the Fall (1995). Always worth watching. Great cast, all at the top of their games. Great story,

where the individual trials of every character resonate and create empathy. Well photographed. Well paced. A chick flick men can watch and not feel as if their balls are shriveling scene by scene. One hell of a movie.

The Enemy Below (1957). I saw this as a kid—read the book, too, in Reader’s Digest condensed version—and wondered how it might hold up. It’s   

even better than I remembered it, probably because I missed the anti-war sentiments the first time around. They’re not all handled as smoothly as they might be, and we’ve seen a lot of similar scenes since, but this was good stuff for 58 years ago. One of Robert Mitchum’s best performances, with Curd Jürgens a more than able foil as the U-boat commander. All the tension of an excellent submarine/destroyer battle film—I’m a sucker for scenes inside a sub that’s being pinged—with a good portrayal of men who’d rather be elsewhere, doing their jobs. Well worth the time.

Glory (1989). As in the event, the white officer (Matthew Broderick) got top billing, but the black troops (notably Andre Braugher, Morgan Freeman, and Denzel Washington, in an Oscar-winning performance) do all the work. Broderick’s generally a fine actor, but he’s in over his head here, with an accent I tried to place for two hours, but couldn’t. This is a great story, about the 54^th Massachusetts regiment in the Civil War, an all-black outfit led by white officers who come to see why these men need to do more than dig ditches. Glory treads a fine line between the glorification and horrors of combat. These men want to fight, and many of them die horribly, but for a while they lived as equal men, at least in their own eyes, and the eyes of their officers. One hopes that was enough for them.

 

Eddie Murphy: Delirious (1983). Murphy’s first HBO special, filmed at DAR Constitution Hall. Some of the topics feel uncomfortable thirty years later, but they’re still funny, even if one feels awkward laughing at them in the 21^st Century. Murphy is a joy, embracing his new-found celebrity (he’s only 22 and still working onSaturday Night Live) without seeming to take himself too seriously. After the different phases of his movie career, it’s easy to forget why younger comics like Chris Rock worship at the altar or Murphy until one goes back to see him in his unvarnished original incarnation. Laughed so hard my head hurt.

Drama vs. Melodrama

It’s been my habit of late to watch Sons of Anarchy while riding the exercise bike. One recent day The Sole Heir™ came home early (from graduate school in Georgetown, and—oh, by the way—has been accepted into the Quinnipiac University Medical School, in case I hadn’t mentioned it before) and was catching up on Grey’s Anatomy when I came down after work to ride. I’ve seen a few episodes in the past, which accounts for my philosophy of preferring to kill myself before being admitted to a hospital with anything serious—especially in Seattle—but the kid was there first and I don’t get to spend as much time with her as I like, so what the hell.

(First, some background. My favorite TV shows of anything like recent vintage are, my order of discovery: The Sopranos, Deadwood, The Wire, and The Shield. A common denominator connects these shows in addition to crime. Now back to our regularly scheduled program.)

Watching Grey’s Anatomy in the context of my favorites showed me exactly what bothers me about such shows, and provided a stark definition of the differences between drama and melodrama. The four programs listed above are dramas: they show you shit and you can feel one way or the other about it, or you can miss the point. They have a perspective, but their job is to lead you to it, not beat you over the head with it.

Grey’s is melodrama. They wring every bit of pathos, bathos, and whatever other descending –oses you can think of from every scene. They distrust the audience’s ability to grasp how truly heart-wrenching and emotionally disastrous a given situation is. They explain it and milk it and exploit it until it borders on self-parody. Grey’s Anatomy is a clever title, but they could just as well called it As the Hospital Turns, since General Hospital is already in use. (Ah, but a measly general hospital could not possibly contain the heart-wrenching and emotionally disastrous situations to be found at Grey-Sloan Memorial Hospital. Or Seattle Grace Hospital. Possibly Seattle Grace Mercy West Hospital. Whatever they’re calling it this year.

This joint has too many heart-wrenching and emotionally disastrous situations to be contained by a single name. This is where general hospitals send their patients to be saved and dramatic moderation to die.)

Compare this to what I consider to be the finest end of a dramatic series ever: The Shield. (Spoiler alert!) Vic Mackey spends the day in a cubicle alone. He looks out the window, sees police cars in pursuit. He

takes his gun from the drawer and goes home. No diaphanous flashbacks to good times with Shane and Lem and Ronnie, or with his wife and kids. No schmaltzy music. In fact, if I recall correctly, no music at all. His crimes have caught up with him. He’s lost everything he ever cared about. Then it’s over.

This is worse than prison for Vic. It might be worse than death. If you get it, great. If not? Fuck you. We didn’t write it for you.

I’ll take the drama, straight up, every time. I’m already a borderline diabetic.

Steven Johnson

I first became aware of Steven Johnson when The Beloved Spouse and I watched his six-part miniseries, How We Got to Now on PBS last fall. (How we became aware of the miniseries eludes me.) By Episode 3 I had already placed the companion book on my Wish List. TBS doubled down at Christmas, buying both that and one of Johnson’s earlier books, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation.

Johnson has two great gifts. His engaging personality conveys well on screen, and in his writing. He approaches weighty subjects with respect but no fear, making what might have been difficult concepts less intimidating though his easygoing prose. He makes no pretense of having figured out any of what he writes about on his own. In fact, that’s an underlying theme of both books: no one (hardly) ever figures out anything on his or her own. Everyone stands on the shoulders of those who came before in order to see farther than their predecessors. Others are working on similar things at the same time; knowledge spills over. He even has a term to explain why things work this way: the adjacent possible. (Which term he lifted form someone else and uses to good advantage.)

Johnson’s other, and most compelling gift—there are lots of personable people in the world who aren’t good for fuck all else—is an ability to tie things together, and to see where they came from. Charles Babbage was a genius of inestimable insight. His mechanical forerunner of the modern computer anticipated virtually every aspect of computing we have come to take for granted, yet he could never build one; it wasn’t practical without vacuum tubes. The electric light bulb has come to symbolize an inventor’s “Eureka!” moment, yet Edison did not have such a moment when working on his bulb. Edison did not, in fact, invent the first bulb. He didn’t even invent the first practical bulb, not on his own. What Edison invented was the process—not unlike an assembly line—that allowed his teams of engineers and scientists to create the first practical bulb. While it may seem prosaic to the average person, that’s the invention that has more lasting implications: creating a process than can be scaled and duplicated.

Where Good Ideas Come From ends with an attempt to quantify how the major scientific and technological advances of the past several hundred years came to be. Conventional Wisdom, at least in this country, holds these advances are the work of entrepreneurs working with profits foremost in their minds. Looking at the origins of key advances shows they are far more likely to come about through non-market-oriented collaborative networks, in part because market-driven innovation creates knowledge silos, and doesn’t continue down roads that do not appear to be profitable. The collaborative approach avoid both pitfalls.

I can get down a rabbit hole talking these books; they fascinate me. You’ll have a lot more fun, and learn exponentially more, by reading them yourself. Johnson now occupies a unique position in my reading rotation: the only non-fiction writer on it. I have every intention of reading everything he writes, which means I should never run out of fresh material. Johnson’s 13 years younger than I.