stevengharms.com

Things may look a bit strange around here throughout the next couple of days.

You see, I’m running the WordPress blog engine and when i first got a hold of it i hacked the heck out of it. I put functions in crazy places and generally made a mess of the code. Mess of the code made a mess of the markup. Mess ofthe markup makes it very hard to apply styles consistently. This lack of caution is playing havock in my attempts to get IE to render things properly.

I’m also going to add in some groovy javascript functions that I’ve learnt through my Ajax studies.

So, things may be a bit funky off and on, but I promise when we’re through it’ll be A-OK.

OK, so, uhm, in the vintage 1993 phrase, I need an under construction icon

I’m having an ideabuzz at the moment. What’s an ideabuzz, it’s a feeling that there’s a connection between things ( which spawns an ideabuzz which reminds me of a bit in one of the Dune books by frank herbert where herbert describes a mentat working through a very difficult problem shaking his hands and frothing because he was so close to the final calculation which resolved a very difficult series of unsolubles). An ideabuzz is when you type very fast and you’re not quite sure where the idea is going, but you keep typing very fast. So, i’m having one of those right now about fake things that are meant to be real.

I never much cared for Nathaniel Hawthorne, but there is a story of his called rappacini’s daughter (one of the first best gothic stories ever written) where he writes abotu a man who puts a poison in the lips of his daughter (who is of course, beautiful) and if she kisses someone she’ll kill the kissee.

In any case, there’s a story around that, but see she’s manufactured but natural.

In the end of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep Deckard encounters a wild animal ( in this future vision, the animals are all gone: goats, horses, dogs, etc. Those that remain are venerated under the hyper Christianity of that world called “Mercerism”. The wild animal he encounters is a grasshoper, he turns it over and looks at the bottom and realizes that it is in fact a simulation, a machine grasshopper. This has some meaning relative to the previous experiences he went through.

Origami, origami is amazing. I found this page at Discovery and was amazed by this stunning dragon and then i was even more stunned by the origami flower. As amazing as the dragon is, the flower is more amazing because it’s natural, it’s unnatural natural. It’s like Zen gardens, the goal is to mirror the natural ways and assemblages of natural foliage, but to do it in a way with patterns that show human intervention was involved, the natural unnatural as it were.

And that’s a lot of typing without much sorting into a coherent post. Maybe it’ll turn into something more solid later.

Contrary to popular belief (held by my sister) I do not live at Costco ( she just seems to always call me when I’m there ). Nevertheless, I do go there a bit from time to time.

Invariably we follow the same pattern: enter, look at the pornography for males (Big, shiny, TVs), look at the pornography for females (Big, shiny, jewlery), head for the DVD section, head for the book section, and then get on with what we came to do.

For the last several weeks, when my girlfriend has come across the stacked piles of freakish, skinny, freakbat, looney Ann Coulter’s latest book “Godless” she has taken books from the neighboring stack and laid them atop the Coulter book, essentially ensconcing her whacked-out, paranoid-delusional tome under something more intellectually honest like harlequin romance or Dean Koontz.

Look buddy, Megatron is the bad-assest of the bad-ass.

What did you do to him?

“It’s becoming an absurd world,” said 83-year-old Tsuyako Egashira as she looked at the poster of the former teen idol.”Why does a pregnant woman have to show her belly? You have to take care of it,” she said.

I loved this woman’s comment….becoming an absurd world…

I have to laugh. While Christina Aguilera has a record executive husband (versus talentless deadbeat), the cover of Rolling Stone done a la a Vargas pin-up, and a song that I, pop music hater extraordinaire, couldn’t extricate from my cortex for the better part of 72 hours, Spears’ best counter retort is the cover of People, Bazaar, and Us Weekly with stories focused on deadbeat husbands, love of Cheetos, ‘getting her figure back (eventually)’ or getting ‘back to singing (eventually)’ (after she stops spawning, I take it).

Insult to injury, Reuters story called her a former teen idol; not musician, not icon, not singer, former teen idol. Ouch.

…everyone knew that Christina was a better singer anyway….if only she could learn the lesson that sometimes less is more. Vocal acrobatics are like peasant form tai chi - dazzling to the eye of the untrained, but thoroughly unrefined and unnecessary.

“Being inoffensive, and being offended, are now the twin addictions of the culture.”

—Martin Amis

“Not curiosity, not vanity, not the consideration of expediency, not duty and conscientiousness, but an unquenchable, unhappy thirst that brooks no compromise leads us to truth.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

I found a quote at Slate which I have chosen to abstract from the particular and which I invite readers to think upon. The words in red indicate where I have elided some text so as to make the message more generalized.

They were flattered by the opinion, that they alone were the heirs of the truth, and they were apprehensive of diminishing the value of their knowledge, by sharing it too easily with the strangers of the earth.

Open source software and yoga came to mind. The great wealth of great teaching or great discovery is not what you hold inside once it’s been learnt. It’s a reminder that if your mode of thinking isn’t growing it’s dying.

This is why those who seek to fight fascism by behaving as fascists are poisoning the root of democratic progress. Children learn by example.

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In my french class I sat next to a young freshman named Shandra who wan very nice. I was a junior at the time and on my way out ( I was taking French for fun ) while she was a freshman (IIRC).

We were introduced to a character named Tex: a Franco-American armadillo whose adventures taught us the mysteries of first-year French.

The dialog that made Shandra laugh so hard one day in lab was the following.

(HeavyTexas Accent ): Edouard, est-ce que tu te rase?

{ Edouard, do you shave?}

Enjoy here

I forgot to write about the great previews I saw before Little Miss Sunshine.

On the topic of The WAR Nerd, there’s a new movie about a Scotsman inside the Idi Amin genocide machine called The Last King of Scotland that looks really great.

There’s also another dream world / real world / animated / dreamscape movie from Michel Gondry called The Science of Sleep that’s coming which features Mexican actor of great talent Gael Garcia Bernal and favorite yee-yee generation offspring Charlotte Gainsbourg.

I’m excited to see both.

Last night I had the pleasure of taking my girlfriend on her first visit to The Alamo Drafthouse on South Lamar to see Little Miss Sunshine. LMS was a really great dark comedy.

Ostensibly it’s the Venn diagram intersection of “people on the edge of a nervous breakdown take a road trip together” and “dysfunctional family pulls together in spite of itself to give the most innocent member a shot at the happiness they all secretly yearn for”. While this would set the movie up to be rather formulaic, the movie is most definitely not so!

Instead of formulaic lessons being delivered, at the end of the movie I found myself considering a meditation on how people find different compulsions to which they can devote themselves so that their lives seem livable. And these compulsions need not be addictions per se: are you addicted to some vision of being the best at something, of maintaining some strange goal, to a substance, to a myth of how you can never be a loser again, etc.

Many time black comedy writers allow their characters to fall into caricature which shows a certain black-heartedness and a certain mean intent to the audience (What you make me care about them and then you screw with them, thanks!?), this movie never does that, even when it could have been oh-so-easy to do. Steve Carrell’s (40 year-old virgin, NBC’s The Office) shows a talent for real drama not unlike the brilliant dramatic turns handed in by rubber-faced Jim Carrey in his more serious roles. Carrell’s constraint lets him portray a gay Proust scholar recovering from a suicide attempt in a way that is sweet, and honest, and fresh from the edge of seeking death without having to adopt any of the Harvey Fierstien schtick (despite being gay there will be no commenting on fashion moments, no Liza Minelli in-jokes, or ham-handed innuendo).

Greg Kinnear does a great job as a motivational speaker aspirant whose “9 rules” methodology is being worked as a means to launch him into the rarified air of the “7 Habits”. His commitment to not being a loser forces him to stop being emotionally available to his wife and family in many spots, and he comes to the good realization you would hope he would: but without any dialog-based “Oh I get it, being a winner is being a good father” scene, instead he (imagine this) acts and shows us his evolution without a word. Amazing talent.

The rest of the cast all deserve accolades, Toni Collette, Alan Arkin.

Naturally the most subtle and amazing performance comes from the very young Abagail Breslin whose subtle mastery of emotions in her little-girl face is really something to behold. Never for a moment do you think “this girl is acting” you just follow her hopes and dreams up and down. There’s a scene involving winner-obsessed dad engaging in a Socratic discussion about whether she should order ice cream (“Ice cream has a lot of cream and cream has a lot of fat….Are the winners of beauty pageant skinny or fat?”) which breaks your heart for her, for him, and for the sad, sad world we live in where we know that this discussion is required.

( The visual answer to this is given subtly by the directors but moments later )

Lastly the movie absolutely skewers the pageant industry ( as if the press coverage of JonBenet Ramsey wasn’t enough ). There’s something wrong about airbrushing little girls’ faces and putting them in gowns until they look like someone planted 35 year-old womens’ heads upon their diminutive frame turning them into little bobble-heads. Minute by minute I started to get that same creepy feeling I get when i see “burnt out former star quarterback Dad pressuring bookish son” in movies. The insanity of it really hangs itself without any commentary from the cast.

All in all, it was a really good movie, seek it out, it’s got a good heart deep down, which we all know about minute 5, but didn’t want to be preached at us.

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