blog riley

...To me the question of whether or not he continued to write strikes at the heart of the nature of writing itself. If he indeed wrote volumes and volumes about the Glass family, as has been claimed, it would be such a curious thing, given that the nature of written communication is social; language was created to facilitate understanding between people. So writing books upon books without the intention of sharing them with people is a proposition full of contradictory impulses and goals. It's like a gifted chef cooking incredible meals for forty years and never inviting anyone over to share them. (Dave Eggers on J.D. Salinger)

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A friend writes: "The biggest puzzle that lingers for me after Avatar is

the message that young ones take away having seen the recruitment videos for the Marines and the Air Force before The Show.  I think of the militaristic characters in Avatar as rogue Blackwater mercenaries

violating land and people but I wonder how kids connect the dots to all of the layers of allegory and analogy.  Any insights from your position as interlocuter with people ages 9-24?"

TR: I saw the film as outrageously pretentious movie-making adorning

ho-hum storytelling, although I did liked the lead performance quite a

bit, and that business about him being a gimp fulfilled only via

dream-fueled technology really has some swing to it. You know, for

example, that as his CO tells him he's "got his legs," that the guy's

lying as only a true believer company-man grunt can. And Our Hero knows

this as well -- the only "people" he can trust by that point are his

magic fairy natives. (Those cheeks! Those thighs!)

It works as ham-fisted Iraq allegory ("unobtanium," OMG, squeak squeak),

and it's in that grandiose RAMBO tradition of winning our internal wars

onscreen instead of in real life. (We want to outlaw PICTURES of guns,

not guns themselves.) But with recruitment previews at the top, thats a

deal Cameron MUST have made, it can't simply be coincidental, so what

are we to take away? Fight the "necessary" wars on earth, but strive

towards a better fantasy life? That's so HOLLYWOOD, so retro... so

beautifully self-contradictory it's almost worthy of the rest of his

convoluted bad writing. Of course, how much Pentagon money funded the

technical innovations Cameron wields like so many light sabers? How much

is he leasing to defense if he invented it himself?

Kids don't connect these dots, and that's whats disturbing... it took me

some conscious thinking to figure this out, with help from you. The

young'uns drink it up like so much pop corn. It's of a piece with all

the imagery they drink down every day. I think it's up to us as parents

to hold nightly seminars on all this conflicting information and where

it's gotten us.

The Alien series is a far more intriguing allegory about how Nature

humbles everybody... I think he wanted Sig. Weaver to redeem the role of

"scientist," which he had crafted is pure evil previously. I loved it

when her dying words were almost: "I have to get some samples."

--"Reminds me of a person I got to know in a dean search a few years

back. She'd been involved in Continuing Education programs at Chapman

University in Orange County, right next door to Disneyland  She told

such a great academic funding story about "real-gaming."  How

developments in video-gaming technology were being used in medical

education and other critical, real-world domains.  Of course.  The

military-industrial-entertainment complex.

"Also reminds me of a summer in China in 1991, during the first Gulf

War.  The people I knew best were painters who were mostly not very

interested in politics except the interpersonal political maneuvers that

were pre-requisites to getting good school assignments, good job

assignments, good situations in life.  So I was very startled when my

good buddy Liu She spoke about the spectacle of US bombs zeroing in on

their Iraqi targets in appreciative, aesthetic terms, as 'pretty' and

George Bush I as someone he admired..."

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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/09/nyregion/09nyc.html?_r=3&ref=todayspaper

Or: How I Spent My Downtime: at cinemasterpieces. For more cheap thrills, go to http://images.google.com/advanced_image_search?hl=en, enter "http://www.cinemasterpieces.com" in the "results images from this site or domain" box, and then tweak your size option settings to "medium" or "large." Make sure to take time out for meals. Robert De Niro, Raging Bull, martin scorses

"I've long known about Smith's recordings and his obsession with documenting what went on at the building where he lived and worked from the late 50s until the early 70s. One story, which has stuck with me since I first heard it, was of Smith cutting a hole in his ceiling to insert a microphone through the floor of the upstairs loft while Monk was rehearsing for his 1959 concert. I talked with the owner of the building, Mr. Ho, and we gained access to the hallowed ground, now filled with boxes of Chinese imports. We set out to find the hole. Here it is 50 years later":

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• Gene Smith And The Jazz Loft Project (greg.org)
• Jazz Loft Project
• Radio series from WNYC.org

Was it uplifting or depressing to see Young MC take down Up In the Air's cheezy corporate splash? Nelson George called it "the highlight," but I thought the one-hit wonder looked like Andre Braugher.

George Clooney at his best: he doesn't even need that smile...