and the original…
The movie Zeitgeist came up in a discussion I was having with a friend today. If you haven’t heard of Zeitgeist, it’s a movie that has been floating around for a couple years “about alleged “social myths,” including religion, 9/11 and the banking system.” (from Wikipedia)
I told him I would forward him the link but now that I get home I feel almost irresponsible doing it. When I forward something I’m saying “I like this” or “I believe in this.” But that isn’t the case here. I think the movie is interesting, but I have doubts about some of it and don’t think it should be viewed without a critical eye. If my friend came back saying “Thank you for showing that to me it really opened my eyes.” I would feel like I misled him.
I tried to forward it with links to a couple sites that attempt to debunk it. But many of those seemed to have their own agendas and again, I couldn’t find the right ones to give a good balanced background.
I’ve been thinking about how we ingest information and what questions we ask. We all try to check the validity against our intuition.
Why forward it at all you might ask? Well he had a talk with someone recently about the 9/11 attacks and had been considering if the government may have been involved. Zeitgeist has a whole section on this. I think this is a useful documentary because it is powerful and seems convincing on it’s own. But if you are questioning and researching, you see the holes. The process of finding the holes in these claims, might help him see the holes in what he was told.
And that is something I am looking forward to people doing more of. Questioning what we hear, and talking about those questions. I think people are going to be doing that more with more information available on the web.
In the end, I’ll send it to him. With a warning that he should be looking deep for holes. I’ll send a couple links along of sites with alternate opinions. Quote 2 or so specific points so he can see a counter with good evidence. Hoping to open up a new fold in the movie while he watches it.
My cousin Fred (above) has been trying to sell his truck. A few weeks into trying to sell it he gets hit at an intersection in Reno. Nobody is hurt or anything. A young kid gets out of the car. He’s on the way to his brother’s house to pick up his tux for prom that night. His parents show up, they are screaming at him, “I can’t believe you did this, you just got off probation!” He’s begging Fred not to call the cops, he has no insurance. Fred says, I’m sorry man I gotta call the cops you got no insurance.”
The cops come and do their thing. The whole time the parents are yelling at the kid. The kid is freaking out, “What am I gonna do now”. They don’t have another car and the prom is ruined for him.
Finally Fred interrupts them yelling at each other, “Hey! Look, I got a little old beat up Tercel at home. If you want it for the night it’s yours.”
“Really?” the kid says.
“Really?” the Dad says.
“Really.”
A little later the kid rides his bike up to Fred’s house and the Dad drives up. While Fred is showing them the car the Dad says, “Wait, do you even know how to drive stick?” Nope.
So Fred takes him to the parking lot of the grocery store 2 blocks away for a lesson. There’s 2 Postman on a break. They see them going in circles in the lot. Stalling and, KCHun-KchunGing the whole time. They take off probably figuring they don’t want to get hit.
20 minutes later they are back at the house.
Fred’s giving him the car. “Ok, here’s the license, registration, don’t get pulled over”
“Don’t worry I won’t get pulled over. Umm by the way, do I have to bring it back tonight?”
“Yea you gotta bring it back tonight! What, you think you’re going to get lucky?”
“Well, I’m kinda hoping.”
“Ok, i tell you what. If you get lucky, you bring it back tomorrow. If not, you bring it back tonight!”
“Ok no problem.” And the kid is off.
About midnight Fred gets a call. It’s the kid. “Hey man, you remember that shakey shakey thing (if you ever tried to learn stick, you know what this is) well the cops saw me doing that on Virginia Street and they think I’m drunk and stole it. By the way man, I forgot, what’s your name?”
Needless to say, the cops don’t believe his story.
The cops finally called Fred, verified him as the owner, and the kid was on his way. Next morning the kid shows up.
“Hey man, I got lucky.”
[Much rejoicing]
So the kid thanks Fred. Takes a white sheet he had brought for the back seat which is all fucked up. Puts it on his back, and rides his bike home.
No shit.
I don’t understand what I watched yet. Maybe I never will. But it will stick with me and change my perspective on the world for a bit. My strongest initial thought is how much of a waste of a life to try to review and re-live it like that. Afterwards, Flight of the Concords was on and it seemed hollow. Both because it was so light after the Synecdoche mindfuck and after watching Philip Seymour Hoffman sit there and watch his life play out, watching anything play out seem like a waste.
(Jon Brion’s beautiful song from the movie that won’t leave my head.)
After that I read “How the city hurts your brain.” There was bad and good in this. I definitely feel that in cities and try to protect myself from it. I am not usually really outdoorsy but when I am in a city I have more of a longing for nature. I think moving to the Presidio will help balance this. (I’m excited). The other part I thought was really interesting was,
Recent research by scientists at the Santa Fe Institute used a set of complex mathematical algorithms to demonstrate that the very same urban features that trigger lapses in attention and memory — the crowded streets, the crushing density of people — also correlate with measures of innovation, as strangers interact with one another in unpredictable ways. It is the “concentration of social interactions” that is largely responsible for urban creativity, according to the scientists.
When I am stuck on what to write or trying to figure something out, I go for a drive. Seeing the things out there I wouldn’t see staring at a pad and pen trigger my next idea. Sometimes TV does the same. Outside input from this wonderful world we live in shows paths I could never think of on my own.
I just got back from Shooting the West photography symposium. There were lots of things that really struck me at it. First was hearing all these people talk about their photos, the process of making them, and why they shoot what they do. That was wonderful because, working in support at Flickr I spend a lot of time thinking about what people do after they take the pictures, but don’t get as many opportunities to think about the taking of the photos. And when I do take my own pics, I might partly be thinking about the fun stuff I might do with them. Geotag, HDR, online editing, tagging, etc. To be in a room full of people, all that just love the images, and more than that; that all are there to celebrate this common way of love and place was very special and different. It was a good exercise in getting out of my own head.
In appreciation of the life reflected in the images. I wanted to link to this episode of “This I believe.” She reminds me of my Grandpa Buckie who is a western man. And the values that I saw in the words and images from this weekend, I know from him and my Dad.
Tonight I am sitting on my floor reading some old draft posts, making mixed drinks and listening to Jazz. Coltrane’s Naima is one of my favorite songs. The notes stick with my like scenes in The Razors Edge. After listening to Naima I wanted more Jazz so I went to iPod > Music > Genres > Jazz and let it play.
Reading the posts, editing some and trying to figure out my working style.
They aren’t good enough to post yet. But close. Im realizing i cant be a perfectionist and I’m going to produce a lot of crap for a while. As noted by Ira Glass. I have been holding ideas in my head and not getting them out there because I can’t express them good enough.
But holding them back ensures I will never get them out.
Accepting some crap for a while is progress.
I’m trying writing them and editing them later to get major kinks out.
The process is a work in progress like the words.
As long as the desire is constant.
I’ll see you in a week or less.
I have been thinking about booknotes a lot. I am reading a couple books that I have to underline things all the time so I can remember what is important but there is so much I want to remember.
Here is my normal process, 1) Underline things I find interesting. (pen or pencil) 2) color the edge of the page so I can find important pages by looking at the side of the book. (highlighter or marker)
But this system still has the info locked in the book. In college I had a piece of paper that I would make notes on with page #s and that stays with the book. But I am not in college anymore. The paper was handy when I had the assignment of writting a paper on the book. The paper was just notes of things I found interesting. The notes would add up to the single goal of writing a paper. But without the assignment, what I find interesting in the book and the directions I might take it are so varied that writing notes is too big of a task. The lack of a goal engorges the possibilities beyond what seems manageable.
I have often considered using colors on the edge to distinguish types of notes but never found a categorization that fit for anything.
But with either of my processes, whether I only underline, or write notes and keep that with the book, the ideas are still locked in the book.
My brother is the opposite of me. I like a book that is marked, noted-up, and that looks used. My brother sees books as sacred and likes them pristine.
He made a comment recently that “writing is lonely work” There is much about writing that is lonely, but it is researching that we were discussing at that moment. So I started thinking about how true that is. And it is partly because what you find interesting is locked in the book. A collection of underlined passages and notes may form a picture to someone else but you are the best person to make sense of it.
So I’ve been wondering about how to free that information and I’ve got some ideas. We’ll see where they take me.
I spent the weekend finishing an intro to UNIX book for people with a Mac, reading about Shackleton’s Escape from the Antarctic. Then I studied Drupal, an open source community management system. (totally amazed by how much you can do with it).
In 2 days I already setup the most basic entry to let me record booknotes. Most all of this is because off all the things you can do with Drupal by adding the right modules onto it.
As a side benefit of learning these technologies, lots of pieces have fallen into place on my understanding the technology behind Flickr. In learning a little of the Drupal system and interface there are some php and MySQL mentions. Seeing what that does somehow gives me a better understanding of what happens when the pages load on Flickr. It also helps me understand a little more of what the engineers are talking about. Not that I will understand that much of it. But it takes some of the mystery out which is nice.
CurrentTV has some great content these days. Their Viewer Created Content is getting more interesting all the time and I have recently become a huge fan of infoMania.
They do lots of calling bullshit and “this is stupid” on the media and are really funny at the same time. (as i write this i glanced up at the TV and see a new Pepsi commercial where we see Pepsi at the scene of world events including in the hand of a man striding purposefully past men with sledgehammers bringing down the Berlin wall and wish infoMania would zing the idiot that made this commercial).
Anyway, if you ever think WTF when you are watching TV or reading a magazine and want to see someone say call it out, or if you love E!s The Soup (especially early Soup when it was awesome) try infoMedia. It’s on CurrentTV or you can just see it on their website anytime.
In this great example Sarah Haskins peels away the romance and necessity that diamond commercials create with just a little snarky commentary.