A couple of my coworkers were in California this past week and passed by this amazing gem of architecture on their way back to the airport. Can you imagine the real estate appraiser’s shock at being called to this house? I mean, what would he or she say to the owners? Where would you even start?
I’ve been a bit behind in my blogging for three weeks now. A big trip to Mexico followed by an illness that felt like the flu have really set me back. But I’m starting to catch up.
Over the past few weeks a few things have happened in succession which I couldn’t help but juxtapose. First, the film No Country for Old Men took four Oscars. Then two young women at universities in the south were killed more or less at random, petty robberies a motive in both cases. Take a look at Eve Carson and Lauren Burk. Try to imagine what it might be like to be the parents, grandparents, friends, classmates or neighbors of either of these two women.
Eve Carson, 1985-2008. Murdered for an ATM withdrawal.
Lauren Burk – 1990-2008. Murdered for her ATM card.
As it turns out, I don’t have to imagine in my case. Lauren’s family attended Temple Kol Emeth, a synagogue about a mile from my home in Atlanta. As I was driving to the airport last Sunday to return to Dallas I passed by the Temple as her funeral service was being held. I’m pretty sure that I met Lauren’s parents once a few years ago when I was doing some personal study on comparative religion. I can’t imagine their grief.
What do these tragic deaths have to do with No Country for Old Men? Nothing. At least not directly.
I have traveled quite a lot in recent years and I’ve noticed a few things big and small about us Americans that separates us from most of the world’s popular culture. Some of these things have less serious consequence than others. Take for example our relative obesity. Spend a week or two in most European or Asian countries and then come back. You won’t be 100 yards off of the airplane before it hits you like a bag of bricks just how damned fat we have become. Land of the free and home of the brave? Somehow waddling out of Wendy’s with a Baconator in one hand and a bucket of Coke in the other doesn’t fit that ideal. It’s not pretty, but it’s not the most serious thing in the world either.
Our uniquely casual attitude toward violence in entertainment, on the other hand, has terribly tragic consequences in my opinion.
Here in the US we are arguably very prudish and hypocritical in our concerns about sex in entertainment. In mainstream TV and film we effectively censor sexual content to a large degree while privately I would bet that we are the biggest per capita porn spenders in the world. Meanwhile, the blood flows in rivers out of our movie screens, television sets and game consoles – to a far, far greater degree than anywhere else. For the most part it’s just not like this in other parts of the world. Take Javier Bardem’s comments on the matter. Keep in mind that Bardem is the 2007 Oscar winner for best supporting actor owing for his portrayal of the psychopathic Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men:
“I had a problem with the violence. In Europe we don’t have a problem about sex. We show our ass; we make love—that’s fine. People on the set are relaxed. But when you’re doing a movie and they give you a gun, people in Europe still say, ‘Is this really necessary? Is it going to help to tell the story for us to kill somebody or to take out a gun?’ In America it is the opposite.”
Indeed. The Coen brothers apparently got Bardem to believe that the movie is meant to deplore this sort of violence, but who really believes that? If you want to make a statement about the tragedy of violence you don’t do it with this kind of film. You do it with a film that focuses on the depth of the tragedy, not the graphic extremes of the violence.
Of course it’s not just film and television, music and games too.
Rewind to around the time when these two murdered young women were born and a lot of the “lyrics” you hear in popular music today would have been socially unacceptable in just about any circle. Today however, we broadly and passively accept the discussion of casual yet brutal violence – particularly against women – as just part of the norm in music. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the hip hop genre, where beating, raping, maiming and killing “bitches and hos” is now standard fare. The simple fact is that kids today – and in particular young black men – grow up steeped in a popular culture that celebrates and glorifies monstrous acts – behavior that fully disregards the humanity of other people. We are somehow supposed to accept this as being “authentic” (how insulting this would be to me if I were a black man) and would also be led to believe by the purveyors of this cultural garbage that it is somehow harmless, that it has no effect on actual behavior.
Really? Does anyone out there really believe that? What do you want to bet that the thugs who murdered Eve and Lauren have grown up on music from the likes of 50 Cent and Ludacris as opposed to artists who don’t glorify rape and murder?
If depictions of behavior have no impact on real behavior, please explain to me how advertising revenues run into the hundreds of billions of dollars each year. A lot of pretty smart people prove day in and day out that words, images and video can and do affect how we think, buy and otherwise behave. The idea that popular entertainment is somehow separated from the behavior of the people that soak it up is self indulgent stupidity.
Of course it’s not just hip hop. Gratuitous violence oozes from American entertainment in every direction. Ever heard anyone describe the Hostel movies? Try this. Read the movie review posted here on Hostel: Part II. Pay particular attention to how director Eli Roth describes his mood when he’s filming horrific acts of torture and murder. Then try the interview with Roth and Quentin Tarantino here. Scroll back up and look Eve and Lauren in the eyes. Now what do you think of Roth’s glee? How do you like Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction now?
Today people routinely accept the idea that second hand smoke makes people sick, that pollution in general can degrade health, and that “hate speech” is bad. Everybody knows that having good role models is good for kids. How can we possibly believe that the cultural poison of casual violence in entertainment can do anything other than make our lives cheaper and more dangerous?
Everybody ought to know that a society which freely supports the objectification and murder of young women as a form of entertainment is going to wind up with more of them killed in the real world. And yes, if you buy this sort of entertainment you’ve got a hand in the violence – however far removed it may be from the actual perpetration. I love the United States of America and would live nowhere else in the world, but we are more than what we have become. At all times every human being sets an example for all others and in some ways, our country’s example has become pretty pathetic in recent years.
I look forward to the day when we remember ourselves.
A few weeks back I met the Inmans over at yeswehavenobananas. We’ve gotten to do a thing or two together since and last night we met up with a few other Uptown-area folks at Lalibela. No, we did not fly to its namesake Ethiopian city of ancient rock hewn churches. We just drove over to Forest Lane and ate as though we had.
If you haven’t tried Ethiopian food before you are missing out. It’s reminiscent of Mediterranean or Middle Eastern cuisine in some ways, but it’s definitely got its own flavor and style. Lots of good spices and some very brightly colored dishes. Just get used to the fact that you don’t eat with utensils. You scoop up your food with lots of spongy flat bread. And don’t think Lalibela will provide some kind of white table cloth version of Ethiopian dining all scrubbed up to the point you can’t tell it from any place else. You won’t. Chances are you will find yourself all alone except for a handful of real live Ethiopians that come there to feel at home.
With all of that as a back drop we had some hilarious dinner conversation. A couple that is friends with Matt & Erin came along with one of their college roommates. They had their fair share of funny stories. Did you know that there was such a thing called a ScatMat which uses very powerful static electric shocks to train pets not to sit on sofas? Do you know what happens when your unwary friends sit on the ScatMat? Can you guess what might happen when you put the ScatMat in your room mate’s bed before he stumbles home drunk? The Ethiopians might have been confused as to why the Americans were laughing so hard, but they didn’t seem to mind too much.
After that we drove over to Wild About Harry’s where I finally got some of Mr. Conley’s very fine custard along with everyone else. I had the coconut with hot fudge on top. Awesome.
But I can understand how the cleaning lady might have thought otherwise.
On Tuesday around mid-morning I summoned all my will power and drove into the office. I couldn’t stand another day of sitting on the sofa with Kleenex and a pounding headache. I had to have a change of scenery. So I went into the office but posted this sign on my door and kept it closed. Last thing I wanted to do was start an epidemic at work.
I expected to make my colleagues laugh if they stopped by. I did not expect to make myself laugh the next morning. Click to zoom.
Posted in Uncategorized
You know that sort of burning sensation you get in your chest when you’re sick and you get a cough? I’ve always had that happen on the tail-end of a chest cold or bronchitis, one of the last symptoms to show up as you turn the corner and start to beat an illness. Not this time.
Last Thursday night while I was taking literally the last seat on the last plane out of Dallas during the ice storm I suddenly coughed out of the blue – and had that unmistakable burning sensation. “That’s really weird,” I thought “I’m not sick”. Oh yes I was. I just didn’t know it yet. Friday morning started a long tumble downward that finally ended Tuesday night after a few days of suffering, a couple of gallons of Gatorade, a bottle of Tylenol and some big fat doses of Levaquin.
As (bad) luck would have it, I seem prone to bronchitis from bacterial infection. Go figure. I hope that the big drug companies come up with some new antibiotics before all of the ones we count on today stop working. Otherwise, I can already tell you how I’m likely to be leaving this world.
Anyway, I’m back now and finally able to think well enough to write again. I don’t know about you guys, but one of the silver linings to getting sick is that when I start getting better I feel intensely… alive. For lack of a better way to say it. I become very alert and everything seems brighter, sharper – even louder. Reminds you just how much your senses and your mind have to offer when they are taken away for a little while by the dull gray blanket of illness and then suddenly returned.
Yesterday at lunch, for example, it seemed as though I could hear every conversation in the restaurant all at once. Very distracting but fascinating at the same time. And you over there with the rib plate and green beans. You should definitely dump her. She sounds like a self-centered loser.
Posted in Uncategorized
Everybody knows that the iPhone is going to get updated later this year with much faster wide area networking. Consequently, I know it too and it is the sole reason why I haven’t bought one yet. So it was with some interest that I watched the iPhone SDK presentation this morning at about 2 am when I couldn’t sleep. Bronchitis sucks.
Here are some revealing statistics. Though the iPhone is less than a year old, it lags only RIM’s Blackberry in market share among smart phones here in the US with 28% of the market. That’s pretty remarkable. What’s more, Apple claims that even with approximately 1/4 of the market that the iPhone already accounts for approximately 3/4 of all mobile phone Internet use.
And that’s without 3rd party applications. Or any meaningful hooks into enterprise IT systems. It’s hard not to get swept away when you watch Apple’s presentation on how they are about to blow past both barriers to even broader acceptance of the iPhone.
With support from Microsoft via licensing of ActiveSync Apple is poised to knock off RIM. I think the final barriers they will face in the IT market will be per-unit cost and the lack of a tactile keyboard. I don’t think either of those will hold them back very much over time – costs will gradually come down and the soft keyboard and iPhone users will gradually adapt to one another. Speaking as a Blackberry user, if I were RIM I’d be concerned. People have a love-hate relationship with their Blackberries. While they provide a business professional with a fair amount of flexibility, it comes at the cost of a 24/7 link to The Man. But even when iPhones do a good job of linking back to the office, I think their users are likely to view them more as a “lifestyle” device and less as a ball and chain. It would be very hard for RIM to close that gap going in the other direction. Advantage Apple.
As for 3rd party applications, the native SDK for the iPhone looks like it has the potential to not only win over a lot of software developers to the iPhone, but to the Mac platform generally. To help that along Apple is providing developers with a very easy and low cost distribution model for getting their software distributed to users and supercharging investment with a $100 million venture fund backed by Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers. I don’t think any other smart phone platform will be able to sustain the kind of developer community that this combination of market share and funding is likely generate for Apple.
As John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins said in his portion of the presentation, “this is bigger than the PC”. I think he’s right. I have believed for some time that devices with the form factor of a phone will one day run all of the software we run on laptops now. Each year the gap in usefulness between PCs and phones shrinks while phones continue to keep commanding leads in battery life and wide-area connectivity. Many business laptops dock to larger displays and keyboards when their users are in the office, and it is not at all hard to imagine phones doing the same thing once they can literally run identical software to a laptop. I believe that this will happen in less than a decade. Eventually the “laptop” itself may be little more than a peripheral of the phone – a portable display/keyboard combo that is basically a brick until users plug their phones into them.
It’s a long way from here to that point, but for the first time I think you can actually see the first step down the path that gets us there.
Speaking of fun on the dance floor, one my compadres in Mexico last week spied this yesterday. My only thought to add is that a real Ninja in this situation would be able to finish the drink and then steal the girl.
Posted in Uncategorized
Wow am I behind on my Deadly Sins. For those of you that have been tuning in for a while you will recall that I’ve been attending a Sunday school class on the seven deadly sins since the beginning of the year. I’ve missed three of them owing to the fact that I’m in Dallas only every other weekend. As a result I’ve fallen far behind in my write ups on them. On February the 17th our class was on Wrath. If you’ve been following this series on the deadly sins you’ll recall that they get increasingly deadly as they progress toward Pride. Wrath holds 3rd position.
Early in the class series when the deadly sins were discussed broadly people fessed up to which one was their worst – the one they were most likely to succumb to on any given day. Mary said hers was Wrath, which would not be apparent when you meet her. It’s mine also. I was well into adulthood until I finally realized that my easily provoked temper was not in any way valuable, useful or virtuous. Part of that came with age and maturity, part as a result of the patience that comes only with parenthood, part from the general trial-and-error experience of life. I have slowly succeeded in my struggle to contain and dissipate my anger, and I’m a much happier person as a result. So my interest in Wrath is a little more personal that that of the other deadly sins.
Aquinas thought that anger – if very carefully controlled – could be put to positive use. Augustine would have none of that, insisting that it was always dangerous. Although theologians may remain split on this one as they are on many things, Mary was quick to point out that most agree that there is no such thing as “righteous anger.” As a recovering Angry Man, I have to agree with Augustine and the majority opinion. Though I see where Aquinas was coming from – anger perhaps bringing to bear action where it is appropriate – I think that anger is so destructive and risky that even accommodating it for this reason is fraught with peril. Action may indeed result where anger lurks, but it’s very likely that the action itself will be an ill-considered response, and that a cooler head would work with more wisdom. I think of it in the same way that George Washington compared government to fire when he said:
“Government is not reason. It is not eloquence. It is a force, like fire: a dangerous servant and a terrible master.”
Substitute “anger” for “government” in the statement above and you understand why I disagree with Aquinas. While he believed that reason could divert anger to useful purpose, I would argue that reason and anger are essentially opposites. I don’t believe that the mind can entertain both equally at once, and that anger is far better at killing reason than reason is at taming anger. Aquinas’ accommodation of anger must be very appealing however. The idea of righteous anger is a popular one. One of Mary’s questions from class was why we thought that anger is a sin which we tend to defend more than others. I’m not sure that we adequately addressed the question, but I feel certain that we humans too often walk around believing that anger is justified.
Interestingly enough, another of our founding fathers said something about anger which is noteworthy. Contained in Benjamin Franklin’s endless storehouse of aphorisms is this gem:
“What’s begun in anger ends in shame.”
I couldn’t agree more. Note the particulars of this very concise statement. What is begun in anger ends in shame. Not what passes through anger, but what starts there. Throughout all of my experience in life this has ever been the case. Acts carried out with a premeditated anger as their genesis have always ended badly and reflected poorly on me or whoever else I observed making this mistake. Never once did something admirable result in my experience. My guess is that this has something to do with Pride, the deadliest sin and the subject of another Sunday.
The subject was a rich one. Mary asked more than one question which was tough to provide a satisfactory answer for. My favorite of these was wondering why we tend to provide more excuses or accommodation to the sin of Wrath than we do to other sins. I suspect that this also has something to do with Pride, but we did not develop the discussion that day. Other questions regarded God and anger, particularly the God of the Old Testament, and most poignantly the scene of Jesus overturning the tables of the money changers in the Temple at Jerusalem. These are subjects worthy of extended discussion I think. One thing is for sure – I doubt that Jesus woke up one morning hell bent on showing those money changers a thing or two. I suspect his anger caught Him by surprise that day, much as it does many of us on many days. Fully human and fully divine indeed.
I don’t know about you guys, but most of my anger is generally direct at one or more individuals when it gets the best of me. For that reason yet another quote that I first wrote about on New Year’s Day sprung to mind when we talked in class about how to best manage our anger. It is from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:
“If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.”
I won’t recall all of my thoughts on that again in this post, but I continue to hold that quote as being pretty special. I could go on and on writing about Wrath, it’s pitfalls, and my happiness at being delivered from it as a constant condition. Maybe I’ll continue with that another time.
As I’ve mentioned before, I work with some really great people. My colleagues are smart, competent, hard working and fun. When traveling for business, we are as focused and tough-minded during the day as we are relaxed and care-free at night. When we gather for a major event like we did this past week in Puerto Vallarta, we also have the pleasure of catching up with our friends and colleagues from all over the world – it’s like a workplace version of a family reunion.
This past week was particularly fun. On Thursday night after a day of pretty tough and even emotional meetings we all went out to dinner at a really neat place called the Vista Grill. It is an open-air restaurant high up on a hillside overlooking the city and the ocean.
It was something else. One of the guys on the team I work on had just been promoted, and we were all enjoying the food, the candle light and the view while congratulating him. Great guy – he really deserves the recognition and added responsibility.
As the meal wound down, conversation drifted toward what we were going to do with the rest of the night. For some reason everyone turned to me and asked what I had in mind. The words formed immediately. “Something uninhibited” I said.
Though I had mostly gotten over it already, I was still in a little bit of a funk after breaking off a new relationship the week before. I guess deep down inside I wanted to go out, have a good time and put it thoroughly behind me. Seemed like a wild night out was in order.
Mission accomplished. Way accomplished.
Our first stop was El Hilo. It’s a bar down toward the beach and the hotel where we stayed. This is one of those places in Mexico that I guess is definitely targeted tourists from the US. It might not have been my first pick, but the company was still good. The bigger problem – I found this out the following day – was that my friends had previously decided that I was going to be the target for the evening. Maybe they could tell that I needed to cut loose.
The “tequila girls” have a pretty time-tested technique. Wearing bandoleers of shot glasses and hip-holsters of tequila and margarita mix, they show up out of nowhere and blow a whistle in your face until you take the shot they are offering. Think you could easily escape? OK. My suggestion is go down there, try it, and let me know how it goes. Before long, everything in front of me was in soft focus, all warm and happy like. This video gives you some idea of what it was like, but we were there a bit too early for the dance floor to have really started up:
After we had enough of that place we headed to The Zoo Bar, a club where there seemed to be a lot more people from parts of the world other than just the US. I met a woman from Germany right away, but we didn’t talk long. The dance floor was in full swing. My boss, being the troublemaker that he is, told a couple of gorgeous blondes sitting next to us that I just love to dance. Now this is only true when I’m drunk enough, and by this time that was not a problem – I had already been dancing with one of my colleagues.
I would have sworn that both of them were from somewhere in northern Europe – say the Netherlands or Sweden. Close. Their ancestors were – they were from Minnesota. Their good looks wasn’t beer goggles either folks – my buddies (who had every reason to say otherwise to tease me) agreed the following day that these two were very pretty. Anyway, it wasn’t long before I was out on the dance floor with both of them. We were out there for a while and had a good time.
Meantime, the tequila was not done with me. I started to crash later, and they poured me into a taxi headed back to the hotel sometime in the wee hours of the morning. I had one hell of a hangover the next day and didn’t really get moving until about 1:00 in the afternoon. Good thing it was a free day.
As is usually the case when I have fun like that, the positive state of mind didn’t stop for me with the evening. My funk was broken, and I continued to have a great time for the next several days. My colleagues even made me a souvenir. They got me a shot glass with a figurine clinging to the side. He is wearing a sombrero with “Jimmy” painted on it. Awesome. I love going to work with these folks.
It’s been over a week since I made my last post, the longest pause in my blogging since I started last year. I had a good excuse I think. I left for Puerto Vallarta last Wednesday morning and got back Monday afternoon late. While I was down there I worked very hard and played very hard. I also had basically zero Internet access. Hard to post with all that.
I added it up last night, and I’ve now visited a total of seventeen different countries. Despite being right next door, this was my first trip to Mexico. That doesn’t count places that I’ve “tagged” by just switching planes within their borders. If you count those (which I don’t) then the number is twenty. Don’t ask me how I’ve managed to visit half of southeast Asia and much of northern Europe before I even went south of the border. Couldn’t tell you.
Now that I’ve been to Mexico it is very easy for me to understand why people like to visit its beaches in the winter time. Man are they beautiful – and the weather down there this time of year is divine. Check out this morning view from my balcony, for example:
And this one, a view of the sunset from the beach just below my room:
Hard to beat, huh? I’ll definitely be going back.
When we got back to Dallas on Monday afternoon it was dark, cold, gray, windy and starting to sleet. Now that will make you appreciate where you’ve come from!
I was so exhausted from all of the crazy, out-of-hand late night partying we did that I slept 10-12 hours for the past two nights. I’ll probably be caught up by some time this weekend.
