Tag Archives: 2013

Nights of shooting stars

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I wasn’t even thinking of the Perseid meteor showers when I posted my review of Stardust, a movie in which a shooting star is central to the story.  Since then I’vs spotted news articles which reminded me that the annual peak time to see shooting stars is upon us!

Nasa photo: public domain

Every August for the last 2000 years, we have been treated to meteor showers as the earth passes by remnants of the Swift-Tuttle comet.  This year, because light from the waning crescent moon will be dim, the celestial light show should be especially dramatic.

The meteors will be visible from now through August 24, peaking this weekend, on the 11th and 12th.  NASA estimates we could see as many as 80-100 shooting stars per hour on those nights.  Best viewing will naturally be in places away from city lights, but in past years, I’ve seen the Perseids from the back yard, where there is plenty of ambient light.

This is really worth checking out if you get the chance.  No matter how many other distractions we face, celestial events like this can stop us in our tracks, open our eyes of wonder, and remind us again of the things that really matter.

Washedashore.org: art to save the sea

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Meet Lidia the Seal. She stands as tall as I can reach, in a vacant lot in Bandon, Oregon, the creation of artists and volunteers of the Washed Ashore Project.

Lidia2

The group’s goal is to turn plastic and other ocean garbage into art that illustrates the harm to marine life and the entire food chain resulting from careless dumping.  So far, 1000 volunteers have collected three and a half tons of marine debris along 20 miles of coastline and used it to create 18 giant sculptures.

Detail of Henry the Fish, showing the kinds of objects used to make the sculptures. Henry is 15'x9'x8'

Detail of Henry the Fish, showing the kinds of objects used to make the sculptures. Henry is 15’x9’x8′

Plaques beside the sculptures explain a little about the dangers of the degrading petrochemicals in plastics in the ocean, as well as the process of collecting, washing, sorting, and recycling what the volunteers collect.

One of the plaques affirms that, “Every action you make in your life has an impact.  Even small actions make a positive difference.  People working together CAN create results.  This project proves it!”

I wish you could have been there to share the delight of rounding a corner to find Lidia and Henry, but for the next best thing, please visit the project website: washedashore.org. There are many more photos and descriptions illustrating the process of turning these castoff items into art, as well as information on exhibits in other locations.

Maybe one day soon, one of these washed ashore creatures will visit a spot near you!  Meanwhile, enjoy these, and perhaps, as one of the plaques says, you will be moved to see art where others see garbage, right where you are today!

Face Rock, Bandon, Oregon

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face rock

From this perspective, it’s easy to see how Face Rock, got it’s name.  Legend says that long ago, Chief Siskiyou from the mountains came to the sea to trade with the four tribes that lived in this region.  Warriors stood on the bluffs above the ocean fearing that the evil sea-spirit, Seatka might cause trouble.

Siskiyou’s daugher, Princess Ewauna, was not afraid of the spirit, and one night, when the moon was full, she slipped away from camp with her faithful dog and a basket with her cat and kittens nestled inside.  She went swimming, farther and farther from shore, ignoring the warning barks of her dog.  Seatka captured the princess.

Carrying the basket of cats, the dog swam out to Ewauna and bit the evil Seatka.  Howling, he shook off the dog and threw the cats into the sea.  Seatka tried to make Ewauna look into his eyes, but she refused and kept her gaze on the moon.  The dog ran on the beach howling, but in time, he, the cats, and Ewauna, still gazing up at the moon, were frozen into stone where they remain to this very day.

I first passed through Bandon, Oregon back in college days, and it’s one of those places that has drawn me back ever since.  I took the current blog header photo two years ago at a spot about half a mile up the beach overlook trail.

With the wind off the sea and afternoon fog, it is downright chilly.  I had almost forgotten what chilly is like, but I remembered this afternoon, rolling into town in cutoffs and t-shirt.  It’s hard to pack for cold weather when it’s 100+ degrees outside, so tomorrow will likely involve shopping for a sweatshirt.

This will probably be a quiet week on thefirstgates, as we wander the shore, listen to the ocean, and eat cranberry oatmeal cookies.

Photo by Casey Fleser, CC-by-3.0

Photo by Casey Fleser, CC-by-3.0

See you then, with more stories and photographs.

Despicable Me 2

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despicableme2

In this year of superheroes and sequels, with intrusive digital effects everywhere you turn and an actor who should know better wearing a stupid dead crow on his head, it is July and I’ve been to the movies exactly twice.

I had the most fun at Despicable Me 2, and was delighted to find it a beautifully crafted film.  If you’ve been waiting…and waiting…and waiting some more for a movie worth venturing out to the cineplex, the drought has lifted with this one.

Disclaimer:  I get nothing in return from anyone for writing this review, but I’m still sort of hoping that karmic forces, somehow and somewhere may award me a minion or two for my efforts.  Come on – wouldn’t you like a few of the happy little guys to do the chores around your home?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwXbtZXjbVE

You know you would…

Informed Citizen Disorder

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Words can sometimes illuminate.  Bill Moyers’ recent interview with Marty Kaplan, Professor of Entertainment, Media, and Society at USC, gave me a phrase that crystalizes the sense of despair that increasingly follows attending to current events.  “Our spirits have been sickened by the toxins baked into our political system,” Kaplan says.  That’s one definition of what he calls, “Informed Citizen Disorder.”

Marty Kaplan by adamrog, CC-by-SA-3.0

Marty Kaplan by adamrog, CC-by-SA-3.0

Kaplan has an impressive and varied resume; a degree in Microbiology from Harvard; a Ph.D in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford; twelve years as a Vice President at Walt Disney Studios.  Kaplan wrote speeches for Walter Mondale and co-authored the screenplay for The Distinguished Gentleman (1992) starring Eddie Murphy.  He was the founding Director of the Norman Lear Center at USC, which studies “the social, political, economic and cultural impact of entertainment on the world.”

In the interview with Moyers, called Weapons of Mass Distraction, Kaplan spoke of the weeks he recently spent in Brazil, watching the widespread protests against “political corruption, economic injustice, poor health care, inadequate schools, lousy mass transit, [and] a crumbling infrastructure” while the government spends billions to host the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics.

One of the obvious questions Kaplan asks is where are the protests in our country?  With ills so blatant and parallel to Brazil, where is our outrage?

“Sickened spirits,” is one of his answers.  Another is misdirection; what passes for journalism often has us asking the wrong questions as it feeds us “the infotainment narrative of life in America.”  Learned helplessness is another factor that Kaplan often cites.

Learned helplessness entered the language of psychology in a now-famous experiment conducted by Martin Seligman in 1967.  Dogs were subjected to electro-shocks with no means to avoid them.  Eventually, they stopped looking for an escape and entered a passive and “hopeless” mode.  In the experiment’s final phase, when means of avoidance were introduced, the dogs did not discover them, because the helplessness had been so thoroughly learned they no longer even tried.  Researchers had to retrain them to manipulate their surroundings again.

The analogies to our situation are obvious.  Citing incidents like the lack of change after Sandy Hook, Kaplan wonders how many times can we stand to have our hearts broken?  Answering a question from Moyers on “Informed Citizen Disorder,” he adds:  

“Ever since I was in junior high school, I was taught that to be a good citizen meant you needed to know what was going on in your country and in your world. You should read the paper, you should pay attention to the news, that’s part of your responsibility of being an American.

And the problem, especially in recent years, is the more informed I am, the more despondent I am, because day after day, there is news which drives me crazy and I want to see the public rise up in outrage and say, no, you can’t do that, banks. You can’t do that, corporations. You can’t do that polluters, you have to stop and pay attention to the laws, or we’re going to change the laws.

…every time that doesn’t happen…something bad happened and nothing was done about it…the sadder one is when you consume all that news…all the incentives are perverse. The way to be happy, to avoid this despondency is to be oblivious to it all, to live in Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World.'”

Despite everything, Kaplan remains an optimist.  “I have kids,” he says, “I have to be.  The world has kids, we have to be.”  The alternative to optimism, Kaplan warns, is to “medicate yourself with the latest blockbuster and some sugar, salt, and fat that’s being marketed to you.  The only responsible thing that you can do is say that individuals can make a difference and I will try…”

Not the happy-happy answer we’d get from the “infotainment” world, but though Kaplan is an optimist, he’s not going to feed us bullshit.  I urge everyone to listen to the interview or read the transcript.  A key finding with learned helplessness that researchers discovered and Kaplan cites, is that since it is based on perception rather than fact, it can be quickly reversed.  We’re not there yet, he thinks, but maybe as people become more and more unhappy with the state of affairs around them, a critical mass is building that will lead ordinary citizens to demand change as we have done in the past.

Tis the season?

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First Christmas catalog arrival date for 2013 - July 5

First Christmas catalog arrival date for 2013 – July 5

At the risk of being accused of having an idle mind, let tell you that over the last few years, I have tracked the arrival date of the first Christmas catalogs.  It was the end of July in 2010, and over the next two years, the trend seemed to reverse – no Santa’s in the mail until August.  This year we’ve hit a new low.  The first one, inviting me to “Celebrate life’s special moments,” was delivered July 5, with two more arriving the next day.

Here I am, just beginning to mourn the beginning of shorter days as a new threat looms on the horizon – if “the most wonderful time of the year” can almost breach the Independence Day bulwark, can “holiday music” be far behind?  Are you ready for “Little Saint Nick” in the stores in September?  Note to self – carry earbuds everywhere!

Every year it seems I come to a greater appreciation of the pre-repentant, “Humbug” Ebenezer.

And when the days grow short and the weather turns cold, I’ll be singing along with Joni Mitchell – “Wish I had a river I could skate away on.”

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, by George Packer

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In the first sentence of The Unwinding, George Packer tells us what his title means:  “No one can say when the unwinding began – when the coil that held Americans together in its secure and sometimes stifling grip first gave way.”

Packer is a staff writer for The New Yorker, the author of an award winning book on American involvement in Iraq, two novels, and a play.  You could almost guess it would take someone with Packer’s chops to weave together the disparate threads of change that have irreversibly altered the country we thought we lived in.

It began in 1973, when the mid-east oil embargo coincided with models showing American had reached peak oil production.  And in 1977 when the steel mills in Youngstown, Ohio, that once stretched side-by-side for 25 miles, shut down.  When an idealistic young man named Jeff Connaughton, got an MBA and then decided to go to Wall Street, because by the early 80’s, getting a business degree and going to work for a company “that actually made things,” was viewed as failure.  When, according to Packer, concern over exported jobs prompted Wal-Mart to hang “Made in the U.S.A” signs over racks of clothing from Bangladesh.  When Connaughton became a Washington lobbyist and one of his colleagues told him, “Four-hundred thousand a year just doesn’t go as far as it used to.”

Poets see things before the rest of us, and Packer quotes Bruce Springsteen, who put it like this in 1984:  “Don’t you feel like you’re a rider on a downbound train?”

Now, almost 30 years later, when we all know we’re on a downbound train, Packer turns a light on some of the hydra-headed influences that led us collectively down this road.  He also shows us where positive change is likely to come from.  And where it is not.  It won’t come from the power elites, though it may come from disaffected refugees from those elites.

Jeff Connaughton, who made it into the outer circles of the inner circle, as a legal council for the Clinton White House, left Washington after being “radicalized by a stunning realization that our government has been taken over by a financial elite that runs the government for the plutocracy.”  Connaughton is now writing a book called The Payoff:  Why Wall Street Always Wins.

Packer also profiles Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who co-founded Paypal and helped bankroll Facebook as a startup.  Thiel put it like this:  “…the deep secret is there’s nobody at the steering wheel at all…People pretend to be in control, but the deep secret is there is no one.”  Thiel now looks for unusual entrepreneurial projects to fund.  Claiming that education is “the latest U.S. economic bubble,” he compares university administrators to sub-prime mortgage lenders.  In response, he began awarding Thiel Fellowships, two year grants of $100,000 each, to 20 people a year under the age of 20, willing to leave school to work on projects that “could make the world a better place.”

Packer doesn’t just profile movers and shakers in the post-unwinding world.  He details the story of Dean Price, son of generations of tobacco farmers, who overcomes multiple obstacles, including personal bankruptcy, to establish a working and profitable biodiesel refinery after learning about peak oil and taking the message to heart.

George Packer

author George Packer

In writing the book, Packer spent a lot of time with Tammy Thomas, an African-American woman who was 11 when the mills closed in Youngstown.  A few years later, she found herself an unwed mother of three, with a fierce determination, which she attributed to her grandmother, to get off welfare, even as jobs evaporated and gangs took over the neighborhoods.  She succeeded in doing so, and is now a community organizer and advocate, but her story makes clear that the odds were stacked against her.  She survived for 19 years in a car parts factory but is scornful of politicians who attach the label of “good jobs” to such work.  “Mitt Romney would be dead in week,” she said.

Packer interweaves the individual stories in a way that keeps you turning pages, like a novel with a large cast of characters that you care about.  Not all the stories have happy endings, and the suffering of individuals, cities, and regions is palpable.  By giving so many seemingly separate events the name, Unwinding, Packer helps clarify connections I had been sensing but unable to articulate.

“Alone on a landscape without solid structures, Americans have to improvise their own destinies, plot their own stories of success and salvation.”

A problem has to be named and described before we can begin to imagine solutions, and for this reason The Unwinding is a profoundly important book.

The Worlds Revolve

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As I scanned reviews of The Great Gatsby, I tuned in to one comment about the visionary quality of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book:  he saw the end of the roaring 20’s in 1925, before almost anyone else.

Almost anyone else…

I’d argue that T.S. Eliot, in Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), saw where our 20th century mode of life was leading even before the party began.

Here is how the title poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” begins:

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question…
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

And here is how Prufrock ends:

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweek red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

One of the best professors I ever had helped me engage Eliot with the visual imagination, which helped me see how radical he was compared to the literary establishment of the day.  A kind of tired, watered down romanticism was the norm before the war, so describing the sky as “a patient etherized upon the table” was shocking.  “Have you ever seen someone unconscious?” the professor asked.  “Or very sick or dead?  Eliot isn’t describing a postcard sunset.”

But perhaps my most unforgettable poetic image came from another piece in Eliot’s first book.  Regarded as a minor work, “Preludes” is even less cheery than Prufrock.  Here’s how the poem ends:

Wipe your hand across your mouth and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

“Picture it,” the professor said, so I did.  I imagined an empty field on the outskirts of London, on a dark winter’s day.  Old women with scarves, patched sweaters and faded coats circle slowly, eyes on the ground, looking for sticks or slats from a discarded crate they can burn at home to stay warm.  Half a dozen figures or more in slow orbit.  They might as well be 100 miles apart, even though they are next to each other, doing the same thing.

Which worlds revolve like ancient women?  I’ve entertained many answers over the years, but one came up this week that helped clarify a sensation I’ve had very strongly since the November election.

The May 20, Time Magazine cover story featured our current crop of young people who are tagged as “Millennials.”

Time cover, May 30

I’ve read such generational articles since the days when they were written about me and my cohorts.  If you don’t take them too literally, they yield some interesting insights.  In this case, when author, Joel Stein, wrote “Millennials aren’t trying to take over the establishment; they’re growing up without one,” I literally jumped to my feet and ran out to brew some coffee.  I do that a lot when a light bulb goes on.

Millennials are growing up without an establishment.  Bulls-eye.  We’re all growing up without an establishment!

The worlds revolve like ancient women,
gathering fuel in vacant lots.

We’ve always had personal areas of concern, particular to our interests, our regions, and the groups that we align with, but have we ever been so lacking in the kind of national ethos and ideology that used to weld us together as one nation under one official God?

When journalists wrote about my generation, the lines were clear.  We had an ugly war which you were either for or against, yes or no, no ambiguity.  Now it’s all too inviting to forget that we’re still in a war no one believes in anymore, and maybe hasn’t for years.  In earlier days, we knew who was good and who was bad.  Now our enemies change on a regular basis.  Who is our biggest threat this month?  The worlds revolve and I can’t remember.

This week, if you live in Boston, you are concerned with the dead bomber’s burial.  In Washington, you follow the Benghazi hearings.  If you’re in congress or one of the 1%, you care about the deficit, though polls show that 92% of the rest of us do not.

If you live in Pennsylvania, you’ve got a new worry.  The legislature decided it’s probably unconstitutional to ban guns from public college campuses.  Think of armed drunken students on Friday night.  A well regulated militia, indeed.

My own new biggest concern springs from a report that our CO2 levels are higher than they have been in three million years.  I drive a hybrid car and use pumps instead of sprays, but clearly that’s not enough.  Some still say it’s a made up problem, and a few believe these are the end-times, so it’s a moot point.  What do I do if I’m not convinced?  Does anyone write to their senators anymore about anything?

No establishment means no one at the helm.  We’re on a ship without a rudder, or rather, many ships, going in circles like women gathering fuel in vacant lots.  The guy next to you at the stoplight is either talking on bluetooth or talking to himself.  You hope that if it’s the latter, he isn’t too angry and doesn’t have a gun.

House behind vacant lot, 2008, by Samuel A. Love, CC by-NC-ND 2.0

House behind vacant lot, 2008, by Samuel A. Love, CC by-NC-ND 2.0

These days some of those ancient women have concealed weapons and none have had background checks.  You spot a piece of wood at the same moment as another who narrows her eyes as if to say, “Are you feeling lucky today?  Well, are you?”

Yesterday’s paper featured an article on the current generation of survivalists, who now call themselves, “preppers,” a terrible name that sounds like a table condiment or the slacks and sweater look for high school students.  They are getting ready for the big collapse, which they say is just a matter of time.  They make a compelling point – ships without rudders run aground.  One local prepper who teaches his skills to others asks, “What would you do if you hadn’t had any water or food for three days?”

Strictly speaking, I think you die after three days without water, but it’s a good question.  I know what I hope I’d do in a crisis, though I don’t think anyone knows in advance for sure.  I recall stories of people helping each other during disasters and others doing just the opposite.  What’s scary is that I think you tend to help people you view as neighbors, and we all have fewer neighbors than ever before.

The survivalists are right about one thing – you have to plan the future you want and practice for it.  Isn’t that the real question, “the overwhelming question,” as Eliot put it? What do we want our lives to be like?  What kind of lives are worth surviving for?

What would happen if those ancient women teamed up to help each other gather fuel?  That’s so un-20th century, but now that we have no establishment, all bets are off.  That kind of future is so foreign to our current way of life that even with the best intentions and effort, many of us won’t see it in our lifetimes.  But that doesn’t really matter.

Outcomes are not as important as the questions.  What do we want our lives to be like?  How do we want to live?  Better to start asking now, lest the day come when human voices wake us and we drown.