Gimme Shelter

A Review of Ludovico Einaudi's work, exemplified by In a Time Lapse and In a Time Lapse (The Remixes) (2013)

I recently described the past week to a friend as like a hurricane. It swept in quickly but not without some advance warning; was devastating in its toll on my mental and spiritual energy; and had moments of calm amid its thrashing waves.

Part of the reason I felt this first week of the fall term so intensely, I think, is that I've become more introverted over the past few months. I feel more disconnected from students than is usual at the start of a semester--perhaps the result of my evolving administrative responsibilities in the Study Abroad Office. (I did feel relief from this scary isolation, though, when I advised a group of thoughtful and energized first-years on Friday.)

Disappointing v Uninteresting v Meh

A Review of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016)

"Nobody cares about Clark Kent taking on the Batman." - Perry White

I first started writing a different post in an effort to decide whether "Uninteresting" captured my reaction to this film. It tested a lingering weakness in the ten-point scale that I developed over two years ago: whether an "uninteresting" cultural text merits a rating at all (putting it in a rather damning undefined space) or if it sits uncomfortably between "OK" (Rank 5) or "Bad" (Rank 3). After all, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice did prompt a response from me. It kept my interest, in fact, for the full, overlong two-and-a-half hours. In some ways, "disappointing" would be a better description, but that implies more that I had higher hopes for the film in the first place.

Now I just feel disappointed that I had such hopes.

Return of the Retry

I last posted to this blog on October 6, 2014. It's now over a year and a half later, and I'm left wondering where the time went.

I recently experienced several big, amazing life changes: a job offer that led to a promotion; a health scare that shed thirty pounds; and two adventures abroad with students that renewed my commitment to my life's work. All of this change has encouraged me to make a decision on--well, more like decided for me--a central and puzzling issue that I've mulled over for several months now: whether to retreat from the world, into what Isaiah Berlin once called the "inner citadel"; or to embrace that world openly and authentically. This internal debate gnawed at me for quite some time, for reasons that I can't quite articulate well right now. I hope one day to write about this issue more. But that debate recently ended as mysteriously as it arose.

I'm now reconnecting with old friends and family on social networks: Facebook, Instagram, the whole lot. I'm suddenly committed to helping construct the world about me instead of fearing, as I had when I righteously left most of these corporate organizations (save for Twitter, which has long been my solitary foothold in the digital world), that they would determine and control me.

I also feel that I can't stay silent in this world of tumult and change. It's an election year. A biggie, I've heard tell. Our politics, our national passions, and even our climate are aflame. A lot is at stake. I want to be part of it. I need to. And so I return.

Thoughts on Marriage

I woke up this morning next to my partner, Leigh, to whom I've been married since December 10, 2011. I didn't feel like a second-class citizen. My family, friends, and community have been very supportive of our union, with some minor (if now obsolete) exceptions. The businesses, banks, insurance companies, and institutions of Manhattan, Kansas, have rarely pointed out with discrimination the fact that my adoptive state had any other opinion on our marriage than full support. I can state with full awareness that I have been privileged enough to not suffer in ways that many LGBT Americans have and do.

And yet, on this evening, as I sit next to my husband--only now according to the State of Kansas by way of the Supreme Court of the United States--I feel a quite bearable, a very welcome lightness of being. It's only now, in the wake of the Court's non-decision decision, that I get what it means to not feel the threat of institutionalized discrimination, as opposed to such discrimination itself. These are two very different things--things that I have long known intellectually, but now only understand holistically.

Glamour On A Pig

A Review of The Wolf Among Us

Snow White: "So...starting now...we do everything cut and dried, by the book, straight as an arrow."

Colin: "Pure as driven snow..."

-From Episode IV: "In Sheep's Clothing"

I often think that life is an expectations game--or, at least, it is for me. Before I read a book, watch a film, play a game--or even do something more mundane, like head into a staff meeting or stop by Dillon's for the week's groceries--I instinctively develop a mental narrative of how that experience will unfold. My guess is that most people do this to some extent. How something plays out, then, inevitably stands in contrast with my expectation of that event; my resulting evaluation colors my memory, my attitudes shaping the very facts of the experience.

With The Wolf Among Us, I had very high expectations. A production of Telltale Games, one of my favorite game publishers (and based in my spiritual home of Marin County, California), the game uses a similar engine and format as The Walking Dead, Season One, one of the best games of recent years. It has a noir setting; draws on the smart comic series, Fables; features similarly breathtaking visuals as The Walking Dead; and stars many of the same excellent voice actors. My mental narrative was an exciting one. It foresaw The Wolf Among Us as a brilliant riff on Western fairy tales and urban legends, holding the Magic Mirror up to these classics and showing us their dark undercurrents.

Expectations can be fatal, however, to the success of a game. The writers behind The Wolf Among Us failed to pull together a coherent story, let alone one as smart and caustically insightful as The Walking Dead.

The Unipolar Moment

A Review of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Season One (1987-1988)

Captain Jean-Luc Picard: "The only person you're truly competing against, Wesley, is yourself."
Wesley Crusher: "Then you're not disappointed?"
Captain Jean-Luc Picard: "Wesley - you have to measure your successes and your failures within, not by anything that I or anyone else might think. But, erm... if it helps you to know this... *I* failed the first time, and you may not tell anyone!"

-Picard and Crusher discussing his Starfleet Academy test, from the episode "Coming of Age"

My long-term study of Star Trek continues apace. I completed Star Trek: The Original Series, Star Trek: The Animated Series (too short and uninteresting to review, sadly, other than providing a quick rating of 5 out of 10 right now), and the Star Trek films through Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Last month, I began watching an episode of TNG while riding the exercise bike each weekday morning. (Ok, just Monday through Thursday. Friday's my day off.) And although Season One is considered among the worst of this celebrated series' offerings--other than the dreaded Season Two, of course--I have to admit that my reaction here is surprisingly positive.

An Unambiguous Utopia

A Review of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed (1974)

"True journey is return..." - Shevek

Even though I never seem to remember its author's name, William G. Perry's scheme for cognitive development comes to mind nearly every day. It shares common traits with Milton Bennett's developmental model of intercultural sensitivity, as well as Carol Gilligan's stages of the ethic of care and Lawrence Kohlberg's model of moral development, both of which Jean Piaget's constructivist work deeply influenced. (Geek snort.) As a humanist, I find much social science inherently problematic, reliant upon assumptions that elide contextual differences. These criticisms equally apply to Perry, Gilligan, Kohlberg, and Piaget, of course, as the extensive literatures on educational psychology illustrate. But these theories, and particularly Perry's, continue to undergird my philosophical metanarrative of life in powerful ways.

Written at roughly the same time as Perry's model, science fiction master Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed reads like a fictionalization of one individual's pursuit of full cognitive development. The book's (mass market paperback) cover strikingly describes it as "an astonishing tale of one man's search for utopia." It's misleading in a very clever way. This book is not about "utopia" as the elusive, perfect place, that "no place" of Thomas More. Le Guin's vision of utopia is a state of mind, of cognitive enlightenment, of the realization that the perfect place--the state of true freedom--is nowhere but in ourselves, an epistemological nirvana.