Mark

Duditivity

Culture / /

Dude, Where’s My Dude? Dudelicious Dissection, From Sontag to Spicoli by Ron Rosenbaum : Dude, this is some seriously funny reading. The complete history of Dude, from its humble origins as a “aesthetic craze” in New York, circa 1883, to Dude, Where’s My Car? in 2000.

Everybody thinks “dude ranch” came first and was somehow the origin. But whence came the dude in “dude ranch”? Before the dude-ranch dude there was dude as dandy, the dude as an urban aesthete; it was the urbanity of dude that made the dude-ranch dude dude-ish.

This is so stupid, but its a smart stupid. Almost Pynchonian, really. Seriously, its a surprisingly complete article, worth reading if only to experience the whopping 160 or so occurrences of the term “Dude” or its derivatives. [via Ipse Dixit – Thanks Dude!]

Update: Unrelated, but interesting: A brief Googling of Pynchon and Dude turned up this article, also by Rosenbaum, about Pynchon and Phone Phreaking.

LMAO

2 Comments / Uncategorized / /

Today marks the first blogiversary of IMAO, and since I do not want to be known as an enemy to IMAO (nor do I wish to be destroyed), I am linking to his uh… much anticipated… One Year Blogography. I’m a little short on the presents and offerings that Frank has demanded; I can only heap praise upon his brilliantly funny “In My World” posts, which have the unique distiction of being universally entertaining (as he notes in another blogiversary post: ” I receive very little hate mail. I’ve often seen liberals link to my posts saying, ‘Hey, look at this great Rumsfeld bashing.'”). Also, whenever his stories feature Bush, I picture the lines being delivered by Will Ferrell’s Bush (which I miss dearly – that new guy stinks). Seriously, every time I stop by IMAO, I laugh out loud, garnering some strange looks if I’m at work.

Incidentally, the Kaedrin Weblog will be celebrating 3 years of bloggy goodness this coming Monday. Yes, 3 whole years, and I can’t even claim a meteoric rise to fame. Given my generosity today, if I don’t end up on Frank’s Links of the Day list that day, there will be hell to pay. You hear me Frank? I’m just itching for a reason to test out the .50 AE Desert Eagle in a combat situation. Don’t tempt me… (Heh, j/k of course)

Heard, Understood, Acknowledged

Military / /

R. Lee Ermey, the infamous drill instructor from Full Metal Jacket, has his own T.V. show, called Mail Call. I’ve seen it several times before, but I never really got into it. You see, its on regular cable T.V. so his speech is somewhat… toned down – and so we’re missing out on half the fun! There aren’t any grabastic pieces of amphibian shit on his show. There isn’t even any neck-shitting, no steers or queers either, and certainly no skull-fucking! About the worst thing I’ve heard him say on that show is “Maggot”… I guess some things are the same. He’s still not a bigot, for instance.

Ok, so that’s just a superficial complaint (and a nice excuse to link to some fun sound clips:P) and I happened to catch the back half of his show tonight, and I really enjoyed it. This season, his shows are being broadcast live from the Gulf, and from what I saw, they’re great. Because of his military background, he’s able to develop an instant rapport with the troops, and it shows. There is an effortless sense of mutual respect there that just can’t be faked. Its also nice to see the spotlight on our courageous and honorable fighting men and women. They’re doing a fantastic job over there, so far from home, and I’ll bet they really enjoyed this visit from Gunnery Sergeant Ermey…

At one point, a lucky marine was demonstrating their chemical protection gear and after everything was explained, R. Lee says that maybe we should get that marine out of the gear before he suffocates… “But not before you drop and give me 20!” (again, Ermey is more… respectful… than he used to be). The bundled marine instantly moved to start his assigned pushups – Ermey had to walk over and pat him on the shoulders and tell him he was joking. It was a great moment. HUA!

Apparently, Ermey’s going to be visiting all the military bases in the region (this episode was in Kuwait – I wonder if he ran into L.T. Smash…) so it should make for an interesting series… Check it out, maggot!

Trivial Pursuit

Culture / /

I was playing Trivial Pursuit the other day, and I was again struck by the victimology that always seems to play out during such a game. “You get all the easy questions! Its no fair!” At times, that’s probably true, but over the course of an entire game, its a little less clear who is really getting the short end of the stick. Ignoring for a moment what questions are considered easy (if I answer a question immediately after it was asked, was it an easy question?), this sort of victimology is a difficult thing to avoid. I definitely feel that way sometimes, but I’m beginning to come around. Besides, in the end there’s really nothing you can do about it. Nobody said life would be fair.

Obviously, this doesn’t just affect trivia games either. My first programming class in college was extremely difficult. The professor was a stickler for things like commenting and algorithmic efficiency (something we didn’t even know how to measure yet), but he never told us these things. When we did an assignment, we’d get it back, all marked up to hell. “But it works! It does exactly what you said you wanted it to do!” Obviously, everyone hated this man, myself included. Only two As were given out in his class that semester, and I ended up with a B (and I wasn’t too happy about that). Classes taught by other professors, on the other hand, were much simpler. However, during the course of the next year or so, it became abundantly aware to me that I learned a hell of a lot more than everyone else, so when it came time to buckle down and write an operating system (!) I ended up not having as much trouble as many other students.

It didn’t work that way for everyone in the class. While I hated the professor, I never stopped trying. I ended up learning from my mistakes, while others bitched and moaned about how unfair it was. Ironically, even those in the “easy” classes were complaining about how difficult the course was.

So now its occurring to me that everyone feels like a victim. Take a little trip around the blogosphere and you’ll see lots of protestations about the “liberal media”. Then I head over to 4degreez and hear all the complaints about the “conservative media”. Well, which is it? With respect to the media, everyone is a victim. Why is that?

I see both, all the time. The truth is that there are tons of both liberal and conservative media sources. You just have to know which is which and take them with the appropriate grains of salt. Yes, its frustrating, I know, but playing the victim leads to ruin and it prevents you from honing your arguments, making them stronger and more resistant to criticism.

Don’t take this to mean that we should not be criticising the media. We should be, emphatically. Blogs are great for this in that they are fact-checking everyone and their mother, and will often print retractions of their own mistakes quickly and efficiently (alas, not all blogs are that trustworthy).

And really, the media could be doing a whole lot more to help us than it currently does, especially on the internet. On the internet, there are no compelling spacial boundries, no character limits. There is no reason complete interview transcripts or offical documents can’t be posted along with an article. Hell, its the internet, link to other sources and even criticisms. Let us make up our own mind! Traditional media is awful at this, though I have seen at least some examples of this sort of thing around. The only “problem” with that is that the media could no longer misquote people on a whim or creatively skew statistics, simply because they don’t like someone or something (if I had a dime for every time Wolfowitz was misquoted, I’d be a rich man. I know this because the DoD posts full transcripts of briefings, interviews, and press conferences on their site, much to the dismay of the media, who are now getting caught). There are tons of great ideas, none of which would be all that difficult to implement from a technical standpoint.

The media has lots of work to do, and with the increase of informational transparency in our society, they better get going. Soon. In the mean time, if you’re conservative, look at the liberal media as an opportunity for strengthening your arguments. Don’t bitch and whine about the liberal media and dismiss it out of hand. If your liberal, don’t get pissed off that the media isn’t repeating whatever new contradictory conspiracy theory you’ve concocted and take a page out of the bloggers book. Fact-check their asses!

Chain Smoking Monkeys Write this Blog…

Uncategorized / /

But they had a rough weekend so I gave them the day off. As such, I’m just going to throw a list of interesting links at you. Enjoy:

  • Prewar Intelligence Investigation by Senator Robert Byrd : A passionate plea for more information regarding the intelligence presented to Congress (and the public). Byrd actually makes many good points, points that should be made. Personally, I feel a lot of people have gone over the line with accusations Bush’s “lies” (at points, its debateable whether or not Byrd crossed said line). There are a lot of good questions to be asked about the affair, but they won’t get answered if those who are supposed to be asking them are frothing at the mouth (at, say, the prospect of running Bush and/or Blair out of office). Byrd inadvertantly brings up another point:

    It is in the compelling national interest to examine what we were told about the threat from Iraq.

    Indeed! But, um, Senator Byrd? Shouldn’t you have examined what you were told about the threat from Iraq before you voted on it? That might have been a good idea. If the President did lie, what does that say about how well our Congress is representing us?

  • The View From Above: An Imagery Analysis Tutorial : A brief tutorial on military imagery analysis by a former CIA analyst. Fun! [via Punchstack]
  • William Gibson’s blog: For those that enjoyed the other day’s post about 1984, check out William Gibson’s blog for more of his spiffy writing (I seem to remember him giving it up, but the most recent entries seem, well, recent)…
  • When being chased by CIA trainees, don’t mention Belgium to the waffle house physicist : Our tax dollars are well spent. Heh.
  • Seinfeld: The Boyfriend : This classic Seinfeld episode with Keith Hernandez contains a brilliant parody of Oliver Stone’s JFK (scroll down about halfway), in which Kramer and Newman contend that Hernandez spit on them after a game. Jerry hilariously reproduces the courtroom scene from JFK, demonstrating that there had to be a “second spitter” (interestingly, as the page notes, Wayne Knight plays the same position in both JFK and this episode).

The road to 1984

Arts & Letters / /

The Road to Oceania by William Gibson : When George Orwell had to come up with a name for his classic piece of dystopian literature, he did so by inverting the last two digits of the year of his book’s completion. Thus 1984 was born, but it was not a novel about the future, it was a novel about 1948. As such, while its still a shocking dystopian vision of what could have been, we’ve got other fish to fry.

Elsewhere, driven by the acceleration of computing power and connectivity and the simultaneous development of surveillance systems and tracking technologies, we are approaching a theoretical state of absolute informational transparency, one in which “Orwellian” scrutiny is no longer a strictly hierarchical, top-down activity, but to some extent a democratized one. As individuals steadily lose degrees of privacy, so, too, do corporations and states. Loss of traditional privacies may seem in the short term to be driven by issues of national security, but this may prove in time to have been intrinsic to the nature of ubiquitous information.

I find this to be an interesting perspective, though I’m not sure how close we’d ever get to a “state of absolute informational transparency”.

This is not to say that Orwell failed in any way, but rather that he succeeded. “1984” remains one of the quickest and most succinct routes to the core realities of 1948. If you wish to know an era, study its most lucid nightmares. In the mirrors of our darkest fears, much will be revealed. But don’t mistake those mirrors for road maps to the future, or even to the present.

We’ve missed the train to Oceania, and live today with stranger problems.

Read the whole thing, as they say. Just as a note, you might want to check out the spiffy new edition of 1984 that was recently released with a new forward by some Thomas Pynchon guy. [via Instapundit]

Understanding Vs. Enjoyment

Movies / /

Does greater understanding mean getting less joy out of things? Steven Den Beste wonders how many literature professors are blind to the simple joys of reading, and Matt Howell contends that greater understanding leads to greater appreciation.

Den Beste points to Mark Twain, who laments that he lost something when he gained a mastery of steamboat piloting (and thus a great understanding of the “language of water”):

… the romance and the beauty were all gone from the river. All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat.

Howell disagrees, and points to his studies of theater. To him, a “critical analytical mindset does nothing to sap the joy from the experience of watching a play.”

In part, they are both right, because the examples are very different. Twain learned a trade, and in so doing, he lost something. He saw the river in terms of piloting a steamboat. Howell, on the other hand, learned more about theater so that he could gain a greater appreciation of theater. Twain didn’t learn the language of water to gain a greater appreciation of nature, but, rather, to avoid crashing his steamboat. Obviously their education in their corresponding subject affected them in different ways, and rightly so.

However, while I admit that I agree with Howell that a greater understanding of a subject can lead to a greater appreciation of that subject, I’ve noticed that it is very easy to over-analyze. I’m not familiar with theater, so I’ll need to fall back on film. When taking in a good horror flick, for instance, a critical analysis of the mise en scène can completely ruin the film. When I look at the screen, and I see a skewed camera angle, cool colors giving way to hot colors, and I hear the music shift, I think to myself the director is manipulating the elements of the film to imply dread; something’s going to happen. Its the difference between being told to feel horror and actually feeling horror. To someone who is passively viewing the film, the feeling of apprehension is palpable precisely because they don’t know what the filmmaker is doing to them. If they did, they’d feel manipulated and cheated, and that’s not why you go to see a horror film.

The best films, the ones that affect us the most, are the ones which transport and immerse you in another world, another time… but if you’re busy nitpicking about the lighting or the editing, then you’re still sitting in the theater, and you’re certainly not enjoying the film.

Of course, this isn’t true all of the time. Sometimes a filmmaker will actually want you to think about why a shot was from that angle or why one color or another dominates the screen at various times (and sometimes bad films will do this unintentionally, giving you that feeling of manipulation I discussed earlier). There’s no way to objectively quantify how you should watch a film, but every way has its advantages or disadvantages. Analysis of a film while you’re watching it can be rewarding and fun, but its possible to overdo it, as I think I’ve shown. Its sometimes nice to let the filmmaker’s vision sweep over you and save the analysis for later.

Its similar to the notion that you have to sometimes have to suspend your disbelief while watching a movie. When a film has too many unrealistic elements, you can no longer relate, and you’re no longer immersed in the film’s world. But the occasional fudging of reality is acceptable, as long as it doesn’t remove you from the film’s grip for too long. Sure, its fun to MST3K a movie, but proclaiming He just shot 8 bullets out of a revolver without reloading and other similar complaints is an awful way to watch a movie, just as an over-analysis of a film can significantly blunt the impact of that film. Then again, I guess this is where the difference between film and theater come in. I can watch and rewatch the same exact film, taking care the second time around to figure out why I felt a certain way during a scene, thus enhancing my enjoyment of the film…

Update 6.23.03 – Porphyrogenitus has two posts discussing how the game of Quidditch ruined the first Harry Potter film for him. He refers to the film as losing his goodwill with a few annoying details (such as the way Quidditch was handled), which is a great way of putting one of the things I was trying to get at above…

Dezinformatsiya (The Power of Disinformation)

1 Comment / Politics / /

The Lie That Linked CIA to the Kennedy Assassination by Max Holland : This makes for interesting reading as a follow up to Sunday’s post about conspiracy theories and JFK in particular. It follows the theory from its origins in the infamous Italian newspaper, Paese Sera (a known Soviet propaganda outlet), and Jim Garrison’s own investigation into JFK’s assassination. Interestingly enough, the merits of both the story and the investigation were highly dubious, but they both appeared around the same time, and tended to feed upon each other lending a perceived credibility to both. Garrison’s investigation was drawing massive criticism from the public, but when he leaked Paese Sera‘s story to a local newspaper, his troubles disappeared as fresh accusations of wrongdoing in the CIA spread throughout the world (which only served to blunt the criticism of Garrison’s probe). “The impression left was that Garrison was being put under siege because he dared to tell the truth.”

The CIA, though deeply concerned by these happenings, was more or less compelled to keep their mouth shut during the entire affair. Its debatable whether or not this was a wise thing to do, but, as CIA chief Ray Rocca noted, the “impact of such charges… will not depend principally upon their veracity or credibility but rather upon their timeliness and the extent of press coverage.” By the time the case against Clay Shaw went to trial in January of 1969, the CIA’s apprehension was palpable. In the end, the trial was a bit anti-climactic. The CIA wasn’t even mentioned during the trial.

Garrison’s pursuit of Shaw was now widely regarded as a legal farce and a fraud. The episode had even precipitated a bitter split among the many critics of the Warren Commission report on the assassination, nearly all of whom had flocked to Garrison’s side in 1967. Now many of them considered the Orleans Parish DA to be the Joe McCarthy of their cause. Just as the Wisconsin senator disgraced anti-Communism by making reckless charges that ruined innocent peoples’ lives, they believed that Garrison had irrevocably set back the case against the Warren Report by persecuting an innocent man.

Which is sort of the point I was making on Sunday (Oliver Stone was attempting to convince us that we should not trust the government, but he chose such a flimsy example that he ultimately hurt his cause). You’d think the story would end there, but it didn’t. Garrison never really gave up, and even after some further unsuccessful legal wrangling, actually saw some success:

An abject failure in courts of law, Garrison’s probe achieved a latent triumph in the court of public opinion. The DA’s message became part and parcel of what has been called “the enduring power of the 1960s in the national imagination.”

In 1988, Garrison was finally able to get his memoir published, and in it, he outlined his conspiracy theory, CIA connection and all. It found its way into the hands of Oliver Stone, and the rest is history. The film was very popular and created a public clamor for millions of pages of documents that had been “suppressed” as part of the government’s alleged massive cover-up. In 1992, the President�John F. Kennedy Records Collection Act was passed, releasing a surprising amount of records relating to the assassination. Stone likes to claim that his film is solely responsible for that legislation, but its worth noting that the “coincidental end of the Cold War also played a critical role in the enactment and implementation of the 1992 law.” Stone also likes to claim that the records prove that there was a cover up, but, as Holland concludes, that’s really not the case:

Far from validating the film’s hero, the new documents have finally lifted the lid on the disinformation that was at the core of Jim Garrison’s unrelenting probe. The declassified CIA records document that everything in the Paese Sera story was a lie, and, simultaneously, reveal the genuine nature and duration of Clay Shaw’s innocuous link to the CIA. These same records explain why the CIA never responded appropriately to the disinformation, as it had in Helms’s 1961 Senate testimony and would later do in swift response to such schemes in the 1980s. Finally, the personal files turned over by Garrison’s family underline the profound impact that one newspaper clipping had on a mendacious district attorney adept at manipulating the Zeitgeist of the late 1960s.

The shame of it all is that the Warren Commission Report really isn’t satisfactory, and the overzealous conspiracy theory forwarded by Garrison and Stone was far enough off course to discredit the case against the Warren Report.

Of course you should know all of this is a lie, as the article I’m referencing is coming from the CIA itself, and they are, by default, lying. Right?

Convincing Bullshit

Movies / /

They Are Alive (JFK to Z) by metaphilm : Conspiracy theories are strange beasts. Generally devised by a paranoid person or group, almost all of them beg the question. One favorite conspiracy theory contends that the CIA (along with a group of anti-Castro Cuban exiles and the military-industrial complex) killed JFK to allow the rise of Lyndon Johnson and the U.S. involvement in Vietnam (obviously there are many variations of this particular theory). This theory was captured adroidtly by Oliver Stone’s film JFK.

In many ways, JFK aptly represents the essence of most of the substantial conspiracy texts. They combine an uncritical analysis of their own findings – that, for example, the CIA would use Oswald as an agent, and a highly important one for that matter – with an absolute skepticism of the Warren Commission’s evidence and conclusions.

Stone is a great filmmaker. JFK, at first glance, makes an alarmingly good case against the traditional story as forwarded by the Warren Commission, but when one is familiar with the language of cinema, its hardly convincing. Stone’s use of cinematic language gives JFK the feel of a documentary, with its black and white footage and its reliance on natural lighting, among other staples of documentary filmmaking. Take away these techniques, and the theory is exposed for what it really is: a “counter-myth” to the prevailing orthodoxy (as Stone himself once commented). Norman Mailer referred to it as “more convincing bullshit than the Warren Report’s bullshit.” But its still bullshit, you see?

Does this mean JFK is a bad movie? As much as I disagree with Stone’s convincing bullshit, I must admit, he does a masterful job presenting it. On a strictly technical level, I enjoy it. It is a suspenseful and tautly constructed thriller, but by using what is essentially a fictional story and presenting it as historical fact, Stone ultimately shoots himself in the foot. He wants to get his point across so badly that he relies on convincing bullshit instead of pure facts.

One senses that Stone deliberately pushes his fictive interpretation over the facts. Why? The fictional account is better and more convincing propaganda against a government Stone strongly mistrusts and Americans have trusted too much.

And this is where I begin to disagree with the author. Yes, the fictional account is better and more convincing, but it’s still propaganda. With JFK, Stone is asking the audience to believe his story over the government’s, but upon closer examination his story falls apart. If you want to show how untrustowrthy the American government is, why choose a conspiracy theory that is pretty much known to be false as the vehicle for your argument? Could it be that Stone is simply demonstrating how someone can make a convincing case based on fictional suppositions, thus deminishing the value of other explainations based on the same evidence (after all, his admission that the film is a “counter-myth” seems to imply that this may be the case)? Its a fine line Stone is straddling, and its easy to come down on eather side of the issue. Ultimately, no one knows what really happened on that fateful day, and I don’t think Stone added anything significant to that, other than underscoring our lack of understanding. But damn, its fun to watch, isn’t it?

Strange Days

Culture / /

“You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the Swiss hold the America’s Cup, France is accusing the U. S. of arrogance, and Germany doesn’t want to go to war” – NothingLasts4ever

What a quote, what a world!