Blue Mouse Monkey Blog

Randall Munroe says, “You know, pep rallies weirded me out in high school, and they’ve only gotten creepier in retrospect.”

Still from Alejandro Amenabar's 'Agora'

Finally someone’s made a film about my favorite ancient woman. Hypatia of Alexandria’s story gripped me in my 20s, and I read Charles Kingsley’s historical novel Hypatia: Or, New Foes with an Old Face several times. Romantic and Victorian as it is, the book is chock full of unique characters, and gives you the sweep of Egypt and the Mediterranean at a time of intense cultural upheaval. Philosophical questions abound throughout the book, and it paints a fascinating picture of the influx of the foreign new Christian ways of thinking as they wicked upwards from the poor and downtrodden to influence the upper classes. Christian ideas are contrasted with Pagan Neoplatonism and other schools of thought that Christianity was competing with at the time. Naturally, questions of fate, destiny, faith, identity, and love are on every page, and to his credit (Victorian Brit that he was) Kingsley presents the different schools of thought with remarkable even-handedness. 

Since I read Kingsley’s Hypatia, scholarly biographies of Hypatia have been published, and I haven’t read a single one. I think I want to keep the Kingsley vision of her intact: heady, single-minded, proud, and pure, a mathematician and astronomer who presided over Alexandria’s great library in the waning days of the ancient Pagan world. (And I’m using ‘Pagan’ in the broad academic sense of ‘Not-Christian’)

Alejandro Amenabar’s film, Agora (not the most catchy title in English), just debuted at Cannes, to mixed reviews. It’s being released in the US in December. I hope the bad reviews are bad for reasons that bother those reviewers and not me. Like maybe, too much philosophy and not enough explosions or something.

Portland’s new mayor Sam Adams is an arts advocate. Let’s show him that Portland supports his beleif in the importance of creativity in the modern world.

Image from Sam Adams's website

WHAT: RACC’s State of the Arts address to the Portland City Council

WHEN: Thursday, March 12th at 2:00 pm

WHERE: Council Chambers at City Hall
1221 SW 4th Avenue
Portland, OR 97204

The Creative Advocacy Network, a new non-profit working towards a regional dedicated funding solution for the arts, is working hard to make sure that the Regional Arts and Culture Budget is preserved by Portland City Council and they have sent us this notice and request.

On March 12th at 2:00 RACC will be giving their “State of the Arts” presentation to Portland City Council and describing how last year’s investments in the arts benefited the City. This is the first step in the FY10 budget process. We need to have the Council Chambers full of arts supporters to send a strong message:

The Arts CAN, and must live here.

The Council will be facing major budget issues this spring so our objective is to pack the Council Chamber with arts supporters to show the Commissioners that the arts and cultural community have a strong voice. We all know how many people there are living in Portland that are in the arts and care passionately about the arts, but we need to insure that the Council understands this too. Please come out and show your support.

If you know you will be attending please RSVP to info@theartscan.org

For more information visit www.racc.org/advocacy/local.php

I just saw WALL-E. Several months late, I know, but it is what it is.

Stunningly beautiful: check.
Cute Mac in-joke: check.
Typical Disney ’simple-hearted ragamuffin’ male, ‘beautiful sophisticated’ female romance. (I went straight to Lady and the Tramp): check.
Take-away “liberal” message linking consumerism and despoiling the world: check. 

Wait, uncheck that one.

Did anyone watch the end? Or the credits? The take-away message of WALL-E is that even if we wreck the world and become infantile slobs who live in space and drink liquid cupcakes, it’s okay! We’ll be able to come back! We’ll be able to start over! And civilization will progress (rather quickly) through a few key phases represented via western Art History, and all will be well! 

The take away message of WALL-E is that we will be rescued from our own bad decisions. And technology will do most of the rescuing. Sure, the ship’s captain had to stand up to the autopilot in order to get the humans home to earth, but the captain is as simple-minded as the rest of them. Other than a spark of rebellion (which seems to come from nowhere) and enough brute strength to switch the autopilot’s button to ‘manual’, he does nothing. Compare this to the relationship between Dave and HAL in 2001: A Space Oddessy. In WALL-E, the humans have no smarts, no ingenuity, and little will. The robots (the ‘rogue’ robots, that is) are the ones with those qualities.

In the credits of WALL-E, the obese humans on earth are shown planting crops (in soil of dubious cleanliness) and building structures with the help of the stalwart robots that were designed and built not by them but at some earlier stage of human existence. There is no human capable in the film of designing and building such things: the humans are sheep-like beings, for whom the mere act of standing up is revolutionary. Lucky for them they are surrounded by intelligent, tireless technology that does the heavy lifting.

Literally: the robots make fire, drill wells, till the soil, help lift nets of fish (which come from where?), supply bricks for buildings. And by the end of the credits we see towns, Renaissance domes, and Van Gogh-like flowers and birds (did he ever paint a bird?). Plus fields of some green plant that may be spinach. And somehow these humans who used to live in hoverchairs and watch TV and drink liquid cupcakes are happy to be doing all this. A return to simple pleasures and all that, I guess. A return made easy by robots that do all the work!

So don’t worry about a thing, it will all turn out okay. In the meantime, another cupcake in a cup won’t hurt.

This article by Lev Grossman in Time Magazine (Feb 2 2009) is exciting. It’s always bothered me that publishing industry seems to push writers into colonial and defensive positions, which seems so…last century. On top of that, the industry itself is in distress, laying off staff in large numbers. Grossman looks at how attitudes towards self-publication have changed in the last two years, and paints an interesting picture of Old Publishing and New Publishing. Excerpts from the article below. Read the full article here.

[Publishing] is evolving, and so radically that we may hardly recognize it when it’s done. Literature interprets the world, but it’s also shaped by that world, and we’re living through one of the greatest economic and technological transformations since–well, since the early 18th century. The novel won’t stay the same: it has always been exquisitely sensitive to newness, hence the name. It’s about to renew itself again, into something cheaper, wilder, trashier, more democratic and more deliriously fertile than ever.

[and] People are still reading. According to a National Endowment for the Arts study released on Jan. 12, literary reading by adults has actually increased 3.5% since 2002, the first such increase in 26 years.

[but] shipping physical books back and forth across the country is starting to seem pretty 20th century. Novels are getting restless, shrugging off their expensive papery husks and transmigrating digitally into other forms. Devices like the Sony Reader and Amazon’s Kindle have gained devoted followings. Google has scanned more than 7 million books into its online database; the plan is to scan them all, every single one, within 10 years. Writers podcast their books and post them, chapter by chapter, on blogs. Four of the five best-selling novels in Japan in 2007 belonged to an entirely new literary form called keitai shosetsu: novels written, and read, on cell phones.

For the first time in modern history, novels are becoming detached from dollars. They’re circulating outside the economy that spawned them.

Self-publishing has gone from being the last resort of the desperate and talentless to something more like out-of-town tryouts for theater or the farm system in baseball. It’s the last ripple of the Web 2.0 vibe finally washing up on publishing’s remote shores. After YouTube and Wikipedia, the idea of user-generated content just isn’t that freaky anymore.

…there are cultural sectors that conventional publishing isn’t serving. We can read in the rise of self-publishing not only a technological revolution but also a quiet cultural one–an audience rising up to claim its right to act as a tastemaker too.

…more books, written and read by more people, often for little or no money, circulating in a wild diversity of forms, both physical and electronic, far outside the charmed circle of New York City’s entrenched publishing culture. Old Publishing is stately, quality-controlled and relatively expensive. New Publishing is cheap, promiscuous and unconstrained by paper, money or institutional taste. If Old Publishing is, say, a tidy, well-maintained orchard, New Publishing is a riotous jungle: vast and trackless and chaotic, full of exquisite orchids and undiscovered treasures and a hell of a lot of noxious weeds.

…if that sounds alarming or tragic, go back and sample the righteous zeal with which people despised novels when they first arose. They thought novels were vulgar and immoral. And in a way they were, and that was what was great about them: they shocked and seduced people into new ways of thinking. These books will too.

These executive orders and memos are gathered at my favorite archivist of open, secret and classified documents, Cryptome. Most are short: no more than a page, and well worth the read. My heart is made glad by all of them, but the open government, presidential records, and FOIA ones are particularly exciting. If transparency is truly in place, then a lot of other repairs can follow. ‘If’ being the operative word. I’ll believe it when I see it. In the meantime, this seems like a really good start. And not half bad for three days work.

Assistance for Voluntary Population Planning is back. Presidential memorandum of January 22, 2001 is revoked:
Obama Order on Abortion Foreign Aid January 24, 2009

The start of an Open Government Directive. “My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government…Government should be transparent…Government should be participatory…Government should be collaborative.”
Obama Memo on Open Government  January 23, 2009

Belt-tightening for all: “…as a signal of our shared commitment to restoring the country’s economic vitality and because of the serious economic conditions we are facing…”
Obama Memo on White House Staff Pay Freeze January 23, 2009

Not just closing Gitmo, halting the Military Commissions too:
Obama Order on Gitmo Closure  January 22, 2009

And let’s not forget the guy who isn’t at Gitmo but isn’t in the regular legal system, either:
Obama Memo on Detainee Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri January 23, 2009

Setting up a task force to have a close look at what’s been going on, detentions-wise:
Obama Order on Detention Policy  January 22, 2009

In the meantime, let’s stop being creepy sadists and go back to the rulebook: “All executive directives, orders, and regulations inconsistent with this order, including but not limited to those issued to or by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from September 11, 2001, to January 20, 2009, concerning detention or the interrogation of detained individuals, are revoked to the extent of their inconsistency with this order”:
Obama Order on Lawful Interrogations  January 22, 2009

Lobbyist gift ban. Revolving door ban. Lobbyists entering government ban:
Obama Order on Executive Branch Ethics  January 21, 2009

Executive Order 13233 of November 1, 2001, is revoked. Former and incumbent presidents may claim executive privilege if they fear their secrets are about to be spilled, but it might not do them much good, as the Archivist gets to check in with the AG and others.
Obama Order on Presidential Records   January 21, 2009

FOIA gets its spine back: “In responding to requests under the FOIA, executive branch agencies (agencies) should act promptly and in a spirit of cooperation, recognizing that such agencies are servants of the public”:
Obama Orders FOIA Obedience  January 21, 2009

Bush flies away. AWAY!

Why do some men find the character River on Firefly (played by Summer Glau) so attractive? She’s sick and needs constant care/supervision. She looks like a child.  She’s not (made to appear) particularly pretty. She has little personality apart from the cold semi-autistic state she spends most of her time in, or the occasional crazed out-of-left-field personalities she slips in and out of. And she makes some pretty bad decisions, causing the rest of the crew danger and strife. Sure, she’s super smart and psychic, but this is what you like? Really?

(Disclaimer: I have only seen the TV series, not the movie. Maybe the movie takes the character to a new level?)

 

Arches National Park

From the Salt Lake Tribune

Excepts from the article by Patty Henetz:

He didn’t pour sugar into a bulldozer’s gas tank. He didn’t spike a tree or set a billboard on fire. But wielding only a bidder’s paddle, a University of Utah student just as surely monkey-wrenched a federal oil- and gas-lease sale Friday, ensuring that thousands of acres near two southern Utah national parks won’t be opened to drilling anytime soon.

Tim DeChristopher, 27, faces possible federal charges after winning bids totaling about $1.8 million on more than 10 lease parcels that he admits he has neither the intention nor the money to buy — and he’s not sorry.

“I decided I could be much more effective by an act of civil disobedience.”

Book Cliffs, Utah

…he came to the BLM’s state office in Salt Lake City to join about 200 other activists in a peaceful protest outside the building Friday morning. But then he registered with the BLM as representing himself and went to the auction room.
There, he thought about the times he has marched, fired off letters to his congressmen, signed petitions and supported environmental organizations — all to no avail.

“What the environmental movement has been doing for the past 20 years hasn’t worked,” DeChristopher said.

…The auction had been under way for a couple of hours when energy company representatives became suspicious of a man wearing an old red down parka after he won bids on more than 10 parcels numbered consecutively, all around Arches and Canyonlands…the man, brandishing bidding paddle No. 70 and unknown to the regular buyers, also seemed to be bidding up on parcels, raising prices on leases that others eventually won.

DeChristopher, who acknowledged upping other bids by about $500,000, said he would be willing to go to jail to defend his generation’s prospects in light of global climate disruption and other environmental threats.

Since the Election Day announcement of the lease sale, preservationists, conservationists, archaeologists, business owners, river runners, anglers and hunters have registered objections to the BLM’s plans to allow drilling in some of Utah’s most scenic redrock desert.

Desolation Canyon, Utah

They challenged proposed leases near Arches National Park, the White River, the greater Desolation Canyon region, Labyrinth Canyon, the benches east of Canyonlands National Park, Nine Mile Canyon, the Book Cliffs and the Deep Creek Mountains.

Objections also have come from the National Park Service, members of Congress and John Podesta, the head of President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team, who said the lease sale should be halted or altered to accommodate environmental concerns.

…BLM official Terry Catlin said the agency didn’t want to reopen the bidding on the parcels DeChristopher snagged unless all interested parties were able to compete for the leases. That means the parcels won’t be available again until at least February — after Obama takes office — during the next scheduled auction.

Read the full article