kaffy_r | Entries tagged with cultural dissonance

Just Wanted to Say

Hey! I got back on! (Haven't been able to for the past few hours.)

And I felt as if I should congratulate the LJ team on stubbornly resisting the various miserable and unending attacks against it, whether they be DDOS, phishing attempts on members, or what-have-you. Miserable saboteurs are miserable, and flawed but fun LJ is flawed, but fun — and in the right, at least in resisting attempts to shut it down.

Current Mood: relieved
Current Location: The Home Office

The Past Is Another Country
And the remarkable

amberite has meditated on that, and on how that country is always changing - and what that could mean in terms of Steampunk. Go, you, and read it, because I think it's impressively close to spot on.

(I find it interesting that I'm typing these words as I watch an Argentine documentary on the discovery of an almost complete copy, long thought nonexistent, of Fritz Lang's Metropolis.)

Current Mood: impressed
Current Location: the living room
Current Music: Turner Classic Movies

The Past Is Another Country
And the remarkable

Current Mood: impressed
Current Location: the living room
Current Music: Turner Classic Movies

Returning to Earth

Today was an interesting day. It wasn't spent in the limbo of a hospital, nor in the jubilation of Bob's return home, or completely sacked out in post-hospital collapse (that happened Tuesday; I came home from dealing with the car and Bob promptly ordered me to bed, and left a message with my boss saying he didn't trust me to drive. I slept right through until 8 p.m.)

Today, I actually got some work done, including an interview done on the road - note to self: don't ever - ever - write notes while driving again. Even when you don't take your eyes from the road, making your notes look like spirit-writing as a result. And my beloved got the washer put back together.

Let me repeat that. He got the washer put back together. And I washed the first in-house load of laundry of the past three weeks. How awesome is that?

And before I head off to bed (where going to sleep with my head on his chest again is still wonderfully new and wonderfully old) enjoy interesting links, courtesy of the Pew Research Center. This one includes interesting figures on Americans and their use of technology (which my dyspeptic beloved pointed out lags far behind many other nations around the globe), while this one is an absolutely fascinating look at how mobile tech skews demographics skews polls.

Current Mood: geeky
Current Location: going to bed
Current Music: The wind

It's Been Niggling At Me
Ever since the British election, I've been absolutely racking my brain every time I looked at David Cameron. Who the hell did he remind me of, I asked myself, who?

Now I know.

Don't they look as if they came from the same family?

White House Secretary Robert Gibbs ....................aaaaaand........................The Shiny New Prime Minister

*I wonder what they'd think?
**Why yes, I do amuse myself, why do you ask?

Current Mood: amused
Current Location: the living room
Current Music: PBS

Parliamentary Frenzy on the North Side
Yes, I just finished watching (checks watch) four solid hours of BBC coverage of the British national election. I have, finally and incontrovertibly, exposed myself as both an election wonk and an Anglophile. I know. Restrain your expostulations of surprise.

Things that occurred to me whilst watching:

I think all the electoral candidates in every Canadian and American election race should have to stand next to each other, wearing badges and ribbons of indecent size and florid design, while someone stands at a microphone with the results, and gives their full name (family name first, given last), and the amount of votes, and declares one of them the winner, while the others look stoic, blank, 'luuded or, in the case of the Monster Raving Loony, etc. Party, gleefully goofy. I think it would do a great deal to advance a sense of humility on the part of North American politicians.
British pundits and journalists (at least the live media types) are far more sophisticated, witty and - to the people they're interviewing - heel-rockingly rude than I am used to seeing in election coverage. They also get to interview slightly tipsy aging Tory supporters like gazillionaire once-upon-a-time rocker Bill Wyman. (Tory. Christ.) It was all quite impressive and bracing. And I'm saying that seriously.
Those pundits and journalists are also pretty damned sturdy. The same guys (most of whom looked ever-so-slightly professorially frail) just soldiered on, hour after hour - remember, this was at 3 a.m., 4 a.m., 4:30 a.m. and straight on 'til morning their time - with only the occasional stumble or flash of inevitably wittily-expressed irritation, and a just-noticeable growth in some five (a.m.) o'clock shadow. I mean, our television gangs over here have nothing on them.
I have to admit I'd never thought of it as a "hung parliament." In Canada, where I grew up, minority governments were, if not commonplace, definitely not rare. And that's what we called them. A hung parliament sounds ... racy.
And the turnouts; 68 percent; 77 percent; higher in other places - that's nothing to be laughed at. I kept looking at those percentages and saying to myself, when the hell are we going to start getting anywhere near those numbers? Damn.

Current Mood: impressed
Current Location: going to bed
Current Music: Rachel Maddow (What? CNN stopped showing the British coverage.)

Inertial Dampener
     Here's how it worked.
     I developed a headache sometime between 4:30 and 7:30 p.m. I then ate the wrong thing, or not enough of the right thing, and the headache kept going. I decided against going for the big anti-pain guns because ... well, because. I have a bet going with myself.
     So. Where was I? Right. Headache.
     Watched television because that was easier than thinking with the the pain. Realized, of course, that one shouldn't watch television when one is in pain, but the inertia that flowed from a warm cat sitting on my lap, and flicking between "Twister" on one channel (I love that movie) and Rachel Maddow (who I believe should be one of my best friends, but to tell her so would be gauche, I think you'll agree) further slowed my thought processes, so that the option of turning off the screen didn't occur to me.
     The pain leveled up (and would our grandparents even understand such a phrase in their youth? No. Of course not, but then I won't understand the language of my grandchildren if it comes streaming out of the fog of the future into my ears at this moment) but I'd be damned if I was going to haul out the big guns.
    So I thought about writing a quick post before admitting defeat and going to bed. What to write, what to write?
    I let my fingers think for me, and the phrase "inertial dampener" flowed from them as a title. (Actually, my fingers first typed intertial, and I had to decide whether I really wanted to type "interstitial" or "inertial." The final decision was as you see above.
     And then I realized that a) I didn't think that had much to do with my own sense of inertia and b) I didn't rightly remember (or perhaps know in the first place) what an inertial dampener was. So I decided to go to Infoplease and type the phrase into their encyclopedia search.
     Among the items returned to me, courtesy the search results:

Mach's principle;
mass, in physics;
heaves (which is, by the way a name for chronic pulmonary emphysema in horses. I must tell BB.);
aviation medicine;
space medicine (which is even better, one assumes);
the general theory of relativity;
the anti-Vietnam War movement;
and the Ugandan economy.

I love the Internet. Thank you, and goodnight. And I'm sorry I didn't get to the editing, but really, look at this. I mean, look at it. I'm not worth a toss tonight. Really.

Current Mood: exanimate
Current Location: going to bed
Current Music: Nothing. Nope. Not a thing.

[Error: unknown template qotd]
Oh. Well. That's easy. The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension. Case closed.

There's B. Banzai, after all. And Reno. And John Parker. And the Jet Car. And Penny Priddy. And the oscillation overthruster. And Professor Emilio Lizardo/Lord John Whorfin, the divergent magnificence of both brought to me by John Lithgow in what may arguably have been his finest role(s). You doubt it? "Laugh while you can, Monkey Boy."

Of course, B. Banzai has all the best lines, partly because they're great pointers for life. "Wherever you go, there you are." "Don't be mean."

Also, B. Banzai and the Hong Kong Cavaliers? They dance just as good as they walk. And they walk with style. Also, loads of narrow belts and ties. And syncopated music. And Perfect Tommy. And ... well, isn't Perfect Tommy enough? (Even though I much prefer Rawhide, and in my personal world he never did run into that particular Red Lectroid, and he's the reason I love Clancy Brown, not the stupid Highlander movie.) And the whole thing's the most brilliant pastiche and paean to Doc Savage that I've yet seen. It's a pity the other hour or so never saw daylight.

And you must read the book by Earl Mac Rauch. Really. It's of inestimable value for all fans of B. Banzai, and makes the movie even more wonderful.

Oh yeah; the rest of the question.

The essential ingredients for a cult classic are (she said, answering it like it was an essay question on a Grade Eleven History final): any suitable combination of off-kilter and generally vaguely scientifictional - or at least, in these degenerate latter days, somewhat niche pop-cultural plot points; attractive character aspects that can either be laughed at, yearned after, or both; one-liners (like whoah!!!); musical themes, any six bars of which, when heard on a radio or over a store sound system, will immediately throw one back into the theatrical experience; and appreciation of the absurd that talented but (possibly) over- or under-medicated writers can mix well and hand over to (possibly) yet-to-be-discovered or shouldn't-be-discovered directors and (definitely) under-appreciated, yet-to-be-discovered. or never-nope-won't-get-discovered actors.

There. I say these things three times, and they are true.

Current Mood: dorky
Current Location: living room
Current Music: the furnace

Guerrilla Chadors
The protesters in Iran continue to amaze me with their Awesome, for several reasons.

Current Mood: hopeful
Current Location: the dining room

Welcome To The Working Week!!!

Yay! I may be able to post using something other than a phone! The local library has wireless, and I'll be able to get some time and catch up with the 20th century.

In the meantime, I'm in a much better headspace about the trip- probably a function of being at my Mom's place, and being able to hang up clothes, and stop living out of a suitcase.

More to come, later, I hope.

Current Mood: excited
Current Location: My Mom's Place.

This Week in WTF

So, on Tuesday the California Supreme Court upheld - narrowly, the analysts assure us - Proposition 8.

I'm not a lawyer, so I won't say too much about the decision itself. It may indeed be the case that the CaliSupremes can give the legal equivalent of a disingenuous shrug saying, "Hey, it's that wacky California constitution. What can you do?" and follow it with the sop of saying, "But you 18,000 couples? Good for you - you won the It's Not Retroactive Lottery!"

If that's the case, I hope, at the very least, that this will force people in that state to turn a magnifying glass to the entire Prop model, and give serious thought to just how broken it may be.

When it comes to non-legalese, however, I know where I stand. This. Stinks. On. Ice.

You can find most of my thoughts here, but one other thing occurred to me this week.

( And it's here, under the cut because it's long. )

Current Mood: infuriated
Current Location: going to bed
Current Music: Bruce Cockburn "Love Song"

Current Mood: infuriated
Current Location: going to bed
Current Music: Bruce Cockburn "Love Song"

This Had Better Be Good.
     Failing that, I had better be patient. Or perhaps we can have both "good" and "patient" in the same place - good literature and a patient reader..
     I hasten to explain myself by informing you, my friends, of a precipitous and most unsensible purchase which I made lately of a local bookseller. I've picked up a rather hefty (but exceedingly well appointed, I again hasten to inform you) volume, entitled "Jane Austen: The Complete Novels."
   Just why have I done this thing, you ask? Because in my more than five decades of life I have never - no, not once - read an Austen novel. Not one. Not one chapter of one, nor one paragraph of one chapter, nor even the slightest, slenderest, most trifling of sentences in one paragraph.
   I have, however, watched a couple of BBC Austen adaptations, snickered my way through Lost in Austen, (ITV, right?) and decided that I should take a running jump at the lot of 'em.
   Because if I am anything, it is precipitous. I am, it seems, more of a hasty Marianne than a level-headed Elinor. The entire collection of novels in one shopping bag. Foolish. Simply foolish - particularly when I remember that I cut my reading eye-teeth on fairytales, Sturgeon and Edgar Rice Burroughs. No, I don't read him now. But my literary palette still seems to overflow with the very bright colors. Purple amongst them.
   I may retreat to my bedroom now, and read a chapter or two of something Austenish.

Current Mood: amused
Current Location: living room
Current Music: nada

Current Mood: amused
Current Location: living room
Current Music: nada

Urge. To. Kill.
Reason #1,436,085 I am glad I do not have a gun or frequent flier miles. It's also reason #9,572,009 I am ... diffident ... about religiously-based gender roles. The laff riot really gets rolling around paras 7 and 8.

Current Mood: enraged
Current Location: dining room
Current Music: blood beating in my brain

Current Mood: enraged
Current Location: dining room
Current Music: blood beating in my brain

Anime, it is Strange.
And sometimes extremely brilliant. Creepy-impressive brilliant. Best Beloved and I are rewatching Serial Experiment Lain, which we first watched, in ragged and erratic fashion, on G4 TV. Back when there was a G4 TV. It's only twelve episodes long, which is a blessing, because a) it's so intense in style, my head might implode if it lasted longer; and b) it's so close to impentetrable in the way it explores its themes - and it hides those themes in and amidst the clutter of its silences and its light and dark patterns - that my head might rebuild itself, then implode again. As it is, I can only watch two episodes at a time - when I watch Bleach, I can suck back four or five episodes a night. (Mmmmm, Bleach. I love Bleach. But I digress ....)

Current Mood: impressed
Current Location: living room
Current Music: computer fan

Current Mood: impressed
Current Location: living room
Current Music: computer fan

Science Is My Friend. Science Likes Me. What's Your Problem?

( Rant, ranty-rant-rant )

Current Mood: frustrated
Current Location: dining room
Current Music: nada

Science Is My Friend. Science Likes Me. What's Your Problem?

( Rant, ranty-rant-rant )

Current Mood: frustrated
Current Location: dining room
Current Music: nada

Beware the Holiday Sentimentalist, For She is A Grumpy Sentimentalist.

This has been percolating in my head since December 18th, when I read Wendell Jamieson's New York Times opinion piece on "It's a Wonderful Life." You might want to read it before you read further here.

I didn't know from Frank Capra's initially under-appreciated masterpiece before I moved to Chicago and met my Best Beloved. He introduced me to it, among the many reasons that his hat brim sparkles with supernovae.

I'm not even going to attempt to delineate the many reasons, or the ways in which I find this movie personally, critically, culturally and spiritually magnificent. Simply put, the movie is now extraordinarily important to me.

Now, if you've read this far, and read Jamieson's article, you can be pardoned for thinking to yourself, "Aha! She's going to inveigh at length about his snarky and oh-so-fashionably revisionist interpretation of the movie.

She's leaping to Capra's defense, and taking upon herself the mantle of neo-traditionalist lately abandoned by Christopher Buckley, to drip holiday-punch venom on the blasphemer."

Nope. No sir. Not in the slightest.

Well, perhaps in the slightest, because I am nothing if not marginally honest. When I first read through the column, I wanted to tear my hair, or his eyes, out.

You see, in this year of our lord 2008, I am tired unto death of cynics, or would-be cynics, or young snarks, or what-have-you's, telling me that not only has the emperor no clothes, but that he sold them to finance the meth habit of his pregnant junior high school-aged afternoon delight. It's a bone-deep weariness, because it's had a long time to seep into my bones. It's not merely the wizened and hard-eyed opening decade of the 21st century, nor the staggering and slightly panicky buffoonery of the 20th century's final decade.

Quite honestly, what Jamieson said initially threw me back to the early 1980s. I was forcibly reminded of David Stockman (look him up, youngsters) and the rising of his smooth-haired ilk in the slouching dawn of the Reagan era - you know, the type of grey-suited prat who'd comment in interviews about the economy, or pieces in the National Review, that Bob Cratchit was actually well-paid for those days, and that he was the architect of his own hard times for allowing his wife to have that many children. That sort of dribbly-nosed swot, secure in the mistaken knowledge that all before him is dross, unless he himself pays for it.

Of course, in addition to being marginally honest, I am enthusiastically careless during first readings. I went back later and read Jamieson's words a second time. And I realized that he was, most probably, nearly as in love with the movie as I am. His last sentence was what I'd missed, along with what appeared, on second reading, to be ample evidence throughout the rest of the column that he was simply protesting too much.

By the time I read him through a second time, I had reason to thank him. Because, frankly, his observations were nothing new to me. Nor were they, or at least softer-hued versions of them, anything that I hadn't, heretically, thought myself.

After I read him, though, I started thinking about what George Bailey did with the rage he had, and whether its reality negated anything else in the story. No, it didn't, I finally realized. It made the story that much more real.

I had a whole bunch of thoughts like that slowly show up in my head after I read Jamieson. And I know there's an essay in there, being nurtured by those thoughts, and I may even write it someday, when I'm more intellectually disciplined that I am now.

What grew up first, however, was an exploration of what might have happened in Bedford Falls after we left.

No, not a story. I'm not that stupid. Just three vignettes.

*******************************

( Read 'em or don't. )

Merry Christmas, everybody. Happy New Year.

Current Mood: grateful
Current Location: Home
Current Music: inside my head

Anime - Surreal High Theater of Two Dimensions in Three,
or Art Form from Planet Sideways?
Discuss.

     Because there are times I just sit and ask nanda hell, you know?
    Believe me, I adore a lot of anime. Just ask folks around me. I have for years. I love a lot of Japanese cinema, both high and low, and Japanese art, too, but there's a special place in my heart for painted moving pictures from the mysterious and often-weird-to-my-stolidly-British-Canadian-cum-American-Midwestern eyes.
     I was delighted a couple of years ago when I talked one of my editors into letting me do a package of stories on anime (and manga, yes, I know manga started first, and I know its historical provenance, and I like reading Bleach almost as much as I like watching Ichigo and Inoue and Chad and Ishida kick massive butt in episodes 1 through 189 - uh, where was I?)
    Right. Anime. Quite simply, I love it.
    I love the diversity of artistic styles, I love the colors. I love the music (BB got all the Bleach opening and closing songs yesterday! W00t! Happy People!)
     I love all the iterations of the many near-archetypical and insanely stylized story lines, the equally archetypical and insanely stylized characters. I love mecha. I love Teenage Heroes. I love feudal Japan. I love impossible physics that allow gorgeously choreographed fights and the sublime beauty of strange imagery, whether it's wind, or birds, oceans, mountains, cherry blossoms, and moonlight.
     I love the trainwreck mashups of intense and surprisingly adult emotional stories, blood-drenched violence, bathroom humor, fanservice, and -- oh, everything. Flying battleships and heroes dying on crosses wound about with roses ... Buster Keaton as Lear on crystal meth, with Bluebottle, Jesus Christ, Faust and the Katzenjammer kids trying to find Sophia and Justice and freedom from the bomb in all the places the universe offers as stages.
    (And don't think there aren't women on stage. Don't mess with anime women: not the Babes, not the Madonnas, not the Assassins, not the Mothers, nor the Sisters, nor the Lovers, nor the Scientists, nor the Cyborg Cops, nor the Queens. Or the Insurance Adjusters. Don't ever mess with the Insurance Adjuster Women.)
    But sometimes ... sometimes, when I'm watching warring high schools with legions of toxically lethal 14-year-old warriors, with no adults in sight, with freshmen who turn into dragons when their glasses break, and casual talk of reincarnated war chiefs eating dogs in the basement ....
   Sometimes you just have to say WTF, y'all. You know?

*And, no, Miyazaki's stuff is not anime, not as such. It's brilliant, but it's not what's croggling me here. Just so you know.

Current Mood: confused
Current Location: Livingroom
Current Music: Nat King Cole Trio, "Straighten Up and Fly Right"

Anime - Surreal High Theater of Two Dimensions in Three,
or Art Form from Planet Sideways?
Discuss.

Current Mood: confused
Current Location: Livingroom
Current Music: Nat King Cole Trio, "Straighten Up and Fly Right"

Frakkin' Interweb learning curve...

May I just say, as an old lady, that learning the ins and outs of LJ communication is making me crazy? I mean, I'm using the frakkin' manual, aka reading the FAQ, but things that seem to me as if they should be self-evident, or at least should be self-evident questions to ask and get answers for, aren't. *Grump*

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kaffy_r

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Grasping at Grace (and Growth)

Transformation is Inescapable

Entries tagged with cultural dissonance

Dept. of Hurrah for LiveJournal

Dept. of Perspicacity

Dept. of Perspicacity

Dept. of getting back to normal

Dept. of snrt

Pawl-tics

Oy

Writer's Block: Killer tomatoes

Freedom, Pending

Canada

aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!

aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!

Where the hell is Mansfield Park?

Where the hell is Mansfield Park?

aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!

aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!

Cultural adventures, neh?

Cultural adventures, neh?

aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!

aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!

True Stories

Cultural adventures, neh?

Cultural adventures, neh?

good times, good times

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July 2025

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