Dave | unobtrusive lucidity

Lost in Translation

A couple of years ago, I encountered a middle-school-aged kid who was listening to Sweet Child O’ Mine, a song with arguably one of the best guitar lines of all time. The song is inexplicably beautiful to me, a rough but poignant emotional tribute. I was so impressed that this kid knew this music. After all, we know how I feel about most of the music that you hear on popular stations these days, if you’re ever unfortunate enough to listen to such things. Here was someone, barely a teenager, who appreciated good music, music with poetry.

Then I found out how he knew it. It’s apparently attached to a video game called Guitar Hero. He knew nothing else of it besides that.

Sigh.

Karen and I were talking a couple of days ago about generational changes in references. This was actually part of her master’s thesis, so I’m borrowing from her, here. Phrases used today by fresh college grads, for example, mean completely different things than they would have to me. Similarly, phrases used that carry a contextual meaning to a person of a particular subculture won’t carry that meaning to someone outside of that subculture. And, these sorts of things morph over time.

Take a yellow ribbon, for example. At one point, it was a popular symbol of remembrance for loved ones who were at war. Before being drafted into a memorial of battle (a fate befalling many symbols in our country), however, it was simply known in a song about a prisoner returning home to find he was still loved. In other times, both pre-dating and post-dating that particular song, it’s become a symbol for…well, you can almost insert your cause here. It’s been granted theological significance, military significance, symbolism of popular causes. That yellow ribbon has certainly made it’s rounds in our culture.

The lover of language in me wrestles with this, because I have a knee-jerk reaction against re-contextualizing things. Of course, it takes me about two seconds to realize that this is ridiculous, that everything is re-contexutalized, and that this is how language continues to dynamically meet the needs of those by whom it is spoken and written. The curious thing about these sorts of metamorphoses is that they tend to leave behind their bits of history. The roots of linguistic bits and pieces that slip so naturally from our tongues is sort of a specialized interest, studied seriously by only a niche of academics and occasionally pursued by geeks such as myself. My problem, I guess, is that, just like that kid listening to one of the greatest rock songs of all time and not even recognizing where it came from, we use expressions without understanding their significance and how they came to be.

I think it’s important to embrace the (respectful) evolutions of language and cultural symbols, because they allow us to communicate on a much higher level than we otherwise would. I also think that it’s important to remember the history of how we arrived at where we are, because a good deal of the power in our language is it’s history. Like us, it stands on the shoulders of what came before it, and is nothing without it’s past. Our language is so, so much more than empty words and phrases (even though it’s often carelessly used as such), and keeping in touch with where it came from is how we maintain our stewardship of it’s strength.

Cops Debriefing

The street outside of our apartment complex entrance is a busy one, especially during a weekday morning. Two schools are on that street, among other public facilities, and the speed limit drops accordingly within a block. I learned within our first week of living here that the local police department, seemingly having nothing better to do on any given day or night, has two favorite spots into which they like to tuck their cruisers and wait for someone not paying attention to the speed limit drop to happen by. I’ve seen them in the dark standing to the side and pointing their lasers over their hoods at oncoming cars to check speeds. These guys take this stuff seriously.

This morning, two cars ahead of me, the inevitable happened: the blue lights flared to life, the cruiser emerged from hiding, and someone likely running late for work was made significantly later.

I spin the stories in my head: someone who had the battery die in their alarm clock, who is struggling to make ends meet and has a boss that refuses to understand anything but punctuality and is having a bad day himself, now 30 minutes late instead of 5, terminated on the spot and left with no income, sky-rocketing insurance and an expensive citation, all because they were in a rush to keep their responsibilities.

And, yes, I know that it is never that simple, that driving is a privilege, and that there’s public safety to be taken into account.

When I was in college, my guilty pleasure became watching Cops. My father and I used to watch it, actually, on a many a Saturday night, for years. We found the antics of the individuals being arrested and the crazy situations to be no end of amusing. Karen found my Saturday night Cops-watching habits to be…less than tasteful…when we were first married. Watching the show through her eyes is interesting, because, as the suspects (“innocent until proven guilty in a court of law,” of course) offer their excuses, she hypothesizes ways in which they could, in fact, be true. And, so, my mind wanders to all of the situations in which I’ve found myself in life, and remembered myself thinking that I would have a ridiculous time explaining the situation to someone (like a police officer) were I to have to do so. I was completely innocent, but we’ve all had those…awkward…moments.

There’s something troubling about our sweeping tendency to assume the worst, to disbelieve the awkward explanations, to make up our minds as to guilt, regardless of the legal standing. I’m the worst at not trusting people, but I know that it does harm to not do so.

I’ve had many friends who were police officers in my life, mostly because of my old career. They’ve generally all told me the same thing: It’s difficult to not become jaded because everyone lies to them. Everyone. They never hear the truth the first time. I understand how it would become so easy to distrust everyone with whom you have contact if you had that experience.

And, so, it becomes cyclical. We assume the worst.

And then I read of tragedies such as this.

Trust isn’t easy. It has to be earned, yes, but it also must be given. I don’t want others, be it my family, my friends, or the officer who just stopped me for speeding (because, let’s face it, that’s happened a few times in my life) to assume that I’m going to do something nefarious.

There’s plenty of reasons out there for us to not trust. Those reasons make trusting difficult to do. Nothing important is ever easy. At some level, we really must stop assuming that everyone standing next to us is evil.

Photo Attribution: West Midlands Police under Creative Commons

Trains and Wonder Women

Batgirl Extreme by JD Hancock, used under Creative Commons

Our daughter’s obsession for about the last year has been Thomas and Friends. We allow a very rationed amount of screen time each day, and are quite picky about what constitutes that screen time. Thomas has impressed us, because each story is a morality tale. She’s receiving good lessons along with entertainment.

As a result of this, Karen and I know essentially every single character involved in the Thomas series. We’ve started a collection for our daughter, gifting a train to her on special occasions. At Christmas, we gave her Emily, one of the few “lead” female characters in the series. We like Emily because she’s smart and bold. We want our daughter to see smart and bold female characters.

Sadly, the Emily that we purchased at Christmas was broken when we opened her, and had to be returned. That particular figure is apparently rare, and we hadn’t found a replacement since. Randomly, last weekend, I took our daughter into a store specifically to check the Thomas collection. She always finds several that she wants to take home, to be followed by a discussion of how that can’t happen at the moment due to budget. At first glance, I found nothing. I dug. I persevered. Finally, at the very back of one of the racks…an Emily! We had been waiting for that since Christmas! Budget went out the window, and I snatched it up.

And our daughter has been ecstatic ever since.

She now has all three of the female trains that are available in the line. That’s really cool. It’s sort of sad, though, too, because there are only three main female characters in the entire line. All those characters…three girls.

Until having a daughter was the best chaos that ever happened to me, I appreciated the importance of strong female characters in any story at an artistic level, and I thought that I understood it at a social level. Now, though, trying to see the world through her eyes…I really want her to have strong female role models. It’s taken on a different level of importance to me.

This has driven me to be even more irritated with both DC and Marvel studios for their lack of effort in giving a strong female superhero her own film. It’s not like they don’t have a lot to choose from. To Marvel’s credit, they have given the Black Widow increasing amounts of screen time, and she played an extremely important role in the Avengers, as well as taking the ultimate heroic action in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Joss Whedon, of course, appreciates strong female characters.

The Black Widow, after all, has held excellent readership in her own limited series time and again in print comics. Hopefully, Lucy (assuming the film is what it promises to be) will prove that audiences will respond well to female heroes.

DC has even less excuse, and more of which to be ashamed. For all of their excellent print titles, they have yet to place Wonder Woman on the screen, although she apparently will have a small role in the upcoming Batman/Superman film.

Wonder Woman. A small role.

I really hope that our daughter grows up to love the superhero genre. Perhaps, though, she’ll take after her mom and love the fantasy genre. Whatever genre she loves, I want her to see strong female role models in the books she reads and the movies she watches. She is blessed to have a strong female role model already: her mother.

I can’t wait to see the woman that our daughter grows into.

I really hope that she gets to see and read cool characters along the way.

Photo Attribution: JD Hancock under Creative Commons

Brick by Brick

The trendy thing to do in Southern New Hampshire at the moment is to renovate old mill buildings and re-purpose them for homes and offices. Mill buildings are turned into apartments in the town where Karen and I live, and the largest city in the state has a riverfront of old mill buildings that have become university campuses, sport bars, shops, and offices of various shapes and colors. My day job is in one of these buildings, a cool, creative loft-space that offers a really nice view of the city. Construction is still ongoing in the adjacent building, and my lunch conversation with a colleague this week centered around watching the workers one floor below and one building over. Bricks were being chiseled out and hauled away by the dumpster full, and mention was made of the worth of those bricks in monetary terms.

I think there’s more worth to them than that. Something that you notice quickly if you transplant to New England is the age of the buildings. Things have been around a lot longer up here. That initially brings some headaches if you’re not accustomed to the differences in architecture (getting a bed frame up a flight of the notoriously narrow staircases of many homes here is a challenge of occasionally epic proportions), but it’s a good thing overall. There’s more character here. When I watched those workers haul bricks away by the wheel-barrow load to place onto a front-loader, I thought of the hands that would have initially carried those bricks, and carefully placed them together to form the building in which we stood, so many years later.

Brick by brick.

I grew up with a father who worked in a technological field, but whose love was crafting things from wood. He kept a fully-equipped workshop in a detached building, and escaped to it whenever he could. He carved shapes and built small structures, many with surprising usefulness, others for simple aesthetics, but all with the best craftsmanship of which he was capable. There are other woodworkers out there of much more skill, certainly, but he was quite good himself, and with no formal instruction. My father loved handling the wood. He enjoyed the feel of it. Watching his creative synergy happen with the shapes that he carved was inspiring.

My grandmother created with needle and thread. Quilting is an art that borders on extinction, and she left a legacy behind her that has helped others to know her. My father will leave his creations behind, as well, one day. My mother was a ceramic potter of sorts, and has gifted things to me that she has made. I sincerely hope that the words I’ve penned will be left for our daughter, because that’s something that she will be able to hold onto, something tangible that I created, as my father’s wooden sculptures and my grandmother’s quilts are to me.

As I’ve watched the workers carry away those bricks this week, I think of the history left behind by the workers who originally built the structures. It’s important to do good work, because the work we do is a gift, a legacy, to the culture as a whole. I doubt that the workers who built the building that houses my office originally were all happy about their labor. I also doubt that they could foresee the future of their labor. And, so it is with all of us, because all of us create in some capacity.

Whatever your craft, know that it carries a legacy, that it will be something that you leave behind for others as you practice it. Respect that.

And do good work.

Photo Attribution: Ryan M under Creative Commons

A Review of “Maleficent”

I’m going to be honest: this was just not at all the sort of film that I would have gone to see on my own. Mostly because the genre just isn’t my taste. I had heard many of my friends talking about it, and knew that there was quite some buzz about it. I heard others discussing it, obviously purists, and thought that this must be what others feel like when I review a film from the superhero genre.

I’ll keep up the honesty. I went only because, on a Friday afternoon with an unexpected offer by the grandparents to watch our daughter, Karen announced that she had really been wanting to see it, and asked if I would get tickets. This really is her genre, so I was into going just because she wanted to go. She, after all, sits through many superhero movies with me. Initially, that was my sole motivator.

Continuing honesty: I’m not a fan of Angelina Jolie. Like, at all.

The final injection of honesty? I was absolutely astounded by this film.

You see, Disney did the literary landscape no favors by making fairy tales the stories that we’ve come to know. The tales originally penned by the Brothers Grimm and the like were more akin to horror stories than to “happily ever after” romances, and, honestly, the Sleeping Beauty story that I heard a child was quite…well, yawn-inducing. Maleficent, however, is no fairy tale. This film is a faerie tale, obvious from the first appearance of the protagonist on the screen. Even as a little girl, Maleficent’s appearance is striking, foreboding, her power obvious. Happy endings are not the goal of this film. The realism, rather, is gritty, the parallels to modern events too striking to avoid, not the least of which is the date rape metaphor. No flat characters exist in this story. One cannot neatly categorize them as the good or the bad. The character whom we expect to be the villain is the character with whom we find ourselves empathizing, understanding her emotions and motivations, if not her actions. The character that looks to be the heroic, upstanding and innocent victim of evil is the one who is wretched, twisted, and whom we find deserving of our disgust. This film is violent. This film is real. This film, like life, provides no easy answers, eschewing black and white and letting the audience wrestle through uncertain shades of grey. Perhaps because I’m more than a bit rusty on the tale as I knew it, and certainly on the story as it was originally written, I could see some liberties taken (most notably in the nature of the curse Maleficent casts on Aurora), but was far too busy being taken on the journey of the film to be put off by these. Either it was that beautifully written, or I’m not much a purist in the genre, or both. In either case, all of the pieces of the plot fit together perfectly at the end of my hour and a half in the theatre.

Jolie’s performance is stunning. Her pace never falters, her delivery is never less than perfect. The visual alterations in Maleficent as we walk through the gamut of her emotional experience are subtle enough to nearly miss at times, while jarring in their effect on the viewer’s psyche. This woman, innocent and lovely, becomes terrifying and dark, and the transformation is beautifully accomplished by Jolie’s acting, as well as the direction and design. I haven’t seen a movie put together this well in some time.

So many threads weave their way through this movie, driven by a complex, brilliant, and strong woman at the forefront. For what is perhaps the first time that I can recall, this genre has been taken seriously and placed on the screen unapologetically, wonderfully raw, real, and redemptive. The ending is not contrived, not stereotyped. That prince-rescuing-the-damsel-with-true-love nonsense? No, not here. There is something much, much more beautiful awaiting you at the end of this film.

This isn’t a movie to which you take your children. This is a movie, though, that you must go see. You will not look at the story of your childhood as you once did. You will ask important questions after you do. A terrific story, after all, enriches it’s audience, leaves you better than you went in.

Go see Maleficent. You will be enriched.