Month: April 2014

This Sunday I am going to spend a ridiculous amount of money to see The Amazing Spiderman 2. My local theater is offering the event in D-Box, a motion-driven 4D experience guaranteed to allow my kids to hoot and holler and enjoy it in that special way that only seems possible for kids under the age of 10. D-Box adds to the already horrific cost of movies these days, but it may be what saves the experience entirely. See, I’m afraid Spiderman 2 is going to suck.

The first story of any televised comic book series is the origin story. We get to learn where a character came from and understand his (or extremely rarely her–and yes I know Wonder Woman may show up in the next Superman flick and yes, yes, yes I am stoked–especially if she is played by Gemma Arterton) roots. Once you know the character it the next logical question is: where do we go from here? The answer is difficult. Most writers and directors get it wrong. Some try to replicate the first episode. Some try to go big. The rare few walk into the situation with an idea of what the sequence (trilogy mostly) looks like. With May 4th looming it is only fair to note that Star Wars got it right with The Empire Strikes Back though Attack of the Clones was an unmitigated disaster of everything but CGI. We saw them get it right with the Dark Knight movies. We did not see that with the Iron Man movies.We definitely did not see that with the original Spiderman trilogy, which leaves me little hope of seeing it now. Instead, I’m bombarded with advertisements showing multiple villains in the mold of the Sinister Six, which leads me to believe that Amazing Spiderman 2 is going big. In this image you see the rigs for Vulture and Doc Octopus, who are not otherwise shown in the previews. What the previews do detail is images of Electro, Rhino, and even the Green Goblin/Hobgoblin/whatever-goblin. You can’t go big and tell the intricate character story. There just isn’t enough screen time to do both. So what happens is the directors build a plot around the origin stories of the added villians, somehow indicating that their fall to evil ways is instigated or dependent on the hero who is forced to defeat them in order to end the movie. It winds up looking stupid and contrived with big effects to hold little ones in their seats, but leave thinking ones feeling dirty.

At least i’ll have rockin seats.

Years ago I heard an interesting theory: We replace every cell in our body over the course of 7 years. I’m a learned skeptic as I’ve learned to challenge a great deal of what people tell me. I look for fact to support claims and the facts I’ve observed and research do not support claims. For example, if people replace cells every 7 years then why do we age at all? In truth some of the effects of aging can be medically diagnosed as mitochondrial dysfunction. Over the years our mitochondria become damaged (through means I don’t understand but to equate to the wear on a tire). This trend could therefore be reversed (or slowed) through the process of mitochondrial biogenesis, or the creation of new (undamaged) mitochondria. I’m not a scientist, so I don’t know precisely how to make that work, but knowing this did trigger a theoretical understanding of 7 year myth. Not all of our cells rejuvenate after a 7 year stretch. Some don’t get right at all, and that is where the problems start.

Cells in different parts of the body have differing rates of rejuvenation. This replacement rate generally varies between 7-10 years. As such the cells of a human body are usually never older than age 10. Still, nobody I know is pulling a Benjamin Button, so something has to be missing. That missing link is in what parts of the body rejuvenate, in what way, and where that programming comes from. To begin, brain cells are constantly depreciating in the same fashion as a CPU. The neurons are not replaced and once lost are lost forever. The brain may be unconsciously responsible for sending out the instructions of cellular reproduction and we all know what happens when you get bad instructions. Likewise other cells, such as heart cells, see their replacement rates slow over time. As we age, those cells cannot replace at the rate they once did.

It isn’t a complete picture of he aging process, but a long-angle snapshot meant to shine some light on why we are all going south. It can also be a piece of the solution. Most of us will have a majority of new cells in 7 years. How nice would it be if we could program those new cells to behave as we did when we were 18?

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Post 1461 will mark year 4. Yep, thats coming.

As the semester slows to that dying man’s crawl I am struck by a sense of impending freedom. It is long chronicled here that I have not been at the top of my teaching game. At this point I am trying to maintain a precarious balance between being a teacher, writer, husband, and dad. As a result I haven’t been anywhere near rockstar status at any of the aforementioned. This goes beyond time management or motivational tactics I’ve sorted through on these pages. This is about burnout plain and simple.

I’m right on the edge of complete burnout. I’ve fought too many battles for too long to maintain a healthy energy level for much longer. In truth I reduced a lot of what I do this semester thinking that would help me get through. It did, and while the desire to do more was tough to resist, doing as much as I did was a great experience and kept me away from the edge. Now I need summer to recharge and make some hard decisions about where to go from here.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Not a whole lot of mention of MH 370 on the CNN page. Perhaps they are returning to a semblance of legitimacy.
2. The previews for Godzilla tell a human story that seems to be reminiscent of the classic Japanese shows. On the one hand I like that we may get a story about the affected individuals, but on the other hand it looks like they are channeling their inner Cloverfield. That isn’t the way to go here.

In yesterday’s post I made light mention of NBA Clippers owner Donald Sterling’s (now extended) racist rant. I wanted to wait until I understood the facts before offering a response. Team Sterling’s response and that of Doc Rivers tells me everything I need to know about the situation.

The tape was originally released by V. Stiviano AKA Vanessa Perez, a mixed-race gold digger who, if we are to believe anyone from team Sterling (which I do in this regard because it makes a lot of sense) released the tape in a revenge move after seeing her relationship with Sterling end. It is clear that she or someone close to her recorded the supposedly private conversation between boyfriend and girlfriend.

Team Sterling cast a weak attempt to cast dispersions on the tape by offering, “We have heard the tape on TMZ. We do not know if it is legitimate or it has been altered.”  Note the legal footwork there: we do not know if it is legitimate. See, this is intended to cast that shadow of a doubt but doesn’t come right out and say ‘hey, this isn’t Sterling on the tape. He didn’t say that crap.’ He apparently did say that crap and those statements appear to reflect the core of his understanding of race and the modern world. As I said yesterday, this is not new. I reflected on the racism of that age group a few days ago when I discussed the Nevada rancher situation. Now I’m waiting to see if the same angry group of disaffected Americans come to the aid of the embattled billionaire.

Here is what I think: Sterling has been a racist for a long time and has used his financial leverage to invest in and create environments where his racism can flower. At one point in the tape he points out that Stiviano is supposed to be a ‘delicate Asian or delicate Latina’ further indicating his world view. As pointed out in this report by The Nation, Sterling was accused of racist practices in his real estate business. He tried to recruit Asians–specifically Koreans–because he felt they wouldn’t complain about the slum conditions and tried to get rid of African-Americans who he saw as lazy people who spent all their time on the stoop lowering his property values. Sterling masks and justifies his racism as merely an understanding of how the world works and an acceptance of how to behave properly in that world. In reality what he is doing it reinforcing a world view that is dated and counterproductive to the ever-shifting ethnography of the modern world.

Still, this is America and we are all entitled to think what we want to think. On the other hand, the market is entitled to act as a result of any individual acting on their thoughts. In other words, we don’t have to support Sterling. Once that starts to happen, the power of capitalism is going to kick in. The NBA is a business, and like any good business the NBA is going to do what it can to remove any and all threats to profit.

Believe what you want, Mr. Sterling, but realize that your beliefs represent one hell of a threat to NBA profit.

A few weeks ago I wrote down this random prompt: All the cars I’ve owned. I saw it tonight and thought, what an interesting conversation to have. So, here it goes.

1. Olds 88: I bought this car off a teenage girl for something like $450. It had one headlight and turned like a fat dinosaur. Still, once it got on the open road that car could flat out move. I still remember doing 95+ down the I-35 with a backseat full of DJ gear trying to make it to a set.
2. Chrysler Cirrus: Eventually the Olds gave out, and I needed to get into something functional. I found this wonderful purple Chrysler Cirrus and christened her ‘Jellybean’. Soon it was the ‘bean racing down I-35 with a backseat full of DJ gear. One day Jelly Bean burst into flames and rolled to a disappointing stop in the middle of the industrial district of Des Moines, Iowa. I managed to walk to restaurant and call someone to cover my DJ gig and someone else to come get me. The ‘bean never ran again.
3. Nissan Maxima: Once I went foreign I knew I was in love. Maxi was my first luxury car and represented everything I looked for in a vehicle. Unfortunately, my mind never accepted the loss of this car. In truth, I probably blacked out whatever happened to it. I’ve since gone back to the Nissan well time and time again.
4. Honda Element: The one thing I remember about this car is the first day I owned it. The seal on that beast was incredible. I’m talking luxury level noise blocking. I couldn’t hear a peep of the outside world–which is why when I saw the police car coming at me from the opposite highway slam on the brakes and switch to my side of the highway I wondered, who the heck is he after. I hadn’t heard the other car that had been chasing me, siren blaring, for quite some time.
5. Nissan Quest: At some point you have to start being a good driver, and start being a dad. No more speeding, because mini-van is here! We bought a mini-van in AZ and I met a guy at the dealership who happened to be the coach of the Flagstaff Hitmen. He invited me to come try out for the team. I did. I played one year for the Hitmen and was interested in returning, but it was too hard on the wife. Its too late now to play anymore. My knees are very much against it.
6. Pontiac Grand Am: Never buy a Pontiac. Within a month of owning it, something in the drivetrain snapped and the car became inoperable. Pontiac sucks rocks.
7. Nissan Altima #1: I should be dead. I’m quite aware that having an Altima is why I am not dead. We were in an accident that ended with the driver of the other car dying. Given my early driving history you may be wondering if it was me who caused this. No. Truthfully, despite speeding through the empty roads of Iowa, I learned to be a more in control defensive driver as a result of moving to the accident capital of the free world. That, and the car saved my family. A car ran a stop sign and thundered on to the highway in front of us. I was able to turn my vehicle just enough to survive the collision.
8. Nissan Altima #2: You know I went and got another one.
9. Scion XB: I love this car. No stories to tell until all the stories of this car have been written. I’ll say this: The Scion has room for days.
10. Nissan Altima #3: Yep, I’m a straight up addict. Or loyalist.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Amidst all the outrage and mock surprise about the Clippers owner’s racist rant tape I feel I need to say something: Stop acting like you’re surprised. We are talking about a league that, like football, essentially operates in the same fashion as the slave trade did–right up to the part about getting paid. Players are poked, prodded, examined, ran through drills, and basically put on display like meat until the auctioneer tells them whose chain to put on–I mean hat. The entire thing is televised like it is a sport in of itself. You don’t see that for leagues that aren’t considered, as Charles Barkley put, ‘black league(s)’. I’ll say more once I know the facts.

   
   The Custom in Washington

   
   The Custom in New York

2. Interesting day of youth soccer. Our clear cut best 4-5 player moved up to the 6-7 league because he wasn’t challenged. We thought the team might struggle as a result. Nope. Up until today only 4 kids had ever scored goals for the team (including our #1 guy). This game 4 kids scored, including my own kid who knocked in 7 on the way to a 10-1 rout. I guess they were laying low and letting the good player do all the work. Now its game time.

Its getting to be about that time I talk football. I’m really excited about it-so much so that I’ve been eyeballing NFL.com daily in hopes that something interesting has happened. Nope. Not yet. Still, there’s been enough fireworks from my two Nw York teams to make me feel like I can fill up a blog post with what I’ve learned about the upcoming season.

Lets start with the Giants and the revamped defensive secondary. The Giants, traditionally not a free agency ball club, reached deep into the free agent pool to pull out a new nickel and a lockdown corner. This, alongside the hopefully healthy return of some of their stronger corners means less points allowed, which takes some of that pressure off of Eli to put up points fast. This means the team can address LB in the draft, hopefully reeling in a CJ Mosley or Khalil Mack. In a perfect world the G-men get two solid LB and a Megatron-sized receiver to boot.

Not much more to say about it tonight. I’m wiped and slow moving…

Bundy finally done done it. From the first day I became aware of the standoff and his grassroots militia, I’ve been waiting for him to pull the race card. In one sense this says more about me than it does about him. I stereotyped Bundy as a relic of early American expansionism who learned his trade on the back of a horse in the mold of a generation of Americans who valued principle over law. For Bundy the principle was–and is–profit and eminent domain. Like I said, he is learned of that era, one which saw the Native Americans torn from their land in order to support the arrival of those who now owned America. He wanted to make a profit and paying for the grazing fees Reagan (important to note who made these fees permanent as his loudest supporters tout Reagan as a demi-God) made permanent.

Bundy’s America is one where hard work is valued and blacks are seen in the vein of the rhetoric that made it possible for slavery to continue until only 148 years ago, which given Buny’s advanced age would mean the time of his great grandfather. Cliven Bundy’s America cannot be led by an African-American man–even a likable (as J.K. Rowling famously penned about the mixed races in terms of magical and non-magical) mudblood such as Obama.

 

That brings us to his comment. Bundy was talking about a time he drove past a housing project and during his comments offered, “I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” Lets stop and consider his use of ‘Negro’ as a modicum of proof of his old-world affiliation. That isn’t sentimentality so much as it is lack of understanding of the modern terminology. It gets worse from there. He goes on to openly wonder if blacks were better off as slaves. This automatically presupposes a sense of superiority. In other words, if blacks were slaves, would that mean his ‘return’ to a position of power as a slave owner? Later he was given opportunity to retract his statement and said this:

“And that’s a question I put before the world: Are they better, or were they better then? I’m not saying I thought they should be slaves, or I wasn’t even saying they was (sic) better off; I’m wondering if they’re better off,” 

Slowly now the opportunistic republican fat cats are crawling off the Bundy bandwagon like the elderly teeming out of the tour bus to get into the casino. They knew they shouldn’t have been there in the first place, but this was a real opportunity to be part of government while seemingly looking tough on government. They hitched on to the Bundymobile because it was an easy feel good story about how ‘Obama’ was taking away a man’s freedom and ability to work–which is the same story they’ve been trotting for the last two elections. The only problem is they hitched on to someone who reflects too much of the far right base in a time where being a centrist, though not safer by a longshot, is more likely to offer you traction with the larger number of voters.

It was a bad move. 325 politicos have figured it out so far. I’m still waiting to see who doubles down on the Bundy bet. Any takers?

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Been looking forward to writing a piece about the Instagram Effect: covetousness in the digital media age once the mood struck me. I was hoping for a legit article vs. 10 minutes of, well, this. Too late. NPR beat me to it and had a great piece on relative depravation that lays the groundwork of what I wanted to say. Now I gotta wait until I have more to say and maybe some pretty infographic.

It breaks my heart to have to pen this blog.

Over the past two semesters I’ve been forced to rethink the skill level of the students I see on a daily basis. At first I thought it was me. Admittedly my teaching has been up and down as of late. Some of the ideas and plans I throw out there fall completely flat or are not supported with enough structure/scaffolding to be effective to the student. Some of that is me, but as I ask around and assess not only what I do but what others do as well, I am learning that it isn’t just me. Students aren’t coming in with basic critical thinking skills and even less creativity than critical thinking. It is as if we are being sent unprogrammed robots and being asked to program them without knowing what to program them for.

There are five stages of composition at the Community College level. Stage 1 focuses on sentence-level understanding and the basics of grammar. Stages two and three move the writer through elementary essay formats and the discovery of the ‘writing voice’. All of these are labeled as developmental English, which is my current field of specialization. Stages four and five are collectively known across academia as First Year Composition. Less known is the fact that FYC originally began at Harvard as a developmental program to address the fact that most students entering Harvard were not prepared for the level of writing instructors expected. This continues to be the case across academia. A student who hasn’t taken research writing (last course in the sequence) is usually not familiar enough with the resources or stylistic demands of academic writing to be successful in upper level courses. Unfortunately, we’ve hit a point where those who are taking that last class in the sequence are not entering the class with the skills necessary to even understand what it will take to pass. This is true of every class in the sequence. In short, students are coming to college extremely unprepared and unmotivated for the challenge of even developmental writing.

The credo of developmental education is ‘meet students where they are at and take them as far as they can go’ but what if where they are at is a place where their expectations are so clouded by disengagement and a lack of understanding that all they think is going to happen is you are going to present them with a formula and praise them for writing what amounts to little more than a mad lib of the sample you gave them? What sort of writers are we building up then? Critical thinking remains a key tenet of the modern age. A recent Jobs report noted that 96% of future jobs will require a high degree of critical thinking, a fact that is bolstered by the recent national switch to a Common Core that praises critical thinking ability and downplays skill and drill. Perhaps thats the reasoning behind my present predicament. Maybe what we are getting is the end of the AIMS (standardized testing largely based on skill and drill) crowd who spent their entire high school career learning how to be over-tested drones and not learning how to think for themselves.

It is a challenge I don’t think I was ready for; a punch that landed flush on my chin. Now it is time to get back up and figure out how to win this fight.

The lead story on CNN reads, “It’s been a month and a half since Flight 370 vanished. Families can now file suit in American courts against U.S. aircraft manufacturer Boeing. They hope legal avenues can bring new information to light.” nearly two months after the disappearance of the flight, two things are now astonishingly clear. First, CNN is being operated by fools. Second, just like the stations here in AZ, CNN is trying to find a way to make this situation about us. The lawsuit story is completely speculative and completely reflective of how the CNN news cycle works. At this point the station is little more than a FOX News with poor awareness of their audience. 

Enough ranting. I meant for these ten minutes to be about the NBA Playoffs. Last year I remembered why I like basketball The excitement of the playoffs dragged me back into the TNT-driven drama of the NBA. This year is more of the same, with parity on full display in some series and vicious beatings on display in others. I’m a big fan of the NBA right now and looking forward to enjoying the next few rounds of mayhem. It doesn’t have the potential financial windfall of March Madness, but it is sure a good time.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Introduced the kids to the 80’s film Cloak and Dagger and they’re loving it. I am typing while watching their charmed expressions. I gotta say, parenting gets better and better each year.
2. I’m getting healthy after a tough week of sickness. I gotta get some serious writing done and then I’m going to devote myself to expanding my writing knowledge and skill while I try to get all the way healthy.

I had an interesting exchange with a student who is still convinced that climax is a completely separate matter from plot. I did a quick and fairly extensive internet search to see if I somehow missed something about the relationship between plot and climax in my years of continuing study. I’ve missed a bunch of stuff, but nothing about climax being a completely separate entity from plot. The climax is a direct result of plots, subplots, and specific interactions between characters.

Climax is one of five key plot points in a story. You start with the exposition, move into the rising action, climax, and then on into the falling action and finally the resolution. This could also be a recipe for sexual intercourse, considering the similarities between the stages. Given that comparison, separating climax from the sequence would make the climax meaningless. There is no context. It is reduced to a forced moment of presumed pleasure with no sense of how we got here or where we go afterwards.

I’m ranting, of course, but the moment truly reflects the modern lack of understanding of story. I don’t truly believe the future of writing is in any real jeopardy I just think that I’m often physically surrounded by an audience of readers who have lower standards than the readers I tend to write for–especially the Shadowrun readers who will yank your beating heart from your chest if you tread on the foundation of Shadowrun. Those readers get the purpose and nuance of climax and why it cannot be separated from plot in any meaningful way.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. An American won the Boston Marathon! I mean an Eritrean… It is truly amazing and wonderful to live in a country where you can become a member of that country and represent that country no matter where you are originally from. There is a certain beauty here which is lost on those who scream angrily about how immigration is destroying America.
2. Wow, still ranting…