Titanic/"Titanic" a Century Later

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Yeah, there's a surfeit of Titanic (the ship)-related business.

Celine Dion aside, it is of course imperative to remember the victims of that tragedy. Media-wise, Downton Abbey executed a wonderful mention of the incident while leaving in the interstices how the agonists were affected.

For me at least, the film had a different impact. I was twelve when it came out, knew the standard narrative, knew disappointedly little about breasts. I was pursuing a girl I thought I was in love with, finding out along the way that I had no idea what love was. Ended up watching this film with her, learning a few things about breasts eventually along the way. (The clit was a separate revelation and a separate story, though a far more important one). It was 1998 at that point, Britney was like 17 and still un-Federlined and this song/film, fuck it, I'll go ahead and say it. Try to be a ladykiller at 13 and not attempt it to Ms. Dion. And will say, regardless of critics who dismiss it with a "schlock" or "treacle" tag, I found this film good. Overdramatic? Okay, yes. Though there have been many good films in the same category. Overdone as a love story? Okay too, but so were Annie Hall and Before Sunset.

Titanic was a good and well-executed film that ages better with each year. Avatar and T2 (among others) aside, Titanic is the signature film upon which James Cameron worked. No one likes it, but facts are facts,

Late night considerations (1/many)

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Late night for sure. It's 4:03 in the central time zone, and of course I'm still awake. I haven't worked a "traditional" (what used to be, at least) 9-8 since the winter of 2009, so the concept of the weekend isn't one with which I really identify. My father enjoys them, my mother as well the three of four weekends during the particular month she has off, but me? The idea of a weekend is as foreign a concept to me as it is to Downton Abbey's Lady Grantham (portrayed immaculately by Maggie Smith) and very well-reviewed by New York Magazine's Amanda Dobbins. If you're not following that particular mag and writer, there's a high likelihood you are over 65 and live in rural Kansas.

I would say the above isn't urbanites making fun of you, but it's urbanites mocking your ass.

That taken care of, just wanted to write how badass this weekend could be. Not only is there QPR-Arsenal in a few hours (my prediction via Twitter? Arsenal 4, QPR 1) but Bulls-OKC in a Finals preview, but additionally the return of Game of Thrones, another Mad Men, and a UU service. I call that a solid weekend.

Creativity (one/many)

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Creativity by its very nature is, for the sort of practical reasons that appeal to the self-appointed arbiters, the well-heeled fundraisers, and the even better-heeled funders, notoriously slippery to define. I would add marks around this were I diligent enough to look up an actual quote: but a paraphrase would go something like "Money calls the shots, tastes the taste, drops the cash." And frankly, fuck that.

Whether or not digitality is ultimately to the benefit of most people in most places is very much under debate, and a debate I am not qualified to weigh into. Yet, as befits what the media complex has dubbed the "creative class," the digital world has become a necessary playground, an entry cost to any pretense of having "influence" (however klout.com defines it today) on others. As an insignificant writer, I do find myself obsessively checking my Twitter timeline on the off chance someone whose opinion I value deeply has mentioned me or followed me. I log into Facebook not to reconnect with former classmates or LOL at a friend's post or new (always ironic) profile pic. It's all in the game, yo. You play it because that's the price of entry in these weird times.

Often, when I'm sitting in a rather uncomfortable desk chair that at least swivels -- and that just for the pleasure of typing "swivel" -- I lose hours and hours to YouTube. I am certainly not alone in this regard. Arsenal and Chicago Bulls aside, I can think of no other time sink than a well-executed YouTube vid that insidiously leads to others and others and hours you didn't know you had. So I fall prey to that a lot, and frankly often what my devilish cold little fingers pull me toward are things like Britain's Got Talent, America's Got Talent, The X Factor, etc. In order to preserve my veneer of deeply-considered and carefully-curated taste, I am bound to say that I don't watch these things on TV.

I've written previously about Susan Boyle and her relevance, and find it quite easy to mock TV talent shows and the like. Simon Cowell, for instance, is an unmitigated ass whose musical taste died somewhere in the back pages of a moth-devoured Billboard from 1985. A good showman? Of course. What strikes me repeatedly -- and not in an elitist way, though I fear it will come across that way regardless -- is the incredible degree of talent in so many arenas folks like mobile phone salesman Paul Potts or unemployed Susan or washed-out bar singer Jamie Archer have. Of course, the shows themselves exist to drive up ratings and ultimately bring greater profits to the parent corporation; the latter of which go to enrich the executives at the expense of the actual creators of the content and the workers who ensure the physical stage's TV-ready perfection. Yet what persists is, importantly, the drive of the contestants. Not all of them are good, of course, but genuine talent is a hard thing to repress. (I tell myself this often while trying to sleep).

One looks at a Jamie Archer or a Danyl Johnson and wonders how great can the human soul become? By what means is genuine talent repressed and what can be done to ensure that brilliance has the chance to become brilliant? With no reference to myself, in case anyone were to imply that, there's so much brilliance that human beings can accomplish outside of the record/publishing/gallery complex, and I hope (I'm undecided about this) that new technology and perhaps even a greater appreciation for "hidden" talent will help usher in an era in which creativity is prized for its own sake. As with everything, we shall see, no?

Unfocused Thoughts

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1) There will be some major changes around here soon, mostly in the arena of me actually posting with some degree of consistency. 

2) I'm a fairly mercurial fellow, as anyone with the patience to pay attention to my rants and ramblings can attest. I won't apologize for the inconsistency as it relates to me as a person, as it tends toward a genuine reflection of where I am at given moment as a person and with what I struggle in a perhaps futile (but always hopeful) struggle to become whom I would like to be. I do, however, sincerely apologize to anyone who follows this site or my twitter account (@destroy_time) and expects consistency; in failing to be consistent, I let down you, my readers, my friends and family, and myself. This is the sort of thing I have in mind to remedy. You, dear (potential) reader, may have read this before; to say "I mean it this time!!!" is well... meaningless. So bear with me; this ship will turn around.

3) The nature of contemporary media seems to be colonized entirely by the marketing machine. 

4) The above statement is entirely intended to inspire debate and I will have a great deal more to say on said topic.

5) And yet (with regard to #3), we in 2012, in the affluent and connected global middle- and upper-middle classes stand confidently and often without a second thought in the midst of the most powerful and least-contained torrent of information in human history. That's pretty much a fact. Never in human history has so much knowledge been available so easily and so cheaply.

6) The immediate above has in no way changed humanity, either for the good or the better. We were, are, will be, and remain animals, physical creatures created perhaps by a deity, perhaps not, but bound to the necessities of food, sleep, sex, parenting, competition, and all the other messy things that constitute the necessary preconditions of our humanity while hemming it in on every side. 

7) This, a leap. What defines "humanity" and what could *possibly* redeem our essential animal nature is the indefinable drive toward creation; creation makes of each human being a potential god, capable not only of surveying a given landscape and passing judgment thereupon, but of reconfiguring that landscape itself in ways that can alter the course of other lives.

8) This is a very good thing.

The X Factor 2009 - Jamie Archer - Auditions 2 (itv.com/xfactor)

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How the hell had I not heard of this guy until now -- I can't stand the Kings of Leon, but this is one of most natural and at-ease stage presenences I've ever seen, not to mention a great voice.

Family

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Fair warning: this post isn't going to have any particular direction, just riffing on something's that's been on my mind of late. I've always been envious of my friends and acquaintances who have had particularly rich family lives, either from a surfeit of cousins (my first girlfriend) or from just general closeness (the girlfriend to which I was closest and many other friends). My family hasn't ever been that close; our nuclear family is pretty tight-knit, but my grandparents and my aunts and uncles spent and spend relatively little time together. I'm down to one grandparent, my father's mother and she's not in the best of health, and at 86, not likely (I hate to say) to see better. As far as uncles go, one passed away this last year, and the other two are each difficult to access in their own way. And for cousins, I have but two: one on each side, with whom I've had but sporadic contact, and certainly never developed a relationship with, despite the fact that with my uncle's son I share a love for the fantasy genre, in fiction, film, and gaming, and with my other uncle's daughter, share a similar age and general perspective. And to the uncles: the one, my father's brother is a quite complicated human being with whom -- in terms of reticence to discuss one's own life -- I perhaps share more even than with my father. The other -- my mother's brother -- I just have little in common aside from a love of the Packers.

Yet as a child, visits with my extended family were rare, and a family reunion occurred exactly once in my life. I have great-aunts and great-uncles whose names I know but have never met. Now I don't lay any blame on any member of the family from this fact, as both of my parents had... fraught relationships with their siblings, and my father -- though I do admire him more than anyone on the face of this doomed planet -- is often an emotionally remote man, making it tough to gauge why exactly his relationship with both his brother and sister is so remote. I imagine there are years of complication to which I have no access and about which I couldn't really ask and he wouldn't tell behind that, all of which is okay. My mother I'm equally unsure about; she speaks in such laudatory tones about her family (which are merited, I must say) yet keeps correspondence to the off-week phone call, the obligatory Christmas letter. I'm not sure what motivates her seeming reticence to develop a more fulfilling relationship with our extended family, and again -- wouldn't feel comfortable asking.

So maybe it's just a generational or a Midwest Protestant sort of thing (guess I'll have to ask Garrison Keillor), but whatever point there was to this was to say that I want to change that. I don't know that I can get my father and his brother to see eye-to-eye, but a trip out to eat, a barbecue or something? Maybe. I guess what I'm really saying is that I've come to the realization that family is really everything, and at the end of the day your kin are the ones who will believe in you and stand behind you when perhaps no one else will. Now many of you will say "No shit, Ben," but it's a revelation for those of us who came neither from a large nor close-knit extended family. Anyway, it's well past the official resolution-making season, but a sincere resolution of mine for 2012 and thereafter is to do whatever I can to celebrate my family and bring them together.

To the Loves I've Had and Lost

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(mostly by my fault)

And to one in particular, with equal measures of regret and understanding:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXLpXu9T7j0&ob=av2e

Maddow Annihilates Rush

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A bit delayed on this, as this was a Friday evening broadcast, and just getting to it now. Yet in this clip, Rachel Maddow (whom I unabashedly admire) completely demolishes Rush's slander of Sandra Fluke, who he demeans for being a sexually active woman, as if that were somehow a crime. He demeans her as a "slut," again, for the mere fact of being sexually active. I'm a progressive, and likely won't agree with Rush on anything, but this goes beyond the political divide; it's unacceptable to call any woman a slut and to demean her for being sexually active. It's ethically reprehensible and represents a stunning and vile (not to mention hypocritical) ad hominem attack on an intelligent and eloquent young woman for the so-called spokesman of the Republican party. And that's true if you're a Massachusetts socialist or an Alabama evangelical conservative: it's just beyond the pale. Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, and Ron Paul -- not to mention John Boehner and Eric Cantor -- distance yourself from Rush. You have nothing to lose but your dignity, if you don't take a stand against Rush.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/ns/msnbc_tv-rachel_maddow_show/#46610339

And my video in support of women and against Rush:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQny3zjdi9Q&feature=youtu.be

Speaking of Uematsu...

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Submitting this for your sonic pleasure.

Stunning

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Also why Nobuo Uematsu is a genius. Said it before and will say it again, so just hit play and drink it in.