Ingmar Bergman

The great Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman died yesterday, as has been widely reported. I'm far from an expert on his works, having only seen a handful of his movies, but those that I have seen have made a significant impact on me and I anticipate watching them and the others that I haven't viewed yet many times in the years ahead.

The only DVD of his that I own is probably his most famous, "The Seventh Seal." I have probably watched that movie seven or eight times and I always find it impressive, thought-provoking and highly entertaining. I also watched his so-called "Trilogy" a few months back - "Through a Glass Darkly," "Winter Light" and "The Silence." These four films offer vivid examples of how cinema can uniquely address the big issues of life in ways that communicate effectively and memorably to a mass audience. Bergman took risks, probed deeply into the human condition, and was not afraid to pose questions that unsettled his contemporaries. Even though film and popular culture have become a lot more explicit, technologically sophisticated and supposedly more cross-culturally informed, I think it's fair to say that most of today's filmmakers have yet to catch up with or surpass Bergman's ability to blend philosophical subtleties, poignant story-telling and sheer craftsmanship when it comes to cinematography, dramatic staging and directing actors to perform so evocatively in their respective roles. Though Bergman is rightly celebrated as an auteur, much of his genius is demonstrated in his excellent taste and wisdom in casting the right actors for the parts (not to mention that the leading women in his films are almost invariably among the most beautiful I've ever seen! Bibi Andersson, Ingrid Thulin, Liv Ullman... wow!) And again, my assessment is based on just a sampling of his long and prodigious career. I have also seen bits of "Persona" but I have yet to get ahold of "Scenes from a Marriage," "Fanny and Alexander," "Autumn Sonata," "The Virgin Spring," and "Cries and Whispers," among the more celebrated titles that I will be hunting down one way or another in the months ahead. Tonight, in tribute to the recently departed, I watched a Spanish-dubbed version of "Wild Strawberries" that I had downloaded awhile back from my favored file-sharing network. (For whatever reason, there seem to be a lot of Spanish-language versions available there.) I had to fast forward through some of the scenes of mostly-talking, but I got the gist of the story, I think. I have not yet been willing to purchase the DVD of that film - it retails for around $40 (a Criterion, of course) and I haven't found it used or deeply discounted anywhere. Maybe it'll have to go on my birthday wishlist!

Douglas Beach

Today was simply a gorgeous, awesome Sunday afternoon, much too nice to spend just sitting around the house. So Julie, Derek, his friend Ben and I jumped in the car and drove out to Lake Michigan, to the artsy little towns of Saugatuck and Douglas. Saugatuck was hosting something called the Venetian Festival, which as far as I could tell, just resulted in a lot of traffic and limited parking the closer one got to the water. We wandered around there for a little bit, then toodled over the bridge to Douglas where there's a beautiful and free public beach that is not nearly as crowded as most of the state parks around here. So that's where we spent the afternoon. After we soaked up enough sun, we went back into Saugatuck for some creamy-but-overpriced ice cream.

Busy Week

On Sunday, I helped load up the instruments, luggage, gear and supplies for a week of band camp. This year's show features music of Carlos Santana ("Everybody's Everything" and "Novus"), Stevie Wonder ("Sir Duke") and Chuck Mangione ("The Land of Make Believe".) I like the program - it's not gimmicky, the music is fun to listen to and not all that simple to perform, so the band is getting a good challenge. The camp went very smoothly - not too many stories for me to tell, and I didn't take more than a few pictures, unlike last year. I was happy to be a part of the process for my son's senior band camp. This week sets our family's "last year of high school" sequence of events in motion.

I came back home on Tuesday because I had a SAMHSA grant-writing meeting to attend in Lansing on Wednesday morning. We're hoping to secure funding for a mental health treatment conference in late 2008 and I'm the main grant writer. When I got back from Lansing, I took care of some other work business and spent the night at home. Then on Thursday morning, I had to lead a Handle With Care training until noon. Right after that was done, I drove down to Berrien Springs again to finish up the band camp. We had our usual ceremonies, including a March-Off competition (Derek finished in the top 5), a massive water balloon fight (I probably filled over 100 balloons myself and we had six other adults helping to load them up as well) and to top it all off, a high-school dance on Thursday night where the kids let loose after a week of hard work. Friday morning we packed everything up and came back north, where the band put on their first performance of the year. Once that was done, my family went out to dinner to welcome Derek back home and also to celebrate my daughter's and my mom's birthdays. Today was spent picking up and fixing up around the home, and now I'm here to update my blog. And that's about it for now. Nothing especially new or deep or profound to relate. But it's been good.

Off to Band Camp

For the last time, I'll be away over the next week, working at my son's high school band camp. Derek will be a senior this fall, so this will be my final trip to Andrews University in Berrien Springs. I may post a mid-week update on this blog since I have to come back to town on Wednesday for work purposes, but for the most part, I'll be pretty quiet on this end as I continue to find ways to enjoy the summer away from my computer!

See ya later!

Monterey Pop

Julie is stuck on the tarmac in Chicago (at least, according to the last report I received from her.) She's been on a buying trip in Atlanta since Monday. I dropped her off at the airport at 5:00 a.m. the morning after we got back from our camping trip up north. She was supposed to be home about two hours ago, but lightning storms delayed her departure from O'Hare, so I'm sitting here waiting for her call that she's landed in Grand Rapids.

Meanwhile, I guess I will share a few reflections on, of all things, the Monterey International Pop Festival. I've been watching the DVDs the past couple days. By pure coincidence, I just saw a nice write up on the Huffington Post on this same topic - this is the fortieth anniversary of that seminal concert event, and I suppose that this fits in comfortably enough with the periodic ruminations I've registered here on pop music of past and present. I really enjoy the films of the old hippie bands and their audience on that sunny weekend in June 1967. I was not quite six years old at the time so the event didn't register at all with me at the time, and it wasn't until fairly recently that I had a chance to really dig into the event itself, though for many years I've known of and appreciated many of the better-known performers who played there - the Who, Jimi Hendrix, the Byrds, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, Simon and Garfunkel and others.

The essential DVD set to watch is the four-disc "complete" edition put out by Criterion a few years back. It basically offers all of the usable footage, according to director D.A. Pennebaker, who admits himself that what he can provide is just a mere sampling of what actually took place. There's also a pretty decent four-CD box set that came out a few years ago that I have in mp3 format (which is now out-of-print and - wow! - sells for $179 used on Amazon.com!), and I also heard about a release that was issued this summer that offers some material that didn't make it into that earlier set and boasts a better sound mix. Plus some of the bands have released their performances as separate recordings. While they have their value, I think that watching the musicians interact with their audience gives the best sense of what was going on that weekend and draws us in much more effectively in the process.

I have seen other concert films and videos, including Woodstock, the Isle of Wight and Gimme Shelter, which covers the Rolling Stones tour that culminated in the tragedy of Altamont. While those documents boast some technical and musical advantages over Monterey Pop, I have to give Monterey the nod for most enjoyable/compelling. The moment captured in that film represents such a significant shift, as the hippie scene is still in its innocent "peace love and flowers" stage and the audience itself has not yet experienced the individual and collective shocks and freak-outs that will lead to innumerable bummers in years to come. I really love the crowd shots of all these young and young-ish folks, men who are just starting to grow out their hair, women who are beginning to loosen up their wardrobes and styles out of the constrictions of the early 60's. Lots of bright and gaudy patterned clothes, expressions of sheer astonishment and rapturous bliss as listeners experience for the first time previously unimaginable possibilities of what music can convey - moving out of the "entertainment" mode and into the "happening" concept where a kind of bond exists between artist and audience member. The purpose no longer being the production of a smooth, snappy or suave image, or simple catchy tunes, but rather, an appeal to intelligence and emotion that had not quite been delivered in that way in pop music before.

I'm glad to see Monterey getting some respect and coverage on the net and elsewhere - it's been quite refreshing and stimulating to me to further explore and familiarize myself with some of the other artists whose reputations haven't endured quite as long as the acts I listed earlier, but who still had a vital role, message and presence at a pivotal moment in pop cultural history.

Vacation Highlights

I better write this down before the memories get buried by more recent stuff...

Our family's recent trip to Leelanau was made possible when Julie's co-worker offered us a spot at the Platte River campground that another family had given up for some reason. This is a tough place to get into, apparently - reservations are made months in advance, on a certain day in March when swarms of people hit the internet and snap up all the available sites, leaving us procrastinating disorganized types to either fend for ourselves or hope for a lucky break like we got this year. The camp is run by the National Park Service and they do a nice job incorporating comfortable facilities into a natural and scenic setting.

Our accommodations have always been pretty simple (cheap) when we go on these camping trips. We've had the same tent and minivan for years and that's what we use to travel - no trailer, no SUV, no RV, just the six of us crammed in, all our stuff taking up every other available bit of floor space in the Caravan and all six of us laying on the floor of the tent at night lined up like sardines in a can. This simplicity has its familiar charms, but also its drawbacks as our children are all pretty much full-sized by now (Derek may have another inch or two to grow, perhaps, but maybe not) and a little more space to stretch out and room to pack things would help to facilitate more frequent and longer trips. But we've made it work up until now and I am not inclined to put a lot more money into it since who knows when we'll be able to coordinate all six of our schedules for another such occasion? Almost certainly not this year, though it would be nice to do something like this again next summer. We'll see...

Anyway, we went up to Michigan's "little pinkie" for a long weekend. Our drive up took us through Traverse City and the famous annual National Cherry Festival, which attracted crowds and traffic we had to get through. The weather was windy and we weren't looking to mix with large groups of people so we passed up a chance to observe in a cherry-pit spitting contest or watch Kellie Pickler in concert.

Dark, ominous clouds awaited us as we moved closer to the Lake Michigan shoreline. They quickly turned into rain of a worrisome intensity and I made half-joking comments about checking into a hotel that night if it kept up. I'm okay getting a little wet on a camping trip but it's not really how I want to settle into what's supposed to be a pleasant weekend away. We stopped briefly at the park's visitor center and when we were done checking that out, the rain had let up and we made our way to the campsite.

So all that set-up went well - the highlight of our first night was a midnight walk to the beach to check out the nighttime sky. Earlier in the evening we listened to a park ranger present a talk on astronomical phenomena, some local Indian legends about the stars and some rules of thumb on how to enhance night vision, read a star chart and identify constellations. That got our appetite up for some stargazing and we were richly rewarded. It's been too long since I got a nice long look at the Milky Way, but the moonless night was perfect for that. Venus was at its maximum brightness for the month, a few shooting stars presented themselves for our viewing pleasure, and it was altogether quite cool. Also pretty chilly so we didn't stay out there quite as long as I would have liked, but we had our "moment" and that was fine.

Friday was the best weather day of the trip - sunny, mild breeze, perfect temperatures, a great day for hiking around the dunes and lakeside forest trails. So we did a fair amount of that. We also did a dune run, a seriously mad dash down a 400-plus foot long, very steep and fairly rocky slope of sand that led right to the edge of Lake Michigan. What an exhilirating rush it was, descending that hill! I felt like a cartoon character with my legs flailing out under me like that and my body at such a weirdly tilted angle relative to the ground. It's about a 15-30 second ride down and a long slow hard climb up. It took me about a half-hour, including one stretch where I got fatigued and light-headed and had to lay flat on the sand for a few minutes just to catch my breath. Kind of disturbing, to be honest, realizing that I'm not in as good shape as I want to be. I also hadn't had much to drink that morning so dehydration may have been a factor. Makes me wonder if I'd be willing to run the dune ever again...

The scenery and overall atmosphere up there is just fantastic. Even though it's a popular area, it doesn't feel over-developed or all that commercialized. I'd say that except for the paved roads and designated walking trails, we're seeing the lake shore, dunes and forests pretty much as nature intended. Besides Lake Michigan, there are quite a few other gorgeous inland lakes nearby, making Leelanau a wonderful outdoor playground for boaters, hikers, skiers, golfers and arty types who inhabit the little towns scattered along the peninsula.

This is where I'll insert one of my picture cubes of various places we visited that day.


The Friday-Saturday overnight was rainy and the next morning was overcast, so we decided against tubing or canoeing down the river. We chose instead to go up to the very end of the peninsula, to the Grand Traverse lighthouse and check out the places between our campground and that terminal point. Along the way we stopped for fudge and ice cream and to just wander around some of the little main streets that for all I know we may never visit again. We found a bookstore in Leland that displayed posters promoting my daughter's book! (The story is set in Traverse City and the publisher and author live up that way, though we did not make any plans to visit them while we were in their neighborhood.) I was pretty excited to see that, even telling some customers in the store that my daughter, standing right there, was the illustrator of the book, and expecting them to be awestruck simply due to being in her very presence. A few smiles of acknowledgment were directed our way, but that was about it for fanfare. I tried looking for the store manager to set up an impromptu book-signing, but Lys wasn't too keen on that idea and I got the signal from her that I needed to chill out with the publicity-seeking. So I contented myself to take a few pictures, and here's one of them.

In the car as we drove away I likened this moment to when the Beatles got off the plane at Shea Stadium, got into their escort vehicles and heard "I Want To Hold Your Hand" on the radio. Except for a few degrees of scale, and different media of course, I think the parallels are quite striking.

Here's another cube of what we saw on Saturday...

We had more rain on the Saturday-Sunday overnight, so we got around to packing fairly soon after we woke up and broke camp a couple hours earlier than necessary. That gave us the chance to have a nice, sumptuous and leisurely breakfast at the Betsie Bay Inn, which had just about the most incredible brunchy buffet line I've had access to in quite a few years. It wasn't cheap but it was a really nice way to draw the family getaway to a close - even now, the memory of their creme brulee french toast puts me in a kind of reverie...

That's about the gist of what I have to say about our trip at this moment. I could go on about how I enjoyed some of the music and books that I read at various points of "down time" but that's not really what the trip was about. It felt good to reconnect with my wife and kids and hike around with them again, enjoying simple things in a beautiful place.

Train-A-Thon

I'm working a very long shift at my job today - it's our first (probably annual) Train-A-Thon, where we are offering a series of in-services to our staff that will run from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. The event is kind of a big hoop-de-do, with door prizes, meals, balloons, free merchandise (pens, water bottles, etc.) Part of the reason we are making such a big deal is that our department is changing its name from "Staff Development" to the "Wedgwood Institute." We're turning more outward in our training efforts, looking to engage more with non-employees, though overseeing employee training will be a bigger part of my job than ever. This topic is more work-related than I typically get for this blog, so I won't get too detailed about the changes, but it's a cool thing, all in all and I'm pleased to be moving things in a new direction, with some new responsibilities coming my way in the weeks/months ahead. But now I have to get going - got some training to give (and receive!)

Empire Bluff

We're back from our camping trip to Michigan's Leelanau Peninsula, got back home yesterday afternoon. Upon my return I proceeded to wade through a lot of email but replied to none of it - I was still "on vacation" and chose to stretch out my time away from the grid for as long as possible.

We had a good trip - the accommodations were very nice at the campground, the environment was beautiful, relaxing, altogether pleasant. Weather could have been better - we tried to sleep through two rainy nights in our tent, got a bit damp both times... but had enough sun during to the day and very mild temperatures (the way we like it) so endured it all just fine. I have a lot of catching up to do at work, two very full days ahead of me so I may not have much time for blogging but here's our latest family picture - featuring a lot of wind-blown hair! - as we stand atop Empire Bluff overlooking the world famous Sleeping Bear Dune (which you can see on the left side of the picture - the Sleeping Bear is just a small dark green clump of trees at the very top of the much larger dune itself.)


More later!

Gone Camping

I have to teach a Behavior Management class at work tomorrow but right after it ends at noon (or earlier if I move through the material with a bit more urgency than usual) I will head home and hopefully soon after that our whole family will be on our way up north. We have a reservation at the Platt River campground on the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, the northeast edge of Lake Michigan.

We'll be hanging out with another family that I don't know (Julie works with them) so we'll see how that goes. I'm happy to be getting out of town for a few days. With our kids getting older and busier, I wonder how many more trips like this we'll be able to arrange... I figure we'll be doing stuff together for years to come, but this might be one of the last for awhile, and maybe the last where we all travel together as members of the same household.

I'll have a lot more to say about the lakeshore and all that after I get back. For now, I'm more preoccupied with citified stuff, like what music will I load into my iPod, what book will I bring along to read, what games and other pastimes should we pack along. Here's what I've come up with:

iPod - I have 522 songs from 1967 (Summer of Love anniversary), another 165 that are just summertime, warm weather songs (playlist highlights will be available upon request) and the following whole albums that I'll have to choose from for more careful listening:

Tori Amos - American Doll Posse
Spiritualized - two "official" bootlegs I dl'd from their website, featuring outtakes and demos from their older albums
The Good, The Bad and The Queen
Justice
Arcade Fire - Neon Bible
Apples in Stereo - New Magnetic Wonder
Can - Tago Mago

Book: Michael Chabon - Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Games: Strat-o-Matic Baseball, Settlers of Cataan, Apples to Apples

OK, I gotta get back to packing!

Live Earth

I've been tuning in off and on through the weekend to the live concert feeds from across the globe that make up the "Live Earth" event/phenomenon. This reminds me so much of all the other socially-conscious megashows that have been put on over the years, though I guess this one ups the ante by featuring performances on all seven continents (I read somewhere that a band of scientists is or has already performed a brief set at a weather lab at the bottom of the world in order to complete the circuit.)

The acts they've gathered are all pretty big-time, mainstream stars, at least, the ones I've seen on TV, which to me has the effect of blanding the thing down a bit, even though I appreciate many of the groups and singers featured. I'd like to see more of an underground/indie/edgy aspect to this thing, and maybe those kinds of acts are performing during the off-peak-media time slots. The effort to cross genres doesn't result in as interesting an outcome as one might have hoped for - I heard Keith Urban (country) and Alicia Keys (R&B) covering the Rolling Stones' (rock) "Gimme Shelter," a song that to me is like a distress signal of a world gone dangerously out-of-whack. I suppose that this message may have been the intention of Urban & Keys (or whoever it was who put together the set list,) but to me at least it seemed like they were performing it more as an inspirational anthem, and all the crowd shots of happy smiling partying concert-goers seemed to undercut the alarmist implications of the lyrics.

Another mash-up that felt kind of odd was pairing Kanye West with the Police to sing "Message in a Bottle." That's another song that logically connects with the Live Earth theme of promoting conservation and green-energy efforts, and the Police (along with guest John Mayer on guitar) chugged out a solid, professional performance, but then Kanye drops in with a rap that didn't really add much more than a few shout-outs to the other guys up on stage and a call for "new leaders for us to follow" - I guess I give him credit for at least having the nerve to try and get some flow going over the MOR light-rock-reggae instrumentation.

Roger Waters performed another inherently subversive tune that's since become a standard - "Another Brick in the Wall" - the rest of Pink Floyd couldn't be convinced to join him, but he had a choir of black schoolkids chanting "we don't need no education, we don't need no thought control - hey! teachers, leave them kids alone!" But how do such sentiments align with the obviously "educational" nature of the whole Live Earth event itself? Do people even listen to or think about the words anymore? :o)

I also observed Madonna seemed kind of winded after her near-gymnastic dance routine on "Hung Up." I don't blame her, I would be huffing and puffing too!

I appreciate the cause they're highlighting and I have abundant respect for the sheer scale and technical audacity of the undertaking, but from what I've heard so far, I don't think I'll be buying the soundtrack CD. :o)

Watching Al Gore doing his publicity shpiel on TV persuades me to think that he really ought not change his mind and run for president at this point. He is a True Believer in this whole "stop global warming" thing, to the point where I can pick up the zealot vibe just listening to him speak for a few minutes. I think that he's found his ideal calling here and he would at this point find the task of governing the USA to be a terrible distraction from the now-worldwide campaign he's orchestrating. At this point in his life, I think he is probably feeling a degree of contentment that he didn't wind up president after all.

Hy Zaret

I just had to blog about this... The song "Unchained Melody" by the Righteous Brothers just came up on my random shuffle, and it occurred to me that the lyricist for this timeless classic, of which 300 different recordings by various artists are known to exist, just passed away recently. Ordinarily I don't do obits on just anyone who departs this life, but I do have to wonder what it would be like to write a song that resonates this strongly not only with the general public but so many performers. The success of this tune is enough to earn my sincere admiration.

So here's the link to the NY Times obituary on Hy Zaret, who went on to have an interesting career writing other types of music, but who put some of the most earnestly pleading romantic thoughts of our times into words.

Raining on the Parade

We're having a grey rainy 4th of July today. Derek (youngest son) is away, hiking with a church group in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and my daughter (Lys) is working. We decided to skip the annual holiday parade today, which is fine with me. I'm actually pretty annoyed with that event, or more precisely, many of my fellow citizens. The street where the parade is going to be held has been marred by the appearance of hundreds of stakes and other markers, set by people who for the past week now have been "reserving" their spots on the curb where they can set up their lawn chairs and watch the big trucks, marching bands, baton twirlers, etc. pass by as they toss out candy to the ravenous juveniles who swarm out into the street to grab the scattered, plastic-wrapped morsels. The audacity and pettiness of so many dozens of people who cannot be content to just show up the morning of to find a little patch of open space to encamp their little families really irritates me and makes me want to have nothing to do with that particular event. Apparently this phenomenon started last year, when a few people got the brilliant idea to claim a little chunk of turf (which is not private property since the strip between the curb and sidewalk is owned by the city) a couple days prior to the parade. As these things do, the idea caught on and now "everybody is doing it" so the scramble to grab prime spots started sometime last week. Now the street (Wilson Avenue) looks like a shambles, with lawn chairs covering large patches of grass that will certainly be yellowed when they are lifted, assorted varieties of string, yellow caution tape, "reserved" signs and other warnings filling a mile long stretch that one must endure if one chooses to approach the local mall from the north. I suppose if this continues into next year, we'll see "No Trespassing" signs and barbed wire over some of the most coveted parcels.

This trend has generated local media coverage though, so I expect the local city council to spring into action sometime this fall, creating new zoning ordinances, usage fees and other regulatory mechanisms that will bring this madness under control.

SiCKO

I just got back from watching the new Michael Moore film and here are my thoughts...

It's pretty good, overall. I didn't find the film as invigorating or fascinating as either "Bowling for Columbine" or "Fahrenheit 9/11" but that's probably due to the fact that health care policy is not something I feel all that passionate about, so a documentary devoted to that topic doesn't swiftly draw me in. I went to see it mainly because I'm a Michael Moore fan (I own all of his available work on DVD - pretty much everything he's released since "Roger & Me" except for the "TV Nation" series which is only available on out-of-print VHS tapes at this time.)

Thinking back on the film now, the emotions that come to mind were:

1) a feeling of dread, even fear, at the prospects of getting seriously ill and losing everything if and when my condition disqualifies me from health insurance. There were some awful scenarios that Moore portrayed of people who have worked hard, lived purposeful lives but wound up broke and humiliated and in many cases unable to get adequate care because the system in this country basically looks for reasons to not treat them if it can be professionally justified.

2) frequent amusement, as Moore uses his ironic, sarcastic wit to make poignant contrasts and wry observations on the differences and similarities between American health care and lifestyles and what our peers in Canada, England and France experience. He also makes his customarily effective use of archival film stock, on-target musical soundtrack choices, and on-location footage. For anyone who's been offended by Moore's in-your-face, guerrilla-with-a-camcorder style where he pounces on unsuspecting executives, flunkies and bureaucrats to confront them with their misdeeds, he has toned that thing down quite a bit - really, there's nothing much like that in the film. In fact, his reputation now is such that I don't think he could ever get away with it anymore. Though one admirer of his invoked Moore's name to get results, as you'll see early in the film, so I suppose the tactic still has its strategic value.

3) lots of empathy and sadness as I watched the plight of many people who are dealing with real suffering and highly uncertain of what will happen to them. Also some people for whom it is too late, the worst case scenarios have already taken place and there's nothing anyone can do about it except consider what could be done to avoid putting others in those terrible circumstances.

One thing I didn't feel coming out of this movie that I especially felt upon watching "F 9/11" was a sense of exhilaration and boldness. When that film came out, of course, Bush had not been re-elected yet and I thought at the time that Moore's portrait of the Bush administration would offer plenty sufficient proof to the American voters that returning that crew of inept, dishonest warmongers would be a terrible mistake. What I wasn't prepared for and didn't expect was that so many people would automatically dismiss Michael Moore as a propagandist, a "bad guy" who distorts, exaggerates and misrepresents things in order to get his point across. I really had no idea that there was already such a dug-in bias against the guy, and even to this day I wonder why so many people have a hard time even choosing to watch one of his films? I do see Moore as a champion of the common person - his films are full of very ordinary, non-glamorous, working class people who generally do the right things according to what they've been taught, but wind up getting screwed badly by the powerful elites in our government, corporate world, the military, the media, whoever. It makes me kind of sad to think that a lot of folks who Moore truly does care about and on whose behalf he is advocating won't give his movies a serious look. Even if you end up rejecting his arguments or find them too slanted (which could even be the case with SiCKO's call for free universal health care for all), his message is thoughtful, relevant and well-crafted enough to merit engagement. And if it's about not wanting to put money in his pocket, I think you can pretty easily download the movie for free if you get onto just about any file-sharing network worth its salt!

2007 1/2

Today marks the beginning of the second half of the year, and even more interestingly (to me, at least), the beginning of the final quarter of this decade. Even though I know that time doesn't really divide up into nice neat manageable chunks as the calendar makers and keepers of this world would like us to believe, I can't help but note these occasions and then think about what, if anything, they signify. My wife and I were out on a walk on this beautiful summer's afternoon just a short while ago and we got to talking about what the current decade would best be remembered for when we and future generations look back on this time. It wasn't a very pleasant anticipation of what would be recalled, from an American point of view. There are the numerous terrorist attacks (9/11, 3/11, 7/7 and Bali being the biggest and most appalling so far, but many others as well), wars (Iraq, Afghanistan), atrocities (AIDS in Africa, Darfur,) natural disasters (the tsunami and Hurricane Katrina,) the emergence of unprecedented levels of secrecy, dissembling, ineptitude and non-accountability in our government (to be fair, I don't think the level of overall corruption hit an all-time high in this administration,) the on-going evaporation of the "middle class" in our socio-economic scheme of things, and a faintly nauseating sense that there's little that can be done even by organized citizens to change things if the vested power interests in our nation are not willing to accommodate popular sentiment (government being pretty much wracked in paralysis or otherwise beholden to elite, big money shareholders.)

Given that dose of solemn and discouraging reminders, I tried to think of what's actually gotten better over the past seven-point-five years, and I struggled to think of anything truly remarkable or celebration-inducing. Broadband internet and wireless connectivity are more affordable and widely available, and on a related note, our cellphones do a lot more cool things than they did at the turn of the millennium. Gotta love those iPods and cheap digital cameras while I'm at it. We can pretty much sum up this whole category by saying information-processing and communications technologies are way improved... but we all expected that.

More people are thinking and talking about the need to do something about climate change, but nothing much has actually happened. It's hard to note much progress on social issues - the whole "national conversation" on various forms of discrimination and bigotry continues but it seems to me that attitudes have more or less hardened into "camps" now and the respective contenders are now hashing things out in various courts and marketplace forums trying to establish slightly modified "norms" that the rest of us will observe and settle into.

I'd like to think that after the Iraq debacle, our society is a bit less gullible and a lot more vigilant about being led into war by future politicians, but we still haven't seen anything happen (other than opinion polls that mainly just track the extent and intensity of our griping) to indicate that people have seriously re-examined their presumptions on the role that military force should have on foreign policy and America's role as a neighbor and leader in the world. So even if my hopes for some kind of redeeming lesson to come from this turn out to be relevant, it doesn't really count as an accomplishment or a positive development at this point.

So I'm inviting anyone, regardless of political convictions or other inherent biases, to please share with me what you regard as "constructive steps forward" for our culture that have taken place in the world since 2000. To me, these have been mainly "bummer" years, culturally speaking, though on a personal level, I've found plenty to enjoy and be thankful for. But my mind's not totally made up yet, so give me something to fondly look back on. Please!

Or, if you want to add to my list of bummers, you can add to that pile too...