What Happened to Litter?

When I was growing up in the sixties, litter on the highways was a topic of national policy. Lady Bird Johnson campaigned against it. Signs on all roads threatened big fines for littering. Yet, shoulders were covered with trash.

Today one will occasionally encounter a "no littering" sign. Occasionally you will see trashy shoulders. But, rarely is litter a subject of public discussion let along political campaigns.

What happened? I don't think the highway maintenance sponsorship programs are responsible. Litter was largely gone before these programs began. If anything, Americans generate more trash while in their cars than in the sixties. When Lady Bird was on the case, McDonald's and KFC had yet to spread across the country. There are orders of magnitude more cars on the roads.

I wonder if air conditioning can account for the change. Americans do not drive with open windows any more, especially on highways. Tossing something carelessly out the window is no longer possible.

Often, technological changes cause changes that cannot be foreseen. Sometimes they are not even seen at the time the changes are taking place, and can only be observed in hindsight.

- J

Notes on "The Cooler"

The Cooler is a movie starring William H. Macy about a man with such bad luck that he is employed in a Las Vegas casino to "cool" the luck of gamblers. He falls in love, his luck changes, and hilarity ensues. Well, hilarity and a good deal of extreme violence.

- J

The fish are still there

I check on the fish in Alameda Creek below the BART tracks now almost every day on my morning walk. I am now convinced they are salmon. They are still there. They have not been as easily seen, the light is poorer in the morning and the water is back to its usual murkiness, but now I know the form to look for and I can clearly make them out. Usually they are swimming in place facing into the current. They have distinctly V-shaped tails.

- J


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TV Friends

In a recent This American Life episode, David Rackoff told a story of a man found to have been dead a year in his lounge chair with the television still on. He said that recent studies have shown that television is capable of having the same emotional and physiological effects as friendship. But, he said, at a minimum a friend should be able to reach over and say, "How are you doing, buddy. You're not looking so good, in fact you are looking a little ..., dead!"

Its true that a lot is missing from the emotional connection that people seem to have with people on television, but it is hard to underestimate its power. Political campaigns these days are built around trivia aspects of appearance or behavior while monstrous defects go unremarked. What goes largely unnoticed is that television news, mainly under the influence of the 24 hour cable news channels, has become more informal and conversational. The way people relate to any medium is by correlation to real world social forms. The transition from Walter Cronkite to Chris Matthews is the transition from a professor in a lecture hall to a guy in a bar. A guy in a bar demonstrates his understanding of the world by inferring broad generalizations from small details that others might not notice: a missing flag in a lapel or quirky turn of phrase. In a bar, a guy who has command of facts and statistics is a know-it-all and must have hidden motivations. A guy who can spin a narrative from whether someone wears a flag in his lapel is a regular guy.

- J

Notes on "Letters from Iwo Jima"

The Clint Eastwood film, Letters from Iwo Jima, is a companion to his earlier film, Flags of our Fathers. This one is about the Battle of Iwo Jima from the Japanese perspective. Like many later Eastwood films, this one centers around violence, but neither romanticizes nor moralizes it. Not to say that it avoids mythologizing. Eastwood is all about the mythic. In this case, it is about the honor system of Japan and the cult of suicide. The narrative makes a distinction between the uses of the honor system to promote authoritarianism and conformity and the truely honorable death.

- J

Salmon or Steelhead?

I walked this afternoon on Alameda Creek. A strong cold wind was blowing from the Northwest, so generally up the creek. Alameda Creek, like many waterways in California, is heavily managed. There are a number of inflatable dams where the creek flows through Niles to divert water into nearby quarry ponds and to thereby recharge the water table. This time of year there is usually a lot of water backed up behind a dam where the creek flows under the BART tracks and only a trickle below the dam. Later the stream below the dam will dry up completely.

Because of, I imagine, the cold upstream wind, the creek was unusually clear this afternoon. As I was admiring this clarity, I began to notice forms moving in the stream. Large forms. Fish, in fact. Quite a number of them , in fact. I counted one congregation to be more than thirty, but most were swimming along in columns of four or five, so all in all there were probably more than a hundred. I was quite astonished. I have seen one or two large fish, floundering in the margins of the creek before, but never this many.

As far as I could tell this was the end of the line for these fish. Since they were mature fish I am assuming they were attempting to swim upstream. There was no way they could cross the dam in its inflated state. I don't know whether they were salmon or steelhead. From my experience, they resembled salmon quite a lot, but I have no point of reference for steelhead. Whatever they were, would that there were more of them.

- J

Notes on "June Bug"

The movie, June Bug, is a very American movie, but had the feel of a French film. It was quiet and static with an ambiguous ending.

This is a city mouse/country mouse story. A sophisticated art dealer from the city is trying to sign a primitivist painter from the deep south. Since this is near her new husband's family home he comes along. The art dealer bumbles along, not understanding her newly acquired family's country ways. Her husband is divided between the two worlds.

The protagonist is clearly the art dealer. Her husband is out of focus for most of the movie. But in the end, it is he that is changed by the experience.

A strange, fastinating, out-of-place, out-of-time piece of filmmaking.

- J

Notes on "Charlie Wilson's War"

The film Charlie Wilson's War is about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the role of Congressman Charlie Wilson in providing funding for the resistance. It stars Tom Hanks, Julie Roberts and Phillip Seymore Hoffman, was written by Aaron Sorkin of West Wing, and directed by Mike Nichols. These are such very competent people and we are so used to seeing their work that we are swept along. It is an entertaining couple of hours. Only afterwards did I stop and realize that there was so little there. This is a political procedural, like a TV cop show or hospital drama. Things happen that appear to have great moral weight but no one changes fundamentally.

The story is based on real world events. Just as in the real world Charlie Wilson had a reputation as a rake, became obsessed with Afghanistan, coerced a reluctant CIA to become involved in the effort to resist the Soviets. Some people have said that the defeat of the Soviet Army there brought down the Soviet Union, though it is of course a bit more complicated than that. But the movie is not very interested in the war in Afghanistan. This is depicted in a couple of montages, the movie is not very interested in the politics, not interested in the refugees. It seems mostly interested in the irony of the assertion that it was a libertine Democrat, and
not the moralistic Reagan that brought the Soviets to their knees.

- J

One Art

I heard Elizabeth Bishop's poem One Art on Fresh Air today. I really liked it. Light and breezy with a punch to the gut (at least for me) at the end. Would that I had it in my back pocket in recent months as my mother was dying from Alzheimer's.

- J

One Art

by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Turtle Blues

Lately, if I get a window seat on an airplane I look for humans when the plane is taking off or landing. I see plenty of cars scutting along. I rarely, if ever, see actual humans, even when the planes are low enough to the ground to make them out. We have become a country of turtles or hermit crabs. We spend most of our time under a shell of some kind.

-- J

A little perspective

Balloon Juice:

If you have a memo from Jeremiah Wright to John Yoo showing how we should become a rogue nation, let me know. If you have pictures of Jeremiah Wright voting against the GI Bill, send it to me. If you have evidence of Jeremiah Wright training junior soldiers on the finer aspects of stacking and torturing naked Iraqi captives, pass them on.

"Until then, I just can’t seem to get all worked up about the crazy scary black preacher that Obama has to 'throw under the bus.'"

The media needs to be talking about the important things, not former preachers and lapel pins.

Notes on "Gulliver's Travels"

Gulliver's Travels: should be required reading for software people. Big Endians, Little Endians, lots of natural law philosophy, and Yahoos! I had forgotten about the chapters on Laputans and Balnibarbians which together catalog everything that can go bad in a software project.

- J

Notes on "Figaro"

The Berkeley Rep. is presenting Figaro, on an adaptation from Theatre de la Jeune Lune of the Beaumarchais play, The Marriage of Figaro, and the Mozart opera reimagined by wrapping it a flashback seen from the perspective of the French Revolution. The play was apparently controversial in its time and some have said it was a precursor to the Revolution. It is an interesting concept and nicely executed. It was rather more opera than drama, though. I imagine if I were more familiar with the original opera I would have been better entertained.

- J

Notes on "Atonement"

The 2007 movie Atonement felt emotionally false to me. Very nice cinematography and competent acting, but to what end?

- J

Notes on "Fellini's 8 1/2"

I remember being enthralled seeing 8½ in the seventies. Seeing it recently, I felt less involved. Some individual scenes are quite memorable: a coming of age memory on the beach where the village outcast dances for the young Fellini and his school mates, a scene taking the water at a health spa, and a scene on an aborted movie set. Unusually for an Italian movie, there is no whorehouse, but there is a fantasy harem sequence. It amounts to about the same thing I suppose.

- J

Notes on "La Vie en Rose"

La Vie en Rose is a biopic about Édith Piaff. It is told as a sequence of montages unrelated in time. Unlike many films that use this technique, there is no wrapping narrative that explains the jumps. This is not a sequence of interconnected memories. Rather, it appears, the filmmaker made a standard biopic in standard narrative order: star as a child has traumatic experience, star gets foot in the door by chance, star struggles to adjust to changing tastes, star has problems with drug abuse, star abandons those who love star, star collapses on stage, star has comeback concert, star dies. I think they realized that they had done this, so decided to randomize the chronology to so that it would not be so apparent.

- J

Notes on "Savages"

I heard from several source that The Savages was a movie about disfunctional siblings caring for an emotionally distant parent with dementia, but funny! I can confirm all but the last clause. It was a well acted movie and emotionally honest, but it was not funny, at least not for me.

- J

Notes on "The Rainbow" by D. H. Lawrence

I have been listening to The Rainbow, by D. H. Lawrence, but I am giving up on it about half way through. I have become impatient with Lawrence's narrative style. Many novels are written from an omniscient perspective. Lawrence writes from a perspective of universal sympathy. He understands, and describes in detail, the inner emotional turmoil of his characters. Pages and pages pass without dialog, direct interaction among characters, or event. The microscopic examination of psyche feels unauthentic to me. It made me feel more remote from the characters, like they are chess pieces being moved on a chess board. Such intimate sympathy does not make me feel more involved in the internal lives as Lawrence may have intended. It makes me feel they are slaves to the author's will and whim.

That being said, The Rainbow has not been without rewards. The prose, particularly when describing the external world, can border on the poetic. The book recounts three generations of the Brangwin family, owners of a small farm near Nottingham. Here is a passage near the start describing the life of on the Brangwin Farm:

But heaven and earth was teeming around them, and how should this cease? They felt the rush of the sap in spring, they knew the wave which cannot halt, but every year throws forward the seed to begetting, and, falling back, leaves the young-born on the earth. They knew the intercourse between heaven and earth, sunshine drawn into the breast and bowels, the rain sucked up in the daytime, nakedness that comes under the wind in autumn, showing the birds' nests no longer worth hiding. Their life and interrelations were such; feeling the pulse and body of the soil, that opened to their furrow for the grain, and became smooth and supple after their ploughing, and clung to their feet with a weight that pulled like desire, lying hard and unresponsive when the crops were to be shorn away. The young corn waved and was silken, and the lustre slid along the limbs of the men who saw it. They took the udder of the cows, the cows yielded milk and pulse against the hands of the men, the pulse of the blood of the teats of the cows beat into the pulse of the hands of the men. They mounted their horses, and held life between the grip of their knees, they harnessed their horses at the wagon, and, with hand on the bridle-rings, drew the heaving of the horses after their will.

Hearing this, I thought I was in for a story bound to the English countryside, with rich and detailed descriptions of farm life, but the author seems to lose interest. We hear comparatively little of the work the do, or the practicalities of life.

The Librivox book is beautifully read by a single reader, Debra Lynn, who has a slightly incongruous, but level and pleasant midwestern accent. She kept me listening long after I would have otherwise stopped.

- J

Notes on "Tragedy: a Tragedy"

In Tragedy: a Tragedy by Will Eno, a new play at the Berkeley Rep, something cataclysmic has happened and we are in the last night. Or maybe not. But, the news team of a local station is on the case. There is an avuncular anchor, a man on the street reporter, a human interest reporter, a political reporter, and a "witness". The content free commentary of these reporters who really do not know anything is pitch perfect and very funny. As the play proceeds, we watch the reporters collapse under the strain of trying to report on a world they believe has turned upside down. Very 9-11.

-- J

Notes on "The Souls of Black Folk" by W. E. B. Du Bois

I thought I was an educated man and understood at least the basic history of race in America, but The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903, was a revelation. There were many points while reading this book where I wondered, "could I have been sleeping in class that day?" The Civil War, of course, was about freeing the slaves. I know about the Civil War. I, after all, watched the Ken Burns miniseries. I should think I would know more about what happened regarding the slaves. I should think I would know that freeing of slaves occurred in the midst of the battlefield, because of course the battlefields were among farms and plantations. I should think that I would know that some Union Generals responded to black men escaping to Union lines by ordering the ir return to their "rightful" owners or by effectively enslaving them themselves. I must have been asleep in school when these facts were discussed.

Du Bois said at the beginning of the last century, "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line." He meant by this more than the white/black issues in the United States, but all the encounters and conflicts among the races throughout the world. This proved prescient, of course. These conflicts continue, in the twenty first century to occupy us. The Souls of Black Folk, except for its title, reads as a very modern book.

- J