MTAC

From MTAC – ConTrek

A while back I tagged along with Stephen, Suzie, Alan and Brittney to MTAC to help promote Con Trek

From MTAC – ConTrek

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Gone in 60 Seconds

It’s funny how old movies can be interesting on so many different levels. On the most basic level. Is it fun, sad, exciting, basically is it worth your time watching it, that’s all that really matters. The next level has more to do with how good the movie could have been. Is the story there, is the acting good, is the direction and cinematography competent. None of these things are necessarily required but the better they are in most cases the better the movie is. If they could have been improved 99 times out of 100 the movie would have been a better movie. I find myself thinking about this stuff watching the original Gone in 60 Seconds. The direction and cinematography are decent enough considering the conditions this movie was made under. The opening scene was iconic enough for Tarantino to homage it in one of the Kill Bill movies, I think it was the second one. The acting is not bad except for when then actors are acting if that makes any sense. The story is crap, but the forty minute car chase that is the heart of the movie is an outstanding feat of narrative. Back to the point this is a very enjoyable movie really marred only by the fact that the protagonists are thieves. I don’t care if you only steal cars that are insured car thieves should be strung up by their balls. I could write a big long screed about how great the car chases are in the movie, aside from some frivolous gags that seem to have only been included to up the carnage level, but that’s not what fascinated my watching the movie tonight. The next level, maybe not the next but another level. The time capsule level. Now everybody knows what a time capsule is, but think about what a time capsule really is for a moment. A time capsule is a collection of items that people want the people in the future to remember them for, not particularly what is important or truly representative of the time being recorded. The hair, the dialog, the cars, this movie is a great time capsule movie. There are some scenes that look like everybody walked walked out of a magazine ad. Did anybody really walk around dressed like this? Well that’s the interesting part. There are enough crowd scenes in this movie, enough extras that you can actually see that nobody did dress like that. Another big kick I got out of the movie this time is I’ve actually been on several of the roads that are covered in the car chase. It was amazing seeing these thirty five year old views and comparing them to my memories from a month ago. Long story short I think I enjoyed this movie more tonight than I ever have before.

Misc. Favorites

Here’s just a few favorites that I can’t resist posting out of order and context before I wrap up posting for the day

From Con Trek at Metropolis

From Birthday

From Los Angeles

From Granville 2009

San Francisco

From San Francisco

From San Francisco

I spent a whole week in San Francisco and this was the best I can do. I thin I was a little uncomfortable snapping pics with so many strangers around. It doesn’t bother me to annoy the hell out of my friends and family taking pictures, just ask them. But something makes me reticent when it’s total strangers walking around in your shots.

Coffee Machinee

From D40 favs

Sometimes I find the most boring things interesting. Seems like everyone else thinks this is a silly photo, but for some reason I like it. Maybe just because it is so silly.

Indy Regional

From Indianapolis Regional

From D40 favs

Did I mention I went to Indy in February? Here are a couple of pics from the Hyatt downtown.

A Cheap Japanese Bass Found in My Office

From D40 favs

In Feburary I bought a Nikon D40. One of the best purchases I have ever made. It actually cost less than my beloved Canon Powershot which has since gone on to the great gadget junkyard in the sky. This is maybe the third photo I took with it. I love this camera.

Where the Hell have I been?

Well I’ve been to San Francisco, LA twice, Memphis, Louisville, Metropolis. It’s been a busy winter and spring. I’ll be going to Gulf Shores, back to Louisville at least once, and hitting Lexington before the summer is over then in the fall I’ll be going back to LA for a couple of days. When I spell it out like that I realize I’m one lucky SOB. About half of this travel was for work and half was tagging along for shooting ConTrek episodes. Along the way I’ve taken a ton of pictures, over six thousand. Of which about 60 are worth sharing. What’s that a .1% average? I’ve read a few books and seen a few movies of course. Hopefully over the next couple of weeks I’ll fill in some of the blanks and get back into the habit of posting here.

The Road Ahead

I don’t like the direction our country is taking. I see us heading down the path towards a type of soft socialism. It seems to me that society is ready to let the government take care of them; they seem to almost welcome it. I would be against it even if I thought it could work but to me that’s the great irony of it. I don’t think it will or can. It’s just going to lead to a lot of misery before the country comes to its senses and we try dig ourselves out of the hole we dug.

You know the old saying that you don’t have a heart if your not a liberal when your young and you don’t have a brain if you not a conservative when your old? Well actually it can’t be that old of a saying because it’s using the modern definition of liberal and conservative. I must have been a heartless youth because I’ve never been a liberal, in the modern sense at least. I have gotten more conservative over the years though, but always with a strain of libertarianism. At first I was drawn to libertarianism because of the ideology of it. I guess I was reading too much Heinlein, but over the years the conservatism reasserted itself and I came to see the value of tradition and certain institutions in our culture that deserved more protection from the government than strict libertarianism allowed. Over the last couple of years though I have begun to see that whatever values that those traditions and institutions may have the government can not protect them. That the cost involved in making government powerful enough to preserve them is a cost that is to high too bear.

Take drugs as an example. Drug abuse whether it is alcohol, methamphetamines, cocaine, marijuana, heroin, whatever places a huge burden on family. Family is one of those bedrock institutions in our civilization that I feel is worth protecting, there fore it is a fair trade to sacrifice some of my natural rights to ensure that protection for families. I’ll give up my right to smoke or inject anything I would like except for the traditionally approved drug, alcohol, so that the institution of family can be preserved from the detrimental affects of drug abuse. The problem is that that’s not the only right I am giving up anymore. I could read out a laundry list of rights that you and I’ve given up to the war on drugs, but for the sake of brevity I’ll bring up the one most sacred right we have, our right to life. I can’t look it up at the moment so I’ll have to water down this statement somewhat but I’m nearly as likely to be killed by police officers exercising a no-knock warrant on the wrong house than from a home invasion. I would say that that holds true in all but the most violent parts of the country. The irony is that the safer your community the more you have to fear that the gang shooting your dog and busting down your front door in the middle of the night with guns at the ready will be those that have sworn to serve and protect you. The tragedy is that we are losing war on drugs. No matter how many rights we surrender it’s a problem that government has proven it can’t fix. We have only to look into our own past to our experience with alcohol prohibition to see that it doesn’t work. Prohibition just compounds the problem funneling huge amounts of money to the most unsavory organizations imaginable, which just leads to ever escalating war that we continue to lose.

Religulous

I watched Bill Maher’s Religulous tonight. Thanks Jay. I’m not sure why. I figured it would be a steaming pile of narcissistic slop and it was, but it wasn’t quite as odoriferous as I expected and despite the way it may seem after reading these words I did enjoy it. I actually found myself chuckling here or there, even laughing out loud on the bits about Scientology, Mormons, and Islam. It is a strange fact though there does seem to be a direct proportion between the time spent lampooning a particular religion and the tendency of that religion to strike back either legally or physically. Basically Maher travels around the world speaking with a few experts and religious scholars, but mostly everyday men and women and a handful of crackpots. He shows himself to be a master at putting people at ease as he manages to poke fun of their most closely held beliefs. A technique he is especially skillful of is coaxing a deer in the headlight look from his subjects. He is honest, at least in the conduct of the interviews. He is straight up with everyone he encounters with just what he believes and doesn’t try any kind of trickery to elicit certain responses. At least from what we see in the doc. To be cynical though, and I can’t help it when Bill Maher is the subject, that is the magic of editing. We only see what he wants us to see and in the order that he wants us to see it. A short little aside about the editing, there is no real structure I could discern to the doc. It just seems to jump around from topic to topic. There was no thread linking it all together, just a beginning, bunch of facts, more facts, and an ending. He should have let my buddy Stephen Lackey edit it. He can find some kind of narrative in anything. Still though he was more fair than I expected him to be and he was always polite and courteous so I give him credit for that.

The biggest curse of the thing is that it’s just the same old arguments; it doesn’t add anything new to the dialog. He basically just goes out and finds some people that he knows will do or say something silly if they have a camera on them long enough and a handful of people that agree with him. He’s preaching to the choir, and while I’m sure the choir will find it amusing he’s getting no closer to the goal he professes in the wind up, which is to get people to drop religion as an old outdated institution that mankind can’t afford to waste effort on any more.

Maher comes across as a straight out atheist, nothing wrong with that, I’m an atheist. But at the same time he is always referencing his doubt as well. He talks about his doubt, but at the same time he is certain that religion is at best a silly eccentricity and more likely a crutch that believers cling to keep from seeing the world as it really is. He brings up the old shibboleth that more blood has been shed in the name of religion than any other influence. After the twentieth century I’m not sure that really hold up any more or not, but granting that it’s true it still missing the point. Religions are institutions of man, kind of an obvious point for an atheist I would think. Mankind has a pretty good track record for finding reasons to kill, maim and enslave with or without religion. For every war fought in the name of God, for every instance of a Catholic priest buggering alter boys you have to weigh the good that religion has brought to the world. It’s an inescapable fact that Western Civilization has been the most liberating force in history and along with some ideas that the Greeks came up with a long time ago the pillars of that civilization are the Judeo-Christian creed. Not to mention the fact that most people find some kind of religion comforting, something I don’t understand but can’t deny.

Just as obvious as it is to me that there is no God it is obvious to many more that God exists. People I respect, love and I know are a lot smarter than me believe in God. I don’t understand it, but I’m not ready to call them all fools. Maher is though. Maher seems to believe that getting rid of religion would rid the world of all of the corruption and evil that can be laid at its feet, but the corruption and evil doesn’t come from religion it comes from man. As an atheist where else could I believe it comes from? Without it man would find some other avenue to express it. He claims that doubt is the only hope for the world, he prescribes doubt for everyone else but he expresses none himself. His closing argument is that mankind’s thirst for religion will lead to our destruction. I guess I’m just not as pessimistic as Maher. I admit I find myself extremely pessimistic about the coming years, but if you plot the welfare of man across our history the trend-line is unmistakably on an upward trend, there are bumps and dips but over the millennia it is up, up and up to such and extent that if the rest of our lives and our children’s lives were spent in pure misery they would still only represent a small dip in the total history of man.