My new favorite YouTube star, Smooth McGroove has fulfilled what he told me was a very popular request (and one of my requests as well): The Moon theme from DuckTales, the 1989 NES game based on the Disney cartoon.
I remember as a kid playing this game, and being really impressed by this piece. Most of the game’s music, as I recall, was pretty standard happy-Disney-video game fare, and then Scrooge McDuck gets to the Moon, and this oddly moving and nuanced piece of 8-bit symphonics hits your brain (and my 11-year-old brain).
Patrick Stewart magnificently describes his efforts in combatting (and his childhood experience of witnessing) violence against women. Watch the whole thing, and then read on for some thoughts.
Perhaps most moving to me is his discovery of what had moved his father to be violent toward his mother: PTSD brought on by his time in World War II. It is this revelation that brings him to a new milestone in his own campaign for the cause, wherein he gives his time both to Refuge, a nonprofit that provides safe houses to women, and Combat Stress, a group that works with those suffering from PTSD:
So, I work for Refuge for my mother, and I work for Combat Stress for my father, in equal measure.
As I have written here before, I suffer from PTSD myself, not from combat of course, but from the combination of a violent assault near my home when I lived in Washington, DC, and many years of relentless mockery and bullying from my middle and high school years. Obviously, the scenarios are starkly different, because my experience had almost nothing to do with any expectation that I be the aggressor, as it is for soldiers. But it does cause me to behave in ways that I would not otherwise, taking over my rational brain and my empathy when a threat is detected. It makes me understand how trauma can cause a person to act in such a way that they themselves might not recognize. It does not excuse it by any means, but it helps to explain it, and provides a point of potential repair so that it stops.
And one more note: I found myself watching Stewart’s body language, and it told its own story. Note how early in his answer, he hugs himself, tightly. This is classic defensiveness — as an actor, I’m well aware of the unconscious tendency for folks feeling insecure in front of an audience to brace or hug themselves to provide a bit of armor from imaginary danger. For Patrick Freaking Stewart to do that tells you something about how raw this issue is for him. Later, of course, he opens up very wide, his arms far out, exposing his face and chest, telling me he there finds his ground, finds his purpose, and it carries him to a courageous state. He is no longer defending, he is affirmatively acting. Not theatrically, but acting as in doing something.
I think their usual lineup of guests must have all simultaneously perished, because HuffPost Live invited me to join a panel this evening, literally minutes before air time. I was happy to oblige, of course. (The host, Josh Zepps, has my boss on a lot.)
We’re discussing he recent moves by Hungary to ban Nazi and communist symbols, and whether laws that prohibit vile speech can ever be justified. I think I managed not to embarrass myself or my employers too badly. You be the judge.
Andrew Sullivan has what at first seems like an alarming reaction to the death of his friend David Kuo, following a ten-year-long battle with brain cancer. Watch:
I feel a revulsion to this line of thinking, that someone has gone “to a better place,” or as Sullivan calls it, “home.” It obviously comes from the ridiculous idea that we all go to a warm, soft, fuzzy afterlife once we drop dead, a state that is allegedly better than the best of mortal life on Earth.
But I also find some of Sullivan’s position, apart from the theological stuff, refreshing, in that he casts a skeptical eye on life-for-life’s sake, the idea that it might just be okay to let go when all you know is pain. (And that there is a heavy dose of hypocrisy in many Christians’ maniacal avoidance of their beloved afterlife.)
As for me, however, I just want to live. I know it’s all I’ve got — this life — and it’s literally all I’ll ever have. So if it’s a choice between the pain, nausea, boredom, tedium, etc., and not existing at all, I will err on the side of staying alive.
So I guess that while I like Sullivan’s allowance for nuance and variation in how a human being deals with his or her own death, I part with him on both fronts for myself: Yes, life-for-life’s sake, because there’s no home but here.
You really have to watch this video of this mystical guy who really seems to know things he could not possibly know about the people he’s giving readings to. Watch to the end to have your mind blown. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=F7pYHN9iC9I
One of Toby’s favorite songs for bedtime used to be Toad the Wet Sprocket’s “Walk on the Ocean,” and like all bedtime songs he favors, it had to be sung every night for months.
Current favorites, incidentally, include “She’s an Angel” by They Might Be Giants, “Somewhere That’s Green” from Little Shop of Horrors (which I’ve been singing to him since he was a baby), and The Police’s “Walking in Your Footsteps,” because, of course, it’s about dinosaurs.
Anyway, I remembered this video I made back in July when Toby was about two-and-a-half, singing from the comfort of his then-new big-boy bed. Nice for a peaceful Sunday.
David Kuo, most famous for being formerly of George W. Bush’s office of faith-based initiatives, and for later exposing much of that initiative’s cynicism, submits to Andrew Sullivan’s “ask me anything” videos. The question in this video, which is rather too simplistic for my taste: “Is faith foolish?”
I don’t want to beat up on Kuo, for a number of reasons: He is obviously not, himself, a fool, but a wise, intelligent, well-meaning fellow, and his variety of religiousness is among the most harmless. And, if you’re not aware, he’s also enduring utterly dire medical circumstances.
All that said, I remain baffled by the construction set up by Kuo here, one similar to that used by many of his ilk (such as Sullivan) who despite being rational in all other areas, rejecting unfounded absolutism, claim themselves to be certain of not only God’s existence, but of a particular sectarian variety of God.
Look at the way Kuo describes his certainty, that he is intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually convinced of Christianty’s veracity.
Two of those three, bluntly, are meaningless.
To be “emotionally convinced” of something at least has a real-world manifestation, even if it is empty as a claim to something’s actual truth. I can feel emotionally convinced that a salesperson is being straight with me, or that a job interview has gone well, or that, gosh, there really is a lot of good in this ol’ world, but that wouldn’t be the same as saying that the facts presented to me have made a strong case. It just feels one way or another, and that’s not good enough when we’re talking about whether or not there’s a timeless, all-powerful superbeing lording over us and sacrificing his offspring for us.
But “spiritually convinced”? That is, I think, literally meaningless. You can talk in terms of how your brain, your intellect, has amassed enough data to come to a conclusion, and you can also invoke a kind of dualism in saying that your heart, or your gut, or what have you, have led you in a particular direction. But how does one convince one’s spirit? Even allowing that such a thing exists (it does not), how is that different than one’s mind or emotions? It’s not. It’s rhetorical filler.
I’m sure Kuo would disagree. I’m sure he feels like his spirit really is somehow given assurance of the truth of Christianity. But all I want to say here is that it’s actually redundant, unnecessary, or just plain meaningless to talk about being emotionally or spiritually convinced of grand claims made about the nature of reality.
And if one really is intellectually convinced of the divinity of Jesus, et. al., well, you’re just doing it wrong.
You can see the gravity of sadness — almost the literal gravity — weighing on this man, as though the force of grief itself is pulling on his face. His hair is whiter than ever.
I’ve never seen him more sincere than when he said, “We’re not doing enough. And we will have to change.”
And the line that reminds me why I’m a kid person, the child who assures the adults, “I know karate, so it’s OK; I’ll lead the way out.”
A concerto is an argument between an individual and the state. Between an individual and society. It is an individual voice crying out and trying to make a statement of some kind. And it’s often drowned out by the orchestra, and it fights back. And the orchestra fights back. And it fights back. And the dynamic of listening to that is like nothing on Earth.
For my 34th birthday (December 1), my lovely wife commissioned a song about me from our friend Joe Langham. Just…just…don’t even ask me to express how many emotions this song evokes. It’s a beautiful thing.
Even the blog got a shout-out. Wondrous. Thanks, Joe.
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