Life In a Day weaves together moments of joy and sadness, frivolity and struggle, plainness and great beauty into a wonderful fabric of the human experience.  It at once shows the ways in which the routines of our days are shared across cultures and landscapes (we wake, we clean up, we eat, we interact, we travel, we love, we argue, we sleep), but also the stark contrasts of wealthy and poor, privileged and oppressed, healthy and unhealthy, troubled and care-free.

There are only a few “characters” we see multiple times throughout the day -- a man bicycling around the world, a family struggling with cancer -- but the amazing editing and soundtrack create a story arc grounded not in personality or plot twist, but in the experience of having 24 hours pass and all of the amazing (or mundane) things that can happen in that time.  It’s a masterpiece that will perhaps seem quaint in a few decades, but that could not have been possible even 5 or 10 years ago.

Life In a Day is inspiring and moving.  Best of all, it’s real.

Here, you can start watching it right now:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaFVr_cJJIY

Scalene is a dark thriller that tells a story of a mother, her son, and the son’s caretaker as they interact around some events that change their lives significantly.  The film shows the perspectives of each of the three characters using a combination of linear (forward and reverse) and non-linear story-telling, a technique that certainly keeps things interesting and always a bit unsettling.

The movie was filmed in Richmond, and so as a resident it was also “fun” to try to pick out the locations and backdrops along the way – various scenes in the City building, various restaurants, Glen Miller Park, etc.  I’ve even been pulled over by one of the Richmond Police Department officers who makes an appearance in the film, but I don’t think that qualifies me for an on-screen credit.

The story itself is intriguing to watch unfold, despite the darkness of the subject matter – mental disability, sexual assault, unhealthy and co-dependent relationships, and so on.  All three primary cast members hold their own in the 95-minute piece; Margo Martindale’s “Janice” fluctuated between evoking sympathy for her plight and making your skin crawl with her mania; Hanna Hall’s “Paige” brought strength, complex emotion and a grounding presence on screen; Adam Scarimbolo’s “Jakob” was convincing and, despite having few spoken lines, full of personality and nuance.

There were scenes in Scalene when the pacing felt a little slow, and a few occasions where the plot seemed a bit contrived, but as a whole it was a very tightly made film.  Zack Parker has clearly built on each of his past filmmaking experiences to make Scalene; the editing was excellent – especially impressive given the multiple combined story-telling techniques – and the sound production and score were superbly done. Parker has enjoyed his identity as an emerging independent filmmaker, but he clearly strives for a quality of work normally only seen in much bigger budget productions.

From following Zack’s social media updates along the journey of making the film I only know a little bit about what what it took, but it’s enough to realize that between fundraising, coordinating production, directing, editing, marketing and distributing (and I’m sure much more), Mr. Parker is the model of a entrepreneurial film artist who can take an idea and then do whatever it takes to make it a reality.  It takes a lot of hard work to make any kind of film that doesn’t have serious flaws noticeable to the average viewer; Parker has put in that hard work and more.  In Scalene I think he has a film that stands on its own, and that will hopefully also serve as a stepping stone to even more great projects.

You can buy Scalene online from Along the Tracks Productions.

The movie was incredibly well made.  Aaron Sorkin’s writing was as good as the best days of The West Wing, each member of the cast seemed to just nail their role, the editing was some of the best I’ve seen, and so on.

Perhaps most enjoyably, this is a mainstream movie that is at least in part about the culture and goings-on in the modern world of Internet entrepreneurship, I believe the first of its kind. It fully embraces the geekiness that was and is a part of building a web application like Facebook: in the first 30 minutes, the Apache webserver software project is mentioned at least twice, there are dramatic lines about needing more Linux webservers running MySQL, there are punchlines that involve the emacs text editor, and scenes of glorious code writing marathons – wow.

The Social Network also takes on the complex and sometimes dirty aspects of Internet start-ups, business partnerships that go sour, the role of lust, greed, insecurity and power struggles in creating beautiful things, and the general messiness of human relationships in a post-industrial world.  Some of this is probably over-dramatized; if you believe the narrative it presents, success in the world of the Internet means being ready to screw over your friends and then lawyering up to defend against their lawsuits, treating women as decorative sex objects to invite to website launch parties, and deferring basic care of one’s body in order to write software all night long.  My experiences as a web developer in the Midwest have been much less sensational…but then again, I’m not a billionaire, so maybe I’m doin` it wrong.

The movie doesn’t purport to be factually accurate, but there’s enough real history in there that it will likely become the popular understanding of how Facebook actually came to be; it might be close enough.  If you use Facebook, or if you’re interested in some of the crazy stuff that happens to take a start-up business like Facebook to what it is now, I think The Social Network is a great film to check out.

If you’ve seen it, tell me what you thought!

In the meantime, as a distraction, here are some things you might want to click on and check out:

1. Is it possible that all this political rage is not actually about healthcare?
2. I enjoyed the documentary “This Film is Not Yet Rated,” which takes a look at the MPAA’s system of assigning maturity ratings to films, and how it affects the production, distribution and success of movies in the U.S.  The themes were that (A) a small group of anonymous and inaccessible people have significant influence in deciding what becomes a part of our culture, (B) anything that depicts the sexual empowerment or fulfillment of women is dangerous or obscene, and (C) anything that isn’t 100% pro-military, pro-war is dangerous or obscene.

   I know these themes will be shocking to you, so just take a minute and catch your breath.

3. There’s a new federal policy that says cycling and other forms of non-motorized transportation should be treated as equal to motorized transportation when we plan our cities and streets.  Yay! But apparently, this is going to lead to economic catastrophe.  RUN FOR–er, uh, I mean DRIVE FOR YOUR LIVES!!
4. Have you tried playing Glenn Beck Bingo?  It’s a great party game.
5. I really hope none of the commenters on my review of Lierre Keith’s “The Vegetarian Myth” were among the militant vegans who assaulted her at a recent speaking engagement.  Um, you’re doing it wrong.

There now, you almost forgot about my blogging transgressions, didn’t you?

(Disclaimer: I’m not here to tell you how to live, but my general sense is that the world would be a better place if people didn’t spend their time watching television.  Period.  That said, and the reality of TV watching as a cultural norm firmly in place for now, I continue with my narrative.)

The end of channel surfing

The first stage in my transition away from “watching TV” was to get free of the notion that my schedule should ever revolve around the schedule of TV broadcasters.

It’s a shame to think about how much of my childhood scheduling might have revolved around wanting to be home at a certain time to watch a certain show, and what other opportunities I might have missed as a part of that.  That’s where the Tivo DVR that I bought a number of years ago really changed everything – because it records the shows you want to watch for later viewing, I never again had to worry about being proximate to my TV at any particular time.  Add in features like fast-forwarding through commercials, having “access” to shows and movies that were on during hours of the day I never would have watched before, and integrating content from the Internet and my computer, and it was quite the little media center.

Yay! I was a little more in control of my TV watching habits, and didn’t spend any more time wandering through channels looking for something mediocre to watch.

Tethered to a TV?

Once my TV-watching was controlled by storing content on an Internet-connected device that would let me retrieve it for later viewing, I thought more about why I couldn’t watch the content from anywhere I had a screen, instead of having to be in front of the TV itself.  The most impressive tool that I found in aiding that un-tethering was the Slingbox, which takes most any audio/video signal and makes it available over the Internet, while also allowing you to remotely control whatever device is playing the signal.  In other words, I could watch my TV from anywhere I had network access.

This meant that not only did I not have to be on time to watch content I wanted thanks to Tivo, I didn’t have to be anywhere in particular either.  While my actual practical uses of this were few, the slight shift in TV watching paradigm was refreshing.

Thank you, Hulu.

A few years ago, to give up cable TV meant giving up the watching of most TV shows altogether, unless you were bumming off of friends and family.  But the recent trend is that most kinds of television content is available in some other digital form, whether it’s on DVD or on the web for free or available for purchase through an online store like Amazon or iTunes.  The emergence of services like Hulu.com, which makes full length episodes of many TV shows available for “free” soon after their broadcast, further drove establishing standards for digital delivery.  (I say “free” in quotes because Hulu still shows you advertisements that take up your time and burn into your soul, and neither time nor souls are free.)

So it was about a year ago that I decided that the few shows I still watched on television were either (A) shows I didn’t need to watch anymore, or (B) shows that I could find within a reasonable amount of time using other means.  I called the cable company and told them so, and haven’t looked back since.

Hello, Roku.

This strange new world of only watching shows over the Internet was working just fine, but I did notice that there was a drop in the convenience factor, as I could no longer sit down in front of the TV, pressing a button and watch something.  If I wanted the TV-watching experience, I took the time to hook my computer up to my TV and sound system, and things like pausing to answer the door or switching between content options became a lot more noticeably distracting.  (Reality check: yes, watching glowing rectangles is the true distraction.)

A few months later, I saw the announcement of a new $100 device called the Roku player that would make digital content as easy to browse and view as “regular TV” had once been.  By linking it with a Netflix account at the lowest price level ($9/month with 1 physical DVD at a time) or paying per-use for Amazon.com selections, I had access to a significant collection of movies and TV shows available for on-demand viewing, and I was back to navigating all of that with a remote control – no computer hookup needed.

A little bit after that, the folks at Hulu made available the great “Hulu Desktop” application, which basically turned navigating their content into something you could also do with a remote control, and so while there was still some computer hookup needed there, it wasn’t as distracting.

Am I there yet?

That’s where I’m at right now.  I can sit down with a remote control and have a real “TV Watching Experience.”  I have a wide variety of interesting (some of it is even, dare I say, socially redeeming) content available to me on demand, and I don’t miss cable or broadcast TV at all.  I go to the movie theater a lot less because I have (IMHO) an equivalent or better experience with my own technical setup.

I can’t make any claims around living a life free of the distractions and time-wasting activities that cable TV brought with it – I spend plenty of time staring at glowing screens, I still watch shows produced for TV, I’m still bombarded with messages not of my choosing, and I’m still subject to information overload.   But I’ve got a lot more control over how and when I experience that information than I ever did when I subscribed to cable.

While watching this content (especially documentaries) is something I enjoy greatly, I hope to continue to reduce the amount of time I spend in front of a TV for any reason, trading it for time spent experiencing the world in other, less passive ways.

If you have experiences with making changes in how you “experience television,” (whether you own one or not), I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

Book, The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom by Don Miguel Ruiz: a great little book, a quick read full of wisdom that seems like it should just be common sense.  To find happiness, be impeccable with your word, don’t take anything personally, don’t make assumptions, and always do your best.

Book, Leaving Church by Barbara Brown Taylor: moving reflections on a life devoted to ministry and service, and the unexpected twists and turns in how that was manifested.  As someone who has vacillated widely in my relationship with organized religion over time, much of it rang true for me.

Books in progress or coming up soon: The River Why by David James Duncan (thanks Derric), The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron (thanks Artie), The Chaos Scenario by Bob Garfield (thanks Bob).

Magazine, Men’s Health: I was somehow subscribed to this magazine through some purchase or survey I took, and when I track down who it was, I’ll let them know that they’ll never get another dollar or opinion from me (so far I’ve traced the path through three agencies, waiting on a call back from the third).  As you might guess, the magazine presents ridiculous ideals of what an actual healthy man is like, objectifies women into puzzles to be solved so that they’ll be more available for servicing men, and encourages rampant consumerism as the true path to personal happiness.  Umm, no thanks.

Live Performance, Second City in Chicago.  I’ve seen this Saturday Night Live feeder troupe do their thing in the past and it’s been really, really funny.  When I went again recently, the material was not funny, the actors were not in to it, and the show dragged on.  Lest you think it was just me, one of the longest jokes in the performance centered around a man describing for several minutes in graphic detail the brutal rape of a woman his character met at a bar; apparently it was supposed to be funny because it was edgy, but it was actually just wrong.

Live Performance, Cats: What the hell was Andrew Lloyd-Webber smoking when he created that?  And oh, there was some good singing and dancing and stuff.

Television, Glee: I shook my head in disbelief when my co-workers described the premise to me, but I ended up watching it anyway.  It’s part high school drama a la “Friday Night Lights,” part Auto-Tuned musical production, part ridiculously contrived sitcom.  I’m worried that, like the dreadful mess that was Prison Break, the show’s creators never really expected it to take off, and therefore have no idea where they’re taking the story or character development, and so they inject artificial plot twists to delay the season finale so they have the off-season to make something better up.  I can’t say I recommend it on the whole, but the interesting renditions and mash-ups of the musical numbers are pretty impressive nonetheless.

Television, V: I love a good “the aliens have come to destroy us” sci-fi drama, and it’s harder to resist when the story is couched in the hopes, fears, technologies and personalities of the present day.  V (for Visitors) has done a reasonable job of creating just that, but it seems like they’ve unleashed their entire bag of tricks in the first few episodes, so (like Glee) it’s hard to imagine a sustaining storyline and character development.  The hardcore fans of the original show must be really ticked off, and having been a fan of her work in Lost, it’s too bad to see Elizabeth Mitchell compelled to say such campy lines.  I will give maybe one or two more episodes of my time, and then I will go back to watching old Star Trek: TNG episodes, because it was never campy.

Movie, 51 Birch Street: a really neat documentary that anyone who’s ever thought about life, love, family, relationships or marriage would probably enjoy at some level.  It was a helpful reminder for me that even the marriages of my parents and grandparents and their peers, which may seem to me frozen as unquestionably pure during unquestionably better times, were probably actually more complicated than that.  It’s also a great story about never quite knowing what your moment in the spotlight will look like.

Anything you’d like to suggest?

Every year, high school students around Indiana are encouraged to submit their films for judging and showing at the festival.  The top ten or so films are selected by a panel of judges, and then shown at the screening night (which was tonight).  Before the screening is a panel discussion with professional filmmakers and those involved in the film industry.

The event has gotten better and better every year.  Tonight there was a great panel that included Zack Parker (long-time filmmaker from Richmond who has produced two feature films), the Herbert brothers (who created a Superbowl commercial that recently won $1 million in a contest!), Erin Newell (the director of the statewide film initiative Film Indiana), and Krista Hoffmann-Longtin (who has been involved in Indiana film stuff for some time now).  The quality of the films were a clear step above last year’s submissions, with better sound production, plots, directing and photography all around.  There were three documentaries and an animated short!  Horror, comedy, romance and more!  Even the format of the evening was more energizing, with Oscars-like introduction and award presentation, and a great MC in Scott Tucker.  Well done, all for free.

Again, I’m not sure why the auditorium wasn’t packed.  Sadly, there were no submissions from Richmond students that were screened, so perhaps we’re a bit behind in encouraging our young folks to consider filmmaking for fun, inspiration, or even a career. I’m hopeful that we’ll do that and more, encouraging support for this artform in non-highschool settings too (e.g. have a 48-hour film project here).

Hopefully more people will become aware of this refreshing and impressive burst of creativity on display, and ask what we can to do take better advantage of it in our community.  If you’re at all interested in the creative arts and filmmaking in particular, I hope you’ll consider coming next year.

• Smaller Indiana, a social networking site for Indiana people, with an apparent trend toward IT/design professionals. It’s built on Ning, which I’m considering as a platform for a few projects. But mostly I’m just excited to see social networking applied at a more regional/local level – a great trend.
• If you enjoyed Thought to Exist in the Wild, you’ll enjoy this bit of satire: San Diego Zoo, Prison Merge. Yeah.
• The Emergency Party Button – oh yes, I will build this some day soon. They even got the music right.
• What You Do Counts – National Geographic selected this film by an Earlham College student as a finalist
• Someone took the time – a lot of time – to create an interesting map of humanity.
• Wired says you can keep your SUV, don’t bother paying for organic food, forget about the spotted owl, etc. because reducing carbon emissions is the only real battle that matters. Hmm.

It was poorly written, poorly directed, poorly acted, and poorly edited. The dialogue was fluffy and cheesy and delivered with little authenticity. The cutting of the scenes almost made you wonder if they’d randomized their order and lost a bunch of footage along the way. The story barely made any sense to me and I just finished the book a few months ago – I pity anyone who came in off the street wondering what it was about, even with the artificial backstory narrative at the beginning. The action scenes were boring and confusing. And so on.

The one redeeming quality was the computer-generated graphics work that brought the characters` “daemons” – animal manifestations of one’s soul that travel alongside – to life. It was integrated very smoothly into the action and some of the detail and nuance was excellent.

But that was not enough to save this sinking ship – The Golden Compass is an unfortunate mangling of a perfectly good story, and a total bomb of a movie.

No End In Sight is pitched as an insider’s tale of the reckless decision-making and subsequent incompetence that has propelled the invasion and occupation of Iraq forward from the planning stages to the present day, and it satisfies that characterization quite well. I was impressed with the broad scope (in rank, affiliation and political persuasion alike) of the subjects that writer/director Charles Ferguson was able to secure for the film – everyone from former State Department leader Richard Armitage to soldiers and diplomats who had been on the ground in Iraq carrying out the haphazard instructions from afar. What’s more, they seemed unusually candid and authentic, almost humbled by the chance to reflect – saying out loud how badly things were done, clearly second guessing themselves and their decision-making process they engaged in, barely containing their frustration at the conflicts and politicking within the Bush administration that prevented any real meaningful collaboration or planning to take place. It was amazing to hear from some of the people who were ostensibly planning for life in Iraq after the invasion, and all the roadblocks and impossible tasks they encountered. It reminded me somewhat of Errol Morris’s The Fog of War, with the same kinds of long, uncomfortable pauses as people who were directly responsible for life and death decisions came to grips with their place in history.

Beyond the interviews, the film is a great chronology of the invasion and occupation as a whole. With the inattentive and lopsided media coverage the many-hundred-billion dollar adventure gets, it’s all too easy to forget that it’s been going on for more than 4 years and that so many different milestones of presidential, congressional, and national identity (many of them unfortunate) have been reached along the way. But despite the moving stories of discontent from U.S. soldiers and the wrangling of egos and power agendas in the U.S., this is about huge losses of life, total destruction of communities, cities, cultures, livelihoods, and a profound sense of injustice, all sustained by the Iraqi people at the hands of our country’s military/industrial complex. The collection of footage often never shown in mainstream media for its heartbreaking implications is in itself a story of unacceptable disconnection from this tragedy.

One of the soldiers interviewed for the film, Field Artillery Gunner Hugo Gonzales, talked about how his life now was preoccupied by trying to find some meaning in the occupation there, especially given his debilitating injuries and near-constant pain. I felt such sadness for him and his fellow soldiers, knowing they have in most cases done what they believe is right and necessary, and that some of them are now feeling pangs of doubt (if not plain outrage) about the nature and origins of their mission. As I walked out of No End in Sight, it was clear to me that any universally useful meaning will probably only come years from now, when the machinations of national and cultural self-consciousness will finally lead to some wider-spread sense that the whole ordeal was a catastrophic mistake. But until then, the movie gives us as much perspective as might be possible while the battles continue and more lives are needlessly lost.

While President George W. Bush would not be interviewed for the movie, other interviewers have asked him and his advisers about the logic and decision-making process that governed the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and most often the response is to brush off the mistakes of the past, saying that dwelling on them doesn’t really serve a useful purpose, and to talk about what needs to happen to move forward (hey, that sounds familiar!). While I understand this perspective, I think it is horribly flawed.

And so I really appreciate that in The Assault on Reason, Al Gore took the time to look deeply at the thought processes, public and private conversations, and general approach to decision making that has dominated the Bush administration’s tenure, not the least outcome of which was the mess in Iraq. Gore starts with the psychology of fear and takes us on a whirlwind tour of how it is used to subvert our appreciation of reason, even to the point where the decisions we make are not in our own self-interest. He looks at the language and framing used by modern politicians (certainly with a critical focus pointed right at conservatives) and how every pressing issue of the day — from climate change to foreign policy to immigration to Katrina to the economy — are being poorly addressed or not addressed at all because of the paralysis of the nation due to these tactics. The sad part of his thesis is that, for those who are assaulting reason, it’s all about power:

Throughout history, our innate fear of others-who-are-different-from-us has combined all too frequently with some malignant dogma, masquerading as a message from God, to unleash the most horrific violence and oppression in the repertoire of hell. Moreover, this deadly form of exclusivist group passion can be virtually invulnerable to reason. So it is especially useful to demagogues who learn how to fan it and exploit it to gain and consolidate power. –p. 48

Like some interviewees in No End In Sight, Gore effectively lambastes the Bush administration for its approach to Iraq, but does so in the context of the notion that the Iraq invasion was a distraction from the search for Osama bin Laden and those who attacked the U.S. on 9-11. He returns to the amazing phenomenon where some high percentage of U.S. citizens surveyed incorrectly believed Saddam Hussein had something to do with those attacks, and the rhetoric and carefully planned talking points of the neocon planners that facilitated that trend. In other words, because of the way reason has been assaulted and the truth twisted, lots of people died.

Gore is optimistic about possibilities for improvement and solutions to the phenomenon he lays out, but I’m not sure I can agree with the specific paths he sees to resolution. His primary conclusion is that if Americans can reclaim the practice of meaningful public debate about the issues that face us, we can once again be a nation governed by reason and true democracy. Specifically, Gore sees the promise of the Internet as the key vehicle to that reclaiming, and goes on to promote some of his own efforts with Current TV to that effect.

…the Internet is perhaps the greatest source of hope for reestablishing an open communications environment in which conversation of democracy can flourish. It has extremely low entry barriers for individuals. The ideas that individuals contribute are dealt with, in the main, according to the rules of a meritocracy of ideas. It is the most interactive medium in history and the one with the greatest potential for connecting individuals to one another and to a universe of knowledge. –p. 260

It sounds really good, but as George Lakoff and others have identified, pinning our hopes for the resurrection of a nation driven by progressive values on the notion that everyone just needs to be more reasonable is NOT a strategy for success. The reality is that people will let their understanding of the world and their short-term preferences override any deep comprehension of what might be reasonable or right; even, as I mentioned above, when they are making decisions that conflict with their own self-interest. I’ve experienced that often here in my home town, where some of my attempts to engage those with opposing viewpoints using the tools of logic and reason results only in further misunderstanding, animosity, and even outright resentment at the attempt. I’ve come to understand this as something I can’t really completely blame on the people I’m engaging – if I can’t interact with them in a way that is meaningful and useful to both of us, then that’s partly my fault, too.

Still, Gore’s clarity of vision is worth hearing out, even if it isn’t a comprehensive one. As with soldier Gonzales` attempt to find meaning in the events of the past four years, Gore does manage to make a lot of sense of how we got where we are in a fear-based national identity, and I consider The Assault on Reason to be an essential contribution to the discussion about what we want for ourselves from here on out.