In support of The Random

In the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election, I had an idea for a TV show that I think could quite possibly save the world.  It's a U.S.-based show, so in fact, perhaps, it might only save our country (but given our nuclear arsenal and disproportionate influence around the world, mayhap the world is right!).  

The concept is (and, I officially submit it here for consideration): 

A weekly news / talk program which features three guests and a host / moderator (ideally me, but if someone else takes on the project, I just ask for an associate producer credit {as well as the asidementioned 0.003% of all profits}).  The guests are completely randomly selected from across the country (and of course, because of my self-sabotaging tendencies my primary focus thus far on this project has been on how, precisely*, to define a randomly selected person in America), and each of the guests would be asked to submit a topic for conversation - whatever they are either most interested in or feel they would most like to cover - and then the four of us (3 guests plus the moderator) spend an hour or so talking about those topics.  Prior to each episode, the moderator would generalize and contextualize the topics enough so all guests could contribute (and the audience would care)^ and that's the show.

I have long suspected that randomly selected people would generally be better at most (general) tasks (like talking on TV or governing, say), if given the opportunity, than those who do it currently who have foisted themselves upon us.  I dare say that if we were to repopulate the entirety of the Halls of Congress (as well as all of the state legislatures and city halls) with randomly selected citizens of their respective states and districts a lot more generally good things for most people would get done more often.  I'm not the first to have this idea, and I must admit that in our current hyper-polarized climate I would be more than a little worried at who, exactly, would get selected in the first few cycles.  Information is the gasoline for a democracy, and we are currently living in a bad information age (think sugar in the tank).

Although we are living in the age prophesied by The Colbert Report - and beyond, where truthiness has given way to Choose-Your-Own-Truth-Venture where what you want to be true becomes true, because it supports your already existing pre-conceptions.  However, I don't think the state we find ourselves in just now needs to be permanent or even particularly long-lasting.  The main problem we have in our current culture is the monetary value of leveraged truths.  Getting people to believe your version of the truth is worth so much money to so many interests in terms of media messaging, political fundraising, and expenditures in our managed economy (i.e. which winners & losers we pick going forward) that the practice of swaying opinion is more important in most parts of our civilization today than actually studying to learn any particular truth.  A debate over whether Climate Change is real is worth much more to capitalism writ large than actually investing in combatting climate change (which, for the record, is real).

This doesn't need to be a permanent state of affairs, however, it needs to start with a majority of humans deciding and then actively advocating for the fact that improving the lives of the majority of humans is more important than continual marginal gains year over year in the Dow Jones Industrial and everyone's 401(k)s and capitalism's perpetuation.  That doesn't even have to mean, necessarily, that we need to end economic growth or overthrow capitalism... it just means that we have to agree that helping out the vast majority of humans so they can have adequate food, shelter, and dignity is at least slightly more important than 6% annual growth in your (and EVERYONE's) portfolio.  That's it, that's the ask, and it is astounding to me (and yet hauntingly familiar to me) that this is not a consensus proposition in America... at all.

* The random selection process would be a part of the weekly broadcast (or a separate "mini-episode"), and would entail some pomp & circumstance.  Because not every person in America will willingly partake, I think the best way to select a person is to first choose a community randomly (which can be done by a series of "weighted rolls" - e.g. if California is 70 times more populous than Wyoming, it would get that weighted probability and so too would every other state; from there, a county is chosen in the same way and so on down, until we get to a specific neighborhood, village or city block).  The plan would be to offer a month of free, high-speed wifi in their area as well as a goPro or similar easy to use, low-cost web cam to the chosen guests both as a thank you and a way to convince people to take part.

^ Ergo, if guest #1 says what is most important to him is his neighbor's tree branches encroaching on his yard and dropping leaves all over his yard and he should be able to make his neighbor come over and rake because it's the latest tree to drop leaves in the whole city, and always after the city's yard waste pick-up has ended and I hate MY NEIGHBORS AND THEIR SCREAMING KIDS IN THE BACKYARD... ahem... - that conversation for the panel may be neighbors and community changing over time from front porches to fenced-in back yards to NextDoor...

Tyler Ledger Joker Fi

I went and saw Joker last night - dutifully.  It was violent, very well made, well acted (and heavily acted), wonderfully shot, all like you've heard.

I would also like to submit that it may just be the most thought-provoking piece of cinematic commentary on our current socio-economic condition in decades.

It is a radical film full of radical ideas and radical violence.  Although it saddens me that it is radical to say that the current economic status quo is wildly immoral and that an existential cognitive dissonance is necessary to participate in the system honestly.

The central question of Joker is whether any of the events of the movie actually happened or not within the confines of the fictional Batman universe.  This question is revealed in the final moments of the movie when Arthur is locked up for treatment of his mental illness.  It becomes clear that this moment is chronologically prior to all of the violence that has previously occurred in the film.  Arthur describes all (or possibly just some) of that violence as a "joke" that as occurred to him as we was speaking with his case worker.  When she asks him what it was, he says that she "wouldn't get it".

Source: tvOvermind.com

This 'final reveal' parallels the 20-year-old final reveal of what I consider the last really radical movie focused on these same themes, Fight Club.  In that movie we learn that our previously reliable narrator was actually Tyler Durden the whole time.  (Also, in a partial re-viewing the scene where Lou drops in on a fight club evening, Tyler's hysterical laughter after having his ass kicked by Lou is preminiscent of Arthur's own manifestations of his mental illness).

Earlier in the film, it is revealed that Arthur's mother was diagnosed with delusional psychosis and narcissistic personality disorder (a diagnosis that may be pretty close to part of Arthur's own plus a dash of schizophrenia - which is reified in the moment when Arthur is actually standing in the room as an adult when his mother is being booked into Arkham after abusing him as a child).  While many reviewers have made much of the portrayal of mental illness in the film, I think the underlying argument of both of these movies is that some forms of thought and action (including some violence) that we casually refer to as mental illness are in fact radical responses to the immoral status quo.

To be clear, I am not condoning any real world violence here, but I do think that artistic depiction of radical political violence can pose important questions that perhaps can't be voiced within the current socio-political climate.  Questions like - what might happen if we take the modern-era royalty (i.e. the super-rich) out of power.  In Joker the one piece of violence that we know "really happens" (although perhaps not exactly as we see it occur in the movie) is the murder of Thomas and Martha Wayne.  This event is formative to the future Batman, so it has to occur within the larger mythology of the film.

We also tend to forget in our modern and enlightened era how rare it is to have massive social change without violence.  Although the "clowns" in Joker are easily read as violent criminal thugs engaged in looting and riots, they are also the lumpenproletariat activated by their clown prince.  They are engaged in a modern iteration of the French Revolution and their King Louis XVI (i.e. Thomas Wayne) needs to topple.  One wonders what, exactly, this makes Batman in this historical parallel?

Pre-prequel

Anticipatory plagiarism is a concept I used to struggle with - coming up with a brilliant idea only to come to realize that someone else had thought of it and published it decades or even centuries earlier than you had the opportunity to get it down.

This also happens in literature when a writer unwittingly writes a similar story to something they had never come across. In general, this happens by some sort of collective osmosis (perhaps it’s a Jungian phenomenon) by which these thoughts and ideas are in the ether - part of the existing background. It’s in the groundwater. 

This morning I read a short story in the Bradbury-edited collection that I’ve been making my way through.  It’s called “Mr. Death and the Redheaded Woman”, by Helen Eustis. It is an unintentional prequel to Piers Anthony’s On a Pale Horse (by which I mean of course, Anthony unintentionally wrote a whole series of novels {of which I’ve read the first few but not all} as a follow up to Eustis’s very fine story).

I've been getting back into Wikipedia as of late, particularly as I've been reading Timeless Stories for Today and Tomorrow, edited and with an introduction by Ray Bradbury.  As I started digging into the stories, I was struck first by the sense of time - of being tales from a different (but not entirely unfamiliar) era.  Much like when I read The Thin Man last year, one of the most enjoyable parts of every story, is a real insight into how folks lived 'in the before'.

The stories have also been enjoyable in their own right, but because they are primarily speculative as opposed to pure fantasy, they each have been deeply and fundamentally rooted in the time they are written (or when they are portraying in the rare case it's not meant to be "present day").  Bradbury finished the introduction on 1 July 1951, which means the collection is made up of stories all from before that time (and likely mostly well before, given that they're mostly being re-produced and collected here in this book).

As I read the first couple stories, I wondered who the collection of writers were that Bradbury had collected.  I've heard of many of them, but the first two at least were completely unfamiliar to me.  Henry Kuttner's story, particularly, excited me as he had worked within the Cthulhu Mythos (and had corresponded with H.P. Lovecraft).  Kuttner also worked closely in collaboration with his wife, C.L. Moore and the authorship of much of his work and her work were intermingled (so much so that the story in this collection could likely have been in good part her work).

 I plodded forward, and for each story resolved to read the Wikipedia entry for each author in concert with the story.  Which brought me to Christine Govan's story, where I found no corresponding wiki-entry (though she was mentioned in a few other articles, often as a family member to someone else).  A writer in her own right, I created her article and have now noticed that Helen Eustis also has one missing.

Govan and Eustis were the second and third woman authors collected in this book, and the first two authors in the book without their own wiki-entries.  It's a problem and I am working on solving in a small way.  I created a stub for Govan, in the same way that I had Faustin E. Wirkus years ago.  I don't have the time or inclination to go in depth and create a full article, but a sourced stub about someone who definitely deserves a wiki-page will grow on its own.  It takes time, but eventually the world will help do the work (as long as it doesn't get deleted!).

Jim Carey has totally stolen my life...

or at least much of my philosophy.

I'm flipping around as i read student papers ("the horror, the horror") after Colbert & Jim Carey was on Letterman...

but first, a bit of background. I totally had the idea for The Truman Show when i was, like 9, and then the movie came out... and nothing. Suddenly, he doesn't return my calls, it's like nobody's ever heard of me...

...anyway, tonight Jim Carey tells this story about knowing Frank Sinatra and asking him to come up to a table he's at with some beautiful woman to impress her... point is, it's a Don Rickles story... what this has to do with me, you may be asking, well, i have this dream... it's what i call continuing the oral tradition... here's how it works.
I love stories, good stories, person(al) stories, anecdotes, if you will... stories about something that's happened to you, well, in the interest of continuing the telling of great stories, i think we should be able to tell other people's stories as if they're our own... The reason being, is that nobody cares about a story of what happened to your college roommate's high school friend, so you turn that friend into your friend, suddenly (if it's a good story) that story lives on...

Anyway, just wanted to let you know who was stealing from me today...