This week at Sea World in Florida a killer whale killed its trainer. Details regarding treatment of the animal and its history of aggression against humans are trickling out, and soon we’ll all have a lot of conflicting information over which to bicker on this issue and plenty of questions, like, was Sea World at fault or was this just a tragic accident? As valuable as answers to these specific questions may be, in light of this latest horror we do have some larger questions to tackle regarding our relationship to the natural world, and they are worthy of discussion.
Over millennia, humans have domesticated many species and have engaged in exploration to the depths and breadth of the earth to find out more about how living creatures came to be, how they may serve us, and what the lives of animals can tell us about ourselves. From the domestication of the canine to bear-baiting, these pursuits can be benign or malevolent; it all depends on your point of view. However, some things are certain: 1) human beings anthropomorphize animals, often to the detriment of the animal, and 2) in an effort to transcend the human condition, we often transfer our love of a trait found in an animal onto the entire organism, thereby obscuring the animal’s true nature.
The idea that man has dominion over the natural world is ancient; it’s in the first few chapters of the Bible and other world religions teach a similar principle. To the extent that humans top the food chain (so far as we can see) we do have a right to exploit the natural world and its denizens for our survival. Of course, with that right there is an attendant responsibility to preserve that which is eternal and perhaps a result of the divine without utterly destroying habitats in a variety of locales. To be clear, to raise animals for food or as helpmates to industry, in my view is not immoral or in any way wrong. What is wrong, damn near criminal in fact, is our tendency to take animals that have no free choice in the matter and use them for our entertainment and amusement and then condemn them for acting aggressively against us.
The Sea World incident involving Telly the Orca is multi-faceted and there isn’t one truly right answer to the question of marine conservation and I don’t pretend to know enough to answer them all. One complicating factor is that as cruel and confining the cetacean shows may seem to me personally, it is also true that the people who train these animals love them dearly and by the act of conservation inspire others to enter the admirable field of marine biology. On the other hand, scientists attached to the Museum of Natural History and other outlets have maintained that we don’t necessarily need to make orca dance in the water to preserve them for scientific study. It is only the profit motive that keeps such shows in business, because it is an expensive endeavor to feed and house whales that cannot survive in the wild.
We are shocked when a woman’s face is torn off by her pet chimpanzee, but isn’t the real matter whether such an animal is really a pet at all? I don’t want to engage in blaming the victim, but someone who is mauled by a wild animal, no matter how long domesticated, was playing with a fire they couldn’t possibly understand and it was only a matter of time before being burned. So when we consider Telly the killer whale, it’s helpful to remember the killer part. Society needs to make more of a commitment to scientific study and preservation of the natural world so that animals may live in their rightful habitat, without developing a dependency on humans. But that entails a harder choice, which is paying for it out of public or private coffers. In the end, if we can make some money and save a few whales, we’ll likely do just that.
If the only way to see a horse is at the track or to see a whale is at a marina, we’re doing something terribly, terribly wrong. Not necessarily to the horse, since it is in their observed nature to run the hills and plains, but to our posterity. To make a greyhound race on a track is cruel because of the way it is practiced – the use of drugs, selective breeding that leads to infirmities – and its only practical results; entertainment for the audience and profit for the venue owners.
The point is we consider gladiatorial combat barbaric because it pitted slaves against each other and ended in the death of one, if not both. The slaves’ lack of free will in the matter is essential to our understanding of this as a moral issue. Perhaps the best thing to come from the recent tragic death of Telly’s trainer is that we have a fresh opportunity to look at our relationship to the natural world and really ask ourselves how far do we need to go for thrills and kicks.
Are you not entertained?
© David Mark Speer
Friday, February 26, 2010
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Dispatches…
23 February 2010
This morning’s news reports the New York State Senate and Assembly will soon take up the matter of medical marijuana and the state will be the 15th in the Union to allow for the use of cannabis in prescribed ways. This marks progress toward getting many people the help they need to deal with the litany of diseases whose symptoms are alleviated by the use of cannabis, but conservative elements are setting themselves up to limit the number of ailments marijuana might be used to treat.
In a case like this, advocates can only hope to get as much progress as they can in the first round of legislation and leave the door open to expanding usage parameters after the law has been enacted and the benefits studied. As with most civil rights legislation – and marijuana use, medicinal and recreational, is indeed a matter of personal and community liberty – when advocates attempt to drag the wide majority forward kicking and screaming into the promised land of the full extension of rights such as same-sex marriage or full decriminalization the effort stalls. If any benefit is to be gained by allowing for limited medicinal use, it would serve those interested in more loosening best to support the programs lawmakers will allow for now and let consensus catch up to what cannabis users have long known – the healing power of marijuana can soothe not only the aches in our bones, but the soul of every village and town.
Bipartisanship Reboot
Later this week the Obama Administration will present its “opening bid” in negotiations with congressional Republicans on crafting a health insurance reform bill in the wake of the legal sausage-making wreckage now on the table in the D.C. clown college.
Many observers have said the president dropped the health care ball last year in the spring when rather than presenting his majority with a clearly defined plan, the White House allowed the conversation to be hijacked by town hall screamers, lies and distortions about death panels, and to be overtaken in importance by a decaying real economy that is right now best served by knitting the safety net tighter and creating good-paying jobs. Those observers see the picture clearly, in my view, because there’s so much inertia in Congress right now that it makes little sense to keep pushing Ted Kennedy’s last wish up the Hill when most people polled who have coverage say they want no change to the system, especially in light of the deficit spending that will likely subsidize expanding coverage to those who don’t have it.
Furthermore, reaching across the aisle again only to have the hand extended bitten in defiance doesn’t strike me as politically sound; it only proves the point the election of Scott Brown made, the point the Tea Party types keep harping on, the point that CPAC made with their Ron Paul straw poll pick, etc… which is, the loyal opposition is no longer loyal to the republic, only loyal to Republican ideology.
How the administration gets meaningful reform legislation out of the current gridlock holds dire implications for the Democrats’ fortunes, but it seems more and more no matter which party wins, the voting and taxpaying public loses anyway.
© David Mark Speer
This morning’s news reports the New York State Senate and Assembly will soon take up the matter of medical marijuana and the state will be the 15th in the Union to allow for the use of cannabis in prescribed ways. This marks progress toward getting many people the help they need to deal with the litany of diseases whose symptoms are alleviated by the use of cannabis, but conservative elements are setting themselves up to limit the number of ailments marijuana might be used to treat.
In a case like this, advocates can only hope to get as much progress as they can in the first round of legislation and leave the door open to expanding usage parameters after the law has been enacted and the benefits studied. As with most civil rights legislation – and marijuana use, medicinal and recreational, is indeed a matter of personal and community liberty – when advocates attempt to drag the wide majority forward kicking and screaming into the promised land of the full extension of rights such as same-sex marriage or full decriminalization the effort stalls. If any benefit is to be gained by allowing for limited medicinal use, it would serve those interested in more loosening best to support the programs lawmakers will allow for now and let consensus catch up to what cannabis users have long known – the healing power of marijuana can soothe not only the aches in our bones, but the soul of every village and town.
Bipartisanship Reboot
Later this week the Obama Administration will present its “opening bid” in negotiations with congressional Republicans on crafting a health insurance reform bill in the wake of the legal sausage-making wreckage now on the table in the D.C. clown college.
Many observers have said the president dropped the health care ball last year in the spring when rather than presenting his majority with a clearly defined plan, the White House allowed the conversation to be hijacked by town hall screamers, lies and distortions about death panels, and to be overtaken in importance by a decaying real economy that is right now best served by knitting the safety net tighter and creating good-paying jobs. Those observers see the picture clearly, in my view, because there’s so much inertia in Congress right now that it makes little sense to keep pushing Ted Kennedy’s last wish up the Hill when most people polled who have coverage say they want no change to the system, especially in light of the deficit spending that will likely subsidize expanding coverage to those who don’t have it.
Furthermore, reaching across the aisle again only to have the hand extended bitten in defiance doesn’t strike me as politically sound; it only proves the point the election of Scott Brown made, the point the Tea Party types keep harping on, the point that CPAC made with their Ron Paul straw poll pick, etc… which is, the loyal opposition is no longer loyal to the republic, only loyal to Republican ideology.
How the administration gets meaningful reform legislation out of the current gridlock holds dire implications for the Democrats’ fortunes, but it seems more and more no matter which party wins, the voting and taxpaying public loses anyway.
© David Mark Speer
Monday, February 22, 2010
Legerdemain
Cut off from itself
The heart grows cold, slow, and weary –-
Pain oozes easily through its portals
All the gates and alleys run rampant with the poison solitude brings
Love seeps through the skin when blocked up in the body
Some reek of it
Sweat it out like an anti-pheromonal signal betraying the present beating
Of a lonely
Cut off from itself
Heart.
End.rev2. 22 February 2010, 11.44 am, Brooklyn.
© David Mark Speer
The heart grows cold, slow, and weary –-
Pain oozes easily through its portals
All the gates and alleys run rampant with the poison solitude brings
Love seeps through the skin when blocked up in the body
Some reek of it
Sweat it out like an anti-pheromonal signal betraying the present beating
Of a lonely
Cut off from itself
Heart.
End.rev2. 22 February 2010, 11.44 am, Brooklyn.
© David Mark Speer
Thursday, February 18, 2010
How Little We Know
In seventeen minutes, Harry will be severely injured. In about another twenty minutes after that Harry will be dead.
As he unwittingly waits for the hammer to fall, Harry stands with his back against the west facing wall of the Stanwick Building, a ten-story office he’s worked on the tenth floor in as a data entry clerk for the last fourteen years, smoking a cigarette. The butt is menthol, bummed off a co-worker because he didn’t want to buy a pack when he had a pack on his nightstand – the pack he left behind. Harry flicks an ash from the tip, watches it as it floats to the sidewalk and then slowly lifts his head, eyes tracking upward in line with the source of an unfamiliar noise. The sound is something like a screech, more accurately a sustained buzz, and is getting closer.
Annette is coming back from her long lunch, customary in the summer months when she has less and less to do and more time to fill looking busy than she knows what to do with. Usually she will make copies of her firm’s transaction reports and file them manually or from her desktop for the first three and half hours of her day, starting from nine-fifteen until around twelve-five when she goes out for lunch. Being so regular and dedicated has its advantages; no one notices the extra ten minutes break Annette sneaks from time to time.
As she approaches the Stanwick Building, she gets to about twenty feet from where Harry is standing, and she sees him looking up. He seems to be just getting the point of a joke he heard earlier, Annette thinks as she raises her hand to wave hi, and because the seventeen minutes are up, Harry is being struck by and air-conditioning unit that came loose of its moorings in the window of an unoccupied office on the ninth floor, the floor below the archive room where Harry and Annette work.
The air-conditioner strikes Harry squarely on the head, sending him to the ground in a heap of splashing crimson and a mournful, unintelligible wail of pain. He lifts both hands to his forehead and writhes on the ground. Annette rushes over to his side.
The midday sidewalk is filled with pedestrians moving in their chaotic patterns toward designated appointments, drug deals, sales calls, betting windows and the rest of it and some begin to notice the injured man, the blood seeping into the pavement as it pools beneath the barely audible figure in a beige sport coat, black slacks and tennis shoes. They also see and hear the tall, lean red-haired lady in her prim royal blue skirt and white blouse kneeling next to the man shouting, help, anybody – for God’s sake, help – and some of the people begin to mill around the scene. Someone takes out a mobile phone, and others start asking questions like what happened, did anybody see it fall? A wiseass says that guy saw it fall, that’s for sure, and someone else says, he’s bleeding to death, man, that’s not right.
Vincent runs the newsstand outside the Stanwick Building and has seen Harry come and go for the last fourteen years, along with all the others that come and go, and his face is twisted in alarm as he also dials up an ambulance and then calls the precinct house on Sixth Avenue, so they’ll send some beat cop quick to the scene. Annette yells over to Vincent to get some help, quick – he’s dying, she says. Vincent is on hold now, waiting for someone to get back to him and continue taking enough information to dispatch assistance. Harry’s mouth isn’t moving the way it should, but he tries to speak, making wet gurgling sounds that Annette can’t understand as she hovers over him, her right hand holding his left and her left hand stroking his back. It’s as if by smoothing out his jacket she can make him whole again.
Vincent starts speaking again in a very fast and clipped Arthur Avenue patois, rattling off the time and location of the event and describing the victim in a rough outline. There’s not much need to be overly-specific; there’s only one guy on the street right now bleeding as much as Harry and Annette is still by his side. Vincent says this to the operator, hangs up and comes out of the newsstand over to where Harry has fallen.
Vincent’s ice-blue eyes dart back and forth, scanning the crowd that’s gathering and asks did anybody see anything, did you or you or you hear it falling? No response, just a few shrugs and mutterings. Although it is never recommended to move an injured person unless you have training in such things, Annette and Vincent turn Harry over so that his ruined face points to the sky, his left eye obscured by the shattered bones of his skull. The left cheek is gashed and cut to the bone as it hangs from a single thread of tissue. Harry works his jaw spasmodically with no words coming out, just jets of now blackening blood and other bits of flesh that have come loose from the crash. Annette swallows hard and feels sick at her stomach, clutching her sides so as not to vomit.
The smell of blood in the air and Harry’s desperate struggle to speak threatens to overwhelm Annette, but she steadies herself and cradles his head up a little as she kneels beside. I barely know this guy, she thinks, as he struggles. Vincent puts his hand on her shoulder and standing next to her looking for a sign of relief. Others in the crowd listen for sirens, hoping for a wagon to show up and clear this mess away so things can go back to normal.
Harry turns his good eye toward Annette’s hand on his shoulder, and he wants to tell her how much he appreciates her trying to help, but his windpipe has been crushed and he doesn’t have long to live. Harry thinks back, looking into her eyes – of all the times he’s seen her busy doing her work, trying so hard to look busy and how he never said anything. He also thinks about all the times he saw her making it unsteadily back to he cubicle after a long lunch in the summer months and how she was never really drunk, just getting there, as the say. Through bloodied nostrils Harry gets a whiff of gin and tonic coming from Annette’s now-ragged breaths, her eyes cloudy with concern, half a buzz, and tears.
Annette feels Harry’s right arm going slack and his attempts to moan out a cry for help or some last words grow more labored as the minutes melt off the clock. Time speeds up and Annette’s sense of the present is of a series of flashing images, as if everything outside of her and Harry is moving in fast-forward, but they are in slow-motion. She wonders if he ever thought about her, ever noticed her at work or desired her when she walked past his desk in the archives room when she slipped back in from her long lunches. She wonders this, but is snapped back to the moment that is crawling by as Harry spits out more blood and coughs dryly. She feels guilty for thinking of herself at this moment, but it passes. Vincent leads the paramedics over to where Harry is and they move Annette off to the side after asking if she’s all right. No, it is Harry who is dying she says.
One of the paramedics is a rangy black man with dreadlocks and his partner is a compact, powerfully-built blonde with her hair in a ponytail. They take out their equipment and the stretcher and begin clearing Harry’s airway and try to get him to breathe with an oxygen bottle. He begins to spasm and goes into shock when Annette is moved out of his sight, such as it is with only one good eye. The tall paramedic shouts something into his radio in code and the blonde medic spits out the plastic top of a hypodermic needle and injects Harry with a clear solution. The two medics lift Harry’s stretcher and roll it onto the ambulance as the only onlookers concerned with Harry’s fate – Vincent and Annette – look on.
Vincent’s thick forearm is around Annette’s shuddering shoulder and she is crying fast, hot tears as she tries to explain to two policemen what happened, or at least what she saw of what happened. Vincent pats her shoulder gently and she buries her face in his chest, unable to go on. He continues telling the policemen what he saw, how fast it all happened and the policemen write down the facts and thanks them for remaining calm.
The sirens are silent what seems a very long time, and Annette sees the paramedics through the back windows of the wagon. They continue to work on Harry, injecting him and taking his blood pressure and attempting to restore to flow of blood to his cracked-open brain and Annette sees the tall medic’s dreads whip back and forth furiously as he shakes his head. His blonde partner throws down the blood pressure cuff and slowly shakes her head as well.
The sirens start up quickly, and Annette and Vincent are escorted into the Stanwick Building by the two policemen, who are telling them that everything that can be done will be done, and that their friend will get priority treatment.
As Harry breathes his last and the wagon careens out of sight, neither Annette nor Vincent feels it necessary to say that Harry wasn’t their friend. Harry was just some guy who worked in the office and smoked his cigarettes in front of the newsstand.
End. Rev4. 18 February 2010, 12.21 a.m., Brooklyn
© David Mark Speer
As he unwittingly waits for the hammer to fall, Harry stands with his back against the west facing wall of the Stanwick Building, a ten-story office he’s worked on the tenth floor in as a data entry clerk for the last fourteen years, smoking a cigarette. The butt is menthol, bummed off a co-worker because he didn’t want to buy a pack when he had a pack on his nightstand – the pack he left behind. Harry flicks an ash from the tip, watches it as it floats to the sidewalk and then slowly lifts his head, eyes tracking upward in line with the source of an unfamiliar noise. The sound is something like a screech, more accurately a sustained buzz, and is getting closer.
Annette is coming back from her long lunch, customary in the summer months when she has less and less to do and more time to fill looking busy than she knows what to do with. Usually she will make copies of her firm’s transaction reports and file them manually or from her desktop for the first three and half hours of her day, starting from nine-fifteen until around twelve-five when she goes out for lunch. Being so regular and dedicated has its advantages; no one notices the extra ten minutes break Annette sneaks from time to time.
As she approaches the Stanwick Building, she gets to about twenty feet from where Harry is standing, and she sees him looking up. He seems to be just getting the point of a joke he heard earlier, Annette thinks as she raises her hand to wave hi, and because the seventeen minutes are up, Harry is being struck by and air-conditioning unit that came loose of its moorings in the window of an unoccupied office on the ninth floor, the floor below the archive room where Harry and Annette work.
The air-conditioner strikes Harry squarely on the head, sending him to the ground in a heap of splashing crimson and a mournful, unintelligible wail of pain. He lifts both hands to his forehead and writhes on the ground. Annette rushes over to his side.
The midday sidewalk is filled with pedestrians moving in their chaotic patterns toward designated appointments, drug deals, sales calls, betting windows and the rest of it and some begin to notice the injured man, the blood seeping into the pavement as it pools beneath the barely audible figure in a beige sport coat, black slacks and tennis shoes. They also see and hear the tall, lean red-haired lady in her prim royal blue skirt and white blouse kneeling next to the man shouting, help, anybody – for God’s sake, help – and some of the people begin to mill around the scene. Someone takes out a mobile phone, and others start asking questions like what happened, did anybody see it fall? A wiseass says that guy saw it fall, that’s for sure, and someone else says, he’s bleeding to death, man, that’s not right.
Vincent runs the newsstand outside the Stanwick Building and has seen Harry come and go for the last fourteen years, along with all the others that come and go, and his face is twisted in alarm as he also dials up an ambulance and then calls the precinct house on Sixth Avenue, so they’ll send some beat cop quick to the scene. Annette yells over to Vincent to get some help, quick – he’s dying, she says. Vincent is on hold now, waiting for someone to get back to him and continue taking enough information to dispatch assistance. Harry’s mouth isn’t moving the way it should, but he tries to speak, making wet gurgling sounds that Annette can’t understand as she hovers over him, her right hand holding his left and her left hand stroking his back. It’s as if by smoothing out his jacket she can make him whole again.
Vincent starts speaking again in a very fast and clipped Arthur Avenue patois, rattling off the time and location of the event and describing the victim in a rough outline. There’s not much need to be overly-specific; there’s only one guy on the street right now bleeding as much as Harry and Annette is still by his side. Vincent says this to the operator, hangs up and comes out of the newsstand over to where Harry has fallen.
Vincent’s ice-blue eyes dart back and forth, scanning the crowd that’s gathering and asks did anybody see anything, did you or you or you hear it falling? No response, just a few shrugs and mutterings. Although it is never recommended to move an injured person unless you have training in such things, Annette and Vincent turn Harry over so that his ruined face points to the sky, his left eye obscured by the shattered bones of his skull. The left cheek is gashed and cut to the bone as it hangs from a single thread of tissue. Harry works his jaw spasmodically with no words coming out, just jets of now blackening blood and other bits of flesh that have come loose from the crash. Annette swallows hard and feels sick at her stomach, clutching her sides so as not to vomit.
The smell of blood in the air and Harry’s desperate struggle to speak threatens to overwhelm Annette, but she steadies herself and cradles his head up a little as she kneels beside. I barely know this guy, she thinks, as he struggles. Vincent puts his hand on her shoulder and standing next to her looking for a sign of relief. Others in the crowd listen for sirens, hoping for a wagon to show up and clear this mess away so things can go back to normal.
Harry turns his good eye toward Annette’s hand on his shoulder, and he wants to tell her how much he appreciates her trying to help, but his windpipe has been crushed and he doesn’t have long to live. Harry thinks back, looking into her eyes – of all the times he’s seen her busy doing her work, trying so hard to look busy and how he never said anything. He also thinks about all the times he saw her making it unsteadily back to he cubicle after a long lunch in the summer months and how she was never really drunk, just getting there, as the say. Through bloodied nostrils Harry gets a whiff of gin and tonic coming from Annette’s now-ragged breaths, her eyes cloudy with concern, half a buzz, and tears.
Annette feels Harry’s right arm going slack and his attempts to moan out a cry for help or some last words grow more labored as the minutes melt off the clock. Time speeds up and Annette’s sense of the present is of a series of flashing images, as if everything outside of her and Harry is moving in fast-forward, but they are in slow-motion. She wonders if he ever thought about her, ever noticed her at work or desired her when she walked past his desk in the archives room when she slipped back in from her long lunches. She wonders this, but is snapped back to the moment that is crawling by as Harry spits out more blood and coughs dryly. She feels guilty for thinking of herself at this moment, but it passes. Vincent leads the paramedics over to where Harry is and they move Annette off to the side after asking if she’s all right. No, it is Harry who is dying she says.
One of the paramedics is a rangy black man with dreadlocks and his partner is a compact, powerfully-built blonde with her hair in a ponytail. They take out their equipment and the stretcher and begin clearing Harry’s airway and try to get him to breathe with an oxygen bottle. He begins to spasm and goes into shock when Annette is moved out of his sight, such as it is with only one good eye. The tall paramedic shouts something into his radio in code and the blonde medic spits out the plastic top of a hypodermic needle and injects Harry with a clear solution. The two medics lift Harry’s stretcher and roll it onto the ambulance as the only onlookers concerned with Harry’s fate – Vincent and Annette – look on.
Vincent’s thick forearm is around Annette’s shuddering shoulder and she is crying fast, hot tears as she tries to explain to two policemen what happened, or at least what she saw of what happened. Vincent pats her shoulder gently and she buries her face in his chest, unable to go on. He continues telling the policemen what he saw, how fast it all happened and the policemen write down the facts and thanks them for remaining calm.
The sirens are silent what seems a very long time, and Annette sees the paramedics through the back windows of the wagon. They continue to work on Harry, injecting him and taking his blood pressure and attempting to restore to flow of blood to his cracked-open brain and Annette sees the tall medic’s dreads whip back and forth furiously as he shakes his head. His blonde partner throws down the blood pressure cuff and slowly shakes her head as well.
The sirens start up quickly, and Annette and Vincent are escorted into the Stanwick Building by the two policemen, who are telling them that everything that can be done will be done, and that their friend will get priority treatment.
As Harry breathes his last and the wagon careens out of sight, neither Annette nor Vincent feels it necessary to say that Harry wasn’t their friend. Harry was just some guy who worked in the office and smoked his cigarettes in front of the newsstand.
End. Rev4. 18 February 2010, 12.21 a.m., Brooklyn
© David Mark Speer
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Moving Pictures, Forward and Back
As the Academy Awards season swings into high gear, I thought it might be useful to take a closer look at a couple of releases that give might give us some insight into where the art form is going and where it really shouldn’t – for the sake of the audience and to a lesser extent, the filmmaker’s own good.
Directed by Terry Gilliam, “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus” stars Christopher Plummer, Tom Waits and Heath Ledger in his final role. Mr. Gilliam succeeds on almost every level with this film, delivering a complex and nuanced story about an itinerant and immortal magic-show proprietor and his family as they dodge the law and the Doctor wages a centuries-old battle of wits against the Devil (played to the mustache-twirling hilt by Mr. Waits). The plot of this story is relatively simple, although dressed up as it is with wildly rendered fantasy landscapes one gets the impression of not getting the entire picture with only one viewing. Wagering with the Devil doesn’t get you exactly what you expect and even if you win the bet, you’ll still lose is the summary I came away with, although others may see it all differently. It’s a fairy story, a morality play and very old-fashioned in sentiment, even if the techniques used to realize the world of imagination are quite modern. The best thing about “Imaginarium” is that the audience is asked to suspend disbelief entirely and just go with the flow of the story, no matter where that may take you.
As a result, we get to see all sides of each character – vanity, protectiveness, and pride, irredeemable lust for power, duplicity, self-sacrifice, petty anger, and even pure bliss. It’s up to you whether bliss produced by a world made of jewels is better than one made chocolate, and that essential respect for our ability to make up our own minds is where Mr. Gilliam succeeds most powerfully.
The film isn’t entirely even – using three actors to complete the story as a result of Mr. Ledger’s untimely death during filming led to some confusion as to what’s what and who is who – but when the story is so inventive and gently asks so much of the audience in the first place, one can forgive a few wrinkles that never get smoothed out. As for the Oscars, “Imaginarium” garnered two nominations (art direction and costume design) but may not win anything because the film was released in the same year as “Avatar” (which I have not seen and will not comment on). The best chance for Oscar gold may lie with the costume design, which in “Imaginarium” is top-notch and adds subtly to advance the story in each scene, whether the setting is gritty modern England or an absurd chase to a mountaintop. Of course, going up against a film all about clothes and a designer (“Coco Before Chanel”) might make “Imaginarium” a long shot for a statuette. Nonetheless, I would hope this movie gets repeated viewings over the years and becomes something like a “Wizard of Oz” for a new generation. It deserves that kind of adoration and is in my view, just that good.
On the other hand, “The Wolfman,” directed by Joe Johnston (whose best-known credits to date include “The Rocketeer” and “Jumanji”) takes in hand new film technology and an old, old story to create one of the least memorable entries into the venerable canon of lycanthropy lore. Benecio del Toro and Sir Anthony Hopkins team up for this campy, hokey thrill ride full of gratuitous blood-splattering that makes the phrase, “over the top” even more clichéd than the whole production. Although Mr. Johnston stays true to the Universal Studios werewolf tradition in most places, nothing new that was really worth seeing was left in the film. We do learn a little more about why that poor sap Larry Talbot was such a poor sap, but ultimately we’re left in the dark as to why his family was cursed in the first place. Yes, there’s a bit of mumbo-jumbo about finding something not-quite-human in India or somewhere, but the whole thing just doesn’t add up. The only two places this film succeeds are in the visual effects and its pacing which is truly pulse-pounding. Mr. del Toro’s transformation from man to Wolfman is stunning and quite riveting, but this ground was covered by “American Werewolf in London” to much more credible effect. Mind you, that film was released nearly 30 years ago.
“The Wolfman” suffers most from the curse of the remake, where the audience is doomed to see every plot twist coming and the thrills have to come from upping the violence ante at every turn. At any rate, the essential question at the heart of “The Wolfman,” has to do with what separates man from beast and it is a good question. In the end, anyone seeking the answer in a movie is probably better off renting a copy of the 1941 original (“His hideous howl a dirge of death!”) and watching it with the lights off. You won’t learn much about human nature, but you’ll see a far better film.
©David Mark Speer
Directed by Terry Gilliam, “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus” stars Christopher Plummer, Tom Waits and Heath Ledger in his final role. Mr. Gilliam succeeds on almost every level with this film, delivering a complex and nuanced story about an itinerant and immortal magic-show proprietor and his family as they dodge the law and the Doctor wages a centuries-old battle of wits against the Devil (played to the mustache-twirling hilt by Mr. Waits). The plot of this story is relatively simple, although dressed up as it is with wildly rendered fantasy landscapes one gets the impression of not getting the entire picture with only one viewing. Wagering with the Devil doesn’t get you exactly what you expect and even if you win the bet, you’ll still lose is the summary I came away with, although others may see it all differently. It’s a fairy story, a morality play and very old-fashioned in sentiment, even if the techniques used to realize the world of imagination are quite modern. The best thing about “Imaginarium” is that the audience is asked to suspend disbelief entirely and just go with the flow of the story, no matter where that may take you.
As a result, we get to see all sides of each character – vanity, protectiveness, and pride, irredeemable lust for power, duplicity, self-sacrifice, petty anger, and even pure bliss. It’s up to you whether bliss produced by a world made of jewels is better than one made chocolate, and that essential respect for our ability to make up our own minds is where Mr. Gilliam succeeds most powerfully.
The film isn’t entirely even – using three actors to complete the story as a result of Mr. Ledger’s untimely death during filming led to some confusion as to what’s what and who is who – but when the story is so inventive and gently asks so much of the audience in the first place, one can forgive a few wrinkles that never get smoothed out. As for the Oscars, “Imaginarium” garnered two nominations (art direction and costume design) but may not win anything because the film was released in the same year as “Avatar” (which I have not seen and will not comment on). The best chance for Oscar gold may lie with the costume design, which in “Imaginarium” is top-notch and adds subtly to advance the story in each scene, whether the setting is gritty modern England or an absurd chase to a mountaintop. Of course, going up against a film all about clothes and a designer (“Coco Before Chanel”) might make “Imaginarium” a long shot for a statuette. Nonetheless, I would hope this movie gets repeated viewings over the years and becomes something like a “Wizard of Oz” for a new generation. It deserves that kind of adoration and is in my view, just that good.
On the other hand, “The Wolfman,” directed by Joe Johnston (whose best-known credits to date include “The Rocketeer” and “Jumanji”) takes in hand new film technology and an old, old story to create one of the least memorable entries into the venerable canon of lycanthropy lore. Benecio del Toro and Sir Anthony Hopkins team up for this campy, hokey thrill ride full of gratuitous blood-splattering that makes the phrase, “over the top” even more clichéd than the whole production. Although Mr. Johnston stays true to the Universal Studios werewolf tradition in most places, nothing new that was really worth seeing was left in the film. We do learn a little more about why that poor sap Larry Talbot was such a poor sap, but ultimately we’re left in the dark as to why his family was cursed in the first place. Yes, there’s a bit of mumbo-jumbo about finding something not-quite-human in India or somewhere, but the whole thing just doesn’t add up. The only two places this film succeeds are in the visual effects and its pacing which is truly pulse-pounding. Mr. del Toro’s transformation from man to Wolfman is stunning and quite riveting, but this ground was covered by “American Werewolf in London” to much more credible effect. Mind you, that film was released nearly 30 years ago.
“The Wolfman” suffers most from the curse of the remake, where the audience is doomed to see every plot twist coming and the thrills have to come from upping the violence ante at every turn. At any rate, the essential question at the heart of “The Wolfman,” has to do with what separates man from beast and it is a good question. In the end, anyone seeking the answer in a movie is probably better off renting a copy of the 1941 original (“His hideous howl a dirge of death!”) and watching it with the lights off. You won’t learn much about human nature, but you’ll see a far better film.
©David Mark Speer
Friday, February 12, 2010
Strange Double Negative
Not unwell
My low tolerance is high
Backed up down the back way
There are indeed two Agent 99’s
Safe trip, tight environment
I want it, but I know it’s wrong
Where my loins lead me I wish not necessarily to not go,
So I make cavalier comments about divorce in mixed company,
Thirst, this is thirst.
And if you want to buy houses in this game, all the colors have to line up
Or is that a non-sequitur?
End. Rev4. 12 February 2010, 5.00 pm, Brooklyn.
© David Mark Speer
My low tolerance is high
Backed up down the back way
There are indeed two Agent 99’s
Safe trip, tight environment
I want it, but I know it’s wrong
Where my loins lead me I wish not necessarily to not go,
So I make cavalier comments about divorce in mixed company,
Thirst, this is thirst.
And if you want to buy houses in this game, all the colors have to line up
Or is that a non-sequitur?
End. Rev4. 12 February 2010, 5.00 pm, Brooklyn.
© David Mark Speer
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Insult, Injury and Calling a Spade a Spade
This week the American Psychiatric Association announced its proposals for revising the most widely consulted guidebook for diagnosing mental disorders, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (fifth edition). This revamped DSM-V, as it is known, will be used by clinicians and insurers to define the mental diseases of our age and treat the maladies that result from living in a speed-of-light society that can seem on the verge of unraveling at any minute due to economic upheaval, ferocious natural disaster or not getting your Twitter feed in a timely fashion.
Some relatively new disorders did not get the full treatment in DSM-V, for example, internet and gambling addiction (which often seem to go hand in hand, from my observation) did not make the manual. On the other hand, there are categories and full definitions for “binge eating disorder” and “temper dysregulation disorder with dysphoria,” which appear to be age-old problems gussied up for their walk down the red carpet of media attention. If you’re really interested in seeing the full glory of the DSM-V, http://www.dsm5.org/Pages/Default.aspx will provide the text along with the association’s methodology for developing criteria.
The debate over what’s treatable and what’s not, including the more difficult issue of who is sick and who is not, will be solved by revising the DSM, as worthy and effort that may be in and of itself. As someone who has close personal knowledge of autism -- my brother Brian has a pervasive developmental disorder, now to be renamed, “autism spectrum disorder” and will likely live with it the rest of our lives – I can attest to the fact that not having a definition for a condition can lead to disastrous consequences. The large and growing community of people dealing with children diagnosed with autism, Asperger’s syndrome and other such problems knows that when your kid or sibling doesn’t behave normally and that behavior impairs their ability to live a normal life, getting the right diagnosis is key to getting onto the road to recovery, or at least knowing what the hell you’re up against. Many critics of the DSM-V revision point to the explosion in autism and ADD (attention deficit disorder) diagnoses and the inevitable prescription and over-prescription of stimulants like Ritalin as the main reason we need to be careful when creating whole new classes of patients for the pharmaceutical industry. Once we have a name for something, famed t.v. shrink Lucy Van Pelt once said, we can treat it. I paraphrase Ms. Van Pelt, but you get my meaning. More importantly, once we have a name for something, we can give you a drug for it.
The insult and injury I referred to in the title have to do with the number of people who I know have been denied proper treatment or forced by the mental health bureaucracy into pharmacological labyrinths of trial and error, re-trial and more error simply because the doctors can only treat a problem with drugs and they can’t give you a drug until they can see the symptoms laid out in the DSM and match the symptom column with the prescription column.
Looming on the horizon are the millions of people who overate once a week for three months in a row and are now laid up with real diseases brought on by the side effects of the medications prescribed to solve their “binge eating disorder”. Or imagine the hordes of parents packing their pediatricians’ offices to get little Dylan and sweet Eudora fixed up from the anger outbursts that are, “grossly out of proportion in intensity or duration to the situation or provocation,” to quote the proposed DSM-V.
Another point to consider: think of all the college students who now use stimulants (again our old friend Ritalin drops in for a visit) on a regular basis to enhance their academic performance. Many of these kids who might have used good old-fashioned coffee to cram for midterms are getting their Ritalin from their younger siblings back home that have it coming out of their ears due to over-prescription. This has created a secondary black market for the stimulants in case you can’t get them prescribed, which isn’t likely and the new DSM-V will likely make easier. And even the green revolution has reason to worry. Our sewers and ground water are now so contaminated with pharmaceuticals we can’t boil the water long enough to get it clean.
People who love people with behavior disorders are not the only ones that need to be concerned about this creeping over-medicalization (not exactly a word, but again, you get my meaning). What used to be called “fat bastardism” or a simple temper tantrum might very soon be medical conditions worthy of paid time off from work, therapy, support groups and every modern medical/psychiatric intervention known to man. And if they haven’t found a cure for the disease yet, they’ll invent the disease and then cure it.
Americans in particular have only themselves to blame when it comes to the softening of our society, meaning that problems earlier generations dealt with as a matter of course we have to take pills and 12-step programs to get through. Depression-era hard times made a lot of people’s grandma cheap, but she didn’t have “post-recession disorder”. Someone who ate like a pig on Friday night and felt like crap on Saturday in the Seventies was a fat bastard, now they have a “binge-eating disorder”. Ridiculous on top of ridiculousness, but what isn’t funny is that if we stay true to form and the pharmaceutical industry stays true to its form, we’ll have a lot of internet-addicted, temper-dysphoriac binge-eaters at the helm of every bus, train and ship.
Maybe soon we’ll get a Standard Manual of Common Sense, and everyone can take two pages and not call their doctor in the morning.
© David Mark Speer, Brooklyn
Some relatively new disorders did not get the full treatment in DSM-V, for example, internet and gambling addiction (which often seem to go hand in hand, from my observation) did not make the manual. On the other hand, there are categories and full definitions for “binge eating disorder” and “temper dysregulation disorder with dysphoria,” which appear to be age-old problems gussied up for their walk down the red carpet of media attention. If you’re really interested in seeing the full glory of the DSM-V, http://www.dsm5.org/Pages/Default.aspx will provide the text along with the association’s methodology for developing criteria.
The debate over what’s treatable and what’s not, including the more difficult issue of who is sick and who is not, will be solved by revising the DSM, as worthy and effort that may be in and of itself. As someone who has close personal knowledge of autism -- my brother Brian has a pervasive developmental disorder, now to be renamed, “autism spectrum disorder” and will likely live with it the rest of our lives – I can attest to the fact that not having a definition for a condition can lead to disastrous consequences. The large and growing community of people dealing with children diagnosed with autism, Asperger’s syndrome and other such problems knows that when your kid or sibling doesn’t behave normally and that behavior impairs their ability to live a normal life, getting the right diagnosis is key to getting onto the road to recovery, or at least knowing what the hell you’re up against. Many critics of the DSM-V revision point to the explosion in autism and ADD (attention deficit disorder) diagnoses and the inevitable prescription and over-prescription of stimulants like Ritalin as the main reason we need to be careful when creating whole new classes of patients for the pharmaceutical industry. Once we have a name for something, famed t.v. shrink Lucy Van Pelt once said, we can treat it. I paraphrase Ms. Van Pelt, but you get my meaning. More importantly, once we have a name for something, we can give you a drug for it.
The insult and injury I referred to in the title have to do with the number of people who I know have been denied proper treatment or forced by the mental health bureaucracy into pharmacological labyrinths of trial and error, re-trial and more error simply because the doctors can only treat a problem with drugs and they can’t give you a drug until they can see the symptoms laid out in the DSM and match the symptom column with the prescription column.
Looming on the horizon are the millions of people who overate once a week for three months in a row and are now laid up with real diseases brought on by the side effects of the medications prescribed to solve their “binge eating disorder”. Or imagine the hordes of parents packing their pediatricians’ offices to get little Dylan and sweet Eudora fixed up from the anger outbursts that are, “grossly out of proportion in intensity or duration to the situation or provocation,” to quote the proposed DSM-V.
Another point to consider: think of all the college students who now use stimulants (again our old friend Ritalin drops in for a visit) on a regular basis to enhance their academic performance. Many of these kids who might have used good old-fashioned coffee to cram for midterms are getting their Ritalin from their younger siblings back home that have it coming out of their ears due to over-prescription. This has created a secondary black market for the stimulants in case you can’t get them prescribed, which isn’t likely and the new DSM-V will likely make easier. And even the green revolution has reason to worry. Our sewers and ground water are now so contaminated with pharmaceuticals we can’t boil the water long enough to get it clean.
People who love people with behavior disorders are not the only ones that need to be concerned about this creeping over-medicalization (not exactly a word, but again, you get my meaning). What used to be called “fat bastardism” or a simple temper tantrum might very soon be medical conditions worthy of paid time off from work, therapy, support groups and every modern medical/psychiatric intervention known to man. And if they haven’t found a cure for the disease yet, they’ll invent the disease and then cure it.
Americans in particular have only themselves to blame when it comes to the softening of our society, meaning that problems earlier generations dealt with as a matter of course we have to take pills and 12-step programs to get through. Depression-era hard times made a lot of people’s grandma cheap, but she didn’t have “post-recession disorder”. Someone who ate like a pig on Friday night and felt like crap on Saturday in the Seventies was a fat bastard, now they have a “binge-eating disorder”. Ridiculous on top of ridiculousness, but what isn’t funny is that if we stay true to form and the pharmaceutical industry stays true to its form, we’ll have a lot of internet-addicted, temper-dysphoriac binge-eaters at the helm of every bus, train and ship.
Maybe soon we’ll get a Standard Manual of Common Sense, and everyone can take two pages and not call their doctor in the morning.
© David Mark Speer, Brooklyn
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Guardian of Forever
Or,
For the 9th Street, 4th Avenue El
Toward the margins of the neighborhood,
In the lost spaces,
The old town that was bustling in the long ago decays and every block has become the places where corners bend into dead ends and some of the numbers are fractions…
Silvery quiet of four in the afternoon on a November Monday wraps me up like a fog,
My feet need not touch the ground,
I go left,
West, to be exact,
Along the sidewalk ringing the area under the trestle that has been marked off as a playground,
Playground,
Minefield of garbage to say the truth of it,
Frayed black wooden bats cling upside down to a rotten chain-link fence…
Hanging like a flag in the middle of the trestle block from one of the supports is a sign with fading red lettering in gunmetal gray,
Fifty years old if it’s a day,
It says, “First Machinery Corp.”
And it says this suspended over what was never a door,
Nowhere in sight is any trace of anything that could ever have remotely or possibly have been the “First Machinery Corp.” –
So where did the company go?
Silly question,
It’s gone,
The sign remains,
Always having been in the wrong place,
The sign remains,
Commemorating nothing,
Opening a door to the past…
Many such journeys are possible,
None of which will make any more sense than this one did in the end.
End. Rev4. 10 February 2010, 6.36 pm, Brooklyn
© David Mark Speer
Toward the margins of the neighborhood,
In the lost spaces,
The old town that was bustling in the long ago decays and every block has become the places where corners bend into dead ends and some of the numbers are fractions…
Silvery quiet of four in the afternoon on a November Monday wraps me up like a fog,
My feet need not touch the ground,
I go left,
West, to be exact,
Along the sidewalk ringing the area under the trestle that has been marked off as a playground,
Playground,
Minefield of garbage to say the truth of it,
Frayed black wooden bats cling upside down to a rotten chain-link fence…
Hanging like a flag in the middle of the trestle block from one of the supports is a sign with fading red lettering in gunmetal gray,
Fifty years old if it’s a day,
It says, “First Machinery Corp.”
And it says this suspended over what was never a door,
Nowhere in sight is any trace of anything that could ever have remotely or possibly have been the “First Machinery Corp.” –
So where did the company go?
Silly question,
It’s gone,
The sign remains,
Always having been in the wrong place,
The sign remains,
Commemorating nothing,
Opening a door to the past…
Many such journeys are possible,
None of which will make any more sense than this one did in the end.
End. Rev4. 10 February 2010, 6.36 pm, Brooklyn
© David Mark Speer
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
In Fifteen Minutes
The suicide bomber will strap on his vest…
This is for the glory of God,
For I am not worthy of earthly grace,
The infidel will feel his wrath through me,
And paradise waits on the other side –
Some jackass will piss off his bartender…
I never said you were a bastard,
The word was chiseler,
You cheap sonofabitch,
All right, that’s it –
The clock will tick…
Time slips forward and back,
Erasing itself from existence,
As you try to watch its flow,
This is as true as you’ll ever know –
Your world will get up-ended…
End and start all over again,
Each moment a chance for redemption,
Carrying with it an opportunity,
To set it to rights –
Taxis won’t stop…
Freezing rain beats into my skin,
Isn’t my money still green?
No matter, just another shovel into the grave,
My keys still fit all my locks.
End. Rev2. 9 February 2010, 8.58 pm, Brooklyn
© David Mark Speer
This is for the glory of God,
For I am not worthy of earthly grace,
The infidel will feel his wrath through me,
And paradise waits on the other side –
Some jackass will piss off his bartender…
I never said you were a bastard,
The word was chiseler,
You cheap sonofabitch,
All right, that’s it –
The clock will tick…
Time slips forward and back,
Erasing itself from existence,
As you try to watch its flow,
This is as true as you’ll ever know –
Your world will get up-ended…
End and start all over again,
Each moment a chance for redemption,
Carrying with it an opportunity,
To set it to rights –
Taxis won’t stop…
Freezing rain beats into my skin,
Isn’t my money still green?
No matter, just another shovel into the grave,
My keys still fit all my locks.
End. Rev2. 9 February 2010, 8.58 pm, Brooklyn
© David Mark Speer
Binary
Chapter One: Planetfall
On the 27th day out from Space Station Mariah, the Hendrix and its complement of 200 set down on an asteroid devoid of life and set about the work of terraforming. How they got there is an old story with an easy ending. You jump and then you hope.
Seemingly endless void stretches out beyond the rock as it looms into view. With instruments on and your visor down, you can make out large nearby celestial objects or at least read enough telemetry to scan away for later study. But seeing it now, even though it has become familiar in its way, is still breathtaking.
All the more because I got to blow the hatch and take the first crew in. My first landing as crew chief and section leader. And they said this boy would never make it. Twelve minutes to apogee.
I can’t believe I’m doing this, taking a crew in and among them is Van, the best soldier in Space Force and the toughest woman in I’ve ever known. I pray for the engines to die smoothly and planetfall will turn out to be just a pressurized descent with a little jolt at the end to let you know you’re still alive; and I pray for this not to be the day of the firestorm.
As visions of stars flash through my mind, I pray harder and feel my ribs crushed back into my spinal column and the retrorockets kick into atmospheric control attitude. The rush of depressurization washes over me like a cool evening tide and I stop praying.
The miracle is here. Maybe tomorrow will come the firestorm.
The work itself is clockwork, simple stuff that anyone with good reflexes and some sensitivity to the instruments could handle under normal circumstances, but in space risk is ever present and reward walks hand in hand with the reaper.
It was steady, regular work for Kimbro and the others in his quasi-military unit -- comprised of 50 recruits direct from Space Force Central Command, all carrying the rank of ensign. The ensigns served the rest of the crew their meals and after a while, began to see themselves as the engine that drove the armada. The other 150 in the regiment were ranked according to seniority or specialty, those with technical knowledge or a particularly keen aptitude for tactical missions holding the highest stations. Kimbro was only 23, but had risen quickly out of the ensign corps and into Operations, serving as navigator and survey chief. The Hendrix’ pilot, Commander Brooks Atkinson, relied on the younger man heavily, and the Hendrix was a profitable ship mainly due to properly surveyed jobs, with their handiwork standing out among the many AstroTech installations they had a hand in building. They would need Kimbro’s instincts and logic to get through the next six days, but they couldn’t have known that, or more accurately have understood how much they would need him on day twenty seven. Kimbro’s left palm itched a little in the center, as he reached for the control panel touch screen to pull up the star charts that were updated hourly by the control computers. That itch was familiar, an old friend that never failed him; he called it the love touch, and when he had it, there was never any doubt that he would remain on course.
The current trip was planned for years in advance by AstroTech engineers on Earth and the orbital colonies for the Moon, but had been delayed by an unexpected revolt by the terraforming drones at work on dozens of Martian colonial asteroids – artificial satellites bestowed upon the red planet after the first successful terraform mission in 2034 established the drones as reliable workers in harsh environments.
AstroTech beat out NASA after the deregulation of 2020 for a monopoly on the space travel and satellite launch business that sprung up in response to the wild success of the Lunar Colonization Project. Armed with all the resources of United Earth Inc., the LCP started the advanced research which led to the creation of the Santana class scout lander/terraformer and sent out 19 to meet the Martian business challenge.
Kimbro and three other ensigns, including Van, fell in behind the commander as he opened the hatch and stepped out onto the amber asteroid’s dust. Atkinson looked over his left should, held up two fingers and crooked them to beckon Kimbro. The surveyor ambled up, grabbing the prelim charts off the network and beaming them directly to the commander’s visor. “Good work, son. Just what I needed to know.” After a time he said, “Look sharp. Twenty kilometers dead ahead. That’s where we’ll dig our first well and drop the enzyme pack to begin terraforming.”
Van and the others spread out, forming the wings of a V-formation, all armed and ready for danger. The drones had taken to the shadows, hiding behind gigantic rock formations and burrowing deep into the asteroid to avoid detection from orbit. They could be anywhere and if the AstroTech briefings were to be believed, they were now sentient and set on stopping any further development of the colonial asteroids by AstroTech or its Space Force cannon fodder. Van looked ahead to the point where Kimbro walked alongside the commander just in time to see how far the drones had advanced.
In almost the wink of an eye, Atkinson was dragged down into a ten-meter wide hole that opened beneath his feet. Kimbro and the rest of the company stepped back from the point, and then instinctively leaned forward to try and catch the falling commander. It was no use.
The drones had set their trap and the end of Atkinson’s life was broadcast to each member of the scouting party via radio link, which they had looped to include the others waiting back in the drop ship.
to be continued…
On the 27th day out from Space Station Mariah, the Hendrix and its complement of 200 set down on an asteroid devoid of life and set about the work of terraforming. How they got there is an old story with an easy ending. You jump and then you hope.
Seemingly endless void stretches out beyond the rock as it looms into view. With instruments on and your visor down, you can make out large nearby celestial objects or at least read enough telemetry to scan away for later study. But seeing it now, even though it has become familiar in its way, is still breathtaking.
All the more because I got to blow the hatch and take the first crew in. My first landing as crew chief and section leader. And they said this boy would never make it. Twelve minutes to apogee.
I can’t believe I’m doing this, taking a crew in and among them is Van, the best soldier in Space Force and the toughest woman in I’ve ever known. I pray for the engines to die smoothly and planetfall will turn out to be just a pressurized descent with a little jolt at the end to let you know you’re still alive; and I pray for this not to be the day of the firestorm.
As visions of stars flash through my mind, I pray harder and feel my ribs crushed back into my spinal column and the retrorockets kick into atmospheric control attitude. The rush of depressurization washes over me like a cool evening tide and I stop praying.
The miracle is here. Maybe tomorrow will come the firestorm.
The work itself is clockwork, simple stuff that anyone with good reflexes and some sensitivity to the instruments could handle under normal circumstances, but in space risk is ever present and reward walks hand in hand with the reaper.
It was steady, regular work for Kimbro and the others in his quasi-military unit -- comprised of 50 recruits direct from Space Force Central Command, all carrying the rank of ensign. The ensigns served the rest of the crew their meals and after a while, began to see themselves as the engine that drove the armada. The other 150 in the regiment were ranked according to seniority or specialty, those with technical knowledge or a particularly keen aptitude for tactical missions holding the highest stations. Kimbro was only 23, but had risen quickly out of the ensign corps and into Operations, serving as navigator and survey chief. The Hendrix’ pilot, Commander Brooks Atkinson, relied on the younger man heavily, and the Hendrix was a profitable ship mainly due to properly surveyed jobs, with their handiwork standing out among the many AstroTech installations they had a hand in building. They would need Kimbro’s instincts and logic to get through the next six days, but they couldn’t have known that, or more accurately have understood how much they would need him on day twenty seven. Kimbro’s left palm itched a little in the center, as he reached for the control panel touch screen to pull up the star charts that were updated hourly by the control computers. That itch was familiar, an old friend that never failed him; he called it the love touch, and when he had it, there was never any doubt that he would remain on course.
The current trip was planned for years in advance by AstroTech engineers on Earth and the orbital colonies for the Moon, but had been delayed by an unexpected revolt by the terraforming drones at work on dozens of Martian colonial asteroids – artificial satellites bestowed upon the red planet after the first successful terraform mission in 2034 established the drones as reliable workers in harsh environments.
AstroTech beat out NASA after the deregulation of 2020 for a monopoly on the space travel and satellite launch business that sprung up in response to the wild success of the Lunar Colonization Project. Armed with all the resources of United Earth Inc., the LCP started the advanced research which led to the creation of the Santana class scout lander/terraformer and sent out 19 to meet the Martian business challenge.
Kimbro and three other ensigns, including Van, fell in behind the commander as he opened the hatch and stepped out onto the amber asteroid’s dust. Atkinson looked over his left should, held up two fingers and crooked them to beckon Kimbro. The surveyor ambled up, grabbing the prelim charts off the network and beaming them directly to the commander’s visor. “Good work, son. Just what I needed to know.” After a time he said, “Look sharp. Twenty kilometers dead ahead. That’s where we’ll dig our first well and drop the enzyme pack to begin terraforming.”
Van and the others spread out, forming the wings of a V-formation, all armed and ready for danger. The drones had taken to the shadows, hiding behind gigantic rock formations and burrowing deep into the asteroid to avoid detection from orbit. They could be anywhere and if the AstroTech briefings were to be believed, they were now sentient and set on stopping any further development of the colonial asteroids by AstroTech or its Space Force cannon fodder. Van looked ahead to the point where Kimbro walked alongside the commander just in time to see how far the drones had advanced.
In almost the wink of an eye, Atkinson was dragged down into a ten-meter wide hole that opened beneath his feet. Kimbro and the rest of the company stepped back from the point, and then instinctively leaned forward to try and catch the falling commander. It was no use.
The drones had set their trap and the end of Atkinson’s life was broadcast to each member of the scouting party via radio link, which they had looped to include the others waiting back in the drop ship.
to be continued…
Monday, February 8, 2010
The Mists of Reason
The hard cruel blasting wind, in an effort to exert influence over the uncontrollable is sometimes given a name or a face. The storm you can call by name, you can grasp, and somehow falls more easily within range of understanding.
Gentle, soothing breezes are known by a variety of names, personalities. Zephyr, trade wind, swell, tramontana… all speak to us not with any voice they possess but with the one we gave them. Should that influence be thought benign, so then it is.
The power of wind harnessed, redirected may be witnessed if one works in a mill, but truly the wind in all its ways is impossible to see. It simply lives by its effect, being both the actor and the acted upon. To the dreamer then, when the blade spins, God whispers from across the ocean of space and the chasm of time.
To truly experience the power of the wind, in all its guises, one must be close to it, and give oneself to it trustingly and without regard to consequence – the lesson learned is the only reward; one must sail.
Moonlit bayside cottages,
Sloops swaying on the water line,
The silver glow of night on water,
From the point a light sweeps the seas,
Beneath the keel, the water’s power churns,
In the distance,
Hanging vines and willows just shed,
Are set to dancing by an unseen animator,
That same which presses against the window,
And whistles,
Whines and careens,
Bellows,
And caresses,
All of this beneath a canopy of stars,
Web-work of timber and canvas,
Shower of meteors,
Laughter of grand and happy angels,
As the mainsail unfurls,
The mists of reason lift,
Only the push of the rig through the waves,
Only the vagaries,
Only the unseen remains.
End. Rev4. 12.40 pm 8 February 2010, Brooklyn
© David Mark Speer
Gentle, soothing breezes are known by a variety of names, personalities. Zephyr, trade wind, swell, tramontana… all speak to us not with any voice they possess but with the one we gave them. Should that influence be thought benign, so then it is.
The power of wind harnessed, redirected may be witnessed if one works in a mill, but truly the wind in all its ways is impossible to see. It simply lives by its effect, being both the actor and the acted upon. To the dreamer then, when the blade spins, God whispers from across the ocean of space and the chasm of time.
To truly experience the power of the wind, in all its guises, one must be close to it, and give oneself to it trustingly and without regard to consequence – the lesson learned is the only reward; one must sail.
Moonlit bayside cottages,
Sloops swaying on the water line,
The silver glow of night on water,
From the point a light sweeps the seas,
Beneath the keel, the water’s power churns,
In the distance,
Hanging vines and willows just shed,
Are set to dancing by an unseen animator,
That same which presses against the window,
And whistles,
Whines and careens,
Bellows,
And caresses,
All of this beneath a canopy of stars,
Web-work of timber and canvas,
Shower of meteors,
Laughter of grand and happy angels,
As the mainsail unfurls,
The mists of reason lift,
Only the push of the rig through the waves,
Only the vagaries,
Only the unseen remains.
End. Rev4. 12.40 pm 8 February 2010, Brooklyn
© David Mark Speer
Every cliche in the book
After every Super Bowl, we all get a chance to look back at the spectacle and laugh and laugh at the human tendency to reduce our experiences to the lowest common denominator and at the same time share the joy of a communal experience.
The problem is that the experience itself is a cliché, a world-weary and frankly tiresome exercise in gluttony, meaningless revelry and sanctimony all wrapped up in the American flag.
This year’s annual pilgrimage to Madison Avenue was a triumph of the human spirit over adversity, the turning of a grim page in our nation’s recent history, or some such sentimental hogwash (and I’m not referring to the kind that Frank Capra mastered). Then again, the conventional wisdom doesn’t always hold true – Manning wasn’t perfect, the ads were not the best part of the show – and that in itself is a small, good thing we can all hold up as a gleaming virtue. Without listing in numbing detail all the shortcomings of our federal and state responses to the devastation of hurricane Katrina, suffice it to say that the Gulf region affected is in large part still in desperate shape. No number of drunken women flashing crowds on Bourbon Street is going to make a damn bit of difference to someone who is still fighting with FEMA, the insurance companies and the overall shrunken economy to simply get back to a tenuous lower-middle class (or lower) standard of living. So as happy as we all may be to see a perennial loser come out on top, it may bear remembering that the victory is only one of sport and not some clarion call to a blessed new day for New Orleans and yes, all of the good old U.S. of A.
When thinking specifically about the supposed cultural relevance of the Super Bowl, one can’t help but discuss the advertising. This year we got treated to new, more acidly cynical takes on the age-old battle of the sexes (spineless guy dragged through a shopping mall, for one) and surrealism in the service of mass consumption (those poor dolphin people begging for salty snacks) and along the way a couple of comments about how lesbians are really cool as long as they excite heterosexuals. That, along with a pair of ancient Englishmen croaking their way through a greatest hits reel and pretty good football game constitutes just about every cliché in the book.
8 February 2010, Brooklyn.
1.41 pm
The problem is that the experience itself is a cliché, a world-weary and frankly tiresome exercise in gluttony, meaningless revelry and sanctimony all wrapped up in the American flag.
This year’s annual pilgrimage to Madison Avenue was a triumph of the human spirit over adversity, the turning of a grim page in our nation’s recent history, or some such sentimental hogwash (and I’m not referring to the kind that Frank Capra mastered). Then again, the conventional wisdom doesn’t always hold true – Manning wasn’t perfect, the ads were not the best part of the show – and that in itself is a small, good thing we can all hold up as a gleaming virtue. Without listing in numbing detail all the shortcomings of our federal and state responses to the devastation of hurricane Katrina, suffice it to say that the Gulf region affected is in large part still in desperate shape. No number of drunken women flashing crowds on Bourbon Street is going to make a damn bit of difference to someone who is still fighting with FEMA, the insurance companies and the overall shrunken economy to simply get back to a tenuous lower-middle class (or lower) standard of living. So as happy as we all may be to see a perennial loser come out on top, it may bear remembering that the victory is only one of sport and not some clarion call to a blessed new day for New Orleans and yes, all of the good old U.S. of A.
When thinking specifically about the supposed cultural relevance of the Super Bowl, one can’t help but discuss the advertising. This year we got treated to new, more acidly cynical takes on the age-old battle of the sexes (spineless guy dragged through a shopping mall, for one) and surrealism in the service of mass consumption (those poor dolphin people begging for salty snacks) and along the way a couple of comments about how lesbians are really cool as long as they excite heterosexuals. That, along with a pair of ancient Englishmen croaking their way through a greatest hits reel and pretty good football game constitutes just about every cliché in the book.
8 February 2010, Brooklyn.
1.41 pm
Saturday, February 6, 2010
The Problem With Only Working the Problem
In a recent Atlantic article, James Fallows attempts to answer an age-old and essentially American question, that is, “Can America Rise Again?” With deft insight gained from years of experience writing on technology and foreign policy in places like China, Japan and Europe, Mr. Fallows reacquaints us with the tradition of doom and gloom predictions of American decline, in both our popular expression and our politics – to edifying effect, to be sure.
The article points out a lot about what’s wrong with this country and usefully points the way toward fixing our many troubling troubles. The long and short of Fallows’ argument is, in my view, that American exceptionalism is alive and well, for a number of compelling reasons. Whatever else is wrong, we still live in the kind of cultural environment that is the envy of the world, our universities turn out techies and thinkers who can innovate at a higher more flexible level than any in the world and our private economy can still create opportunities so that a middle-class standard of living is reasonably attainable. The big whatever else that’s wrong is that our politics are antiquated – cases in point, the two-party system and the Electoral College – and structurally the Constitution is difficult to amend, leaving us plenty of time to dicker over grain subsidies, useless weapons systems, bridges to nowhere, don’t ask/don’t tell and school prayer while, according the American Society of Civil Engineers, one out of every four bridges is, “structurally deficient or functionally obsolete.” And that’s just the start of it.
If there is any reason to look forward with hope, it may lie in the underlying optimism of Mr. Fallows’ prescription for the polity and society, but we may very well be undermined by our exceptionally American way of finding more effective ways to solve problems that don’t need to be solved – in other words, the over-reliance on better tactics rather than sound strategic thinking.
One point the article brings up is that back in the “Contract On America” days, Newt Gingrich and his gang abolished the Office of Technology Assessment (established during the Nixon Administration; sometimes you just have to hand it to Nixon). The OTA was something like the Congressional Budget Office and helped to steer technical advancements into the marketplace as American creations before they got gobbled up by some other world power. Without that key agency, even if we have the capability to say, set up a network of electric car refilling stations across the country, we have no central office charged with figuring out how to implement the solution. We’d rather let the invisible hand that doesn’t exist direct the market, straight into second place in technical development.
From the way we fight our wars to the way we power our homes, perhaps the only way for the U.S. to remain a viable, vibrant hope for the world is for each and every one of us to find a fundamentally new way of thinking about our lives. We cannot continue to live only in the moment and cope with issues as they arise ad hoc, willy-nilly, and most significantly only for ourselves. All the little fixes we’ve come up with for managing our devices and data, scheduling our time, robbing Peter and skimming off Paul’s payment, all these stalls and hedges against making the tough choices we know we must make together are a symptom of focusing mainly on alleviating our immediate pains, rather than strategically mapping out a plan for the continued health of America as a society, a beacon to the world, and a really good idea (however flawed in its current execution).
To sum up, the way forward through history is marked by periods of crisis in which truly great societies somehow collectively force themselves to commit to great works of imagination and inspiration (rebuilding Europe after WWII or going to the Moon) whose fruits will be mostly realized by some future generation and not so much in our lifetimes. Our lifetimes are so very short, even with an average of 75 years allotted to most nowadays, we choose at our own peril to spend all our energies on today’s comfort over our posterity’s. So much so that poetic justice might just prevail and give us nothing but dystopia as a reward for having so diligently feathered our nests and building so many houses of cards on so many foundations of quicksand.
End. Rev1 7.01 pm, 06 February 2010, Brooklyn© David Mark Speer
The article points out a lot about what’s wrong with this country and usefully points the way toward fixing our many troubling troubles. The long and short of Fallows’ argument is, in my view, that American exceptionalism is alive and well, for a number of compelling reasons. Whatever else is wrong, we still live in the kind of cultural environment that is the envy of the world, our universities turn out techies and thinkers who can innovate at a higher more flexible level than any in the world and our private economy can still create opportunities so that a middle-class standard of living is reasonably attainable. The big whatever else that’s wrong is that our politics are antiquated – cases in point, the two-party system and the Electoral College – and structurally the Constitution is difficult to amend, leaving us plenty of time to dicker over grain subsidies, useless weapons systems, bridges to nowhere, don’t ask/don’t tell and school prayer while, according the American Society of Civil Engineers, one out of every four bridges is, “structurally deficient or functionally obsolete.” And that’s just the start of it.
If there is any reason to look forward with hope, it may lie in the underlying optimism of Mr. Fallows’ prescription for the polity and society, but we may very well be undermined by our exceptionally American way of finding more effective ways to solve problems that don’t need to be solved – in other words, the over-reliance on better tactics rather than sound strategic thinking.
One point the article brings up is that back in the “Contract On America” days, Newt Gingrich and his gang abolished the Office of Technology Assessment (established during the Nixon Administration; sometimes you just have to hand it to Nixon). The OTA was something like the Congressional Budget Office and helped to steer technical advancements into the marketplace as American creations before they got gobbled up by some other world power. Without that key agency, even if we have the capability to say, set up a network of electric car refilling stations across the country, we have no central office charged with figuring out how to implement the solution. We’d rather let the invisible hand that doesn’t exist direct the market, straight into second place in technical development.
From the way we fight our wars to the way we power our homes, perhaps the only way for the U.S. to remain a viable, vibrant hope for the world is for each and every one of us to find a fundamentally new way of thinking about our lives. We cannot continue to live only in the moment and cope with issues as they arise ad hoc, willy-nilly, and most significantly only for ourselves. All the little fixes we’ve come up with for managing our devices and data, scheduling our time, robbing Peter and skimming off Paul’s payment, all these stalls and hedges against making the tough choices we know we must make together are a symptom of focusing mainly on alleviating our immediate pains, rather than strategically mapping out a plan for the continued health of America as a society, a beacon to the world, and a really good idea (however flawed in its current execution).
To sum up, the way forward through history is marked by periods of crisis in which truly great societies somehow collectively force themselves to commit to great works of imagination and inspiration (rebuilding Europe after WWII or going to the Moon) whose fruits will be mostly realized by some future generation and not so much in our lifetimes. Our lifetimes are so very short, even with an average of 75 years allotted to most nowadays, we choose at our own peril to spend all our energies on today’s comfort over our posterity’s. So much so that poetic justice might just prevail and give us nothing but dystopia as a reward for having so diligently feathered our nests and building so many houses of cards on so many foundations of quicksand.
End. Rev1 7.01 pm, 06 February 2010, Brooklyn© David Mark Speer
How Much, How Long?
Two questions pervade,
Need answers,
Require attention and the straight story,
The short of it,
The point of the tale,
Quickly cut to the quick,
Dead to me,
Long time coming,
Too short in the remembering,
Cuts perfect ice,
The bulldog gets fed,
Day by easy day,
It gets easier to lie to yourself,
To go ten yards out the way,
Overshoot the mark by overthinking the problem,
Lope backwards over your own synapses long enough to get tired,
Tired of the whole thing,
Knowing that if those supply ships had got there just a little earlier,
The whole goddamn deal would have turned out different,
And yet and still,
Those questions sit unanswered,
Rotting on the vine,
How much, how long,
What you need to know,
The end of the story,
The beginning of wisdom.
End. Rev2 6 February 2010, 2.35 p.m.
© David Mark Speer, Brooklyn.
Need answers,
Require attention and the straight story,
The short of it,
The point of the tale,
Quickly cut to the quick,
Dead to me,
Long time coming,
Too short in the remembering,
Cuts perfect ice,
The bulldog gets fed,
Day by easy day,
It gets easier to lie to yourself,
To go ten yards out the way,
Overshoot the mark by overthinking the problem,
Lope backwards over your own synapses long enough to get tired,
Tired of the whole thing,
Knowing that if those supply ships had got there just a little earlier,
The whole goddamn deal would have turned out different,
And yet and still,
Those questions sit unanswered,
Rotting on the vine,
How much, how long,
What you need to know,
The end of the story,
The beginning of wisdom.
End. Rev2 6 February 2010, 2.35 p.m.
© David Mark Speer, Brooklyn.
Salvo is such a violent word
Since the page is blank, it has to be filled with something.
That's almost too easy, but it is the essence of creation. Start at the beginning, which for all practical purposes is right here, right now.
Start with anything, the way God did, and create light because it will be easier to see what you're doing. Of course, it would help to not get deluded into equating one's ability to type with the creation of the universe, but who really would that help? The reader? No, they come to the work with their own set of preconceptions and hang-ups and delusions, so to hold back on the hubris really can only help the writer help the reader and maybe begin to square the circle.
Manifestoes are boring and generally the province of the insane or the Marxist, so I'm not going the grand declaration route. So here's an introduction to my idea of the best use of this space, and then I'm going to go do something else.
In a few words, the work I'm going to do here will combine short stories, poems and commentary on living in this magical, post-partisan, socially-networked, garden spot of a rapidly gentrifying world and the way I'll get better is to see what the reader (yes, that deluded, hung-up sonofagun again) thinks, feels, gets upset with or just agrees with like a bobbleheaded booby. Who doesn't like being agreed with no matter how inane their positions and arguments? And yes, a sentence ago what you saw was simply an excuse to use the word, "booby".
As you're reading this, you might be thinking, "What's wrong with this guy? Doesn't he get the point of blogging? And why doesn't he just get on with it?" You would be right to think such things, and any answer I could provide would just lead you down the wrong road and maybe only tangentially to the right conclusion. You'll figure out what's wrong with me as we go along and you'll tell me in no uncertain terms, I'm certain. At some point we'll talk about the radio, the movies that we know and whether our love is here to stay, and in that discussion some politics, sex and drinking might come up as well. Whatever you think of this first post, don't call it an opening salvo.
Salvo is such a violent word.
That's almost too easy, but it is the essence of creation. Start at the beginning, which for all practical purposes is right here, right now.
Start with anything, the way God did, and create light because it will be easier to see what you're doing. Of course, it would help to not get deluded into equating one's ability to type with the creation of the universe, but who really would that help? The reader? No, they come to the work with their own set of preconceptions and hang-ups and delusions, so to hold back on the hubris really can only help the writer help the reader and maybe begin to square the circle.
Manifestoes are boring and generally the province of the insane or the Marxist, so I'm not going the grand declaration route. So here's an introduction to my idea of the best use of this space, and then I'm going to go do something else.
In a few words, the work I'm going to do here will combine short stories, poems and commentary on living in this magical, post-partisan, socially-networked, garden spot of a rapidly gentrifying world and the way I'll get better is to see what the reader (yes, that deluded, hung-up sonofagun again) thinks, feels, gets upset with or just agrees with like a bobbleheaded booby. Who doesn't like being agreed with no matter how inane their positions and arguments? And yes, a sentence ago what you saw was simply an excuse to use the word, "booby".
As you're reading this, you might be thinking, "What's wrong with this guy? Doesn't he get the point of blogging? And why doesn't he just get on with it?" You would be right to think such things, and any answer I could provide would just lead you down the wrong road and maybe only tangentially to the right conclusion. You'll figure out what's wrong with me as we go along and you'll tell me in no uncertain terms, I'm certain. At some point we'll talk about the radio, the movies that we know and whether our love is here to stay, and in that discussion some politics, sex and drinking might come up as well. Whatever you think of this first post, don't call it an opening salvo.
Salvo is such a violent word.
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