The Internet, Our Brains and the Possibilities, Pro and Con

 













Is it true the Internet is affecting how we think? 

Here is a great and brief exploration of the question by Nicholas Carr, a writer who I just learned has written a new book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing To Our Brains. The link below is to the short video.

 What the Internet Is Doing To Your Brain
As I prepared to start this post, I received an email which I naturally stopped to read. Then I wandered around on the blog and scanned my posts to discover a piece of information about a birding expedition that I wanted to send family who are about to vacation in South Padre.  Then I lost track of what I was doing for a moment before I remembered I was going to write a blog entry. 

And this is a relaxed, easy day. What does my brain look like preparing to face a room full of students who mistook my class as an easy A?

What do you think of this video? I confess I struggle with some of the ideas, particularly the idea that deep, contemplative thinking is required to create works of art. It may be useful at times and for some people, but there are other ways to create. I am a proponent of group projects and know of the value of brain storming with colleagues and working with one or more partners.  

Fifty years together as artists and friends

This ARTS segment was recorded in early April at Brackenridge Park by Sergio Gonzalez, directed and written by me, and edited by David Bibbs. 

The challenge for me was to give each of these artists their due time in a brief documentary segment. That would be about two to three minutes for each person--not enough time to include very much, so I decided to focus on their craft, not personal or even group histories. I hoped 50 years together would say it all!

I was inspired one morning about a day or two before our scheduled shoot, while doing Buteyko breathing exercises, to devise a shot list that would allow me to "frame" the artists with unloading from a vehicle and use those shots of arriving and departing the park as an open and close. 

Thinking visually was challenging, but our KLRN TV (PBS) Executive Producer, Julie Coan's suggestion for our team to study the work of award winning videographer and to read Al Tomkins' Aim For The Heart, Write, Shoot, Report and Produce for TV and Multimedia
really helped to fire up my thinking: I would end each artist's mini-profile with a close up of his signature. 

The shooting was wonderful, the location couldn't be beat, and the music and editing were fabulous. The interviews were succinct and clear about the challenges watercolor painting poses to the artist. 

Not everything worked as I planned, however hard I worked on my shot list. I tried and tried to get the artists to send images of their final work of the pieces they started for us that day to show each of the completed versions, but technology barriers were too many to overcome. 

I'm so proud of this piece! It's great to see inspiration through to completion, but it's never quite like you might envision things. I totally agree with the artist, Clay McGoughy as he taps his temple, "You should see what I see in here!"

San Antonio's Watercolor Gang

The Spurs, The Cowboys, The Eagles and the Movie

Silver Linings Playbook was a good movie to see around this time of year when the San Antonio Spurs are performing their annual ritual of teasing the city with playoff action that has many fans battling something bordering mental illness. 

The film, which deals in a small way with mental health, and touches on our culture's tendency to solve all problems with medication, depicts in an amazingly tender and rare way how fathers and sons treat each other, resemble each other and love each other.

In the film I learned about the value and nature of sports, the passion and emotion that we are allowed to express through our surrogate sports persona-avatars. The steam we are allowed to vent with their wins and losses. 

You have got to give credit to an award-winning movie about ballroom dancing and football. That's a movie for everybody. The love story's ballroom contest is itself a contender for the funniest dance move in cinema history.

Hell's Got Nothing Over Mexico in film: El Infierno

At the start of the movie, I wasn't sure if the film's billing of El Infierno, or Hell, as a comedy was an error. 

So far, the friendly, polite Mexican laborer, Benny, had been sent back by the border patrol to his dusty home in Mexico after 20 years in the U.S., told "don't come back," and was then welcomed home by his dear, old mother with a whalloping slap across the face. Then Benny learns his younger brother, who he had promised to send for while away in the States, earned the name El Diablo, the devil, while Benny was away, before being killed in the narco turf wars of two look-alike brothers who hate each in the way that only family members can.

When the affable and gentle Benny needs money to bail El Diablo's son out of jail, Benny's childhood friend, also turned mafioso, takes him to his patron's ranch to get him a job in what seems to be the only trade visible besides bar-tending or patching up tires: running drugs. We need a guy in a white hat to come into this picture, I said to myself on the couch.

The old mafia don and his wife, who's the brains of the business, have a living room the size of  a museum. The photos of the don and his wife taken with Mexico's ex-president Vicente Fox and shown kneeling piously receiving the blessing of Pope John were the first clues telling me where this film was headed: dangerous and dangerously-funny territory, as in "oh-no-you're-not-going-there." Maybe Benny's old mother's slapping him to say hello was a hint. 

When Benny faints at his first mob-style execution, I sat up straight on the sofa and said, "oh-hell-yes-you-are-going-there!" A film about a complex character, a man caught in the combine.  And though I knew where he would end, I was glued to the screen wondering what I would learn in the story of his journey. Thoughts of white hats were far from my mind now.

It's a modern Godfather story, complete with betrayals and loyalties, corrupt officials and lots of blood and machine-gun fire. What makes this an A film, and not a B, guns-n-tits shoot 'em up, is the dark humor and brutal honesty of the movie. 

El Infierno takes you to the underbelly of the beast of our times:  the centuries-old resentments of the Natives against the Whites, as who Benny is perceived by the native Oaxacan military-trained soldiers-turned narcos with whom he works. Mexico's schizophrenic views of women as either virgins or prostitutes are turned upside down in characters who have no recourse but to think only of themselves, such as Benny's mother,  the knitting shop-keeper who is bought off with drugs to watch out for the mob, or the wife of the don, who is a movie unto herself. She is the more-cruel-than-anyone-woman behind the narco-throne who is surely to blame for her son's being gay, not to mention being murdered.

I'm strangely optimistic for Mexico's future after watching this film. I confess I'm probably myopic in my love for Mexico, but I'm optimistic that a film like this can be made with funding help from the Mexican government. This is not to say after it was completed, the film was later supported by the government, which it was not. I'm mainly optimistic because I'm reminded once again by El Infierno that the arts have a strong role to play in making life--if not better for us--then clearer for us to see. 

Art helps us to observe what the dusty clouds of sharp braking trucks and the commotion and business of everyday life obscure. Picasso with Guernica, Steinbeck with The Grapes of Wrath. The Spanish Civil War and the Great Depression, each seen more easily. Leading us to remember and not make the same mistakes twice, hopefully.

Here in El Infierno is the role of drugs, now entering the lives of off the shelf, average Mexican kids, cops, and even the man at the hotel desk with his own meth addiction. Here is the stereotype of the self-less, sacrificing mother exposed  as empty by Benny's mother, who as she blesses him asks for his new gold watch and for a Walkman like her neighbor's. Here is the handsome "good cop" federal agent promising immunity and protection in return for information such as offered thugs in America, and Benny falling in his trap. The trip through the combine is nearly ended. Here is the childhood friendship of two boys who lovingly call each other 'mi' or my when referring to each other. "Mi Benny" is really no one's, not wanted by the U.S., which has tossed him back, not Mexico's, who sees him only as another grunt with a strong back. 

When Benny finally takes his place at the fancy stretch of cemetery mini-chapels that are set up when men in his family die, we see through the veil of the supposed foundations of Mexican culture, that his religion and faith have also failed him. 

Benny, who was always polite, waited for the patriotic orators to complete their speeches on Mexico's Independence Day when the names of Mexican heroes sound hollow against the fact that more people have died in the drug war there than in the entire 30 year Revolution, which surpasses in carnage that of our own Civil War. Benny waited for the crowd to finish singing the national hymn before paying his respects with an automatic weapon to the assembled powerful elite standing above the celebrating crowd.

For all the seemingly never-ending cycles of misery of greed and drug-born corruption this film exposes, my optimism and my laughter at the irony of the film's story and of its making are my rewards for watching El Infierno.  

After the commercial success of the film in Mexico and its easy availability over Netflix now, if the government regrets its funding of the project, that's too bad. The cat's out of the bag. Anyway, El Infierno is too funny and too accurate to censor. Though, if the brilliant and brave filmmaker ever asks for funding for his work from the government again, he might be told, as was Benny when he was booted out by the border patrol, "don't come back." 

The link below is to the full on-line version, without subtitles. 

I would try to see El Infierno on Netflix, with subtitles, if only for the fun of watching how many ways the word "cabron" is translated. 

Also puzzled at the translation of "mas loco que una cabra" (crazier than a female goat) to "crazier than a shit house rat." Overall, surprised and grateful thanks to the translator, the writer, the director, actors and everyone associated with the making of this amazing and brave film. 

Good luck in finding a new job, too, to the government official who approved its funding.
http://cinefox.tv/ver1957/el-infierno_pelicula-completa.html 


   

Won't Stop Lovin' Him Today

At the ripe old possum age of 81, country western singer George Jones passed away today.

I imagine his signature song, "He Stopped Loving Her Today" will be on the air a record number of times all over the world today, played in homage to the singer. 

Here is a link to a 1980's television performance from Youtube:
http://youtu.be/1R2F9f2Cl6Y

The song has got to be in my list of top country songs of all time.

Here is a fairly recent interview  with the song's writer from NPR's Fresh Airhttp://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129550239

Thank you, Mrs. Landingham

This is a teacher's blog, so it's natural to write about what I teach. In mass media, there's much I've seen and not seen, so it sometimes feels like I live in a foggy watchtower or lighthouse, able to see some but painfully aware of all I cannot see. 

Age and experience makes for high criteria for judging good media. One compares one project to another, sometimes validly, sometimes not. Is a film as heart-breaking as The Wizard of Oz? Does it change the way one thinks like The Smartest Guys in the Room or All The President's Men? Does the play resonate with your own history and experience like La Casa de Bernarda Alba or the film, Callejon de Milagros? 

It is a joy to see new technologies applied to story-telling-- think of Skyfall, the latest 007 film. Yet, story-telling can fall short of its twin-sister, production values and the result is unbalanced work that becomes more common than it should.

West Wing's episode about a pivotal moment in the President's thinking not only met my criterion for a balance between production values and story-telling, it surpassed it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2akDd-VoQwI

Like many, I watch TV on Netflix, on my own time and without ads. Like everyone, I watched it the other way for long enough to figure I've seen enough TV with ads, if the business model is crumbling, hell,  I did my part to encourage and save it. Last night's episode made me wince with pain, cringe in sorrow and stand up with a tall spine with my hands in my pockets to face my own challenges. Mrs. Landinham's words should be heard by everyone "having a bit of a day".

The Director, The Fascist, The Videos and the song, Harlem Shake

http://youtu.be/QkNrSpqUr-E

The Internet's current phenomenon of Harlem Shake videos is interesting to explore. 

Maybe one way to understand the role the videos serve is to think of Pedro Almodovar, the wild and wonderful Spanish director of films such as "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" and a long line of films that break boundaries like children break pinatas.

The end of the control of Spain's dictator, Francisco Franco unleashed the artist Almodovar's pent up frustration and fury, and we, Almodovar's fans worldwide are the grateful, if exhausted, beneficiaries.

The song, "Harlem Shake" has simple lyrics, "con los terroristas"--  which lead me to think that since 9-11-2001, Americans have had an unelected dictator of their own, terrorism. 

The way Harlem Shake has caught on makes me wonder if the song allows people--mostly young men-- to break free from the serious drone-at-work world that has been largely defined by terrorism.