Sunday, August 22, 2010

 

Get Low

This film will be nominated for several Oscars. Of note, of course, Robert Duvall gave the performance of a lifetime and is at least for now, well ahead of the competition for Best Actor. Both Bill Murray and Cissy Spacek will also get nods in their respective Supporting Actor categories. And the film? Well we haven’t seen the usual November and December rush of films which usually make up the bulk of nominations and winners, but this one certainly heads the field right now.

Based on real events, it is the story of a man who is carrying a heavy guilt, incarcerating himself in a house apart from the town for 40 years. The locals see him as a hermit and make up stories about him. And now he is ready to end his self-imposed penitence. He pays for a funeral for himself, to be had while he is still alive. And everyone with a story to tell about him is invited. To tell more here would be doing readers an injustice. This film unfolds so magically, you leave the theatre feeling uplifted. Complete strangers talked to us in the street afterwards, as they knew we had just shared this experience.

I have seen some wonderful films this year, and would recommend Cyrus, The Kids are Alright, The Concert and Kisses, of the films I have seen recently. But this is the first absolute must see film of the year

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Thursday, August 19, 2010

 

Growing number in America believe Obama a Muslim – poll

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11027568

According to a just published poll, the number of Americans who believe that Barack Obama is Muslim has risen from 11% in March 2009 to 18% now. Of respondents proclaiming themselves Republican, 34% believe him to be Muslim and 33% did not know his religion. Apparently, 43% of all respondents didn’t know, which is quite staggering. I wonder how many people doubted Jimmy Carter or George Bush’s religion, even after seeing them go to Church?

The disinformation campaign really seems to have taken root among those who let certain elements of the media do their thinking for them. I wonder how many people who watch CNN or MSNBC take everything that they see as absolute fact unless there is an element of substantiation. And yet it appears that too many people who watch Fox Views Channel or listen to Conservative Shock Jocks need any proof at all to be furnished. If the words match their own ignorance then they are happy to drink and breath them as if they were water and oxygen.

Another finding was that the majority of people who disapprove of Obama are extremely stupid and racist. Or, to put it the way the poll did, people who believe he is a Muslim, overwhelmingly disapprove of his job performance, while the majority of those who believe he is Christian approve.

I firmly believe that everyone is entitled to an opinion. I am obviously naïve in my hope that such opinions will be reached through reasoning, and that since no two people are exactly alike, so no two people will have exactly the same reasons for reaching these opinions. However, this poll is further evidence – not that I for one needed any more - that a very large percentage of Americans do not think for themselves and are capable of denying all evidence presented which goes against what they want to believe. The venom spitters from Fox Views Channel make their cases based upon nothing but ignorance and lies. They need no burden of proof. Their followers hang on to and will believe their every word. What a shame! And I mean that in both senses of the word.

There will always be ignorance in every country. But surely the levels reached here, now, are approaching historic proportions. Polls like these are an embarrassment to every thinking American, whatever their political affiliation or views of the sitting president.

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Monday, August 16, 2010

 

You are you and can only be you

I live in New York and work in Jersey City. This means that my commute is very much against the flow of traffic, as very large numbers of New Jerseyans (New Jerseyites?) work in my home town. So in the morning, after climbing the stairs at Pavonia Newport, I must try to find a turnstile to exit which isn’t backed up with people wishing to enter through it. It can certainly be of more than minor irritation that nobody ever yields to us reverse commuters. We must sometimes forge a path through hostile on rushers so that our fellow New Yorkers may follow.

One morning last week, while 3 of the 4 turnstiles to the left of the station were unavailable to me, I saw that the leftmost turnstile offered a free path. I stepped towards it. A split second before the side of my hip hit the turnstile (I am of that certain height where I dare not exit facing forward, at least without protection, for fear of extreme temporary incapacitation of the instantly eye-watering variety), a woman appeared on the other side.

I continued unabated, as to do anything else would have meant a very sudden change of trajectory – and anyway, the other 3 turnstiles in the bank were still taken by people heading to and not from the Big Apple. As I passed her, I caught her mumbling “asshole”. I didn’t dignify this comment with so much as a stutter in my step or a sideways glance. She had perhaps thought that I arrived after her and should have let her pass before me. Maybe she thought that as a man, I should always let her go first. And maybe, in the spirit of camaraderie between our two great States, she thinks that all New Yorkers are assholes. I will jump to no conclusions as to what prompted her comment, other than that she herself jumped to a conclusion strong enough that she felt justified in calling me a name.

It brought back a moment some years earlier, from the days when I lived in New Jersey and commuted from Newark Penn Station, that had long been buried in my memory, of a failed clairvoyant who knew me better than I knew myself. As I walked towards the turnstiles, I was hedging my bets as to which of the two on either side of me I would enter through. As other commuters will recognise, my decision would be last moment, depending upon which one presented itself as open.

I stepped to the right and a man walked into me quite hard. One of the perils of commuting, and not to be fretted? I excused myself but he yelled: “you were headed for the other turnstile and changed your mind at the last moment.” Again, I did not rise to the bait. It would have achieved nothing other than a pointless, heated exchange. In his mind, I had apparently decided upon a path, so he decided, using this certain knowledge of his, to aim for the turnstile I supposedly changed my tack for at the last moment. His reality was forged with such conviction, that he felt justified in telling me what I had been thinking.

The morals of these stories? Even those of us who rarely give much credence to even our own musings regarding the minds of others, still occasionally jump, or at the minimum pigeon step to conclusions. We know that 90% of these conclusions are 90% wrong (and that 76.3% of all statistics are made up), but our untethered minds still sometimes get the better of our varying levels of common sense. I’m not looking to preach about the lessons to be learned apart from suggesting that nobody should leap to (re)action based strictly upon our version of another’s reality, or waste too much time on these ponderings. Indeed, while we may paint detailed impressions of the workings of another’s mind, the event or thoughts we have so painstakingly (or perhaps instantly) crafted, supposedly from the other’s viewpoint, may have registered with them minimally or not at all.

Ultimately, we can’t help but think from our own viewpoint. Even if we are trying to think from that of someone else who we know very well, the closest we can manage is to come from our understanding of who that person is, from our angle of view and through our viewing filters. So whereas people might presume that they know someone well enough to predict how that person will react, sometimes going so far as to state that they know a certain person better than that person knows themselves, this is at best, really only a form of self-flattery. You are you and can only be you. Admit that you are confined to your own mind and don’t spend any great amount of energy presuming you have successfully got into someone else’s while constructing scenarios that are, at the bottom line, all yours and nothing to do with the person you attribute them to. And sure as hell don’t lose sleep, lose friends, call anyone names or yell at anyone based upon a personal construct that you have labeled as belonging to another.

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