Long Thoughts About Different topics
1) Daschunds are definitely not desiged for a tight turning radius and cats aren't always good with kids.
2) Thanks to Petzi for these thoughts about the Sopranos. I never watched the show and know nothing about a resurgence, but this was an interesting view of what it was saying about the state of America to come. It made me curious enough that I put the new movie on my queue even though I know I'll be missing many of the implications for the series.
3) Thanks also to Petzi for posting this essay about everyone being famous:
According to Postman, TV destroyed all that, replacing our written culture with a culture of images that was, in a very literal sense, meaningless. “Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other,” he writes. “They do not exchange ideas; they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.”
Ok, this is just Tumblr vs LJ in another form. This mythical history he conjures is made up of a minority of Americans (even fewer, in some other nations) who were highly literate and totally ignores people who weren't or who had poor access to information for other reasons (I'm thinking of Tom Hanks' character in News of the World, which I watched recently). To me, at least, the big problem with TV has never been its dominance over literacy but the fact that it is such a costly medium to appear on that it favors the very narrow interests of a monied class and is very easy to censor from the inside.
But the breakthrough came when it was discovered that one suspect had attended the wedding of the daughter of their G.R.U. unit’s commander. In a video-posted on Instagram, of course-the commander walks his daughter down the aisle on a lovely dock, to the sounds of a bossa nova cover of “Every Breath You Take.”
What an appropriate wedding song for a family in the spy business. It's yet another good reason not to go to weddings, because those photos get spread everywhere.
the condition of contemporary life is to shepherd entire generations into this spiritual quicksand
There is a lot of truth to that. Even worse, IMO, is that feeding of the ego has been sold to the young as a side hustle. It can excuse what they do to make it seem like a professional endeavor. How else to explain the role of "influencer"? If they were doing anything practical that's what they'd be known by. Otherwise it's much like the whole "popular for being popular" which has existed since before the days of "socialites."
However I'd caveat that even though people can now be known by many strangers, chances are fewer people are truly famous than one would think. I forget now who did the study a few years back, but it revealed that an enormous percentage of people who had high social media followings (as in over 100k) had bought a lot of those followers. Plus there are so many bots circling and following people in hopes of promoting spam, porn, etc. that people are both more well known than they realize but also less famous - a particularly terrible combination should all that public information be one day used against them.
4) I have perhaps unusual opinions on two things I've watched recently, the first being Promising Young Woman. I already knew the gist of the film before watching and forwarded through various parts because it was just hard to watch. The twist with the boyfriend was no surprise as I couldn't believe for a moment he wasn't complicit. I was satisfied with the way the film ended because it seemed to me her life was stuck in an endless loop anyway. I think she was herself suicidal since Nina's death.
One thing I thought was telling was who Cassie put in charge of avenging her. It was somewhat heartening that there was someone with an attack of conscience in the film who was not connected to her. But it's sad to me that it was a man and even sadder that this was the least believable part of the film. Perhaps that was in itself a statement -- that what women do can only go so far, it's up to men to prosecute their own.
But oddly what I was left feeling was that women would be doing much better as a whole if we had more Cassies, not just as activists but even as friends and family members. Looking at my own life, I see Dean Walkers, Mrs. Fishers and Susan Thomases, not someone who would ever avenge me should things go very wrong (and I don't even mean with men, but with other institutions that defend their own such as the medical establishment). Gail is conveniently left out of the equation because she knows nothing about what has gone on in Cassie's life nor is she ever put in a position to take a stand. But women do not come off well here either.
5) The Ken Burns documentary on Muhammad Ali is both a long piece of work and yet maddeningly quiet on too many things surrounding him. Besides knowing Ali was a highly successful boxer I knew next to nothing of his life. I am among those who are appalled that boxing has ever been a legal "sport" much less that it still is, so I knew little about its history and have never watched anything about it, including movies about fictional boxers.
However I have yet to see a Burns documentary in which I was not sucked in regardless of the topic, and this proved true of Ali as well. But it surprised me in ways I didn't expect which is that it takes somewhat for granted that Ali fulfilled his brag about being the greatest boxer ever, and that he was a widely beloved figure. But all it raised in my mind were doubts about what sort of person he was compared to the public mythos.
It seemed to me that the number of people connected to Ali who were willing to speak (or had much to say) were limited compared to outside observers. And, of course, many of the people who were in the story are now dead. But I had so many questions. Such as:
a) Why did these Louisville businessmen create such a favorable protective setup for Ali's career? Why him? Yes, he was a Golden Gloves champ by then and a hometown boy with a sunny disposition. But the suggestion in the doc is that this was an unusual setup, one which was unprecedented in giving Ali a salary, and in which there was a great risk that the men would make very little money in his career. Had they done something like this before? Why were they willing to go against the Mob who the doc said had enormous control over boxing at that time?
b) Given said mob control and the suggestion that Sonny Liston cheated in his bout with Ali, as well as a curious pattern in Ali's career of first losing to an opponent - often, the doc said, due to a lack of training and seeming indifference about the fight - and then creating huge paydays in rematch fights, I was left with doubts about Ali's skills as a fighter. The doc itself stated more than once that his talents were innate but that his technique had been poor, relying on things like his height, reach and speed to simply tire out his opponents. The story about the way he took drugs to drop weight later in his career seemed very suspicious to me. Supposedly it was thyroid medication to speed his metabolism but I have been on thyroid meds for a decade and they have done nothing for my metabolism. What they can do though, if the dosage is too high, is to damage one's heart and cause palpitations. Ali would have done better with speed which I suspect is what he was actually given. There was never any discussion of what counts as a banned substance in boxing.
c) Why was Ali so drawn to Islam so quickly? My impression was that it was a way to combat fear and a world stacked against him, but he also seemed very attracted to dictators. He was already a non-drinker and smoker before he ever became Muslim, but the way he felt about women was extremely offputting and I wonder if that came before or after he became an adherent of the Nation of Islam.
The treatment of the NoI itself seems remarkably hands-off given its history. There is some discussion of how corrupt both Elijah Muhammed and his son (who profited from Ali's career) were, and the suggestion that they assassinated Malcolm X is present. But the discussion of the group focuses a lot on their separatist ambitions and actions to enable black Americans to be self-supporting (something neither new nor unique at the time).
There was a small reference to how Wallace Muhammad attempted to guide the organization to a closer alignment with traditional Islam, but nothing about Farrakhan's takeover or the fact that Wallace disbanded the group in 1985. Given that Ali died in 2016, I had to look up information on him to find that he had followed Wallace's direction to instead attend traditional Islamic institutions.
d) Speaking of offputting, the section on Zaire was also both baffling and telling. Since we never got the POV of anyone from any African nation about Ali's reputation, I failed to see why a fairly successful black American was seen as an aspirational figure to Africans compared to some of Ali's opponents. There was a great quote from Frazier about how Ali got started boxing because someone stole his bike (though the bike theft was really incidental in his discovery of the boxing gym). Frazier asked who had a bike? Certainly he and George Foreman were people who had actually dragged themselves from poverty into success, and the doc noted Ali's cruelty in his attacks on them outside of the ring -- which often focused on their lack of education.
e) That was rich though given that Ali himself, who it was suggested was dyslexic, had passed school against the protests of his teachers and only as a reward for having succeeded in sport. Supposedly he had failed an initial military draft assessment for being mentally incapable. This seems very hard to believe, but it's a lot easier to believe he failed it on purpose given his later opposition to being drafted. I happen to be completely on his side regarding the many good reasons to defy the draft, and there were some rather obvious government shenanigans involved to get him out of the way by sending him abroad. But I suspected his opposition came as much from the example of what happened to Elvis Presley's career after he joined the Army than from religious belief.
f) Ali was reported, repeatedly, to be a soft touch about money and a good friend. Yet I have my doubts about either of these things. For one thing, he was profligate with money, which makes it a lot easier to be generous if you both want to be seen as a big man and don't really care about managing your money. And secondly there were some spectacular betrayals in his life, the one most clearly discussed in the doc being him abandoning Malcolm X. Also the way he seemed to control his entourage spoke less to me of friendship and more of the usual syndrome of stars and their hangers-on. The departure of his longtime doctor Ferdie Pacheco seemed emblematic of how one-way the relationships ran, as he was one of the few who could afford to leave Ali's camp and did so due to his professional ethics.
One thing the documentary did highlight was how often Ali was cruel to people, employing it as more than just trash talking before fights or showmanship during them.
g) He was not a good father. Although the two daughters who spoke of him seemed fond of him, their mother admitted he liked playing with the children for about an hour and then that was it. He preferred to be on the road to being at home and spent very little time with his kids. The doc talked about the amount of womanizing he did later but still didn't even mention several more acknowledged children from affairs or how long many of them went on. It also failed to mention "While still married to Belinda, Ali married Aaisha in an Islamic ceremony that was not legally recognized. According to Khaliah, Aaisha and her mother lived at Ali's Deer Lake training camp alongside Belinda and her children." This despite a good chunk of time devoted to his time at the Deer Lake camp and the suggestion that Belinda and their kids only ever visited, they didn't live there. If in fact he married Aaisha, it was the second time he was a bigamist, having done the same with his third wife while still married to his second.
h) The doc didn't talk about any of the kids' lives, which I was curious about because in situations with absent famous fathers, the kids lives often don't go well. Even though Laila famously went into boxing herself there was only a brief reference to it. I took a look online and the one thing I turned about his only acknowledged son was that he claimed his dad would consider BLM racist. Wow.
i) Ali's career went on long after it should have ended, when he was already ill (though as yet undiagnosed) primarily because he was being exploited for the money his name would still bring as well as his own need for money because of the way he spent it. One wonders how much longer things would have dragged out had his Parkinsons not put a stop to it.
Overall it was a full life that even eight+ hours could barely cover, the last chapter being 1974-2016 which tells you how much got glossed over. What came across to me was that Ali's life was less about Ali and more about what other people made of him. There were efforts in the doc to explain why he meant so much to particular people, particularly Black Americans in the 70s, though during the 60s reaction to him was far more mixed even in Black communities. But I saw him as a very fitting icon indeed for America, both in terms of his use of the media and his own over the top self-promotion.
It made me think of Donald Trump. The fact that his son claims he would support him says more about the son than Ali, since Trump was clearly anti-Islamic and apparently this caused a rift. However Ali supported Ronald Reagan so who knows.
One thing's for sure, the way the doc ended was very moving no matter what one thought of Ali. The reading by Wole Sotinka of his Ali poem At the Ringside was apparently written 30 years before his death but was still fitting. It ends as follows:
Cassius Marcellus, Warrior, Muhammed Prophet,
Flesh is clay, all, all too brittle mould.
The bout is over. Frayed and split and autographed,
The gloves are hung up in the Hall of Fame -
Still loaded, even from that first blaze of gold
And glory. Awed multitudes will gaze,
New questers feast on these mementos
And from their shell-shocked remnants
Re-invoke the spell.
But the sorcerer is gone,
The lion withdrawn to a lair of time and space
Inaccessible as the sacred lining of a crown
When kings were kings, and lords of rhyme and pace.
The enchantment is over but, the spell remains.
View poll: Kudos Footer-318
Comments at Dreamwidth
.
2) Thanks to Petzi for these thoughts about the Sopranos. I never watched the show and know nothing about a resurgence, but this was an interesting view of what it was saying about the state of America to come. It made me curious enough that I put the new movie on my queue even though I know I'll be missing many of the implications for the series.
3) Thanks also to Petzi for posting this essay about everyone being famous:
According to Postman, TV destroyed all that, replacing our written culture with a culture of images that was, in a very literal sense, meaningless. “Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other,” he writes. “They do not exchange ideas; they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.”
Ok, this is just Tumblr vs LJ in another form. This mythical history he conjures is made up of a minority of Americans (even fewer, in some other nations) who were highly literate and totally ignores people who weren't or who had poor access to information for other reasons (I'm thinking of Tom Hanks' character in News of the World, which I watched recently). To me, at least, the big problem with TV has never been its dominance over literacy but the fact that it is such a costly medium to appear on that it favors the very narrow interests of a monied class and is very easy to censor from the inside.
But the breakthrough came when it was discovered that one suspect had attended the wedding of the daughter of their G.R.U. unit’s commander. In a video-posted on Instagram, of course-the commander walks his daughter down the aisle on a lovely dock, to the sounds of a bossa nova cover of “Every Breath You Take.”
What an appropriate wedding song for a family in the spy business. It's yet another good reason not to go to weddings, because those photos get spread everywhere.
the condition of contemporary life is to shepherd entire generations into this spiritual quicksand
There is a lot of truth to that. Even worse, IMO, is that feeding of the ego has been sold to the young as a side hustle. It can excuse what they do to make it seem like a professional endeavor. How else to explain the role of "influencer"? If they were doing anything practical that's what they'd be known by. Otherwise it's much like the whole "popular for being popular" which has existed since before the days of "socialites."
However I'd caveat that even though people can now be known by many strangers, chances are fewer people are truly famous than one would think. I forget now who did the study a few years back, but it revealed that an enormous percentage of people who had high social media followings (as in over 100k) had bought a lot of those followers. Plus there are so many bots circling and following people in hopes of promoting spam, porn, etc. that people are both more well known than they realize but also less famous - a particularly terrible combination should all that public information be one day used against them.
4) I have perhaps unusual opinions on two things I've watched recently, the first being Promising Young Woman. I already knew the gist of the film before watching and forwarded through various parts because it was just hard to watch. The twist with the boyfriend was no surprise as I couldn't believe for a moment he wasn't complicit. I was satisfied with the way the film ended because it seemed to me her life was stuck in an endless loop anyway. I think she was herself suicidal since Nina's death.
One thing I thought was telling was who Cassie put in charge of avenging her. It was somewhat heartening that there was someone with an attack of conscience in the film who was not connected to her. But it's sad to me that it was a man and even sadder that this was the least believable part of the film. Perhaps that was in itself a statement -- that what women do can only go so far, it's up to men to prosecute their own.
But oddly what I was left feeling was that women would be doing much better as a whole if we had more Cassies, not just as activists but even as friends and family members. Looking at my own life, I see Dean Walkers, Mrs. Fishers and Susan Thomases, not someone who would ever avenge me should things go very wrong (and I don't even mean with men, but with other institutions that defend their own such as the medical establishment). Gail is conveniently left out of the equation because she knows nothing about what has gone on in Cassie's life nor is she ever put in a position to take a stand. But women do not come off well here either.
5) The Ken Burns documentary on Muhammad Ali is both a long piece of work and yet maddeningly quiet on too many things surrounding him. Besides knowing Ali was a highly successful boxer I knew next to nothing of his life. I am among those who are appalled that boxing has ever been a legal "sport" much less that it still is, so I knew little about its history and have never watched anything about it, including movies about fictional boxers.
However I have yet to see a Burns documentary in which I was not sucked in regardless of the topic, and this proved true of Ali as well. But it surprised me in ways I didn't expect which is that it takes somewhat for granted that Ali fulfilled his brag about being the greatest boxer ever, and that he was a widely beloved figure. But all it raised in my mind were doubts about what sort of person he was compared to the public mythos.
It seemed to me that the number of people connected to Ali who were willing to speak (or had much to say) were limited compared to outside observers. And, of course, many of the people who were in the story are now dead. But I had so many questions. Such as:
a) Why did these Louisville businessmen create such a favorable protective setup for Ali's career? Why him? Yes, he was a Golden Gloves champ by then and a hometown boy with a sunny disposition. But the suggestion in the doc is that this was an unusual setup, one which was unprecedented in giving Ali a salary, and in which there was a great risk that the men would make very little money in his career. Had they done something like this before? Why were they willing to go against the Mob who the doc said had enormous control over boxing at that time?
b) Given said mob control and the suggestion that Sonny Liston cheated in his bout with Ali, as well as a curious pattern in Ali's career of first losing to an opponent - often, the doc said, due to a lack of training and seeming indifference about the fight - and then creating huge paydays in rematch fights, I was left with doubts about Ali's skills as a fighter. The doc itself stated more than once that his talents were innate but that his technique had been poor, relying on things like his height, reach and speed to simply tire out his opponents. The story about the way he took drugs to drop weight later in his career seemed very suspicious to me. Supposedly it was thyroid medication to speed his metabolism but I have been on thyroid meds for a decade and they have done nothing for my metabolism. What they can do though, if the dosage is too high, is to damage one's heart and cause palpitations. Ali would have done better with speed which I suspect is what he was actually given. There was never any discussion of what counts as a banned substance in boxing.
c) Why was Ali so drawn to Islam so quickly? My impression was that it was a way to combat fear and a world stacked against him, but he also seemed very attracted to dictators. He was already a non-drinker and smoker before he ever became Muslim, but the way he felt about women was extremely offputting and I wonder if that came before or after he became an adherent of the Nation of Islam.
The treatment of the NoI itself seems remarkably hands-off given its history. There is some discussion of how corrupt both Elijah Muhammed and his son (who profited from Ali's career) were, and the suggestion that they assassinated Malcolm X is present. But the discussion of the group focuses a lot on their separatist ambitions and actions to enable black Americans to be self-supporting (something neither new nor unique at the time).
There was a small reference to how Wallace Muhammad attempted to guide the organization to a closer alignment with traditional Islam, but nothing about Farrakhan's takeover or the fact that Wallace disbanded the group in 1985. Given that Ali died in 2016, I had to look up information on him to find that he had followed Wallace's direction to instead attend traditional Islamic institutions.
d) Speaking of offputting, the section on Zaire was also both baffling and telling. Since we never got the POV of anyone from any African nation about Ali's reputation, I failed to see why a fairly successful black American was seen as an aspirational figure to Africans compared to some of Ali's opponents. There was a great quote from Frazier about how Ali got started boxing because someone stole his bike (though the bike theft was really incidental in his discovery of the boxing gym). Frazier asked who had a bike? Certainly he and George Foreman were people who had actually dragged themselves from poverty into success, and the doc noted Ali's cruelty in his attacks on them outside of the ring -- which often focused on their lack of education.
e) That was rich though given that Ali himself, who it was suggested was dyslexic, had passed school against the protests of his teachers and only as a reward for having succeeded in sport. Supposedly he had failed an initial military draft assessment for being mentally incapable. This seems very hard to believe, but it's a lot easier to believe he failed it on purpose given his later opposition to being drafted. I happen to be completely on his side regarding the many good reasons to defy the draft, and there were some rather obvious government shenanigans involved to get him out of the way by sending him abroad. But I suspected his opposition came as much from the example of what happened to Elvis Presley's career after he joined the Army than from religious belief.
f) Ali was reported, repeatedly, to be a soft touch about money and a good friend. Yet I have my doubts about either of these things. For one thing, he was profligate with money, which makes it a lot easier to be generous if you both want to be seen as a big man and don't really care about managing your money. And secondly there were some spectacular betrayals in his life, the one most clearly discussed in the doc being him abandoning Malcolm X. Also the way he seemed to control his entourage spoke less to me of friendship and more of the usual syndrome of stars and their hangers-on. The departure of his longtime doctor Ferdie Pacheco seemed emblematic of how one-way the relationships ran, as he was one of the few who could afford to leave Ali's camp and did so due to his professional ethics.
One thing the documentary did highlight was how often Ali was cruel to people, employing it as more than just trash talking before fights or showmanship during them.
g) He was not a good father. Although the two daughters who spoke of him seemed fond of him, their mother admitted he liked playing with the children for about an hour and then that was it. He preferred to be on the road to being at home and spent very little time with his kids. The doc talked about the amount of womanizing he did later but still didn't even mention several more acknowledged children from affairs or how long many of them went on. It also failed to mention "While still married to Belinda, Ali married Aaisha in an Islamic ceremony that was not legally recognized. According to Khaliah, Aaisha and her mother lived at Ali's Deer Lake training camp alongside Belinda and her children." This despite a good chunk of time devoted to his time at the Deer Lake camp and the suggestion that Belinda and their kids only ever visited, they didn't live there. If in fact he married Aaisha, it was the second time he was a bigamist, having done the same with his third wife while still married to his second.
h) The doc didn't talk about any of the kids' lives, which I was curious about because in situations with absent famous fathers, the kids lives often don't go well. Even though Laila famously went into boxing herself there was only a brief reference to it. I took a look online and the one thing I turned about his only acknowledged son was that he claimed his dad would consider BLM racist. Wow.
i) Ali's career went on long after it should have ended, when he was already ill (though as yet undiagnosed) primarily because he was being exploited for the money his name would still bring as well as his own need for money because of the way he spent it. One wonders how much longer things would have dragged out had his Parkinsons not put a stop to it.
Overall it was a full life that even eight+ hours could barely cover, the last chapter being 1974-2016 which tells you how much got glossed over. What came across to me was that Ali's life was less about Ali and more about what other people made of him. There were efforts in the doc to explain why he meant so much to particular people, particularly Black Americans in the 70s, though during the 60s reaction to him was far more mixed even in Black communities. But I saw him as a very fitting icon indeed for America, both in terms of his use of the media and his own over the top self-promotion.
It made me think of Donald Trump. The fact that his son claims he would support him says more about the son than Ali, since Trump was clearly anti-Islamic and apparently this caused a rift. However Ali supported Ronald Reagan so who knows.
One thing's for sure, the way the doc ended was very moving no matter what one thought of Ali. The reading by Wole Sotinka of his Ali poem At the Ringside was apparently written 30 years before his death but was still fitting. It ends as follows:
Cassius Marcellus, Warrior, Muhammed Prophet,
Flesh is clay, all, all too brittle mould.
The bout is over. Frayed and split and autographed,
The gloves are hung up in the Hall of Fame -
Still loaded, even from that first blaze of gold
And glory. Awed multitudes will gaze,
New questers feast on these mementos
And from their shell-shocked remnants
Re-invoke the spell.
But the sorcerer is gone,
The lion withdrawn to a lair of time and space
Inaccessible as the sacred lining of a crown
When kings were kings, and lords of rhyme and pace.
The enchantment is over but, the spell remains.
View poll: Kudos Footer-318
Comments at Dreamwidth
.