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Sunday night. Still have one dog walk to go, so haven't yet taken off my boots.
Watched an odd little movie tonight. About suicides off of the Golden Gate Bridge. Plus queer. Quiet. Don't know if you could say "stylized"--- if you did, it might give the misimpression of gimmickry, which it avoids. But it uses unusual cinematic style. I liked it. Gorgeous to look at. If you love San Francisco, you should see it just for that. The narration/voiceover in the first part, butch dyke diary excerpts, is particularly good stuff. How its touching on intimacy and fear and desire (and drive/hunger/ache related thereto) connects to the suicide theme that's to come, it's left to us to feel, figure out. And that's especially nice.
(Now available on DVD, and Netflix has it.)
Had a date w/Dennis K. last night. So did about 200 other people. He was good. He talked about international relations and interpersonal relations, and violence & nonviolence & compassion in both. He told us a little of his family of origin, discussed in his recent memoir. ("When you grow up like I did, where there's constant chaos and fighting, you learn to love peace," he told Publisher's Weekly, "and you also learn that the conflicts we have in our lives aren't inevitable, it's not that we're made that way.") He spoke of envisioning a societal version of punctuated equilibrium, a phenomenon in evolutionary biology that has been borrowed as a model in policy studies. We can change, he says, and we can change dramatically in a sudden spiral upward.
I keep forgetting to tell people that he used to be a copy editor. That right there speaks to his character, no?
(Now available on DVD, and Netflix has it.)
Had a date w/Dennis K. last night. So did about 200 other people. He was good. He talked about international relations and interpersonal relations, and violence & nonviolence & compassion in both. He told us a little of his family of origin, discussed in his recent memoir. ("When you grow up like I did, where there's constant chaos and fighting, you learn to love peace," he told Publisher's Weekly, "and you also learn that the conflicts we have in our lives aren't inevitable, it's not that we're made that way.") He spoke of envisioning a societal version of punctuated equilibrium, a phenomenon in evolutionary biology that has been borrowed as a model in policy studies. We can change, he says, and we can change dramatically in a sudden spiral upward.
I keep forgetting to tell people that he used to be a copy editor. That right there speaks to his character, no?
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having thrown dennis at you, i am glad to find out more about him. i wish i had been there (for reasons that bear no repeating) and i wish i had witnessed someone advance a *theoretical concept to a "popular" (not to say populist) audience. i want to learn how to do that.
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he also mentioned, all without sounding canned or polished, the falcon & the falconer et al. (and contextualized that poem relative to war), the prioress's badge, and some line from emerson (that one maybe went into cheesy just a little, but i'll forgive that in this politician). more than once he indicated that he knows we can't be perfect or achieve ideals, that the competing forces within human nature are always gonna be there, that we each decide, ongoingly, in individual moments, whether we're going to enact (e.g.) peace or violence. referenced vishnu and shiva in that part. ol' margaret mead poked her head in along in the middle, too.
he's not mr. elegant flowing speechmaker dude, don't get me wrong. he'll pause to think of the right word. sometimes for a few seconds! imagine that.
hey, at the end when he was saying something about how we can communicate with each other from one spot in the world to one very far away in pretty much no time, and how we can also travel about dramatically faster, and that the two collapse time and space in a way that should, or could, help people connect & build compassion and recognized common humanity, he gave the example of how long it took his grandfather (a month) to get to ellis island from a place in what is now croatia, vs. how quickly that trip could be made now.
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i wonder if we are the ones who lack all convictions or the passionate ones. can't tell which is worse. but i always do wonder if "surely" it's all coming. i surely hope it is.
i hope he's right about the collapse of time and space and the approximations of people. i am yet to see it (i find plane travel sapping and disorienting), but i hope he's right, or at least that the story works. i think i can also learn from him how these "workshops" have an effect, even though the crowd is small, but it is the seed crowd, sort of like in a wacky classroom. if you keep two heads straight, those two might reach four. until the second coming, at which point we all get an extended vacation :)
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website of the Bridge Rail Foundation (nicely done)
Olson's op ed in SF Chronicle
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Indeed!
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