Category Archives: big stuff

On ice cream

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Speaking of foods that no one needs, this must be the most delicious example of one. Creamy, sweet, cold, ice cream is pretty much universally liked by everyone who has ever eaten any. Even bad ice cream is still pretty good. I suppose fish-flavored ice cream might be a little creepy and weird, but I’ll bet it’s been tried–anchovy, anyone? My personal favorite, besides chocolate, is anything with lots of butter and pecans in it. Most people, especially when they need to punish themselves, can eat an entire vat of ice cream, regardless of what the consequences might be–obesity, diabetes, heart disease, lactose intolerance, and death, of course. Common sense just seems to go straight out the window when ice cream comes into picture, including metaphors that make sense. Ice cream is food exaggeration taken to the nth degree. Filled with copious amounts of pure animal fat and dangerous amounts of sugar, this frozen concoction is a slippery slope toward decadence and corruption. Only Dorian Gray could ever eat all the ice cream he ever wanted and, at the same time, ignore the consequences. We kid ourselves and lie to ourselves, willing to justify more ice cream with any excuse no matter how lame and stupid our reasons might be. You know, you think it’s worth it, those few minutes of pleasure while you eat that huge cone of yoghurt and lemon ice cream, but later you feel guilty and hateful because you know you did a bad thing to your body. This is, of course, the great paradox of eating ice cream, that you love the ephemeral moment as the ice cream passes over your tongue, but you despise yourself for ingesting another 800 calories that you never needed in the first place.

On ice cream

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Speaking of foods that no one needs, this must be the most delicious example of one. Creamy, sweet, cold, ice cream is pretty much universally liked by everyone who has ever eaten any. Even bad ice cream is still pretty good. I suppose fish-flavored ice cream might be a little creepy and weird, but I’ll bet it’s been tried–anchovy, anyone? My personal favorite, besides chocolate, is anything with lots of butter and pecans in it. Most people, especially when they need to punish themselves, can eat an entire vat of ice cream, regardless of what the consequences might be–obesity, diabetes, heart disease, lactose intolerance, and death, of course. Common sense just seems to go straight out the window when ice cream comes into picture, including metaphors that make sense. Ice cream is food exaggeration taken to the nth degree. Filled with copious amounts of pure animal fat and dangerous amounts of sugar, this frozen concoction is a slippery slope toward decadence and corruption. Only Dorian Gray could ever eat all the ice cream he ever wanted and, at the same time, ignore the consequences. We kid ourselves and lie to ourselves, willing to justify more ice cream with any excuse no matter how lame and stupid our reasons might be. You know, you think it’s worth it, those few minutes of pleasure while you eat that huge cone of yoghurt and lemon ice cream, but later you feel guilty and hateful because you know you did a bad thing to your body. This is, of course, the great paradox of eating ice cream, that you love the ephemeral moment as the ice cream passes over your tongue, but you despise yourself for ingesting another 800 calories that you never needed in the first place.

On invisible

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The very idea of “invisible” is a little hard to grasp. I’m not just talking about something that is really, really tiny such as an atom or an individual molecule of water, which are pretty much invisible to the human eye. What I want to talk about is something you should be able to see, but for some reason you don’t, and no, I’m not talking about stealth technology, or am I? I am not entirely sure what “invisible” means at all. The Predator can make himself “invisible” by turning on his high-tec camouflage, but that is stealthy technology that makes him hard to see, but he’s not really invisible. I think one needs to ask the hard question, can anything really be invisible that has mass? We know that a magnetic field is invisible, but it also has no mass. Light is visible and invisible according to its wavelength and the ability of the human eye to detect certain wavelengths. Again, for the Predator, other wavelengths are also visible, not invisible. Smells are invisible because the detectable parts per million are so small, we can’t see them with naked eye. If ghosts were real, they would be both visible and invisible at the same time. Certain bombers are invisible in the dark and even radar cannot seem them, but they aren’t really invisible either. Sound is invisible, and the wind is invisible, sort of. I think that it is both frightening and ironic that there are series of horror movies about men who have made themselves invisible, that the invisibility causes insanity and false grandeur. Even the tiniest bugs, amoeba, diatoms, and the like are only invisible because they are tiny and the human eye cannot distinguish anything at the atomic level. Love, or hate, are invisible, but then again, wild emotional abstractions don’t exist in the physical world other than as ideas, not as concrete realities. The closest thing to invisible in our world is the fictional cloaking device that exists in the world of Star Trek, which alters something at the sub-atomic level, changing the time phase of the object, rendering it invisible within its current physical frame and/or context. So I not only don’t know what invisible is, I also have no way of really describing it either. The actual physics of light reflecting off of an object so that said object appears invisible has yet to be truly defeated, except for the world of science fiction. None of this means, however, that we still aren’t working on it, albeit, clandestinely.

On invisible

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The very idea of “invisible” is a little hard to grasp. I’m not just talking about something that is really, really tiny such as an atom or an individual molecule of water, which are pretty much invisible to the human eye. What I want to talk about is something you should be able to see, but for some reason you don’t, and no, I’m not talking about stealth technology, or am I? I am not entirely sure what “invisible” means at all. The Predator can make himself “invisible” by turning on his high-tec camouflage, but that is stealthy technology that makes him hard to see, but he’s not really invisible. I think one needs to ask the hard question, can anything really be invisible that has mass? We know that a magnetic field is invisible, but it also has no mass. Light is visible and invisible according to its wavelength and the ability of the human eye to detect certain wavelengths. Again, for the Predator, other wavelengths are also visible, not invisible. Smells are invisible because the detectable parts per million are so small, we can’t see them with naked eye. If ghosts were real, they would be both visible and invisible at the same time. Certain bombers are invisible in the dark and even radar cannot seem them, but they aren’t really invisible either. Sound is invisible, and the wind is invisible, sort of. I think that it is both frightening and ironic that there are series of horror movies about men who have made themselves invisible, that the invisibility causes insanity and false grandeur. Even the tiniest bugs, amoeba, diatoms, and the like are only invisible because they are tiny and the human eye cannot distinguish anything at the atomic level. Love, or hate, are invisible, but then again, wild emotional abstractions don’t exist in the physical world other than as ideas, not as concrete realities. The closest thing to invisible in our world is the fictional cloaking device that exists in the world of Star Trek, which alters something at the sub-atomic level, changing the time phase of the object, rendering it invisible within its current physical frame and/or context. So I not only don’t know what invisible is, I also have no way of really describing it either. The actual physics of light reflecting off of an object so that said object appears invisible has yet to be truly defeated, except for the world of science fiction. None of this means, however, that we still aren’t working on it, albeit, clandestinely.

On Gabriel García Márquez (and Cien años de soledad)

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It wasn’t the first book I read in Spanish, but it was one of those experiences that completely changed my life. I was completely flummoxed by a book that started with the phrase, “many years later, while standing in front of a firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that afternoon when his father took him to see ice.” Almost as good as Cervantes’ “In a place in La Mancha whose name I don’t care to remember.” You remember the books that change your life. There is a before and an after. I can still see Ursula trying to keep here crazy, scheming husband from melting down their life savings. Or Remedios, la bella, whose smell drove mean crazy. Or the seventeen Aureliano’s. Or the parchments. Or the birth of a baby with the curly pig’s tail. Or the storm which sweeps it all away as the ancient alchemist stands by watching. You cannot read this book and be indifferent about the passion of human relations. Without doing much (or any) literary analysis, I’d say that Macondo, as is the case with lots of imaginary places, is the town where you live, maybe the town you grew up in regardless of your specific geography. Towns evolve, people grow up and change, have families, and the Buendía family no different than my family or yours. What is very interesting about the Buendía family is our opportunity to witness their history, warts and all, floods, disasters, tragedies, triumphs, and the simple day-to-day things that happen in all of our lives that no one ever sees or cares about. Is magical realism real? Who knows, but then again, how many weird things have happened in your own life that seem magical but aren’t? So I read this book in Spanish over a long weekend of about three days. I couldn’t stop. The prose, as Mohammad Ali might have said, “Floats like a butterfly, and stings like a bee.” This is one of the few times I feel sorry for non-spanish speakers–you can’t enjoy the original–it doesn’t speak to you. Today, I also write as a tribute to the man who created that wonderful novel. So the author has gone, but not gone, really. The Buendía family is now immortal, as is the coronel, and the patriarch, and Santiago Nasar, and the very old man with enormous wings.

On Gabriel García Márquez (and Cien años de soledad)

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It wasn’t the first book I read in Spanish, but it was one of those experiences that completely changed my life. I was completely flummoxed by a book that started with the phrase, “many years later, while standing in front of a firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that afternoon when his father took him to see ice.” Almost as good as Cervantes’ “In a place in La Mancha whose name I don’t care to remember.” You remember the books that change your life. There is a before and an after. I can still see Ursula trying to keep here crazy, scheming husband from melting down their life savings. Or Remedios, la bella, whose smell drove mean crazy. Or the seventeen Aureliano’s. Or the parchments. Or the birth of a baby with the curly pig’s tail. Or the storm which sweeps it all away as the ancient alchemist stands by watching. You cannot read this book and be indifferent about the passion of human relations. Without doing much (or any) literary analysis, I’d say that Macondo, as is the case with lots of imaginary places, is the town where you live, maybe the town you grew up in regardless of your specific geography. Towns evolve, people grow up and change, have families, and the Buendía family no different than my family or yours. What is very interesting about the Buendía family is our opportunity to witness their history, warts and all, floods, disasters, tragedies, triumphs, and the simple day-to-day things that happen in all of our lives that no one ever sees or cares about. Is magical realism real? Who knows, but then again, how many weird things have happened in your own life that seem magical but aren’t? So I read this book in Spanish over a long weekend of about three days. I couldn’t stop. The prose, as Mohammad Ali might have said, “Floats like a butterfly, and stings like a bee.” This is one of the few times I feel sorry for non-spanish speakers–you can’t enjoy the original–it doesn’t speak to you. Today, I also write as a tribute to the man who created that wonderful novel. So the author has gone, but not gone, really. The Buendía family is now immortal, as is the coronel, and the patriarch, and Santiago Nasar, and the very old man with enormous wings.

On The Mole People (1956)

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Filmed and released in 1956 as a B movie, The Mole People, is one of the Saturday night camp films starring John Agar that is both good and bad at the same time. Production standards were card board cutouts and paper mâché boulders. As a movie goer you were required to suspend all of your disbelief regarding a plot line with more holes in it than a Swiss cheese. Even as a twelve year-old I thought this movie was awful, but perhaps even in its extreme awfulness one needs to contemplate the enslavement of the mole people. The plot is irrelevant, but the story is an old one, one group enslaves another, using force and violence to get another group to do all of their dirty work. The “mole” people are grotesque monsters, brutes and savages, and they are enslaved by more normal-looking humanoids, light-sensitive Sumerians as it turns out. The film is drenched is various levels of gratuitous violence and inexplicable adventures. The improbability of the storyline is only matched by the horrendous special effects, which turn out to be a flashlight. As a kid, we called this genre of film a “monster” movie in our own naive and simplistic way. Monsters were everywhere back in the 50’s and 60’s when this movie was made–middle of the Cold War, actually. We couldn’t defeat our monsters in real life, so we created troubling rubber-masked non-human monsters to populate the twilight zone of our subconscious. The weird light-fearing albinos and their slaves are thwarted, and the modern world of science and reason are re-established before the crowd walks back out into the real world of mutually ensured self-destruction of the nuclear age–slavery of another kind.

On the bildungsroman

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A German term for the “coming of age” novel, the bildungsroman as a genre is as old as time, as timeless as humanity itself. Customs, traditions, a rite of passage, almost all cultures celebrate the liminal state of the “tweener” in their journey to adulthood. Novelists have pursued the topic of with a certain energy, if not enthusiasm. I would venture to say that most novelists are trying to understand their own coming of age by writing that experience into a work of art that may or may not mirror their own. Perhaps they a looking for redemption, perhaps they are looking for sacrifice, but regardless of their intent, they have left a broad trail of broken dreams, failed intentions, and busted lives. Coming of age is that moment experience supplants innocence, and the grown child looks out at the world with new eyes. The transition may be rocky, painful, full of disillusion, regret, a place where dreams go to die. We find out that we are mortal, imperfect, and finite, but what is worse, we find out who we really might be. The problem is that all young children will eventually turn into adults whether they want to or not. During that transition, youngsters are asked to make a series of decisions about their future, for good or bad. In theory, the bildungsroman is about those experiences and those changes that shape a young person, resulting in a new being. Do you have a favorite “coming-of-age” novel? I’d like to hear about it.

On the bildungsroman

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A German term for the “coming of age” novel, the bildungsroman as a genre is as old as time, as timeless as humanity itself. Customs, traditions, a rite of passage, almost all cultures celebrate the liminal state of the “tweener” in their journey to adulthood. Novelists have pursued the topic of with a certain energy, if not enthusiasm. I would venture to say that most novelists are trying to understand their own coming of age by writing that experience into a work of art that may or may not mirror their own. Perhaps they a looking for redemption, perhaps they are looking for sacrifice, but regardless of their intent, they have left a broad trail of broken dreams, failed intentions, and busted lives. Coming of age is that moment experience supplants innocence, and the grown child looks out at the world with new eyes. The transition may be rocky, painful, full of disillusion, regret, a place where dreams go to die. We find out that we are mortal, imperfect, and finite, but what is worse, we find out who we really might be. The problem is that all young children will eventually turn into adults whether they want to or not. During that transition, youngsters are asked to make a series of decisions about their future, for good or bad. In theory, the bildungsroman is about those experiences and those changes that shape a young person, resulting in a new being. Do you have a favorite “coming-of-age” novel? I’d like to hear about it.