Many years later, while drinking coffee with me in Starbucks, Max sleeping quietly at our feet, the Grinch told me of the day that his heart grew bigger by five sizes. He liked having a name like Cher or Madonna, but it was hard as a youngster because he scared everyone. Though he smiles a lot now, back in the day when he stilled lived in his cave, he suffered from depression and was a prisoner to much darker thoughts than he cared to discuss. Living alone, he said, was a terrible thing and no one should live in complete isolation, especially during the holidays when his solitary ways seemed so much more bitter and lonely than they did the rest of the year. He and Max moved into Whoville that year, after the “incident,” and he took a job fixing musical instruments. After his story broke, though, and the television show came out, he only did the job so he could interact with others. Secretly, he was thrilled that Boris Karloff did his voice. What the cartoon did not really go into was the depth of his depression, the breadth of his isolation, or the blackness of his despair. Up to that point Christmas and its joy had been torture. In those bad old days, he had wept openly in bitter despair upon hearing the music come up the valley to his cave. He was supposed to be happy, but he wasn’t, and he couldn’t figure out why. He sipped his triple-caramel large macchiato (with a triple shot of espresso) and got whipped cream on his lip. He laughed and smiled. Max stirred under the table. He told me about his therapy, his anti-social behavior, and his eventual road to recovery–Dr. Geisel is a genius, he said. His book about depression, and the black hole of despair to which it drove him, will be out in the spring. He is the current mayor of Whoville and hasn’t been back to the cave in years.
Category Archives: monsters
On the Grinch
Many years later, while drinking coffee with me in Starbucks, Max sleeping quietly at our feet, the Grinch told me of the day that his heart grew bigger by five sizes. He liked having a name like Cher or Madonna, but it was hard as a youngster because he scared everyone. Though he smiles a lot now, back in the day when he stilled lived in his cave, he suffered from depression and was a prisoner to much darker thoughts than he cared to discuss. Living alone, he said, was a terrible thing and no one should live in complete isolation, especially during the holidays when his solitary ways seemed so much more bitter and lonely than they did the rest of the year. He and Max moved into Whoville that year, after the “incident,” and he took a job fixing musical instruments. After his story broke, though, and the television show came out, he only did the job so he could interact with others. Secretly, he was thrilled that Boris Karloff did his voice. What the cartoon did not really go into was the depth of his depression, the breadth of his isolation, or the blackness of his despair. Up to that point Christmas and its joy had been torture. In those bad old days, he had wept openly in bitter despair upon hearing the music come up the valley to his cave. He was supposed to be happy, but he wasn’t, and he couldn’t figure out why. He sipped his triple-caramel large macchiato (with a triple shot of espresso) and got whipped cream on his lip. He laughed and smiled. Max stirred under the table. He told me about his therapy, his anti-social behavior, and his eventual road to recovery–Dr. Geisel is a genius, he said. His book about depression, and the black hole of despair to which it drove him, will be out in the spring. He is the current mayor of Whoville and hasn’t been back to the cave in years.
On scary movies
I am currently watching “The Frankenstein meets the Wolf Man.” (1943) One of the multiple, cheap, and tawdry sequels that are so common in the film industry. The studios made all of those sequels, cheap and tawdry, because there was so much money to be made. No matter how bad the films were, they still made tons of money. They made/make money because people loved to be scared, to experience the vicarious thrill of fear that they do not have in their own lives. All scary films are about fear, and yet modern society is quickly becoming scary enough all by itself. Perhaps scary movies are more about the fears we harbor in our sub-conscience than about the ones we face daily on the freeways, at work, or at school. Most of these “monster” movies are based on the beauty and the beast dialectic, and this movie is no different. The beauty here is IIona Massey, a stunning blond actress from Budapest, and she plays opposite both the monster and the wolf man. The voice of reason and modern science is played by Dr. Mannering, the stand-in for the dead Dr. Frankenstein. The problem with making loads of sequels is that in each movie most of the characters are killed, maimed, or burned–often dismembered or frozen, and so you often need an entirely new cast for each film. Characters don’t carry over from movie to movie unless they can’t die or are already undead. The absurdity of life presented by the irrational story lines of most monster movies is a metaphor for the more abstract absurdity that makes up our everyday lives. The frightening part of the Frankenstein movies is the irrational, murderous nature of the crowd, the angry town’s people who want to lynch anything that moves, shouting, screaming, and whining about everything. The truly frightening part of these films occurs when you can’t see a difference between how the crowd acts in the film and how crowds act in real life. Real life, however, is often much more tragic, much more arbitrary than anything that Hollywood could ever dream up. The survivors of riots, earthquakes, and hurricanes can testify to the terrifying reality of the destructive nature of life on earth. Maybe we go to the movies to watch horror pictures and monster movies because, when the film is over, we know we can just get up and walk out.
On scary movies
I am currently watching “The Frankenstein meets the Wolf Man.” (1943) One of the multiple, cheap, and tawdry sequels that are so common in the film industry. The studios made all of those sequels, cheap and tawdry, because there was so much money to be made. No matter how bad the films were, they still made tons of money. They made/make money because people loved to be scared, to experience the vicarious thrill of fear that they do not have in their own lives. All scary films are about fear, and yet modern society is quickly becoming scary enough all by itself. Perhaps scary movies are more about the fears we harbor in our sub-conscience than about the ones we face daily on the freeways, at work, or at school. Most of these “monster” movies are based on the beauty and the beast dialectic, and this movie is no different. The beauty here is IIona Massey, a stunning blond actress from Budapest, and she plays opposite both the monster and the wolf man. The voice of reason and modern science is played by Dr. Mannering, the stand-in for the dead Dr. Frankenstein. The problem with making loads of sequels is that in each movie most of the characters are killed, maimed, or burned–often dismembered or frozen, and so you often need an entirely new cast for each film. Characters don’t carry over from movie to movie unless they can’t die or are already undead. The absurdity of life presented by the irrational story lines of most monster movies is a metaphor for the more abstract absurdity that makes up our everyday lives. The frightening part of the Frankenstein movies is the irrational, murderous nature of the crowd, the angry town’s people who want to lynch anything that moves, shouting, screaming, and whining about everything. The truly frightening part of these films occurs when you can’t see a difference between how the crowd acts in the film and how crowds act in real life. Real life, however, is often much more tragic, much more arbitrary than anything that Hollywood could ever dream up. The survivors of riots, earthquakes, and hurricanes can testify to the terrifying reality of the destructive nature of life on earth. Maybe we go to the movies to watch horror pictures and monster movies because, when the film is over, we know we can just get up and walk out.
On Halloween
Costumes, candy, horror stories, parties, and lots of strange behavior mark the final day of October. I think that most mainstream religion visibly cringes at the religious tones of the holiday, or just relaxes and accepts it openly as one of those strange manifestations of supernatural belief that can neither be denied nor dismissed. There exists a carnivalesque atmosphere that draws people in who dress as zombies, politicians, monsters, superheroes, or whatever as an expression of the innermost desires to be heard and seen as something other than what they are during a routine day. Halloween is definitely a break from the routine, a break from the established social orders, a break from the sadness that often crowds into our daily lives. People wear masks, or perhaps they take one off. They eat candy–lots of it. Perhaps what people are doing with Halloween is confronting their fears–of the darkness, of the unknown, of the future, of economic ruin, of joblessness, of death. The dark, festive nature of Halloween is attractive because it speaks to the repressed desires that lurk just off camera for most people. Whether those desires are sexual, or violent, or perverse, or gluttonous, or lazy is the thing that brings out the ghosts and goblins on the last day of October. The year is winding down, summer is over, and the year is drawing to a close, boredom is creeping in from all sides. Halloween is a salute to our darker natures, the hidden ego, which, for one day a year, gets a chance to go out on the town and play.
On Halloween
Costumes, candy, horror stories, parties, and lots of strange behavior mark the final day of October. I think that most mainstream religion visibly cringes at the religious tones of the holiday, or just relaxes and accepts it openly as one of those strange manifestations of supernatural belief that can neither be denied nor dismissed. There exists a carnivalesque atmosphere that draws people in who dress as zombies, politicians, monsters, superheroes, or whatever as an expression of the innermost desires to be heard and seen as something other than what they are during a routine day. Halloween is definitely a break from the routine, a break from the established social orders, a break from the sadness that often crowds into our daily lives. People wear masks, or perhaps they take one off. They eat candy–lots of it. Perhaps what people are doing with Halloween is confronting their fears–of the darkness, of the unknown, of the future, of economic ruin, of joblessness, of death. The dark, festive nature of Halloween is attractive because it speaks to the repressed desires that lurk just off camera for most people. Whether those desires are sexual, or violent, or perverse, or gluttonous, or lazy is the thing that brings out the ghosts and goblins on the last day of October. The year is winding down, summer is over, and the year is drawing to a close, boredom is creeping in from all sides. Halloween is a salute to our darker natures, the hidden ego, which, for one day a year, gets a chance to go out on the town and play.
On loud commercials
This is not about weird local commercials for flooring or odd used cars or sewage pumping. This is about how television stations raise the sound level of commercials, a move that should be illegal, but still plagues us all. Imagine, you are watching a favorite television show at a normal level of sound. A commercial for pick-up trucks cut in at the same decible level as an old 747, knocking you off of the sofa, leaving you both startled and deaf. I know that “they”, the advertisers have been doing this for decades, but I still hate it. I end up diving for the remote control, spilling my potato chips and soda, in order to hit the mute button. I get it–they want me to pay attention, but really, the exact opposite happens: I take note of the offending product and vow to never, ever to buy it, no matter what it is. Once I get the screen muted, many commercials are actually rather entertaining, especially when you can’t really tell what is being advertised. Since the sound if off, you can’t hear either the music, the sound track or the voice-over, so many times it’s not easy to tell what is being sold at any given moment, especially if they need to use euphemisms to describe the product. I particularly hate the ads for all sanitary products, diapers, catheters and the like. Food ads late at night are despicable. All truck ads are blatantly loud and obnoxious. Some insurance ads, especially if the character is dressed in white, are creepy and sketchy, which is not exactly the image an insurance company wants to put forward. Honestly, if they didn’t turn up the sound during the ads, I might actually listen and watch. In the meantime, I will turn off the sound, defeating the entire purpose of the commercials, and make up my soundtrack and voice-over, all the while maintaining my list of annoying products that I will never use.
On loud commercials
This is not about weird local commercials for flooring or odd used cars or sewage pumping. This is about how television stations raise the sound level of commercials, a move that should be illegal, but still plagues us all. Imagine, you are watching a favorite television show at a normal level of sound. A commercial for pick-up trucks cut in at the same decible level as an old 747, knocking you off of the sofa, leaving you both startled and deaf. I know that “they”, the advertisers have been doing this for decades, but I still hate it. I end up diving for the remote control, spilling my potato chips and soda, in order to hit the mute button. I get it–they want me to pay attention, but really, the exact opposite happens: I take note of the offending product and vow to never, ever to buy it, no matter what it is. Once I get the screen muted, many commercials are actually rather entertaining, especially when you can’t really tell what is being advertised. Since the sound if off, you can’t hear either the music, the sound track or the voice-over, so many times it’s not easy to tell what is being sold at any given moment, especially if they need to use euphemisms to describe the product. I particularly hate the ads for all sanitary products, diapers, catheters and the like. Food ads late at night are despicable. All truck ads are blatantly loud and obnoxious. Some insurance ads, especially if the character is dressed in white, are creepy and sketchy, which is not exactly the image an insurance company wants to put forward. Honestly, if they didn’t turn up the sound during the ads, I might actually listen and watch. In the meantime, I will turn off the sound, defeating the entire purpose of the commercials, and make up my soundtrack and voice-over, all the while maintaining my list of annoying products that I will never use.
On the Borg
Normally, I have few problems separating fiction from fact, fantasy from reality, and unlike Don Quixote, I can tell the difference between a windmill and a giant. Nevertheless, the first time I met the Borg, a race of half-human, half-machine cybernetic drones, I knew I was watching a cautionary tale about the dangers of digital mechanization, the incorporation of technology into the human body, and the uncontrolled growth of technology industries. The Borg, first seen in Star Trek: Next Generation, are a race of biological robots who are controlled by a single “collective”, which is code for eradicating, once and for all, the individual. The actors wear a series of mechanical appliances which are supposed to enhance their biological processes–better eyes, better ears, better hands, whatever, the mechanical parts are better than the biological equivalents. Of course, by eradicating the individual, the social interaction between the drones is less than zero, having been reduced to the social behavior of a colony of bees. The actors playing the drones all look pretty much alike, and their skin is gray, and their amour is black, further erasing the last vestiges of their humanity. The Borg are a kind of cross between undead zombies and Frankenstein’s monster with no will of their own, no thoughts of their own, not really alive or dead—more like machines that have on/off switches. Certainly, there is no personal initiative or ethical or moral codes controlling their behavior. They follow the orders of the “hive” without questioning anything. They don’t even interact with one another, which means they have no emotions, can show no empathy, can show no mercy. They are ideal killers. They are the ultimate consumers of technology as they assimilate the others’ cultures with which they come in contact. The Borg has only one concern: assimilate as many races as possible, adding the uniqueness and technology of each race to their own advantage in search of some sort of ideal perfection. Every time they assimilate a race, they also eradicate the unique identity of each victim, a sort of ethnic cleansing, as it were, to insure the idea that perfection does not lie with the individual, but only with the fascistic collective. Perfection, then, is about eliminating all that is unique or different and bending all of those cultures to some ultra-creepy ideology that is concerned with the pursuit of perfection. Why should we, as a people, be concerned about the Borg? Beyond the fact that they are creepy and dark villains, they are also a metaphor for our own society of consumers who are ruled by the collective marketing strategies of the technology companies who are dedicated to rolling out more and better technology to capture the consumer dollar. One of the side-effects of this technology race is a total lack of concern of what technology does to the people who use it. Can we actually say that computers, cell phones, tablets, and laptops make our lives that much better? In some ways, they do enhance communication, especially for those people who are on the go and hard to get a hold of. I like to have a phone in the car in case of emergencies, but I worry about the time people invest in social media and what that takes away from their relationships. I worry that the technology crushes individuality and creativity, that smart phones and tablets eliminate real face to face communication, that technology isolates the individual, repressing or eliminating real communication. Is the Borg collective our society turned on its head and taken to its last apocalyptic logical conclusion? The day it is possible to have a smart phone implanted into your head so you don’t have to worry about carrying it around or making sure it’s charged is the day we all need to take a good long look at what we are doing, but then again, by then, it may be too late.
On the Borg
Normally, I have few problems separating fiction from fact, fantasy from reality, and unlike Don Quixote, I can tell the difference between a windmill and a giant. Nevertheless, the first time I met the Borg, a race of half-human, half-machine cybernetic drones, I knew I was watching a cautionary tale about the dangers of digital mechanization, the incorporation of technology into the human body, and the uncontrolled growth of technology industries. The Borg, first seen in Star Trek: Next Generation, are a race of biological robots who are controlled by a single “collective”, which is code for eradicating, once and for all, the individual. The actors wear a series of mechanical appliances which are supposed to enhance their biological processes–better eyes, better ears, better hands, whatever, the mechanical parts are better than the biological equivalents. Of course, by eradicating the individual, the social interaction between the drones is less than zero, having been reduced to the social behavior of a colony of bees. The actors playing the drones all look pretty much alike, and their skin is gray, and their amour is black, further erasing the last vestiges of their humanity. The Borg are a kind of cross between undead zombies and Frankenstein’s monster with no will of their own, no thoughts of their own, not really alive or dead—more like machines that have on/off switches. Certainly, there is no personal initiative or ethical or moral codes controlling their behavior. They follow the orders of the “hive” without questioning anything. They don’t even interact with one another, which means they have no emotions, can show no empathy, can show no mercy. They are ideal killers. They are the ultimate consumers of technology as they assimilate the others’ cultures with which they come in contact. The Borg has only one concern: assimilate as many races as possible, adding the uniqueness and technology of each race to their own advantage in search of some sort of ideal perfection. Every time they assimilate a race, they also eradicate the unique identity of each victim, a sort of ethnic cleansing, as it were, to insure the idea that perfection does not lie with the individual, but only with the fascistic collective. Perfection, then, is about eliminating all that is unique or different and bending all of those cultures to some ultra-creepy ideology that is concerned with the pursuit of perfection. Why should we, as a people, be concerned about the Borg? Beyond the fact that they are creepy and dark villains, they are also a metaphor for our own society of consumers who are ruled by the collective marketing strategies of the technology companies who are dedicated to rolling out more and better technology to capture the consumer dollar. One of the side-effects of this technology race is a total lack of concern of what technology does to the people who use it. Can we actually say that computers, cell phones, tablets, and laptops make our lives that much better? In some ways, they do enhance communication, especially for those people who are on the go and hard to get a hold of. I like to have a phone in the car in case of emergencies, but I worry about the time people invest in social media and what that takes away from their relationships. I worry that the technology crushes individuality and creativity, that smart phones and tablets eliminate real face to face communication, that technology isolates the individual, repressing or eliminating real communication. Is the Borg collective our society turned on its head and taken to its last apocalyptic logical conclusion? The day it is possible to have a smart phone implanted into your head so you don’t have to worry about carrying it around or making sure it’s charged is the day we all need to take a good long look at what we are doing, but then again, by then, it may be too late.