Category Archives: Technology

On Sleeper

Posted on by

You know, Woody Allen’s movie, Sleeper (1973), would be funny if it weren’t so profectic. Today we are obsessed with our smart phones, tablets, and laptops to the extent that we would be helpless to do anything if the power went out. Woody awakes in a future world to find giant cooperations taking over the world, technology has disconnected people from nature, and robots have a human form, but they all have the same face. The heart of his satire lies with the juxtaposition of his skinny anti-hero, who takes silly to greater heights, and an advanced civilization whose technology has long since outstripped its feeble ethics and morals. Governments have turned into mechanized oligarchies, and primitive revolutionary groups roam the countryside, spouting anarchy and non-conformity. Technology has triumphed over the human form, and physical love can only be done in a machine. Yet, his satire seems almost innocent. He riffs on the dangers of too much technology, the alienating nature of technology, and the absurd inventions that are supposed to make life better. He also riffs on government, control, oppression, revolution, science, religion, sex, and institutional corruption. The visuals, the dialogues, the jokes play on a well-established cinematic traditions, satirizing a series of films from the late sixties and early seventies that deal with apocalyptic end-of-civilization scenarios. The film only takes itself (half) seriously when the main characters plot to steal the “great” leader’s nose–all that is left of him. “We’re here to see the nose. We hear it’s running.” Sleeper also riffs on Kubrick’s 2001: a Space Odyssey, and Woody gives viewers a strange cautionary satire on the dangers of computers and how their interests are completely disconnected from humanity at all. The movie, in all its absurd silliness, seriously discusses the dehumanization of people as technology creeps in on all sides. This seems to be a common motif in the 21st century.

On Sleeper

Posted on by

You know, Woody Allen’s movie, Sleeper (1973), would be funny if it weren’t so profectic. Today we are obsessed with our smart phones, tablets, and laptops to the extent that we would be helpless to do anything if the power went out. Woody awakes in a future world to find giant cooperations taking over the world, technology has disconnected people from nature, and robots have a human form, but they all have the same face. The heart of his satire lies with the juxtaposition of his skinny anti-hero, who takes silly to greater heights, and an advanced civilization whose technology has long since outstripped its feeble ethics and morals. Governments have turned into mechanized oligarchies, and primitive revolutionary groups roam the countryside, spouting anarchy and non-conformity. Technology has triumphed over the human form, and physical love can only be done in a machine. Yet, his satire seems almost innocent. He riffs on the dangers of too much technology, the alienating nature of technology, and the absurd inventions that are supposed to make life better. He also riffs on government, control, oppression, revolution, science, religion, sex, and institutional corruption. The visuals, the dialogues, the jokes play on a well-established cinematic traditions, satirizing a series of films from the late sixties and early seventies that deal with apocalyptic end-of-civilization scenarios. The film only takes itself (half) seriously when the main characters plot to steal the “great” leader’s nose–all that is left of him. “We’re here to see the nose. We hear it’s running.” Sleeper also riffs on Kubrick’s 2001: a Space Odyssey, and Woody gives viewers a strange cautionary satire on the dangers of computers and how their interests are completely disconnected from humanity at all. The movie, in all its absurd silliness, seriously discusses the dehumanization of people as technology creeps in on all sides. This seems to be a common motif in the 21st century.

On snow flakes

Posted on by

The engineering and architecture of the snow flake is really a very simple hexagonal lattice which forms regular symmetrical hexagonal prisms. Your car, however, will slip and slide the same whether you know that or not. Every winter I am fascinated by snow and our relationship to it. Where I live in central Texas, it rarely snows at all. The fresh white blanket of a recent snowfall, however, adds incredible beauty to the frozen and desolate landscape of winter. Winter in the Northland is a devastating and painful experience of cold and ice, temperatures so low you have to put a “minus” sign in front of the number. Yet when it warms up to just below freezing, it snows and we have to plow or shovel or go sliding into the ditch–love, hate snow flakes, you might say. Watching falling snow has such a calming effect on me that I can nap at the drop of hat during a fresh snow–I have a Youtube channel on my computer which only shows falling snow. Yet it is slippery, and on more than one occasion I have performed awkward ballet moves on my way down to the ground, proving once and for all that gravity is real and that I am mere flesh and blood that may be broken. My one and only spinout in a car occurred while driving in fresh snow. Snow flakes are of the most delicate combinations of frozen ice crystals, microscopic, really, but they have the power to wreak to havoc on the populations where they fall, clogging up streets and highways, slicking up sidewalks and driveways, making life just a little more dangerous than it already is. So one would have to say that snow is both a blessing and curse, but for the moment, I prefer to see it as a blessing.

On snow flakes

Posted on by

The engineering and architecture of the snow flake is really a very simple hexagonal lattice which forms regular symmetrical hexagonal prisms. Your car, however, will slip and slide the same whether you know that or not. Every winter I am fascinated by snow and our relationship to it. Where I live in central Texas, it rarely snows at all. The fresh white blanket of a recent snowfall, however, adds incredible beauty to the frozen and desolate landscape of winter. Winter in the Northland is a devastating and painful experience of cold and ice, temperatures so low you have to put a “minus” sign in front of the number. Yet when it warms up to just below freezing, it snows and we have to plow or shovel or go sliding into the ditch–love, hate snow flakes, you might say. Watching falling snow has such a calming effect on me that I can nap at the drop of hat during a fresh snow–I have a Youtube channel on my computer which only shows falling snow. Yet it is slippery, and on more than one occasion I have performed awkward ballet moves on my way down to the ground, proving once and for all that gravity is real and that I am mere flesh and blood that may be broken. My one and only spinout in a car occurred while driving in fresh snow. Snow flakes are of the most delicate combinations of frozen ice crystals, microscopic, really, but they have the power to wreak to havoc on the populations where they fall, clogging up streets and highways, slicking up sidewalks and driveways, making life just a little more dangerous than it already is. So one would have to say that snow is both a blessing and curse, but for the moment, I prefer to see it as a blessing.

On changing a tire

Posted on by

A flat tire gives you all kinds of time to ponder the world. You have to clear out the trunk to get to the jack and other tire changing gear, so as you ponder all the crap you keep in the trunk, you might also ponder the meaning of life, wondering all the time why you do have so much useless stuff in your trunk. Jacks today are a little different than the bumper jacks of yesteryear that our fathers taught us to use. They are smaller and safer, but harder to use–most of are a scissor-type that goes under the frame just in front of the tire. Once you have that figured out, you have to attack the lug nuts with the lug wrench. Since most lug nuts are put on with power tools that torque the nuts to a certain torsion that will not loosen up on its own, getting them loose by hand is a real challenge. The act of loosening those lug nuts really gets you in touch with your feelings, your muscles, your weight. All of this takes time, and for someone who doesn’t do this every day, this is a chance to review the principles of physics that govern mass, work, gravity, torque, and the like. Since changing a tire is a solitary past-time, you get to talk to yourself, review procedures for the correct changing of the tire, debate the pro’s and con’s of carrying a larger lug wrench, and analyze the engineering of the jack and its correct application. Once you have the old, flat tire off and the spare tire on, you have to repeat the procedure of removing the tire, but in reverse. You screw on the lug nuts, lower the car, tighten the lug nuts, remove the jack, and had to the tire store to get the flat fixed. You pick up your tools, put the flat tire in the trunk, ponder the destiny of all the junk that was in the trunk, pour yourself a cool drink and wipe the sweat from your forehead.

On changing a tire

Posted on by

A flat tire gives you all kinds of time to ponder the world. You have to clear out the trunk to get to the jack and other tire changing gear, so as you ponder all the crap you keep in the trunk, you might also ponder the meaning of life, wondering all the time why you do have so much useless stuff in your trunk. Jacks today are a little different than the bumper jacks of yesteryear that our fathers taught us to use. They are smaller and safer, but harder to use–most of are a scissor-type that goes under the frame just in front of the tire. Once you have that figured out, you have to attack the lug nuts with the lug wrench. Since most lug nuts are put on with power tools that torque the nuts to a certain torsion that will not loosen up on its own, getting them loose by hand is a real challenge. The act of loosening those lug nuts really gets you in touch with your feelings, your muscles, your weight. All of this takes time, and for someone who doesn’t do this every day, this is a chance to review the principles of physics that govern mass, work, gravity, torque, and the like. Since changing a tire is a solitary past-time, you get to talk to yourself, review procedures for the correct changing of the tire, debate the pro’s and con’s of carrying a larger lug wrench, and analyze the engineering of the jack and its correct application. Once you have the old, flat tire off and the spare tire on, you have to repeat the procedure of removing the tire, but in reverse. You screw on the lug nuts, lower the car, tighten the lug nuts, remove the jack, and had to the tire store to get the flat fixed. You pick up your tools, put the flat tire in the trunk, ponder the destiny of all the junk that was in the trunk, pour yourself a cool drink and wipe the sweat from your forehead.

On detours

Posted on by

Are you where you always thought you would be? As a child I always dreaded those big orange “detour” signs which were always synonymous with “getting lost.” In the pre-digital age of gps devices, getting lost along your way was a pretty common phenomenon. The most common reason for detours is to allow road crews to do road work and for drivers to make it around the mess. Some detours are cut and dried simple, but others can really carry you out of your way, taking you into neighborhoods you’ve never seen before, giving you a chance to visit previously unknown scenes. Unexpected detours wreck your schedule, add miles to your trip, and raise nervous emotions of uncertainty. My childhood dread of detours usually meant the trip would be longer, and we would arrive later. No one ever tells you how much longer the detour is going to be, if there will unexpected waiting while other cars pass. At the same time, however, the detour might show you a new way to get where you are going. We are all creatures of habit, and we don’t like to have our habits disturbed, even if the old normal way was never that good in the first place. Detours always test the validity of what we hold to be true. Whether that detour puts you on a new road or it makes you second guess the route you have always taken, it makes you re-examine all of those old values that you hold so dear. If we could only stick to familiar scenes, avoid the unknown, stay in our cocoon, life would be so much easier, but then come the detours, those orange signs with black arrows sending us off into the great unknown, making us wonder if we are going to get lost after all. We think that we can plan everything out, that we can control every situation, that we know how the world works, what the future holds. The uncertain chaotic nature of detours dashes every plan, destabilizes futures, destroys the illusion that we are in charge. Detours delay our arrival at a final destination–home, the cabin, the farm, the office, a restaurant, church–giving us time to think about things, give us a chance to examine what we are doing. How many times have I sat behind the wheel of my car and slowly turned onto a detour, all the time wondering what was in store for me now, giving me a chance to think about things, giving me a moment to contemplate my journey, the automatic pilot won’t serve anymore. Perhaps there is nothing like a detour to put most everything in its relative place. What scares us most about a detour is the idea that we might not ever arrive at all, but will instead end up somewhere else, a new place where nobody knows our name. Maybe detours are less a detriment to our lives and more of an opportunity to do something new–learn a language, eat something new, climb a mountain, visit Dr. Johnson’s house, follow a dark trail, read an old book, have a drink with a stranger. Detours challenge our inherent fear of the unknown because we are so deathly afraid of change. Life is so uncertain that even a good detour cannot be planned. So we check our maps, look at time schedules, program the global positioning device, consult the internet for delays, construction, detours, and jams, but where the rubber meets the road, we still run into detours, which derail all our plans.

On detours

Posted on by

Are you where you always thought you would be? As a child I always dreaded those big orange “detour” signs which were always synonymous with “getting lost.” In the pre-digital age of gps devices, getting lost along your way was a pretty common phenomenon. The most common reason for detours is to allow road crews to do road work and for drivers to make it around the mess. Some detours are cut and dried simple, but others can really carry you out of your way, taking you into neighborhoods you’ve never seen before, giving you a chance to visit previously unknown scenes. Unexpected detours wreck your schedule, add miles to your trip, and raise nervous emotions of uncertainty. My childhood dread of detours usually meant the trip would be longer, and we would arrive later. No one ever tells you how much longer the detour is going to be, if there will unexpected waiting while other cars pass. At the same time, however, the detour might show you a new way to get where you are going. We are all creatures of habit, and we don’t like to have our habits disturbed, even if the old normal way was never that good in the first place. Detours always test the validity of what we hold to be true. Whether that detour puts you on a new road or it makes you second guess the route you have always taken, it makes you re-examine all of those old values that you hold so dear. If we could only stick to familiar scenes, avoid the unknown, stay in our cocoon, life would be so much easier, but then come the detours, those orange signs with black arrows sending us off into the great unknown, making us wonder if we are going to get lost after all. We think that we can plan everything out, that we can control every situation, that we know how the world works, what the future holds. The uncertain chaotic nature of detours dashes every plan, destabilizes futures, destroys the illusion that we are in charge. Detours delay our arrival at a final destination–home, the cabin, the farm, the office, a restaurant, church–giving us time to think about things, give us a chance to examine what we are doing. How many times have I sat behind the wheel of my car and slowly turned onto a detour, all the time wondering what was in store for me now, giving me a chance to think about things, giving me a moment to contemplate my journey, the automatic pilot won’t serve anymore. Perhaps there is nothing like a detour to put most everything in its relative place. What scares us most about a detour is the idea that we might not ever arrive at all, but will instead end up somewhere else, a new place where nobody knows our name. Maybe detours are less a detriment to our lives and more of an opportunity to do something new–learn a language, eat something new, climb a mountain, visit Dr. Johnson’s house, follow a dark trail, read an old book, have a drink with a stranger. Detours challenge our inherent fear of the unknown because we are so deathly afraid of change. Life is so uncertain that even a good detour cannot be planned. So we check our maps, look at time schedules, program the global positioning device, consult the internet for delays, construction, detours, and jams, but where the rubber meets the road, we still run into detours, which derail all our plans.

On Dalí’s mustache

Posted on by

The only thing that I will ever have in common with Salvador Dalí is the mustache. In fact, even say that, that we have our mustache’s in common is a lot of wishful thinking, hot air, and posturing. Actually, it is a mustaches which keep us apart–his a scandalous handlebar, mine, a conservative brush of gray that barely reaches my lip. In fact, we have nothing in common at all unless it is our love for the surreal, the absurd, and the fractured. Born in different parts of the twentieth century, he has fifty-five years on me, a different mother tongue, and our birthplaces are six thousand miles apart, but we both have mustaches. Dalí is uber-famous for his outrageous, if not outlandish, paintings and art, which reflect his fractured, discontinuous, and illogical view of the general, received view of regular society. His rejection of convention is a complete rebellion against the conservative values of a general neo-liberal hyper-consumerist society. In other words, he takes all the markers of society and throws them into the air, disregarding where anything might land. His complete disregard for propriety also leads him to sport a mustache that was as surreal as any of his work. Since I am not a plastic artist as was Salvador, my mustache is pretty plain. Dalí was as much a happening himself as was his work–dripping clocks, jumping tigers, a skull morphing out a a matador. Though one should always separate the artist from the art, in the case of Dalí, the artist is just another work in progress. I would like to think that I might understand Dalí in some way, having learned Spanish and having learned to live with the Spanish, but I’m afraid that his work transcends all of those boundaries in broad ways. The problem, however, with both the mustache and his paintings is the same problem that any work of art has in the age of mechanical reproduction, which turns the work of art into just another part of consumer society, nullifying its unique nature and voiding its value as a creative venture. The mustache is iconic of something incredibly unique, but the industrial society consumes everything in its path as if it were a hoard of locusts, which is both the reality and the tragedy of capitalism. So even being rebellious is a useless objective because even rebellion turns into a commodity which may be manipulated, bought and sold independently of its meaning, which then falls to zero. Today, a retrospective of Dalí’s work might signify many things, but it most certainly signifies that Dalí has become a commodity, that surrealism is a commodity, and that his outlandish mustache is a commodity. Yet, I would still love to believe in the spirit that informs the art of Dalí, independently of how various societies have conventionalized the strange nature of the man and his work, still exists and means something outside the boundaries of accepted behavior. Tomorrow I will still have a mustache, and it will still be the only thing that Dalí and I have in common.

On Dalí’s mustache

Posted on by

The only thing that I will ever have in common with Salvador Dalí is the mustache. In fact, even say that, that we have our mustache’s in common is a lot of wishful thinking, hot air, and posturing. Actually, it is a mustaches which keep us apart–his a scandalous handlebar, mine, a conservative brush of gray that barely reaches my lip. In fact, we have nothing in common at all unless it is our love for the surreal, the absurd, and the fractured. Born in different parts of the twentieth century, he has fifty-five years on me, a different mother tongue, and our birthplaces are six thousand miles apart, but we both have mustaches. Dalí is uber-famous for his outrageous, if not outlandish, paintings and art, which reflect his fractured, discontinuous, and illogical view of the general, received view of regular society. His rejection of convention is a complete rebellion against the conservative values of a general neo-liberal hyper-consumerist society. In other words, he takes all the markers of society and throws them into the air, disregarding where anything might land. His complete disregard for propriety also leads him to sport a mustache that was as surreal as any of his work. Since I am not a plastic artist as was Salvador, my mustache is pretty plain. Dalí was as much a happening himself as was his work–dripping clocks, jumping tigers, a skull morphing out a a matador. Though one should always separate the artist from the art, in the case of Dalí, the artist is just another work in progress. I would like to think that I might understand Dalí in some way, having learned Spanish and having learned to live with the Spanish, but I’m afraid that his work transcends all of those boundaries in broad ways. The problem, however, with both the mustache and his paintings is the same problem that any work of art has in the age of mechanical reproduction, which turns the work of art into just another part of consumer society, nullifying its unique nature and voiding its value as a creative venture. The mustache is iconic of something incredibly unique, but the industrial society consumes everything in its path as if it were a hoard of locusts, which is both the reality and the tragedy of capitalism. So even being rebellious is a useless objective because even rebellion turns into a commodity which may be manipulated, bought and sold independently of its meaning, which then falls to zero. Today, a retrospective of Dalí’s work might signify many things, but it most certainly signifies that Dalí has become a commodity, that surrealism is a commodity, and that his outlandish mustache is a commodity. Yet, I would still love to believe in the spirit that informs the art of Dalí, independently of how various societies have conventionalized the strange nature of the man and his work, still exists and means something outside the boundaries of accepted behavior. Tomorrow I will still have a mustache, and it will still be the only thing that Dalí and I have in common.