Into The Wild Wednesday, Apr 30 2008

I had heard about this book (and obviously the movie) from a few friends and wanted to see it for a while now. Last Sunday night, after returning from a three-day camping trip — during which the first night’s dinner was canceled due to uncooperative weather — it seemed sort of fitting to watch this before bed.

First I’ll give you my thoughts on the movie. It’s a damn good movie. Just trust me on that. I was in my bed, dead-tired after three days of rock climbing & camping, and I didn’t even consider falling asleep for a single second while watching it. The cinematography, the music and Emile Hirsch (The Girl Next Door, Alpha Dog) as Christopher McCandless, aka Alexander Supertramp, were amazing. The movie has a good flow, cutting between his “current” situation in Alaska and his various experiences prior to venturing into the Alaskan wilderness, starting out quite playful, almost innocent, and turning more serious towards the end. While making his way north, he encounters, and in some cases deeply affects the lives of many characters that come across as genuine. Too many times there’s an array of distractions rather that supporting charters.

As for my commentary about the actual story, be warned that the following paragraph(s) will most likely contain spoilers.

If you know me, you know that I am no fan of marriage. I don’t despise it — though it may appear so at times — but I feel the need for a proactive indifference, similar to coping with a bully on the playground … except that marriage won’t go away, no matter how long you ignore it. I feel this way mostly because of how much the concept is abused on a daily basis. This is more or less where the movie starts for me philosophically. The happy McCandless family is a complete sham. You have two people who don’t love each other — possibly don’t even know what love really is — that got a piece of paper that proclaimed them married. Soon after, they started making babies and played out all the little plays, that in their mind looked like things a family would do. It was all a farce. It was all empty. No one made any attempt to understand and actually care about each other. Christopher was undoubtedly a very driven, intelligent guy who lived his life by a code, and the realization of what emptiness he was borne from pushed him on this quest to find himself and define who and what he really is. His great enemies were all the things his parents were so preoccupied with. A great big house, a nice new car. This, I think, is why: Had the foundation upon which any young person builds their life — one’s family — had it not been as materialistic as it was described to be, he most likely would have not grown up with such contempt for everything material that society places a value on. Had his family life been more about relationships, he would have accepted money as a tool, not a false object of desire.

While his quest to find himself, was on occasion a bit dangerous, the end was not so much tragic as it was just plain stupid. What he did, and the way he chose to do it was an atrocity on his own life and everyone who did love him him. If he’d just had a real map he could have easily walked out his situation, as a hand-operated tram crossed the river only a quarter mile from where he was. And that’s only the beginning of the travesty he committed. He was completely unprepared, in every way imaginable, to cope with the situation he was about to put himself into. There’s courage, and then there is just plain ignorant stupidity, and it’s particularly upsetting when it’s committed by someone who is neither ignorant nor stupid. Sure in the beginning he did alright – but a drunk driver is a pretty safe driver until he has to react quickly to some unforeseen event. What’s ironic, in a very sad way, is his transformation into what he quite possibly despised the most: his father. Throughout the movie he met people and affected all of their lives in some positive way; he was loved, admired and cared for. Yet he chose to throw it all away, ignore those who opened their hearts to him, and do something incredibly selfish, which perceptibly hurt all those who cared about him. His lack of concern for the relationships he formed resembled his father more than any of the men he idolized.

I think it is often the case, that if we blindly try to escape something, without understanding the root of it and its effect on us, we are likely to end up where we started.

In the spirit of the movie, I leave you with this quote:

“What we need for our happiness is often close at hand,
if we knew but how to seek for it.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

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The 2008 Motion Titles show Tuesday, Mar 11 2008

Earlier today I stopped by the University of Missouri – Saint Louis, to attend the Motion Titles presentation of the current junior graphic design class. My class, as did many classes before us, had to go through this same rite-of-passage presentation, the first we as students had to do. The audience is usually made up of the faculty, some family, other students and alumni. This all part of the Advanced Problems in Graphic Design II class, where we had to choose a movie, create a new poster and DVD package that incorporated more symbolism and relevance to the movie than the average off-the-shelf Hollywood garbage (generally a big budget/big name movie poster/DVD cover will consist of the actors faces with some irrelevant background imagery). The last part of the project were the motion titles, which is just a fancy word for the intro. Not many people pay attention to the motion title, unaware of how much they say about the movie. I think the best motion title I’ve seen was for the movie U-Turn (starring Sean Penn and Jennifer Lopez). So much is revealed about … well everything. Anyway, this tends to be the most challenging part of the assignment, because all of a sudden you’re dealing with an entirely new element. The first thing I noticed today was how many people used a completely different software to do it then my classmates and myself did only two short years ago. Two things here: 1. time flies and 2. boy is technology eager to leave you behind. That said the little ones did quite all right. I was very impressed with two of the students and quite satisfied with the vast majority.

On a more negative note, I’m more convinced than ever than universities need to make public speaking classes absolutely mandatory. I’m no Demosthenes, but I’ve always striven for some measure of eloquence, and I’m rarely left speechless. While I was in school I found some of my classmates lacking good communication skills, but I guess being away for almost a year now makes it a bit more of a shock. For a second I imagine them talking to my VP, nervously muttering about something, sounding entirely unprepared for all of 10 seconds before being looked with the strangest of looks and told to get to a point … soon. Not a single person talked about their work, instead they all just read things off a piece of paper some with a voice so monotonous it was hard to take. Some would lose their spot on the page and restart at the beginning of the current sentence, the way novice telemarketers do when they are startled by an unexpected question. While no particular part about this irked me, the apparent (not actual) lack of knowledge on the subject of their own work was nothing short of disappointing. I have been there and I know all of them spent enough time with their projects to know them inside and out, yet they all spoke (read, actually) with the shaky uncertainty of an 8th grader reading Nietzsche. Of course it’s not the end of the world but communication is damn important, in my opinion, and if we’re out there education a new generation, shouldn’t we teach them how to speak rather than just talk?

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The most moving thing I’ve read lately Friday, Oct 20 2006

Earlier today I stumbled upon this article written by Kevin Tillman and I absolutely had to share it with anyone who may come across my blog. Kevin Tillman as you may or may not know is the brother of Pat Tillman, the Arizona Cardinals safety who was shot and killed in Afghanistan in April of 2004. Pat turned down a 3.6 million dollar three-year contract with the Cardinals and chose to enlist in the Army instead. His brother Kevin also enlisted, and passed up a career in professional baseball.

This letter is written in anticipation of the November 7th elections, and I hope it will move people to consider what we have allowed go on in this country.

After Pat’s Birthday

It is Pat’s birthday on November 6, and elections are the day after. It gets me thinking about a conversation I had with Pat before we joined the military. He spoke about the risks with signing the papers. How once we committed, we were at the mercy of the American leadership and the American people. How we could be thrown in a direction not of our volition. How fighting as a soldier would leave us without a voice… until we get out.

Much has happened since we handed over our voice:

Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the September 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can’t be called a civil war even though it is. Something like that.

Somehow our elected leaders were subverting international law and humanity by setting up secret prisons around the world, secretly kidnapping people, secretly holding them indefinitely, secretly not charging them with anything, secretly torturing them. Somehow that overt policy of torture became the fault of a few “bad apples” in the military.

Somehow back at home, support for the soldiers meant having a five-year-old kindergartener scribble a picture with crayons and send it overseas, or slapping stickers on cars, or lobbying Congress for an extra pad in a helmet. It’s interesting that a soldier on his third or fourth tour should care about a drawing from a five-year-old; or a faded sticker on a car as his friends die around him; or an extra pad in a helmet, as if it will protect him when an IED throws his vehicle 50 feet into the air as his body comes apart and his skin melts to the seat.

Somehow the more soldiers that die, the more legitimate the illegal invasion becomes.

Somehow American leadership, whose only credit is lying to its people and illegally invading a nation, has been allowed to steal the courage, virtue and honor of its soldiers on the ground.

Somehow those afraid to fight an illegal invasion decades ago are allowed to send soldiers to die for an illegal invasion they started.

Somehow faking character, virtue and strength is tolerated.

Somehow profiting from tragedy and horror is tolerated.

Somehow the death of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people is tolerated.

Somehow subversion of the Bill of Rights and The Constitution is tolerated.

Somehow suspension of Habeas Corpus is supposed to keep this country safe.

Somehow torture is tolerated.

Somehow lying is tolerated.

Somehow reason is being discarded for faith, dogma, and nonsense.

Somehow American leadership managed to create a more dangerous world.

Somehow a narrative is more important than reality.

Somehow America has become a country that projects everything that it is not and condemns everything that it is.

Somehow the most reasonable, trusted and respected country in the world has become one of the most irrational, belligerent, feared, and distrusted countries in the world.

Somehow being politically informed, diligent, and skeptical has been replaced by apathy through active ignorance.

Somehow the same incompetent, narcissistic, virtueless, vacuous, malicious criminals are still in charge of this country.

Somehow this is tolerated.

Somehow nobody is accountable for this.

In a democracy, the policy of the leaders is the policy of the people. So don’t be shocked when our grandkids bury much of this generation as traitors to the nation, to the world and to humanity. Most likely, they will come to know that “somehow” was nurtured by fear, insecurity and indifference, leaving the country vulnerable to unchecked, unchallenged parasites.

Luckily this country is still a democracy. People still have a voice. People still can take action. It can start after Pat’s birthday.

Brother and Friend of Pat Tillman,
Kevin Tillman

Link to original article:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/200601019_after_pats_birthday/

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Bad business Sunday, Oct 8 2006

Why hiring high-school kids is bad for business

When I moved to the states in 1998, the most notable difference was the employment of high school students throughout various establishments. Work was nothing new to me — I had also been working with my next door neighbor in the summers (as a plumber) since I turned 15, but that was over once school started and my level of responsibility was always minimal. I would watch, learn, and help out when an extra hand was needed. Here, however, these kids were full-fledged employees with responsibilities and customers. I think giving young adults responsibilities is a good thing but the whole business model of paying high school teens next to nothing to fill various positions is flawed. In comparison, being a sales associate at a department store in Germany was not a teenager’s job and people would attend the equivalent of a junior college to become a bank teller or a factory worker. Perhaps the concept of hiring kids to do some jobs isn’t that flawed, however the resulting application and cases where these kids are being underpaid for doing jobs that are a little over their head, are tremendously flawed.

We’ve often discussed the implications of having a hormone-crazed teenage working force and my friend coined an interesting phrase in response to questionable service we’ve received in the past. “For $5.50 an hour you’re only paying my body to be there – don’t expect me do anything besides showing up.” His interpretation of a teenagers’ point of view is fairly obvious at places like movie theaters where I still get carded, even when I’m sporting a full beard and my receding hairline. If I get carded for alcohol, it’s one thing, but when some 16 year old implies that I might not be 17, that’s seriously hysterical. I’ve sort of made a sport of this, although I don’t go to the movies as often as I used to. I would pretend that I did not have my ID while purchasing a ticket, and then proceed argue with the teen-on-a-power-trip about why it’s silly to insist there’s any chance I’m 16. I would also throw in some big words to really illustrate that I’m not a high school sophomore (Is this issue really that inexplicable?) Sometimes I would win and other times it would come down to speaking to a manager. Every time a manager showed up he or she would nod and say “that’s fine,” immediately after shooting the little punk a mildly contemptuous look for wasting his or her time with such idiocy. Soon another thing became obvious. All the words that a look of contempt is supposed say would usually fall on deaf ears because the kid working the counter either didn’t get it, or simply didn’t care. Sometime, I would also simply walk into the movie without having my ticket checked so I suppose my friend is right, they’re paying their physical presence and not much beyond that.

While the example of poor service you receive at a movie theater isn’t truly significant, there are occasions when this is a problem. I wrote about one incident close to a year ago involving a sales associate at a outdoors oriented store. I’m not going to discuss the details, but let’s just say he made a huge mistake by suggesting a certain product to a buyer. I stopped him and explained why it was a terrible idea and then I explained to the customer the proper way to go about resolving the issue. (This probably wasn’t to smart on my part because I could probably get sued if something went wrong, but I did also tell him to ask for a in-depth explanation at the other store I sent him to.) The customer thanked me and contrary to the bitterness I was expecting from the sales associate, I received nothing but a semi-polite but distinct attitude of indifference. He didn’t care about the fact that he was wrong regarding an issue that could result in injury, he didn’t seem to care that I made him look like a moron in front of a customer and he didn’t seem to care that I probably could have gotten him fired, had I requested to see a manager about this. As a result of this incident, I avoid that store at all costs. So while they saved on paying their employees they lost money by ensuring that a customer will not return to that store, or any other that bears its name, ever again.

hope that more people will understand that they as consumers have the power (in fact only they have that power) to control the level of service they will get. Too many people just take it and go on their marry way. I’m not saying go out there and picket-fence the store in question, but talk to a manager and tell them what went wrong. You don’t even need to single out an employee since this problem transcends far beyond one teenager who doesn’t have much beyond next Friday’s party on his mind.

If you’ve been paying attention you might say, “Follow your own advice, dude.” I would say: “I’m glad you’ve been paying attention and while I have ignored this in the past, I assure I would make it known these days.”

I hope you will too.

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