intellectual properties

memories and dreams (Waltz with Bashir and Inception)

“We all have our time machines. Some take us back, they’re called memories. Some take us forward, they’re called dreams.”

— Jeremy Irons

(note: this was written before having read any one else’s email/posts about Inception, so as to not blur/influence my initial thoughts, so this is probably missing many things other people have already discussed. this doesn’t really have any big spoilers but you might avoid reading the Inception part if you haven’t seen the film yet and are going to.)

memories, dreams and reality – how distinguishable are they? i have fairly vivid dreams almost every night, and also a lot of memories i’m not sure are real, so this topic is of high interest to me personally. the function of dreams has been studied at every angle from spiritual to physiological, and the psychological process of creating memories has been well studied and recorded. memories and dreams have been the subject of art and films for as long as can be traced, as these realms are difficult to understand, and seem to contain keys to human consciousness. recently i read that recent experiments with sleep deprivation and “dream withdrawal” showed that if a person is deprived of dreams they begin to show psychotic tendencies while awake, and therefore maybe the function of dreams is to allow for a time of quiet insanity and that maybe it is not sleep that is necessary for well-being, but dreams (sorry, cannot find citation).

I. 2 weekends ago we watched Waltz with Bashir (available on Netflix) – a mostly-true film about participants in the 1982 Lebanon War and the horrible civilian massacre that occurred (warning: i was unprepared for the actual real footage of this event shown at the end of the film). the mission of the main character is to determine which of his memories of such a chaotic and traumatic period as a solider are true. the film is done in absolutely gorgeous animation, which supports the dreamlike quality.

i found this film not only educational (i myself had no idea what happened in that war, as i was an American and only 6, but i remember Beirut being a city name i heard on the news quite often during that time), but brilliant in that it captures not only the confusion that soldiers feel in chaotic wartime (forgetting all training/orders and acting only in self-defense, mass hysteria, trauma), but also the crux of the question of what memories are and how they are created. all but one of the characters in the film is a real person, and each of them, through the series of interviews, questions who/what/where/why/how. if 2 people are in the same place at the same time, but each remembers it differently, how does anyone ever know what really happened? i highly recommend Waltz with Bashir not only for its beauty and history, but for the bravery to question traumatic political events that collectively have a million different memories contributing to the public understanding.

II. watching Inception last weekend [SPOILER ALERT: STOP READING HERE], i have to say i was unimpressed by its lack of creativity and i got bored. my brain just kept returning to every other film on the relative subjects of the intersection of dreams, memories and consciousness manipulation i’ve ever seen (Waking Life, Scanner Darkly, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Dream a Little Dream, and the director Nolan’s previous film, Memento), and most of all, the classic Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. the idea of the film was simple but the execution was overly complicated, and somewhere around the “third level” snow scene i was completely bored and wondering why we were being taken through all that ridiculousness. for other people that was probably a very entertaining part of the film, but i’m not someone entertained by shootouts and explosions and special effects, so it all seemed incredibly superfluous and that last 1/3 of the film just dragged on forever for me. that, and the whole embedded love story, there to give personal weight to the intentions of the main character and provide another plotline (and possibly a whole subplot of her participation not brought to light in the film), seemed entirely unnecessary to what otherwise would have been a fairly straightforward idea: we plant an idea in a dream, and make the dream complex enough for the dreamer to believe it was their own, and s/he wakes up and changes life course. however, the big question on that premise, for me, was this: has a dream ever made you actually change YOUR life?

the final question laid in front of the viewer in the final second of the film was just so OBVIOUS – was it ALL a dream? if so, whose dream was it? – that i am not even interested in addressing it, because i think 1. the point is that you will never know, and 2. the script doesn’t seem mature enough to actually have a tight resolution to that even if you watched the movie 100 more times looking for “clues” (here’s a link though if you want to).

the psychological aspects of the film are of more interest to me than the film itself, and while i understand they are all intertwined, the substory of the wife going mad after spending 50 years in a dream and not believing “reality” (i guess i should put that in quotes) was much more intriguing to me than the main plot, looping back to the idea of what it means to remember, and what our consciousness decides our story has been, and how.

i am more intrigued by the ranting homeless people i see screaming at bus stops or cases of extreme savants and schizophrenia: science-fiction unnecessary, there are humans on this planet at this very moment who are living in an entirely different world than we are. those of us who consider ourselves “sane” are only such because our brains have set up layers of filters for the infinite amount of sensory data it receives. what if those filters were to disappear? many suggest that perhaps this is what manifests in our dreams.

i know i am going very wide with this, but i have very little use for fiction unless i can relate it to and question real life (i guess that makes me a “plausibilist”). i am not big on fantasy, and i have little suspension of disbelief when it comes to films. so i spent most of the time watching Inception thinking about all of these other things, and caring less about the plot and the characters. is that what the film was supposed to do? if so it did its job, but i could have done without the blockbuster bits (i much prefer Linklater’s style).

(btw if you haven’t seen Ellen Page in Hard Candy, i highly recommend that deeply twisted film.)

.::.

now that i’ve written that, here’s some good bits of what other people have written about Inception:

Continue reading »

QOTD: M.I.A. on Gaga

“People say we’re similar, that we both mix all these things in the pot and spit them out differently, but she spits it out exactly the same! None of her music’s reflective of how weird she wants to be or thinks she is. She models herself on Grace Jones and Madonna, but the music sounds like 20-year-old Ibiza music, you know? She’s not progressive, but she’s a good mimic.”

—M.I.A. to the NME on April 7, on Lady Gaga.

– Interview Magazine, June 2010

i’m not much into M.I.A.’s music either, but this perfectly sums up why i’m not into Gaga. her costumes? fantastic (but i’m giving a lot of credit to her costume designers there too). her music? horrible, to the point that it annoys me so much that i can’t bear the thought of listening to it just to see the performance art.

lots of other good quotes in there too, such as the opening one:

“I find the new Justin Bieber video more violent and more of an assault to my eyes and senses than what I’ve made.”

—M.I.A. to NME.com on May 12, responding to the furor over the video for her new song “Born Free,” which was yanked from YouTube.

faith, hope and power in 2010

this is a little delayed as this link is from a few weeks ago, but if you, like me, often wonder WTF can be done about the state of the world and maybe sometimes get overwhelmed and depressed about things way beyond our control (or are they?), i highly recommend reading this:

http://social-creature.com/how-to-stand-in-the-face-of-powerlessness-for-a-new-generation

excerpt:

We humans have such a deep need to feel like we’ve got any sense of agency in our lives, we’ll gladly trick ourselves into perceiving we’re in control — or at the very least, that control over chaos is attainable — even when it’s not true. This proclivity is a large part of why God exists — or rather, why we believe he does. In a2007 New York Times article exploring possible answers from evolutionary biology as to how we have come to believe in God, Robin Marantz Henig wrote:

Our brains are primed for [belief in the supernatural], ready to presume the presence of agents even when such presence confounds logic. “The most central concepts in religions are related to agents,” Justin Barrett, a psychologist, wrote in his 2004 summary of the byproduct theory, “Why Would Anyone Believe in God?” Religious agents are often supernatural, he wrote, “people with superpowers, statues that can answer requests or disembodied minds that can act on us and the world.”

We automatically, and often unconsciously, look for an explanation of why things happen to us,” Barrett wrote, “and ‘stuff just happens’ is no explanation. Gods, by virtue of their strange physical properties and their mysterious superpowers, make fine candidates for causes of many of these unusual events.” The ancient Greeks believed thunder was the sound of Zeus’s thunderbolt. Similarly, a contemporary woman whose cancer treatment works despite 10-to-1 odds might look for a story to explain her survival. It fits better with her causal-reasoning tool for her recovery to be a miracle, or a reward for prayer, than for it to be just a lucky roll of the dice.

As an alternative to these external supernatural forces it’s become increasingly popular to reclaim a sense of power in the face of chaos or tragedy by elevating control of our inner selves to this transcendent status of godliness. In Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined AmericaBarbara Ehrenreich recounts, in a chapter titled, “Smile or Die: The Bright Side of Cancer,” how getting diagnosed with breast cancer led to her first introduction with the cult of “positive thinking.” The “Pink Ribbon Culture,” she writes, is defined by a mantra of “positive thinking” that is so extreme, at times it paints cancer as a “gift, deserving of the most heartfelt gratitude:”

it goes on to discuss the cultural exhaustion/overwhelm/paralysis over the BP oil spill.  WHAT CAN WE DO? oh wait – have you stopped thinking about that already? maybe that’s part of the problem.

related previous post: postmillennial hope (2/24/10)

related obnoxious internet meme: affirmations of a little girl

UP and away (in memory of my grandmother)

today is the anniversary of my maternal grandmother’s death on 7/21/2003. she was a loving mother of 8 children, 20+ grandchildren, and now a number of great-grandchildren i can’t even count. many of us grandchildren lived with my grandparents for various reasons for different lengths of time, and i lived with them in Harbor Springs, MI the spring-summer of 1991, when i was 14 and finishing the 9th grade. it was a rather tumultuous period of my family life, but Grandma was always there and having that safe place to go to was invaluable. i can’t write much more about her and the memories now because it’s too hard. we all miss her dearly.

when i saw the Pixar movie “UP” for the first time, i cried during the first montage of the old man and his wife buying their house, growing old together, and the feeling of loss when she died and he was left alone to ponder their lives and things they’d never done, including her lifelong dream to go to South America, and his fight to save his home – the place that held all of the memories. it reminded me so much of my grandparents, and of my grandfather, who still lives on there in that quiet little town. unfortunately, the farm house they built together and lived in for decades burned down shortly after i moved to California and my grandfather lives somehwhere else now. but in my mind, that is always where they lived, and i know that house was full of memories and dreams.

part of the reason i am going to South America (on August 2) is because of that film. i want to grow old with Jay and not have any regrets about what we dreamed of and didn’t do. i want to make sure that we don’t put aside things like travel until it’s too late. i know in the film the wife was perfectly happy with the life they ended up living, and i know the same is true for my grandmother, who loved her home and her children and her church and her small town. i don’t even know if she ever really wanted to travel, but i do, and if i have a fear of anything – it’s regret, and so this trip i’m taking is, in part, in honor of the memory of my grandmother, bless her soul.

07.18.10

for Miss G designs @ Evolution [of Fashion], July 18, 2010

photo PhatCatPhoto.com

headpiece by Caley Johnson/Miss G (SF)

top – vintage/reconstructed

skirt – BadUnklSista couture (SF)

5/2010

photos: Belle Images (SF)
coat: Tamo Design (SF)

online book club: Absence of Mind

i have a few different groups of friends who semi-regularly get together to accomplish various types of activities and tasks, some of them athletic, some of them intellectual, some communal, some artistic, some of them therapeutic, some of them purely entertainment. (the best ones are a combination of all of those things).

and while we’re all in our own sub-sub-sub culture together at least enough to know one another, there are in some cases some deep divides in terms of belief systems, and the topics of religion and science.

i just saw Marilynne Robinson on the Daily Show promoting her new book about religion vs science, Absence of Mind. She articulated my position better than anyone i’ve seen/heard/read in a while. that position is something more in agreement with religion than even i would think, in that i don’t necessarily always believe what scientists have determined is empirical evidence, and that – in many cases – what science claims is evidence enough to prove a theory is not much different at the core than many religious arguments.

In this ambitious book, acclaimed writer Marilynne Robinson applies her astute intellect to some of the most vexing topics in the history of human thought—science, religion, and consciousness. Crafted with the same care and insight as her award-winning novels, Absence of Mind challenges postmodern atheists who crusade against religion under the banner of science. In Robinson’s view, scientific reasoning does not denote a sense of logical infallibility, as thinkers like Richard Dawkins might suggest. Instead, in its purest form, science represents a search for answers. It engages the problem of knowledge, an aspect of the mystery of consciousness, rather than providing a simple and final model of reality.

or maybe this is a rather exaggerated distinction the author used to rabble rouse and sell books; i’d be interested in hearing the discussion either way.

watch: http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-july-8-2010/marilynne-robinson

so the book is out in hardcover now, and i’ll be waiting for paperback. a used version. (for those who have asked about using amazon….i first always support buying from your local independent book store. but for the purposes of providing onlinks here, i support buying books from small booksellers selling on amazon, which you can readily find by clicking the “new” and “used” links.) i have no idea what level of understanding of the belief systems of these fields the reader needs to have to engage this book, but it seems accessible to me.

now, of the things that none of the groups i currently semi-regularly meet with is a book club, although we have talked about it numerous times. so what i am proposing here is that it be an online book club (hosted where tbd), and possibly also an offline book club, if enough people in the immediate Bay Area want to join it. we’ll have to see how many people participate, so the format remains to be seen. but if you do want to participate, online or off, leave a comment or email me, and when the book comes out in paperback, i’ll let you all know (how long is that?). if you’ve already read it, good for you. you’re ahead. do you recommend this book?

heartbeat amplifier/supperclub/miss gigglemonster

more

feral offering

it seems odd to me that i never posted these photos here from last june – i must’ve linked through them somewhere else. for the album:

(c)Neil Motteram aka Mr Dodgy

priceless v5

there is so much i haven’t blogged lately, but typing hurts (yes, still), and so does my brain.  taking off tonight for the annual Priceless party in the mountains.  i’m already ill, so i’m hoping that priceless is more like Time to get Well.  hey, it’s worked before.

happy 4th, y’all.  be safe, and do it good.