:: groupthink ::

:: Friday, May 30, 2003 ::

A WORTHY READ: Caroline Knapp's Appetites, a very compelling and poignant read about why women want and the fight to understand and feed our Appetites -- love; compassion; to be known; career; balance -- and the struggle often lost in appetite -- consumerism, complusion, sex; food, either too much or too little. It uses her earlier battle with anorexia as a springboard to examine the influence/context of society, culture, family, mores, feminism on personal hunger -- intellectual, sexual, spiritual, consumeristic -- and the decisions women make to bridge the push/pull on body image and identity, how we frame it in our personal boundaries and
decisions.

it's the personal version of the Beauty Myth and the accessible version of Faludi's Backlash, leaning heavily on anecdote and memoir with a few statistics sprinkled in (rather than Faludi's heavy stats sprinkled with anecdote.) On a certain level it addresses the opiates Americans often are drawn to, but on a female level, its affects on satiety and sorrow. It's a fast read -- only 200 or so pages -- that can be consumed as an essay. It's not an indictment of beauty, but a call to understand it's influence and to define desire in one's own, intensely personal, way. While moving -- made all the more so because Knapp died last year at age 42 of lung cancer -- it
also is hopeful.


:: Courtnay 8:18 PM [+] ::
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long interview with jayson blair by sridhar pappu of the ny observer.
:: h 8:51 PM [+] ::
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Review of The Matrix Reloaded - Spoilers included!

Okay, on the lighter side, here is a review of the Matrix Reloaded which I saw last night. Let's cut to the chase: for those of you out there who haven't seen it, wait until it's on DVD. Terrible movie! I almost walked out of the theatre in disgust a couple of times and I am a huge fan of the original Matrix.

Where to begin? Here is a list of my peeves, in no particular order. Be warned, this is chockful of spoilers so don't read unless you want to know.

You are constant bludgeoned with proof that Trinity and Neo love each other very, very, very much. The directors and writers don't believe this can be done subtly or gently. It feels instead like they're wacking you in the face with a large wet fish every three minutes to make sure you get the point. Okay, okay, I get it, they loooove each other... no, really, despite the fact that their facial expressions barely change, they really really do. Honest.

Everyone has mythical or historical names to imply a depth and thought to the movie that doesn't exist. It's pseudo-symbolism. It quacks symbolism, it walks symbolism, but unfortunately, it is not a duck. So you have Morpheus, Niobe and Persephone (greek mythology), merovingien (french medieval kings), nabuchadnezar, the one, trinity, seraph (biblical). In the first one, Morpheus's name had meaning as he wakes Neo up from the sleep of the matrix, but now with all these names it just seems like they are pretending to a depth and meaning that is not there.

You get to listen to a lot of mumbo jumbo dialogue without continuity or logic. For example, at one point, Agent Smith says "I want the same as you. Everything" Huh, what? Or when Neo meets the Architect. First the Architect states that he knows what Neo's going to do because his 5 predecessors all made the exact same choices as him and of course he's going to pick Door A. Two minutes later, he says "I know what you're going to do, I can feel it and I knew all along this was going to happen, you're going to pick Door B." Huh, what?

The fight scenes have become highly choreographed and stylized dances. No one changes their blank facial expression, no one grimaces or feels pain, no one gets hurt, everyone bounces back effortlessly after smashing into walls and objects, It's exactly like a video game and maybe that's the effect they were going after. Unfortunately, it's to the point, you don't even feel that you're watching a fight or that you should feel any anxiety because clearly its not a big deal for anyone involved. It makes you wonder why Neo even bothers to get into some of these fights because he usually ends them by just leaving. Why didn't he just leave right at the beginning and skip the fight?

For some reason, Zion is organic and earthy. Why do rebels have to be organic and earthy? What's with the tribal orgy party scene? Why can't they be super-smart and high techy and competent like the Star Wars rebels?

The Neo worshippers in Zion and what exactly they "need" Neo for as Trinity states remains unclear. Does he go around performing miracles? And why do they all look Hindu and Buddhist?

One big difference between the first Matrix and Reloaded is the passivity of the heroes. In the first, they were a step ahead of the machines, doing unexpected actions such as unplugging Neo, actively engaged in a desperate fight with the matrix where real people died. In the second, they've lost the initiative and are primarily reactive and defensive. They wait like cattle for the sentinels to reach Zion, they wait like cattle for the Oracle to contact them whenever she feels like it. They believe everything she says and run off obediently to follow her exact instructions. Then they follow the merovingien's instructions, then those of persephone, then those of the architect. In between they fight agents and bad guys. Voila.

Don't even get me started on the hokey scene where Neo restarts Trinity's heart by plunging his hand in her body.

In short, you can wait until the DVD comes out.
:: Seema 2:45 PM [+] ::
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The latest in profiling news ... the Pentagon is developing radar-based technology that can identify people according to the way that they walk. Big bro. wants to use it as part of its surveillance system -- it's so-called Total Information Awareness. So far it's 80 to 95 percent successful in identifying people in tests. The government expects the TIA surveillance system to collect a petabyte of data -- or a quadrillion bytes -- including financial, medical, fingerprint, iris data. AP story says it's equal to about 50 times the Library of Congress, which holds more than 18 million books.
:: Courtnay 10:16 PM [+] ::
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m becoming increasingly concerned over time about the notion that we are returning to a state of seperate but unequal. we've seen almost a goverment license for racial profiling of individuals through premature / confusing/ costly and ineffective registrations of immigrants to the U.S. . motivated by fear and the false logic that people aiming to do harm to the country will step forward more willingly than Jayson Blair or Stephen Glass or Ruth Shalit did to their publications. the justice department feels that it can suspend the writ of habeus corpus in cases such as Jose Padilla's where a man accussed of being a possible dirty bomber in New York has been in jail for more than a year without access to counsel much less the habeus corpus guaranteed to us all. i'm sure my mentioning Jose or Yasser Hamdi in this vein makes me a terrorist- sympathiser in the eyes of some, but its not an issue of terrorism for me. its just an idea that the constitution should be as strong in times like these as it should be during the good times where all we worried about was the alternative minimum tax. Thats not a position supported by Paul Rosenzweig of the heritage foundation who commented on NPR's all things considered today that the interpretations of freedom guaranteed to us are constantly swaying and if anything we should be happy to have such an alert citizenry and press in this day and age, that our transgressions on the constitution are not nearly as bad now as they have been. David Cole- a professor from Georgetown articulated the inverse yesterday, pointing out how essentially the DOJ was headed toward getting information out of Padilla through coercion and that ultimately whatever information this guy has- might never hold water in court anyway. i think situations like this actually weaken the constitution and the credibility of the United States from the simple notion of whether this is a fair fight or not. everyone recognizes a fixed fight, and the winner never really goes away a winner. if anything more people sympathize for the underdog and so forth. if you truly wanted to prove the case- let him have the best defense in the world- and if hes guilty- let the adverserial system of justice that we have set up prove him wrong- or right. the notion that the system ought work for some of us, but not all of us is what i'm getting at here. its the idea that the scales of justice are not being held by the roman goddess Justitia blindly.

a parallel observation is something i heard about on the Lehrer hour this evening as part of a series on what states are doing to balance their budgets. there was a piece on how the state of CO. has axed medicaid benefits to approximately 3500 legal immigrants (meaning greencard holders). according to the piece, about a third are elderly with about a thousand suffering from diabetes or cancer etc., about a third are children and the last third are pregnant mothers. the state saves $8mm by lopping off this program. the reporter - or director for the colorado consumer health initiative mentioned that the state has maintained appropriation of $9mm for tourism and refused to ask gun owners to pay the bill for their background checks. the aclu has temporarily stopped the cuts from taking effect.

as i consider whether to become a citizen or not- this is yet another bizarre conundrum that vexes me. should i hurry up and become one out of fear that my liberties will slowly be taken away if i don't, or that i'll be considered a third or second class citizen with my legal resident status? or should i hold off on becoming a citizen to a country that is headed down this path.

more to ruminate.

h


:: h 10:35 PM [+] ::
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Here is a long mea culpa about the Jayson Blair case from his employer, the New York Times.
:: Sukumar 2:42 PM [+] ::
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All I know about the Jayson Blair case is what I've read in the Washington Post article, so my opinion is based entirely on that piece. He seems to have violated elementary standards of integrity (fact checking, no making things up, no plagiarism), and done so repeatedly. There is no place for that in journalism, let alone at a place as august as the New York Times. I don't think his being a POC should have anything to do with the decision to get him out of a forum where he can do more damage to his institution and to his profession.
:: Sukumar 10:05 AM [+] ::
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This topic is kind of old, but haven't heard much discussion about it. Wondering about Jayson Blair -- what the fall out will be for the once-rising-star NYT reporter-turned-icarus; for the business; for other journalists of color. Any predictions? Janet Cooke has never been allowed back into the profession since passing off fiction as fact in "Jimmy's World" for the Washpost. Are conditions different now, rules looser after we have historians acknowledging plagarism and other such "mistakes" and a rash of other reporters who have also left because of similar ethics breaches. Do we acknowledge the obvious pressure there is for a POC, as well as one who wants so desperately to make it -- and then once they do, to hack it in the ever-competitive world within the NYT as well as its competitors. Surely, Blair must have understood he was on an international platform and the responsilities that comes with that -- not only with journalism, but with journalism at that level. Do we accept the explanation that he just confused press notes with personal ones and that the 50 corrections previously made on his behalf was because he was green? How much do we castigate, how much do we condone? Would love to hear any thoughts on this.

Also, am curious whether anyone has read Vineeta Vijayaraghavan's "Motherland"? I think it's a charming novel. the premise: a teenage girl, maya, is sent to summer with her relatives in s. india, where she was raised by her grandmother for her first three years until her parents got established in n.y.; the point: the struggle to balance american and indian identities and cultures -- what is considered "too american/indian" or "not american/indian enough"; the feelings of straddling two worlds and not fully belonging. The question that occurred to me is how much the story becomes a primer and does it become necessary to assume the audience knows nothing about indian culture (and the broader question about the responsibility/style to explain everything -- from clothes to food, etc. -- for anyone writing about other cultures that aren't white america?) or just why make the reader work for understand, learn?



:: Courtnay 9:42 PM [+] ::
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so the notion of rice being bad for birds- apparently an urban legend. check it out.
:: h 12:09 PM [+] ::
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Crapling. http://www.vfxhq.com
:: Todd 10:37 PM [+] ::
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wondered what happened to ashleigh banfield? article in today's nytimes.

:: h 1:06 PM [+] ::
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