Desiring Machine

Just watched the trailer for the latest Cohen brothers film “Burn After Reading“. The movie looks pretty funny and I am eager to see what the Cohen brothers do with Brad Pit. But the real story is the kick ass song in the movie trailer. I did a little researching and found out it is a song by a UK band called Elbow. The song is called Grounds for Divorce. It is a catchy, hard hitting little number. The break down into the heavy guitar is truly awesome. Well worth giving a listen. I think it is one of those bands that has been around for awhile, they have a bunch of albums and you ask yourself why haven’t I heard them before? Hopefully, this trailer will get them some notice.

Which gets to my gripe. Why do we have to search for songs in movie trailers? It was fairly easy to research the song by looking up IMDB message boards. But I was kind of zealously interested in the song. It seems to me that when a trailer uses a previously released but relatively obscure pop song it would be good to be more upfront about the music. Why not flash a quick name and band at the end? Song XXXX by Band ZZZZZ, something simple for 2-5 seconds. Catchy little song that grabs the audience? Do the band a favor and put the info out there so that people when watching a trailer can go buy the single right away direct from their iPhones or computers when they get home. Give the band a chance to capitalize on the the impulse buy potential. And if you don’t want to give screen time at the very least put this info up on the website in a prominent place.

Last week I took a trip down to the San Diego Zoo. Although zoos often just depress me to see caged animals it was pretty amazing just how expansive the place was. And there is even the opportunity to see something you have never seen before.

Towards the end of our visit we meandered over near the Giraffes area. After a few minutes of standing around we caught this lovely site out of nowhere.

I guess even in nature one can find examples of the Urolagnia fetish. Or perhaps the Giraffes were simply engaging in a form of Urine Therapy. Who knows?

I know a lot of people are tweaked out because they say that McCain is invoking Obama in the image of the anti-christ in his latest ad.

But I can’t help but laugh when I see this spot. It truly is funny and wickedly sarcastic. In a sense, it is perhaps the most devastating ad I have seen from the McCain camp. To which I say bravo, touche, and thanks for making me laugh in the time of dire darkness. The Obama people would do well to respond with a sense of humor and lightness to these attacks.

Nietzsche, that self proclaimed “anti-christ”, once said

And when I saw my devil, I found him serious, thorough, profound, solemn:
he was the spirit of gravity–through him all things fall.

Not by wrath, but by laughter, do we slay. Come, let us slay the spirit of
gravity!

I am fully in sync with the Obama view of the world, but I worry a bit that the seriousness of the campaign might become too heady and we veer off dangerously into deception. This McCain ad attacks a vulnerability of the self seriousness of the Obama campaign. Lest we succumb to this vulnerability we must rise above it. Unfortunately, the response and tone of some blogs seems to be one of gloom and fear that McCain is invoking the Anti-Christ. This is the wrong approach because it reinforces what the McCain ad so deftly attacks.

No, the right approach would be an acknowledgement of the criticism, and with levity, and a lightness of being declare I am not beyond your reproach or criticism, merely immune to it. I have no doubts that Obama will accomplish this. It is the cultists around him that I worry about. For if you can’t seem to see the irony and humor in this ad then you can’t see the humor and irony that it falsely offers up as pomposity and self absorbtion. We all know that Obama does not see himself as the second coming of Jesus. But perhaps his followers don’t realize that yet.

While some would argue that McCain is speaking code language to the religious right, I think on the surface of it the tone is much more anti-religious. It chastises the very religious rhetoric that has seeped into the political dialog. In this sense I think McCain is authentic on this point. One can tell merely by posture and body language that he is uncomfortable with the religious wackos he must make his political bed with.

McCain rightly so reminds us of the problems of taking things on mere faith alone and mixing that in the political realm. And while the object of this attack (Obama) may be incorrect and misguided, nevertheless this ad seems to attack the very dynamic of faith based politics and charisma. This force of faith is a very dangerous force. And although I would rather see McCain deploy the criticism against the more zealous form of faith in the Bush administration, the criticism still rings true no matter who it is directed at. This superabundance of faith and self certainty can lead to so many crises and a kind of illness. As Nietzsche warns us in his book “The Anti-Christ”:

The fact that faith, under certain circumstances, may work for blessedness, but that this blessedness produced by an idée fixe by no means makes the idea itself true, and the fact that faith actually moves no mountains, but instead raises them up where there were none before: all this is made sufficiently clear by a walk through a lunatic asylum. Not, of course, to a priest: for his instincts prompt him to the lie that sickness is not sickness and lunatic asylums not lunatic asylums. Christianity finds sickness necessary, just as the Greek spirit had need of a superabundance of health—the actual ulterior purpose of the whole system of salvation of the church is to make people ill. And the church itself—doesn’t it set up a Catholic lunatic asylum as the ultimate ideal?—The whole earth as a madhouse?—The sort of religious man that the church wants is a typical décadent; the moment at which a religious crisis dominates a people is always marked by epidemics of nervous disorder; the “inner world” of the religious man is so much like the “inner world” of the overstrung and exhausted that it is difficult to distinguish between them; the “highest” states of mind, held up before mankind by Christianity as of supreme worth, are actually epileptoid in form—the church has granted the name of holy only to lunatics or to gigantic frauds in majorem dei honorem….

This is kind of old school now but interesting and foundational none the less. If you ever wanted to know what the digital in digital computing meant here you go.

This is originally from a Canadian TV show called “The Acme School of Stuff” that aired in the late 1980s, hosted by David Stringer. I just love David’s matter of fact and easy going way of explaining complicated topics such as digital counting, current, and electricity.