Environmental/Political Song of the Day

Subdivisions by Rush

Sprawling on the fringes of the city
In geometric order
An insulated border
In between the bright lights
And the far unlit unknown

Growing up it all seems so one-sided
Opinions all provided
The future pre-decided
Detached and subdivided
In the mass production zone

Nowhere is the dreamer or the misfit so alone
Subdivisions --
In the high school halls
In the shopping malls
Conform or be cast out
Subdivisions --
In the basement bars
In the backs of cars
Be cool or be cast out
Any escape might help to smooth
The unattractive truth
But the suburbs have no charms to soothe
The restless dreams of youth

Drawn like moths we drift into the city
The timeless old attraction
Cruising for the action
Lit up like a firefly
Just to feel the living night

Some will sell their dreams for small desires
Or lose the race to rats
Get caught in ticking traps
And start to dream of somewhere
To relax their restless flight

Somewhere out of a memory of lighted streets on quiet nights...

Oh, the delicious irony. I knowingly live in the suburbs and curse my existence. Sadly, it's mostly out of financial necessity. But even that necessity is becoming less and less so. In the suburbs, you have less access to mass transit and less access to the things we actually like to do. As you've seen from this blog, we're always downtown anyway: protest marches, art museum, ballgames, farmer's market, the Audubon Society, etc.

Rush (the band that is) kicks ass. This song sounds awesome but has great lyrics. I particularly like,

Growing up it all seems so one-sided
Opinions all provided
The future pre-decided
Detached and subdivided
In the mass production zone

The organization of living is just a metaphor for people's opinions. This song is from 1982, but just as relevant today.

Brainwashing

In a surprising, and probably unintended, bit of candor, a local church tells us what they are really doing with today's children.

The dictionary.com definition of "programming":

to cause to absorb or incorporate automatic responses, attitudes ...

“There is no such thing as a Christian child: only a child of Christian parents.” ― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

Wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff

“People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but *actually* from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff.” ― Steven Moffat (Doctor Who writer)

One of the merits of good science fiction is that it's not all about the special effects. It's about the ideas. Of course, there are directors that don't understand this. Michael Bay comes to mind. However, director Shane Carruth does.

Carruth made the sci-fi film, Primer, for $7000 in 2004. Hell, Michael Bay's hair stylist made more than that. We're talking Robert Rodriguez, El Mariachi, Rebel Without a Crew territory. Sleeping in your parents' basement, McDonald's catering style.

When you are making a movie for that amount, you have to wear a lot of hats. Carruth wrote, directed and starred in the movie. His parents catered the movie ... for real.

I've had the DVD for a year or two. I had heard a good review of it on NPR or some podcast. I can't remember exactly. But, I'm glad I finally watched Primer.

There are no special effects. The shooting locations are a garage and a U-Haul storage location. The technical dialogue is intentionally complicated, perhaps to obfuscate, but not in a bad way. More just to confuse enough to make the story plausible.

Primer is about 4 engineers making some kind of device in their garage in their free time. The way they talk about it, it is some type of device that will be market-changing once it is perfected. Two of the engineers think that that is all the device is ... something industrial and useful. The other two engineers, through extensive experimentation and fine-tuning without the other two, discover that it is much more: a time machine.

They refine enough that each can travel ahead in time a day or so. They use this to obtain stock information that will allow them to make short term investments and make money. The complications arise out of the fact that each time they travel, they are creating multiple timelines and iterations of themselves. These iterations encounter each other and confusion ensues. Add on to that the fact that the story is told in a style that is either non-linear (a la Memento) or such that you don't know whose timeline you are following. The ambiguity and causal confusion is what makes Primer, and these types of stories in general, interesting.

I can't get enough of time-travel/multiple timeline/causation stories. No one can honestly say that they haven't thought about what they would do or how they would change things if given the ability to travel in time. Or as the tagline says,

"If you always want what you can't have, what do you want when you can have anything?"

I can't honestly tell you where to find this movie. I think I picked it up used at a Blockbuster Video. As far as I can tell, it is not on Netflix Instant. Anyway, if you want to see it, and can't find it, I'd be more than happy to mail you my copy.

What good is it?