An astute, amusing overview of the various visual storytelling strategies and workarounds filmmakers have come up with to handle visually boring hi-tech interactions. It seems odd having to coax 24's drama out of actors going mano-a-mano with a speakerphone, but much cinematic dialogue, at least when cutting from one face to another, has always been filmed in a one-sided way, and spliced together only afterwards.

computers, mediation, movies, technology and change, telephones

Nate:

Anyone who has followed fantasy football or an eBay auction at the office — and gotten away with it — knows that many of our everyday activities now look like work. Typing and scrolling and peering at a computer, you could be doing anything: e-mail, accounting, short-selling, browsing porn, buying uranium, getting divorced.

This odd accident of life online — the increasing visual homogeneity of our behaviors — may be a boon to procrastinators, hobbyists and multitaskers. But it has some victims. I don’t mean bosses concerned with productivity (who cares about them?). The crowd truly stymied by the merging of human activities are filmmakers. If fighting now looks like making up now looks like booking travel, as it does when people conduct their affairs online, how do film directors make human action both dramatic to viewers and roughly true to life?

Karl Johnson of Cornell's marvelous Chesterton House concisely sums up one of the more interesting historical reassessments of our time: the case of Galileo Galilei had little to do with anything like a "war" between science and religion.

catholic church, history, science

Andy:

According to the conventional wisdom still taught in schools and repeated by many public intellectuals, Galileo bravely spoke truth (science) to power (the Church), and paid dearly for it, spending his dying days in prison. Except that it’s not true. Ronald L. Numbers’ Galileo Goes to Jail: And Other Myths About Science and Religion, just out from Harvard University Press, is only the most recent attempt to set the historical record straight on “myths”, including its Number Eight: That Galileo Was Imprisoned and Tortured for Advocating Copernicanism. Apparently Carl Sagan’s quip that Galileo was “in a Catholic dungeon threatened with torture” has all the academic rigor of the Indigo Girls song that begins “Galileo’s head was on the block.”

Consider: Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, the source of controversy, previously had been read and approved by the Church’s censors; and Pope Urban VIII, who presided over the trial, was Galileo’s friend and admirer. Consider also: prior to the trial, Galileo stayed in the Tuscan embassy; during the trial, he was put up in a six-room apartment, complete with servant; following the trial, his “house arrest” consisted of being entertained at the palaces of the grand duke of Tuscany and the Archbishop of Siena. Galileo, apparently, was no ordinary heretic.

The last sentences of a compelling essay by Roger Scruton on the difference between intoxication and drunkenness (and much else besides). The cultural setting is not incidental, it is central to the difference between the two. Nearly every phrase here is worth pondering.

alcohol, community, england

Andy:

When people sit down together in a public place — a place where none of them is sovereign but each of them at home — and when those people pass the evening together, sipping drinks in which the spirit of place is stored and amplified, maybe smoking or taking snuff and in any case willingly exchanging the dubious benefits of longevity for the certain joys of friendship, they rehearse in their souls the original act of settlement, the act that set our species on the path of civilisation, and which endowed us with the order of neighbourhood and the rule of law.

When, however, people swig drinks without interest in their neighbours, except as equal members of the wild host of hunter-gatherers, when their sole concern is the intoxicating effect and when the drink itself is neither savoured nor understood, then are they rehearsing that time before civilisation, in which life was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Understandably, the first and natural effect of this way of drinking is an implacable belligerence towards the surrounding signs of settlement — an urge to smash and destroy, to replace the ordered world of house and street and public buildings, with a ruined wasteland where only the drunk is at home. Binge drinking may look like a communal act. In fact, it is an act of collective solitude, in which the god of modern puritans, the Self, reigns supreme.

I urge readers of this Web site to spend a few moments today and tomorrow reflecting on one of the most audacious attempts at cultural change in recent history: the 1989 student protests in Tiananmen Square, brutally crushed by the Chinese government on 4 June and scarcely known or discussed in China today. One of the more penetrating critiques of my book has been that I don't devote enough space to environments of persistent oppression where people's culture-making agency is severely constrained. This excellent story by NPR's Louisa Lim provides some insights into how three leaders of the Tiananmen protests have responded to the movement's failure. The response of pastor Zhang Boli is especially worth pondering as Christian culture makers—perhaps both an encouraging and a cautionary tale.

asia, changing the world, china, failure, history, power, protest

Andy:

Zhang, the former journalist who brought the students to the square, has taken a different path. Once, he preached for democracy; now he preaches for Jesus. Formerly No. 17 on Beijing’s most-wanted list, Zhang today is a pastor at a Chinese church in Fairfax, Va.

After the clampdown, Zhang spent two years in hiding, much of it in a remote mountain cabin near the frozen Russian border, where he lived off wildlife that he caught. He also spent a month in a Russian prison. It was at that time that he found God.

“I read the Bible and began to know God,” Zhang remembers. “I gained sustenance from it. People really needed God then. They needed a future. I couldn’t see the future with my bare eyes.”

Zhang finally escaped China through Hong Kong and sought asylum in the United States. These days, he throws himself into ministering his flock. He is planning to build a 16,000-square-foot church for his congregation, which currently numbers about 300.

This is an anonymized excerpt from a chat two good friends of mine found themselves having the other night, which touches on the utter importance of local cultures, and the mysterious matter of what makes the difference between those that are helpful and those that aren't. R. is a native Kansan physician, educated on the coasts but now working at a clinic in a sub-1000-population town in her home state; D. is a law student. (See also Atul Gawande's inevitably fascinating New Yorker piece about how differences in local medical culture make healthcare in some places less effective and much more costly.)

business, community, cultural worlds, health, medicine

Nate:

D: So the problem isn’t small-town Kansas—it’s a toxic mixture of small-town Kansas plus adolescence?

R: I think so. I like the small-town Kansas where we are now but, believe it or not, small-town Kansas is very heterogeneous. The town where we live now and where I grew up have a lot of significant differences in culture.

D: Tell me more…

R: Mainly it has to do with how people treat each other and how people approach problems. Here, problems are meant to be solved and people have a lot of respect for one another. We have “community conversations” when there’s something that impacts the whole town, and everyone who wants to speak can have their say. Where I grew up, on the other hand, people say all manner of things about other people, and if there’s a problem that affects the town everyone just complains to everyone else. The population even since I left has declined really sharply and everyone just says, “Oh, poor us, look at our dying town, who will save it?” Whereas here they formed an economic development commission and went out looking for new businesses to bring to the community. Some problems are similar, but by and large I think this is a positive place to grow up, and the graduating seniors we know well have said so too.

The other great example of small-town heterogeneity is to look at the counties to the north and south of us. To the north we have County A, where people routinely farm well into their 80’s, have active sex lives into their 90’s, and there has not been a teen pregnancy in almost 10 years. These are the ruddy-cheeked insanely healthy country folk you may have read about. To the south, then, we have County B, where everyone over 40 has diabetes, the obesity rate seems like it’s about 90%, STI’s are rampant and there are currently 8 pregnant girls in the high school. What’s the difference? I have been trying to figure this out. The medical care is exactly the same (it’s our group). The physical infrastructure is not that different. But culturally, people in County B have this victimizing, back-biting mentality.

D: It’s that stark a difference, huh? That’s astonishing.

R: It really and truly is.

I love the premise of this piece: you're the editor of the world's coolest, hippest, tastiest music magazine, but your preteen daughters love Hannah Montana. What to do? What I love even better is the culture-making themes here: the only real solution to deficient culture is better culture, in this case Brandi Carlile. And best of all, being exposed to Carlile's intelligent, soulful, honest music has inspired a 10-year-old budding songwriter. Go Jordan! Go Brandi! And go Dad.

consumption, cultivation and creation, family, music

Andy:

[When] our 10-year-old Jordan started to sound a little like the snotty teenagers she was watching on TV, Hannah Montana and Wizards were outlawed. Soon after, we were fortunate enough to be guests on the Cayamo [singer-songwriter cruise ship], and I made the family a mix of Cayamo artists for the drive down—Lyle Lovett, Patty Griffin, Kathleen Edwards, Over the Rhine, John Hiatt. But it was Brandi Carlile they kept wanting to hear. By the time we saw her concert, my girls knew most of the words. At Emma’s ninth birthday party (a lock-in at the Paste office) she cranked up “The Story” for her friends like it was the latest Miley Cyrus hit. The requests for Radio Disney stopped, and I overheard Jordan telling her friends she doesn’t think Cyrus is a very good singer anymore.

So when Brandi recently came within half a mile of our house last week to play a pair of intimate performances at Eddie’s Attic, I took them to the early show. It was the first real club concert for my kids. Eddie’s has a no-talking-during-the-performance rule, and my usually very loud children abided. . . . They mouthed all the words except when they couldn’t resist singing along. When Brandi started clapping, they clapped. When Brandi told the audience to stand, Emma stood up on her stool with her hands in the air.

Jordan wrote her first song a couple of days after the show. She won’t sing it to me yet, but the lyrics are great. She began guitar lessons earlier this year and is headed to girls rock camp this summer. Emma is saving up her money for a guitar now. When they think of a future rock star, the image is of a down-to-earth Carlile instead of a glammed-up Ashley Tisdale.