Shame

I'm wealthy and accomplished and get plenty of sex. Yet this movie thinks something's wrong with me.

"Shame" is about a successful guy, played by the ubiquitous Michael Fassbender, with a high libido. Internet porn, call girls, and even regular gals -- all within the same week. The status quo is interrupted when his lovable goofball sister needs a place to crash. She mucks up his lifestyle. She makes him feel guilt, shame I guess is the word I should use, since that's where the filmmaker wants me to go, about his sexuality.
He tries to have a "normal" relationship with a co-worker. He can't perform. He needs it fast and kinky. Involve the heart and he's not interested.
He's not a family man. He cares for his sister, sure, kind of, but would rather not talk to her if possible.
By the end of the movie, we're led to believe this is all awful stuff, his predilection for sex and his preference of solitude. His sister tries to kill herself. We're led to believe he's mostly to blame. If he were a better brother with a wife, she's be OK.
Nonsense. This is an NC-17 movie with PG themes. Who cares if all he wants to do in life is get his rocks off and be alone? That's perfectly fine! I envy him in a lot of ways, with my family and monogamy and modest life. Naturally, I prefer mine to his, I would definitely grow lonely, but if he doesn't -- why pass judgment?
And I hate how it's shot. It's pretty, all right, but who cares. Visuals should serve the story. In this movie, the visuals serve themselves.




Wo be unto they that play with their joysticks.

In the same vein, there's a new pop science book out called "The Decline of Guys." It's about how porn and video games are making men isolated, ineffectual, and unable to thrive in relationships.
The Walkman and iPod didn't kill us off, but by gum the PlayStation and YouPorn sure will.
This is nonsense. This wouldn't be worth addressing if not for the fact that most people believe it.
This premise is flawed from the outset. Culture does not works this way. Human beings are not blank slates on which behavior is written. Anecdotal stories about how men are perceived and conventional wisdom is not scientific fact. A world without porn would not make gentler, more thoughtful and romantic men.
So before Internet porn and video games, men were more romantic, better conversationalists, and all around superior to us 21st century lug heads? Of course not.
In cultures where these media are non-existent or suppressed, do men thrive and women swoon?
Why only these media? Why not books and TV and movies? Why not politics and live theater and music? Why not iPads and Twitter? Why not art galleries? Why don't they have the same alleged deleterious effect?
Porn and gaming are easy targets because so many men use them with considerable frequency. But some version of porn and gaming is as old as civilization and somehow humanity has forged ahead. The worst criticism one can level at games is that they are a waste of time. But so is so much else we find enjoyable. To suggest that they somehow are ruining men is to misunderstand how the mind works, how behavior is formed, and to ignore the reality that if porn and games were as pernicious as believed, this world would have gone to pot a few months after Pac-Man and Marilyn Chambers arrived on the scene.

Out of Work

Here's a secret. Sometimes I regret moving to California. Sometimes I think it was a mistake. Sometimes I feel like a fool on a fool's errand.

But here's something else. At least I have a job (at the moment). Had I stayed in Utah, and had I stayed at the Salt Lake Tribune, I would most certainly be out of a job now. If not with the folding of IN Utah This Week (or whatever they changed the name to), then certainly today with the cut.

Thinking on it, the number of people I was closest to at the Trib that still work there is getting smaller and smaller.

Waffle fries and Morality

What profiteth it a man if he should eat a fry and lose his soul?

I was telling my 4-year-old about waffle fries (she had asked what we were having for dinner) and told her the best place to get waffle fries was from Chik-Fil-A. I told her we'd go there the next time we're at a place that has one.

But then I remembered all the money they gave to block homosexuals the right to marry like us heterosexuals and thought, I can't give them money that they use to fund movements I abhor.

I explained this to my 4-year-old. Maybe we shouldn't visit a place that refused a certain segment of the population the possiblity to marry. "That's not fair," she said, "Everybody should be able to get married."

I agreed.

Clockwork Oranges

This is a review I posted on Amazon that I am also posting here regarding "Free Will" by Sam Harris.

I came into the book thinking I'd be further convinced that free will is an illusion but, after reading it, I'm more skeptical than I was before. Well, I learned a word for what I am -- compatibilist.

To me, the more lucid and resonating arguments from the book came from Daniel Dennett and others Harris quotes in opposition to his thesis that we're puppets on unseen strings. I agree that consciousness is not ultimately in charge, but my CEO brain still retains the power to "deliberate and choose and act," as I am doing with this review, or when I choose to say something sarcastic or not (and have done both), or whether to take advantage of the broken candy machine or not (and have done both). True, I don't inspire the urge to be sarcastic or steal a Snickers, but I have the ultimate say in whether I do it or not.

Or is Harris really saying men who cheat have no say in the matter? He never brings up this scenario, but I guess if he feels murderers can't help themselves, neither can adulterers. I disagree. Men may be, for biological reasons, more prone to cheat, but that does not mean those who cheat do so unavoidably.

Harris focuses somewhat on the extreme choice of murder, and seems to want to equate murderers with tumors in their brains to murderers who have unlucky genes, bad parents, and an unlucky environment. Well, we can see and remove the tumor in the former (though I still don't know what an apt form of justice would be to such a person), but what do we do to the person who kills for the fun of it? Could such a person be reformed? Could they develop enough willpower not to yield to the urge to kill? Isn't that a kind of free will, then?

If there's no free will, how does anyone ever effectively diet? How does Alcoholics Anonymous work? How can one have the atoms to abuse alcohol and then never touch it again? The conscious self never makes a decision in any of this?

Harris is right when he says we cannot go back in time to see how someone might have reacted differently, but we also can't see the situations where a store wasn't robbed, when a family wasn't murdered, when a home invader decided not to drop the bat on the patriarch's head. What in those situations? Is not beating someone with a bat still evidence of no free will? The genes just didn't have it in them at that time?

Or maybe Harris and I agree more than I think, and we're just defining free will differently, because he does says that choices matter.

And as a final criticism, the book did feel breezy, heavy on rhetoric, light on evidence and real world application. Harris brings up a couple of real world scenarios, but doesn't really develop or probe them in meaningful ways. The awful scenario he opens the book with never gets brought up again, for example. We're left to think Harris thinks what was done to that family was essentially unavoidable. The book feels like Harris spent a couple of weekends writing it.

A book that treads some of the same ground, but with more efficacy, depth, rigor, and power to persuade, is Incognito. I'd recommend that book over this one.

Incognito

I haven't published anything for a while because of a lack of things to say and because I got a Kindle and so I've been reading much more than I usually do. The increase in reading has brought two things to the fore: I've begun writing short stories (and a novel, but that seems so long) and I've been looking into neuroscience as a possible path since working as a paid fiction writer of any kind seems less and less likely to happen (but I keep plugging away).

The best books lately have been Incognito (I forget the subtitle ... and the author) and The Believing Brain by Michael Shermer. Both are excellent. The first is about all the unknown processes the brain does as it sits in total darkness in our heads. The best, and most difficult to accept chapters, revolve around free will, especially as it relates to crime.

Shermer's book continually drives home its thesis -- beliefs come first, then we seek out evidence to confirm those beliefs -- by applying it to everything from religion, 9/11 conspiracy theorists, politics, ghosts, and even science.

The New and Improved Prophet

Even as a believing Mormon, I thought it was silly the way certain figures have come to be represented over the years, from the Americanization of Jesus to the modernization of Joseph Smith. Compare:

Big nose, slightly bug-eyed, looking like the 19th century military and spiritual leader he saw himself as.

More prophet and less theocrat. Looks like a man burdened by God.

Hey, the all-American boy. Handsome, strong, clothes and features completely removed from reality. Those marketers sure can do their job.

Video Games and Values

The Supreme Court recently ruled a California law banning the selling of M-rated, violent video games to minors was unconstitutional. Justice Scalia, whom I dislike in just about every way, wrote the majority opinion.

The ruling is welcome, but the law was misguided in the first place. Almost no one thinks minors should be allowed to play violent video games. Stores already have practices in place to prevent their purchases. Even I, at 29, have to show my ID most of the time.

Also, the games, like movies and music, are "rated" so that parents know what kind of content is in them. And you know, if I had a 13-year-old boy, I would buy Call of Duty for him, or Fallout, or pretty much whatever game. Maybe not some of the really crass and vulgar ones, but those titles are fine for a teenager, if they're interested.

The reason people are worried about it is the idea that violent imagery begets violence in people. Video games must be worse because they're interactive. This is based on the false notion that we are blank slates with brains that are putty-like and adopt whatever they are exposed to. This is not so.

That's not to suggest environment can't shape us - it can and does. But generally not through mediums of entertainment, like books, movies, music, video games, and even pornography. A few people might be genetically disposed to be more affected by such things, but here's an easy test to the effect of violent games on youths: has crime risen or declined in the years since Grand Theft Auto? If violent video games were a instigator, wouldn't we see a dramatic rise in aggressiveness from the $18 billion dollar a year industry?

Instead, the effects of video games are minimal. They get blamed because they are a relatively new technology, just like people thought the Walkman was the end of conversation. The iPod, too. And how Twitter is allegedly going to make us dumb and only able to communicate in 140 characters and unable to have the attentions pans we're supposed to.

The medium is not the message. Behaviorism got it wrong. If you want to ban violent games, you would have to logically extend that to every other medium as well.