An important speech.

As something of a Rawlsian about public discourse, I have no problem with religious people arguing in government for application of ideals that they personally discovered through their religion or their sacred texts, their religious institutions, etc. as long as they respect the need to give reasons that are publicly accessible, reasons that do not cite religious authority as though it were binding upon all rational people to take into account. As long as your religiously derived view is also defensible in terms of reason, you should feel free to argue for it.

This principle is what prevents us from having laws rooted in religious intuitions that are purely arbitrary and incapable of rational justification. If anyone can just “feel” God’s voice telling them that God wants x or God wants y and if they are able to persuade others that they had this insight straight from God, then there are no limits on theological claims made by the fiat of “Scriptural” authors or contemporaries who claim prophetic abilities that can be made into laws. There is no limit to stop those who think God indicates to them that slavery is okay or that God demands a genocide (as the Bible claims he has repeatedly before for example) from making such insistences in arguments about public policy and law. We could wind up with arguments that all Americans must be baptized for the good of their souls, that there should be no separation from church and state, etc. Any argument must be considered when it needs no further justification when it is rooted in premises chosen to be believed purely by groundless “faith.”

And that’s why Obama is extremely right in his manner of trying to explain to his fellow Christians how they should conceive of their incorporation of their religious beliefs (if they must) into their public policy suggestions. And it’s why Dobson is extremely upsetting:

Dobson reserved some of his harshest criticism for Obama’s argument that the religiously motivated must frame debates over issues like abortion not just in their own religion’s terms but in arguments accessible to all people.

He said Obama, who supports abortion rights, is trying to govern by the “lowest common denominator of morality,” labeling it “a fruitcake interpretation of the Constitution.”

“Am I required in a democracy to conform my efforts in the political arena to his bloody notion of what is right with regard to the lives of tiny babies?” Dobson said. “What he’s trying to say here is unless everybody agrees, we have no right to fight for what we believe.”

Dobson’s either obtuse or a liar to interpret Obama as saying that “unless everybody agrees” he has no right to fight for his beliefs. What Obama is saying is that your arguments must be of the type that could persuade those that disagree with you on the common terms of rational debate that we all share: appeals to logic, history, repeatable or universally had types of experiences, science, anecdotal evidence, etc. Obama’s not saying the ridiculous thing that unless everyone already agrees with you you cannot make an argument. He’s saying you cannot make an argument from premises that are simply idiosyncratic to you and your dogmatic faith tradition with its bald assertions that subject themselves to no thorough rational questioning but instead insist on “faith” to make up a key role in their assenting.

Unless Dobson really (and rather stupefyingly) thinks that he has no reasons to argue against abortion that do not come from the claims of “special revelation” from God, what in the world is wrong with demanding he use arguments that do not appeal to leaps of faith but actually are persuasive to “reason alone?” And if he thinks abortion is only refutable for religious reasons, because of his self-conscious, rationally uncompelled choice to believe (which is what faith is, a choice to believe) , then how dare he insist others who do not make a similarly rationally uncompelled choice to believe as a matter of law? How dare he derive laws from those beliefs he knows he chose even though they weren’t nearly conclusively proven to him? How does he not see the arbitrariness, unfairness, and theocracy in that? Is he just that unwilling to view things from the perspective of others who disagree with him? Does he have that little respect for them?

The irony of Dobson’s anger and contempt for Obama is that he goes right ahead and in defense of his right to argue on religious terms makes an explicit appeal that is accessible to all people after all—-he appeals to “what is right with regard to the lives of tiny babies.” One does not have to be religious to have an interest in the well being of “tiny babies.” That he thinks you must is just religious arrogance. That’s not to say of course that all irreligious people accept his views on what is or is not a “tiny baby” or what is right or wrong with regard to them. But neither do all religious people agree with him. The issue can be debated among reasonable people on rational and reasonable terms without appeals to religious authority and without the assumption that only religious people can have the most robust senses of goodness possible.

It is Dobson’s pure arrogance that his religion makes his moral intuitions and moral insights superior and that arrogance translates in an unflinching willingness to theocratically impose his moral intuitions on people by appeal to reasons they could not even theoretically assent to as long as they are not adherents to his theology.

That’s obnoxious, that’s authoritarian, that’s anti-rational, and that’s flat-out regressive.

This commercial actually ran against Obama….

Amidst an insightful piece on Obama’s use of language, there’s this interesting thesis about what style indicates about substance.

How much can you tell about a candidate’s fitness to lead a country based on a single clause? The substance/style debate has been around for centuries—and, like all the other venerable binaries, is probably best considered as a symbiosis. Too often, style is dismissed as merely a sauce on the nutritious bread of substance, when in fact it’s inevitably a form of substance itself. This goes double for the presidency, where brilliant policy requires brilliant public discourse. If you can think your way through a sentence, through the algorithms involved in condensing information verbally and pitching it to an audience, through the complexities of animating historical details into narrative, then you can think your way through a policy paper, or a diplomatic discussion, or a 3 A.M. phone call. Bush’s difficulty with basic units of syntax has not been trivial: It signals a wider habit of mind that has extended to every corner of governance. Hillary’s tendency to express herself in distant clichés very likely lost her the nomination—and, one might argue, rightfully so. Style tells us, in a second, what substance couldn’t tell us in a year. It’s silly to downplay the importance of verbal intelligence to a job that makes you the mouthpiece of arguably the most influential nation in the world.

Fascinating article about what sounds like a fascinating book.

Thaler and Sunstein correctly assume that people are busy, their lives are increasingly complicated and they have neither time nor inclination nor, often, the ability to think through even all important choices, from health care plans to retirement options. Therefore the framing of choices matters, particularly using the enormous power of the default option—the option that goes into effect if the chooser chooses not to make a choice.

For example, Obama advocates that where defined contribution savings plans such as 401(k)s are offered, there should be automatic—note well: not mandatory—enrollment by employers of new workers. Contributions to such plans are tax deductible, taxes are deferred on the accumulating money and often employers match part of the employees’ contributions. What is at stake is, essentially, free money. Yet when an employee must affirmatively opt in, participation falls far below 100 percent. Obama’s proposal would simply change the default option: Employees are in unless they choose to opt out, which they would be free to do.

Abundant evidence indicates that most would not, which would serve the national interest because Americans’ savings rate is a disgrace. In fact, in 2005 it turned negative, and if insufficient saving persists, that inevitably will mean bigger government to provide for people who have not provided for themselves.

By a “nudge” Thaler and Sunstein mean a policy intervention into choice architecture that is easy and inexpensive to avoid and that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing an individual’s economic incentives. “Putting the fruit at eye level counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not.”

Thaler and Sunstein say the premise of libertarian policy is that people should be generally free to do what they please. Paternalistic policy “tries to influence choices in a way that will make choosers better off, as judged by themselves.” So “libertarian paternalism is a relatively weak, soft, and nonintrusive type of paternalism because choices are not blocked, fenced off, or significantly burdened.”

Flip-flopping on NAFTA, Obama explains his position in his native politician language:

“Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and amplified,” he conceded, after I reminded him that he had called NAFTA “devastating” and “a big mistake,” despite nonpartisan studies concluding that the trade zone has had a mild, positive effect on the U.S. economy.

What that means in English is “Politicians pander and lie to get elected and I’m a politician, so I’m no exception.”

I give Obama the credit of having enough honesty that he here and elsewhere not only admits he lied but also accurately attributes it to his being a politician. Problem is with the lies and with the attempt to excuse his behavior on those grounds.

I understand the felt need to pander. I actually also prefer his true position on NAFTA to his rhetorical one for the primaries.

What I don’t appreciate is his consistent unwillingness to take an unpopular stance on principle. On gay marriage, he has given tacit approval of the California Supreme Court’s position, so there is reason to hope he won’t sell out the gays like Clinton did with DOMA. But his official position says he will indeed oppose marriage for gays. He claims he will reverse Bush’s assaults on the constitution, but thus far is silent on the Congress’s contempt for the constitution expressed in its passing of the FISA legislation. I put up with pragmatically, but less and less appreciate, his pandering to evangelicals on both the left and the right to insist on increasing rhetoric that insists religion should play a large role in governmental thinking. It would be nice if maybe he could take leadership and combine the Democrats’ just call for universal health care with the Republicans’ just call for tort reform that would eliminate the enormous amount of money wasted on unnecessary medicine aimed at protecting doctors’ from irrational malpractice suits. It would be nice if Obama didn’t pander to ethanol producers in Iowa. It would be nice if he could take a principled, controversial stand on anything, actually.

I agree with most of Obama’s platform and McCain is an extremely dangerous, militaristic Neo-Con and scary deficit spender who wants to stack the Supreme Court with people with no concern for civil rights. Plus McCain is as big a flip-flopper, if not bigger,than Obama is. So, there’s no doubt the only remaining hope in this campaign for any kind of reversal of the disastrous Bush policies and mindset in government is a President Obama. But it’s increasingly clear that while Obama will not have Bush’s vices, he can be expected to have most of Bill Clinton’s, excluding only the sexual ones.

It is definitely a lesser of two evils election as usual though, I’m finally coming to see and accept that. For a short period there I actually thought it might be something else.

I like Obama a lot for a lot of reasons, but I’ve never bought into the myth that he’s not a scheming politician at his core. So, this article doesn’t surprise me but it’s still disappointing.

A pretty hilarious series of photos wherein people in the background intentionally or unintentionally “ruin” (or in some cases make) the photo.

Just read this description of Hillary and Obama meeting in the halls at the AIPAC conference the day after he clinched the nomination.

http://nymag.com/news/politics/47837/

The scene unfolding in front of me is a semiotician’s fantasia. For months, Clinton and Obama have battled (and battered) each other more or less as equals. But now there is no longer even a faint pretense of parity. When they first spy each other in the corridor, Clinton hugs the wall deferentially to let Obama pass; their brief tête-à-tête only ensues at the latter’s instigation. When the chat is over and the nominee strides toward the freight elevator to make his exit, his Secret Service agents brusquely shoo away Clinton’s aides: “Stand aside for Senator Obama! Make way for Senator Obama!”

This news is so devastating. He was the best.

From a New York Times profile on quotes Obama:

“I love when I’m shaking hands on a rope line and”— he mimes the motion, hand over hand — “I see little old white ladies and big burly black guys and Latino girls and all their hands are entwining. They’re feeding on each other as much as on me.”

He shrugs; it’s that distancing eye of the author.

“It’s like I’m just the excuse.”

regardless of whether it’s put-on humility—there’s something in there to meditate on a bit, I think.

Senator Coburn writes,

Compassionate conservatism’s starting point had merit. The essential argument that Republicans should orient policy around how our ideas will affect the poor, the widow, the orphan, the forgotten and the “other” is indisputable – particularly for those who claim, as I do, to submit to an authority higher than government. Yet conservatives are conservatives because our policies promote deliverance from poverty rather than dependence on government.

Compassionate conservatism’s next step – its implicit claim that charity or compassion translates into a particular style of activist government involving massive spending increases and entitlement expansion – was its undoing. Common sense and the Scriptures show that true giving and compassion require sacrifice by the giver. This is why Jesus told the rich young ruler to sell his possessions, not his neighbor’s possessions. Spending other people’s money is not compassionate.

That’s right folks, all that disgust with the George W. Bush and the Republican party these days is based on their being too compassionate. Shame on Mark Foley and his “compassion” towards his interns. Shame on the compassion of Jack Abramoff. Shame on the president for killing tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians, thousands of American soldiers, and trillions of dollars out of his blind compassion.

And according to Coburn, politicians need to be governed by the principles given from “a higher authority,” a “Scriptural” Christian higher authority that should determine our legislation. And what is the message of this Christian Gospel? Apparently the sole Gospel truth that should be guiding our government is “Thou shalt not force thy rich neighbor to sacrifice for his fellow man.”

Now that’s what I call creative hermeneutics!

That this man gets to be one of the most powerful legislators in all the world, a freaking United States Senator, is shudder-inducing.

I used to consider myself a conservative. I have a whole lot of sympathies with libertarians like Ron Paul. On social matters I’m almost extremely libertarian. On fiscal matters, I’d be one if it weren’t that I thought markets are too capricious to be just or stable when unfettered and totally deregulated; if I didn’t believe that some government regulation is needed as a check and balance that prevents de facto oligarchies of undemocratically controlled multinational corporations that threaten liberty and safety in comparable ways to government’s threats to these things; and if I didn’t think that since health insurance arrangements are already by their nature socialistic arrangements, they’d might as well be run as a not-for-profit by a just government and include everyone. So, those caveats restrain my libertarianism. But at the core of classic libertarian conservative principles of small government, promotion of competition, and personal independence appeal to me.

But simply nothing about the present day Republican party appeals to me. Its combination of theocratic longings, pandering to ignorance, antipathy to science, homophobia, racism, contempt for civil and privacy rights, self-righteous hypocritical religiosity, materialism, arrogant jingoistic chest-thumping imperialism, and obscene corporate corruption make the party as repulsive as toxic waste.

And none of this has to do with the party’s “compassion!”

In response to a former student, frustrated with the labels of agnostic and atheist, I wrote the following. I thought it might be of interest to others, so figured I’d post it here in case it is.

Well, I’m not sure you have a good grasp on what agnosticism is. Thomas Huxley coined the word as a play on words. He was a philosopher who was irritated about the metaphysical presumptuousness of the philosophers around him who all seemed to know the secrets of the universe as though they had some special knowledge about things no one can really know about. He compared them, derisively, to the gnostics of the early Christian church. The gnostics were a sect of Christians who believed they were in on secrets that Jesus gave to a handful of his disciples but not the others. Gnostic in Greek is one of the words for “to know” and so the “gnostics” were those who thought they had “special knowledge.” It’s basically like “those in the know.”

SO, Huxley compared overly presumptuous metaphysical speculation and confidence to the gnostics, a sect believing it had secret knowledge. He contrasted himself to them by calling himself an “agnostic” (a “not gnostic”) who had no special knowledge about the secret metaphysical/theological truths of the universe.

So, the word agnostic has grown to mean a position of confessed not-knowing in almost any area of disputable beliefs. But primarily it applies to the theological position of declaring yourself as not knowing whether or not there is a God. Some Christians like to distinguish two types of agnostics: those who say THEY just don’t know if there’s a God and those who claim NO ONE can ever know whether there is a God. Clearly Huxley meant the latter. He meant to claim such matters were inaccessible to human knowledge and to have knowledge would require a preposterous “secret knowlege” that no one should feel entitled to claim themselves a right to.

Yet, there is still humility to agnosticism. It’s not audacious enough as to declare knowing that there’s not a God but it is saying that such questions are unanswerable and left alone. It’s not an opening for others to say they believe anyway. It’s not an outright claim there is no God. It’s a position that says we should ALL admit we know nothing about such things.

Atheism is just the firmer claim there is no God. I wish it wasn’t so closely linked to the attitude you described being wary of whereby someone claims that all knowledge is scientific knowledge. That’s scientism. That’s the (naive) belief that science can answer every question. I (and Nietzsche incidentally) completely reject that way of thinking. I think science is our most powerful and compelling mode of knowing and I think that it is a model for its insistence on method and experience and verifiability and falsifiability as tests for knowledge.

But, ultimately, science cannot answer many metaphysical questions that I think we can formulate relatively defensible beliefs about. Neither can science say very much at all about values and ethics. And again, I think there is much to say. Essentially, there are many topics for philosophy and for the social sciences that require modes of inquiry that are messier than science for being less quantifiable, but nonetheless are valuable forms of inquiry.

Just theology is not one of them.

So, you can be an atheist like me and Nietzsche without adopting scientism.

I’m technically an agnostic. I believe we cannot know the source of eternity in the universe. All we know is that in some way something must just exist. Whether that’s an eternal character to the stuff of our universe or whether it’s a seperate being is an unsettlable question. I’d rather not answer it therefore. But, if pressed to give an answer, I would say it’s a simpler and therefore less presumptuous answer, to simply say there’s something eternal about the world we do know rather than make the huge unwarranted leap to posit an entire other being that we can not know.

Ultimately, I call myself an atheist because due to my agnosticism, I de facto live like an atheist and I have enoough antipathy towards religion and monotheism that I like to express it in the least compromising title available. It is also a matter of importance to me that we deliberately accept a godless universe and pursue reframing our values in light of that apparent situation. The term atheism is more consistent with such an insistence on such an attitude.

when the Mets score over and over again….There are few more satisfying sounds in life than that! Tonight was a good night. The Mets seem to always get crushed on the Yankee Stadium Sunday night game every year, so I was not expecting such a happy game. It just stinks that my man Carlos Delgado got jipped of a three run homerun he really could have used that wound up getting wrongly called foul. Still pleased to see him follow it up with a run scoring single after continuing the at bat. He should get 4 RBI in the books

Let’s Go Mets!

Click video for a fundamental truth of life.

Teeth

Sometimes people disagree about what makes for a horror film. As far as I’m concerned, the definitive feature of the genre is that it deals with frightening transgressions of nature and of morality. Mitchell Lichtenstein’s Teeth is horror that situates itself purely in terms of this defining characteristic. The horror is not in the surprises, as the film offers few ultimately, and it’s not in traditional scares. The horror is all in the transgression promised in the premise. The trailer below will cue you in to the premise sufficiently enough that I need not waste words or risk spoilers by going into it myself.

Teeth is pitch black horror comedy. The tone of the film borders on cartoonish at times and its funny moments are almost always its absolutely grotesque ones. The gore is not frequent or gratuitous but it is as transgressively scandalous and perverse as promised. I am not at all one to watch horror films to see gore for gore’s sake. Yet the horror genre at its best provides incredible opportunities for shrewd commentaries and visceral meditations on all sorts of themes and in service of such themes, I am probably as interested in gore as the most gratuitous gorehound. And Teeth delivers thematically with a fascinating synthesis of narratives and myths related to sexuality—ancient myths, Freudian myths, contemporary evangelical Christian purity myths, female empowerment myths, evolutionary stories, and familiar rape narratives are all interwoven with each other in a remarkably coherent and, to me, intellectually stimulating way. I had a good time sifting through the ways that these disparate and sometimes competing narratives found so many elemental features in eerily common with each other and how they also fundamentally diverged and created fundamental contrasts by the end.

Fundamentally, what becomes so interesting with this particular horror film is the way it throws into question what is nature and what is transgression? Is puberty’s sexual awakening the end of the age of purity or is it the return to nature lost to trauma and repression until that point? Are these teeth a transgression of nature or are they an evolutionary gift for adaptation? Is female empowerment itself an overturning of nature or an adaptation for advancement of women (and the species itself)? Do our traditional myths put us at odds with nature and is the point of the film to affirm the more modern stories of physical, personal, and social evolution as vehicles towards a strengthened nature that overturns the patriarchy, dogmatism, and religious fundamentalism that traditionally have claimed to be true to nature but have only functioned through a fundamentally anti-natural tyranny, as Nietzsche would argue?

So, all in all, Teeth is a horror film in the most elemental way, manifoldly transgressively playing off primal fears, gallows humor, and vengeance fantasies in order to give life to and put in tension some of the most enduring and some of the newest myths and narratives that our culture uses to cope with, understand, and control the primal forces of sexual desire.

As to form, the acting is uneven and the pacing is a little overly drawn out frequently. And the music stands out very well. Robert Miller’s score is excitingly evocative of Danny Elfman, in particular the Beetlejuice score in places. In other words, the score knows how to do dark, wry horror comedy. And fitting the primal themes, the score also heavily relies on more tribal elements to a fitting effect.

B+

Your Friends and Neighbors
Neil LaBute’s film Your Friends and Neighbors is pretty much what I expected and desired from the director of In the Company of Men, The Shape of Things, The Wicker Man, and Nurse Betty: It’s a film in which irredeemably cruel, selfish, and sexually despairing narcissists rip themselves and each other apart. Unlike Teeth, which plays on mythic horrors and familiar narratives in exploring humanity’s uneasy relationship with sex, Your Friends and Neighbors is one of a seemingly endless line of films that drags sex down from the realm of ideals and myths and through the vulgar bedrooms of your idiosyncratically twisted friends and neighbors. The more serious films I watch, the more it becomes clear that cinema from all over the world has been for decades now chronicling sexual dysfunction and shades of particularity of experience in a nearly encyclopedic fashion.

And Your Friends and Neighbors is a fascinating watch if you’re of the temperament to enjoy unvarnished exposure of human weakness, narcissism, aggressiveness, and passive aggressiveness, and if you’d like to add to your mental catalogue of nuances of idiosyncratic sexual despair. I enjoy a great deal such films that plumb unpleasant truths and dissect in detail human cruelty, despair, and power dialectics with some dark humor. So I loved this film.

The performances were also uniformly superb. Ben Stiller vanishes into his serious role astonishingly well, Jason Patric’s portrayal of possibly the most repulsively thoroughly sketched mysoginist I’ve ever seen on screen is perfectly sickening. And Catherine Keener has a scene towards the end of the film that just blew me away. I never understood all the hubbub around her performance in Capote, but she deserved an Oscar either for 1998’s Your Friends and Neighbors or 1999’s Being John Malkovich, both for vivid portrayals of icy narcissists , callously indifferent to the attention of her admirers.

A-

In reply to my review of Peter Bogdanovich’s film about Tom Petty Running Down a Dream , “Lizzie B” over at the Tom Petty message board points out an oversight in my review. She astutely observes:

Something you didn’t touch on that really stood out to me in the film is Tom Petty’s shrewd sense of what it took to become the long-running established band they are today. It only makes sense that anyone in Tom’s position has to have a special ability for spotting great musicians. But then to acquire them by any means necessary was almost shocking to me. This was especially true in the story of how they got Howie in the band. The way Tom laughed it off was a little eerie.

I loved the way Bogdonvich highlighted the crazed drive Tom had from the very earliest days of his musical career. That angry, perfectionistic drive explains so many of the choices in his life. Tom is portrayed as strong, opinionated, almost manipulative. But he stops short of making him look like a despot. Just short, in my opinion.

I don’t think Bogdonovich could have made him look any more human.

I agree completely. Recently in one of my lectures I was referring to the oppressively controlling streak that great artists have and I cited some aspects of Tom’s attitudes there. Even to this day, as far as I understand, the band has no input in what goes in the setlist. Tom is an extremely controlling guy.

I think there’s a sort of justification to it in that, as long as he doesn’t stifle the rest of the band, what his method does is to establish firmly a clarity of artistic vision. The goal with Tom’s kind of approach is to get the most out of his band for making his music. These world class musicians become themselves the instruments for making [B]his[/B] music. Individually, Benmont is a talented songwriter and a virtuoso on the piano and Mike is as good a jam guitarist as any one could hope for. But none of that gets showcased on TPATH albums because these extremely talented musicians are willing to subordinate their musical goals to Tom’s and to channel them to serve his music. They go off and do other projects to stretch their wings but in Tom’s band, they are restrained.

In concerts, Tom lets the jamming take place and after 26 years in the band, Mike finally got some serious jamming tracks on the Last DJ album, and finally, after decades of loyal support, Benmont finally got to write and sing a song on the new Mudcrutch album. But for the most part, it’s Tom’s band and Mike and Benmont let themselves fall in line because they trust him as a worthy leader.

Interestingly this image of the band with a strong leader who can get the most out of talented band members who flourish through their subordination serves as a powerful illustration of how Nietzsche views the healthy soul to function. For Nietzsche we do not have unified selves but essentially are the sum of a multiplicity of competing drives. He says that the “great man” is “great owing to the free play and scope of his desires and to the yet greater power that knows how to press these magnificent monsters into service.” He writes,

In contrast with the animals, man has cultivated an abundance of contrary drives and impulses within himself, thanks to this synthesis he is master of the earth.—Moralities are the expression of locally limited orders of rank in his multifarious world of drives, so man should not perish through their contradictions. Thus a drive as master, its opposite weakened, refined, as the impulse that provides the stimulus for the activity of the chief drive. The highest man would have the greatest multiplicity of drives, in the relatively greatest strength that can be endured. Indeed, where the plant “man” shows himself strongest one finds instincts that conflict powerfully (e.g., in Shakespeare), but are controlled. (WP 966)

The ideal here is an ever stronger dominating will over the self that makes possible more desires and each more intense as the stronger the dominating will that can harness more variegated and intense passions, the more use can be made of their being present. Another element of this is that the tension between the opposites within great men, the conflict between their great virtues and their “opposites” is actually the generative tension that develops the great man as such. He is a “bow with the great tension.” (WP 967) Nietzsche characterizes moralities as essentially the hierarchy forming disciplines that create internal cohesion by which a dominant drive (transformed into a dominant virtue) controls and channels the other energies within. Moralities are localized in that they represent the particular ordering of powers a specific individual (or group, through an analogous macro-level hierarchy forming process) finds most conducive to its needs.

So, a morality is like Tom’s principles and rules for his band. The songs remain short (like Mike says in the documentary, “don’t bore us, get to the chorus”), the guitar solos make their point quickly and end, etc. Because Tom is a strong leader, his band can flourish and produce their best work without it spinning off into becoming a mess.

This is how Nietzsche sees the value of a morality. He is famously suspicious of morality for its possibility for complete stifling of desires (and at worst, even its desire to extirpate desires completely.) Nietzsche’s ideal is a strong will that through its strength can orchestrate great music out of competing strengths of talent and keeping their competition from creating mere cacophony.

To further elaborate for those for whom the above has been too densely written:
The point is that a stronger dominant will within the self makes it possible that one can have stronger and more intense desires without being ruined by them. So, a weak willed person cannot handle strong desires because they would overwhelm him or her. But if you have a strong will, you can experience intensity of desire because you can control it. You can experience contrary emotions and passions and perspectives without letting them dominate you and make you lose control of yourself.

Nietzsche is arguing that the ability to see things from multiple perspectives that even conflict with each other, to feel things with intense passions and desires that conflict with each other—-you need a strong dominating drive that doesn’t let all this conflict within you derail you or pull you apart at the seams. But if you can feel and think from with such tension and conflict within yourself, without letting it destroy you but by harnessing all that tension and conflict into a more intense and deeper way of seeing the world and feeling it—-then you can both experience life and live it more powerfully.

The idea about moralities being “localized” is that in individuals it can be different dominating drives that give cohesion to someone, based on his or her needs. Tom is a strong willed nature who is dominated by different drives that keep himself and his band together than, say, Nietzsche’s example of Shakespeare. Nietzsche doesn’t recommend an ethics that is universal for everyone. Rather he encourages those strong enough to develop their own rule by which they can master themselves in this way that embraces and maximizes the utility of conflicts within.

And on a “macro-level” moral communities represent the domination of a particular principle or two over the people in that community. This is how moralities dominate communities. All the resources of the community are marshalled in service of these overriding values. So, in an individual soul, the dominant will marshalls all the resources of competing passions, emotions, and perspectives to generate a more profound depth of personality. In a band, this becomes the strong leader allowing increased creativity of his band without that spinning off into incoherent chaos. In a culture, this becomes a dominant virtue being the one that overrides all the others and marshalls all their value in its service.

All of this represents the streak of Nietzsche that sees value in the power of moral discipline to harness conflicting energies to put them to unified purpose. Of course, the danger of these themes is that if they are not counterbalanced with Nietzschean suspicion of values stagnation and the stifling of individual expression—they risk being read as justifications of authoritarianism.

Overall, I think the important way to read these remarks about a soul or a community dominated by a strong will is Nietzsche’s highlighting the valuable role of disciplines in a way that needs always to be balanced by his suspicion of the drive to treat our disciplines as absolute, inflexible, and a justification for completely stifling others.

From a reader (and old friend) in Pittsburgh:

I see you have a blog. Sweet! If I can find the time, I will try to make vintage blog-style drive-by comments; complete with the requisite cynicism, pettiness, ad hominem smears, and (most necessary of all) appalling grammar befitting the beneficiary of a bona fide public school education. Vive la difference!

You read it here first. This blog will have everything you want from a blog soon.

And be sure not to miss all these reporters gone wild, they’re hilarious (if you find people losing their temper over petty things hilarious)

And at least O’Reilly has a sense of humor about it http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/05/14/oreilly-tries-to-laugh-of_n_101832.html

Andrew Sullivan posts an e-mail from one of his readers:

I live in SD and I am a candidate for the State House. I was out walking my district last month and spoke to a woman about the primary. She has a statue of the Virgin Mary in her front yard and was wearing several crosses around her neck. Here is our conversation:

Woman: “I don’t know about that Obama guy.”

Me: “I’m an Obama supporter, do you mind if I ask what you’re unsure about.”

Woman: “He’s a muslim and there is a biblical prophecy that a muslim will take over our country and destroy the world.”

Me: “You’re aware he is not a Muslim.”

Woman: “He can say anything he wants.”

A prophecy in the Christian Bible about a Muslim? And it mentions America? And she thinks that she can prevent a prophecy from happening by voting against it?

Has this woman ever read the Bible? She can say anything she wants.

Yesterday I talked to the local convenience store owner with whom I’ve long been friendly. He’s from Kosovo and he’s so anti-Muslim that as far as he’s concerned Obama is a Muslim because “it’s in his blood.” Last night in order to emphasize how anti-Obama he is, he explained that, “I hate work. I hate it. But if you told me, if I vote for Obama, I never have to work again, I still won’t vote for him.”

We’ve already seeing the beginning of 6 months-8 years worth of pushing away the giant rock of public political correctness to see the slime and maggots that normally hide in the dark.

Well, now it turns out that anyone that Barack Obama endorses is magically endorsed by Jeremiah Wright. By November’s time it is the Republican party’s wish that not only Barack Obama is equated with any one he’s ever been associated with in any capacity but that pretty much every Democrat who aligns him or herself with Obama or whom Obama aligns himself with is magically converted into a member of Jeremiah Wright’s fold.

By November, the Republicans are going to want Jeremiah Wright to be perceived as the pope of Democrats essentially.

Thankfully, this hilarious ad with all its baseless character assassination and insult to intelligence failed and Childers was elected. The Republican party is horrified.

What follows are a couple of replies to questions sent to me by a student this semester about Nietzsche’s views on politics and religion. While not definitive or thoroughly sourced discussions of Nietzsche’s thoughts on politics and religion, I think the sketches of Nietzsche’s positions as I formulated them in these replies have some promise.

I would eagerly welcome replies as to the tenability of the positions spelled out both for their justice to Nietzsche’s texts and for their general philosophical merit. With no further ado, here are the questions I was sent followed by my replies:

Does Nietszche want everyone to embrace the noble mindset? He says the individual must always re-affirm himself, act spontaneously and free, without restrictions of some sort of authority/moral over him. But since humans do co-exist in societies, there needs to be some sort of order/law, no? Does he propose societies without leaders, that each person is his own sovereign? Or does he think the noble people will rise above the inevitable masses that will continue with the slave mentality?

Your questions are superb ones without simple answers. They are exactly the kinds of things I’m still trying to sort out. Firstly, Nietzsche acknowledges in a more fatalistic sort of way that not every one will be of noble mind and he is suspicious of philosophies that try to ignore the ways that people really are. The common person will always be the common person. He does, I think, talk about whole ages where a whole people might be more noble but in general there will be these contrasts in mindset and internal constitution between the herd and the more noble types.

So, to an extent, Nietzsche can be read as making his appeals to those fewer ones who will be receptive to the nobler calling to a nobler way of life that he is making. He can, to a greater extent than most philosophers, admit that there can be different codes of life good for the herd than for the nobles. Herd morality does serve the herd’s interests and so is genuinely valuable for them. Nietzsche does not so much want to upset their stability as free the “nobles” to do the sort of value creation that is possible for them as people with greater internal resources.

At minimum, we can say that these nobler individuals can transform a culture in a way that takes the whole people to another level for its having the influence of their greatness. The importance of great artists is of great significance for Nietzsche as exemplary figures who effect this kind of move within a culture. Now, whether or not the masses will be able to incorporate the profundities of these transformative cultural figures in such a way that makes them embody all his virtues and be as great in themselves is hard to say. It’s likely they won’t, but they will nonetheless be better off for the contributions to their culture.

Now the question of laws and ethical precepts are a couple whole other balls of wax. I think Nietzsche tends to focus on creating the conditions for the excellent to emerge and to be the cultural leaders. He totally mistrusts statism because he thinks that state apparatuses are woeful substitutes for genuine culture when it comes to genuinely uniting a people. Also, while he is not an individualist, he is protective of the values-innovators who state and religion will vilify as evil. The problem that Nietzsche sees the values-innovator as facing is that when (s)he questions the dominant values, he is inevitably going to be deemed evil according to the dominant values because he is a threat to them themselves. How can you question your values when your values are the judge of what’s a good answer? So, Nietzsche’s concern with morality is this conservative dimension to it, by which it shuts off the questioning that goes against it. So, he is concerned to break the hold of laws that would enshrine the values of the present. Whether he wants laws created by the coming values-innovators who will replace the Christian values or whether he wants them only to be cultural influences who don’t get into the business of actually turning their new values into actual laws, is a difficult question that I can’t really definitively answer yet.

I am starting to write my paper and I am a little confused about Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence.

As far as God is concerned, I thought Nietzsche doesn’t believe in God or an afterlife per se, just that you keep living your life over and over again, like reincarnation except its always the same. So in that sense its not really an afterlife(because an after life, in the Christian sense anyway, is some spiritual never ending life after a short period of temporal living), I think it would be more like some never ending circle of temporal life. You would really never die (because death is understood as your spirit separating from your body for another place). It would be sort of like a book with many chapters, each saying the same thing. Does Nietzsche believe that there is some infinite being causing this eternal recurrence? and how exactly does it work, because obviously time goes on, so you couldn’t keep living your successive lives on Earth, they would have to be on some other plane or dimension right? And since people are born and die at different times, how does that work out( say I die today, and start my eternal life, but my brother doesn’t die for another 50 years…how does he end up in my “new” eternal life?)

Also, Nietzsche doesn’t believe in any seperate infinite being or “other”, but rather the unity and oneness of the universe. So how are we all connected? Is there an interconnecting spirit or something?

thanks!

You’re basically on the right track. The only things that I would correct are as follows. There is no reference to a being beyond the universe such as an independently existing God. If he is to speak of a “divine” at all, it would be just the totality of the universe taken as a whole. What I mean by this is as follows: the question of “what is God?” is a question of what is the ultimate, eternal reality upon which all particular being depends for its existence. The metaphysical intuition that leads people to talk about the “divine” is that temporal beings as we know them require outside causes to come into existence—they can’t cause themselves. So, the divine has usually been interpreted by philosophers in some way or another as whatever that thing is that didn’t need a prior existing thing to create it.

Obviously particular material objects don’t seem fit for such an uncaused existence since they require causes outside of themselves. Where the monotheist posits a separate being, a God, who exists by his own power, uncaused by anything else, the atheist or the pantheist usually just posits that the universe itself has some sort of eternal dimension such that even though particular combinations of matter are created through causal interactions, there is some eternal dimension to the universe that itself is not caused to come into being or to go out of being.

This is a very rough way of spelling out Spinoza’s essential position and Spinoza was the thinker most fundamentally in the background of Schopenhauer—-who in turn deeply influenced Nietzsche. Nietzsche also speaks very highly of Spinoza. So, it’s fair to infer some common sympathies with Nietzsche and Spinoza and flesh him out in the Spinozistic terms I like to use. For Spinoza, the universe is “God:” it is the totality of everything that is and it is eternally existing. The particular beings that we are and that we experience are just modes of the universe—forms it takes within the greater unity of itself. For Spinoza, as I think for Nietzsche, the universe is not merely matter, nor merely mind but rather is both in every one of its modes. What I mean by that is that there is both a material and a mental dimension to all of existence. In other words, everything in existence has both a mental side and a material one to it.

God is neither the material nor the mental aspect of existence or things but just the entirety of the whole universe, he is the “substance” in which all the particular beings exist. An analogy I like to use is to take a human being. There is a material and a mental dimension to you. And you can express those yourself in all sorts of ways physically and mentally. You can take on different modes. Your body can be sitting or standing or walking or chewing, etc. and your mind can be thinking and feeling all sorts of thoughts. You are not separate from any of these things but expressed through all of them. You are more fundamental than any particular mode you take. You exist before and after all the particular thoughts you think and body positions you take, etc. But you also don’t exist without any body position or thoughts whatsoever. So, to apply this analogy to the world. “God” is like you in that scenario, he is the totality of everything but he only exists in the particular modes that his attributes (matter and mind) take. You and I are just the modes of God’s attributes. We’re just shapes his material and mental attributes twist themselves into. He doesn’t exist without expressing himself in his attributes, but he is the more fundamental being because we exist in him, rather than him in us. He doesn’t have an independent identity apart from all the modes of the universe. In other words, our thoughts are God thinking, he doesn’t think separately from that as though he were a distinct person from all of us. We are modes of God’s body, he doesn’t have a different body than the material universe itself. So God=the universe.

So, that’s in a nutshell, Spinozistic pantheism. The connection between all of us in such a scenario, as Nietzsche to some extent accepts, would be that we all boil down to the same fundamental being of the universe. Nietzsche never explicitly embraces pantheism and so that’s why I suggest in my review of Julian Young’s book Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Religion that we shy away from calling him a pantheist as Young does. What he does share with the pantheist though is that the universe itself is what is eternal and so if anything is to be called divine, that would be it. But I think he would reject ultimately reject the idea that the universe is indeed one substance since his major rejection of Schopenhauer is denying that the entire universe is a single will, in favor of interpreting it as made up of innumerable centers of will to power. In this way, Nietzsche is more Leibniz than Spinoza and less inclined to positing a notion of a fundamental unity to all the universe that we could call “God.”

Now, on Nietzsche’s thinking, how the eternal recurrence would happen is a little sketchy. But what he speculates is that with an infinite amount of time and a finite amount of matter following out fixed laws of nature, eventually all the combinations of matter would recur an infinite number of times. Since there are only a finite numbers of combinations among material in the universe and there’s an infinity to keep recombining the same combinations, following the same laws of nature, would recur an infinite number of times. This is roughly how Nietzsche sketched out the recurrence.

So to answer your question of how we can each recur in our own lives when we die while others continue their present lives—-the issue there I think is simply that it’s a matter of the universe recurring and our lives recurring when we are reconstituted in it. So, in other words, you don’t recur immediately but only when the universe gets back to reconstituting history to the point where you come into being again. There are others who think more in terms of dimensions similar to the one you theorized and argue that our infinite recurrences actually all happen simultaneously. I have to admit I have a hard time wrapping my mind around that idea since it’s hard for me to grasp what would distinguish all these infinite versions of the same existence. If they happen sequentially, then I can grasp that. But if they’re all happening simultaneously, how are they distinct?

I think the argument for the simultaneous recurrences is that eternal recurrence does not happen in time in the sort of manner I described earlier where the matter just keeps recombining sequentially in time. Rather than there being eternal recurrences in time, there would be the eternal recurrence of time itself. So, this would require different dimensions in which time and matter recurred separately from their instantiation in each other dimension.

Now, it is possible that none of these physical and metaphysical speculations are correct and it is also possible (though I don’t think likely) that Nietzsche didn’t think it important that they be correct. In such cases, the meaning of the eternal recurrence still stands as a test for affirmation. Is what we want most desperately to be eternal our own temporal lives in this temporal universe, recurring for all eternity? If it is, then we maximally affirm our lives—regardless of whether or not the universe honors our desire. This is at minimum our test. There are those (like Paul Loeb) who stress though that for Nietzsche it must also be that the universe does indeed recur for this to be such a crushing existential question to contend with. They argue that if the eternal recurrence is not real, we can just dismiss the question of its possibility as not at all the kind of thing that would lead us to the sort of turmoil that Nietzsche describes in the Gay Science 341.

Mike Monelscachi is Tom Petty’s biggest teenaged fan.  Over on Tom’s messageboard (and in his high school he says) he’s known affectionately as “Petty Kid” (which, incidentally, I think would make an awesome band name for him).  He’s cutting a record and here are three of his songs.  I’m seriously impressed after all this time talking about his band to find out that he’s actually pretty talented!

http://www.myspace.com/mikemonomusic

[written January 4, 2007]

Best film of 2006, in my opinion. Just a stunning film. I was in love with it early on and then it took fascinating turn after fascinating turn and just became deeper and deeper.

It’s a truly sublime, sensual film that manages to communicate the power of scent through its medium’s power of visual imagery, through an incredibly seductive engagement in sensuality.

The film is a wonderful meditation on contingency and the pained desire for eternal possession of what is only contingent and passing and fleeting. It’s a film about the rise of beauty and love out of the muck and filth and violence of the filthiest modes of life.

It is the greatest screen portrayal of a super villain I have ever ever seen. It is a truly great and unconventional seriel killer film that manages not just to explore the narcissism, sociopathy, possessiveness, and desire for consumption that drives the seriel killer’s pathology, but also to make the viewer feel it by making the purity and intensity and aesthetic drive of the villain relatable in a perverse way; making the viewer forget the monstrous detachment from humanity is an abberation—the way the monster himself has let himself let his desire overwhelm any social feeling.

It is a visionary portrait of evil, of demagoguery, of genius, of beauty, of power, and of love.

It is a legend that plays like 18th Century science fiction.

And in a few scenes, it gives a fascinating portrait of what Nietzsche characterized as the Dionysian/Apollinian dynamic but I shall not elaborate here out of spoiler concerns. Perhaps in another post for those who’ve seen the film already.

I just loved it. I couldn’t get over it when I got out of it, my head was swimming.

[written October 24, 2007]

One of the reasons that great art means so much to us is because we find ourselves reflected and expressed in it, even when it is other people’s creations. For a long while now, I have figured out the formula to really understanding my mind and my heart for anyone interested. If you can understand Friedrich Nietzsche, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the New York Mets, and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, you’ll have as good a window into my soul as any I myself could create. I have already resolved that if I ever find a woman whose heart beats to these things the way mine does, I’d might as well just go ahead and propose right off.

And so, it was a big, huge deal for me to see the most important and comprehensive documentary of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ unbelievable career. So, obviously, what follows will be the review from a total fan. Dismiss it on that basis if you will, but I honestly think you’ll be missing out on an important recommendation for film and music lovers alike.

Review upcoming in a series of short posts.

The Music, Not “Behind” It
The first thing worth praising about this amazing documentary is that it’s about the men and the music. It’s not about lurid details, it’s not a manipulation of material to tell an artificial story of rise to glory, burn out, redemption, and new beginnings. Tom’s story is filled with highs and lows that could be generically forced into this boilerplate, formulaic mythos in terms of which VH1 manages to characterize every freaking rock band. But refreshingly, Bogdanovich doesn’t reduce these great artists’ story into a childish and convenient morality tale. These are real lives. There are ups and downs, periods of euphoria and those of despair, friends made and friends lost, and that’s it. No overplaying sentiment or drawing morals needed.

While I liked Walk The Line, for example, very much, I didn’t like the way it told such an incomplete story of such a great artist’s life. I know that he liked to see his life as a Christian redemption story like was made in the film. But it did a disservice to the richness of a great man’s life to skip those 30 years after he married June and overcame his addictions. I found it degrading in a way to say the only thing worth really focusing on was his addicted period. Many, many people get addicted. The tiniest handful get to be Johnny Cash. Show some more of what it was to be Johnny Cash.

And along these lines, this documentary of Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers covers the private addictions of the band, even when they lead to death, and the infamous conflicts that led Stan Lynch to leave the band, without sensationalizing anything. As Benmont Tench, the amazing keys man of The Heartbreakers mentions in the documentary (and I paraphrase), it used to be that you were interested in learning an artist’s take on the world, now it’s who they’re sleeping with.

This film is about the artists’ takes on the world and about the most important thing about them, the incredible music they have ceaselessly produced for 30 years of rarely paralleled commitment to musical integrity and consistent production.

A Whole Life and Career on Film

It’s been reported that Bogdanovich went through over 300 hours of footage in putting together this film, and that was after countless more hours of available footage were whittled down for him by archivists who categorized the material.

I have numerous dvds and videos of live Tom Petty concerts, documentaries, collections of Tom’s videos and those of the Travelling Wilburys. I pretty much have everything released and many things that only appeared on TV. And I’ve seen my fair share of what’s on youtube, etc. And I have to say that there is a remarkable representation of the available footage. A truly judicious and admirable sampling of what’s there. A couple really sweet moments were when they found little moments that were favorites of mine and included them. It’s not exhaustive of course by any means at all. There are of course many omissions. But overall, this is an incredible 4 hour distillation of what one finds through amassing a larger collection.

There’s Ron Blair’s prescient 1993 joke about being scheduled to rejoin the band in 2001 long before Howie Epstein’s tragic death in 2002 led to his actual return. There’s wonderful footage of The Travelling Wilburys writing rehearsing, recording. Any fan of the Beatles, Roy Orbison, or Bob Dylan just can’t miss this stuff. (At least youtube it people!!) There’s Stan’s last performance with the band in a living room, playing Mary Jane’s Last Dance, the last song he recorded before leaving the band for good. And, as they say “much much more.”

But, beyond just reproducing previously released footage from prior documentaries and live concerts, Bogdanovich was able to incorporate an incredible amount of home video footage and stills of numerous moments along their way to the top, including plenty of material Tom and the band reportedly didn’t really know about before this project. It’s as thorough a capturing of every phase of an artist’s entire life on film as you could manage.

Scoring a Story in Songs

It’s greatly satisfying how close to completely Bogdanovich represents the scope and power of Petty’s music without ever deviating from the primary task of telling the story of his life. Few songs recur as Bogdanovich shows 1:30 minute clips of most songs almost always linking closely the music and live performances of a given time to the images of that time. And often, there are extremely happy coordinations between song lyric and the storyline. So the pauses to watch Tom and the gang perform at a given period of life don’t interrupt the storyline so much as often comment on it artistically, through lyrics. There are just beautiful and ingenious combinations of emotions and musical expressions of them that all follow a great chronological progression.

And while the full breadth and depth of Tom’s incredible catalogue is inexhaustible in under 4 hours, so many songs that really deserved representation got it.

The only sad snub (though an expected one) was any incorporation of the wonderful music Tom put on the soundtrack of She’s the One. I love that album and was sad to see it omitted entirely. Long After Dark got an odd sort of snubbing too. As has been chronicled before, Jimmy Iovine’s insistence that Tom not include the wonderful songs “Keeping Me Alive” and “Trailer” on the album was the symbolic creative difference that represents the rift between Tom and Jimmy that had grown by the time they finished that record, which had been their third together. Tom bashes the album often as one where he had gotten stagnant. I really love the album but understand his thought process. Anyway, ironically, the song here to represent the album is the song omitted from the album, “Keeping Me Alive” and then an explanation from both Tom and Jimmy about how such a great song didn’t make the cut. As wonderful as “Keeping Me Alive” was and as big a treat as it was to see the band perform it, the songs “Deliver Me,” “Straight Into Darkness,” “Change of Heart,” and “Magnolia” are too special to me to see them all snubbed.

Echo gets limited exposure too but they do a wonderful job of demonstrating Howie’s contribution to the band with that album and Benmont has a wonderful moment reflecting on Howie and what he meant to the band and his contribution even during his most heroin ruined time with the band. Bogdanovich here and elsewhere does a marvelous job of highlighting a piece of the music to say something about what makes it work in a way that makes it completely obvious to the listening viewer.

There are also subtle touches like the way that after the opening performance from 2006, you never see Scott Thurston until he is introduced in the story. Watching, I perked up and thought, “Hey, there’s Scott” unassumingly in just a third of the screen when the camera pulls back. And then, sure enough, he’s introduced. It’s a suble but welcome touch the way Bogdanovich keeps the story so basically chronological, capturing the sense of how things unfold through time rather than lumping the images and music of a life together in a deceptive whole.

A Story About Integrity

I always wanted the documentary to be named I Won’t Back Down but can respect the choice to frame it as Runnin’ Down A Dream, a less combative and more upbeat, classic American framing for a band that Bogdanovich has claimed epitomizes the American Dream.

Nonetheless, Tom’s integrity is as defining a feature as anything. Through reading and seeing tons of stuff about Tom’s various legal battles with corrupt music companies, the story had never been articulated so clearly in its details as here. Tom isn’t heroized out of proportion but the facts speak for themselves. He fought for the rights to his own music against unjust record contracts and then he fought for fair prices for his fans when he refused to let them raise the price of records by starting with his own. Later on we see an incredible piece of candid footage in which Tom stands up for his musical influence and long time friend The Byrds’ Roger McGuinn by insisting that the execs and producers trying to get him to record commercialistic crap go to hell. He insists that McGuinn is a great artist deserving better and goes to the mat when McGuinn himself was willing not to fight for his own integrity.

These sorts of moments are consistent throughout Tom’s entire career. The next evidence of selling out I see from the man will be the first.

The Interview Subjects

They could have interviewed more people, that’s for sure. But I doubt it would have made the documentary much better. What’s important is that they have plenty of interview footage with the people who matter most, the band members themselves who tell the story themselves. It was an elegant and appreciated choice to forego narration. In addition to the band though there are some wonderful commentators on the bands history including the five most important producers of their career, Denny Cordell, Jimmy Iovine, Dave Stewart, Jeff Lynne, and Rick Rubin. You get a wonderful sense from the narrative of the significance that each producer brought to Tom’s career. Each producer represents extremely specific developments in his music and his career and it’s nice to see their views sufficiently represented.

And a special touch for me was to see Dave Grohl and Eddie Vedder, replete with great footage of their respective famous performances with the band. In 1994, no non-Christian bands besides Metallica and “Weird Al” meant any more to me than Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Nirvana, and Pearl Jam. So it was really sweet to me to hear Grohl and Vedder express what Tom means to them.

Also a neat little treat is to see Johnny Depp who famously was in Petty’s Into The Great Wide Open video in 1991. Tim Burton’s my favorite director, his and my favorite living actor is obviously Mr. Depp. It’s nice to also tightly connect that dot over to Tom Petty. It reinforces the sense to me that there is a consistency to my sensibility that even the artists I admire share among themselves. I really dig that. Though of course I can’t take that too far—-Petty loves westerns immensely and I hate them. But Petty encapsulates everything great about westerns and old school country music. That is country music before it became what Petty characterizes its present form as—-bad rock bands with a fiddle.

The biggest surprise though was the wonderful, passionate, insightful commentary from, of all people, an MTV executive. He reappears periodically throughout the documentary and some of his thoughts were just great.

I laughed, I cried

Tom’s trademark droll sense of humor that conistently comprises a good bit of what makes his lyrics so remarkable also comes through in interviews. And Bogdanovich’s droll editing gives the whole film Tom’s sense of humor. Comedy is about timing and so is editing and Bogdanovich edits some good laughs into the proceedings.

You probably won’t cry because Tom and his songs probably don’t mean to you what they mean to me. But three or four times, I really teared up. And not at the moments you’d guess even. Just certain songs and certain moments in their story that struck me as especially special. The presentation of the great song “The Waiting” was just so celebratory that it made me surprisingly emotional, for example. Again, as I said before, this film does so much tribute to the music.

Don’t Do Me Like That

There are a few problems worth noting. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers live are a whole different, equally special thing to what they are on records. The film shows ample live footage but doesn’t really show enough of the musical innovation that they bring to live interpretations of their songs. Also, there’s not an adequate demonstration of how much their live shows incorporate an unbelievable range of covers that express their bottomless knowledge of their forerunners from rock and roll artists to bluegrass artists to country artists to surf rock artists to psychedelics, etc. Even a ten minute montage of this would have sufficed to highlight more explicitly their range. And additionally, their classic live reinterpretation of “Don’t Come Around Here No More” that was a huge highlight of their late ’80s/early ’90s shows deserved some attention.

The film relied in the end (literally, at the end of the film) too heavily on the 2006 Gainesville homecoming concert. That tour is extremely special to me as it was the first tour I saw the band live and the tour that sparked an all-consuming obsession with collecting every live performance, video, studio release, etc. that I could get my hands on. But even as important as it is to me, it’s too much attention on one concert here at the end when some more time could have been spent on some other aspects of their concerts from along the way.

What makes this choice especially unfortunate is that the movie is sold with that full Gainesville concert as another disc in the boxset. So, it’s redundant to include so much of it in the film at the expense of other vital pieces of that 300+ hours worth of material that was available.

Ultimately it’s not a big deal to me as I own more than I could have ever ask by way of live recordings and videos from the band anyway. But it would have been nice for the official record to give a more representative look at what the band offers by way of transformation of their own songs and by way of infectious tribute to their forerunners live.

The Bonus CD!

Okay, finally getting around to checking out the bonus CD. I stress again, I have somewhere over 90 discs of live music. But I don’t have any of this. They did a bang up job of finding neat rare live recordings. Two that are particularly special are a cover an awesomely old school country song “Lost Highway” which they perform in a rehearsal in the film but which I have never heard them do live otherwise and “Honey Bee” from the Saturday Night Live with Dave Grohl playing a mean set of drums.

I love the intros to the versions of “Breakdown” and “Fooled Again” here as they are unique (and again, I’ve heard plenty of versions)

The sound quality on all these live recordings is just spectacular, something one is not quite used to when trading in bootlegs The “Keeping Me Alive” here is especially sweet as previously I’d only heard the studio version on Playback, the collection of greatest hits and rarities, and the one really rough bootleg available of it. I love that bootleg to death but this is a super-sweet, high quality version of it. And I might have never heard so good a live take of “Shadow of a Doubt.” These are really great recordings.

Another neat aspect for the pettyphile and the pettynewbie alike

Yeah, it was embarrassing. The eyes got all leaky a few times. Had to get my sleeve up to try to get rid of the evidence and get my composure.

Lars and the Real Girl ends a streak of frustrations for me at the theater [this was written October 28,2007] and was the first film to deeply move me in a theater since the early spring. It was such a beautiful film, filled with indeterminate cartharses. What I found most fascinating and moving about the film is that everything revolves around central metaphors with several different kinds of meaning there for different viewers (or the same viewer) to find resonant.

As is well known the film revolves around a lonely man named Lars (Ryan Gosling) and the sex doll that he is deluded into believing is his actual girlfriend, Bianca. Rather than trying to talk some sense into Lars, his sister-in-law and his brother [played by very sweet Emily Mortimor (Match Point) and Paul Schneider (All The Real Girls)] take the advice of Patricia Clarkson’s doctor character (The Station Agent, All The Real Girls) to play along with Lars’s delusion because he has created this relationship as a means of working through something emotionally. Soon more members of the community are encouraged to play along as part of helping Lars.

Without giving any more specifics away, the result is a moving, understated comedy that explores the role that projections and fictions play in our psychological lives. Lars’s delusion is narratively specific and so on one level is about mental illness and a fable about the healing powers of patience and thoughtful person-specific care. It’s about how helping people involves understanding them and opening yourself up to their reality and how each person’s journey and needs are radically different and inscrutable. There’s a bit of fantasy and idealism in this story, which is why I call it a fable, but there’s nonetheless an admirable hope and suggestion in it too. The film is about the ways that in an ideal world people would work with each other to address their unique needs, even when this involves going way out of their normal way and involves opening themselves up to seeing the world through each other’s unique eyes. It’s a wonderful, optimistic story of openheartedness towards a lonely, confused and conflicted man and his inanimate girlfriend.

But the film goes beyond this surface level at which we can distance ourselves from Lars as just a delusional man. His inanimate girlfriend upon which he projects a whole personality is a symbol for anything any of us might idealize and project our desires or fears into. At least in my case, I totally resonated with this theme of idealization and projection. I know I’ve treated a real live, moving, thinking woman the way that Lars treats an inanimate one—-namely, as a projection of my hopes, dreams, and fears seperate from who she might have herself been. And this isn’t just about women, this is about anyone or anything we turn into an imaginary ideal of goodness or threat or whatever, so that we can find ourselves through that.

Healthiness comes not from alienated relationships to realities in which we only encounter them through the idealizations we create of them. The film doesn’t simply condemn such projections and false idealizations but instead opens us up to their possible therapeutic value. It rather explores how the use of projections and idealizations can be a stepping stone to coming to terms with reality. This is a humane, non-judgmental, and yet nonetheless growth oriented view of psychological projections in which I found a good deal of helpful wisdom and emotional catharsis.

One level on which this metaphor works is in helping us to relate to the meaning of art and fiction for helping us work through things. Lars’s use of narrative and fiction for coming to terms with emotions and problems he can’t articulate is really fascinating and illuminating with respect to the media of art. I found it fascinating throughout the film to think about the fine line between Bianca and the “real people” in the film. They’re all fake. Through our empathetic imaginative engagement with these fake people, into whom we project so much reality, including so many reflections of ourselves—our own fears, hopes, ideals, etc.—-we can therapeutically work through emotions and ideas we might not have prior been able to, or still be able to, articulate verbally and cognitively. Through art we empathetically connect to others and traverse emotional journeys, through projecting ourselves and our experiences into constructed narrative characters. Lars relates to Bianca like we relate to Lars and all the other fictional characters who help us escape reality a little while with the ideal result of coming back to it in the end, now more ready to deal with it.

I’m not even sure these are the only three levels to interpret the film, but I loved the experience of watching the film simultaneously from three such rich and personally meaningful angles.

Beyond the themes, let’s talk aesthetics. Ryan Gosling is a masterful actor. Between The Believer, Half Nelson, and now this film, I could not be any more impressed at his transformative powers and his communicative powers. He’s unbelievable and if he doesn’t get a nomination for an Oscar, there should be a riot.

The movie is also very fu