Gridley Fires

The Change is here

For all the readers of this blog - - 

My time with Typepad is gone now, and I want to thank all of you who visited here regularly. You can follow me - and view my post history from Typepad - on my new Wordpress blog, also entitled Gridley Fires.

Bucky Fuller's Vision and Why I Continue To Write

Last night the missus and I went to see a play, "R. Buckminster Fuller - The History (and Mystery) of the Universe." I'm not sixteeen years old, so I hesitate to use the word "awesome," but the play was, well, awesome. For several reasons:

• Playwright D.S. Jacobs synthesized thousands of pages of R. Buckminster Fuller's writing into a two-hour show.
• Actor David Novak was the only person on stage, and his talent nailed Fuller's mannerisms, even his coastal Massachusetts way of talking. 
• As serendipity would have it, the set for this local production was designed by good friend Sylvia Pierce, which incorporated tekkie bits, such as film, animation, and geodesic modeling - one of the best sets I've seen in years.

But can I synthesize further? Let's see...

image via essential-architecture.com

Fuller was born near-blind. Consequently he had to use his tactile sense to relate to early school projects. While we were all using building blocks (Leggos, maybe) to construct in a fledgling way what turns out to be a most inefficient and irrational "square" reality, Fuller's hands were creating things from triangles that were far more sound and efficient than our "square" cartesian world. 

He flunked out of Harvard twice, largely because he was already headed toward a reality that educating minds of his age weren't ready to accept. So he continued to go his own way. He joined the Navy. Shipboard life made him much more aware of the necessity of ultra-efficiency in sailing across "Spaceship Earth," as he came to call it.

After leaving the Navy, he quickly came to realize from his examination of the way nature works that the Darwinian, Malthusian model of scarce resources (that could only belong to the strong - and to hell with the weak and less capable) was wrong and would eventually lead us toward oblivion, extinction. His strategy, then, was to create a new mindset that would be so capable of doing so much more with less and less, hence eminently attractive, that the old divide-and-conquer model, enforced militarily, would be abandoned. 

image via scodpub.wordpress.com

 

But he didn't deal just in high-minded abstractions: he devised and designed - the geodesic sphere, the dymaxion cars and homes. Still, fear of scarcity and an infatuation with inefficient  thinking, building, and wealth, caused his creations to be all but ignored. But this play, and the continuing interest in Fuller's inventions and ideas testify to their endurance. 

But none of this explains why I continue to write:

Fuller left the old mindset - and his Navy days - and so did I. While he reached much higher, I chose a career built on constructing instead of destroying - devising and building road systems within the U.S. Parallel with that, and following those years, I began to write fiction and nonfiction. Still, why?

While Fuller persisted with the continuing ephemeralization (doing more with less) of technology, I chose the human angle. Humanity is all about story, and the stories of us humans are replete with both our foibles and our strengths. I learned early on, of course, not to editorialize or to rant - simply to tell human stories as best I could.

In this way, I can only hope my readers will be provoked to think for themselves. If they do, says Fuller, they will increasingly leave behind a mindset - one that worked for ages, but which humanity has now outgrown. And I believe that's so. Story is a manner of mirroring our ways, of providing essential human questions that must be asked, in hopes that we'll have that "Aha!" moment and - one by one - change our lives and the world for the better.

 

Visit Bob's Web Site here, and his FB Fan Page here.

The Real Arbitrage

Arbitrage - The Movie

image via imdb.com

 

Boy, posting on this one is going to be hard without sounding the spoiler alert...

Well, here goes.

With the missus out of town, I chanced upon this one on pay per view on a Saturday night. I think she would have wanted to see it - not for my economic/political interests in the flick, but because she's a Susan Sarandon fan. Still, the movie is virtually all Richard Gere's - he plays robert Miller, a hedge fund kingpin, but one with something of a conscience and a heart.

Miller has been wanting to make a last killing, on a copper mine, before bowing out of the biz and (hopefully) turning everything over to his financial whiz daughter. But there's something of a cash flow problem, and some hanky panky with a young woman art dealer. Of course, both situations get out of control, and the remainder of the movie is built around the ensuing suspense as Miller tries to manage his crises.

Three things interested me about the movie as I watched it, and afterward as I sought to make sense of the abruptly ending tale: I thought, as the romantic crisis heats up, that this is a movie clone of a rather famous political tryst, but that isn't the case. I'm hesitant to let that cat out of the bag to any greater degree, but Tim Roth plays the overreaching cop in trying to place blame where it's obviously meant to be. 

Second, the acting is nuanced and real-life - Gere playing the wheeler dealer, Sarandon, playing his family-protective wife, Ellen. I had the sense that both were improvising script a lot, possibly acting out aspects of their own lives. Since the movie was largely Gere's vehicle, Sarandon had to sublimate her script and her acting to his, and in such situations, said actor has to pick her spot to shine. Sarandon does this, without upstaging or undermining - the skill of a consummate actor. 

And third, the movie is a morality play without seeming so. You see, no one's a clear-cut villain or hero; consequently the story deals with ambiguities akin to those we all slog through in real life. And the real arbitrage of the story has more to do with family than a financial empire.

Arbitrage has all the elements of a finely done movie: fine acting, a thoughtful premise, and a clever story line. Well worth a couple hours of your time.

My rating: 18 of 20 stars

 

Visit Bob's website here, and his FB Fan Page here.

Going One’s Own Way

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce

image via plodit.com 

 

It sometimes takes a while to warm up to writing such as this first major work by James Joyce. His title tells the story cleanly enough, but there’s more to this bildungsroman than simply a young man coming of age in 1900s Ireland. 

The story is of a young man, Stephen Daedalus who, as we all have probably been in our youth, was subjugated to family, school, and religion. And in this era of Ireland’s history, these constitute a formidable albatross. I’m synopsizing to a great degree, but Daedalus’ first onus is a rather formal Catholic education, in which discipline is paramount. The school’s rules are an end unto themselves. 

Of course, this is a Catholic school, so the sensibilities of education and religious training are intermixed. Daedalus and his mates are cowed by this one-two societal punch, much time being spent listening to a priest telling the boys of the horrors of Hell. Daedalus’ reaction? “It put me in quite a blue funk.”

Young Stephen quickly comes to experience the carnal, courtesy of a girl he pursues, Eileen, and later, a fantasy girl. But these are just set-ups for the priests in his life to bestow guilt on him. Stephen hurries to confess his earlier life a way and considers a commitment to the priesthood. 

At this point the book - and Stephen - experience a sea change of sorts. He has two choices here: he can knuckle under to the approved Irish/Catholic lifestyle, or he can go his own way. And of course he chooses the latter.

Some of Joyce’s writerly techniques wouldn’t pass muster today, but that’s hardly a knock, since he did more than anyone of that generation (other than Hemingway) to change novel writing technique. Joyce plays the philosopher, the roue, and the iconoclast, perhaps in ways never played out on the page before. It must have been hard to accomplish what Daedalus managed toward self-determination, but then that’s what Joyce is giving his readers - the opportunity to throw off the burdens of an overly strict society and to go their own way.

 

My rating: 17 of 20 stars

 

 

The Universal Soldier

On Labor Day, the missus agreed to accompany me to an action flick (payback on that this weekend - more on that later), and so off we went to see The Bourne Legacy. Matt Damon and the Bourne franchise has been so successful, selling some $1 billion at the gate (according to Rotten Tomatoes), that the creative minds decided to chuck Robert Ludlum's stories altogether for one from their own fertile imagination. 

 

Bourne movies are all rife with backstory, and in this one, in which Jeremy Renner takes over the Bourne role, we discover that part of his discombobulated past has to do with having been a U.S. Army soldier amped up (and befuddled) by "chems," these to make him more physically agile and strong and more mentally alert and flexible. The plot throws Bourne together with Rachel Wiesz as Marta Shearing, the chem whiz who had a lot to do with Bourne's plight.

What makes the movie interesting is that it plays to the well-known compartmentalization of the Federal government, particularly the secretive, competing agencies, and the emerging myth of using such chemical devices to create super soldiers. Too, it plays on the popular theme of one man against the system (Bourne is capable of defeating all sorts of military hard technology with the softer technology of his over-chemmed physicality and mind).

It was easier for us to accept Bourne's exploits against technology than to buy the obligatory chase scene which seems all too fantastical. It's the sort of movie that entertains, but I don't advise taking its skulduggery as an artistc representation of real life.

My rating: 14 of 20 stars.

Wanna Satire?

Are you sitting there this Labor Day weekend wishing you could be the next Mark Twain? The reincarnation of Kurt Vonnegut? Well, you need to know about satire:

the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the contextof contemporary politics and other topical issues.

It's been said that humor is a corrective social device - it presents imaginary or exaggerated situations that poke at falsity, whether in an individual's ego, or in the more collective social sense, but it does so without being seen as a diatribe or personal attack. In this way, for instance, a supremely vain person will see him/herself in a joke or witticism, will then consider his/her own behavior, and hopefully moderate it. 

image via rferl.org

Politics is a fertile field for correction through satire, and Jon Stewart is possibly the best at it today. Forget for a few moments which side of today's ideological divide you fall on, and pay attention to how Stewart deals with satire in this interview.

 

See Bob's website here, and his Facebook fan page here.

Much Ado About Some Things

The Atlantic, September 2012

 

This is as close to a themed issue as I’ve seen from The Atlantic, and as you might expect, the focus is on this year’s Presidential election. For someone who follows politics, there’s little new here, despite James Fallows’ gaming of the Romney/Obama showdown, a bit on the Latino Vote, and the most talked about article of some time , Ta-Nehisi Coates’ critical evaluation of race in America from the standpoint of the U.S.’s first black president. But back to that in a minute.

One other article sure to put letters in the editor’s box is Hanna Rosin’s sex on campus article. Here, Rosin speaks rather cautiously of the rise of feminist sexual romps on campus, how women are focusing on careers and independence (and that includes sexual) instead of the old saws about catching a husband during those halcyon four years.

An there are two other quirky ones: how tequila does or doesn’t make you crazy and, how the millennial generation is ignoring the old values of home and car ownership - and how that generation’s turn of values might save our economy.

Now to Coates:

Much has been said for years about a need for a national conversation on race, and Coates does his damnedest to begin one, centering on the Obama Presidency. Ignoring the 2008 hype about the U.S. as a post-racial society, Coates also all but ignores the insane charges by his political opponents and centers on Obama’s reaction to all of that. Obama, says Coates, has been more than reticent to amp up race talk, because he (Obama) fully understands the nation hasn’t come very far since Emancipation, even since the racial liberties granted in the ‘sixties. Coates’ object here isn’t to condemn Obama, but to explain his racial reticence in light of the nation’s stalled experiments in equality. And to wish Obama had ventured more bravely into this social and political arena.

Atlantic Fiction:

Emma Donoghue has written a present tense, third person story, that has a first person feel, “Onward.” It’s a pretty ho-hum story until you either realize (if your’e a student of literary history) that it’s about a woman, Caroline Thompson, who was befriended by Charles Dickens,  or are told so by an editorial footnote. Actually, I find the editorial footnote much more interesting than the story, but then that’s me. 

There are other pieces of interest here in you’re a fan of The Atlantic. But I’m becoming a bit dismayed with this mag. Why? For years it’s been one I could look to, not only to set the table when it comes to controversial social and political issues, but to suggest a way to answers and solutions. As much as I admire Coates‘ article, I don’t see a way out of the political darkness in it, nor in Rosin’s sex expose (it’s hardly an expose). Perhaps I’ll have to rely on the millennial article for that and hope for better things in the next issue.

 

Magazine Time - - Comin' Up!

I started to dig into my backlog of magazines and will let you know what I think of them over the next couple of weeks. 

image via zappablamma.com

 

The trouble with opinions on magazines (and I'm always full of opinions) is that they're edited with the general public in mind. Thus, you might find only an article or two in each to address your concerns or push your buttons. In fact, having done a little of this sort of editing in the dimly lighted past, I have to take my hat off to anyone who edits periodicals - its a mighty task!

Having said that, I may sound cranky in some of my opinions on opinionated periodicals, but what will underlie this alleged crankiness of mine will be how I view the substance of what I read.

As always, I value your opinions of my opinions.

See Bob's Web Site here.

Writing and Life

I sure relate to this Fitzgerald quote - - how about you?

 

image via hofstra.edu

 

“Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.” 

F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

See Bob's (revised) Web Site here:

You Can't Make This Stuff Up, But You Can Use It!

There's just nothing to write about? Really?

How about taking a look at today's newspaper. For example, in mine today, three stories virtually leaped off the page. 

 

image via iwasbornveryyoung.com

 

• A man running fur U.S. Senator makes a really lame comment about women and rape.

• Following the arrest of a noted country singer for driving while intoxicated - naked - people begin coming forth saying they like to drive naked.

• The director of an apocalyptic movie about kids who hunt one another reveals the delight he experienced in finding a delapidated group of houses in a rural setting for the movie by saying, "It's really hard to come up with this sort of squalor from scratch."

The first two approaches I can think of to meld these "torn from the pages" stories into one of your own would be:

• A Philip Roth/Kurt Vonnegut satire  -  a "let it all hang out" personality living out a libidinous fantasy or two in either a big city or a counry town...or both. 

• A dark story of the crudenesses lying just below the surface of "normal" people's "normal" lives, leading to...what?...crimes? the destruction of a family? A way of life? 

Real life often seems stranger, more evocative, than anything you might have the nerve to invent. So why not begin there? Why not let real life parade its strangeness before you and tempt you into its story?

 

image via youwantedproof.blogspot.com

 

See Bob's Web Site here.