silent unction

I recently finished reading an extraordinarily long novel (roughly 2000 pages) which held my attention throughout like few others have. Without question, it was one of the most impressive novels I've ever read, and I'll remember and cherish it always. I shared the enjoyment of reading it with my wife, and beyond that, saw fit to mention it to just a couple people.

This is so far out of character for my conception of myself that it gave me serious pause. In the past, generally speaking, I'd hasten to get everybody I knew to read such a compelling book. I'd bring the full force of my personality to bear evangelizing for it. It's not that I would be especially obnoxious or indiscriminate in trying to share things. It's just that this book was easily among the best I've ever read, and certainly, something of that quality would have erstwhile compelled me to spread the joy of reading it far and wide.

But we age, and our social circles contract, and the people we remain in contact with grow busier and busier, and less inclined to try things which are not in their habits, or perfectly suited to their preferences. And so the zeal that formerly motivated me to tell the world was reduced over time, in consequence anyway, to making blog posts, and then Facebook posts, and then tweets, and then, basically, to silence.

I can see the same overall trend in my life. Always a fan of words, but growing willfully quieter by the year, as experience teaches me more and more how little an impact my words are likely to have. Can you remember, two years ago, how I spent December issuing forth the best things I'd posted on-line that year? But no such thing could be concocted from last year or this one. They are too empty.

In some ways, I am my own worst advocate. I wrote a book, and put it up for crowd-nomination to the Kindle Scout platform (which I would be much obliged for you to nominate, if you haven't already). I posted about it on social media, and received but few nominations, hardly enough to have any hope of actually qualifying. Then, my wife and some friends shared it on their respective pages, and the nominations started pouring in! It was moving to be so supported, but it was also very strange, considering my wife and I share most of the same social media connections.

True, there was more to my wife's post than my own, and social media is a poor place to go looking for anything, but the experience simply underscored my own poor abilities to engage with my social network. I used to feel differently, and I don't know if my own abilities have faded, or if the entire process has gotten more difficult, or if (the scariest option) I was never any good at it, and have just gotten better at evaluating outcomes.

The lesson here is that there are other, surer ways (for me) to engage with people than this thing called 'the internet'. In the spring, I will be teaching a university course for the first time, one on Business Law. Now I have a whole host of new concerns to occupy me, but if I do it right, I will have quite the captive audience. So I need to debate with myself what things I should teach them, what I really want them to come away with, besides a sense that there are a whole lot of Business Law concepts they have yet to learn.

I want to make the course my own, in a variety of ways, but naturally I hesitate. The indelible marks of my personality will characterize it whatever I do, but how much do I really want to turn this into a soapbox? How much do I really understand, and how much value is there in what I have to say? Nowadays I spend most of my time as a sounding board, and when I'm truly heeded, it is with great, staggering reluctance. That is one way to live a life, but it's really no way to teach a class. A teacher should have authority. So once again I must redefine my relation, and build a new identity. It is a task which wears thin.

Ultimately, I will be okay. That is the way of things. But the road to being okay is not one of stark, abrupt transformation. It is a path of a thousand little steps, and many questions asked along the way. These are some of them.

Disney Movie Reviews #6: Make Mine Music

When I started this review project, I committed myself to reviewing every full-length animated feature film released by the Walt Disney Animation Studios, as taken from this list. I thought those would be reasonable bounds to limit myself, while leaving room to explore a few lesser-known films. You'll notice Make Mine Music skips over a few on the list, as I'm still wrestling with whether those can be considered "animated" films. Unfortunately, while I'm sure Make Mine Music belongs, I've learned exactly why it's not quite as famous as its forebears.

There are two title cards. The one on the right is a physical book, as Disney wonts.

Released in 1946, Make Mine Music has a lot in common, at first glance, with Fantasia. Both are comprised of a series of unrelated shorts set to music. But where Fantasia was developed as a unified product around the central pillar of The Sorcerer's Apprentice, Make Mine Music was just a jumbled collection of whatever ideas Disney had lying around. It's true that the studio was reeling from the financial and staffing shortfalls inflicted by World War II, and they needed to just throw whatever they could together to stay afloat, but wasn't Dumbo produced in a similar environment? I didn't like Dumbo very much, but I prefer it to this.

Perhaps not everyone would agree.

I structured my Fantasia review as an examination of each piece individually, but Make Mine Music doesn't really merit that level of scrutiny. It's no more than a hodgepodge, and just as you wouldn't gain much from reading too closely into the individual parts of a stew, we will be better served focusing on the whole.

Although it's since been removed from the North American release, Disney originally opened the movie with the Martins and the Coys, a celebration of rednecks murdering each other. Apparently the gun violence and stereotypical portrayals were a little too much? It was hard for me to find, and it doesn't really add anything to the whole. It's just a silly, lighthearted exploration of the early days of American gang wars.

This is how you should react when your baseball team is doing badly, apparently.

Even with its removal, there's still a ton of cartoon violence throughout, actually, which starkly sets it apart from previous Disney movies. Three of the five pieces featuring humans involve guns prominently, and that giant knife in the picture above is from the fourth. Maybe the nation just had battle on the brain so soon after the war, but it paints a pretty disturbing picture nonetheless.

This is our introduction to Peter of Peter and the Wolf.

But it's not all the gunplay that puts me off. Death is a real and more vicious consequence than in anything we've yet seen. More than once, a hero is killed and goes off to Heaven, which I guess is a pretty nice place, but it's still not a very happy thought. The weird thing is that these deaths aren't treated as grave events, but more likely a silly bump in the road of life. That's a pretty big bump. (In fact, the UK required Disney to censor scenes featuring deceased characters & Heaven's gates as inappropriate subjects for a children's movie!)

Sonia actually isn't dead, but we still get treated to this farewell shot. Nice to know there's a Russian duck heaven.

This would normally be the part of the review where I start to tie everything together, identifying a few key themes that permeate the work, and really dig into what Disney was trying to say. But that's just the problem here:  there's nothing really unifying anywhere in Make Mine Music. The shorts have wildly differing art styles, and even the level of animation quality jumps dramatically up and down between them.

The hands may be ghostly and weird, but at least they look great.

Which is to say primarily that a lot of the animation is quite good. It's still Disney, and there's tremendous care and craft in even the remotest corners of most of the shots. But this isn't like Pinocchio, where the quality of the animation outshone the story. Since, by and large, Make Mine Music has no story, it's somehow worse. Pinocchio annoyed me because at times the story was bad (from an adult perspective, anyway), but Make Mine Music commits the much greater sin of letting me get bored. The quality animation is wasted, beautiful wallpaper on the world's most generic house.

The pitcher does what pitchers do, and nothing more or less.

Fully five of the nine (or ten, with the Martins and the Coys) shorts have no real plot to speak of, no drama, nothing particularly to get invested in or excited about. They were generally very pretty, and there's nothing wrong with creating something that merely exists to look and sound pretty, but I can't help expecting more out of Disney. A few of these pieces (I'm looking at you, Without You) seem to be in there for no other reason than to fill time with a nice song.

The entire piece is just alternating between this and a scene of some trees.

Like Dumbo, Make Mine Music was put together on a budget to ease the studio's wartime financial woes, and it worked. It's easy to look back with modern eyes and judge them harshly for producing an "inferior" product, but harder to justify that criticism in light of evidence that it was, ultimately, a sound decision. Maybe even more importantly, the jumble of different animation styles gives artists room to experiment with techniques across multiple forms, which is the only way real progress in the art can occur. There can be virtue in mediocrity after all.

At least it's weird.

But perhaps not so mediocre. Disney submitted Make Mine Music to the Cannes Film Festival and won the award for "Best Animation Design." The field was likely not that competitive, but all reviews from the time are generally glowing. Everybody in 1946 seemed to agree that it was no Fantasia, but an enjoyable romp nonetheless. I don't blame it for not being Fantasia (Fantasia 2000 is proof enough that lightning doesn't strike twice), but I'm looking forward to the big ones, the films that will help redefine American culture forever, like a modern-day Shakespeare.

Shakespeare, this ain't.

After this, Disney will make one more musical-medley film ("package film"), called Melody Time, in 1948. From then on, they will leave behind the musical conceit and focus entirely on narratives (until Fantasia 2000). Any professional musician can tell you that there are few techniques more challenging than turning music into gold. But Disney was willing to settle for silver, and that was good enough.

MAKE MINE MUSIC
1946
RATING: C+
REASONING:  Good music can't replace good drama. Not-obviously-experimental, boring at least a third of the time, and generally unmemorable at its best. There was an entire short about a whale singing opera and I didn't even feel the need to mention it. Only completionists should have it on their lists, near the bottom.

I, Wave

Last time I said the blog had "run its course". The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became of the truth. But I'm not about to quit, and I've done a much better job on here than most other parts of my life, so just a change is in order. Consider it a haircut for the soul.

"A Tree in Wind" was a fine title, and served me well for four and a half years. These were, without a doubt, the 4.5 most harrowing, emotionally intense years of my life, and that includes secondary school. But things (as things tend to) have evened out, we have settled in for some indeterminable period of anti-turbulence, and it is time to let go of the past. (At least, to do so in a healthy, reasonable, relatively non-destructive way.)

The point of that title, and the poem it came from, was that things sometimes happen without our say-so, and it can be that all we can manage is to react to them, hoping to grow stronger from the experience. I like that idea, but it's all about reacting and coming to understand the whys of the struggle, or the hows of the growth. Fine subjects each, but there comes a time -- and may it come soon for you! -- when you have bested the greatest of your demons, or at least set up a custody arrangement where they only get to wreck your life one weekend a month or so.

Up until now, my focus has been on digesting the past in order to better prepare for the future. But the past can't really prepare you for the future, because the world is wide, and full of things we have never encountered. It's true that the vast majority of your experiences will be pretty consistent with what you've already seen and done, so that past-analysis isn't time wasted. But eventually, you kind of plateau, and everything that happens is understandable, fitting neatly into one of the boxes you have prepared for, and you can be content.

Well I say screw that! Contentment is for chumps and people who wish they'd never been born in the first place. I'm here to make myself extremely uncomfortable until the day they pry the charred-black phylactery from my cold, skeletal claws. Dwelling on the past (if you're doing it right, that is:  productively) is only ever going to make you feel better. Nothing but an eye towards the future can keep you ill-at-ease in the long run, and I've got at least two firmly fixed ahead.

So, Seventh Signal. Seven is an auspicious number, of course, and seven signs are referenced freely in a number of popular works. The core of the idea is that an event will occur, and there will either be some way of predicting it, or its very happening will coincide with these indicators by which you will know a prophecy has come to pass. What the actual signal turns out to be is irrelevant; barring the Discworld, these things come in sevens. I am going to bring them to you, or at least try to, though I'm more of a Cassandra than a Cassini these days.

Not everything can change, nor should it. The Disney reviews will continue. But I do aim to create a more collaborative atmosphere here, one way or another, such that I can come to see it as a place to learn as much as prattle. The majority of you are either shy, or interested only in using what I write as a springboard for jokes. I'm fine with both of those, but I think we can all do even better.

the crest of a new age

Life is full of distractions.

It's temping to frame this as a problem particular to modern living, whatever that is. To suggest that the conveniences afforded us by technology and mature, industrialized capitalism are somehow to blame, that if we had been born one or two or three centuries earlier, it would be so much simpler to buckle down and focus on the things that really matter to us, like creativity and self-improvement.

But that's an easy answer. There were plenty of distractions available to people pre-Netflix, even if there may have been a lot more boring work to do as well. If we are to compare ourselves to people in the past, we should at least choose people similarly situated. If that means we look at how the wealthiest citizens of history chose to spend their time, so be it. We have far more in common with them than we do with the average illiterate peasant.

If you wanted to make yourself feel bad (and who doesn't?), you would point out that, while those ancient lettered ones may have indulged just as freely in entertainments, they were hardly the vapid, sugary dross that passes for pop culture these days. Instead, they relied on the fine arts: reading beautiful poetry, taking in moving plays, and listening to sophisticated music that probably uses more than three chords. Whereas we spend our precious time in endless 3-minute chunks of forgettable streaming video, songs that all rely on the same beat, and TV shows so repackaged and redundant that you could rewatch one by mistake and never even realize it.

Fine, I guess, but it's not like all that old stuff disappeared. It's all still there, and just as easy to access. It's just not what most people are into. So if your priority is being relevant, then yeah, you shouldn't listen to opera. But there are still these people who bemoan our lack of sophistication, who at the same time truly relish the least sophisticated offerings of our times.

This isn't a new phenomenon. Even back in the day -- any day -- you could find erudite, sophisticated members of society ready and willing to castigate the youth for engaging in silly buggers. It isn't that they didn't have crappy, empty art in the past, just as we do today. It's that the crappy stuff didn't survive, so our perspective on the past is rose-tinted indeed.

There are balances to be struck. Moderation in all things being essential to leading a non-miserable life, you can't spend all your time enjoying content. Even the finest literature will ruin you if you do nothing else. But even once you've carved out an appropriate amount of time in your life to devote to entertaining yourself, you aren't done evaluating. You need to decide what, exactly, is worth your time. Separating the wheat from the chaff is good and important. All the more important, I think, if you intend to do produce something of your own.

I often struggle to balance my time between creating and consuming art. Consuming gets the lion's share of my free time, and I only feel a little bad about that. It's far easier to do so in social contexts than creating can be, and building and maintaining strong social connections is probably the single most important factor in not being miserable. On top of that, I've always understood, intuitively, that the art we create is, at its most essential, a reinterpretation of all of the art we have ever consumed, run through the filter of our experiences and feelings (and skills, of course). So, being that consuming art directly feeds whatever mechanisms we use to create more, this is a good thing! On top of that, many of my friends give me art recommendations all of the time; comparatively few actively inquire about my creative status. So it just makes sense that I'd devote more brainpower to consuming than creating.

(Don't take this is a repudiation for not encouraging me to create more often, but feel free to repudiate me for not creating more often.)

So I have a huge list of games, books, movies, TV shows, music, comics, blogs, podcasts, et al. to get through, in order to satisfy my friends and myself, depending. And an equally long list of creative projects, any of which could be, on its own, a deeply rewarding experience. And I'm lucky to be in a position where I have the free time and energy to really decide what kind of person I want to be, in this regard. And though the creative stuff takes a bit more energy, initiative, and organization to get going, and is a little lonelier in the process, its rewards are consistently higher, and nothing draws people to you more than having created something. So it's just a matter of seeing the creation as another way to distract yourself, and fill in the blanks as appropriate.

Looking back over the history of this blog (which, in some ways, has really run its course, and persists mostly out of the bedrock of human nature, habit), I'm struck by how full of moment each and every post title strives to be. And how, every few months or so, I get it in my head that it's time to write a grandiose declaration of self-definition. I've written almost two hundred of these things, and let's look at some of the titles in question:

My first post, "turmeric, the golden spice, auspices; or, the poet as master of his own identity". Nice.

A month later, "shadows of a new life". I'm obsessed with both seeing and shaping here. I haven't gotten away from it, apparently.

Two months from there, "shining, shimmering, splendid". Dreams of returning to the glory days of the past (my own past).

The next year, "graduating to gratuity". On gracefully giving up on our dreams.

It goes on...."a path to many selfs," for instance. An obsession with identity which is getting to be a little embarrassing. And it isn't just constrained to the blog.

I will probably never understand identity

— Scott Hansen (@Lithros) August 20, 2016

So I don't want to, or need to, keep doing that. I want to write, and read, and watch, and play, and laugh with friends when I can. But as for the other stuff, which was good, and valuable, and helped me grow, I'm grateful for it, and grateful it's in the past. And with this post's title, I bid that self farewell.

Onward together.