The Muppets: Bohemian Rhapsody

My travels and the holidays haven't left me time to write down my recent profound thoughts. So instead, here's an interlude especially for my fellow Baby Boomers who grew up with Queen and have raised kids on the Muppets (with a wry ending for us technology users). Go to YouTube to watch it in HD!

Happy Holidays!

Julie & Julia

Though it differed from what I expected, I thoroughly enjoyed the new movie Julie & Julia. I was psyched for it, having just cooked a big dish of garden fresh Chinese Long Beans for my friends Roger & Sherran on Sunday. Following a week's worth of media hype about the movie and the glowing reviews for Meryl Streep (and less praise for Amy Adams), I went out on Monday for a premium-priced showing ($9 vs. $7 regular price in Columbus, OH) of the film.

With my home theater system and over 900 DVDs, I don't go out for movies very often. I usually wait 6 months, buy a used DVD, and get the same audio/visual theater experience (10' projection image and 7.1 sound from a 2800 watt A/V receiver and a 2500 watt subwoofer), in the comfort (Ekornes Stressless chairs), and convenience (fresh-popped corn with known additives from flavorings and a wide selection of legal beverages - my wine cellar abuts my home theater), of home - at 1/3 the cost for me, plus no additional charge for guests. However, the foodie in me was allured to catch Julie & Julia now.

I grew up inspired by Julia Child on PBS. Her whimsical demeanor delightfully deflated the starched stuffiness of the French cuisine mystique. Combined with my father's genes and his own love for food and cooking, Julia's TV presence reinforced my expectations that cooking should be fun and the resulting food would be delicious.

Writer/director Nora Ephron has woven together two memoirs - Julia Child's story of her cooking and cookbook-writing beginnings in France, and Julie Powell's year of cooking and blogging her way through Julia's cookbook - to provide a delightful comparison and contrast of their lives. At the start of their stories, Julie is actually a better cook than was Julia. But Julia's life was certainly more glamorous and intriguing, with her living the leisure life of an American diplomat's wife in France, settling into a luxurious Parisian apartment, while Julie and her magazine-writing husband have just upgraded to a 900 square-foot apartment above a NYC Queens pizzeria. Julia's need to occupy herself leads her from hat-making classes, to bridge lessons, and finally to cooking school at Le Cordon Bleu. Julie needs a release from her 9-to-5 phone-bank job helping NYC's 911 victims, so commits herself to cook every one of Julia Child's 524 recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking in one year and blog daily about her experience. Both husbands are lovingly supportive, through their own trials, as are their friends. The development of these very different yet similar stories, intertwining 8+ years of Julia's life and 1 year of Julie's, carried me along, savoring every scene.

Meryl Streep's portrayal is absolutely marvelous. I've experienced two memorable portrayals by an actress of a celebrity. I recall being mesmerized by Zoe Caldwell's portrayal of Maria Callas in Master Class on Broadway in 1995. It took all of 30 seconds for Ms. Caldwell to have me believe she was Maria Callas - another notable personality from my high school years - on stage, right in front of me, conducting a master class with aspiring opera singers. Ms. Streep never had me believing she was Julia Child, but her absolute mastery of her craft had me admiring, for the entire 2 hours and 5 minutes, how well she could invoke my fond memories of Julia without ever having me feel she was presenting a caricature of her. And somehow, through the magic of film and the film maker, she always came across as the full 6' 2" that Julia Child was, instead of Meryl Streep's own 5' 6", hence never breaking the spell.

I must confess that in the 1980s, I really didn't like Meryl Streep as an actress, despite friends who swooned over her performances. Several years ago, however, I found my opinions completely reversed over the Metropolitan Opera tenor, Richard Leech. For over a decade, I had seen him perform the role of Pinkerton in Puccini's Madama Butterfly - and I really didn't care for him. Then I saw Mr. Leech perform as Romeo in Gounod's Roméo et Juliette - and I realized that what made me dislike him all those years was that he portrayed the role of his character so well, he had me believing he was the despicable Pinkerton! In that same sense, Meryl Streep conveyed Julia Child, as she did all the characters that I didn't like in her earlier films.

While the critics seemed to share my adoration of Ms. Streep's acting prowess, they were less kind to Amy Adams. I don't know her work (I've seen a couple of movies she's been in but don't really recall her), and came to expect little after the reviews of Julie & Julia. Well, I was pleasantly surprised. Since I don't know Julie Powell, Ms. Adams had different challenges portraying her to me. It's hard to say why Julie wasn't as clearly defined or nuanced as Julia. Was it the character (by her own definition, not the goddess on a pedestal that Julia Child is as Julie's muse), the book, the screenplay/direction, or acting? It's hard to blame Ms. Adams; she may have played the part perfectly. Certainly, Ms. Adams quickly had me feeling she was Julie and got me sympathetic for her.

But to my real surprise, this wasn't really a film about food. There aren't any salivation-generating scenes of irresistibly alluring dishes. Even Julie's year-long intimidation of her known need to eventually tackle de-boning a duck was laughable to me, given the fact that my father taught me to de-bone not by slitting the skin down the center, as Julia instructs, but to remove the bones through the duck's vent to retain the skin's shape and minimize the stitching required to enclose the stuffing.

Julia's story is initially about learning to cook, but then moves to her years of working with the original authors of the would-be first English-language French cookbook and the re-writes needed to get the magnum opus published for the American housewife audience. Julie's story is about her self-imposed need to get through preparing Julia's 524 recipes in 365 days and the affect this quest has on her life and marriage. There are nice insights into the impacts and changes of the times - from the McCarthyism of the 1950s to an unknown's blogging of today leading to fame and presumed fortune.

More, it's about two individuals persisting to fulfill their dreams - of maintaining their happy marriages and of completing their self-assigned challenges. In this era in which so many of us require immediate gratification of our desires, Julie's commitment of a year to complete her task may seem to be a lot. Yet the underlying contrast with Julia's 8-year work on her cookbook - and celebration of her $250 advance from a publisher - shows how much times have changed.

Julia Child's efforts made her an icon. Julie Powell's efforts made her a movie character. It was an enjoyable movie - one that I look forward to seeing again when I buy the used DVD for my collection.

Social Networking, Twitter, Blogging - In Plain English

While cruising around the 'net trying to figure out how I should use social networking, blogging, newsfeeds, etc., I found a series of quick (2 minute), light videos by Lee LeFever and his company Common Craft that effectively convey some basic concepts. Here are the links to the videos on YouTube with the embedded videos. If you go to the videos at YouTube, you'll see other explanatory videos you might find interesting.

Social Networking


Blogs


Twitter


RSS Feeds

TED: Ideas Worth Spreading

The Rotary Club of Briarcliff's blog on Chinese food led me to TED: a website devoted to spreading ideas. It's a wonderful source of talks (most about 20 minutes long), that have been given at the TED conferences that were originally focused on Technology, Entertainment, and Design, but have broadened out since their first conference in 1984. They range from light and entertaining to very thought-provoking (and often are both), and are free.

My finding and exploring the site reflect a few of the points I've made in my blog entries so far. First, I found it by following someone's blog entry. Responding to my FaceBook status saying I was exploring TED, a FB friend endorsed the site, saying it's wonderful (and suggesting other sites for me to check out as well). The hundreds of content-filled videos at TED are examples of Information Overload, but at least the ideas have been assessed (the conference organizers and TED's Brain Trust invite the speakers). Still, there are so many interesting sounding presentations (available both through the Internet and for my iPhone), that going through them will take a lot of time. I'm trying to play the talks I've selected in the background, replacing TV, while I'm working on other things (multitasking). I'll share specific items that I find interesting that are related to my own thoughts; doing so may help others sift through the talks and encourage them to do likewise.

So here's the first talk I'll share. It's one directly related to The Tyranny of the Either/Or - more pointedly, the difference between liberals and conservatives (I call them "tribes"; Haidt calls them "teams"). It's a surprisingly moderate talk (both/and), since was given at a TED conference (expectedly - and empirically - attended mainly by liberal thinkers), and presents the developed moral psychology differences between them. Among its conclusions, as K.S. commented in my blog: We need to be open to both black and white thinking. Here's a link to the talk on the TED site in case the embedded video doesn't work for you.

The Personal Communications Explosion

In the past few weeks, I've spent a lot of  time getting myself into blogging and FaceBook. As I've thought about it, these are two of an explosion of new means of communicating that have become widely available during the last several years. Learning how to use them, with whom, for what, and with which of alternate providers of similar services has been a new experience - one that has made new demands on my time.

Thinking back, through my school years, I had three basic means of communicating: personal conversation, letters, and telephone. New technologies provided fax machines and mobile phones. Then personal computers and telecommunications networks opened up entirely new kinds of communication: desktop publishing, email, personal websites, user help forums. Combining PCs with mobile communications gave us instant messaging, Internet phone and videophone service. Add camcorders and iPods and we got YouTube and podcasting. Now we also have blogging, social networking sites (like FaceBook and MySpace), and instant mass broadcasting (Twitter).

With this expansion of types and means of communicating has come the explosion of volume of personal communications: more types of communication, more frequently, with more people. There are evolving expectations of responsiveness (can I ignore instant messages when I know the sender can see that I'm online and active?). Add Internet surfing to find information and just try out neat stuff. And this is on top of the explosion of commercial communications: junk mail & faxes, telemarketing, spam, pop-ups, plus all the news services. And I've probably left out some other major communications mechanisms.

How are we to manage this new volume and its demand on our time and attention? 

New technology will eventually help (my answering machine and two phone lines let me direct commercial calls to my answering machine so I can ignore most of them; spam and junk mail filters, like anti-virus programs, fight a never-ending battle of who can be more clever). I've found ways to link my Twitters and Blogger entries to FaceBook, but I still have a net added demand on my time to read, respond to, and generate all this new communication. (That's why I'm writing this at midnight.)

I'm afraid the personal assistant avatars that the futurists at Xerox PARC predicted 20 years ago won't come soon enough; technology still hasn't met its promise of giving me less paper or more leisure time. So I guess I'll just have to cope with even more work - even if it's the pleasant work of staying in touch with friends and family. 

Perhaps with the expanded level of communications, some folk more experienced at this will provide me help by suggesting ways they've found to cope!

Blogging

Thanks to K.S. for starting my Mom on blogging. Her blogs finally got me into doing mine.

Years ago, I bought futurist John Seely Brown's 2000 book The Social Life of Information. He's the former head of Xerox PARC. I really couldn't get into the book (it's a difficult read). But I had the pleasure of hearing John present at a national SHEEO conference. He made the story live! And he made so much sense. He basically presaged the Web 2.0 phenomenon, noting how much more directly people would interact with each other through the Internet.

In 2006, I suggested we invite John to speak at an Ohio Learning Network conference of education technologists. I had the pleasure of introducing him. (It's interesting to look back at the video of my introduction on the OLN website. My 6 1/2 minute introduction includes some of my fundamental conclusions of what we must do to improve elementary, secondary, and higher education education in America.) 

In introducing John, I boasted how I had really learned something from hearing his address at SHEEO and, as a result, had moved to get with the new technologies: I had taken an online course using the multi-participant conferencing facilities of Elluminate, bought an iPod, signed up for instant messaging, and had a webcam. In response, at the start of his talk John quickly burst my bubble and challenged me further: "Do you have a blog? Ah, we have to work on this guy!" (John Seely Brown's thought-provoking talk and slides are, sadly, no longer available on OLN's website.)

Having lived such a public life for the past 25 years, I've been especially focused on maintaining what personal privacy I could. The notion of making my thoughts available to people I don't know has been completely abhorrent to me. However, as I've been thinking about writing a book with such thoughts, the notion has become more reasonable. Tackling a big project such as writing a book is somewhat more conceivable if I address it a little piece at a time.

So here I am, almost 3 years later, finally blogging. Thanks to K.S., Mom, and John Seely Brown for getting me going! This blog has already gone in directions far removed from my book thoughts. But it's nice to get down in writing some of the thoughts I've had for a long time, even as they randomly pop to mind.