Posted on by Jo Gent

Barcelona: Day Two of 24

After four years of dreaming and six months of planning, we have finally started our first true retirement vacation, in Barcelona. As a routine-oriented homebody I had some trepidation about this trip before it happened, but in the moment I couldn’t be happier.

I managed to manipulate my medical team into getting me into my Velcro cast the day before we left, and I survived the 11 1/2 hour flight with nothing worse than sleep deprivation and swollen ankles. Since we arrived in our Eixample neighborhood apartment, it’s been pure magic. Our neighborhood is lively and safe, the city is beautiful, every person has been very friendly, the language “barrier” is just not a problem, and we are so relaxed we’re pretty much ready to move here, or we might be if we weren’t too old.

Because of the tension between Catalonia and the Castilian government of Spain, Barcelona was not allowed to remove its city walls until late in the 19th century, after most other major cities of Europe had done so. The delay allowed Barcelona to learn from some of their mistakes, so the expansion was careful to incorporate local artisans and architects, to place beauty and equity over efficiency, and to prioritize the needs of pedestrians over vehicle operators-not always, and not always forever, but often, and very much as an ongoing discussion.

Eixample, which means expansion in Catalan, was the first area to extend outside the city walls, so it has regular blocks of one-quarter kilometer per side, with every intersection forming an octagon by cutting off the corner of the four blocks that meet. This creates a bit of a scrum for both vehicles–including bicycles, motor scooters, monowheels, emergency vehicles, buses, and delivery vehicles–and people, with the borders between streets and sidewalks somewhat blurred.

While this may sound dangerous, it provides more visibility for both pedestrians and operators and more open space in front of buildings. Everyone has to be alert, which allows them to make suitable decisions. We’ve noticed crosswalk controls being treated quite practically: Operators with a red light who notice the crosswalk is empty may proceed, whereas pedestrians with a red symbol may notice there are no cars and also proceed, yet no one seems to do so when inappropriate. It’s actually empowering, and also engenders trust.

While planning the trip I read a lot of things about Barcelona that I appreciate. Although the decision is controversial and still under stress, there is a statute that would eliminate apartment rentals to tourists within two years, forcing them to stay in hotels. This is a simple remedy to the problem of the tourist business snapping up all the real estate, which raises housing costs for people who live there.

We could totally use this in Santa Cruz, a poster city for high housing costs, homelessness, and shuttered businesses, all of which have worsened every year since we moved there. Santa Cruzans, we love you, but you have to stop blaming UCSC for these problems. We can do something to fix them!

Back to Barcelona, there are areas that are free to enter if you are a resident and require a small fee if you are not, which is also the case in San Francisco, and I think it makes sense. All residents should get more benefit and less penalty from the tourists flocking to the desirable place in which they live, not just those lucky or wealthy enough to have snapped up property in advance, and those over-propertied owners should be willing to share.

It’s not because of them that people want to come visit, and those visits won’t stop when the city becomes more livable for residents.

My husband and I are trying to be very good tourists. Although we did rent an apartment, a splurge we justified by the fact that we haven’t vacationed in Europe since 2001, we were careful to choose one that is officially approved by the government and to pay the extra visitor fees for ourselves and our guests. So far we’ve been eating in local establishments in which we find ourselves the sole English-speakers, including the employees. We haven’t done much shopping, but we’re planning to seek out the local craft establishments that remain, many of which have been closed in recent years.

This is not entirely due to tourism; Barcelonians are just as likely as anyone to be tempted by the convenience of Amazon and the predictability of chain stores. But we don’t have to pile on. We are delighted to do what we can to keep Barcelona delightful!

Posted on by Jo Gent

Controlling Foxes

Today I’ll start with a quote from one of the essays in Aminatta Forna’s The Window Seat:

What bothers people about foxes is that they will not be controlled and humans are control junkies. We love an ordered environment and there is none more so than the city. …[W]e have become fearful of what is chaotic, the uncontrolled and uncontrollable. We do not care to be reminded that we are living beings, for that is to remember that we are vulnerable.

I don’t agree with this completely. Although the city provides lighting, plumbing, roads, traffic control, and other things that order our environment, it contains an enormous amount of diversity in both people and activities and plenty of options involving spontaneity.

I also don’t think that most humans are control junkies, though too many of us are. When I’m in my people mood, as opposed to the mood in which I think people are the worst thing that ever happened to Earth, I want people to be free to do what we want. Everyone won’t make the same choice, so lots of interesting things will be happening. The only rule is not to hurt anyone else.

While I can imagine that world, it’s not a world most people would want to live in. For me this describes the world of native Americans pre-Columbus, specifically some of the low-hierarchy tribes, maybe the Lakota Sioux? Definitely the Ohlones. There was plenty of leisure time to socialize and create, health and longevity if you survived childhood, and the majesty of the heavens streaming overhead every night. On the other hand, most people never traveled more than 20 miles from their birthplaces, although nothing was stopping those who wished to do so, and there were no operas or symphonies as far as I know.

What appeals to me about living that way is both the lack of worries and the lack of other people telling you what to do. I mostly live that way as a retiree already, but there are a lot of people trying to put laws in place that would control what I and others do, most of which make life harder for the people at whom they are aimed.

Forna speaks further about foxes: …[T]he fox [is] a creature that chooses to live close to humans but refuses subordination, has submitted neither to domestication nor taming, well not been to anyone‘s will. …Those of us who find beauty in urban foxes do so for the same reason their presence provokes anger in so many, we admire and envy the foxes for their defiance, for choosing freedom over safety.

I do admire wild animals who ignore or exploit humans, and I’d like to think I would choose freedom over safety. I’m pretty safe now though, and more important, people are more social than foxes. I don’t want to live without other people around me. I want to live surrounded by people who believe in my freedom as much as their own.

Recently, I have had to embrace my own vulnerability; I broke my right wrist while taking a small but foolish risk. A cast seems to cut pretty seriously into my freedom since there are a lot of things I can’t do by myself, but I am very thankful for my friends and especially my husband, who is making my life as easy as he can. That is to say, my current freedom is due to the actions of other people, and that is also a nice sort of freedom to have.

Choose freedom!

Posted on by Jo Gent

By a (Pore on a) Nose

The summer Olympics coincided with the births of my children, the first of whom was born during the Barcelona games and the second of whom was born a month before the start of the Atlanta games, and perhaps that’s why I love to watch them. I don’t love them enough to stop my life for two weeks though, so for recent ones, including Paris, I recorded the prime time summaries and viewed with my finger toggling fast forward. Skipping not only commercials but also interviews, athlete profiles, and pretty much everything other than actual competition, I can get through three recorded hours in less than ninety minutes, which says something about what Americans care about? Or maybe about what television networks think we care about.

I’m always a day or two behind and so sometimes I hear the results before I see the event. This didn’t happen a lot though, likely because I am a) retired and b) married to someone not exactly keen on sports. My husband has spent these Olympics proposing sports he would watch, such as Mime and Pickpocketing.

I don’t see those coming soon, although this cycle we had breakdancing and skateboarding, and I hear jump-roping is making a strong case for inclusion in 2032. I don’t watch any of those, though I did take a peek at Artistic Swimming, which is much more athletic and 3-dimensional now, consisting of acrobatic sculptures formed above and below the water.

Having said all that, and knowing that I am very likely to watch future winter and summer Olympics in the same manner, I must confess that a lot of it seemed ridiculous to me this time. The speed races in particular are so close–how often did a field of eight swimmers finish a race with everyone less than a half-second apart? The global search for athletic elites and the millions invested by competing countries in training them has produced competitions that can only be adjudicated by computers. In one of the long women’s track races, the fourth place woman “lost” by one one-hundredth of a second. This sort of delay could occur due to a sneaker pin (improvement on cleats!) catching briefly on a dirt clot, and would be indiscernible to even the wearer.

The subjective sports are worse. Barring a fall or clean miss, most of the audience does not really understand why a gymnastics or diving performance gets the score it does, and even the esoteric group of judges relies on monitoring tools, especially in the case of a challenge. Even when the viewers “get” the criteria, we may not buy in. Why is it so important for a diver not to splash, or for a vaulter to stick the landing? At some point, someone made the whole thing up.

Of course, that’s also true of economics, the name of which we commit much more serious sins than arbitrary medal awarding.

Prime time network coverage in America yammers on about how close the times and scores are, as well as how many world record holders and former Olympians are competing, which would seem to emphasize the foolishness of anointing just three of them, yet it also describes those not on the podium, or even those not winning gold, as disappointed losers. Which may well be true, since the athletes have obviously all bought into the hype. I imagine if someone were to suggest that we could have groups of gold, silver, and bronze winners, say everyone within the same half-second pace or within 1% of the same overall score getting the same award, the athletes would be the primary objectors.

DNA tells us that we are equally close relatives to chimps and bonobos. The Olympics are definitely a creation of aggressive chimp-like patriarchies. Bonobo matriarchs would say they’re all winners, and then celebrate with unbridled sex. Despite the return of “anti-sex” beds to these recent Games, the athlete quarters may have more of a bonobo vibe.

Posted on by Jo Gent

Floating Motes

I’ve started to think of humanity as a cloud of floating motes. Floating motes can be wafted by water or breezes, carried by flora or fauna, or moved by cascades of snow, dirt, rock, or lava. That they have no agency of movement, however, does not mean they have no effect. Particle density affects air quality for everything that uses air, alive or mechanical, as well as water sedimentation, sunlight impinging on Earth, sunset spectacularness or lack thereof, and how often I have to clean my windshield.

Dust was the leading factor in the extinction event that ended the 165 million year reign of the dinosaurs after that asteroid hit Earth. Don’t underestimate the power of tiny, brainless, nearly invisible specks.

Humans similarly seem to cause large effects without intending to. We refer to this as unintended consequences, and the way we wield that term implies that these are rare, that most consequences of our actions are just as we intend. This may be true in a very local sense: When I wipe down the countertop, it looks cleaner. Of course if I had a microscope, I would realize it is completely covered with Colony Forming Units, aka CFUs.

Though the bacteria and fungi that comprise CFUs are quite small, they are not motes, not only because they are alive–that’s how they form those colonies!–but also because they are much tinier; though the size of dust particles can range widely, in most cases each is 3 to 25 times larger than a bacterium. It’s easy to read some shocking stats on how disgusting most kitchens really are, but why bother? We are all covered with CFUs, both inside and out, as is the air, the water, pretty much the entire planet. We evolved to live with these things, and if you know how to keep your immune system healthy you shouldn’t worry too much about it.

Since we’re human, what we do doesn’t matter to us so much as what we believe we do. The countertop looks, feels, and smells great after my husband cleans it–really, he is so talented, you would not believe it–and that works fine for me. I don’t even own a microscope, and my vision is deteriorating each year, so I’m going with the evidence of my senses, especially since I can’t do anything about the situation anyway.

At least when we clean the countertops we aren’t making things worse. When we heightened smokestacks to improve local pollution, we created nationwide acid rain. During the Plague, Londoners killed the dogs and cats that might otherwise have eaten the rats carrying infected fleas. We tried to stop forest fires by just stopping them, leading to a massive increase in underbrush that fueled megafires many times more dangerous.

Unintended consequences can be positive too. Demilitarized zones often become vibrant ecosystems. Reduced human activities in cities during the pandemic allowed birds to sing more softly.

When we are noisy, birds have to yell.

I don’t mean to suggest that we shouldn’t try to do our best. I think our best strategy is to be as kind and patient as we can and to not try to influence other humans other than by our own example. They will take from it what they will. Doing my best is, well, the best I can do.

As a retired person, I sometimes enjoy thinking of myself as a floating mote, open to whatever happens without trying to force it. Wonder what I’ll do today?

Posted on by Jo Gent

Brace Yourself

Have you had a chance to rate anything lately? JK! I know you have because I have. Every visit to a retailer, every online purchase, every interaction with customer service results in an email requesting feedback, and often several if I don’t reply. I rarely do. It’s sort of like reading those legal agreements associated with every software upgrade, which is to say, it could take up your entire life if you actually did it.

Just check I Accept! They already have all your data anyway.

However, there are some things I would LOVE to rate yet I can’t. A lot of those are news programs I hear on the radio or watch on TV, which don’t even offer the thumbs up/down you get with streaming shows. NPR is usually the main offender. I have a habit of listening to it from years past, when it didn’t have commercials and employed actual journalists who interviewed principals on air live.

Now of course, NPR has regular commercials by sponsors, celebrity hosts with neither radio nor content skills (eg Ira Flatow or Meghna Chakrabarti), and a stable of young radio announcers who “interview” each other using scripts.

I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a journalist-journalist interview that was informative or interesting, but I am positive I haven’t heard a scripted one that was. Those kids may have journalism training, but they aren’t actors or writers, and you can practically hear the paper rustling. JK! Of course they are reading from their tablets.

The gang I really want to rate is MSNBC. While NPR is still trying for the neutral voice in a foolishly rigorous way–every climate change feature includes someone from the opposition, probably because these kids do all their research online where Mother Earth and World 2 have roughly equal coverage–MSNBC has always been unapologetically partisan, politically blue and very woke. I think NPR correspondents are overpaid, but I know MSNBC anchors are, since some MSNBC salaries are public. They’re mostly 7-figure amounts, though rumor has it that Rachel Maddow’s is now into 8-figures.

I stopped watching MSNBC during the pandemic, when the bubble enclosing their anchors started choking their brains. Every night they were ranting about people who wouldn’t stay home from work to keep others “safe.” Later we found out that over 90 % of workers were unable to work from home. I was one of those, working in a provider’s office for a while, then for Cal-Fire, then in a grocery store. All essential jobs! During the pandemic and after, there was nary a word of thanks or even acknowledgement to all of us who enabled those bubble babies to work from home.

After the recent presidential debate MSNBC doubled down. Big Biden backers until then, its anchors lined up to throw Biden under the bus. Partly it was the need to let everyone know how many Dem decision makers each had on speed-dial, since like all modern journalists they compete on follower counts and insider access.

However, they weren’t alone. NYT has jumped on board, as has the entire continent of Europe. This must be an extraordinary moment for the MAGA movement, as the Blue press competes to cancel Biden. It’s a classic shoot-yourself-in-the-foot move, since no Red state is going to put a non-primary-winning Dem on the ballot. Continuing with the self-inflicted wound theme, this wasn’t even necessary: Is it really impossible to make the case that a reality TV star glibly spouting a fictional script is a worse choice than a seasoned politician with a record of accomplishment who had a badly-timed cold?

Blue Media could learn something about loyalty from Trump supporters.

Posted on by Jo Gent · 1 Comment

Knowledge v. Learning

Knowing was a barrier which prevented learning. -Frank Herbert

As anyone debugging a computer program who has ever skipped over a routine they “know” is working can attest, knowledge can impede insight. Knowledge is a stone, a wall, a fallback position, an opt-repeated aphorism, a discussion-ender, an assertion of superiority, a casual rebuke to the curious. Learning is a river, a tide, a question, a detailed observation, a discussion-starter, an admission of ignorance, an invitation to the curious.

This intro leads me to a bifurcation, as I feel equally able to confirm or dispute this assertion, the curse of the former debater. I started writing with the expectation of confirmation so I will continue, though I admit that knowledge has some use in our world, used as a guide rather than a bludgeon, though I personally prefer lore.

Everyone today knows raw milk is dangerous to consume. That’s because raw milk was demonized to the public over doctors’ objections after industry was able to monetize homogenized and pasteurized milk in the 1920s. Milk is a natural substance that evolved to help baby animals grow–as opposed to nut milk, which is an oxymoron–and any human mom who has gone to the trouble of expressing her milk would never waste that effort by blending or microwaving it. This knowledge has nearly eliminated access to this therapeutic substance a century later, and led to a deluge of unnecessary “lactose-intolerance.”

Everyone knows that wild turkeys are quite dumb and really do drown by holding their mouths open in rain. Yet they are actually quite smart, as described by a variety of sources ranging from bamboozled hunters in North America during the 18th century to police reports of a wild turkey gang systematically terrorizing Brookline, Massachusetts in the 2000s. This type of knowledge, the assumption of human superiority over wild animals of all kinds, continues to prevent us from understanding numerous interconnections between us and wild animals, such as sharing of disease vectors.

In a recent poll, over 60% of Americans, almost everyone, were found to believe, or know, that crime is a huge problem in our country, though only 17% believe it is a problem for them locally. Statistics suggest that the gap may be due to media influence rather than reality. This knowledge leads to a fearful populace and to wasting community resources solving non-existent problems.

Everyone knows homelessness is caused by drug use, laziness, illegal immigration, lawlessness, and financial downturns. Those factors may contribute to anecdotal cases, but homelessness as a phenomenon is definitely caused by two few homes. It simply does not exist where there are plenty of homes. This knowledge guarantees we will never solve it.

Posted on by Jo Gent · 1 Comment

Ride ’em, Cowgirl

My book group is unlike any other of my experience in that many members don’t read the books, or don’t finish the books; we often read children’s books; and most of our time is spent describing personal connections tangential to the books, or just socializing.

I don’t mean to imply that I don’t have agency in this group, all women roughly my age, but as the only non-Californian, I keep a low profile. This week we read Charlotte’s Web and the Ring of Bright Water, so we spent most of our time sharing animal pet stories, and it turns out many of us have dead pets at home in the form of either boxed ashes or backyard pet cemeteries. As a city girl, I thought that was illegal.

The pet story sharers had so much fun that it was proposed that we each write an animal story to share at our next meeting. I feel it is unlikely this will happen, since a key characteristic of the Central Coast personality is lack of follow-through. This is not a critique, they are delightfully chill and have low blood pressure. I did think of a story just-in-case, which I will share now.

My mother met her good friend Cynthia when they were both mothers of infants married to men in college, and both couples continued their friendship even after our family moved to Houston while theirs was operating a ranch in Sonora, Texas. Their daughter Cathy and I were the same age, and visiting the ranch was my favorite vacation, because Kids Ran Wild. Cathy and her siblings could drive on the property, which seemed huge to me; you could easily drive for an hour without exiting. There were hunting rifles which were much more fun that the BB gun I had at home, cattle and sheep to feed or chase, and a working windmill that generated a refreshing pond.

Best of all there were horses. My family boarded a pony in Houston for a while, a sweet animal roughly shaped like his name, Peanut, and so tame I could ride him with only a blanket and halter, so I was accustomed to horses, but I was not a competitive barrel rider and calf roper like Cathy. That meant I always ended up on Capuchin, a phlegmatic animal most likely to hit his top speed, trotting, when we were heading in the direction of the feed trough.

We were probably 11 or 12 years old the time I requested a more lively steed and Cathy obligingly saddled a tall, black horse I will call Putin, based on my memories of him, which don’t include his actual name. Putin started our relationship by trying to bite my feet as soon as I mounted; Cathy yelled, Kick him in the teeth!, so I did, and he stopped. This may not have improved our rapport.

We left the paddock in orderly file, yet Putin was apparently concocting a plan for revenge. Shortly after we entered the first pasture he made a beeline for the fence and attempted to press my left leg into the barbed wire, forcing me to drop that stirrup and put my foot on the saddle, effectively preventing me from dismounting. Cathy was loping toward us when I managed to jerk the reins enough to get Putin to turn away to the right. In retrospect this was probably hard on his soft mouth, but he started it.

I’d just managed to regain the stirrup when Putin launched into Plan C, a full out gallop toward a tree with a cartoonishly low-handing branch. This was–and is–by far the fastest horseback ride of my life, so I was very focused on staying on his back, clenching my legs and lying low over the saddle and holding onto the pommel, since I figured he wouldn’t hesitate to trample me if I fell. I had seen plenty of Westerns and knew what would happen: he would duck his head as we went under the tree, and I would be ready to grab the branch and hang from it then drop softly–WHOMP.

One second I was in the movie and the next I was on the ground. Putin was joyously free. Cathy hurtled past, yelling, and in a serious cowgirl move steered the two steeds neck-to-neck and grabbed Putin’s reins. She came back to me with both horses and said, You’ve got to get back on him! She did not mean this idiomatically.

I demurred.

I limped, wincing, back to the paddock. Cathy was riding Putin, on a tight rein at a slow pace while continuously dressing him down, leading her own compliant horse. The next day I was a little too bruised for a ride.

Thereafter I was delighted to ride Capuchin.

Posted on by Jo Gent · 1 Comment

Locomelon

Another day, another review. Yesterday I was innocently reading the latest New Yorker, which contains an article about Cocomelon, a new-to-me animated series for young children. I mentioned to my husband that I was very confused by it. Always a man of action when YouTube in involved, he promptly launched an episode onto our TV.

Watching it affected me as I imagine hallucinogenic mushrooms might. I was transfixed, unable to move, even to sit down, as I watched large-eyed denizens of the Uncanny Valley participate in actions that can be described with real words–grocery shopping, playing with toys, playing with toys in a grocery, using groceries as if they were toys–but were not really those things.

Happily the one we watched was only about five minutes long, so I was released shortly, feeling dazed at first but quickly regaining brain function, which I used to promptly turn the feed off. There are 30- and 60-minute versions as well, from which I fear I might not have recovered.

Maybe the problem was the music, which my body was insisting should be ominous but was horribly not-ominous in a cruel way. The parents and children were oddly proportioned and simultaneously acrobatic and clumsy. There were no spoken words, only English subtitles, which did the opposite of explaining.

Perhaps a warning could be appended: Activities are not representative of those in real life.

This warning would be as useless as the subtitles, since the targeted audience is mostly pre-literates, primarily toddlers and infants. I’m old enough to indulge my inner curmudgeon, and I find myself nostalgic for the days when moms conversed with their children, even very young children, instead of both being engaged by devices.

As with the industrial food system, many people have no choice but to partake. The article’s views of the behind-the-scenes production revealed a pernicious research technique: A tot is given two screens, one showing Cocomelon and one showing a parent doing typical things around the house, and whenever the tot switched attention to the real life screen, observers analyzed the Cocomelon video to figure out how to punch it up to avoid the distraction.

Before release, the videos are scrutinized against a list of corporate no-nos, including Coco-children shown as sleepy or sleeping, which might inspire a viewer to leave the video for a nap or bedtime, and Coco-children riding on a parent’s shoulders, which would reveal how unnaturally enormous their heads are.

At some point this was the brainstorm of an individual, but that person has long ago cashed out. Cocomelon is now in the hands of its second or third profit-focused owner and has expanded correspondingly. It is now the third most subscribed channel on YouTube In The World, after MrBeast (even I’ve heard of MrBeast, so you must have) and T-Series, a Bollywood channel in Hindi shown in India.

The company has fired quite a few people lately, and may be planning a wholesale switch to AI for content-generation. That should kill it?–or else the bot-indoctrinated children will come after the rest of us when they grow up.

Posted on by Jo Gent · 2 Comments

Movie Pan

Now for a review of the worst movie I have ever seen, Gone With the Wind. GWTW is not the worst movie in terms of production quality; that would probably be Plan 9 From Outer Space, in which strings are clearly visible supporting the attacking alien spacecraft, and the “plot” and “writing” are LOL terrible. It’s also not the worst movie in terms of bad writing/acting/directing, yes, a trifecta of failure, aka Racing Stripes, a movie which proves that adults can suffer lifelong trauma from watching extremely awful content created for children; I did. I do.

GWTW may not even be the worst movie in its category, which I might dub Propaganda for Satan. I don’t watch those movies, and can’t even come up with the name of an example, so as a virgin in this category I was easily shocked.

Nothing in this movie is accurate. Yes, it’s a fictional story based on a novel, so why should it be accurate? Well, because it’s historical fiction, includes many real persons and events, and is clearly fabricated to convince its audience of things that are False. Other works in this genre might include Tales From the Flat Earth: What Are Stars, Really? and Childhood Corporal Punishment: The Key to Lifelong Mental Health.

From the first chords of the theme through the hysteria of the ending, I was aghast, agape, gobsmacked. Actually, that was only true while I was watching it, which took three days. It’s a lot to swallow even in smaller chunks, and from the relative safety of the 21st century Bay Area.

Here are a few of the low-hanging fruit examples, because the list of misleading items would be almost as long as the book:

  • Plantation owners were bereft of basic skills, unable to feed, dress, or clean themselves or their stuff or their domiciles; ignorant of any understanding of agriculture; the opposite of intellectuals; disorganized; and completely unaware of the customs and religions of any other part of the world or the country, other than to disparage those without basis. Successful working people of the region–who are rarely depicted– must have had some knowledge, but slaveowners were haughtily dismissive of anything outside their idiotic world of duels and debutantes, proud men and degraded women.
  • Enslaved persons were threatened, beaten, raped, separated from family, deprived of education and freedom, impoverished, and imprisoned. They did not on any level enjoy this, just as humans today do not like being controlled by others, even in minor ways.
  • Homo sapiens are all the same. “Race” is an imposed construct that can’t be recreated from DNA, which is 99% the same in all humans, with more genetic variation with one “race” than between any two.

To be fair, the first point above is actually made by GWTW. A lot of what the slaveholder class do therein sparks the reaction, Wow, they are so <shallow trivial stupid clueless>. Choose your own answer; I sort of rotated among those. The contrast between their expectations of the experience of Civil War (quick victory) and what actually transpired (definitive defeat after long conflict) is starkly drawn though not a major component.

I was re-shocked to learn that in a 2014 Harris poll, the movie was still America’s favorite while the book was second only to the Bible. Presumably a poll using landlines? Still a bit of a hangover after outrage.

Or is it? Data dive reveals GWTW was the favorite movie of women but not men, republicans and independents but not democrats, boomers and matures but not any other generation. GWTW was the 2nd choice for dems; for men and younger generations it did not make the top three. So perhaps not complete dominance of the cultural landscape, just another misleading poll. That’s a sign of our times.

Posted on by Jo Gent

David Holmes: The Boy Who Lived

This is the title of the second documentary I promised I would review. David Holmes was the main stunt double for Daniel Radcliffe, who portrayed the title character in the Harry Potter film series. Holmes was gravely injured in a stunt accident during the penultimate film, and is now paralyzed from the waist down.

I was drawn to this by an Atlantic article about Radcliffe, who wanted to direct this documentary himself originally but decided he was too close to Holmes to do it properly. Ratcliffe seems to be a very centered person, which may owe something to his parents, who were careful to maintain reality for their small family during those years of filming frenzy. I would contrast this with the family of Sam Bankman-Fried, who were avid to join him in the la-la land of living high on pyramid scheme money, so much so that they bear some culpability for his having to spend much of his life in prison. Not that I would wish that fate on any parent.

I really enjoyed the first part of the film, seeing Holmes as a stuntman in the making from quite a young age, then as a professional plying his trade, and in-between as a physically gifted youth with like-enabled friends, all literally leaping from lamp post to fence top while walking through London streets. Radcliffe and Holmes were 11 and 16 when they met on the set, and hit it off right away. What kid wouldn’t enjoy hanging out with kids who casually backflip while walking down the hall, or fall off walls on demand, apparently effortlessly?

Sometimes I wonder if I would have had a different career I’d been exposed to unconventional options. In retrospect, I think my dream job might have been as music librarian for a major orchestra. I did see plenty of performances though, so clearly I wasn’t compelled to find out, say, how the music for all those different instruments gets sorted and placed.

Some *are* called, though, and Holmes was always a fearless child ready to climb anything, then leap off or slide down it. His parents recognized his strength and enrolled him in competitive gymnastics training, which is not just a world of wannabe Olympians; a lot of those kids target stunt performer careers from the start.

After the accident, the movie changes quite a bit, just as Holmes’ life did. He will never regain use of his lower limbs, and he struggles daily to maintain a functioning level of muscle mass. I learned that paraplegia is a deteriorating disease that can ultimately claim many unexpected functions, including the ability to talk, one of his greatest fears.

The key component for ensuring a movie about such a setback is uplifting rather than depressing is a victim who not only shows real courage and resilience, but also is surrounded by a group of supportive friends, and Holmes is that guy. One of his former work colleagues has become his personal caregiver. Most of his peer group from the movies, as well as Radcliffe, stayed beside him from the start, and their camaraderie and playfulness and positive life force are fully on display.