Dr. Metablog

At the Getty Museum

Dr. M.  "How long have you been a guard here?"

Guard:  "Seventeen years. You can't stand still. You have to change your position, move around." 

Dr. M.  "Has anything ever happened. Someone try to steal a painting?

Guard.  "No nothing. Nothing has ever happened."

Dr. M.  "No one descending on ropes from the ceiling, trying to snatch a sculpture."

Guard.  "Nothing has ever happened. Wait, I forgot. Something did happen. Two or three years ago, there was a woman, she had a can of soda in her bag. She leaned over to look at one of the bronze sculptures, and the soda fell out of her bag. It broke and sprayed some soda on the statue. They called a special crew in to clean the sculpture. We closed down the entire wing."

Dr. M.  "Must have been exciting."

Guard.  "No, not really."

Los Angeles Uber Driver

"I worked for Ethiopian Airlines in Ethiopia. I have a degree in business. One time my wife came to America and she says she wants to stay here. I had so much paperwork and investigation but now I am a legal immigrant. America is the land of opportunity. I believe that one hundred per cent. I bought a house, it is my house. In Ethiopia, I would have to bribe many big shots and one day they could take the house anyway if someone wanted it. Here, no trouble. I had to leave Ethiopia because I was opposed to the government. We had an election and 100% of the people voted for the government, hah! We do not like Obama so much because he visited Ethiopia and said it was a democracy. Our government is fighting the terrorists in the Sudan so he pretends not to know the facts. I have two children, they speak English but also Amharic. My wife is a nurse. It is good here. I am an accountant at LAX but I drive for Uber on weekends and sometimes at nights, extra money. Los Angeles is very expensive to live."

What's Next?

Our sun is halfway through its life cycle. Its luminosity increases 1% every 110 million years. Therefore the Earth ineluctably grows hotter and hotter. In a billion years, life on its surface will be impossible. Global surface temperatures will reach 117F and the oceans will evaporate. Water molecules in the atmosphere will be broken apart by solar radiation and hydrogen molecules will escape the planet. Eventually the sun will exhaust the hydrogen fuel in its core. When it begins to exploit other material, its luminosity will increase a thousandfold until it stabilizes with a radius about 250 times its present size. It will consume Mercury and Venus but probably not the Earth which will become locked into an orbit with only one side facing the sun (as the moon does to the earth). This will mean impossibly hot temperatures on one side, impossibly cold on the other. The moon's orbit will reduce to 11,000 miles causing it to fracture, raining pieces of itself onto the Earth. Eventually the sun will lose mass and gravitational pull and the earth will drift away into a remote orbit -- dark, cold, and lifeless.  

(Adapted from Douglas Palmer, Earth in 100 Groundbreaking Discoveries (Firefly Books, 2011.)

De Somno

I am a bad sleeper. I don't know if I'm technically an insomniac but I can say in all honestly that for me, the nighttime is the hardest part of the day. It's been this way for a long time. I''m good at going to sleep and I enjoy the "first sleep" of two or three hours, but after that, say from 2 am on, it's an adventure. Nightmares, tossing and turning, "fluff in the lung and a feverish tongue," and mostly what I think of as "airplane sleep" -- that is, the kind of semi-sleep, semi-awake borderline limbo which you're in when you're sitting up in a crowded plane.

Moreover, things start to look mighty bleak in the 2-5 part of the morning. Is that pain in my toe a bruise, or is it the beginning phase of gout or neuropathy? Cancer of the instep? Will they want to amputate my leg at the knee?

Not so in the 1950s. Return we now to those days of yesteryear and recall the most glorious sleepings of my life. I'm in my teens, and it's spring. A weekend. I spend the morning at the PS 217 schoolyard, playing basketball. I'm tireless once I get my second wind. After four or five hours, I drag myself home for a roast beef dinner, stuff myself. Then I lie down, turn on the radio and listen to Red Barber and Connie Desmond broadcast the Dodgers game (if it's Sunday, perhaps a double-header). By the second inning, I'm deep in the arms of Morpheus. Profound. Incomparable. A sleep beyond ordinary sleep. When I wake, it's the seventh inning. I've been in sleeptopia for two hours.

Where are the sleeps of old time? 

Junebug (2005)

When I saw Junebug for the first time shortly after it appeared in 2005, I enjoyed its gentle, affecting comedy. It's yet another "stranger comes to town" enactment, although this time, for once, the stranger is a woman. Madeleine Johnsen is a fortyish, worldly, sophisticated Chicago-based art-dealer. She arrives in a small North Carolina Christian-saturated community accompanied by her brand-new twenty-something husband, who is a native of the place. If they're not deeply in love, they're certainly enjoying a time of sexual satisfaction, perhaps even frenzy. As the film proceeds, a series of exquisite culture-clash misunderstandings illuminate both city and country.  

On last night's viewing, however, the film was far less amusing and more painful than I remembered. Did I see it the first time with rose-colored glasses?

In the film's loveliest scene, the young husband George Johnsen, played gracefully by Alessandro Nivola, is prevailed on at a church-basement social to "give us a hymn," which he does rather beautifully, offering Will Lamartine Thompson's ""Softly and Tenderly, Jesus Is Calling" which is an extremely melodic but theologically naive piece of sentimentality. As he sings, obviously very comfortable with the milieu and with the surroundings, the director's camera focuses on his wife Madeleine's (i.e. Embeth Davidtz's) expressive face. 

When I saw the film in 2005 or thereabouts, I thought Madeleine shone with wonderment and appreciation. O, I thought, she sees and appreciates a new dimension in her husband. This will lead to understanding between them and help her to navigate the gulf between her and her new family. How could I have been so undiscerning? This time, it was entirely clear that her reaction was exactly the opposite of what I had previously attributed to her. Madeleine doesn't get it at all. It's not appreciation, it's incomprehension, perhaps even condescension. Madeleine, I'm sorry to say, doesn't understand her husband, his culture, his religion, or his family. And indeed, subsequent events in the plot confirmed my new pessimism, for every time Madeleine has to make a choice, she does so with no accommodation to her husband's upbringing or values

She's glad to leave the place, she says at the end, but it's clear to me that she's learned nothing and that there's trouble brewing.

Most of the attention that the film has garnered is owing to Amy Adams' performance as George's pregnant child-like sister, which is indeed a remarkable piece of acting. But for my money, it's the visiting husband and wife who steal the show -- along with the intelligence and art of the director (Phil Morrison) and the writer (Angus MacLachlan).