Ego and the Power of the Critic

Posted on September 3, 2013 by awtraughber

My students recently completed an assignment where they had to bring in a media clip (audio or visual) that reflects some personal belief.  One student shared the following clip from Pixar’s Ratatouille.  The scene that always stuck out to me was Ego’s (the critic) flashback to his childhood, so I was pleasantly surprised by this clip.

For some (like my student), it’s all about rising above the criticism of others.  For those of us further down the journey, it’s about wielding the weapon of criticism well.  It’s a constant struggle, choosing between picking apart and building up.  And in a world where all kinds of people say all kinds of things demanding some kind of response, sifting through things can be difficult.  So when we find good stuff?  Ego gets it right.  And the clip is a reminder that maybe we can, too.

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Four Reasons to Watch SHIELD This Fall

Posted on August 30, 2013 by awtraughber

This past week, I’ve run some quotes from the Entertainment Weekly Joss Whedon interview.  I held a couple of my favorites back as they pertain to his latest television interest: Agents of SHIELD.  A quote from the interview about serial storytelling:

. . . the thing I brought to the other shows is the thing I still try to do: Have a different reason to tell a story every week and not just have a different story.

It will be interesting to watch the show evolve.  First seasons are always a bit tricky, especially when they can easily become “villain of the week” stories (which is okay for a while).

But it was four simple words used in a series in the short article on SHIELD itself that makes me want to see the show even more.  Not sure if the quote is from Maurissa Tancharoen or Jed Whedon.  The article calls it “the behind-the-scenes mantra” of the show: Funny, sad, wondrous, and beautiful.

Any show that can pull those four things off on a regular basis will be amazing.

And the already-seen-by-millions trailer makes me think they just might do it.

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Tonight’s Song and Prayer

Posted on August 29, 2013 by awtraughber

As the days pass (especially days like today), I become more mindful of something someone said somewhere back in some book I had read: that every conversation should somehow turn into prayer.  I’m not doing a very good job of that, but I want to.  So many words end up inadvertently hurting someone or simply go no where.  I like the simple prayer caught in an older song by Andrew Osenga, written for one of his Letters to the Editor albums.  Simple and sincere, as so much good prayer can be.  It’s a good prayer for a long weekend, too.  “Let us know You.”

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Joss Whedon Quotes the Lord of the Rings

Posted on August 28, 2013 by awtraughber

Topher from DollhouseSeriously:  the Entertainment Weekly interview with Joss Whedon is page after page of quality stuff.  For instance: when asked what character would be his alter ego, Whedon said it would be Topher from Dollhouse.  Why?  Because “he’s a nerd who stays up in the attic by himself controlling people’s lives and telling who they’re going to be that week.”  Which really does sound like the life of a writer/director.

Whedon, of course, finds himself in the same place as many go-to directors these days: caught between making new stuff and making variations on old stuff.  He says:

It’s very important that we start creating new content again.  We can only build on nostalgia so much before we have nothing left to build on.  Before we’re rebooting Spider-Man— again.  It’s dangerous to the culture, and it’s boring to me.

What’s his general rule for telling good stories on a weekly hour-long like Buffy or Firefly?

Have a different reason to tell a story every week and not just have a different story.

That is, I believe, a fine but necessary distinction.

But it’s the end of the interview that really gets me.  He is asked about his own somewhat nihilistic view of life and how his writing counteracts that:

My stories do have hope because that is one of the things that is part of the solution– if there can be one,  We use stories to connect, to care about people, to care about a situation.  To turn the mundane heroic, to make people really think about who they are. . .  We create to fill a gap– not just to avoid the idea of dying, it’s to fill some particular gap in ourselves.  So yeah, I write things where people will lay down their lives for each other.  And on a personal level, I know many wonderful people who are spending their lives trying to help others, or who are just kind and decent . . . But on a macro level, I don’t see that in the world.  So I have a need to create . . . I want to be wrong more than anything.  I hate to say it, it’s that line from The Lord of the Rings— “I give hope to men; I keep none for myself.”  They say it in Elvish, so it sounds supercool.

The “Joss Whedon” issue of Entertainment Weekly is on sale now.  I highly recommend it.

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Dave Eggers Completes The Circle (before anyone notices)

Posted on August 27, 2013 by awtraughber

The Circle from Dave EggersMissing my book-buying radar is one thing.  But a major author holding off on the release of a 500-page tome til just over one month until said tome drops?  That’s something only someone like Dave Eggers could accomplish.

Turns out that Eggers (of Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and You Shall Know Our Velocity! fame) will release a book called The Circle from Knopf in early October.  After writing fiction about Saudi Arabia and mostly non-fiction (about the Lost Boys of Sudan and Hurricane Katrina) over the last few years, The Circle sounds like an interesting departure: it’s the story of a new employee at a mysterious tech-giant some are comparing to Google or Facebook.  From the end of the publisher’s write-up:

What begins as the captivating story of one woman’s ambition and idealism soon becomes a heart-racing novel of suspense, raising questions about memory, history, privacy, democracy, and the limits of human knowledge.

I’m a little surprised that McSweeney’s (the maker of great hardbacks and Eggers’s own company).  Even still, October 8 can’t come fast enough.  You can read the little that anyone else has to say at the LA Times or the Atlantic Wire.  WIth other new books by N. T. Wright and Jonathan Lethem dropping in September, this fall is shaping up to be a great time for quality reading.

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Joss Whedon and Trusting the Story

Posted on August 26, 2013 by awtraughber

JossEWThe joy of this past Saturday was sitting down with my coffee and breakfast and reading Entertainment Weekly‘s Joss Whedon issue.  And it was great.  I think I’ve seen about 85% of Whedon’s work (I still haven’t finished the last season-and-a-half of Angel), and I’m always amazed at how he creates new things that reflect significant truth.

Some highlights:

  • While working on Roseanne, Whedon learned that “every time somebody opens their mouth they have an opportunity to do one of two things– connect or divide.”  I wish I could always keep that in mind.
  • The story of the Toad/Storm dialogue from X-Men epitomizes the importance of not just what is said but who says it and how.
  • It’s always interesting to hear people’s opinions on The Avengers movie.  Maybe the movie’s writer and director said it best: The Avengers may not be a great film, but it is a “great time.”

and

  • “Somebody once asked me if I have anything like faith, and I said I have faith in the narrative.  I have a belief in a narrative that is bigger than me, that is alive and I trust will work itself out. [Buffy star] Sarah Michelle Gellar once said, ‘I’m not sure where we’re going with this [story line],’ and I said, ‘You don’t have to trust me, trust the narrative, we’ll find our way back.”

Brilliant words from one of our culture’s best story-tellers. There are some more goodies from the interview, but I’ll hold off on them for a day or two.  I encourage you to go find the latest issue at your area Barnes & Noble or grocery store.  It’s brilliant thinking.

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Thinking Through The World’s End (or The Apocalypse of Gary King)

Posted on August 25, 2013 by awtraughber

Cornetto TrilogyThis past Thursday evening I had the opportunity to watch the “Three Flavors Cornetto Trilogy,” the three movies made by Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost.  I’ve been a fan of their work for years (including two great seasons of Spaced) and was excited to see two classics and the latest work back-to-back-to-back.  The short of it: Shaun of the Dead really is simply amazing.  Hot Fuzz is wonderfully polished and well-played.  And The World’s End?  Well, it’s definitely the more sober of the lot, which is interesting when you realize that it centers on a pub crawl.

The movie follows four childhood friends as they are brought together by their long-dismissed leader, Gary King, to finish a 12-stop pub crawl that didn’t go to well the last time they tried it, twenty years earlier.  It’s a movie tinged with a manic sadness.  It’s not about the loss of society to plague or the loss of real community for twisted civic pride like its predecessors.  This one is about remembering and forgetting and stumbling upon the problem at the heart of the world today.  That, of course, is where the sci-fi twist comes in.  Which is funny, because so much of the normal lives of the characters (cell phones, blue tooth devices, sleek cars, glass offices without posts and lintels) often look like the stuff of early sci-fi movies and shows.  The World’s End is well-done, kinetic and thoughtful and brutally honest.

Any critique of the movie will probably settle on the big technology-centered reveal near the movie’s end.  It’s a popular trope these days, what technology is doing to us.  But I like the spin the movie puts on it, the seemingly benign and innocuous way things have changed over the last two decades.  It’s the perfect contrast to Gary King’s final cry for help, his own personal apocalypse, when his jacket comes off and he reveals the genuine deficiency in humans and their systems, too.  It’s a quick moment, two sentences maybe, that are bulldozed over by the next fight scene.  But the moment is true.

“To err is human; to forgive is divine” is a saying plastered in the background of one scene near the movie’s end.  It’s a good visual and a brilliant reminder.  And while most of the movie epitomizes the first part of the saying, it’s the promise of the second line that should give us all, Gary King included, hope.

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Seth Godin Turns a Phrase (into something great)

Posted on August 23, 2013 by awtraughber

The first time I read Seth Godin’s thinking on emotional labor, I knew I had found a writer I wanted to learn from.  I had never really had a good term for what I knew was a vital part of community and co-working.  Now, as far as I can tell, Godin has done it again.

In his post from this past Monday, Godin spoke of mental bandwidth, the limited amount of quality attention you’ve got to do the thing you most want or need to do but that you so often use up doing (hiding in, really) everything else that fear uses as distraction.

The challenge, then, is a matter of finding ways to minimize “the leakage of mental bandwidth.”  How do you find space enough and time to do the work that is most important to you when so many other things are calling for your attention?  Godin remembers:

Before internet connectivity poured from the sky, I was able to get on a train, plug in my Mac and have nothing to do for four hours but write. And so I wrote. I once bought a round trip ticket to nowhere just to eliminate every possible alternative… pure, unadulterated mental bandwidth.

Perhaps the thought is nothing new: people have been writing about the science of attention for years.  But the image is potent, timely for our age of networks and connectivity and the overlap of so many of our resources.  From beginning to end, the post is a good one.  Take a moment and check it out here.

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A New Steven Curtis Chapman Song? Always a Good Thing

Posted on August 22, 2013 by awtraughber

A few weeks ago I was bemoaning the absence of good new music.  And then a river of solid music started flowing.  Derek Webb.  Andy Gullahorn.  Jars of Clay.  And now it’s Steven Curtis Chapman’s turn.  His new album, The Glorious Unfolding, drops at the end of September.  The first single? An upbeat tune called “Love Take Me Over.”  Here’s SCC performing the song for the folks at K-LOVE.

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Simple Psalm

Posted on August 21, 2013 by awtraughber

I’ve had the opportunity to learn some good things this week at work, from my students and from my co-workers.  In a recent meeting, one of my co-workers shared Psalm 131.  A great example of right psalm at right time, the English Standard Version goes like this:

O Lord, my heart is not lifted up;
my eyes are not raised too high;
I do not occupy myself with things
too great and too marvelous for me.
But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
like a weaned child with its mother;
like a weaned child is my soul within me.

O Israel, hope in the Lord
from this time forth and forevermore.

Tradition has it that this is a psalm of ascent, one sung by pilgrims on the way to Jerusalem.  The first verse finds the singer in the right disposition, a place of humility and not pride.  Instead of focusing on things beyond his control, he calms the one thing that he can: himself.  All things in place, then, and that means hope in the right thing: the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

A simple psalm worth singing.

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