How do you listen?

With the invention of the iPod listening to music has become a lot easier. Prior to mp3's, listening to music was a cumbersome pastime. To listen to a particular album, one needed to remove the record, tape or CD from its sleeve or case and place it on its player. After you completed all of these overwhelming tasks you listened to the entire album, rarely skipping a song because of the inconvenience of it.

Of course I am exaggerating, but, there is a part of this that I feel is true. Before I had my iPod, I carried around my CD case. It looked like a family picture album. I, every morning would take to CD book to my car and removed at the end of every day. I desired to have all of my music with me at all times. I never knew what type of mood I would find myself in, on any particular day.

But, the day arrived, I received my very first iPod. I was to never be the same. My life changed. I now reflect on my life as Pre-iPod and Post-iPod. It was a watershed moment in my life. I now had everything that I could possibly want to listen to on something no larger than an index card.

With this Ipod, I could now go seamlessly from the Beastie Boys to Beethoven to Nelly depending on my mood or fellow passengers in my car. With this invention, it changed the way I listened to music. I could now develop my own soundtrack to my life.

So, how do I listen to music now? Well, I still listen to albums and a bands full catalog but now I
find myself developing themes. Creating a musical essays in my head based on certain songs. For example, I have listed some songs below that I think could be an example of a dating relationship. The beginning of the relationship to a possible break up.


Cupid- Sam Cooke
The Lovely Linda - Paul McCartney
Hallelujah I love her so- Ray Charles
September- Earth, Wind and Fire
Let's Stay together- Al Green
I Still Miss Someone - Johnny Cash

I think about music and its ability to cross boundaries, to communicate complicated emotions. So my question is, has technology ruined art, and specifically music, or opened it to a whole new world of interaction?

Dostoyevsky: the role of the Church and the State

Matt Damore

In Book 2, Chapter 5 of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s masterpiece The Brother’s Karamasov called ‘So be it! So be it!’, we find a very interesting debate between Ivan Karamasov and Father Zosima. Ivan is very intelligent and is the vile Fyodor’s second son, between Dimitri and Alyosha. Father Zosima is the very wise and renown mentor and teacher of Alyosha, who presides over a monastery as an elder. The setting is the monastery, where Fyodor, Alyosha, Ivan, Miusov (Fyodor’s cousin), the monks, Father Zosima, and Dimitri (who is running late) are going to attend.

Ivan, Dimitri, and Fyodor have chosen the monastery as a possible place to settle a dispute that has arisen between Fyodor and Dimitri. Dimitri’s mother had left him an inheritance and yet Fyodor has stolen it and claimed it as his own. What I want to focus on is not the hopeless dispute, but a debate that begins when Zosima leaves the monastery to meet with the townsfolk, continues after his return, and is finally resolved. The debate is spurred on by an article Ivan had written on whether the Church should subsume the State and take on the role of punishing crime and making laws.

Ivan’s reasoning is that if citizens knew they were not just disrupting the harmony of society but offending God as well, there would be more deterrence. In other words, Ivan doesn’t believe in the separation of Church and State. The Church should be able to cast criminals out of society. According to this theory, crime would begin dwindle more and more. Miusov retorts by calling Ivan’s position Ultramontanism (literally ‘beyond the mountains’), the position that the Pope has ultimate power. But one of the monks points out that Miusov has it backwards: it’s not that the church becomes the state (Rome), but that the state becomes the church.

Zosima disagrees, though, with Ivan’s reasoning. Remember, Ivan’s thesis is put forward because he thinks it’ll deter more effectively. The criminal is less likely to steal, say, if he knows he steals from God rather than from the State. But Zosima underlines the notion that conscience is the only real deterrent. This leads to another one of Ivan’s points.

Without immortality everything is permissible. The reasoning is this: if man didn’t believe he was going to live forever, his criminal acts in the here and now would have less condemnation from his conscience. But if he believed in an afterlife, that his acts here and now have consequences there and then, man might have less reason to break laws and be criminals. What is interesting about this debate is the way Zosima - skilled psychologist as he is - probes into Ivan’s heart and motives for why he puts forth the thesis he does. Ivan believes things with the head instead of his heart; inside, he is a man with deep problems about the idea of faith, and Zosima even suspects that Ivan is using his intellect to put forth a thesis he doesn’t believe himself to be ironical.

We come to see that not only is Zosima a spiritual mystic and an elder at a monastery, but that his mind has been trained to debate Ivan on his own ground. The spiritual man is to be attuned in all his faculties because of his faith and his knowledge of his self because of his love for God and his neighbor. If the state became the Church, Zosima argues, the physical part of man is excommunicated or punished; but true reformation can’t happen unless the individual conscience is stung by a person’s sense of sin. This is Zosima’s counter-thesis: the individual conscience is the best deterrent. By the end of the civil debate, Ivan respects the elder and receives his blessing. While Ivan is admittedly intelligent, it extends only to the head and abstract principles. Zosima’s intelligence extends throughout his soul from a lifetime of faith, with an extensive knowledge of human nature due to his own soul-searching and his obedience to God’s commands: to love God and his neighbor.

To love is to know. That is the mystery of knowing the things of the spirit.

Donnie Darko and the Philosophy of Time Travel

Matt Damore

Jake Gyllenhaal plays the insomniac Donnie Darko in the movie Donnie Darko. This is director and writer Richard Kelly’s debut, and what a debut it was. I actually saw this for the first time with Matt Johnson, and I remember while it was playing looking over at him and knowing that we were watching something unique, something that we hadn’t seen before. The most interesting part of the movie to me is the philosophy of time travel that pervades the story.

In the movie, a character nicknamed Grandma Death wrote a book called The Philosophy of Time Travel. Near the beginning of the film, Donnie is led away from his bedroom and outside the house where he meets a 6-foot tall rabbit with a demonic looking face. The rabbit informs Donnie that the world will end at a certain time. While Donnie was out, a jet-engine inexplicably landed on Donnie’s bedroom, which would have killed him had he not been lured away by the rabbit.

But where did the engine come from? If you remember, both the rabbit and Donnie put there hand on a liquid-like substance that acts like a wall between them. Well, what is that? Why do we see Donnie at certain parts of the movie with what are called wormholes coming out of his chest? What is that dark, ominous cloud that forms above Donnie’s house near the end of the movie? Why is Donnie dead at the end and his girlfriend Gretchen not know him? Obviously because the jet engine killed him; but why show earlier in the movie him avoiding the jet engine to talk to the rabbit about the end of the world?

Well, Richard Kelly has the answers to all our questions. Let’s see if they satisfy.

What really happened right when Donnie left his bedroom to talk to the rabbit and the jet engine fell on Donnie’s bedroom? According to Kelly, around that moment (some time after Donnie got out of bed and before the engine fell) there was what is called a Tangent Universe that split away from the Actual Universe. Keep in mind that now that this split has happened, everything in the Actual universe is duplicated in the Tangent Universe. So, for example, we now have the Donnie in the Tangent Universe, and the Donnie in the Actual Universe.

Kelly got this notion from geometry. If you remember, scientists picture space/time as a curve, and so we can represent the universe as a circle. A tangent is a straight line that skims one point on the curve. In essence, at that particular point that the Tangent intersects with the point on the Curve, the jet engine falls on the bedroom, leaving only the Donnie of the Tangent Universe. But guess what? The Tangent Universe is essentially unstable. That means the Tangent will eventually re-collapse into the Actual Universe. The time of the re-collapse is what the rabbit meant when it was telling Donnie about ‘the end of the world’: it was giving the exact date of the re-collapse.

Donnie’s task now becomes what Kelly calls The Living Receiver, whose job it is to ‘close’ the Tangent universe manually. If he doesn’t, when the Tangent Universe collapses, it takes the Actual universe along with it and both universes are destroyed!

By virtue of the Tangent universe, Frank (the rabbit) can communicate with Donnie only through the medium of what is called The Fourth Dimensional Construct (water), which is the liquid-like substance that always separates Donnie from Frank. Those who die in the Tangent that would have lived in the Actual universe are Frank and Gretchen. And those that prod Donnie along with his mission are his science and english teachers. The ultimate mission for Donnie is to be killed by that jet engine, technically called The Artifact.

So, let’s tie these loose ends together. Donnie is lured out of his bedroom by Frank the rabbit. Frank the rabbit is from the future. Which future? The future of the Tangent Universe only. Why? To warn Donnie about the end of the world, the collapse of the Tangent Universe into the Actual Universe, and the destruction of both if Donnie isn’t killed by The Artifact. The movie from then on is the run-up on the Tangent timeline up until it hits that exact point on the space/time curve of the Actual Universe, the point at which the jet engine is supposed to fall on Donnie and kill him. However, Frank has the other role to play as Donnie’s sister’s boyfriend. In this manifestation, Frank is the Present Frank that is destined to be killed by Donnie in this Tangent Universe, but alive in the Actual One. Frank the Rabbit came back from the future to fulfill his role by being killed as Present Frank (Donnie kills him) in order to ensure the re-collapse of the Tangent Universe into the Actual One.

Donnie’s break from the Actual Universe into the Tangent One and Frank’s time travel all use elements from The Philosophy of Time Travel. It’s primarily based on the phenomenon of wormholes, shortcuts through space/time, tunnels that would take you from one point in space/time and immediately teleport you to another point. It is these wormholes that allow Donnie and Frank to travel as they do, and that answer those questions we puzzled over earlier. Such as: just what was that tornado doing hovering and forming just above Donnie’s house? Well, it was forming just at that time because that time was the point at which the Tangent Universe was re-collapsing back into the Actual Universe; and in the Tangent Universe, Donnie’s mom and sister were flying in a plane while it was sucked into the twister, disconnecting the engine, which sent it tumbling down onto Donnie’s room killing Donnie in the Actual Universe, since the engine traveled through a wormhole from the Tangent Universe (in which the twister engulfed the plane) to the Actual Universe (in which the mom and sister are safe in their house).

Donnie is killed, the Tangent Universe re-collapses, saving the Actual Universe from peril. Make sense?

Remembering a Forgotten Classic

Matt Damore

Science Fiction might be my favorite genre of film. In particular, I want to focus on a movie that came out in 1998 called Dark City. The film stars Rufus Sewell (The Illusionist, A Knight’s Tale) as John Murdoch, who has lost his memory. It’s not too long before Dr. Daniel Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland) calls Murdoch to warn him about a mysterious group of people (called The Strangers) who are on his trail!

The Strangers have the mystifying power of psychokinesis, the power to move things with the mind. Come to find out, Murdoch also has this power. The story is about Murdoch finding out who he is, who The Strangers are, and trying to remember whether he really murdered people, which is the reason why a relentless detective (William Hurt) is hounding him.

The city at night is freakish, as all its citizens fall into a coma, and the entire cityscape transforms, and the identities of everyone are altered. We later come to discover that The Strangers are extraterrestrials on the verge of extinction, bound together by a collective consciousness, who use corpses as parasites in order to soak up their memories: find out how humans survive so they themselves can. But Murdoch poses a threat to The Strangers’ plan, since he is also endowed with their powers.

While everyone was comatose, Murdoch awoke, and being the anomaly he now is, The Strangers implant one of their own with Murdoch’s memories to find him! The adventure leads to the edge of the city at a billboard which we find is a portal to outer space, the portal The Strangers used to enter the city.

But then the real surprise comes. Don’t read any further if you don’t want to know. Through the portal, we come to find that the city (Dark City) isn’t on earth at all; it is a floating environment in itself, protected by a force field. Later, Murdoch is held hostage by The Strangers underneath the city to inject into him their collective consciousness, believing Murdoch to be the last piece to their puzzle ending their experiments. Dr. Schreber, however, and against the wishes of The Strangers, injects Murdoch with the false memories necessary to inform him of his entire life, which enables him to tune his psychokinesis to a point. He defeats The Strangers, and uses his powers to make a landscape which is a copy of Shell Beach, his home town, after learning his wife has been hopelessly assimilated into The Strangers’ collective consciousness.

Murdoch finally reveals why The Strangers' experiments in learning the humans’ adapting abilities have failed: they had been searching in the wrong place - the mind. They ought to have been searching the human heart. In the new Shell Beach, a copy of his wife is there waiting for him, with new memories, and with a new name (Anna, rather than Emma), and they begin their relationship again.

What a movie! It’s amazing. I highly recommend it, especially after you find out it was influenced by German Expressionism, a movement dabbling in the Fantastic. It is quite an achievement to create a city organized and created by various memories, a cityscape which literally morphs in response to the psyche.

The Island of Dr. Hitchcock!

It turns out Martin Scorsese’s new thriller is a salute to the master of suspense himself: Alfred Hitchcock. Opening today, the movie Shutter Island is Scorsese’s latest film. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio (this is their 4th reunion), the movie centers around a mysterious and disturbing insane asylum and the two cops sent there to investigate a particular inmate who has managed to escape. But strange things begin to unfold about the watchmen of the Island itself!

Little did I know, Scorsese is a member of a non-profit organization called The Film Foundation, which fights to preserve the integrity of old, black and white films, and which has brought to the attention of critics the memory of forgotten directors, and has also restored numerous forgotten gems from the early 20th century. For instance, at one point, they tried to fight against making black and white films colored for modern audiences, but to no avail.

The Hitchcock films Scorsese has restored are Saboteur, Shadow of a Doubt and Suspicion. What is interesting is that all these movies begin with the letter S. Now, when Scorsese makes a movie dripping with Hitchcock stylistic themes, he makes Shutter Island, beginning with the letter S!

Shutter Island is adapted from the book by Dennis Lehane, released 1954. What else came out in 1954?: Dial M for Murder and Rear Window! - Hitchcock classics.

Another factor here is that a couple years ago Scorsese worked with a Spanish movie producer to shoot a short film during which he found 3 missing pages from a Hitchcock script that had been lost up till then!

In Shutter Island, we have - among other scenes - a shower scene (Psycho), a scene where people are hurrying up a tall building (Vertigo), and a hurrying up a rocky crag scene (North By Northwest), intentionally put in as a tribute to the master.

Matt Damore

Of last year

In honor of the Oscars on march 7 I decided I would give my personal movies of last year as well as what I think should win.

Movies:
Inglorious basterds
Public Enemies
District 9
Up in the air
An Education
A Serious Man
Watchmen
Away we go
Zombieland
Up

And the winner is....

Why you ask? First this movie was written and directed by the Coen Brothers. In my opinion, they are some the best story tellers alive right now. A Serious Man is the story of a professor who watches his life unravel before his eyes. The Coen Bros are masters at dark comedy. As the viewer you are laughing at the pain of the main character because that is the only response left for the viewer.

I am continually impressed by these men. I was first introduced to them through their film Raising Arizona and was immediately hooked. I was sold on their storytelling and dialogue through one simple line, "Edwina's insides were a rocky place where my seed could find no purchase."Absolutely hilarious, inappropriate and sad at the same time. I can't think of a better way to communicate this emotion.

If you are familiar with the Coen Brothers work then the themes you are familiar with. A man overwhelmed by his circumstances and responding in equal parts naivety and anxiety. But, they are able to keep this topic fresh.

I also recommend Fargo, Barton Fink, Miller's Crossing, Burn After Reading and No Country for Old Men for a survey of their work.

Matt Johnson

You can't handle the Truth!

Have you ever thought about the notion that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life? This is John 14:6 and it is one of the first verses I was ever taught to memorize. But then I started to dig a little. These self-ascriptions are very interesting and these concepts in themselves could preoccupy a scholar for the rest of his or her life. What I want to focus on is Truth. And I’ll be brief. After investigating this from an angle I’ve never seen before, it’s somewhat of a thrill to inject new life into such a boring sounding concept.

Jesus is the truth. Now, I am no scholar. But I decided to find out how this word ‘truth’ might come to have more meaning for me. In Greek mythology, Truth is represented by the goddess Aletheia, a virgin, dressed in white, perhaps to suggest purity. Because she was hard to find, legend has it that she hides at the bottom of holy wells waiting to be discovered by only the most dogged of seekers. Curiously, Aletheia is the daughter of Cronus, the god of agriculture, justice, and strength. Yet agriculture jumps out at me the most. In agriculture, food is produced through farming. The food will come only if the field is tended to. What I find interesting is that the daughter of Cronus was the goddess of truth. It’s almost as if myth was teaching us that Truth is only produced after the field is tended to, only after there is a farming process. And until then, Truth will remain hidden.

Interestingly, the Greek word for truth is Aletheia, which actually means ‘not hidden’. In essence, Jesus is the naked truth, the wisdom without the veil. Even Martin Heidegger noticed the power of Aletheia. Aletheia is contrasted with another Greek word called Leth, which (in Greek mythology) is one of the five rivers that flow through Hades. If you drink from the river Leth, you forget everything and have perpetual amnesia. In Heidegger’s philosophy of art, he saw Art as an avenue through which Truth lies unhidden, disclosed, not forgotten. In Orthodoxy, even Chesterton says that we’ve forgotten who we are. Empty rationality and common sense means that we forget that we’ve forgotten, that we’ve drunk again from the river Leth. But all that we call Art, ecstasy, and passion means that for one awful instant we remember that we forgot.

Matt Damore