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Page 20 Whose brilliant [I use that word such that it is dripping with as much sarcasm and disdain as I can muster... which is a lot] idea is it to spend the two months after the Academy Awards releasing nothing but dramas [often tediously heartfelt] and light comedies [crammed so full of poignancy and “meaning” it makes me ill to even think about]. I can only watch so much drivel before I need to watch something sheerly fun and entertaining...I like a balance: intelligent and insightful [not that Hollywood manages that very often] followed by brutal revenge driven violence [woohoo!]. Alas, it is not to be, but despite my general disgust for the releasing schedule at this time of year I still managed to find some films that are worth the time they take to watch. So below are a few of the titles that captured my interest [and yes, I’m aware of the irony of my selections...three dramas and a comedy...sigh...but they’re all exceptions to my general rule of “comedies and dramas suck”]. These titles, and thousands upon thousands more, are available for rent at your local DVD/BLU-RAY store Tundra Moving Pictures, 435 Sunnyside @ Seneca. “Afghan Luke” - I really wanted this to be “Fear and Loathing in Afghanistan” and I’ll admit that I was disappointed that it never lived up to this hope The OSCAR - OUR 40 th YEAR TheTundra Review [near constant disappointment is my lot in life when it comes to the current “age” of cinema], but despite that “Afghan Luke” remained an entertaining, fascinating, and absurd road trip through the bizzaro world that is Afghanistan [which is a beautiful country in a postapocalyptic wasteland sort of way]. Following a disillusioned and cynical journalist as he wanders through an incredibly SNAFU/FUBAR world, the viewer is treated to moments of dark comedy, social commentary, and a general sense of the absurdity of the world [and I love absurdity, and irony, and cynicism, and dark comedy...etc]. This should have been a better film [as with so many films, sigh], but despite its flaws [it never quite gets its tone and atmosphere right, and, in all fairness, I wanted more dark comedy than existential drama], the movie was good [read: worth my time to watch...which is a step above most films, which aren’t worth my time to watch...] - it has some brilliant moments and hilarious dialogue, and keeps pushing its roadtrip story forward through strange encounters with odd-ball characters and surreal situations. “Atlas Shrugged, part One” - I’ve never read the book, and my knowledge of Rand is all secondtier and derived as much from Bioshock [brilliant critique of the inevitable consequences of Rand’s philosophy - in the form of a video game...that I’ve played through at least 3 times...100% completion I might add...as if that means anything to any of you...sigh] as from early philosophy courses I sat through in university a long, long time ago. The timeliness of this film is unsettling to say the least, and at its core is a critique of modern society that is disturbingly accurate [though completely one-sided] and a mix of anti-political / anti-bureaucratic rhetoric that can border on stifling [very heavy-handed and cynical... almost more cynical than my own perspective on things, which made me feel like I wasn’t living up to my full cynical potential]. Yet, at the heart of the story is a very human problem - that of creation, social interaction, greed...and parasitism. The film has some short-comings [it’s an independent production funded by a wealthy financier - talk about self-serving propaganda], but it’s a fascinating story, and I’m certainly looking forward to watching the second-half when it gets released [and I plan to read the book by then... hopefully, after Catch-22, which I’ve been told will suit my sense of humour]. “J. Edgar” - I’m not really a fan of biopics [they tend to be about people I could really care less about, and they’re generally tedious and extremely bias about their subject] but I’m always willing to give Clint Eastwood the benefit of the doubt [he’s a fantastic director - except for “Flags of Our Fathers,” which was atrociously boring and very badly acted]. I’m also willing to watch most DiCaprio films [despite the fact he seems like a slimy untrustworthy douchbag... yeah, personal bias, I know, other people think he’s “dreamy”, but they’re wrong] because he seems to have a damn good agent who consistently picks roles that DiCaprio suits. “J. Edgar” is no exception for either of them: it’s an intelligent multi-layered look at a complex character whom [grammar brain-fart, I couldn’t decide between “who” and “whom”] both director and actor portray carefully so as to examine MAY 2012 the individual without passing judgement, a task which they leave to the viewer. It’s impossible to speak to the factual veracity of the film [and only an idiot denies that Hollywood like to flaunt its dramatic license], but as a character study it’s probably one of the most interesting films I’ve ever seen. “Johnny English Reborn” is, well, hilarious [although, since I generally dislike comedies - they’re predictable and often have crappy endings with tedious “moral” messages worked in with as much grace as a duck stuffed into a turkey - I’m not sure how much weight should be given to my opinion]. Rowan Atkinson recreates a character that was fun the first time around, but ages him appropriately and redefines him as a rare mix of competence, intelligence, bad luck and...well... bumblingness. An endearing character [he’s just so likable] put into an absurd situation is the basis of a surprising large number of comedies, but it doesn’t alway work. Thankfully, in this case, it works perfectly, and we’re treated to a fun and funny film with entertaining action sequences and an amusingly dastardly villain [always a necessity - good villains are becoming harder to find sadly, probably thanks to all the silly villains in comic book movies]. From the pre-order lists, the upcoming month should satisfy some of my cravings for action and violence, along with some more interesting smaller titles, if for no other reason than I’m running out of teen melodrama TV series to watch [just finished “Vampire Diaries” and “The OC” - both thoroughly entertaining...sadly]. If you’re looking for a list of our weekly new releases or trailers of new films we really like please check out our Facebook page, just google: “facebook tundra moving pictures” Reviews courtesy of Chris Whitehead.
MAY 2012 AFTER THOUGHTS The OSCAR - OUR 40 th YEAR The World System as an Ecology of Suggestions from Richard Ostrofsky of Second Thoughts Bookstore (now closed) www.secthoughts.com quill@travel-net.com My column this month will be fairly academic but not unbearably so, I hope. The concepts at point seem to me of general interest, and worth some effort by the lay public to understand. Briefly, I want to link Immanuel Wallerstein’s ‘worldsystems analysis’ to Gregory Bateson’s concept of an ‘ecology of mind,’ and suggest how the resulting paradigm offers a new approach both to political economy and to ethnography – the detailed description and explanation of lifestyles in a given community of interest. Entries for all these terms are available on Wikipedia, for example, but I will try to make this piece about them clear and self-contained from this point on. The key idea is that human groups and their lifestyles should not be studied in isolation from one another (nor from the anthropologists who study them) as static structures, but as interrelated systems evolving in relationship to one another, and to an ecological context that includes them all. Anthropology has been in a pickle for some years now because the pristine ‘cultures’ that it traditionally worked with – e.g. in Samoa, New Guinea or the jungles of South America – no longer exist, if indeed they ever did. Every one of the communities thought to live by such a culture had a history of contacts with other peoples and ways of life. All have had, and still have, significant contact with the modern world, if only with the explorers who found them, and with the anthropologists who studied them. Most have been subject to missionaries, traders and colonial adminis-trators as well. Thus, none of them is truly ‘pristine,’ or structurally self-contained. All are much more like the urban ghetto (or wealthy, gated community) of interest to sociologists than like the primitive tribes studied by Margaret Mead. Responding to this situation, Immanuel Wallerstein and others have developed the concept of a ‘world-system,’ with any number of sub-systems of varying collective mentalities or ‘mindsets,’ at varying levels of wealth, autonomy, political Spring Melodies power, technological sophistication, and so forth. There is only one such system today – the global one – and many scholars and ordinary people would like to understand it, as honestly as possible. Herewith some of the conclusions that have been reached, following this world-system approach. The first point is that supposedly ‘free’ market transactions are (at best) an ideal special case, and (at worst) a matter of self-serving ideology. In fact, all transactions (economic and otherwise) occur within relationships of relative power, even when the parties are legally equal. All such transactions are negotiated, tacitly or explicitly, between parties in differing circumstances, with different levels of need to come to an agreement. The employer and the worker, vendor and customer, husband and wife, parent and child are just examples of such asymmetrical relationships between parties with differing needs, desires and ‘mindsets,’ and with differing options if no agreement is reached. This last point is the most important. In any such negotiation and in the relationship (if any) that follows, power is held by the party that cares least whether they can reach agreement or not. In a ‘buyer’s market’ the customer knows that he can always find other vendors to sell him what he wants. He walks away if the price does not come down. In a seller’s market, the vendor knows that he can find other customers and raises his price accordingly. A similar “law of supply and demand” holds when the transaction is not strictly economic, and when the price is not just a matter of dollars and cents. The negotiation and the contract (if any) that follows is always conditioned by the party who needs agreement least. For this reason (if nothing else), power has tended to flow toward centers of technological and organizational sophistication which could find their raw materials, their workers and their customers wherever. The world system as a whole has tended to selforganize around a core where such power is concentrated, dominating a much poorer, weaker periphery which supplies (relatively cheap) raw materials, and has to purchase (relatively expensive) finished goods. Of course, the terms of trade between performed by the Ottawa Regional Youth Choir under the direction of Kevin Reeves, with guests, the Ottawa Children’s Choir, on Saturday, May 12, 2012, 7:30 p.m. at the Canadian Martyrs Church, 100 Main Street. Admission at the door: Adults: $20; Students: $10; Children under 12: Free core and periphery are influenced also by non-economic factors, notably military power, ideological rhetoric, advertising and so forth. In any specific negotiation, factors like these must help to shape the outcome – as will the ‘mindset’ of the parties concerned. And here the notion of a suggestion ecology will enter. By definition, mindset is the cognitive repertoire of concepts, beliefs, desires, and whatever, that people bring to the situtions they encounter. People are influenced and cued in various ways by the suggestions put to them – by significant others or by advertising commercials, for example. They weigh and decide amongst the competing suggestions of their present situation in light of their respective mindsets – their repertoires of suggestions received and accepted in the past. Each such repertoire is actually a dynamic system, analogous to the ecologies of nature in some ways: the whole repertoire must be consistent with itself, and may be invaded by new and powerful suggestions at any time. Wallerstein’s ‘world system’ is comprised of numerous sub-systems and ultimately of individuals, each with mindset of its own. The economic relationships and power relationships amongst such entities can be conceived and analyzed according to the ‘terms of trade’ between them. A fine-grained analysis of these relationships and terms will abstract from the goods exchanged and the specific transactions negotated between them, and will seek Page 21 to describe and account for the over-all quality of their relationship and for the ‘balance of power’ amongst its parties. To do this it will describe and analyze their negotiations as an exchange and weighing of suggestions to one another, seeing the outcome as a kind of ecological balance – self-consistent and fairly stable in the ideal case, but more-or-less volatile in detail. In such negotiations, the suggestions in play are of many kinds: offers to trade, threats, seductions and self-justifying rhetoric are probably the most important. This paradigm of ‘suggestion ecology’ has interesting implications not just for the social sciences, but for sane political activists and for the ordinary, concerned citizen. It leads us to think and write about a world of embedded, mutually interacting communities, each with its mindset, its suggestion ecology. In this way, anthropological structuralism is retooled into a kind of cognitive systems analysis: the concept of ‘mindset’ becomes mutable and dynamic while remaining something that communities and whole societies can share. We see that a group’s common ‘mindset’ can be coherent, adaptive and fairly stable, but also deeply incoherent, conflicted and maladaptive. Both ethnography and political economy adapt accord-ingly. We find ourselves talking about something larger than the global economy: the coherence, competence and sanity of the global mind.
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