Wild Things

Really hoping this will be good. Hard to tell from this trailer.

Mythology in the News

I teach a class on World Mythology at school, and so I naturally look for news items that correspond to what we study. Usually, they're not too difficult to find, but for some reason, this week has been even more obvious than usual. There have been three more or less astonishing events that are worth sharing here.

First, there was the amazing and bizarre story of the soldier who dressed up as the Joker from Batman - makeup and all - and had a standoff with police up on Skyline Drive in Virginia. He had been in trouble before for wearing the costume and attacking his roommate with a knife and stun gun. After a car chase, he ended up trying to shoot himself with a shotgun, but after he refused to put the weapon down, he was shot and killed by the police. More details are in the article, and we'll hear more as the investigation continues.

Then, there was the case in Texas of the Fight Club for severely mentally disabled students in Corpus Christi. Apparently, it was set up by the workers in the school, and they took videos on their cell phones, which is how the police found out about it.

And then there was the man who was apparently trying to kill himself by jumping off Niagara Falls naked, and surviving, and then spending 45 minutes in the freezing waters, trying not to be saved by rescuers. They had to use a helicopter's rotors to blow him back toward shore. You've got to wonder what story lurks behind this, and what he's running from. The whole thing sounds like the story of Jonah to me.

These stories say two things to me. First, as my Mythology students will understand, this is evidence that we are living in the Wasteland. When people lose grasp of their place in the universe, there is a need for extreme action, and these poor souls are desperate to find meaning in any way they can. The Joker is meant as an example of what happens when a fictional society's laws don't speak to a troubled but gifted individual, who then tries to expose that society's hypocrisy and annihilate any semblance of what he feels to be a false sense of righteousness. However, because our society also doesn't speak effectively to those who are troubled, the Joker becomes a philosopher to be followed and even emulated.

As Joseph Campbell has noted, when we do not have a functioning mythology to explain our existence effectively, we reach for the closest and easiest way to make sense of it, even if that way is dangerous and counter-productive. And in doing this, we resort to all sorts of bizarre and nonsensical behaviors to force meaning on the world, since we don't believe we are able to find it.

Second, these acts show how completely the symbols of our current mythology have been misunderstood. They have been concretized, so that the symbols lose their meaning in a recreation of the act itself, with only the outer shell of its meaning still alive. These three stories are all responding to a very real need, but because the people have not had any guidance about how to deal with these needs, they respond in unhealthy ways. It doesn't have to be so difficult, or so tragic.

I just discovered this guy from a recommendation from a former student. He is pretty great. This video sort of captures what I find good about him. You can check out his site at illdoctrine.com.

The West Wing

A terrific article that is a collaboration between Maureen Dowd of the NY Times and Aaron Sorkin, who created and wrote The West Wing. The article imagines a meeting between Barack Obama and The West Wing's president, Jed Bartlett.

Fallen Idol Worship

I still haven't seen The Dark Knight (I'm dying to), so I can't comment on the film, but I really did think Heath Ledger was enormously talented (particularly in Brokeback Mountain), but this article brings up some really important and interesting issues about how we make excuses for those who are talented, and thus enable celebrities in their addictions. Worth a read.

Bohemian Astrophysics

Gotta love this. Queen's guitarist, Brian May, has just finished his doctoral thesis in Astrophysics after taking 30 years off to "play some guitar.

Human Mirror

Some people from my old theater department are in charge of Improv Everywhere. They do cool and fun stunts - their latest is a Human Mirror on the subway, where they found 16 pairs of identical twins to ride all together in a subway car. Check it out here.

Their complete mission list is here - all worth watching. My favorite is Anton Chekhov.

Here's the video of the Human Mirror, but be sure to check their website too.

Boston and Journey

Maybe I'm behind in hearing about this. The bands Boston and Journey both have new lead singers, and both of them were discovered through MySpace and YouTube. It's a completely new paradigm! Here are the stories.

Tommy DeCarlo with Boston



And here's Arnel Pineda with Journey



I'm not sure how I feel about the emphasis on sounding exactly like the original singers. Musically, it seems like we're labeling everything now. But these guys are pretty amazing technical singers, and it does show that we're living under an entirely different set of rules these days.

Virginia rape law

I saw this on TV tonight, and was floored. It reminds me of the rape of Dinah in Genesis - where Dinah (one of Jacob's daughters) is raped, and the assailant offers to marry her, which was an acceptable solution at that time. Well apparently, that is currently also an acceptable solution in Virginia! - at least until tomorrow, when it will finally be removed from the books. Under the current law, if a girl aged 14-16 is raped, the man is not allowed to face criminal charges if he offers to marry her.

The law goes off the books tomorrow - nearly 4000 years after Dinah. Of course, the rapist in Dinah's day was not really protected. Dinah's brothers tricked him by saying that he could marry her as long as he and all of his extended family and servants were circumcised. On the day of circumcision, when they were still weak, they were slaughtered by Simeon and Levi - every last one of them. Jacob (God's favorite), who had been quiet about the rape, was upset with his sons because he thought it would cause trouble for them, and later, on his deathbed, he cursed the two who had done it. The curse was that their tribes would eventually be scattered, which of course did happen, though the Levites would become the tribe of the high priests, with Moses as their most distinguished member.

There are many outdated laws on the books, but this one caught me particularly off guard.

Atheists who believe in God

Now this is amazing. It's a set of statistics published by beliefnet, including these:

21% of atheists say they believe in God.

The group that answered the questions in the most similar way to Evangelicals was Muslims.

57% of Evangelicals believe that many different religions can lead to eternal life.

Check out the rest of the stats here.

30 Days

This is one of my favorite shows. If you don't know about it, it's Morgan Spurlock, who made the film Supersize Me. For each episode, a person goes to live for 30 days with a person or family who has a completely different experience from what they have lived. Some of my favorite episodes have included living on minimum wage, spending 30 days in a prison as an inmate, working in a coal mine for 30 days, and my personal favorite from this year - an avid hunter who lives with vegan animal rights activists. There are certainly people who believe that Spurlock has a slant, but from my perspective, he's pretty even-handed. It's amusing that shoppers rated Season 1 3/5 stars in the Fox Store, but 4.5/5 on amazon.com.

It's on during the summer on FX - Tuesdays at 10. The first two seasons are also on DVD. Really worth checking out! Here's a trailer for the show, and here's the main website.

Here's the trailer for Supersize Me, which won him Best Director as Sundance.