From Streetcars To Spaceships

Movies, TV shows, etc. to teach with

A lot of us have talked in recent years about movies and such that are good enough at presenting some historical period, techology or concept that they could be used as real teaching means. Something that a student could watch and come away with a pretty real hope that the viewer(s) would come away withsome basic competency in something that we've counted on schools.
Ideally, one would pair such viewings with instruction by a live human. But I'm only interested here in the ones that YOU think could do well enough on their own. This list is very heavy on war movies. I am more than ready to see that balance shift. This list is also almost entirely Anglo-American. There, too I am more than eager to see films added to balance that out.

We live in a time when many of us are losing our faith in schools. And where there is more respect both for learning after leaving school and for those who are not able to be in one regularly enough to learn in the ways that our society has taken for granted.

These are, educationally speaking, desert island movies. And let me say again, these are not to be held to the high typical standard of our brilliant circle. The acid test is does this piece combine entertainment value (call it watchability) with content well enough that viewers come away better informed than they would have been otherwise in some way that noticeably brings them towards being capable and competent citizens?

Please list them here and hopefully as I go I'll incorporate some or all suggestions in the body of the post. I'm HOPING that eventually your contributions will far outweigh my few feeble ones.

Obviously TED Talks have a special place here. In my opinion most documentaries don't. These days all too many of them are so seduced by the drive for a tidy narrative that they actually HURT understanding by forcing a clean, simple narrative, with Good Guys and Bad Guys. And then people like us have to deal with people who think "I know all about that. I saw the Discovery Channel Special." And that usually means that they're utterly incompetent to judge anything related to it at all.

That having been said, let me start:

 

CONCEPTUAL SOPHISTICATION

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

Absurdity is one of the defining tells of a nimble mind. Here's a dose.

 

The Princess Bride

 As far as I'm concerned, this movie stands alone as a brisk, watchable, funny, and remarkably high-speed tutorial in quite a lot of the key tools of critical thinking. The untrustworthy narrator. Ambiguity of language. The smooth, confident, and in some ways sincerely concerned sociopath who can sound so authoritative if you don't pay attention.

Yeah, it's funny, it's goofy. So are many films. But I know of no other movie that seems to have stimulated so much self-examination about clear thinking. And done it in such an easy to remember way. 

HISTORY 

The Middle Ages 

The Lion In Winter

Not only for history of the period but on politics. Trust nobody. Even those you tryst with. Especially those you tryst with. Watch your ass. Plan. Prepare.

Robin and Marion
Companion piece to TLIW, if only for the additional exposure to a world where indoor heating is a joke, and other aspects of daily circumstances of the period among the "nobles", not to mention how little and how much that could mean. 

 

Elizabethan Era

Elizabeth I and II

Not perfect but it will sure as hell put names and faces and personalities to all those names and dates in the textbook. Five hours of this and, if done with any standard written teaching tools the whole period becomes and stays more real.

 

And let me take this chance to say that, by contrast, The Tudors is toxic shit in gold leaf and fancy perfume. It is worse than sometimes innaccurate, though it is that. It is fundamentally misleading about who these people were and why they did what they did. As part of a class where a teacher and ample written materials can counter the idiocies? Then, yes, go to, go to. Otherwise? Keep it away.

 

Shakespeare In Love

No, it's not perfectly accurate or trying to be. But it drops you into a world that is fundamentally different in more ways than a superficial gloss will notice. Rule of Law? Yeah, right. Torture as day to day thing? Of course. Being a spy for the crown? It's a contract job. Plenty of people have done it at some point or other.

1700's

Master and Commander

Beautifully shot, rigorously researched, solidly acted. And might just entice the viewer to check out the many, many books in this wonderful and potentially enriching series.

 

Victorian Era

Topsy Turvy

The life and world(s?) of Gilbert & Sullivan. Again we're seeing England through its performers. And a very different England it is. Wealthy. Smug. Extraordinarily capable and sometimes absurdly blind. And by this time thoroughly, profoundly mercantile, from street urchins to titled aristocrats.

Edwardian Era

Raise The Red Lantern
So historical. Such an ancient world of stone walls and inherited fiefdoms. All struggling to maintain control in a time of record players and modern eyeglasses and steam locomotives. Don't think that the existence of those things plays no role in the nature of rebellions this movie shows.

 

The Thirties and Forties

Brother, Where Art Though? with Matewan

Yes, the first is a film built of metaphors and poetry. But it's also an affecting and detailed portrait of a world and a time that don't get the attention they deserve. And both of them, while making myth of details, show a place and a set of values that was absolutely real.

Mephisto with Cabaret
Pre-Nazi Germany. Both focus on the arts scene but both give plenty of elegant and earthy details of the rest. Seen together they add emotionally resonant context to all those seemingly impossible parts of that world.

Saving Private Ryan

World War II combat. By people who can't get shot two dozen times and merely grunt in manly fashion and be back jumping freight trains by a week later. Detailed. Specific. A true ensemble cast. And a portrait of a time and a place and series of decisions that continue to matter now.

 

The Fifties and Sixties

The Apartment

Mad Men is cute and all but this is a much less prettified view of those days of the man in the grey flannel suit.

 

Thirteen Days

Not perfect but it lays out the circumstances, the players, and many of the dynamics of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the surrounding Cold War.

 

The Space Race

Apollo 13
Well, duh. 

 

Modern Life

(This is more useful than some of you might think. Remember how many kids still have never been to any place with more than two hundred thousand people. Or, even worse, have only gone for a weekend visit or passed through the bus station and have no fucking clue and think that they know all about what cities mean. Or, for that matter, deep country.)

 

Eat, Drink, Man, Woman

Mortgage scams, megacatering. Urban sprawl. Gender stereotyping. Yeah, this one's a damn good start. I suspect that it could also be a superb teachable moment for the weakness of rule of law in many modern Asian cities.

 

Half Baked

Just about everybody disses this movie. But ya know what? It's a superb overview on living in the city on no fucking money. Screwing around and scraping by. The kinds of lives that hundreds of millions live every day and the media and schools almost never portray sympathetically. Go ahead, laugh.But you just might learn something.

 

The Ice Storm

Our world since the late 1800's has been largely under the thumb of a certain kind of upper middle class, suburbs-living, educated, ambitious class of people who truly are, in their ways, cosmopolitan and intelligent, largely and quite intentionally out of self-interest. This film does a sympathetic but, in the end, largely unforgiving job of showing their world.

 

Tampopo with Taxing Woman, followed by Diva and Mona Lisa

We start with two films about Japan in the eighties. Both by the same director, with related feels and perspectives. But showing very different worlds. Then films about the grimy undergrounds of England and France in the same general times.
All four beautifully made, with the kind of writing, acting, and visual production to can get even an audience that doesn't know these times or places emotionally connected to what they are seeing. And coming away with a collected view of rough lives lived under different terms than the ones that we're used to.

Osama

Life in Afghanistan through the eyes of (mostly) reasonable (by the standards of their context) people trying to create functioning lives in an implacably dysfunctional context. 

POLITICS

They Live

It's just a joke, right? I don't bloody think so.

 

Training Day

Again, this movie shows the kinds of lives that are all too rarely shown well from, more or less, the inside. This movie exaggerates. But not all that much. And I suspect that for the right social studies teacher it provides easily a dozen superb teachable moments. And for once the cool bad guys come away looking like the shitty-ass scumbags that they are and DON'T get away with it. But nobody gets away clean. Good lesson, that.

 

The West Wing
Many of you will squee with glee at this. Some will rage with loathing. Whatever you think of its politics, it lays out congressional procedure and a hell of a lot more of the operational side of modern American politics. Most people find the pretty people and crisp writing makes it easy to watch so getting two or three hours in is pretty easy and that's enough to cover a hell of a lot of ground.

 

WHERE DO WE GO NOW?

A.I.

I know that it's got sappy elements and a soft soap ending. But this is a troubled and troubling world shown here. And the more time passes the more impressive I realize that portrayal to be.

Silent Running

Not fun, not glamourous, all too possible. Important to discuss.

 

Almost every kind of job is going away. Really. I mean it.

A few years back I wrote about how automation, changing demand, and resource depletion were going to result in far fewer jobs relative to level of prosperity. That for a population of constant size to maintain the same degree of material prosperity will, in the not too distant future, require far fewer hours worked. That even the creation of a new multi-billion person middle class only delays this shift. It doesn't prevent it. And I wrote that this automation would encompass not only "brute force" jobs but also white collar skilled work such as skilled cooking, most legal practice, and service jobs.

Well, look at this article in Slate. And the discussion on Slashdot that it has engendered. The links and refs here should give you more if you want to dive that deep.

This is real, folks. It's happening right now. 

Which, among other things, makes even further hash of the bullshit that the executive class-backed media is trying to sell us that anybody who is unemployed somehow deserves it. If for ten adults to live to the limits of a "middle class" income only involves four of them having jobs then no amount of badgering or sermonizing or even retraining will make that unemployment go away. And, as precictably as gravity, that wealth will tend to concentrate in the hands of a subset of that shrinking percentage who have jobs.

Let me go over each of those again in more detail.

- Assume a world where for ten adults to live "well", ten of them must have jobs.

- Change the means of production and other factors such that only four of them need to work to maintain that same degree of prosperity. Not only does this leave the majority of people unemployed, it also, means (under most forms of government) that a minority of the people will be making most of the choices about how that work gets done.

I'm not only talking about the big decisons here. I'm talking about the ten thousand little ones of which each of those big ones is made. If ten of ten people do the cooking then everybody knows how the ingredients get used. If one does the cooking then there will always, ALWAYS, be a power imbalance where that one person can put goodies aside, give them preferentially to their friends, sell them off for bribes, etc. Try to stop this with thousands of descriptive rules and mostly what you'll do is create black markets and end up micromanaging the person doing the work. Which almost never works out well.

- Therefore, when the percentage of people with jobs decreases, power and wealth concentrates.

- And once power and wealth become unevenly distributed, those who have wealth already will push to even further gather that wealth to themselves and others like them.

And if you think that this can be countered by having everything done by consensus or some such then I recommend that you spend some time working in your local food coop and see how that works out for you. And a food coop, mind you, is a case where participants have the option of withdrawing and so there's constant pressure on the group to not get too caught up in bureaucratic idiocies lest everybody walk out.

It is past time that we admit the truth. Now and more so every year those with wealth need to get used to either subsidizing or at least giving access to land and other resources to a population that is on its way to being bigger than that which is "gainfully employed." It's either that or starvation followed by brutal repression and almost certain violent revolution.

Note, please, my second option. When I write "giving access to land…" I'm talking about changing zoning codes to allow any number of things that we now consider squatting. I'm talking about not persecuting those who choose to live disconnected from the grid. I'm talking about making it expensive and difficult for property owners to "warehouse" those properties, either to create scarcity or simply because they can't be bothered to keep it in use. I'm also talking about not treating it as a sin to be short on money. About raising our children to understand that a person can be honorable and disciplined and smart and hard working by nature and still not have any money.

This also means a world where the obligations of citizenship are less frequently denominated in money. When a few percent of the people control just about all the money and where our government "does its business" entirely in money then it's very simple. That three or four percent will own the country. And, sooner or later, will reduce most of that other ninety-something percent to peonage. Slavery.

How do we counter that? We should start by admitting that all of us inherited most of the wealth extant now. And that morality alone should compel us to provide basic means of sustenance for everybody, refusing to do so only in cases of severe scarcity.

What does that mean? Again, let's take that part by part.

1.) We have vast reserves of wealth. If one includes the resources that we keep idle or use profligately, we have almost incomprehensible amounts of wealth.

2.) Even correcting for increasing raw materials scarcities, wealth creation is getting easier and the rate of that increase is accelerating. So our children, if we just sit still, will have even more wealth per citizen than we do.

3.) Most of our wealth was here when we got here. We inherited it, as Elizabeth Warren articulates very well in this video clip.

4.) Therefore, nobody now alive can legitimately claim to have created most of it or even found it.

5.) Therefore, we're all, to some extent, living on the backs of somebody else's labor, innovation, and sacrifice.

6.) Therefore, it is morally unsound for some to hold to themselves the resources that none of us "earned."  (Some of you may disgree with this but I'm not going to get sidetracked right now.)

7.) Therefore we have the means and a moral pressure to let loose at least enough of that wealth from private ownership to ensure subsistence for all.  

8.) Such a transfer is not a favor. It is not charity. It is giving property over to people who already have legitimate claims to it.

9.) It is crucial that our citizens, and in particular our children, be taught to see such systematic and permanent distribution of wealth as just, reasonable, and normal.

Obligatory, several year, separated periods of duty national service would also be a damn good start. Not just as people with guns. But serving in the ways that we pioneered quite well in the thirties and forties. As teachers. Park rangers. Builders. Many, many things.

And yes, this would break most of the unions.

But let's be honest please for a minute. As constituted now most of them are dying and/or zombified already.

All of this comes down to one conclusion. Our world as it is shaped now won't work for the circumstances ahead. Either we change voluntarily now, with minimal disruption, tragedy, and waste or we wait. And get to watch something like the French Revolution get enacted with over five billion likely combatants, modern propaganda techniques, and nuclear weapons.

That's the truth. Period.

 

Reason depends on acceptance of complexity.

A determination to reduce all things to a few conflict-free sentences is one of the biggest forces behind fascist movements from the Armenian Genocide to the Tea Party. Complexity and nuance are at the very heart of responsible adulthood. Fight that as such and you are an enemy of democracy and reason. When a situation is reduced to one factor, to "the thing that really matters is…", it cannot be understood in any useful way.

Watch this talk. She gets it just right.

Then read this and think about the dangers that we face.

I hate those who need to reduce everything to comfortably tidy simple stories. Hate them. They are enemies of all that lives. We are facing problems defined by their complexity. Global climate change.

My father was born in Missouri. My mother was born in New York City. They met and married in California, where they both lived for years and where I have spent quite a bit of time myself, from San Diego in the early 70's to the Bay Area in 2009. My stepfather was born in Tennessee. I was born in Panama City, Panama. I have lived in Panama City, New York City, Pittsburgh, Portland, OR, and Milwaukee. Which am I? Am I a New Yorker? A Panamanian? An Oregonian? Which is the "correct" answer? That's a stupid question.

We're in a thousand arms races with the entire planet. Even with our own species.

Our skin is a constantly changing and traveling planetary surface of innumerable species, tribes, and climates. So are many of the tissues inside.

A recent XKCD riffed on our visceral terror about this.

Not only are our bodies staggeringly complex and ever-changing ecosystems with an astounding range and quantity of inhabitants, but the health and stability of those systems is key to our health. We need those stomach flora and scalp residents and all the rest, if only to prevent having those warm, wet, nutrient-rich territories colonized and stripped by species that we're not in symbiosis with. And yet much of our "health care", from mouthwash to how we use antibiotics is premised on the brutal and flawed logic that the best way to address a bodily problem is to do our best to kill all the microorganisms that live in that part of our bodies. And that way of looking at the world informs our approach to everything from how we treat "weeds" near our homes to how we treat people living under bridges. If we can just finally find the right collections of toxins and attacks, we tell ourselves, we can keep our world "clean". Though it rarely works for very long, does it? 

We endlessly fight inevitable equilibrium states at enormous cost and view the world from a constant adversarial place, in our tensely defended bastions, with trimmers and toxins always kept close, ready for use to kill anything we didn't put there. Have you ever met a homeowner who didn't think of the living things around their home as an enemy, to one extent or other?

What would it do to our definitions of self, cleanliness, and ecosystems if we all lived our lives aware that we are what we are? That sterility is death.

Re Greg Mortenson, how deep does the rot go?

I see that people are finally reading my post from six months ago about Greg Mortenson and the CAI (Central Asia Institute). The 60 minutes piece and the CNN article and all the rest have changed things, haven't they? I never went into details last year about what might be in it for the people who I have long suspected are behind him. So I guess that's kind of overdue.

First of all, I'm going to say it yet again. If you want to get a handle on what's going on in that part of the world, personally, I say drop "Mortenson's" books. Instead, read Charlie Wilson's War (The movie's not bad in its own way), Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, by Ahmed Rashid, and The Root of Wild Madder: Chasing the History, Mystery, and Lore of the Persian Carpet, by Brian Murphy.

Just for starters, this would also be the time to say that I was born in Panama. To parents who had spent quite a bit of time in Mexico. And each of whom has since spent ample time in the developing world, from Sri Lanka to Kenya to Nicaragua. And very little of that in hotels or other "Americanized"and protected zones. My best friends when I was a little kid were the missionary family down the hall. Their mom was from a Wyoming family of evangelists (she eventually spent years in China) and their dad grew up in a mission in Burma and did his thesis on U Thant, who was then just a local notable. I'll get back to him later.

I could go on with the long list of missionaries and NGO folks and ethnobotanists and mountain climbers in my life or the time I've spent in my own kinds of places that aren't exactly "U.S. mainstream" but let's just say that when I wrote six months ago about having a visceral sense of Mortenson's books being wrong, it wasn't in comparison to Discovery Channel specials. It was in comparison to things like, oh, god, my father is caught in a "civil revolt" again and I'm really impatient to hear from him. Or once, oh crud, here I am arguing with my mother about is it worth keeping our appointments while the smoke from the protests and Guardia Civil's tanks wafts into our room?

Okay, that having been said, it's time for me to speculate.

My guess is that there were people in, well, let's just say the Mary Bono/Mellon-Scaife world, who were uncomfortable with the various movements by people like BRAC to route around the horrific but very controllable "education" infrastructure in south Asia.

In other words, there were, by the late nineties, any number of groups, most native to south Asia, that were working to build schools, many also for especially for girls, tying this into microcredit (note how CAI has now positioned themselves as a gatekeeper for microcredit as well) and enable things like access to birth control and health care for women. In other words, groups that were and still are generally taking a decentralized, locally controlled, collaborative approach to the systemic problems that have kept women (and actually, to some extent, everybody not from the ruling families) relatively powerless in that part of the world for, at the least, centuries.

Now, I don't know about how much y'all followed the Reagan period approach to policy there but a key part of it was a systemic approach to do just the opposite. To keep things such that oil companies and our local totalitarians could "smoothly" keep doing their thing. I've long since lost track of the number of schools U.S.-backed people like the Contras burned down or how many teachers they tortured and killed. And it's not like U.S. foreign policy has exactly become simon-pure since then or avoided such techniques before.

Not to mention that birth control, especially in the developing world, is a big no-no to such people. They feel that it's VERY important to keep groups backing that on the margins. Our Congress has given us demonstrations of just how hard and viciously the right will fight for that quite recently, haven't they?

So they found an American, a charismatic guy raised in a missionary outpost, a very controllable, very ambitious, very Christian guy who was already doing something in the field and happily admitted that he wanted to hand off things like publicity and managing money, and they turned him into a front man they could position publicly as THE voice of education reform in that part of the world. It's a game as old as Alfred Sloane. If you can't kill a threatening movement you build your own organization under your control (G.M. backing Greyhound Lines, anybody?) and position it as the "more legitimate" and emotionally compelling substitute for the people who are threatening your power.

And Greg Mortenson would have been, I suspect, a very controllable front indeed for the person who knew what buttons to push. I don't think that my friends' dad ever quite got the hang of American culture and his permanent confusion about what "America" meant is pretty common among people who grow up overseas in missions. I strongly suspect this applies to Greg Mortenson. They grow up on idealized and very fraught stories of the U.S. and visits from friends of their parents and workers for the mission and some of these former mission kids seem to have trouble all their lives with a certain kind of "in-betweenness" and need to get back to what feels "real" conflicting with a guilt that they should want to be "back" in the U.S. where they've been told they "belong" but never entirely feel comfortable. Except when spending time with others from the same backgrounds which just leaves them driven to go back "overseas" again. Sound familiar?

So if Mortenson's would-be backers/handlers can drape their "suggestions" and "advice" in the language he was brought up in, then he'd be eager to agree and go along. And as, over time, that advice grew to include money and organizational help and maybe now and again "one of our people who'll drop by and fix that little problem you're having with your accounting" he would be quite possibly relieved to be able to turn his back and not look too closely at the details. And as the "help" shifted over to them buying him expensive suits and flying him around on private jets, there would always be somebody there to tell him that this wasn't a bribe or a luxury. Just a selfless part of doing the job. And as the Pakistani and then U.S. military stepped in, he could just keep saying that it was all for the purest of reasons. And as for his millions in "personal expenses", he wasn't stealing CAI's money. It was all for the greater good, really, and surely not at all, well, sinful. I don't think that any of us will ever know how deep the lies went in his head and among the staffers at CAI. But we know that one way or another the answer was "pretty deep."

At the moment the world out there is enjoying their high dudgeon about "this is an OUTRAGE!" but they aren't, from what I've seen, asking the question, "so, if this has been going on for over ten years, why weren't you covering this in, say, 2007, when he was already a celebrity but hadn't gotten the massive support from everybody from the New York Times to Oprah Winfrey that he has now had?"

This is about centralization of power, and the coordination and propaganda machines that play such a key role in making that centralization possible. It's also about the media's collective habits of what to cover and how.

 

And that makes it everybody's business.

 

-Rustin

 

Greg Mortenson should be no model to anybody.

Greg Mortenson and his group have built some very admirable things in the mountains of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the rest of that part of the world, material and organizational. But I am convinced that he, deep down, is a dangerous and willing tool of the authoritarian right wing and that we should all be damned careful before giving him or his group a penny of our money or a second of our support. You want to help children in that part of the world? Wonderful. Find other ways to do it.

Not only that, but any techniques his group, the Central Asia Institute, put forward as models for wider use should be strictly cost-accounted, broken down to their constituent tasks, and then reviewed with a fine-toothed comb and run past others for confirmation who have done similar work in similar parts of the world before being adopted or publicized.

I'm taking this opportunity, with the New York Times having just name-checked him yet again, to say again that I find many things about "Three Cups of Tea" and Greg Mortenson morally repellant and that I look forward with fervor to the day that people realize that it's no coincidence that Mortenson's strongest Congressional supporter featured in his books, Mary Bono, is a mainstay of the authoritarian Christian right.

I found it interesting and non-coincidental that his writing partner for his first book, David Oliver Relin, is never even mentioned in Mortenson's second book. I suspect that they are no longer even on speaking terms. I'm betting Relin's patience ran out. That the mixed feelings he alluded to in the introduction to Three Cups of Tea shifted further over to the negative as time passed and that Mortenson and his people have erected as tall a barrier as they can manage to block off any role Relin might have in speaking about what's really going on. In fact, I'd give it about one in three odds that Mr. Relin is under continuing pressure to keep his mouth shut or be faced with attack by Mortenson's allies. Allies who I would equally bet have long since threatened Mr. Relin in no uncertain terms with retaliation if he should say "the wrong things" in too loud a voice.

As I read Three Cups of Tea and then Stones Into Schools, a lot of subtle things kept sounding somehow off to me. Credit seemed oddly disproportionate to contribution and was weighted far further to authoritarian, conservative sources than their role would seem to merit. Groups I had heard about doing related work seemed oddly absent. Major help from people here in the Pacific Northwest was glossed over, while much smaller efforts by midwesterners got paragraph after paragraph if not page after page. An especially odd thing given that his coauthor was a Portlander. Gender issues in the areas he was working in were addressed, but in an odd tone. One that would fit well in a 1980's Mormon document trying to show that, no, we're not racist at all. Never were. And some of his actions in the mountains just somehow didn't sit right with me. Didn't quite match what I had heard from mountaineers and other people who had been there about what was possible, viable, advisable.

But, well, I've never really even been out of America's big cities. Certainly never really spent time overseas. Maybe I was wrong. I'm just a techie and publishing guy. What would I know?

So I asked around a bit. And I've got to admit the details escape me at the moment. Well, other than my sources being able to rattle off half a dozen agencies getting more schools built with far less fanfare. Or the mahooah I already knew he was spouting about the availability of earthquake-resistant building techniques. Or the presumption that nobody could have been expected to notice the massive fraud his later "partner" was pulling off as his first big third round funding came in. Or the details of his "lucky" chat with Congresswoman Bono and the military connections thereof.

I've spent plenty of time in my life around the charismatic leaders of do-gooder organizations, from senior officials in the Salvation Army to managers of anarchist community centers, and they all have a certain vibe to them, to some degree or other. A certain sense they give off of how much they're sanding off the serial numbers of other people's work to build their own legend or clouding up the record to cover up the shortcuts they've taken or making their agendas seem more in line with what the general public will find palatable. And I'm telling you that based on those two books and a bit of looking around I've done, Mortenson is over on the greasy-haired preacher end of the equation.

I'm telling you, eventually the honeymoon will end and left and right people will be distancing themselves from Greg Mortenson. And, crucially, making heavy pronouncements that "there was no way we could have known".

Yeah, well. I knew. And I'm just a crippled guy with no special access reading a couple of library books and making a few phone calls in a barely heated studio in a cheap part of town in a city far away indeed from the halls of power.

But even so, I'm telling you, don't believe the hype.

Good education can be found in more places all the time.

With all the negative things I have to say about mass media in general, you might think that I want all of us to hide in forest caves with no more than a quill pen and a few sheets of paper. T'ain't so. Occasionally I'll get wind of something coming out of the market-directed media that I find not only admirable, but useful. More specifically, I am convinced that we get closer every day to being able to build small, world class educational institutions simply from a building body of works. Works that can serve as superb tools for learning that depend neither on equally superb teachers to be effective nor on conventional textbooks or course-length curricula.

Seems to me that the new documentary about Allan Ginsberg's Howl is an excellent example. As this NY Times article lays out, this movie is itself (according to the author), not only literary criticism, but a solid introduction to what literary criticism is. Even, to some extent, to what it means to be a writer and to write well. Seems to me that a well-built five page teacher's guide to using this film should enable any basically competent teacher to get most kids over the age of twelve up to speed on these dynamics in six or seven hours of class time, including time to see the movie twice. In, let us remember, a way tied to enough emotionally rich stimulation to be considerably easier to retain than most pedagogy manages.

Add to this such resources as the much-discussed M.I.T. online materials initiative and sites such as Khan Academy, and we're well on our way to considerably attenuating our dependence on conventional schooling or the arduous, not entirely accepted approaches to home and community schooling available now.

Every day we get a little closer. We just need to learn to use these new resources and spread the word of what we find.

OLPC V3, Too Little, Too Late. At Best.

I'm delighted that the OLPC project has happened. I agree with those who say that most of what they accomplished is seen not in their own devices or projects but in the prod they gave and occasionally still give to other organizations, most famously Asus, who openly stated that the OLPC project inspired the EEE PC that massively shifted most people's perception of the possible and launched the netbook revolution. I'll even say that I think that Sugar has been unfairly maligned and may yet turn up as a valuable part of something six market segments away.

That having been said, the current agreement with Marvell to create a computer on a chip and build the new OLPC around it, well, it looks nice stated briefly on paper but I just don't believe that they'll get there. Maybe eventually. Not soon enough to matter to most of us. Especially with so many other projects moving ahead, even taking into account the new revelations that India's "$35 laptop" was largely a rebranded existing el-cheapo design. And most especially with Pixel Qi having gone independent.

This article in Forbes lays it out pretty well.

Me? I'll be dropping by Amazon and watching Liliputing, UMPCPortal, and Shanzai and the iPad jailbreak sites and choosing my next computer from what turns up there.

Sorry, Nicholas, you've cried wolf too often now. I'm done and so are most of the rest of us.

It's the engineering, stupid.

I was just pointed to this article by my friend Erik Smykal. If it doesn't scare the ever-living piss out of you, you're not paying attention. Unless, that is, you're Iranian or Chinese or Indonesian or whatever and you're sitting there right now feeling smug.

A nation without productive capacity is a hot-house orchid and will not endure. A nation whose citizens don't understand the workings of its machines and homes and organizations is, well, 1990 Kuwait just waiting to get used, abused, and broken by the first people capable enough and self-justifying enough to do it.

And, oh by the way, programming and engineering and factories that make real salable goods are the keys to great buckets of money and them what don't know it or do it don't get that money.

If you have children, raise them to be competent. Raise them to be able to understand how wood shrinks when it gets dry and what makes a plant grow tall. Raise them to understand Boolean algebra and why languages are built the way they are. Raise them to understand their world.

Because our nation is wealthy and indolent and rude and has pissed a hell of a lot of people off on a regular basis for a couple of centuries now. Unless you want our future to look like that of French aristocrats circa right about 1760, then do your part.

And even if you don't have kids, you're not off the hook. Ask yourself, what have you done to make the next generation competent, honorable, and strong? If you don't a solid answer right on the tip of your tongue then it's time that you started doing your share.

Giving props to another jewboy from a bad part of the New York streets

Dig this. I grew up between Central Park and Riverside Park. We saw the sunrise from our balcony and could walk to Columbia University. So very pretty. But right on our block it wasn't all so pretty. The shooting galleries across the street gave us a regular supply of junkies, sometimes unconcious or dead in the gutter. The addicts and street kids playing until 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. in the basketball courts right below us would have been loud enough if they had just played but instead we got a regular diet of arguments, knife fights, and broken glass and blood on the streets in the morning.

So when I tell you that I grew up in New York City I want you to understand that I don't mean Park Avenue and I don't mean the cleaned up, prettified world you see now. The seventies were rough around my part of town and it only took a couple years in P.S. 84 to guarantee that I would never sound or move or think like the products of the suburbs who now make up most of this country.

But I want you to understand something else. The sounds of our blocks had plenty of crazies and beatdowns on hot summer nights but we also had the funk. We had boogie and merengue and salsa and my stepfather's old jazz albums from back when he had a band hitting the small towns of the south in the days of Dizzy and the Duke.

If you kept your shit together and you never got sloppy or stupid or looked like you had something valuable to steal, my little piece of the city could be a beautiful place in it's grubby, hustling, drugged-out way.

I don't know if I would ever want to go back there but I miss it sometimes. Eating french fries out a paper bag and watching the people go by. A big steaming plate of arroz con pollo served by a Chinese-looking guy with a full Cuban pompadour and a guayabera peeking out from his stained white jacket. A bunch of guys in a rough circle around a splintery bench, jamming with bongos and guitar cut by somebody's sweet, longing voice. Sneaking into the abandoned rail yard with a friend, keeping out of the burned out twisted metal former loading docks where the gay guys were hanging and cruising and fucking. Having my own little corner of the then unstaffed northern Central Park, with my little "streambed" I had cut out of the swamp over the course of a few years where an overflowing water pipe provided my stream.

And when I miss that world, nobody brings it back like Howard fucking Chaykin. The man was there. He knows it and he brings it back and soups it up and makes of it a fantasy of sex and menace and hot, languid nights filled with operators and rubes and people just keeping their head down and trying to get by. Rude, lewd, and always trying to get into your mind and your pants.

That's my city, baby. Come on in, take a seat, and order a drink. Keep your eyes open and your eye on your wallet and you may just have a hell of a time.