February 26, 2006
Random Thoughts on a Sunday
1. Working in my office on Sunday is peaceful. I get a lot done. If I were home right now, I'd be doing laundry and cooking.
2. If data analysis is like woodworking, then I have a couple of really great spice racks about to be done. Props to Lindsey Zimmerman, Jessica Sanders, Miriam Krause, Sarah Brincks, and Adriane Baylis for passing along some excellent balsa wood (=spreadsheets). Lindsey in particular has a couple of incredibly interesting sets of data which I will be presenting at the University of Iowa on March 23. Exciting stuff.
3. If the jerk who broke into my sister's car and stole her radio is reading this, hear me: you are a jerk.
4. If anyone knows an easy way to calculate rationalized arcsine transformed percent correct scores (like a pre-fab macro in Excel), E-mail me.
5. Why does every University of Minnesota event have lemonade at it? Seriously, guys, has the lemonade mafia been putting the heat on?
Unintentional sexism--shame on me
Who's to say that only men can sublimate their disappointment into woodworking? Women can, too.
Shame on me.
February 25, 2006
Data: The Experimental Scientist's Woodwork
In days of old (when knights were bold...) men dealt with minor disappointment and transient depression by making pointless woodworking projects. How many women (and men) out there have a cache of pointless knick-knack shelves who intricate carvings reflect 10,000 fleeting disappointments?
For me, it's data analysis. Though I do live in a former rubber factory (
February 23, 2006
Only Connect
I write a blog, and within a day I hear from people all over the country--old friends, family, and strangers--who have read it. I like that.
Hello, Molly Babel.
Hello, Kristine Davies.
Hello, Greg Gladden. Thanks for defending me pro bono back in '92. I appreciated receiving an E-mail from you.
Hello, Dad. You're right that I have made many meaningful contributions to society other than the whole '92 thing. Teaching does allow me to make a meaningful contribution to society.
...and to everyone who wants to see data on DDK rates as a function of talker sex and sexual orientation, I swear to you, these are not phantom data. See the figure below. Explanation to follow at a later date. (Labels refer to talkers' self-stated orientations):
February 22, 2006
Return to Houston
I vowed I would never return.
It was August, 1992. I had just moved to LA a few months prior, and had joined ACT-UP LA. For those of you who don't remember, ACT-UP stands for the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. ACT-UP is a grassroots political action group that was instrumental in transforming the country's response to the AIDS crisis. In 1992, long before the advent of organizations like moveon.org, ACT-UP was a potent political force. ACT-UP LA decided to send a delegation of sorts to the 1992 Republican National Convention in Houston, Texas, to conduct a series of 'actions' to raise awareness about AIDS related issues, and to demand a more intensive and comprehensive federal response to the AIDS crisis. I was in that delegation of sorts. I was 20 years old. My action was to go, along with four confederates, to a $1,000 a plate breakfast at which the then-president (this was August, 1992) was speaking. Other guests included Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and a spate of other names that aren't quite as familiar--when was the last time Georgette Mosbacher came up at a dinner-table conversation? We were able to get into the press box. At a key moment in the President's speech, the five of us, who had split into a group of three, and a group of two (another guy and I) started shouting slogans. The first group couldn't be heard very well by the President, but my companion and I shouted loudly and clearly. Our question: "what about AIDS?"
Needless to say, I was immediately arrested. Fortunately, we were in the press box, and the cameras were clicking away. This was good insurance against a rough arrest. I was handcuffed and taken to a police station. I was booked, my mug shot was taken, and I was put in a holding cell. I spent one night in a holding cell somewhere in downtown Houston, and three nights in Harris County jail. I ended up pleading guilty to a class B misdemeanor, disrupting a public meeting. I was on the local news stations. When I was released, I had a late-night dinner at a Luby's cafeteria, slept about 2 hours, and got on the next plane out of there. I vowed I would never return.
Barring extraordinary circumstances, that vow will be broken a week from today, when I will go to Houston to deliver a colloquium in the Rice University Linguistics Department. I want to go back to the Harris County jail and look up at the ninth floor. I was in 'tank' 9D6. (A 'tank' is group of about 12 cells, and a common area with two showers, two toilets, some tables, and a TV. This is where we spent our entire time, at least when we weren't in court.) We were with a lot of transvestite sex workers. Everyone was reasonably friendly. I never felt threatened by any of the other inmates. My lawyer was named Greg Gladden (Gladdin? Sounded like Glad-In.) There was also a public defender named Paige something who was really nice.
I have clear memories of the entire ordeal. I remember in minute detail the way that my cell-mate and fellow ACT-UP activist, Michael Morrissey, looked. I wonder what happened to him. I remember calling the UCLA phonetics lab and talking to a variety of people (including the late great Peter Ladefoged) from the Harris County Jail.
After we returned to LA, ACT-UP LA went through an implosion of sorts. The older members were dog-tired, and the younger members were so optimistic that Clinton was going to change everything that they let down their guard. (Big mistake.) I don't have any real tangible mementos of the occasion, with one exception. Because we were in the press box, a picture of me made it on the AP wire. In fact, it showed up in my hometown newspaper, the Buffalo News. Here's the picture. By the way it was wonderful to have a picture of myself in my hometown newspaper over the headline "Gays Bash Intolerance of Republicans."
It's not the greatest looking picture, but it's the greatest picture ever taken of me, because it commemorates the one thing I have done in my life that I'm most proud of. It took planning and commitment. I think it made a small but lasting difference. I'm happy I did it.
I vowed I would never return, but I'm actually kind of excited.
February 21, 2006
February 16, 2006
Moron runs iPod through washing machine. Story at 11.
Today has been a rough day (in a rough week, in a rough semester), for reasons not appropriate to share on this blog. After a massively unproductive day, I decided to head to the gym for a few hours of working out until I could work out no more. Nothing takes the edge off like exhaustion. It clears the mind, completely. Unfortunately, clearing the mind completely may be good when trying to deal with work- and life-related stress, but it isn't 100% good. Case in point: when I was finished with my workout, I put left my iPod (a necessary device when working out in the 3-5 pm time period, as this is the time when there is always a gaggle of people at the gym who seem to be there only to gab with each other) in my gym shorts pocket. When I got home, I decided that I should pack workout clothes to take on my trip to Alaska (leaving tomorrow). I threw them in the washer. Two hours later, I was checking my packing list and saw 'iPod.' It hit me: I let it go through the wash.
My first reaction was a good-natured "oh well, let's hope for the best. No use crying over spilled milk." This is a minor miracle, given that my childhood was so filled with screaming, fist-beating, plate-breaking temper tantrums that my parents got sick of saying all 12 phonemes in the phrase "temper tantrum" and just started calling them "TTs" (insert sly wink here). Instead of screaming and crying, I googled "iPod" "washing machine" and found out that there is hope! Evidently many people have done this, and there seems to be a fairly decent recovery rate.
Cross your fingers.
February 11, 2006
When does Professor Munson Sleep?
When indeed, when indeed
February 09, 2006
Giving Dorothy Day her Day, and Imagining Poetry Written by a Cat
Pauline Welby (in whose apartment in Grenoble I read aloud the 2004 essay in the Times about a harsh and dangerous love) responded to my earlier posting by reminding me that Dorothy Day was the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement (see http://www.catholicworker.org/) and that she did a lot of really worthy work in social justice. The characterization of her as a "Catholic Communist" was off-base.
Noted, correct, apologized--BRM
And now, for something completely different, Kevin has written more poetry, this time in the voice of Carrie Munson. This is in honor of the snow we're having right now.
Reflections
Wet and cold my paws,
Gray sky dropping icy salt.
My thoughts shift from fish on strings,
To images that at once are bleak, and strangely exhilarating
In my dreams, I slide……
Next up: I absolutely promise a blog entry on diadochokinetic rates in GLB and heterosexual men and women (Volume 1 issue 1 of the Journal of Never-to-be-Published Data)
February 07, 2006
Brokeback Mountain: Twenty Year of a Harsh and Dangerous Love, Requiring Real Transformation
I have worked for weeks on a long essay about Brokeback Mountain. After much thought, I have decided to post only a short part of it. I realize that much of what I wrote is shockingly negative (not about the movie, which was wonderful and easily one of the best I've ever seen, but about society and about the notion of socially sanctioned 'romantic love'). Ultimately, the essay had the strong potential to alienate people considerably. I kept going back and reading parts that I had written and recoiling. I actually managed to alienate myself from myself. Evidently, I have more than my fair share of anger at the way that our society dictates such a shockingly narrow view of love. (And no, I'm not just talking about same-sex versus opposite-sex attraction, I'm talking about how society rigidly codifies the range of 'acceptable' ways of expressing love, and dictates so narrowly the roles that people have to take in relationships.) Moreover, the bulk of the essay wasn't about the movie itself. Of course, blogging has no codified etiquette—believe me, I looked for it—but I want to keep this professional. In the absence of a scathing indictment of conventional romantic love, you're going to get two excised paragraphs that can best be described as safe and middlebrow.
Like all serious, faux-serious, and aspiring-to-be-serious essays, this one contains spoilers.
Excised Paragraph Number One.
The film's main performances seem to beg critics to draw comparisons with the great film performances. Some of these are quite apt, if maybe a little obvious: Dean and Hudson in Giant seem to be mentioned quite a bit. Rock Hudson's life, of course, is like an urbane Hollywood version of Jack Twist's life. Though he wasn't killed with a tire iron, the way he died—of AIDS, at the height of Reagan's criminal neglect of people suffering from the disease—was no less a murder. If there is a Rock Hudson performance that I was reminded of watching Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback, it's his superior performance in the 1966 film Seconds. Seconds is a quasi-science fiction film in which a retirement-age man is given the opportunity to leave his life behind, get mega plastic surgery, and live as a young man again. He must, however, have no contact with the people he knew in his previous life, and tell nobody in his current life who he is. As the film goes on, he becomes progressively more and more disenchanted and lonely in his new 'young' life, and he wants to tell someone about who he really is. In one really great scene, he writhes under the stress of not being able to anyone who he really is. Though Jack Twist doesn't have any scenes quite like that, Jake's performance really conveyed that same gut-churning pain. Heath Ledger's performance is the type rarely seen on film, because his character doesn't fit in to any traditional romantic movie. It does, however, have a few precedents. In some ways, it recalls William Hurt's pitch-perfect performance in The Accidental Tourist. In other less-obvious ways it reminded me of Ian Holm's on-screen implosion in The Sweet Hereafter ("let me give your anger…a voice").
Excised Paragraph Number 2
The other aspect of Brokeback Mountain that sticks out in my mind is the ending. If you haven't seen it, you can probably guess that it wasn't a conventionally happy ending. I was genuinely surprised, then, that I felt almost elated and oddly optimistic when the movie finished. (This is by no means a universal reaction. My sister cried for three days.) One rather banal possibility is that this reaction is just a natural defense mechanism. In the face of a soul-crushingly sad ending, the mind invents something—anything—to make it palatable. The other, though, is that the movie did such a good job illustrating love that it ended up affirming the existence of love more generally even in the face of a horrible tragedy. There is a quote that was floated around the web a few years ago. I first saw it in an editorial in the New York Times in about March, 2004. The editorial quoted Dorothy Day, someone who I didn't know at the time but who evidently was a famous religious labor activist (A Catholic Communist—now there's a piquant mix!). She described "a harsh and dangerous love," that requires real transformation. (The origin of the actual quote itself is evidently not Day herself, though many websites mistakenly attribute it to her. I saw it attributed in one essay to Dostoyevsky, without any indication of which text it comes from. I suppose I could find that out if I looked hard enough.) Interestingly, the essay I was reading back in '04 was commenting on the then controversy over the film The Passion of the Christ. Times essay reminded the readers that while the essence of Christian love is compassion and selflessness, these don't come scot-free. They require sacrifice, and a declaration of faith that might come with a horrible price. I got the strong sense watching Brokeback that the love between Jack and Ennis was of the harsh and dangerous variety. Each one of them was completely transformed by the love itself, but not in a way that ever invoked the flowers-and-candy 'romance' that bombards our eyes and ears daily as the only acceptable way to show affection. Moreover, it was a love that cost one of him his life, at least indirectly. Maybe it was seeing this kind of love in a movie, particularly expressed by two men, that left me feeling elated.
Well, there's the short version. There is some indication in it that the original essay was much more strident and angry. I think these paragraphs leave my general feelings intact.
Coming Soon to a Blog Near You: New GLB Speech Data
It's time for an academic blog. Long-lost friends from middle school and angry film essays are fun, but I have a little blog entry I'm writing with some data that I have decided never to submit to a peer-reviewed journal. It's diadochokinetic rates in GLB and heterosexual men and women. Be on the look out for it!
Monica Wolfe, Jon Wolfe, Ben Munson, circa 1985
As I mentioned in a previous blog entry, an old friend, Jon Wolfe, contacted me, having found me through my blog. Summarizing the past 21 years of my life in a series of E-mails to him hasn't been an easy activity. I guess what's been hard about it is an overwhelming sense that I have not accomplished even 5% of the things I thought I would have accomplished by now. I guess I set unrealistic goals for myself.
One thing that is certain is that I don't look anything like I thought I would look as an adult. Seriously, when I pictured myself as an adult, I didn't think I would look like this. Where did this "jutting jaw and sallow cheeks" look come from? If you want to know where I'm coming from, check out this picture from 1985. My memory of this occasion is a little fuzzy. I think that this was in about 1985, maybe early 1985. I'm thinking that Jon and his younger sister, Monica (who I am not afraid to admit was the first girl I ever open-mouth kissed) came back from Northern Virginia to visit their grandmother in Buffalo, New York. I don't remember seeing him for very long. This is what we looked like at the time.
February 03, 2006
My Top 10 Desert Island DVDs
The oscar nominations came out today. Having movies on the brain spurs me to come up with my list of 10 desert island DVDs. Remember the rules for desert island DVDs (as codified through the international desert island survival gear commission): if you choose to have a DVD of a television show, then every single disc counts as one choice, but DVDs of extras count as one choice. You can have DVDs with no more than one disk of extras. Box sets of franchises (i.e., the Alien 'Quadrilogy') count as the number of different movies. So, what would I pick? Glad you asked!
1. In the Mood for Love (Wang Kar-Wai, 2000) (crucially, this DVD would have to be the Criterion Collection DVD with the alternate endings, not the Canadian-issued CD that I bought from E-Bay). The love that dare not speak its name need not involve same-sex attraction, as this spectacular film shows. Nominally a story about the friendship that develops between two neighbors whose spouses are having an affair with each other, this movie is about the virtues and pitfalls of self-denial in the face of desire. It is also a feast for the eyes and ears, which easily make it a sine qua non for desert island DVDs.
2. The Ice Storm (Ang Lee, 1997). Providing that Brokeback isn't yet on DVD around the time that I get stranded on this desert, then I'm going to have to go with this 1997 Ang Lee movie as a suitable substitute. Don't believe the glib characterization of this as a movie about the swinging, wife-swapping 1970s. This film is at its heart a sobering meditation on faithfulness and need. It distinguishes itself by exceptionally good acting (nearly everyone in the film, especially Joan Allen, Adam Hann-Byrd, Elijah Wood, and Christina Ricci, are exceptional), and its stunning visuals (a boy bouncing on an ice-covered diving board in front of an empty swimming pool, and leaf-bare treetops rustling in the breeze as if they were shuddering).
3. Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955). Every time I see this movie I wonder what the people who made it were thinking. Is it a horror film? A religious parable? Whatever it is, it's a riveting movie from start to finish, filled with imagery that sticks in the mind for years and years: Shelley Winters' corpse swaying in the river current, two children floating down a river in the moonlight, and, best of all, Robert Mitchum and Lillian Gish singing dueling hymns before she blasts the begeezus out of him with a shotgun. Perfect.
4. Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, 1946). If you like love stories laced with lethal doses of self-loathing, then this film is for you! Ingrid Bergman is a boozy party girl who hates herself for secretly hating her treasonous father. Cary Grant is a straight-laced G-man who hates himself for lusting after a boozy party girl. Claude Raines is the weak-willed Nazi bad-guy who actually loves Ingrid. This is the film that has every gimmick that would come to be labeled Hitchcockian (i.e., no shortage of suspenseful scenes, and a plot that doesn't resolve until, oh, 3 seconds before the final fade-out) AND a bizarre, almost sadistic love story. Nobody even came close to this film's achievements until 1992 when The Crying Game reminded us that Hitchcock's best film didn't just have suspense, it had an enigmatic love story, too.
5. Badlands and 6. Days of Heaven. Voice-over narration is always a bad sign. Nobody wants a smug know-it-all telling you what's going on—see Harrison Ford's cringe-inducing voice-over in the cinematic release of Blade Runner if you don't believe me. It's the cinematic equivalent of a loud person talking in front of you, only you can't lean over and tell them that you're going to brain them if they don’t shut up. But detached, enigmatic narration from a character clueless to their fate? That I can palate. Nobody is more detached and clueless than Holly Sargis, who does the voice over in Badlands, or Linda, who narrates Days of Heaven. Both movies are about people whose lives get swallowed up by the land around them, whether it's the Dakota prairies where Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen hide in Badlands, or the Texas wheat fields where Linda Manz works in Days of Heaven.
7. The Killing Fields (Chris Menges, 1986). This movie has it all: a scathing indictment of US policy in Southeast Asia in the 1960s and 70s, a cinéma vérité view of the horrors of the Khmer Rouge, and a showcase of exceptionally powerful, subtle, and realistic acting. Most of all, though, this movie is a chronicle of a deep-rooted friendship in the context of war--A harsh and dangerous love indeed.
8. Hannah and Her Sisters (Woody Allen, 1986). How did this movie make it on to my desert island DVD list? I would argue that no film in the history of film has better dialogue. If I were to spend the rest of my days on a desert island, I would need to hear what English sounds like, and what better way than to listen to Dianne Wiest saying "Of course I can SING, Hannah! For Christ's sake, you've HEARD me SING."
9. Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk, 1958). After watching movies about repression and unrequited love, a guy needs a movie with a little levity, huh? What would be better than a soap-operatic movie about the seamy underbelly of the very very rich? Nothing, that's what! Freudian symbolism runs rampant (guess what those pumping oil wells are supposed to symbolize?) and Rock Hudson hems and haws while trying to make excuses for not being married. And any movie where the town pump (Dorothy Malone) mambos while her father dies of a heart attack because she's just been caught tramping around with a gas station attendant deserves to be in every DVD library.
10. Aliens (James Cameron, 1986). Aliens is more than just an immensely entertaining science fiction/action film, it is an incisive critique of masculinity. Who would you rather have in your corner? Ripley and Vasquez (what ever happened to the actress who played her? That character rocked!) or Bill "Game over!…We're dog food!" Paxon and mealy-mouthed Paul Reiser? Seriously, folks, it's a no-brainer. Even the android comes off as more manly than most of the men in this movie.
If any of the above were checked out of Netflix on the day in question, the following is a list of suitable runners-up: Nashville, Poltergeist, Strangers on a Train, Victim, The Accidental Tourist, The Sweet Hereafter, Howard's End, The Manchurian Candidate (1963), The Empire Strikes Back, Alien, and Heavenly Creatures
Blogging: Ranting, Raving, and Bringing Old Friends Together
Loyal readers will remember a blog posting that I put out in August, 2005. Part of it is repeated below:
…And speaking of this blog reuniting me with people from my past, like Kate Taylor, I have this to say: Jon Wolfe, my best friend from 6th grade who moved from Buffalo New York to King William County Virginia and subsequently dropped off the face of the Earth, if you're out there, hi, it's me, Ben.
Well today, February 3, 2006, I open up my E-mail, and what do I see?
Hi Ben,
I don’t think it’s too presumptuous to think you’d remember me, but I’m fairly confident you’re
the guy that I used to consider my best friend back in 82-83, in Buffalo. I was trying to think of
excuses to delay going to bed last week, and one of the most effective solutions is to Google
something random. Without any premeditation, I typed your name in, and as you are aware, your Blog
is highly ranked. I saw your picture on your Departmental Bio page, but it wasn’t until I read
your Blog that I was sure it was you… The Bowie references sealed it. (I’m still a big fan, I
finally got around to seeing him a couple years ago).
...things too personal to put here, thought at one point he does desribe himself as an über lefty, god love 'im...
I think that’s a good first salvo…
--Jon Wolfe
Well, how about that? Damn.
February 01, 2006
Five Songs that I can't Get out of my Head, 2/1/2006
Crowded in the Wings, the Jayhawks
Waltz for Koop, Koop (blaim the f***ing trailer for Match Point--and it didn't even appear in the movie!)
A Love that will Never Grow Old, Emmylou Harris (commence rolling your eyes)
The Annointed One, Ted Leo ...
Waltz (Better than Fine), Fiona Apple
How should interpret this? Winter blues?