Barefoot Running with Stretches

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This morning I went out for another run barefoot. The last few weeks I cut back as my right heel was hurting — I felt it was indicative of an inflammation on my Achilles tendon and my chiropractor — Dr. Karen Santini at The Greater Rochester Chiropractic Office (30 Allens Creek Rd.) agreed. She used a cortisone ultrasound application and suggested I add calf muscle stretches. In a brief search I couldn't find a description (or pictures) of what she had showed me, so I'll have to explain.

She said there are two calf muscles: the gastroc (or, more formally, the gastrocnemius) and the soleus. To stretch the gastroc muscle, stand on a stair or step. Put one foot backward so your toes and part of the ball are on the edge of the step. Keep your calf relaxed as you shift your weight backward onto that foot, allowing your heel to drop below the level of the step. To stretch the soleus, put one foot on the next step as before with the heel hanging off. Keep your calf relaxed as you shift your weight forward onto that foot, allowing your heel to drop below the level of the step.

I gave it a go and it seems the run went fine — if I did shorten it to 15 minutes or so.

My Winnipeg at the Dryden

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I went to the Dryden Theater at George Eastman House (900 East Ave.) to see Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg. Maddin described it as a "docu-fantasia" (or was it "docutasia") about his hometown of Winnipeg, Manitoba (Canada, duh). And, barring a better word, it was exactly that.

It's hard to discern what was fact and what was fantasy — for instance, did Maddin (also acting as narrator) in fact rent out his family home to stage reenactments of his childhood? Were the events described real in any way? Does it matter? I had a similar reaction to the feverish dream of his former film, Brand Upon the Brain!. Winnipeg shared the poetic and metaphoric use of visual effects (rather than the more traditional use of creating a false reality).

My friend Christina has a theory about Rochester: that people don't leave because it's hard to move in winter, but when spring arrives, everything comes up green and beautiful, summers are fantastic, fall is beautiful in its own right, and before you know it, it's back to winter and you can't leave. Maddin shares a similar view of Winnipeg: that people are so sleepy there that they are unable to stay awake long enough to stay on the train that leaves town — to escape.

So I guess, in the end, it succeeds in being a documentary about Winnipeg — that which he was supposedly chartered to do (and evidenced by the title card announcing funding by The Documentary Channel) — albeit an extraordinarily personal one. But, nonetheless, one that appears to succeed in documenting the spirit of a city.

Heroes, Monsters, and Your Own Personal Monkeysphere

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I had an interesting confluence of information thrown at me this past week. First, on Monday, I got an e-mail from one of the organizers of FrostBurn. It was a gentle suggestion to check out the lecture on TED.com by Philip Zimbardo: How ordinary people become monsters…or heroes.

The gist is that it is relatively easy to get people to do unimaginably cruel things. All you need to do is to ask them to gradually increase the intensity of their behavior, and to absolve them of responsibility for that behavior. As has been demonstrated by the atrocities of history, nearly anybody can be party to this kind of behavior, except for a few: the "everyday heroes".

In response to that e-mail, someone else posted a link to What is the Monkeysphere?. It outlines the notion that our brains are only capable of dealing with a clan of about 150 individuals. Outside that group, everyone else is not even a person, just a thing in the world. The article argues that in general, people don't care about the outsider group except when they make a deliberate effort to be empathetic. I personally don't think this is true, but Philip Zimbardo's research seems to back it up.

Anyway, in Zimbardo's lecture, he says that anybody can be trained to be an "everyday hero". His method of doing so asks people to consider themselves "heroes in waiting" — that someday you may be called upon to act heroically. I personally use the guilt-based technique where I ask myself, "which course of action will make me respect myself tomorrow?" to elicit my best behavior.  Regardless, we agree that a core element is the desire to not go along with the status quo for its own sake, but to remain vigilant and question that which seems wrong.

Then on Tuesday, I went to The Rochester Public Library (115 South Ave.) for the Books Sandwiched-In lecture. Douglas Lowry discussed his view on The Soloist: A Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music by Steve Lopez. Lopez, a columnist, discovers a man named Nathaniel Ayers playing violin in the streets of L.A. Although he writes a column about this encounter, he is struck by this man and returns to him many times over several years. Ayers is clearly mentally ill, and Lopez tries to get him to use psychiatric services to discover how to experience joy.

Anyway, I just thought it was interesting that these things all seemed pretty related.

RIP, Baby Squirrel

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This afternoon I was talking with my neighbor and a baby squirrel (okay, maybe an adolescent squirrel) came stumbling out and tried to befriend me. We suspected it was dislodged from a nest in the wind from a few days prior — or it was possibly Blondie's kin (that is, the so-named blond-hair squirrel that was flattened by automobile earlier this week). Whatever the reason, this inexperienced tree-rat was perfectly willing to let me pet it.

I went in and got it a banana — it seemed quite receptive to me (well, anyone I guess) giving it affection. I pet it a bit and brought it some sunflower seeds as well. I decided to let it be and see if its instincts would kick in after a decent (?) meal, so I headed out.

a baby squirrel

Well, come 1 a.m. when I got home, I searched for it and found its lifeless body in my driveway. I might have been able to do more, but I can only believe that its last hours were spent with a full belly, and with dreams of frolicking — cat-free — with its peers. Perchance, even, to run confidently along the squirrel superhighway (a.k.a. human utility service wires). Rest in peace, baby squirrel.

Among the 609

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Sometime around midnight on Monday night, the lights in my house blinked out several times in 10 minutes or so. I knew what was coming — alas the same line I've complained about before was once again afflicted with inability to transmit electrical current. It's been a while since it got knocked out, but by midnight, the lights went out and the fans all stopped; the only sound was the beeping of back-up power supplies on assorted computers and appliances around the house.

So I called Rochester Gas and Electric (RG&E) (89 East Ave.) when it happened, and the nice computer lady recorded that my power was out. I went to bed. In the morning, the nice computer lady said that they recorded my outage — but did not mention that it was part of a larger outage. Darn. I had hoped a crew would be out already. As it turned out, tens of thousands of people were also without power, so I was not all that likely to get responsive service. By 10 a.m. or so, the computer lady said that there was a known outage affecting approximately SIX HUNDRED NINE customers — thus it was that crazy wire by the canal that got knocked out again. The worst, though, is that the streets near me are interleaved with power from different sides, so across the street, my neighbors were preserving perishable foods with refrigeration, drinking hot coffee, and reading in at night. By 3 p.m. or so, the nice computer lady reported that "the estimated repairs are scheduled to be completed by 6 p.m. — this Wednesday."

So I got a lesson in pioneer life for a while. As it turned out the power came back Tuesday night sometime — probably between midnight and dawn by my guess. In any case, I took the opportunity to revamp the computer setup where I write JayceLand and other stuff. I also pondered alternatives: like solar panels to operate the sump pump (which was thankfully bone-dry), getting (or making) a chest freezer, and figuring out how to get Internet connectivity. I might be closer to off-grid living than I thought … or not.

Idiocracy at the Dryden

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I headed out to the Dryden Theatre at George Eastman House (900 East Ave.) to catch Idiocracy — the seldom-seen Mike Judge film, which was released … er … buried just a few years ago. It's about an absolutely average guy in the army, Joe Bauers, who takes part in a human hibernation experiment, only to accidentally be left for 500 years. When he awakes, he finds himself in a bizarre world where stupefyingly stupid people are running the place, and impossibly-stupider ones populate it. Automated systems somehow keep things marginally running [something like "Matrix Vista", I guess] — albeit in a totalitarian dystopia to which the population is absolutely complacent with. Joe is arrested and given an intelligence test which places him as the smartest person in the world — by a huge margin.

But the real brilliance of the satire is that it's a believable amplification of what we have today. The Brawndo corporation bought the FDA and FCC, allowing them to pump their energy-drink beverage through the plumbing for drinking — leaving people to refer to plain water as "toilet water". And, like in today's spirit of anti-intellectualism, people of the future referred to rational speech as sounding "pompous and faggy". It's relentless in its celebration of stupidity.

The film proposes that it was because stupid people have lots of kids but smart people don't that the world was getting dumber, but genetics don't work like that: stupid people breed smart kids just as often as smart people breed dumb kids. Remove that presumption, and the film becomes much more melancholic. For it's not that nature is failing us, it's that we arrogantly and tenaciously believe that because we think intelligence is a good thing that it should necessarily be — in Darwinian parlance — "selected for": that the "good" traits in a species should necessarily become more dominant in the population. Yet that has causality backwards and isn't even a valid comparison. Dominant traits in a population are simply most common, and "good" traits are at the whim of the era. Having ten toes is completely unrelated to being an oil baron in the 20th century or a king in the 16th century.

In Jim Healy's introduction, he believed the screening we were about to watch was the first 35mm screening in New York State — and possibly the entire American northeast. According to IMDb, it opened on 6 screens then peaking the next day at 130 screens — by no means large numbers, but it's unlikely this was the first screening. Anyway, Jim sided with the most rational and least controversial theory for the lackluster marketing for an otherwise hilarious and simultaneously biting film: that Twentieth Century-Fox simply could not figure out how to market it. While I don't doubt that's true, I don't think it's the full story since the Fox corporation has been aggressively courting anti-intellectualism as a philosophical mainstay. So I find it hard to believe it was as simple as a film without a market, but that Fox was the wrong group to try. After all, they opened drivel like Glitter on 1,201 screens and Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties on 2,946 screens yet intellectual fare like Fast Food Nation began on only 321 screens and Waking Life was seen on only 4.

If only they had smarter people working for them …

Burning Man: WTF?

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Sondra and I got on the road on Sunday around 10:30 in the morning, headed for Burning Man. Once we picked up groceries at Smith's (1740 Mountain City Hwy., Elko, NV), we figured it might be possible to arrive just after midnight — a first time for both of us. As it turned out, we arrived around 4 a.m. or so. It was interesting to arrive then, but I much preferred arriving in daytime. We slept on the ground until dawn then hunted down a spot — Bonneville at 5:15 — which was pretty centrally located.

We got the tents and shade set up, then the dust storm started. It was not only a harsh storm by Burning Man standards, but it was relentless. It lasted until dark. We tried getting around to pick up ice and such, but it was nearly impossible to do so. The shade I built got blown down, having snapped two segments of 1/2" water pipe. Fortunately they were just extension pieces so I was able to make the shade again, only it was short enough to hit the tent.

We finally got out to see things at night. I got the chance to try Ecstasy for the first time. It was apparently quite pure (sometimes, I guess, Speed is added which makes one more interested in dancing, or Cocaine is added which makes it suck). I liked it a lot. It created a sense of empathy with others which allowed me to easily put aside feelings of annoyance with others. I tended to look deeply at people and feel bonded with them. Its other dominant experiential effect greatly reduced my awareness of minor bodily irritations — achyness from the day, for instance, but also irritations like holding a flashlight.

Anyway, I started getting tired quite late and decided to head back to camp. Unfortunately I got hit with irresistible tiredness and ended up falling asleep on the way there. I became aware of walking in the dawn and slowly realized that I was not, in fact, dreaming, but experiencing reality. I got back to camp and got some sleep. Tuesday morning I got up and hunted down my trike that I left behind — someone had found it and brought it to their camp on the Esplanade where I found it. The light tube got damaged and the backpack went missing — fortunately only containing some water and a dust mask.

I had signed up to volunteer to work at the sound stage in the Center Camp and I actually made it on-time, despite having not seen a clock in more than a day. I worked the mixing board and learned a lot about using a large board. The performances were not all that interesting, and the four hours went by quite slowly. That night was my night off: each year at Burning Man, it seems I take one day and get some sleep … Tuesday was it this year.

For the rest of the week, things were pretty much the same … relatively pleasant weather and total boredom. Somehow, Burning Man didn't quite happen — it was more like a mock-up of Burning Man where people camp in the desert but don't bother to bring any good art, or try to act with tolerance, or act like a community at all. It was quite strange.

I think "The Bummer" was the art piece that summed up the whole event. It was a 4-times-or-so mock-up of a Hummer vehicle. From a distance, it indeed looked like it was intended, but I had to ask, "what's the point?" I mean, okay: a big Hummer … umm … and? Up close, it was like a plywood clubhouse. It had no detail inside, and it was apparently just dimensionally correct on the outside. I really didn't get it at all — and that's pretty much what all the artwork was like. Some were better than others, but none that I saw exceeded a modest level of mediocrity.

Saturday brought another horrendous day of dust storms. Sondra and I decided to call it quits. We got things packed up in the slightly-less-bad storm that continued into the night and left around 11 p.m., just a bit after they burned the Man figure. By 5 a.m. we made it to The Lovelock Inn (55 Cornell Ave., Lovelock, NV) which had beds and showers. We got on the road on Sunday refreshed and made it back to Colorado by the next night.

Along the way we tried to think of anything good about this year's Burning Man: something specifically awesome — anything, in fact, like what we had experienced in past years. Alas, the only maximal adjective we could come up with is "worst", only qualified by "ever".

Thankfully, we escaped it.

Rochester to Glenwood Springs

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So I headed out on Wednesday night, stopping at Paola's Burrito Place (1921 South Ave., formerly Big Dog's Hots) with Ali before saying our goodbyes. I drove until I got tired around Cleveland, then got up on Thursday and made it just inside Kansas. Of course, things took a downturn when the air conditioning in the Roadmaster gradually stopped working with a warning signal on the heating controls. At least I made it through the worst of it.

On the way through otherwise-dreadful Kansas, I saw a billboard for a GM dealership in Hays, about halfway across Kansas. Crap. I guess they do work. Anyway, I went to James Motor Works, Co. (108 E. 13th St., Hays, KS). I talked with Dan and they got me right in to check out the A.C. It turned out there is a leak (which I knew, having added more coolant before I left) and the ventilation system computer shuts things down when the compressor cycles too much. I got it recharged there — they were really nice and it was "only" $100 or so. Afterward I got a recommendation for lunch, and I went to Gella's Diner and Lb. Brewing Company (117 E. 11th St., Hays, KS) right around the corner. I had a really good Oatmeal Stout and a great Patty Melt: a "beef patty topped with mushrooms, schmeltz (caramelized onions) and provolone cheese on buttered marbled rye toast". Mmm. I met this guy who happened to be from Colorado and we chatted a bit before I got back on the road.

I made it to Colorado around 2:30 p.m. and managed to snap a self-portrait along the way:

Self-portrait (sort-of)

See the wagon? To be honest, it's larger than it appears.

Unfortunately, my timing was such that I got to Denver at almost exactly 5:00 p.m. Yeesh. It wasn't too bad, but getting up the mountain took a while. I made it to Sondra and Will's around 8 and got settled in. We'll be leaving on Sunday morning in a little convoy for Burning Man. Hopefully in air-conditioned comfort.

Dinner and a Movie with Ali

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Ali and I tried out that whole dinner-and-a-movie deal — the one where you can get free tickets for The Cinema TheatreMySpace link (957 South Clinton Ave.) for everyone at your table at Highland Park Diner (960 S. Clinton Ave.) if you spend at least $12.50 each. It's not that the Cinema is all that expensive, but it was a good excuse to spend a little more than usual on dinner. After all, even though Highland Diner is pricier than average, it's still kind of hard to spend that much per person.

The first film was Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull which Ali enjoyed more than I did. The thing I always enjoyed about the series is the way that the highly improbable circumstances are at least physically possible — it's set in the past of our daily world with a twist that there's a bit more magic and ancient booby traps continue to function flawlessly. In the latest installment, however, the action is just too far beyond unlikely: getting blown-clear from a nuclear blast, or going over a waterfall and surviving completely unscathed, for instance.

I also condemn the film for having internal inconsistencies indicative of a changing script. In one instance, Jones has strong knowledge of an unusual artifact but later claims he was kept in the dark and knew nothing. That artifact was supposed to be magnetic — able to deflect hanging lights from tens of feet away — but could be easily loaded into a steel Jeep. I also recall at least one instance where a character starts arguing with another, but that argument was almost edited out, and in the next shot, they're all fine again.

Ali had to skip Hellboy II: The Golden Army but I went back to see it. I liked it a lot more than Indiana Jones. I wasn't all that keen on it being so comic-book-like because some of the scenes would have worked as a comic book panel — where your imagination fixes the incongruities as if in a dream — but when rendered in film-form, they're shown to be rather absurd. That said, the dialog is snappy, funny, and overall the film is just fun to watch.

Duck, You Sucker at the Dryden

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I headed out to the Dryden Theater at George Eastman House (900 East Ave.) to see Giù la testa (A Fistful of Dynamite, or Duck, You Sucker). According to Michael Neault in his introduction of the movie, Sergio Leone — after having made several movies celebrating political revolution — Duck, You Sucker takes a much more cynical view of it.  It also happens to be that there are no fewer than four versions of the film, and the one we got to see was presumed to be the "original" director's cut.

I immediate thought that as much as The Bridge on the River Kwai is a testament to the rational insanity of war, Duck, You Sucker shows war as a black comedy. In the film, John — a former Irish Republican Army explosives expert — gets paired up with Juan — a poor thief in Mexico. That is, despite John's best efforts to avoid it. And to avoid getting roped into another revolution … sort of … it seems that getting involved in revolution is more of an addictive habit than anything. Juan, in the mean time, is also trying to avoid getting into the revolution. But he accidentally keeps saving people and making terriffic progress for the revolutionaries.

As revolutions are, there are advances made by each side, making it seem like no progress is made on either front overall until perhaps, one of the parties involved just gets too tired of fighting — or forgets what the point was in the first place.