Blast from the Past

Today, a student (JC) said she had a video to share with the class:

https://www.showme.com/sh/?h=mEMW8si

As we were watching this (I think the video dates from 2012 - Sebastien was probably four years old as he narrates this), I remembered that I actually showed this to the faculty.  We used to have technology share-outs at faculty meetings and so I used this one to show the utility of the "ShowMe" app on iPads because "It's so easy even a child can do it!".

(At the very end he says "These are first-borns" (Because Isabelle and I are both first borns whereas Seb and Irene are 'second borns'))

Movies under my Skin

These movies made me a better person.  Well, not better in the sense of kinder or becoming philanthropic or anything like that.  More like in the Socrates-sense: "The unexamined life is not worth living"

This list is personal in the way my top three books post was personal:  It's not about what I objectively think about all the movies I've seen, but rather the intersection of the movie and the time in my life when I saw them.  Scenes from these movies rattle around in my head constantly and inform my interpretation of all other scenes that I might now encounter.

1. Cocteau (1946) La Belle et La Bete.  Blogged about this one already.
2. Fellini (1956) La Strada.  Anthony Quinn on his knees breaking chains he put on himself. 'nuff said  but it turns out I have a really awkward blogpost inspired by this movie already as well!
3. Resnais (1980) Mon Oncle d'Amerique. A lecture on neuroscience embedded in a film about life.  The juxtaposition of the scenes of Depardieu having his job threatened and two rats in a cage fighting over limited resources is one that flashes through my mind at least once a day.
4. Wenders (1988) Wings of Desire.  Found another blog post inspired by the movie as well!  Possibly the most life-affirming movie I've ever seen.
5. Kurosawa (1951) Roshomon.  What is truth? Do events exist outside of our interpretation of them?  I don't remember anything specific about this movie, but I can access the existential mind-funk inside of me that was inspired by this movie easily.
6. Bergman (1958) The Seventh Seal.  Protagonist plays chess with Death incarnate?  Drop the mic.
7.  Linklater (1995) Before Sunrise.  It's as if someone found a fantasy deep within me and made a film about it that I then saw before I even knew about it myself.
8. Malle (1981) My Dinner with Andre.  I'll reference lines from this movie in the middle of a speech about the dangers of technology and I don't think this movie has anything to do with that.  I think about this movie when I think about the power of storytelling.  Basically, I think about this movie all the time.
9. Truffaut (1959) Les 400 Coups.  Feels so personal and authentic - rarely have I felt another's existential pain so viscerally.
10. Clouzot (1953) The Wages of Fear.  The first poem ever written is to literature as this movie is to cinema.
11. Cacoyannis (1963) Zorba the Greek. Engage!  I wish I could ask Joseph Campbell if this is the film version of The Magic Mountain.  I think that question would make me sound very smart...
12. Nolan (2001) Memento.  The ending of this movie hit the resonance frequency of my darkest fears.  Am I beholden only to my sense of self as defined by my memories?
13. Coen Brothers (1991) Barton Fink.  "Oh, I could tell you some stories."  Make assumptions, live in your own head, judge books by their covers - oh this movie hit me where it hurts!
14. Linklater (2001) Waking Life.  Sometime I get up and switch the light switch to make sure I'm still real.
15. Lynch (1990) Wild at Heart.  Maybe the only one on this list I am embarrassed by, but for me this is the road trip movie to end all road trips.  I admit I think about the touchstone line about his jacket everyday:

Expectorating, Cinema, and Art

In class we were talking about the classic momentum problem in which you throw your gold coins in one direction so you can slide off of the frozen lake in the other direction (seriously, it's a legit problem from Giancoli!) when a kid in the back row (JW) says "I'd just spit and save my money!" so I respond with "Oh, you're just like Gaston?"

After we shared a chuckle over this (Okay, maybe I was the only one who thought it was funny), I told the class the real deal was the 1946 Jean Cocteau version:

They looked at me blankly and we moved on.  

This incident has me thinking about how, back in the day (at Swampscott High), a student (SD) and I started a short-lived "Foreign Film Club".  It was fun and the memory inspired me to send out a proposal to show La Belle et La Bete one evening during winter week this year.  Not sure if it will actually happen but now I have thoughts buzzing around in my head about this movie and about Art vs. Entertainment in general.....

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I've seen this French masterpiece by Jean Cocteau (1946) at least half a dozen times and as with all great works of art, I have a different experience each time I watch it.  I think the transcendent nature of art is captured a bit in my increasingly layered appreciation of the film:

I first saw it as a child in France with my grandparents.  I remember being struck by the fact that they stayed and watched the entire movie with me attentively although I thought it was a simple child's fable at the time.  (in retrospect it could not have been the first viewing for either of them!).  Although I was primarily merely entertained by the movie, I was struck and haunted by the imagery and the one-layer deep impression of the plot: Beauty is more than skin deep ("Don't judge books by the covers!").  

Later I saw it as a teenager and realized the story was about the transformative power of love and I also began to appreciate the technical feats in the filming of the scenes themselves: These all "firsts" in the history of Cinema and these "tricks" then became part of the vocabulary of all subsequent film makers!

Then I saw it in my 20's and thought about why my feelings for the restoration of the prince at the end so mixed?  Why was the obvious, happy ending unsatisfying in some hard-to-pin-down way?  Is the elimination of the beast an elimination of the essential appeal of the Jean Marais' split character?  Is our inner beast something to be denied or celebrated? How can this movie leave me feeling like I just went to an art museum and was reading poetry at the same time?

I saw it again in my 30's and took the perspective of the woman-who-is-attracted-to-bad-boys archetype.  What happens to your love and interest once you've "fixed" him?  I also began to realize that the titular relation is not just about the woman (beauty) and the man (beast) and the man and himself (he is both a beauty and a beast). 

I watched it again in my 40's and for the first time looked at the lead actor (Jean Marais who plays the beast, the Gaston-like character, and the final prince: three different beasts for the price of one!) on film knowing he was the director's lover.  There an early scene where the camera lingers admiringly on his sprawled out form, lounging casually on a chair.  How could I have missed that?

Jean Cocteau (L) and Jean Marais (R)

Now, I'm gearing up to watch it again.  How can we have beauty without beastliness?  Are we defined by our flaws?  Is perfection even interesting?  I am sure I will leave this viewing with even more questions than I knew to ask before!

Blog Traffic

Someone asked me how many people read my blog.  I hadn't checked in a while, but Blogger.com (now owned by google!) generates a nice graphic.  I started this blog in 2009, but didn't put a counter on until 2010:



Of course, this count of "hits" does not mean that people actually read anything on the page!

I was poking around trying to find out if the traffic corresponds to the amount of content I post (sometimes I blog a lot and sometimes I don't blog at all), but I couldn't find that easily.  I did find that the most popular entries are clearly redirects from random google searches:



All this data made me think, why do I have a blog in the first place?  Turns out, the answer to that was my very first entry:

http://riddicisms.blogspot.com/2009/06/whys-and-whats.html

Some Navel-Gazing

If you went back to the 20-year-old version of myself and told that young physics major that his destiny was to become a high school physics teacher and that he would absolutely love his job, he would have said, “You’re crazy – you don’t know anything about me!”

I always thought I would be doing some kind of science in a research setting.  I quickly narrowed my interest to physics even while still in high school.  Then, as an undergraduate at Purdue, I thought the big question of destiny was “theory or experiment?” At Carnegie Mellon, I enjoyed being a teaching assistant while earning my Masters degree so much more than my own classes, it should have been a clue! Somewhere after completing my qualifying exams (by the skin of my teeth!) and in the no-man’s-land of interdepartmental work in computation neuroscience, searching for a thesis topic, I finally looked around me and thought, “Wait a second, where am I headed again?”  

I saw the revolving door of post-docs waiting for a spot in academia and my friends getting their PhD’s in physics only to go off and work in banking or in the computer industry and I had a young-life crisis. ABD, I took a leave of absence in 1995 and ran off to make wine with my uncle in France.  I heard they kept my picture on the wall with the other grad students for a couple of years (“Who’s that guy?” “Oh, he’s making wine in France.” “You can do that here?”)

Although my mother will remind me occasionally that it would be handy to be Dr. Rideout, I have no regrets.  After flailing around in various other jobs (lab rat, micro-plumber, architect’s flunky, wine importer), I found myself entering the world of high school teaching sideways at the age of 32.  Almost immediately I fell in love with the job.  I simultaneously rediscovered my own love of physics and discovered the unique pleasure that is guiding the occasional, willing teenager into the light.  I know those particular students would probably fall in love with physics anyway, but to take undue credit as their guide is the teacher’s special pleasure.  While I was a student myself, I was always scaling an ever higher summit in physics-land (or at least trying to!) and enjoying the challenge of the next peak, but not really savoring the view along the way.  Now, that’s all I do: savor the view and attempt to get others to enjoy it as well. 

A few years ago, on a bad day, I shared with my principal that I felt I hadn’t lived up to my potential and that younger me would be disappointed in older me.  He gave me a startled look and said with simple sincerity, “What could you possibly be doing that is more important than what you are doing right now?”

Hey, young Ken, there’s plenty of science to go around outside of doing the research you are dreaming of!

Costco, New Years, and Being White

Years ago, I was introduced to the yumminess of Taiwanese pineapple cakes:


My mother-in-law brought this very brand back from Taiwan just before Isabelle was born (but after we had settled on a name - see the branding above (even the French spelling we chose!))

Eventually, Costco began to carry this exact brand seasonally, so we always buy a box. It's been a family tradition to have these around the Chinese New Year ever since.

All this is back-story for the following funny exchange at Costco when I recently bought a box while shopping solo (usually Costco is a family outing):

Chinese cashier: "You tried these before?"
Me: "Yep"
Cashier: "Hmm... usually Chinese people buy these to celebrate Chinese New Year."
(I start to realize I've been racially profiled:  Why is this white guy buying pineapple cakes?)
Me: (defensively) "Yes - my wife is Chinese and the brand is the same name as my daughter: Isabelle!"
Cashier looks at the box and frowns, not seeing "Isabelle".
I point it out and realized she probably had never read the English brand name!
She smiles, visibly relieved that there is a rational explanation for this white dude buying Isabelle branded Taiwanese pineapple cakes.
We made some small talk which oddly wound up with her asking me what my son's name.  She seemed oddly satisfied that his name is Sebastien.  (I remember the old lady down the street from us in Burlington once told me they were "fancy" names.)

I left the store thinking on how when I get racially profiled I get to not feel like a victim at all, but rather my white privilege makes it a funny novelty that I even get to feel a little smug about afterwards.

Xmas at the Rideouts

The kids needs to split a communal gift of jelly beans.
At first they start to count it out, then Sebastien says "Let's use the mass gram weighy thing!"
Isabelle: "You mean the SCALE?"

Here they are carefully weighing out one jelly bean:


After divvying up the candy, Isabelle says the count does not look equal but Sebastien says "We did it by weight, but the individual beans might not be the same so it's okay if the count is not the same."

Next year, I expect them to mass 10 random beans and take the median value for their calculations...