Monkeytreats

Somebody could use a little SEO help:

I can't think of a movie that's quite like Syriana in terms of its feel. It's a huge movie, but it's not capital-e Epic in the way that we usually think of that form. There are no armies massing in the desert, no swelling strings as the lovers do their tragic whatever in the midst of the surge and chaos of the something something.

It's writ small. The dialogue is not explicative. It's like a furtive hand motion that you need to interpret, but all the information is there nonetheless.

It's discouraging, but discouraging in the way that reality occasionally is.

Above all, it feels like massive forces are at work underneath, roiling the waters but only showing a ripple on the surface.

I finished watching King Corn last night, and while I don't think there was anything there that I didn't already know, it got me thinking about the huge, complex systems that we live within, and the capacity for those systems to be just unbelievably broken, specifically when human meddling is involved.

To use the King Corn example: the government initially subsidized corn farmers by paying them to limit production. This was effective in that it kept crop prices stable and ensured farmers could make a solid living, thus in turn ensuring that the food supply was strong. Great, right?

Sure, except the fundamental principle of the plan, that of paying to reduce production, flies in the face of everything we understand about markets and capitalism and value for money and common sense and what have you. So, in the 1970's, the government started subsidizing the increase of production.

This was fabulous, because now instead of paying for nothing, we were paying for something, and that something was just unbelievable quantities of dirt-cheap corn. Specifically, feed corn, as opposed to sweet corn--the vast bulk of it was not actually edible by humans without processing. So it was processed. In some cases it was processed by factories into high fructose corn syrup and cornstarch and other additives, and in some cases it was processed by cows into beef.

That vast bolus of corn that we'd created was squeezed out into other systems. It turned our range-grazed cows into fattened, diseased animals standing in their own feces, and then we ate them and grew fattened and diseased ourselves. Not content to just get indirectly sick, we drank down corn-sweetened soft drinks and accelerated our obesity and the spread of diabetes.

This would seem a relatively straightforward problem to fix: just quit subsidizing increased production, right?

Unfortunately, the imbalance on the production and nutrition side is counterbalanced by the imbalance on the economic side. Farmers can't survive without the subsidies, but that's not all. A whole false economy depends on them, from the thousands of farmers who need the subsidy directly, to the food manufacturers and the thousands of employees who rely on the subsidized corn to make cheap food, to the millions of people who rely on food being cheap so they can afford to pay their huge mortage, or their huge rent.

How do you fix something that's broken like that?

Lately I've been feeling almost like a man with no memory. No, I don't mean that I literally have Alzheimer's, rather that it feels like I don't particularly retain things from moment to moment, or at least that there are a lot of lessons that I learn and then pretty much forget immediately. Like there's a lot of useful stuff that I'm losing because...well, I'm not sure why. Mental laziness? Too much information intake? Lack of perspective? The anesthestic amnesia of frequent TV consumption? Probably all of those are culprits.

When I was younger, I was a voracious book reader. I'd read something like seven books a week, just slurping them down, and occasionally someone would ask me about something I'd read, perhaps just a couple of days before. I'd think back to it and realize that all I had lingering in my mind, from some classic piece of literature, was a general sense of "goodness," and not much more. "Wow," I'd say, "wow. Catch-22 was a really good book. Just really...great. And funny. And also horrifying?"

There are a few notable exceptions to this general rule, and it occurs to me that most of them are books I read for some class or another. I mean, I still can't recall everything that happened with perfect clarity, but it seems like the mental effort of saying something about what you've read helps you hold onto what you read in the first place.

The point being that I'm going to try and start writing some brief essays about the things I'm watching and reading, not necessarily because I think anyone will give two shits about my opinion, but because I think I'm losing hold of a lot of what I'm learning, simply because I'm not taking the time to say anything about it.

Thus, I'm giving myself the first homework assignment I've had in almost 13 years.

Next up, Helvetica.

I just finished watching Helvetica, which is the only movie I've ever heard of about a font.

I'm a web developer but have no design background, so while I've dealt with fonts quite a bit, I can't speak intelligently about them beyond "that looks clean" or "that looks sophisticated" or "I will not build this in MS Comic Sans."

It's strange to think about something that's omnipresent, like Helvetica is, and to think that someone invented it just fifty years ago. It's like looking up the word "wall" in the encyclopedia and discovering that walls didn't exist before 1970 and that they were invented by a guy named Irving Wall.

The clean, legible quality of the font really appeals to me. In the last couple of years in particular, I've found myself very interested in simplification, just as a broad principle. Much of my life I've lived surrounded by clutter and complication and crap--lots of stuff that doesn't help me in any way but requires maintenance--because I never really realized that there was such benefit to making the difficult decision to get rid of stuff. I never really grokked it.

Some of that probably has to do with the fact that physical life was just more cluttered and complicated when I was younger. Notebook computers were underpowered and expensive, so anyone serious about computers built their own, big beige boxes stuffed with cards and hard drives and cables and wires spilling all out of the back like black spaghetti. You assembled it all yourself, and nothing ever worked flawlessly, and you constantly tweaked and replaced and reshuffled, opening the case over and over again, plugging and replugging cables.

Physical media was the reality, so even in the "digital" age of CD's, you had to have ugly specialized furniture just to keep all your music organized. You honestly needed a TV and a DVD player or a VCR, because watching movies on your computer was impossible. Stacks of old letters were spread throughout boxes of memorabilia in the basement, effectively lost to time.

There are times when I wish I was graduating from college now, with the technology that now exists. I wish I could have started out with a blank slate and not filled it up with so much crap; just a comfortable place to sit, a comfortable place to sleep, my MacBook and phone, a single plate, cup, glass and fork.

That's what Helvetica is to me. Everything I need, nothing I don't, nothing that's in the way, no need for other options.

The time to create the text, rather than fiddle around with what the text looks like.