Category: From the Old Server

Items imported from Manila, one of whose many bad features was a lack of categorization.

Saturday Night at the Movies

by philg

In theaters everywhere (well, maybe in Manhattan):  Rivers and Tides, a documentary showing Andy Goldsworthy at work.  If you’ve not seen Goldworthy’s books basically the idea is to go out into the woods and arrange or alter natural items such as leaves, rocks, dirt, and moss.  Governments and foundations pay him to do this and before Nature reclaims the work he takes photos to sell and put into art books.  I thought that the funniest scene is in his kitchen at home in Scotland.  He finishes a cup of coffee and tells his wife “I’m going out to work at the tree” in much the same tone as a factory worker.  Worth seeing on a big screen, especially for the sequences of leaf chains flowing through streams.


Francis Ford Coppola provides an excellent argument for the DVD format with his director’s commentary on the Conversation (1974), a superb movie to begin with.  He really explains the how and the why of the camera angles.  His commentary on the Godfather DVD is also interesting for students of the interaction between the suits and the creative types in Hollywood.  According to his commentary, Paramount was ready to fire Coppola 2.5 weeks into the filming.  This despite the fact that Coppola had already captured some of what are today regarded as the best scenes in the movie, which of course went on to be one of the most profitable pictures ever.  Mario Puzo’s book, on which the film was based, had become a bestseller and the studio thought a bigger name director was warranted.  Coppola only saved his job by firing 4 of his subordinates whom he’d felt to be disloyal.  This confused the studio sufficiently that he was able to finish shooting.


One Day in September (1999; Academy Award winner) documents Yasser Arafat’s terrorism operation at the 1972 Munich Olympics, told primarily by retired German offiicials, the Dutch widow of the Israeli fencing coach, and Jarnil Al Gashey, one of the killers (currently hiding, with his wife and children, “somewhere in Africa”). 


The plot is vaguely familiar.  Palestinians walk into the Olympic Village, kill two Jews and take nine others hostage.  Despite the murders and the hostages the Games continue.  The German government refuses to let an experienced Israeli hostage rescue team enter the country.  Tens of thousands of curious onlookers and TV crews surround the apartment building in which the Arabs have holed up.  The Bavarian police organize a group of untrained volunteer policemen to rescue the hostages but the effort is called off when they realize that it won’t be possible to surprise the Palestinians given that (a) the TV crews are filming the police sneaking around the roof, and (b) the terrorists are watching TV inside the apartments.  The terrorists ask for a plane to take them to “an unspecified Arab country” and the German government arranges a decoy 727 at a nearby military field, to be filled with policemen (disguised as crewmembers) ready to overpower the leaders.  Events at the airport go wrong very quickly.  Apparently the public was kept informed of the plans and tens of thousands gawkers clogged the roads to the airport.  The police in the 727 get scared and abandon their position, leaving an empty plane.   The two Arabs who go into the 727 to check it out find that there aren’t any pilots so they come back out screaming that the whole thing is a trap.  There is some shooting, meanwhile the hostages are trapped and tied inside two helicopters.  The Germans organize a team of 5 police snipers to take on the 8 Palestinians but do not supply the snipers with radios.  In the ensuing confusion, a sniper on the terminal roof shoots a sniper on the tarmac by mistake. The police forgot to order an armored car and weren’t willing to get anywhere near the terrorists without it (2 hour delay after the shooting started).  The Arabs toss grenades and machine-gun fire into the helicopters, killing all 9 remaining Jews.  Less than two months later, the surviving terrorists are freed by the German government and are given a hero’s welcome in Libya.


Around the same time that the movie was released, Abu Daoud, the planner of the operation, who was living in comfortable retirement in Jordan, released a French-language book about the operation that won the 1999 Palestine Prize for Culture.  Yasser Arafat had denied involvement with the Munich murders at the time, claiming that it was the work of a radical spinoff of his own terrorist organization, but Daoud writes that Arafat saw him off on the mission with the words “Allah protect you”.


The movie is mostly interesting for what it reveals about how much has changed and not changed in 30 years.  The TV clips show a festival atmosphere around Palestinian terrorism that persist in Muslim countries today but which has gone out of fashion in Europe and the U.S.  German families were bringing their kids out to picnic and watch the exotic Arabs with guns.  You probably wouldn’t see that today, even if the authorities would allow families with kids to get within a few hundred yards of an Arab hostage taking.


What hasn’t changed is the success of French and German policies toward violent Arabs.  In the 1970s, Palestinian terrorists flowed freely in and out of these countries’ jails in exchange for the understanding that terrorist attacks would not be carried out in France of Germany proper.  What do we see 30 years later?  The September 11th terrorists using Hamburg as their planning and finance base; France and Germany being Saddam Hussein’s strongest supporters in Europe.

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Happy Friday: the ice pack is breaking up

by philg

A wise man once told me that people tended to be unhappy because they focussed on the problems in their life.  Things that were going well did not require attention and therefore did not get it.  Consequently if you asked a person what he or she had been thinking about it was generally an unpleasant and difficult to solve problem.  This blog will try to fight this tendency with a Happy Friday policy.


Yesterday my friend Brad and I took the DA40 out of its hangar and headed out to Williamstown, Massachusetts.  There are three great art museums within 3 miles of the Harriman and West Airport (paved but VFR-only and surrounded by mountains):  Clark, MassMOCA (installation art fueled by approx. $50 million of Massachusetts taxpayer funds; run by New Yorkers who dress and sound like Dieter on Saturday Night Live), and Williams College’s art museum.  We stopped by Williams College and looked at their magnificent 9th century BC Assyrian tablets plus a visiting show of Tibetan art.


The Assyrian tablets remind one that the current conflict in Iraq is not the first one and that the artifacts of ancient civilization in Iraq have nothing to do with its current Arab rulers.  The Assyrians are the heirs to a literary and cultural traditional that goes back to the Epic of Gilgamesh and Sargon’s kingdom circa 2350 B.C.  For some reason it became conventional in Assyrian literature for heroes to be discovered in baskets floating on rivers, washed into the reeds.  This is how Gilgamesh was found and also Sargon.  For those of you going to a Passover Seder this year, a good way to really piss off your hosts is to start asking questions about whether the story of Moses being found in a basket in the Nile wasn’t simply copied from much earlier Assyrian stories.  Suppose that it is true that Moses grew up in an Egyptian royal household but not that he was found in the river.  That would make Moses, the Jewish leader of the Jews, … an Egyptian pure and simple.  (The descendants of Moses’s relatives would therefore be the Coptic Christian minority that survived the Arab invasion of Egypt.)


Assyrians converted to Christianity shortly after the death of Jesus and have been fighting a losing battle with Muslim Arab invaders since the 7th century A.D.  They seem to be a forgotten oppressed minority in an Arab country but they do have a Web site: http://aina.org/aol/


From the art museum we walked out into the 50-degree sunshine and along a creek filled with snowmelt.  A young woman came up behind us, smiling, red-faced, and walking briskly with wet hair.  She had been celebrating Spring by taking a swim in the freezing water.


For our return flight to Boston we took off just as the sun was setting in the Berkshires.  The hilly landscape around the Connecticut River was painted with a pinkish light reminiscent of the Hudson River School.  We could distinguish the subtle tones with our eyes but there is no way that film would have captured it so Brad and I just enjoyed it.  In flying over lakes we noticed that the pack ice was broken up and covering less than 50 percent of the surface.  Spring is here.  Brad flies for American Airlines so you’d think that he would have become jaded with aerial scenery but he looked out the window in wonder (and in fear; I did much of the flight with a hood on so that I could see only the instruments while Brad looked for other airplanes and critiqued my performance on 4 instrument approaches).


Now that we New Englanders seem finally to escaped the clutches of Winter it may be worth reflecting that it could have been much worse.  Here’s a note from Marion, an old friend who lives in Alaska:



I am curious whether you heard as far away as Boston about the storm of the century we had here in Anchorage about two weeks ago. 130 mph winds, right off the inlet and onto our poor little condo. The winds and low temperatures also meant there was about a -30 degree F windchill. First the power went out and the car alarms in the neighborhood were going off like crazy. Debris was flying everywhere, trees were going down, and the dust was high. Then the roof flew off next door (from the green house on the corner), up about 15′ and onto our building’s roof, crushing it and breaking a joist. Boards were falling from the ceiling onto Sylvia & Jerry while they were in bed (Jerry tried to dismiss Mom’s complaints about the roof falling in until a board hit him in the ear! That is what he deserved). Then, early in the morning, our downstairs neighbor, Sherman, came flying into my condo announcing that the pipes had burst and water was spraying everywhere. We had to shut off the water. Concurrent with this, we also lost our heat. The water and heat stayed off for about a week. 

Marion lives in Anchorage, the largest city in Alaska and one of the places with the mildest climate. Full post, including comments

The Life of a Public School Teacher

by philg

In an effort to adapt to the blog culture, perhaps it is best to alternate between the themes of public schools and politics in the Middle East.  Here then is a public school-related posting.  Most of the opinions one hears expressed on public schools come from folks who’ve not set foot in a school for a decade or more.  This story comes from a friend who is a very well-educated teacher of high school math/science and gifted/talented classes.  I asked her why, given that so much taxpayer dough ($11,000+ per student per year in Cambridge, MA) was allocated to public schools, people still weren’t happy with the results.


Her words:



Maybe the perception is there that money gets poured into the public schools, but I certainly never see it.  I take home $1500 a month after taxes and have an increasingly expensive healthcare plan.  I’ve been waiting for five months for the state to consider whether to pay me at the Masters degree level, which would add $3500 more over the year.  With my student loans and other unconvered expenses like vision and part of dental, I save no money.  But obviously we don’t do this for the money. 


How about the job satisfaction?  I came back to my OKAY job to have it turn into a HORRIBLE job in one week.  All my stuff got moved w/out my knowledge, some personal things were thrown away, and I lost my space for consultations, meetings with parents, and computer access… This was all done to accommodate an administrator they moved into the area (a teacher work area, how humiliating for her).  I am no longer allowed a key to the area so I can’t get to my desk much of the time.  So now I keep half my crap on a cart, which I roll from room to room, getting stuck on any small bump, losing papers all over the floor.  I keep my purse and lunch out in the lockbox of my truck so I can get to it.  Of course, ALL the teachers lost their one last work area, and since even if they have their own room, it is used by a floater teacher during their planning, they either have to try and work at their desk with a class going on around them or wander rather aimlessly in the halls…. The room I use for one of my classes, which is out in one of the portables (so the above-mentioned cart gets rolled outside, where gusts of wind tend to blow things everywhere), now THAT teacher stays in there while I’m trying to teach, and on Friday even kept his radio on and had a loud conversation with one of this students.  Thank God my students (gifted and sharp) are very patient and understanding, because I feel that my environment is truly making me incompetent as a teacher.   I had to move my parent conference the other day from one room to another halfway through because my room was booked for a class, and another room had just opened up.  And none of this was held near my files, nor could I get to them, so if I needed to look something up, too bad.  Combine all of this with my good ol’ boy/former coach principal YELLING at me for (a) crying when I discovered personal things had been thrown away,  (b) for sending an email to the gifted supervisor saying I was concerned because one of the vice-principals was trying to make my gifted class a dumping ground for other students, and one of the gifted student’s parents is already ready to sue us, and (c) for having the AUDACITY to ask that same vice-principal if the students he dumped in my class came with teacher recommendations, because their academic background was weak, and he told me he spoke with them and thought they should try it (later the same kids showed up, said, ‘What’s this class?’, and immediately dropped the classes because of difficulty).


When I was being yelled at, the principal was saying things like, ‘You’re gonna sit there and listen, little lady, and I don’t want no attitude out of you… I’m the boss here, I say what happens… I’m in control, and if you don’t like it [they] can pull gifted out of this school…’


Like I said, none of this is particularly unusual.  The principal is stressed and yells at lots of people.  I know 7 people (plus myself) who are leaving next year because of working conditions. 


End of her words.


She starts her new job in a private school this fall.

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The Second Violinist

by philg

The Second Violinist is in a practice room at Symphony Hall.  The police knock on the door:  “We’ve got some bad news for you, sir.  Your house burned down and your children were injured.  They’ve been taken to the hospital.”


“That’s terrible!” exclaimed the Second Violinist.  “How did it happen?”


“I’m sorry to have to tell you this, sir,” continued the policeman, “but it seems that the Conductor has been having an affair with your wife.  They were in your bedroom, smoking cigarettes after having sex, and got careless.  The cigarettes lit the bedclothes on fire and then it spread to the rest of the house.”


The Second Violinist seemed stunned for a moment as a look of wonder spread over his face.  “The Conductor?  … Came to MY house?”


——————————


This story may explain how things spiraled into violence in Iraq.  George W. kept mentioning Saddam and Iraq in his speeches.  If Saddam had been watching CNN he’d have seen the most powerful man in the world focussed on him and the country that he owned.  It would have been a lot scarier for Saddam if W. had said, in response to a question about Iraq, “I delegated the issue to a one-star general, who has full authority to bomb Saddam if necessary, and he will be giving me a report six months from now.”


I recall seeing a headline “President delivers ultimatum to Saddam Hussein”.  How much more scared would Saddam have been if the headline had read “Administrative assistant to 3rd Undersecretary of State delivers ultimatum to Saddam”?

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What they should teach in public schools

by philg

Third World dictators come and go.  Preppie U.S. presidents come and go.  The U.S. military comes and goes (from various far-away lands).  What topic is sufficiently eternal to merit inclusion as my very first blog entry?  Public education!


A friend grew up in a rich suburb of Chicago and went to a public school full of rich kids.  “In our school we read all of the great philosophers and were asked by the teachers to figure out which of these philosophies we agreed with and would like to apply to our lives and our society,” he related.  “The problem with most public schools is that they don’t teach this kind of critical thinking,” he continued, “I’d like to see every kid in America educated like this.”


I replied “that doesn’t make sense for schools in middle-class and poorer neighborhoods.   With the increasing income disparity in the United States, it is very unlikely that a middle- or lower-class kid will ever become wealthy enough to influence politics.  So it is irrelevant what he or she thinks is a fair, just, or optimum law or philosophy of life.  We should teach middle class kids to obey authority mindlessly because that’s what they’ll have to do anyway.”

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