Oct. 30th, 1988
A long awaited, highly treasured thriller is at last out on tape, and it is of such nightmarish impact that I find it hard to get it out of my mind.
The release of director John Frankenheimer's "The Manchurian Candidate," a film of such disturbing relationships and political satire that it can be classified as both weird and powerful. Frankenheimer, master of deep focus and a director of unforgettable scenes and uneven wholes, was at the top of his young form in 1962, casting Laurence Harvey, Frank Sinatra, and Angela Lansbury in a filming of Richard Condon's book of the same name.
The tale is about an unapproachable, ill-liked sergeant, Raymond Shaw, who is captured, along with his platoon, during the Korean war. He and his men are brainwashed for three days by Chinese experts under Soviet instruction and released near their own lines.
On his return to the U.S., Shaw is put under the control of foreign agents, who plan to place their own man, Shaw's stepfather, senator John Issland, into the White House.
In Condon's book, the story seems wildly improbable, but the film smokes you along through the strength of it's strange images and through the incredible acting of Angela Lansbury, who plays the most monsterous mother I've ever seen on the screen. The plan to take over the U.S. moves forward to its devastating conclusion, only to be foiled by the human psyche's need for expression, in this case through nightmares.
The nightmares caused by the brainwashing are odd, indeed. The men in the platoon believe they are at a flower show, listening to a lecture by a cracked-voiced dowager. (An imaginative touch is that the sole black soldier's dreams the ladies are black too.) One shot shows the dowager-lecturer speaking to male communist officials in a banner decorated lecture hall. Another shows the actual Chinese brainwashing expert addressing the ladies of the garden club. The constant shifting of perspective, between reality and dreamlike fantasy, is so involving that I sat stunned.
The other set-piece to watch for is the presidential convention. The noise, the confusion, the energy and enthusiasm are all there, and the echoing sounds of Madison Square Garden, when heard through a Hi-Fi VCR, put your right in the center of things.
But it is the character of Raymond's mother, brilliantly played by Lansbury, that is the emotional center of the movie. In action, she makes Cinderella's stepmother seem like Saint Joan, yet she is also devastatingly human. In a grotesque expression of mother-love, she takes her hypnotized son's face in her hands, tells him that she will make her mentors pay for his sacrifice, and then kisses him full on the lips. Even today this 26-year-old scene is a shocker.
A subplot featuring a silly romance between Frank Sinatra and Janet Leigh was lifted entirely from the book, where it didn't work, either. This distraction is the only fault this superb thriller has.
"The Manchurian Candidate," the film, has a strange history itself. Though it was critically acclaimed on its release, it was pulled from theatres after Kennedy was assassinated. Frank Sinatra, one of the key players (he discovers the plot through his own nightmares), acquired rights to the movie and released if for video tape only a few months ago. To publicize the tape, a new print of the movie was made and shown in a Los Angeles theater where it was so popular that "The Manchurian Candidate" was subsequently released inmost major cities, and even in Willimstown's Images Theater, where I saw jaded college students cringe with horror at each killing and gasp at the revelation of who Shaw's American controller was.
This grand film can be rented in Bennington at Cross Town Video, Picaflic, Record Rack and The Video Stop.
Mac Rush Works in the Banner composing room.
Just a few notes from me. There's one spot where the word "Your" should be the word "You." I don't know if this is an editing error on my dad's part or if it happened somewhere before it actually went to print. There's no way to know for sure where the error happened but I can say, my dad was fanatical in his editing.
Also, my dad spells theater, both as "theater" and "theatre" in this column. I copied everything as it was written. Were he alive, I'd certainly ask why the different spellings were used.
Tuesday, January 7, 2014
Buying a VCR
Oct. 23rd, 1988
There is nothing like the purchase of a videocassette recorder, or VCR, to confuse the novice or even the technically minded who has not kept up with the field, so perhaps a summary of what's available and worthwhile would be helpful, especially with Christmas coming on.
"Christmas already? Aren't you rushing the season?"
Not really. Not if you have to save for an expensive gift. Not if you want to put something on "layaway." Not if you want to take advantage of pre-Thanksgiving sales.
Not if you need time to convince yourself that a self-indulgent purchase is really a "gift for the whole family."
Consumer VCRs come in three major formats: eight-millimeter, Beta, and VHS; and VHS dominates the market and is the subject of this discussion.
After years of tumbling prices, VHS VCRs, thanks to the movement of the dollar against the Yen, are slowly climbing, though makers of low-end machines are fighting the increase by building their machines in low-wage Far Eastern countries, by further automating their production facilities, and by offering perceived value for real price increases. But in any case low priced VCRs are a whale of a bargain, offering such features as wireless remote control and frequency synthesized tuning (whereby you can access channels directly) for less then $300.
Incredibly, VCRs have become a mature technology in just ten years, and it is hard to buy a bad one. No matter what you pay, you'll get a pretty good picture with fine color, the ability to record while you're away, the capacity to watch one show while recording another, and the enormously satisfying power to "fast forward" though or "zap" commercials by remote control.
So what do you get for more money? The first step up is a the enhanced capacity that more video heads provide. All a tape machine needs is two heads on a revolving drum to record or play back a picture. But a pair of heads for the high (SP) and an additional pair for the slow speed (EP or SLP) gets the best picture from each. Unfortunately, few VCRs are available with this feature.
Most "four-head" VCRs use two heads for record and play-back, just like the cheapest, and two more for the "special effects," that is, noise-free still frame, fast motion, and slow motion. This feature is fun, but is not essential for most people.
At higher prices ($450 or so), two other features become prominent. One is digital effects, which is a process whereby the analog TV signal is converted by a computer into numbers, and these numbers are processed before being converted back into an analog signal again. Digital processing allows still yet better "special effects" than multiple heads alone offer, and allows you to watch one picture while another station is showing in the corner of your screen. The type of digital processing that would eliminate "snow" and "ghosts" is not yet widely available due to cost, and the current digital processing is largely useless in day-today use.
The other feature introduced in this price category is MTS, or stereo broadcast sound. If your TV does not have stereo, one of these VCRs hooked to a stereo system will upgrade your viewing experience if your local channels have stereo. In Bennington, only WMHT channel 17 (PBS), and WNYT channel 13 (NBC) transmit in stereo, and none of the scrambled channels on our local cable system are passed along in stereo. Satellite dish owners can get stereo from scrambled channels on their equipment.
As well as sending stereo sound through your audio system, a stereo VCR puts this sound on your tape in one of two ways. The less expensive is "linear" stereo, where the sound is laid down on the edge of the tape by a stationary head just like the monaural sound on a cheaper deck. The problem is that the already narrow, slow-moving track is now split into left and right channels, and the sound from these channels, even with Dolby noise reduction is nothing to brag about.
The other way to lay sound on the tape is with heads on the spinning video drum, and this is how the Hi-Fi system works. The sound is now excellent, and to me, it is worth every penny, even though Hi-Fi units start at more than $500. Sound wise, "Top Gun," played through my stereo, is more intelligible, clearer, more static-free than the sound I heard when I saw it in a local theatre. And when copying tapes, there is no audible loss in sound quality.
At the top of the heap is Super VHS, with better resolution than the normal VHS. With machines more than a thousand dollars, S-VHS tape costing $19 per cassette, and little software around, I'll pass for the time being.
Some hints on shopping:
I would buy from an established dealer, not a discount store. The hassles involved with the warranty work and help in learning the machine are not worth the discount store savings to me.
I would buy either a low-priced, brand name VCR, or if I had more cash, the lowest priced Hi-Fi VCR. Hi-Fi is the only extra cost feature that truly enhances what you watch.
And finally, I would try out the machine in the store, not only for picture quality, but for the ease in setting the timer for unmanned recording. Just because a VCR has "on screen programming" does not mean it is in fact the easiest to use.
If you're as amazed as I am that the darn things work at all, you'll be happy with your purchase.
Mac Rush works in the Banner composing room.
Just a few comments from me. My dad often received harsh criticism for this type of dryer, techno jargon type of information. Thumbing his nose at the nay-sayers, his response was "It's my column, I'll write whatever the hell I want."
Personally, I think 25 odd years later, it's a pretty funny read considering how technology has changed, not to mention the prices for something that is now essentially extinct.
I also feel obligated to mention that my dad used the movie "Top Gun" to demonstrate his high quality stereo frequently to all his friends. This often occurred at two am, when I had school in the morning and I'd wake up to my windows vibrating, stagger out and beg my dad to "Turn it down!"
There is nothing like the purchase of a videocassette recorder, or VCR, to confuse the novice or even the technically minded who has not kept up with the field, so perhaps a summary of what's available and worthwhile would be helpful, especially with Christmas coming on.
"Christmas already? Aren't you rushing the season?"
Not really. Not if you have to save for an expensive gift. Not if you want to put something on "layaway." Not if you want to take advantage of pre-Thanksgiving sales.
Not if you need time to convince yourself that a self-indulgent purchase is really a "gift for the whole family."
Consumer VCRs come in three major formats: eight-millimeter, Beta, and VHS; and VHS dominates the market and is the subject of this discussion.
After years of tumbling prices, VHS VCRs, thanks to the movement of the dollar against the Yen, are slowly climbing, though makers of low-end machines are fighting the increase by building their machines in low-wage Far Eastern countries, by further automating their production facilities, and by offering perceived value for real price increases. But in any case low priced VCRs are a whale of a bargain, offering such features as wireless remote control and frequency synthesized tuning (whereby you can access channels directly) for less then $300.
Incredibly, VCRs have become a mature technology in just ten years, and it is hard to buy a bad one. No matter what you pay, you'll get a pretty good picture with fine color, the ability to record while you're away, the capacity to watch one show while recording another, and the enormously satisfying power to "fast forward" though or "zap" commercials by remote control.
So what do you get for more money? The first step up is a the enhanced capacity that more video heads provide. All a tape machine needs is two heads on a revolving drum to record or play back a picture. But a pair of heads for the high (SP) and an additional pair for the slow speed (EP or SLP) gets the best picture from each. Unfortunately, few VCRs are available with this feature.
Most "four-head" VCRs use two heads for record and play-back, just like the cheapest, and two more for the "special effects," that is, noise-free still frame, fast motion, and slow motion. This feature is fun, but is not essential for most people.
At higher prices ($450 or so), two other features become prominent. One is digital effects, which is a process whereby the analog TV signal is converted by a computer into numbers, and these numbers are processed before being converted back into an analog signal again. Digital processing allows still yet better "special effects" than multiple heads alone offer, and allows you to watch one picture while another station is showing in the corner of your screen. The type of digital processing that would eliminate "snow" and "ghosts" is not yet widely available due to cost, and the current digital processing is largely useless in day-today use.
The other feature introduced in this price category is MTS, or stereo broadcast sound. If your TV does not have stereo, one of these VCRs hooked to a stereo system will upgrade your viewing experience if your local channels have stereo. In Bennington, only WMHT channel 17 (PBS), and WNYT channel 13 (NBC) transmit in stereo, and none of the scrambled channels on our local cable system are passed along in stereo. Satellite dish owners can get stereo from scrambled channels on their equipment.
As well as sending stereo sound through your audio system, a stereo VCR puts this sound on your tape in one of two ways. The less expensive is "linear" stereo, where the sound is laid down on the edge of the tape by a stationary head just like the monaural sound on a cheaper deck. The problem is that the already narrow, slow-moving track is now split into left and right channels, and the sound from these channels, even with Dolby noise reduction is nothing to brag about.
The other way to lay sound on the tape is with heads on the spinning video drum, and this is how the Hi-Fi system works. The sound is now excellent, and to me, it is worth every penny, even though Hi-Fi units start at more than $500. Sound wise, "Top Gun," played through my stereo, is more intelligible, clearer, more static-free than the sound I heard when I saw it in a local theatre. And when copying tapes, there is no audible loss in sound quality.
At the top of the heap is Super VHS, with better resolution than the normal VHS. With machines more than a thousand dollars, S-VHS tape costing $19 per cassette, and little software around, I'll pass for the time being.
Some hints on shopping:
I would buy from an established dealer, not a discount store. The hassles involved with the warranty work and help in learning the machine are not worth the discount store savings to me.
I would buy either a low-priced, brand name VCR, or if I had more cash, the lowest priced Hi-Fi VCR. Hi-Fi is the only extra cost feature that truly enhances what you watch.
And finally, I would try out the machine in the store, not only for picture quality, but for the ease in setting the timer for unmanned recording. Just because a VCR has "on screen programming" does not mean it is in fact the easiest to use.
If you're as amazed as I am that the darn things work at all, you'll be happy with your purchase.
Mac Rush works in the Banner composing room.
Just a few comments from me. My dad often received harsh criticism for this type of dryer, techno jargon type of information. Thumbing his nose at the nay-sayers, his response was "It's my column, I'll write whatever the hell I want."
Personally, I think 25 odd years later, it's a pretty funny read considering how technology has changed, not to mention the prices for something that is now essentially extinct.
I also feel obligated to mention that my dad used the movie "Top Gun" to demonstrate his high quality stereo frequently to all his friends. This often occurred at two am, when I had school in the morning and I'd wake up to my windows vibrating, stagger out and beg my dad to "Turn it down!"
Watching political 'debates'
Oct. 16, 1988
Debates are important, right? They let us see the combatants think on their feet, right? They show us how the key members of our future administration react under pressure, right?
Wrong.
All we've seen so far is that Bush and Dukakis can memorize zingers, that Bentsen "Looks more presidential" than Quayle, whatever that means, that all four can evade tough (or in many cases, nonsensical) questions, and that anybody can be briefed with generic responses to most inquiries.
We see that all four candidates either lack, (in Quayle's case to an appalling degree) imagination under these artificial conditions, or that if they have imagination or originality, they are afraid to use it, for fear that they may blunder. Apparently each debate is approached as a young football team approaches a first-time championship game. The candidates' mind-set is not on the offense, not on blowing the other team out with chancy, original plays, but on avoiding mistakes, on defensive action, with conservative reciting of the party line that in the case of the two debates so far, leads not to insight, but to memorized repetition.
Not that these debates mean much anyway, no matter who "scores points." A National Public Radio commentator remarked that the vice-presidential debate would have no effect on the election unless "Quayle falls off the podium or Bentsen falls asleep," and he's dead on. This artificial nonsense achieves little more than to give us a 90 minute look at candidates acting like performing seals.
It's tough to assess a candidate in these days of speechwriters, public relations advisers, makeup artists and lying press secretaries. The latest overlay in the public relations field is "spin" people whose job, believe it or not, is to talk up their candidate's performance in an attempt to influence the attending journalists.
And the irony is that we cannot judge how a president will act in a crisis or in the long term on the basis of "debate" performance anyway, because the qualities that make for a good public relations dream do not necessarily make for a good president.
A good president (or vice president) needs the following attributes to be effective:
He has to be a diplomat - if he's not, Congress will geld him.
He has to be willing to settle for short-range compromise to achieve long-range goals.
He has to make the difficult policy decisions and convince us that though we need to sacrifice, we or our children will benefit in the long run.
He has to choose qualified experts who can advise him quickly and accurately on matters that may require instant decisions (whether to push the "red button" or not, for example).
And most of all, he must have a vision of what this country and the world should be, and he must let us know what that vision is, so that we may choose to vote for him or not. We must not get lost in the minutia of detail; we must see if the candidate's vision, his goals, are ones we share.
Beauty does not a president make: Lincoln was so ugly, he was characterized as an ape in contemporary cartoons. Personality is not always the key: Reagan is extremely personable, with the best sense of humor of any president I've ever seen, yet that humor does not give him insight into the world of the suffering and the distressed.
And the ability to "think quickly on your feet" does not mean much except under artificial circumstances. Kennedy was a quick, attractive, and effective talker on TV but many of his decisions as president showed that this same "quick thinking" revealed in the debates was not appropriate to presidential decision making. Debates do not show the ability to reflect, to be thoughtful. They do not show how a man reacts to difficult problems in private or within a small group.
Kennedy won by being attractive and smooth. Reagan won by being amiable and likable. And as much as we like these lovely characteristics in a friend or a con-man, they and the other qualities of people who "perform" well in a debate do not ensure a good president. Eisenhower was irascible and unpleasant, in spite of that winning grin, and was a fine president.
So how are we going to judge our leaders when there is zero correlation between "TV" ability and presidential leadership? We have to rely on past achievement, and on how our candidates got to where they are. It's not easy, not when we are unwilling to do the deep investigation into our candidates' past an understanding of them requires.
And so most of us will rely on personal attractiveness, smooth talk, and the rest of the TV values that have been beaten into us, and we will choose on the basis of impact and impression rather than study and introspection.
I wish us luck.
Mac Rush works in the Banner's composing room.
Debates are important, right? They let us see the combatants think on their feet, right? They show us how the key members of our future administration react under pressure, right?
Wrong.
All we've seen so far is that Bush and Dukakis can memorize zingers, that Bentsen "Looks more presidential" than Quayle, whatever that means, that all four can evade tough (or in many cases, nonsensical) questions, and that anybody can be briefed with generic responses to most inquiries.
We see that all four candidates either lack, (in Quayle's case to an appalling degree) imagination under these artificial conditions, or that if they have imagination or originality, they are afraid to use it, for fear that they may blunder. Apparently each debate is approached as a young football team approaches a first-time championship game. The candidates' mind-set is not on the offense, not on blowing the other team out with chancy, original plays, but on avoiding mistakes, on defensive action, with conservative reciting of the party line that in the case of the two debates so far, leads not to insight, but to memorized repetition.
Not that these debates mean much anyway, no matter who "scores points." A National Public Radio commentator remarked that the vice-presidential debate would have no effect on the election unless "Quayle falls off the podium or Bentsen falls asleep," and he's dead on. This artificial nonsense achieves little more than to give us a 90 minute look at candidates acting like performing seals.
It's tough to assess a candidate in these days of speechwriters, public relations advisers, makeup artists and lying press secretaries. The latest overlay in the public relations field is "spin" people whose job, believe it or not, is to talk up their candidate's performance in an attempt to influence the attending journalists.
And the irony is that we cannot judge how a president will act in a crisis or in the long term on the basis of "debate" performance anyway, because the qualities that make for a good public relations dream do not necessarily make for a good president.
A good president (or vice president) needs the following attributes to be effective:
He has to be a diplomat - if he's not, Congress will geld him.
He has to be willing to settle for short-range compromise to achieve long-range goals.
He has to make the difficult policy decisions and convince us that though we need to sacrifice, we or our children will benefit in the long run.
He has to choose qualified experts who can advise him quickly and accurately on matters that may require instant decisions (whether to push the "red button" or not, for example).
And most of all, he must have a vision of what this country and the world should be, and he must let us know what that vision is, so that we may choose to vote for him or not. We must not get lost in the minutia of detail; we must see if the candidate's vision, his goals, are ones we share.
Beauty does not a president make: Lincoln was so ugly, he was characterized as an ape in contemporary cartoons. Personality is not always the key: Reagan is extremely personable, with the best sense of humor of any president I've ever seen, yet that humor does not give him insight into the world of the suffering and the distressed.
And the ability to "think quickly on your feet" does not mean much except under artificial circumstances. Kennedy was a quick, attractive, and effective talker on TV but many of his decisions as president showed that this same "quick thinking" revealed in the debates was not appropriate to presidential decision making. Debates do not show the ability to reflect, to be thoughtful. They do not show how a man reacts to difficult problems in private or within a small group.
Kennedy won by being attractive and smooth. Reagan won by being amiable and likable. And as much as we like these lovely characteristics in a friend or a con-man, they and the other qualities of people who "perform" well in a debate do not ensure a good president. Eisenhower was irascible and unpleasant, in spite of that winning grin, and was a fine president.
So how are we going to judge our leaders when there is zero correlation between "TV" ability and presidential leadership? We have to rely on past achievement, and on how our candidates got to where they are. It's not easy, not when we are unwilling to do the deep investigation into our candidates' past an understanding of them requires.
And so most of us will rely on personal attractiveness, smooth talk, and the rest of the TV values that have been beaten into us, and we will choose on the basis of impact and impression rather than study and introspection.
I wish us luck.
Mac Rush works in the Banner's composing room.
Monday, January 6, 2014
Watching "The Mind"
Oct. 9, 1988
Since the commercial networks have long ago decided that mind-stretching programming is not profitable enough, that titillation and the glorification of the mediocre are what the "public" wants, only PBS gives us the opportunity to learn new perspectives, the mental growth that was expected of TV as a whole on it's inception, 40 some years ago.
When I think of recent television that has touched both my heart and my mind, I think of Brownowski's "Civilization," Attenborough's "The Living Planet," the superb multi-parter on the English language, and Nova, the high quality weekly series on science. The latest in this Public Broadcasting Service tradition is "The Mind," a nine-part show about, well, if you have one, you've already guessed.
The debut program, airing on Monday, Oct. 10, is more an introduction than anything else, setting the stage for the eight to follow. Its theme is simple, though well laid out with examples: "The mind is what the brain does..."
It opens with a discussion of animals and contrasts their mental processes with those of early (17,000 years ago) man, following up with how early man might have differed from what we are pleased to call "modern man." Jane Goodall, the British zoologist who studied chimpanzees in the wild as her life's work, discusses the creatures' similarities to us, their ability to make tools, their ability to communicate, their propensity to wage war on their own kind, and their social structure, best exemplified by "grooming," which she compares to two guys having a drink together in a bar.
Yet when asked about how chimps differ from humankind, she replies without hesitation, "No spoken language," describing talk as that which frees humans from the present, which allows us to reflect on the past and plan for the future.
Desmond Morris, probably best known for his best selling book, "The Naked Ape," expands upon Goodall, adding that humans can use symbols to represent ideas and objects. A drawing of our brain compared to that of a chimpanzee shows many more similarities than differences, and even the sizes are in the same ballpark, compared to other land mammals, yet as Morris points out, we have passed a threshold and we can sit, close our eyes, and just think, and become a different individual - something beyond the brightest chimp.
We are capable, according to Professor Nicholas Humphry, of predicting the behavior of our fellows according to the conceptual model that we create from experience, and of therefore interacting and socializing in ways not open to other animals.
At this point, this first episode goes into an explanation of the approach it will take on it's subject, an explanation that is unbalanced in that it relies too heavily on heartrending examples and not enough on the sort of knowledgeable exposition that characterizes the first portion. It starts well with Dr. John Searle of the University of California, Berkley, telling us that mind is the name of a process, not a thing. As Daniel Robinson, a professor at Georgetown, points out, the search for mind begins with philosophy, and philosophy as we know it began in ancient Greece, "when men realized that knowledge was not the simple product of experience, but something that had to be analyzed, examined like any other phenomenon of nature."
Aristotle, whose heritage is still powerful, especially in those of a religious bent, articulated mind-body dualism, the belief that the mind and body, though they affect each other, are essentially separate, and that the laws of mind differ from the laws of nature.
It wasn't until Darwin's "Descent of Man" That this dualism began to lose its grip, and that the idea of mind evolving from animal roots began to gain ground in the world view of thinking people. Prior to Darwin, the mind could not truly be studied, except for introspective brainstorming, because it was not thought to follow the knowable laws the rest of the universe does.
Though this episode describes the pioneering Freud's theories of sexual repression and the warring conscious and unconscious, it rather misses the point, because Freud was important not so much for his theories, as for his approach, that mind can be studied, that we can use it's visible characteristics to infer its processes, that we do not have to pray for knowledge of the mind of God o learn about ourselves.
To judge from the first episode, "The Mind" is not going to be as involving as some previous PBS documentaries. It lacks the strong personalities of Brownoski and Attenboroush, men who loved their work, men who made us feel their passion for it. And, as I mentioned before, it's emphasis of presentation lacks balance. As interesting as are the autistic young bicyclist, and the ex-choirmaster who has lost his ability to remember anything more than a couple of minutes past, both are meant to show the mind is the product of a physical entity, and how when that entity is damaged so is the mind. The long almost biographies of these unfortunates finally distract from the series theme, that the mind is knowable because it is the out-growth of physical processes.
So the naturalistic approach to the study of the mind is what this series will take, and that probably won't sit well with people who believe that the mind should be studied only from the perspective of a divine soul. But what is learned from religious revelation is only that which the revelator reveals to us, and that is not truly study at all.
Vermont ETV Channel 28, which was kind enough to lend me a preview tape, and WMHT Channel 17 will show part 1 of "The Mind" on Wednesday, Oct 12 at 8 p.m., and ETV will repeat on Monday, Oct. 17 at 1:10 p.m. New episodes will follow at the same time each week.
Mac Rush works in the Banner's-composing room.
Since the commercial networks have long ago decided that mind-stretching programming is not profitable enough, that titillation and the glorification of the mediocre are what the "public" wants, only PBS gives us the opportunity to learn new perspectives, the mental growth that was expected of TV as a whole on it's inception, 40 some years ago.
When I think of recent television that has touched both my heart and my mind, I think of Brownowski's "Civilization," Attenborough's "The Living Planet," the superb multi-parter on the English language, and Nova, the high quality weekly series on science. The latest in this Public Broadcasting Service tradition is "The Mind," a nine-part show about, well, if you have one, you've already guessed.
The debut program, airing on Monday, Oct. 10, is more an introduction than anything else, setting the stage for the eight to follow. Its theme is simple, though well laid out with examples: "The mind is what the brain does..."
It opens with a discussion of animals and contrasts their mental processes with those of early (17,000 years ago) man, following up with how early man might have differed from what we are pleased to call "modern man." Jane Goodall, the British zoologist who studied chimpanzees in the wild as her life's work, discusses the creatures' similarities to us, their ability to make tools, their ability to communicate, their propensity to wage war on their own kind, and their social structure, best exemplified by "grooming," which she compares to two guys having a drink together in a bar.
Yet when asked about how chimps differ from humankind, she replies without hesitation, "No spoken language," describing talk as that which frees humans from the present, which allows us to reflect on the past and plan for the future.
Desmond Morris, probably best known for his best selling book, "The Naked Ape," expands upon Goodall, adding that humans can use symbols to represent ideas and objects. A drawing of our brain compared to that of a chimpanzee shows many more similarities than differences, and even the sizes are in the same ballpark, compared to other land mammals, yet as Morris points out, we have passed a threshold and we can sit, close our eyes, and just think, and become a different individual - something beyond the brightest chimp.
We are capable, according to Professor Nicholas Humphry, of predicting the behavior of our fellows according to the conceptual model that we create from experience, and of therefore interacting and socializing in ways not open to other animals.
At this point, this first episode goes into an explanation of the approach it will take on it's subject, an explanation that is unbalanced in that it relies too heavily on heartrending examples and not enough on the sort of knowledgeable exposition that characterizes the first portion. It starts well with Dr. John Searle of the University of California, Berkley, telling us that mind is the name of a process, not a thing. As Daniel Robinson, a professor at Georgetown, points out, the search for mind begins with philosophy, and philosophy as we know it began in ancient Greece, "when men realized that knowledge was not the simple product of experience, but something that had to be analyzed, examined like any other phenomenon of nature."
Aristotle, whose heritage is still powerful, especially in those of a religious bent, articulated mind-body dualism, the belief that the mind and body, though they affect each other, are essentially separate, and that the laws of mind differ from the laws of nature.
It wasn't until Darwin's "Descent of Man" That this dualism began to lose its grip, and that the idea of mind evolving from animal roots began to gain ground in the world view of thinking people. Prior to Darwin, the mind could not truly be studied, except for introspective brainstorming, because it was not thought to follow the knowable laws the rest of the universe does.
Though this episode describes the pioneering Freud's theories of sexual repression and the warring conscious and unconscious, it rather misses the point, because Freud was important not so much for his theories, as for his approach, that mind can be studied, that we can use it's visible characteristics to infer its processes, that we do not have to pray for knowledge of the mind of God o learn about ourselves.
To judge from the first episode, "The Mind" is not going to be as involving as some previous PBS documentaries. It lacks the strong personalities of Brownoski and Attenboroush, men who loved their work, men who made us feel their passion for it. And, as I mentioned before, it's emphasis of presentation lacks balance. As interesting as are the autistic young bicyclist, and the ex-choirmaster who has lost his ability to remember anything more than a couple of minutes past, both are meant to show the mind is the product of a physical entity, and how when that entity is damaged so is the mind. The long almost biographies of these unfortunates finally distract from the series theme, that the mind is knowable because it is the out-growth of physical processes.
So the naturalistic approach to the study of the mind is what this series will take, and that probably won't sit well with people who believe that the mind should be studied only from the perspective of a divine soul. But what is learned from religious revelation is only that which the revelator reveals to us, and that is not truly study at all.
Vermont ETV Channel 28, which was kind enough to lend me a preview tape, and WMHT Channel 17 will show part 1 of "The Mind" on Wednesday, Oct 12 at 8 p.m., and ETV will repeat on Monday, Oct. 17 at 1:10 p.m. New episodes will follow at the same time each week.
Mac Rush works in the Banner's-composing room.
Watching Sports
Oct. 2, 1988
What a great couple of weeks for TV sports fans. The pro football season is well under way with the Jets surprising us all, and with my Giants lucking out against Dallas before the Rams showed them how real football is played; at least eh Cardinals kept the Redskins in check, and I can maintain the hope of the desperate.
Baseball winds down as the Red Sox give us two wonderful weekends of showing the Yankees who's boss of the American League East, and I maintain a childlike faith that the pennant and the series can be theirs, though my cold, dispassionate intellect reminds me that they have the worst record of any division leader this year. Hey, that's just because they're in a tough division, right?
Then there is the Olympics, the wonderfully glorious Olympics missing no major countries for the first time in 12 years. NBC's coverage is very different than ABC's has been in the past, with cameras jumping from event to event much too quickly for my taste. I like to get involved with a sport, especially an unfamiliar one, and that takes continuous exposure. But the snippets of biographical information on the athletes and their sports and countries are nicely done, and the jingoism of past games is refreshingly absent in the announcing and commentary. I find the bicycle sprint racing fascinating, and the traditional track, field, and swimming events show individual and team effort at their finest.
I feel sadness at Chris Evert's awful performance against Italy's Raffaella Reggi, and finding that Ben Johnson's world-breaking 100 meter run was spurious - that he had traces of steroids in hi body, just about breaks my heart.
On the other hand, Jackie Joyner-Kersee's dominance of the heptathlon, making her one of the top athletes of any generation was a delight to watch. The youth of the female gymnast and swimmers is frightening, as is the chance of injury faced by divers and other high-risk athletes.
So why is athletics important to so many of us, both participants and spectators? Why do we care about events that have no impact on the "real world"? The answer lies in the our very nature as sentient beings. We are forced to structure the world in such a way that we can survive in it, and since most of us have the good fortune to not have to spend every waking minute in the business of survival, we look for or create structure to fill our leisure time as well. This structure that we impose upon ourselves can take the form of politics, fine arts, performing arts, science, mathematics, sports, or any other of a huge array of activities, and all these activities serve one purpose, to avoid boredom, and to give us the satisfaction inherent in externally oriented mental activity, because internally directed psychic activity leads to disassociation from the world, to madness.
Sports is especially appealing because for the participant it provides the satisfaction of measurable improvement in the functioning of our bodies and brains; for the spectator it provides easy identification with the athlete or team involved.
My love for the football Giants and baseball Red Sox is more then a masochistic habit; it is an opportunity to experience joy and pain, to feel pride and disappointment, to fill my life with something that is not important to my survival. And to the athlete and those who make the athlete's livelihood possible by coaching financing, and so forth, it can be a vocation as well as an avocation, a means of livelihood no more or less important to the participant that any other vocation.
Of course, like any interest, sports can be overdone. The fanatical boxing fan is missing a lot of life, and so is the obsessive jogger.
There is nothing mystical about sports which is simply an organized form of play, as important to our psyches as other activities. Sports does not contribute to international understanding, football does not make better people of us all, teams do not solve the problemsof the cities they are named for.
What sports does is provide pleasure and structure to players and fans alike.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
Mac Rush works in the Banner's composing room.
What a great couple of weeks for TV sports fans. The pro football season is well under way with the Jets surprising us all, and with my Giants lucking out against Dallas before the Rams showed them how real football is played; at least eh Cardinals kept the Redskins in check, and I can maintain the hope of the desperate.
Baseball winds down as the Red Sox give us two wonderful weekends of showing the Yankees who's boss of the American League East, and I maintain a childlike faith that the pennant and the series can be theirs, though my cold, dispassionate intellect reminds me that they have the worst record of any division leader this year. Hey, that's just because they're in a tough division, right?
Then there is the Olympics, the wonderfully glorious Olympics missing no major countries for the first time in 12 years. NBC's coverage is very different than ABC's has been in the past, with cameras jumping from event to event much too quickly for my taste. I like to get involved with a sport, especially an unfamiliar one, and that takes continuous exposure. But the snippets of biographical information on the athletes and their sports and countries are nicely done, and the jingoism of past games is refreshingly absent in the announcing and commentary. I find the bicycle sprint racing fascinating, and the traditional track, field, and swimming events show individual and team effort at their finest.
I feel sadness at Chris Evert's awful performance against Italy's Raffaella Reggi, and finding that Ben Johnson's world-breaking 100 meter run was spurious - that he had traces of steroids in hi body, just about breaks my heart.
On the other hand, Jackie Joyner-Kersee's dominance of the heptathlon, making her one of the top athletes of any generation was a delight to watch. The youth of the female gymnast and swimmers is frightening, as is the chance of injury faced by divers and other high-risk athletes.
So why is athletics important to so many of us, both participants and spectators? Why do we care about events that have no impact on the "real world"? The answer lies in the our very nature as sentient beings. We are forced to structure the world in such a way that we can survive in it, and since most of us have the good fortune to not have to spend every waking minute in the business of survival, we look for or create structure to fill our leisure time as well. This structure that we impose upon ourselves can take the form of politics, fine arts, performing arts, science, mathematics, sports, or any other of a huge array of activities, and all these activities serve one purpose, to avoid boredom, and to give us the satisfaction inherent in externally oriented mental activity, because internally directed psychic activity leads to disassociation from the world, to madness.
Sports is especially appealing because for the participant it provides the satisfaction of measurable improvement in the functioning of our bodies and brains; for the spectator it provides easy identification with the athlete or team involved.
My love for the football Giants and baseball Red Sox is more then a masochistic habit; it is an opportunity to experience joy and pain, to feel pride and disappointment, to fill my life with something that is not important to my survival. And to the athlete and those who make the athlete's livelihood possible by coaching financing, and so forth, it can be a vocation as well as an avocation, a means of livelihood no more or less important to the participant that any other vocation.
Of course, like any interest, sports can be overdone. The fanatical boxing fan is missing a lot of life, and so is the obsessive jogger.
There is nothing mystical about sports which is simply an organized form of play, as important to our psyches as other activities. Sports does not contribute to international understanding, football does not make better people of us all, teams do not solve the problemsof the cities they are named for.
What sports does is provide pleasure and structure to players and fans alike.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
Mac Rush works in the Banner's composing room.
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