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Movies:  A polyglot collection

 

Still working my way through a bunch of the films from Real Live Preacher’s collection of suggestions.  Here’s the latest batch, including one that hubby picked up on his own (guess which one?):

 

The Mothman Prophecies

 

Entertaining, but about an hour short of real material to call this a good horror flick.  I couldn’t quite engage with the characters; they felt a little too detached, distant.  Consequently any fear or horror was also remote, at arm's length.  Outcome also projected too readily; sure, it's about precognition, but really, do I want to intuit the end of a horror movie?

 

Hubby-Movie-Meter:  After viewing this, hubby told me I had dark taste in films.

 

Hmm.

 

 

One Night at McCool’s

 

Guy flick – and I know some guys who wouldn’t waste their time, even though Liv Tyler is in this flick.  There’s about 10 minutes of this film that’s worth watching; unfortunately, you have to suffer through 90 minutes to get to them.  A waste of an otherwise highly promising cast.  Definitely earned its 31% rating on the TomatoMeter Reading.

 

Hubby-Movie-Meter:  Hubby fell asleep half-way through.

 

 

Iron Monkey

 

Satisfying the itch for action as well as for a quasi-foreign flick.  Highly entertaining, although it does come across at times as a mockery of other Wuxia/kung fu movies.  The kids loved it, too, re-watched it the next day.  Worth buying for our collection.  (And it scored a well-deserved 90% on the TomatoMeter, too!)

 

Hubby-Movie-Meter:  Actually stayed awake through it.

 

  4:49:24 PM    comment []

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STATUS: Project Tuteur

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nuts, it’s raining today – I can’t finish these puppies until it stops.  The paint is rather sticky to work with as it is, when conditions aren’t humid.  Oh well, imagine these with their feet painted white, along with an as-yet undetermined finial added to the top to minimize bird perching.

 

They’re a big improvement, I’m sure, in the neighbors’ eyes, over the ratty bamboo poles the beans have grown on in years past.  They’re far from perfect, being a bit uneven and needing wind bracing, but they offered an opportunity for my daughter and I to work on a project together.  She measured everything for me as I cut it and put it together; she helped paint one of them and even pulled out a couple nails that I bent trying to force them into a knotty spot in the wood.

 

And I didn’t have to wait all summer for hubby to make the perfect tuteur.

 

Heck, I might even make two more this weekend for scarlet runner beans and some Roma beans.

 

  3:13:09 PM    comment []

^

 

Lunch, natural law and the mahu

 

Last Friday I had the chance to lunch with a friend I’ve not seen in nearly a year.  She’s the kind of person one can talk about expansive philosophical topics as well as the mundane minutiae of business.  It’s hard any more to find people with this kind of breadth; I’m lucky to have a handful of friends like this in the flesh, and a handful more virtually.

 

An hour-long lunch is simply not enough time to cover all the ground that we’ve traversed in a year – we didn’t even cover stuff from January to April (which I’m still wanting to dish about, E.!).  We had to do an executive summary kind of fly-by, with the occasional attack on particularly gripping subjects.

 

As we were wrapping up, we got onto the topic of Rick Santorum’s recent comments.  My friend and I don’t buy into the utter nonsense of “Mr. Inclusive”, but at the same time we don’t see eye-to-eye on the concept of marriage as a equal-opportunity organization, available to both male-female couples and to same-sex couples.

 

She asked as we had to break away from what was a dynamic conversation whether I believed in Natural Law.

 

To which I couldn’t really respond negatively or affirmatively.

 

First, the two of us don’t agree entirely on the nature of marriage…or perhaps we do, but we see it from different perspectives.  She believes marriage is spiritual – and I agree.  But I believe marriage is also a social contract, an acknowledgment of a binding between two individuals, not unlike the concept of partnership in the business world. 

 

I cannot subscribe to the idea that our government must prevent any eligible parties from participating in forming this private and personal partnership.  Any adult human eligible by certain criteria should be free to participate at will; excluding eligible adults by class is discriminatory.  (In this I see marginal difference than employment law, where employers may not refuse to contract for employment based on gender.)

 

The crux is eligibility – who should be eligible?  Why any restrictions at all?  This is where it gets personal, harder to separate logic from feeling.  My logic tells me that eligibility should be founded upon what is in the best interest of society, what is for the better, larger, long-term good.  The same logic tells me that 1) close blood relatives should not be eligible, as their offspring from such a union could be a risk to themselves and society over the long run; and 2) persons who already have an established hierarchy of familial power (father over daughter, mother over son) should not be married due to the potential for abuse.  Otherwise, adults of the age of consent (able to make informed decisions) should be free to enter into a binding social contract.  My feelings tell me the same thing, though – should I then discount the logic?

 

Where does the spiritual side of marriage fit in?  That’s between the contractor/contractee to determine.  Not all of us feel we are “spiritual”, or perhaps some of us enter marriage for reasons which are purely contractual in nature (like arranged marriages between consenting adults).  How does one quantify spirit anyhow?

 

In regards to Natural Law, I understand my own internal schism on this matter, based in part on Natural Law’s divide between legal/philosophical theory and moral theory.  I believe that laws and regulations enacted by humans should acknowledge nature and a resultant morality, yet at the same time I believe that there is more than one nature than that to which many Natural Law theorists would adhere.  Whose/which nature would we use?  Whose/which morality would we apply?  And at which point does morality intersect with religion?  If we are to maintain a clear separation of state and religion, at what point is a moral suitable or unsuitable for the purposes of law, assuming an intersection of some religion with morality.

 

It becomes more difficult to weigh out the morality of natural law once one becomes familiar with the concept of nature as a collection of memetics.  Memes don’t judge.  They succeed and live on or they fail and die back.  But memes don’t entirely die out; if conditions change, a once-failed meme can re-emerge and succeed.  This is nature, recessive and re-emergent and in flux – so what of morals to be formed and shaped on nature?

 

Perhaps my perspective is different because of my background.  Being part-Hawaiian, I’ve grown up respecting the indigenous culture of my heritage.  Not all of old Hawaiian laws and mores worked for me; they obviously didn’t work for their people either.  The rigid system of kapu was terminated, an example of memes that simply could not sustain themselves any longer.  However other parts of Hawaiian culture have proved invaluable; if it were not for the mahu (gay) members of the race, Hawaiian culture itself might have died out completely under the suffocating oppression of the alien Christian/western culture.  Mahu people had a respected place amongst Hawaiians; they were welcomed in their society, observing marriage in the same manner as the straight Hawaiians.  (It’s bad form, not in the aloha spirit, to alienate family members; Hawaiians considers themselves all “children of the land”, gay or straight, and to treat another “child of the land” poorly was to disrespect the land itself.)  All that changed with the arrival of missionaries, who felt anything Hawaiian was subversive to the “laws of God”.  The mahu went “underground” once Christian missionaries began wipe out the Hawaiian culture; the mahu preserved the ancient Hawaiian ways and through them cultural history has been returned to the Hawaiian people.

 

With this understanding of the positive role that gays played in Hawaiian history and culture, I cannot reconcile myself to the idea that same-sex couples are unnatural.  I cannot subscribe to the fact that only one culture is viable, since cultures are collections of memes and memes change over time in different environments.

 

Perhaps that’s a portion of the answer; depending on the environment, same-sex marriage should be legalized.  This may mean a state-by-state basis for now, each state representing an environ in which this form of social contract may be accepted by the local culture.  At some point in the future, once same-sex marriage is proven by history and the success of the meme to be non-threatening to the success of other memes and cultures, the environment of the country may change altogether and permit same-sex marriage to be accepted across the land.

 

Perhaps, too, the mahu will fully assume their status in our contemporary society, much like their status in old Hawaii. 

 

Imagine the discussions we’ll have over lunch once this comes to pass!

 

  11:52:43 AM    comment []