I've been lax with all sorts of posting. But in a flurry of Gackt catch up, here's the news...
Gackt's video for Ghost - a theme song for the Japanese release of Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles - has a darkly dancey acid pop sound, like a mirror world version of Cher's Believe. Dig the Papa lapped a pap lopped style of group animatronics.
Justified, Gackt's song for Bounty Killer on PS3 has been out for awhile too, sounding basically like indeterminate old Gackt songs - eerie falsetto, crunchy metal and minor major melody - relabeled as one headbanging new meal.
Finally, there's the new track, Journey through the Decade, created for the 10th Kamen Rider series, a typical chocolate era production of growling guitar angst and driving redemption. The video features a dizzying 360 degree rotomatic shot of Gackt on a high platform behaving Gackt-like, with a lycra transmogrified youngster dueling a hollow-eyed samurai suit below in classic live action tradition, but with razor sharp Magic cards flying. I have no idea what Kamen Rider is about, but Gack't giving the lackadaisickal f-you to our psuedo Power Ranger protagonist at the ending seems proof positive our winged auteur has become a man entrenched in his own iconicism, glaring down the paltry effects of his once stunning fireball, and turning with a bugger-it-all and back to our faces.
Or not.
In any case, I suppose it's impossible for an artist to recapture fully the flavors of their own inception. An audience's impetuous demand to Return is something like a death knell, one that needs to be re-recorded in some grander discovery, some bigger persona, or set adrift in some paradigm shift. For now, Gackt's new songs, his ripe voice, aren't overwriting the tape for me. I still have Cains Feel on my memory.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Friday, January 9, 2009
Film List 2007
As I remember, last year was really Man World heavy in film (No Country for Old Men, Michael Clayton) with lots of tales involving competitiveness and ego. Since, I didn't write about my favorite movies of last year, here they are in no particular order.
12:08 East of Bucharest - I love love loved this film about parochial folks in a small town of Romania. The first 2/3 of the film is an overview of various residents, a teacher, an old citizen, and a television personality, their lives not demonstrably better since the fall of Communism 16 years ago. On the eve of dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu's ousting, a debate is broadcast at the slipshod local tv studio. The three begrudging "witnesses" cannot agree on the exact moment when the great revolution occurred or what even happened during it, but the callers are skeptical that revolution ever happened at all. Poker face funny.
There Will Be Blood is based on Upton Sinclair's novel indicting the crushing machine of capitalism. The drama is writ large and breathtakingly beautiful by director Paul Thomas Anderson whose treatment of the film is structurally thematic and absolutely true to the nature of the subject. Like the "if you're not with me you're against me attitude" of Daniel Plainview, each image gets a payback through another later one, each perceived misdeed answered with a slap. A fresh struck oil well siphons high into the sky, and later, that same oil rig burns to the ground with a rigorous vengeance. Plainview is a man trapped inside the ambition of manifest destiny, his adopted "son", a symbol of his allegorical soul, tossed to the wayside. In Blood there is nothing but pure American drive. Plainview sees through the two bit players like so much chaff, and he's going to suck them all dry.
For any person drowning in the morass of stifling office politics and material culture, despressed by your plight in life, The Bothersome Man is right up your Brazil watching alley. A man commits suicide and ends up traveling by bus to a blandly surreal place with ubiquitously sleek interiors and a blue-grey company culture. The food has the no flavor and sex is equally bland. This Norwegian satire by director Jens Lien is grotesquely, dreadfully fatalist. If a dose of darkly absurd, understatedly soul crunching humor is just what the doctor seemed to have ordered, then beware, because the movie is surreally unkind to the sensitive psyche.
Some people have the olympics and others have the presidency, Billy Mitchell and Steve Wiebe have Donkey Kong. I hate to sound so cliche but King of Kong really is a story about human nature. OK, human nature and a bunch of nerdy classic nintendo freaks who happen to be really, really competitive. But, the film is also a portrayal of underdogs making a space in the world for themselves, trying to hold onto that space for dear life, and fighting to be recognized for their achievements, no matter how inconsequential that may seem.
12:08 East of Bucharest - I love love loved this film about parochial folks in a small town of Romania. The first 2/3 of the film is an overview of various residents, a teacher, an old citizen, and a television personality, their lives not demonstrably better since the fall of Communism 16 years ago. On the eve of dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu's ousting, a debate is broadcast at the slipshod local tv studio. The three begrudging "witnesses" cannot agree on the exact moment when the great revolution occurred or what even happened during it, but the callers are skeptical that revolution ever happened at all. Poker face funny.
There Will Be Blood is based on Upton Sinclair's novel indicting the crushing machine of capitalism. The drama is writ large and breathtakingly beautiful by director Paul Thomas Anderson whose treatment of the film is structurally thematic and absolutely true to the nature of the subject. Like the "if you're not with me you're against me attitude" of Daniel Plainview, each image gets a payback through another later one, each perceived misdeed answered with a slap. A fresh struck oil well siphons high into the sky, and later, that same oil rig burns to the ground with a rigorous vengeance. Plainview is a man trapped inside the ambition of manifest destiny, his adopted "son", a symbol of his allegorical soul, tossed to the wayside. In Blood there is nothing but pure American drive. Plainview sees through the two bit players like so much chaff, and he's going to suck them all dry.
For any person drowning in the morass of stifling office politics and material culture, despressed by your plight in life, The Bothersome Man is right up your Brazil watching alley. A man commits suicide and ends up traveling by bus to a blandly surreal place with ubiquitously sleek interiors and a blue-grey company culture. The food has the no flavor and sex is equally bland. This Norwegian satire by director Jens Lien is grotesquely, dreadfully fatalist. If a dose of darkly absurd, understatedly soul crunching humor is just what the doctor seemed to have ordered, then beware, because the movie is surreally unkind to the sensitive psyche.
Some people have the olympics and others have the presidency, Billy Mitchell and Steve Wiebe have Donkey Kong. I hate to sound so cliche but King of Kong really is a story about human nature. OK, human nature and a bunch of nerdy classic nintendo freaks who happen to be really, really competitive. But, the film is also a portrayal of underdogs making a space in the world for themselves, trying to hold onto that space for dear life, and fighting to be recognized for their achievements, no matter how inconsequential that may seem.
2008 "Film" Picks
Subtle movies that explore "big issues". That's where the weight of my favorite films of 2008 seem to be thrown. From obvious topics like the Three Gorges Dam to lesser known ones like Argentinean Patrimony, these films seem to teeter in no man's land of fact and fiction. But unlike My Winnipeg, where fact and fiction stand in contrast to each other, or hard sap, like March of the Penguins, these films refashion reality from fictional stories and fictional stories through truth telling so that the greater narrative is eventually seamless, on the verge of crux.
7-8. A moralizing typical film takes the propagandist stance about "issues" and incites a self congratulatory response over our hypocritical bourgeoisie responsibility to solve them. However, neither Encounters at the End of the World or Still Life are satisfied with totalitarian definitions or answers, simplistic views of apocalypse. And both Herzog and Zhangke absolutely refuse to settle into straight pedagogy about the Global Warming Crisis or Destitute Modernization. Rather than dramatizing the Antarctic or Chinese "problem", the directors complicate the ultimate scenario to draw out a universality of underlying hopes and fears. Herzog reintroduces his audience to limits of the human relationship with nature, while Zhangke illustrates a melancholy richness left behind in the wake of undeniable beurocratic desolation, to teeter at the very edge of an awareness, half in and half out of "real life" and yet more "true" than any documentary or dramatization. Through, deft handling, the images meet at some ordinary yet fantastical shore where black and white differences are erased, perhaps instilling perhaps a more fundamental desire to make a difference.
6. On a similar note, The Sun Also Rises, by Jiang Wen, is a fictional, seriously fantastical film about China's uncomfortable relationship with its own cultural and social transformation. Told as an interwoven epic in multiple parts through the lens of three cinematographers, the film reminds me very strongly of Hemingway's book by the same name, where the characters are expatriates in a strange land, lost in haze of debauched hallucination, absurd events occurring from almost nowhere to incur violent reactions. However, in the case of 太阳照常升起, the Chinese are strangers in their own land, and thus the series of surreal displacements become an act of conflicted remembrance for old worlds that barely exist or maybe never did. Jiang Wen plays those interruptions of the Chinese myth as a sense of uncertainty that can never be truly allayed. It is probably telling that images from this film continue to float up from my subconsciousness to haunt me from time to time: a pair of twinkling embroidered shoes, floating on a patch of grass on a glittering river, the wide eyed barely contained hysteria of Joan Chen confronting/seducing/disgusting Anthony Wong Chau Sang in a dank backwater hospital bed, the vaguely Wuxia ghostliness of a gnarled tree twisting through a fog that hides many secrets.
5. Apparently, many critics found The Headless Woman bafflingly cryptic. The unusual style of editing: images with extremities chopped off, shadowy figures out of focus fore and aft, mysteriously off camera chatter, creates disorientation about characters and plot. Who are they? What are the relationships? I found the film dreamy and repressively terrifying because of these omissions. But the purposeful sense of confusion is director Lucrecia Martela's technique of structuring the oblique narrative (Vero, the central character, may have killed a boy with her car) through pure imagery. The direction plays out as visible representation of Vero's inner shock and her willingness to elide any error. Each carefully composed frame is imbedded with importance that builds almost invisibly to the film's topical resolution. In fact, Vero's visual story of trauma and guilt is evenutally reclaimed by a subtext of privilege and class, latent patriarchy and gender. Don't let the heady cinematography and meandering staging deceive you, the film has a story and a reason.
4. Wendy and Lucy is a hard-luck story and an obvious tearjerker about a girl stranded in podunk, Oregon whilst on her big escape to Alaskan salvation. When a series of small happenings play out badly, Wendy loses her best friend Lucy - a cheerful golden yellow mutt - and has to find her again. Clinging to normality with spent perseverance, Michelle Williams, as Wendy, embodies the quiet eloquence of a person's desperate isolation and the indifference of people around her as they live their lives towards dead ends. I admit, I cried harder than any other movie I've ever watched probably, but Director, Kelly Reichardt, earns those tears because the film isn't just a cute weeper, but really a frame by frame account of a person's dissipating self worth. An indie age tragedy. Steinbeck for our recessionary times.
3. On the lighter side, but by no means less important in a year of competently illustrious and agreeably well received comic book Blockbusters (Hulk, Hellboy), the winner is... Iron Man. No contest. "Why not Batman?!" you ask, despite more solid performances, tight storytelling, cinematic beauty and great action coming together in one better-than-those-other better-than-real-dreck superhero movies. Well, despite some glitches, Iron Man has all of the above Plus...
Robert Downey Jr's unconventional yet very convincing take on Anthony Edward "Tony" Stark, a nuanced, what some would say, an even three dimensional character. Granted, you have to like RDJ's riffing and broad physical tics, but I do, so Downey's Stark is believable as a charismatically self involved, emotionally crippled genius that tries too hard, but is a real treat to watch. Honestly, he's a little pathetic. But a "vulnerable super-hero" movie which lets the superhero be Vulnerable? Ding!
Plus = Gwyneth Paltrow's understated, charmingly credible treatment of what is traditionally a passively blank female lead. Her Pepper Pots, neither femme fatale or damsel in distress, brainiac or butch, has a world outside her man. Some forgotten critic (sorry) said Downey and Paltrow in Iron Man heat made probably the best romantic comedy since Annie Hall and I would have to agree. Ding! Ding!
And even though I like the inside of a well organized gun locker as much as the next gal, Iron Man slightly sidesteps the convention of "here's the microscopic super duper ray gun, heatseeking latchhook gizmo, and the new boat/helicopter/bike/mobile". Ding!
Obviously, all these perks of the film are part and parcel of Iron Man's inherent character - he makes his own toys, he doesn't get the girl, he's really an alcoholic - but I think Jon Favreau did a bang-up job turning those quirks into a new look for superhero films.
2. Finally... well, my explanation for this film is a little complicated and goes back to a rousing yet not-very-well-thought-out response to Stephanie Zacharek's review of Pixar's Cars in which she scoffed at anthropomorphized vehicles and tired of Car's "red state-blue state divisions". Now... first off, I would have to argue that anyone who thinks a foodie rat who mind controls a human puppet through some major hair pulling in order to make exacting french bistro cuisine is actually any more HUMAN than a city mouse Porsche with serious Fahrvergnugen, is a little less than exacting, or doesn't know how to operate a clutch, or at the very least, has popped a belt in an uncanny valley somewhere North of La Cienega. Thinking that a machine is cold, hard, emotionless is already to anthropomorphize them. An anti-anthropomorphosization, if you will. I admit that Cars was stretched a little thin, but having done a few Republican cowboy jaunts, I'd have to say that vibe was right on the mark (maybe too many marks but generally on. On that note, I have to yield to Manohla Dargis' discomfiture over racial stereotypes in children's animation films. Did anyone else notice that the short stubby, love making penguins in Happy Feet were Mexican?) And yet, as critics - self proclaimed to stand outside the realm of identity making - who soapbox about automobile sprawl from high castles while extolling 'Where's the Prius?', I'm not sure they have a right to criticize "country values" with their very liberal notion of route 66's colorblindness. Cities and suburbia have The Incredibles. Rodents, after all, have that damnable Ratatouille. Why can't Nascar/Low Rider/Cadillac Records fans have Cars? But I digress.
I believe in the circle of life and that animals have feelings. I grew up with Data as a role-model and Transformers for entertainment. So I might be what realists call an anthropomorphic nut-job. In any case, because of my mental setbacks Wall-E takes the silver medal on this lineup. Wall-E isn't really an issue movie despite minor stabs at the hegemony of the iPod aesthetic, fast-food nation, consumer culture, and the media. Bird balances the Buster Keaton-esque humor, the Space Odyssey references, and the Johnny 5 rip-off, with the "thinky" stuff admirably well. But underneath it all, Wall-E is a pure gem of anthropomorphic wit. The kind that Pixar is famous for. Relatively free of dialogue, the charming love story is one completely made up of tiny zips and zings, physical gaffs and still life moments. There's no way you can't feel for this ragtag collection of little robots, but if you don't, well... you just might be human after all.
1. Despite my reservation about the neatly tied psychodrama of the rushed ending, Kaiba is probably, nay, is definitely the most original anime series in recent memory. With the melancholy soul of Cowboy Bebop and a bubbly anime style that looks too easy, almost crude. Kaiba is hard to describe because most of the joy is a wonky world of objects moving in unnatural ways and behaving surprisingly, even to our already sci-fi, anime laden minds. But this isn't a mecha flick, or just another philosophical inquiry - a la Ergo Proxy. Each episode of Kaiba has a plot, albeit moody and mysterious, but one with definite resolutions. The series never feels the need to completely demystify things for the audience (making the larger story arc an adventure), but leaves plenty of hints on the central motifs of death and memory while opening lots of queries on love and identity. Explaining that Kaiba is both an amnesiac man who has a hole in his chest as well as a memory eating plant that devours entire planets isn't really going to cut it. Telling you that the director, Masaaki Yuasa, produced and wrote the script for Cat Soup may help a little. But I think you really just have to watch the series yourself.
7-8. A moralizing typical film takes the propagandist stance about "issues" and incites a self congratulatory response over our hypocritical bourgeoisie responsibility to solve them. However, neither Encounters at the End of the World or Still Life are satisfied with totalitarian definitions or answers, simplistic views of apocalypse. And both Herzog and Zhangke absolutely refuse to settle into straight pedagogy about the Global Warming Crisis or Destitute Modernization. Rather than dramatizing the Antarctic or Chinese "problem", the directors complicate the ultimate scenario to draw out a universality of underlying hopes and fears. Herzog reintroduces his audience to limits of the human relationship with nature, while Zhangke illustrates a melancholy richness left behind in the wake of undeniable beurocratic desolation, to teeter at the very edge of an awareness, half in and half out of "real life" and yet more "true" than any documentary or dramatization. Through, deft handling, the images meet at some ordinary yet fantastical shore where black and white differences are erased, perhaps instilling perhaps a more fundamental desire to make a difference.
6. On a similar note, The Sun Also Rises, by Jiang Wen, is a fictional, seriously fantastical film about China's uncomfortable relationship with its own cultural and social transformation. Told as an interwoven epic in multiple parts through the lens of three cinematographers, the film reminds me very strongly of Hemingway's book by the same name, where the characters are expatriates in a strange land, lost in haze of debauched hallucination, absurd events occurring from almost nowhere to incur violent reactions. However, in the case of 太阳照常升起, the Chinese are strangers in their own land, and thus the series of surreal displacements become an act of conflicted remembrance for old worlds that barely exist or maybe never did. Jiang Wen plays those interruptions of the Chinese myth as a sense of uncertainty that can never be truly allayed. It is probably telling that images from this film continue to float up from my subconsciousness to haunt me from time to time: a pair of twinkling embroidered shoes, floating on a patch of grass on a glittering river, the wide eyed barely contained hysteria of Joan Chen confronting/seducing/disgusting Anthony Wong Chau Sang in a dank backwater hospital bed, the vaguely Wuxia ghostliness of a gnarled tree twisting through a fog that hides many secrets.
5. Apparently, many critics found The Headless Woman bafflingly cryptic. The unusual style of editing: images with extremities chopped off, shadowy figures out of focus fore and aft, mysteriously off camera chatter, creates disorientation about characters and plot. Who are they? What are the relationships? I found the film dreamy and repressively terrifying because of these omissions. But the purposeful sense of confusion is director Lucrecia Martela's technique of structuring the oblique narrative (Vero, the central character, may have killed a boy with her car) through pure imagery. The direction plays out as visible representation of Vero's inner shock and her willingness to elide any error. Each carefully composed frame is imbedded with importance that builds almost invisibly to the film's topical resolution. In fact, Vero's visual story of trauma and guilt is evenutally reclaimed by a subtext of privilege and class, latent patriarchy and gender. Don't let the heady cinematography and meandering staging deceive you, the film has a story and a reason.
4. Wendy and Lucy is a hard-luck story and an obvious tearjerker about a girl stranded in podunk, Oregon whilst on her big escape to Alaskan salvation. When a series of small happenings play out badly, Wendy loses her best friend Lucy - a cheerful golden yellow mutt - and has to find her again. Clinging to normality with spent perseverance, Michelle Williams, as Wendy, embodies the quiet eloquence of a person's desperate isolation and the indifference of people around her as they live their lives towards dead ends. I admit, I cried harder than any other movie I've ever watched probably, but Director, Kelly Reichardt, earns those tears because the film isn't just a cute weeper, but really a frame by frame account of a person's dissipating self worth. An indie age tragedy. Steinbeck for our recessionary times.
3. On the lighter side, but by no means less important in a year of competently illustrious and agreeably well received comic book Blockbusters (Hulk, Hellboy), the winner is... Iron Man. No contest. "Why not Batman?!" you ask, despite more solid performances, tight storytelling, cinematic beauty and great action coming together in one better-than-those-other better-than-real-dreck superhero movies. Well, despite some glitches, Iron Man has all of the above Plus...Robert Downey Jr's unconventional yet very convincing take on Anthony Edward "Tony" Stark, a nuanced, what some would say, an even three dimensional character. Granted, you have to like RDJ's riffing and broad physical tics, but I do, so Downey's Stark is believable as a charismatically self involved, emotionally crippled genius that tries too hard, but is a real treat to watch. Honestly, he's a little pathetic. But a "vulnerable super-hero" movie which lets the superhero be Vulnerable? Ding!
Plus = Gwyneth Paltrow's understated, charmingly credible treatment of what is traditionally a passively blank female lead. Her Pepper Pots, neither femme fatale or damsel in distress, brainiac or butch, has a world outside her man. Some forgotten critic (sorry) said Downey and Paltrow in Iron Man heat made probably the best romantic comedy since Annie Hall and I would have to agree. Ding! Ding!
And even though I like the inside of a well organized gun locker as much as the next gal, Iron Man slightly sidesteps the convention of "here's the microscopic super duper ray gun, heatseeking latchhook gizmo, and the new boat/helicopter/bike/mobile". Ding!
Obviously, all these perks of the film are part and parcel of Iron Man's inherent character - he makes his own toys, he doesn't get the girl, he's really an alcoholic - but I think Jon Favreau did a bang-up job turning those quirks into a new look for superhero films.
2. Finally... well, my explanation for this film is a little complicated and goes back to a rousing yet not-very-well-thought-out response to Stephanie Zacharek's review of Pixar's Cars in which she scoffed at anthropomorphized vehicles and tired of Car's "red state-blue state divisions". Now... first off, I would have to argue that anyone who thinks a foodie rat who mind controls a human puppet through some major hair pulling in order to make exacting french bistro cuisine is actually any more HUMAN than a city mouse Porsche with serious Fahrvergnugen, is a little less than exacting, or doesn't know how to operate a clutch, or at the very least, has popped a belt in an uncanny valley somewhere North of La Cienega. Thinking that a machine is cold, hard, emotionless is already to anthropomorphize them. An anti-anthropomorphosization, if you will. I admit that Cars was stretched a little thin, but having done a few Republican cowboy jaunts, I'd have to say that vibe was right on the mark (maybe too many marks but generally on. On that note, I have to yield to Manohla Dargis' discomfiture over racial stereotypes in children's animation films. Did anyone else notice that the short stubby, love making penguins in Happy Feet were Mexican?) And yet, as critics - self proclaimed to stand outside the realm of identity making - who soapbox about automobile sprawl from high castles while extolling 'Where's the Prius?', I'm not sure they have a right to criticize "country values" with their very liberal notion of route 66's colorblindness. Cities and suburbia have The Incredibles. Rodents, after all, have that damnable Ratatouille. Why can't Nascar/Low Rider/Cadillac Records fans have Cars? But I digress.
I believe in the circle of life and that animals have feelings. I grew up with Data as a role-model and Transformers for entertainment. So I might be what realists call an anthropomorphic nut-job. In any case, because of my mental setbacks Wall-E takes the silver medal on this lineup. Wall-E isn't really an issue movie despite minor stabs at the hegemony of the iPod aesthetic, fast-food nation, consumer culture, and the media. Bird balances the Buster Keaton-esque humor, the Space Odyssey references, and the Johnny 5 rip-off, with the "thinky" stuff admirably well. But underneath it all, Wall-E is a pure gem of anthropomorphic wit. The kind that Pixar is famous for. Relatively free of dialogue, the charming love story is one completely made up of tiny zips and zings, physical gaffs and still life moments. There's no way you can't feel for this ragtag collection of little robots, but if you don't, well... you just might be human after all.
1. Despite my reservation about the neatly tied psychodrama of the rushed ending, Kaiba is probably, nay, is definitely the most original anime series in recent memory. With the melancholy soul of Cowboy Bebop and a bubbly anime style that looks too easy, almost crude. Kaiba is hard to describe because most of the joy is a wonky world of objects moving in unnatural ways and behaving surprisingly, even to our already sci-fi, anime laden minds. But this isn't a mecha flick, or just another philosophical inquiry - a la Ergo Proxy. Each episode of Kaiba has a plot, albeit moody and mysterious, but one with definite resolutions. The series never feels the need to completely demystify things for the audience (making the larger story arc an adventure), but leaves plenty of hints on the central motifs of death and memory while opening lots of queries on love and identity. Explaining that Kaiba is both an amnesiac man who has a hole in his chest as well as a memory eating plant that devours entire planets isn't really going to cut it. Telling you that the director, Masaaki Yuasa, produced and wrote the script for Cat Soup may help a little. But I think you really just have to watch the series yourself.
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
prediction and universal truth
Recent reading selections led to comparisons between Herbert and Asimov's most respectively famous science fiction series, Foundation and Dune. The novels are structurally similar. Both books center around a messianic figure whose attempt to save humanity is foiled by stagnant government systems and the past. Both authors use pseudo historical quotes to head each chapter and share similar theories about cultural evolution. But while Foundation first posits a positive concept of psychohistory*, Herbert questions the emotional and moral questions that arise and ultimately decides that prediction** is a trap that in limiting unknowns, limits the imagination.
Half a century later, Wired presents the obsolescence of traditional scientific models/methods (empirical and experimental) in favor of statistical data crunching (made possible by computerization) in The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete, which sounds an awful lot like the beginnings of a psychohistorical thought machine. During a Calculus class at Pasadena City College, a visiting Cal Tech professor proclaimed in a fit of pique that derivatives "could" be used to calculate probabilities in history in order to apply them to acts of prediction about the future. Max Cohen's maniacal study of stock market algorithms in Darren Aronofsky's Pi: Faith in Chaos is just such an exercise. But the face of "God" hidden in the complexity of mathematical social flux reduces Cohen to a lobotomized zombie in the end. Prediction however remains popular aside from Tarot cards and crystal balls. For 2007 and 2008, US News & World Reports names Actuarial Science and Data Miner on their Best Careers list.
In a way, the statistical view of scientific proof is a nod to the relativist form of reality over the viability of absolute universal law.
In any case, moving from the mechanical quantification model of knowledge to the data accretion model, there is a shift from classical scientific Western inquiry of truth finding, or the workings of things, towards experience and recording of occurrences as truth making. The laws of Feng Shui derive from projecting an outcome through observation over a relatively long and documented period of time. Such and such a thing (a beam often falls on the bed beneath it during an earthquake) is observed to be true, so that the truth becomes law (do not sleep beneath a roof beam), which engenders more proof for the original truth. In a traditionalist society like ancient China, such determinism is not a wholly supernatural act but one that over time has become mythologized Today an admonition about sleeping under beams seem more like a mix of city planning then cultural superstition. Nevertheless, such an example hold seeds of self fulfilling prophecy, a method of data accretion that has in a way become culturally "universal truth".
In a way, the statistical view of scientific proof is a nod to the relativist form of reality over the viability of absolute universal law.
In any case, moving from the mechanical quantification model of knowledge to the data accretion model, there is a shift from classical scientific Western inquiry of truth finding, or the workings of things, towards experience and recording of occurrences as truth making. The laws of Feng Shui derive from projecting an outcome through observation over a relatively long and documented period of time. Such and such a thing (a beam often falls on the bed beneath it during an earthquake) is observed to be true, so that the truth becomes law (do not sleep beneath a roof beam), which engenders more proof for the original truth. In a traditionalist society like ancient China, such determinism is not a wholly supernatural act but one that over time has become mythologized Today an admonition about sleeping under beams seem more like a mix of city planning then cultural superstition. Nevertheless, such an example hold seeds of self fulfilling prophecy, a method of data accretion that has in a way become culturally "universal truth".
But what does all this have to do with Asimov and Herbert? You need a big computer to assimilate such huge loads of information, and Herbert argues, what bigger computer is there than the human brain? The experiential takes on a spiritual dimension in Dune that is particularly alluring, mostly because it transcends all material aids for thinking. Whatever the allure of prescient ability, the most fascinating aspect of all this is a sense of convergence between diametrically opposed ideologies, a blurring of lines between the cause effect of knowledge and thinking. In dealing with the limits of language, knowledge, memory, time, or faculty, the Asimov/Herbert paradigm show bifurcations between two views of reality (Western and Eastern*** as well as other such oppositions) that are not perhaps as dissimilar as once thought.
*a mathematical analysis of social interaction to extrapolate statistical data in order to build a LPS model (least possible simulation model) which in turn can be used to reveal the probable affect/effects of any given social phenomenon. The goal is to foretell the future and forestall doom.
**psychohistory as carried out to a logical endpoint. by non-computerized means, the intuitive processes of the human mind (such as weighing the various aspects of design problem and coming to a satisfactory if not perfectly ideal solution) expands so that the analytical faculties necessary for calculating infinite quantities (including all permutations of time events) is possible. humans, in herberts conception, are limited from messianic power only by mental faculty and lack of knowledge. To some degree Herbert's psychohistorical prediction depends on an analysis that operates only in subconsciousness and reminds me most of Eastern religious world-views.
***Buddha's take on Creationism.
"On the philosophical level, both Buddhism and modern science share a deep suspicion of any notion of absolutes, whether conceptualized as a transcendent being, as an eternal, unchanging principle such as soul, or as a fundamental substratum of reality. Both Buddhism and science prefer to account for the evolution and emergence of the cosmos and life in terms of the complex interrelations of the natural laws of cause and effect." -- Dalai Lama
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