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fog of pixels
Tuesday, July 6 2004
Gretchen wanted to go for a walk in the forest today, so I decided to take her on "the big walk," which goes all the way down the mountain to a highland just above Hurley Mountain Road. About a third of the way down Gretchen said something that indicated she thought I was taking her to the Canary Falls. We'd had a misunderstanding, and the consequences of those are never very pleasant. So we turned around and headed back to the Stick Trail, taking it to its end so Gretchen could sit for a couple of minutes in the nylon hammock that someone installed between two trees near the Canary Falls.
I noticed today that some process had stripped all the carriage returns out of a bunch of the web pages in my website, particularly those in my father's sub-website. The worst damage seemed to have been inflicted on pages that had been translated from Microsoft Word into HTML using Microsoft's infuriatingly-bad web export option. As yet another reason to hate Microsoft, the loss of carriage returns in translated documents means a loss of whitespace between words. This lead to scads of words running together in all sorts of documents. It was a holy mess and a depressing discovery, since it had obviously been this way for awhile and I'd been completely unaware. I eventually tracked the mess down to the script I'd run back in late 2003 that changed all the mailto: tags on my site to feedback links (an anti-spam initiative). Something about this script had evidently stripped carriage returns out of certain document formats while leaving others alone. I couldn't tell whether it had victimized text files in the Mac, PC, or Unix format. I have all three on my website, and I can't usually tell which is which. I can recognize periods during which I tended to use certain kinds of computers - but even then I went through phases in terms of the text-file-type setting I used in my text editors of choice. In the end it was easiest just to drop back to older archived versions of files and restore live web pages from those. I spent at least an hour fixing my father's site, which had the worst damage. Since I was in there anyway, I went through and cleared up a bunch of idiotic design decisions I'd made back when I didn't know any better. I also made the look and feel of the pages more consistent from one to the next. There are thousands and thousands of individual web pages on my website, and only a fraction of them make any use of scripting to do what they do, so it's possible there are whole swaths of damaged documents I've yet to discover.
This evening Gretchen and I drove to Rhinebeck and finally managed to get in to a viewing of Fahrenheit 9/11. We came 25 minutes early and had to sit around without much to do waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting. Well, that's what I did. Gretchen quickly ran across a long-lost acquaintance, a friend of Robby, her first long-term boyfriend. Robby was an operatic singer in Oberlin, and so too was this long-lost aquaintance. It turns out this guy now lives in Paris (France, not Hilton) and is here only because he's part of an operatic production at Bard. Somehow the stars aligned perfectly and he happened to be coming to this particular showing of Fahrenheit 9/11 at the same time we were. Somehow he also recognized Gretchen after all these years (it's been 13 or 14).
Though there are parts of Fahrenheit 9/11 that could have been better, I mostly enjoyed it and even found it powerfully moving at times. It was weakest (or, at least, least interesting) when it explored the connections between the Bushes and the Saudi royal family, a long-winded part of the movie that crowded out other parts that should have been expanded, particularly the exposing of Bush's pathological tendency to proclaim one thing while actually doing something else. The movie was at its best when it was showing us things the press should have been showing us all along, starting with the failed attempt by the Congressional Black Caucus to get just one senator to sign a petition of objection to Bush's "election." Then, most deliciously, there was Bush's inauguration motorcade fiasco. I'm something of a news junky, but I had no idea it had been stopped by thousands of egg-hurling protestors.
As Gretchen observed afterwards, the movie improved a lot once it moved on to the subject the Iraq war (and the methods used to terrify the populace into accepting it). The most powerful material came from the presentation of the consequences of a single tragedy, the loss of Lila Lipscomb's son. I'd read beforehand that this section is exploitative, but it seemed very tasteful to me (and I have a low threshold for that sort of thing, even when done by Michæl Moore). Almost as powerful was a short segment filmed in Iraq of an Iraqi woman grieving after an American missile strike. Aside from the Arabic she was speaking, she could have passed for a Midwestern housewife. At the end when, in her grief, she can think of nothing else to say but "Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!" all I could think was, "That karmic debt will take a few generations to pay back." I was impressed by Michæl Moore's use of grainy television images, particularly of George W. Bush. The fog of pixels did a perfect job of showcasing the contrivance and artifice of the administration (as fronted by Bush) without concealing Bush's creepy AntiChristesque microexpressions.
Occasionally Fahrenheit 9/11's explorations of the depths of the rabbit hole were more thought-provokingly creepy than even the original Matrix had been. How about those Taliban emissaries visiting Texas? And is the world really so small that a bin Laden just happened to be meeting with a Bush as the towers were being attacked? I especially enjoyed the creepy chill I got near the end of the movie when Moore faded the redactive magic marker back onto an uncensored version of a document he'd managed to obtain.
Gretchen didn't like the movie as much as I did, and I didn't like it as much as I expected to. But none of that matters much. What matters is that a lot of America's morons are seeing this movie and discovering things they should have known all along, things like the fact that most of the 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia.
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