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Sunday, June 17, 2007
One step back, X steps forward 
DIO: Do It Ourselves
| | Britt Blaser, after seeing a TED video of John Doerr giving "one of the most noble and human presentations I¹ve ever seen", making an appeal to fight global warming. For all its nobility and humanity, John's appeal is still, Britt Says, "half-hearted" and worse: |
| | What strikes me is his half-hearted appeal to the TEDsters to engage their social networks, presuming methods they do not actually have, about 15:30 into the video. Social networking is more honored in the observance than its reach. |
| | The fact is that neither they nor he have a clue how to engage their networks. These guys show up at tech conferences with other guys, even richer than we are, but they have no tools to make a difference except a vague appeal that the audience should email their friends. Is that an appeal that will survive the cocktail party? |
| | Further, it¹s stunning that the John Doerr video is actually a BMW ad. |
| | What¹s striking is that the mechanics of mobilizing citizens to swarm over a problem to overwhelm it should be such a mystery. We Netizens seem so confident in the ability of "the Internet" and "smart mobs" and "Emergent Democracy" and the "Second Superpower" to right all wrongs that it¹s stunning that it¹s largely a religious issue: a matter of faith. But "the Internet" is not a social engine or a force in politics or society. "The Internet" is, basically, Home Depot. It¹s got tools to fix things, but we¹re largely dependent on several guilds of craftsmen to put the pieces together. If youy¹ve ever remodeled a house, you know how iffy that is. |
| | Britt has ideas about how to put tools to use. But you have to stay tuned for those. |
Lights out
| | Here is what I wrote on 11 June, the morning after the evening of The Soprano's last supper, when six seasons of the show came to an abrupt and inconclusive end: |
| | Now I can't wait to see what Dave writes* about the final Sopranos episode, which I just watched end. Without ending, really. One of the characters (Phil Leotardo, Tony's enemy) got shot (by Tony's guy, with a little help from an FBI friend, it seems) and then had his head run over by his own car, but that was about it for violence. Tony lives. So does everybody else who hasn't been killed in prior episodes. The show concludes with the Soprano family getting together for dinner at a restaurant, gathering while Journey's Don't Stop Believing (chosen by Tony) plays on the juke box. Was that guy heading for the bathroom a hit man out to kill them all? He kept looking at Tony. But... I have no idea. I suppose in one of the two other filmed endings Tony or perhaps the whole family gets killed. Who knows? The last words of the show are Steve Perry singing "Don't stop—" with a cut to black and credits. As David Remmick says in The New Yorker, "Whaddya gonna do?" |
| | I almost never watched the show. I grew up in that part of New Jersey, around people like those. So did David Chase, whose show the Sopranos was, and he totally nails it. Me, I couldn't get far enough away. |
| | Then a friend overseas, who watches the show much later than most of us in the U.S., chided me for playing the spoiler, and I took it down with the intent of putting it up later. |
| | I hope this is later enough. In the meantime, I have watched that same ending about five more times, and spent more time thinking about the final episode than I had spent thinking about the whole show across the prior 85 episodes. |
| | It is now clear to me that Tony's end was as abrupt as Phil Leotardo's. Earlier in that last episode, while Phil was waving bye-bye to his grandchildren outside the window of his car, he got shot in the head. Bang: gone. Never mind that he gets shot again once he's a corpse on the ground, or that his head gets squashed under the wheel of his own car. (You don't see it happen, although the sound is sickening.) The point is, Phil never knew what happened. He was alive one moment, gone the next. From Phils point of view, the ending was lights-out. Instantaneous, total and final. |
| | Tony was the center of the show. His head, and his role as head of the Sopranos family, were core subjects of the show. The show began with Tony's first visit to Dr. Jennifer Melfi, a psychiatrist. The show ended one episode after she finally gave up on him. Or — from her point of view — she stopped enabling him. |
| | The Sopranos point of view was Tony's own troubled one. So, if Tony dies instantly, so does everthing else. Tony doesn't know whether his killer also kills other members of his family. He doesn't know anything. It's not even right to say "he's dead", because that suggests a state of existence. |
| | If Tony gets shot in the head, he ends, and so does everything he knows and cares about. That moment is lights-out. Tony ceases to exist. So does his point of view, because there is no longer any view to show. The camera has been turned off. |
Making the future, rather than just predicting it
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