New Reads I finally received my copy of Milgron and Roberts' Economics, Organization and Management from inter-library loan. Jim Rogers recommended this one, and my library had unfortunately lost its only copy. But thankfully, Dalton State College was kind of enough to lend me their copy. Thanks DSC! I also am reading Adrian Slywotzky's new book, How to Grow When Markets Don't. I wouldn't say I'm a "big fan" of Slywotzky, as that might give the impression that I read all sorts of different business books, which I don't. I've only read two, and one of them was by Slywotzky. But I really liked it. It was titled Value Migration: How to think Several Moves ahead of the Competition. (The other one was similar and titled Managing Customer Value by Bradley Gale). I liked the book enough a lot at the time, but it was all academic for me, as I'll never be a manager of a company. That's not the direction that I'm interesting in going. Still, it's got a lot of intuitive appeal for the neophyte economist.

 
HOPE and cars It's something of a joke in Athens that parents bribed their kids with new SUVs and BMWs if they would not go to college out-of-state, but rather, go in-state for free as a HOPE merit scholar. Georgia has a merit based scholarship that awards each student with a 3.0 high school GPA free tuition if they'll go to a school in-state. This is limited to all state schools, but includes schools like Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Georgia. As a result, many students who would've gone out-of-state remain in-state, and the intuition of some economists here (based in no large part on the ample anecdotes told by freshmen) is that one would expect to see a rise in many amenities, like automobiles, as parents attempt to essentially bribe their children to take advantage of the HOPE scholarship with a shiny new Ford Explorer or BMW. Two of my professors have been on an extended research agenda into the effects of merit-based scholarships - Prof. Chris Cornwell and Prof. David Mustard. Today, I kind of got a nice little piece of luck by being offered some money to collect some data on automobile registration over the past ten years in order to provide some better empirical data for this paper, entitled "Merit-Based College Scholarships and Car Sales". It's a funny story - the intuition is, once again, kind of simple. Parents had been planning to pay for college educations up until the point of HOPE's existence. Once HOPE is invented, it is obviously in everyone's best interests - except for possibly the child - for the child to go in-state for free, rather than out-of-state and pay a hefty, annual tuition. If the child stays in-state, that frees up considerable resources for the parents, who can buy their child a new car as an incentive to go in-state, and still save money on college education. This paper attempts to quantify that effect. So, I'm going to spend the next few weeks trying to get car registration data and ad valorum tax information on automobiles going back to the early 1990s. This will be the first time I've ever actually collected data, and while I'm told it's nothing too sexy, I am nonetheless a bit thrilled to see how this is done. This brings me one step closer to learning how do original empirical research myself, which is something I am eagerly anticipating.

 
Movie grosses The only thing that worries me about Paul Thomas Anderson - and this is just a function of my ignorance - is that his movies don't appear to turn a profit. Magnolia cost $45 million to make, but only made $22 million. I'm guessing Punch Drunk Love did not fare much better, since it too only made $17 million at the box office (I cannot find its production and marketing budget). I hope that does not mean he will have difficulty making movies in the future. Scorsese also does not always turn a profit, yet he consistently makes excellent movies. But I did read that getting the green light for his movies is not always easy. He had been trying to get The Gangs of New York made for many years before Miramax took it on. And incidentally, it too did not make a profit. It cost $100 million to make and $35 million to market, but only turned $75 million (as of June 1st). That's a fairly big failure, in business terms, and I can't imagine that Miramax is too happy about it. I would be interested in hearing filmmakers like these who make important movies but who do not always make profitable movies talk about these unique kinds of challenges. It must be frustrating to know that Spielberg and James Cameron can turn tin into gold, profit-wise, and yet their work is not always nearly as powerful or as important. But, I suppose this is the problem all artists face in all eras and in all mediums.

 
Another review of Magnolia Gideon dropped by and told me to read another review of Magnolia. I urge everyone to read it. Here is one quote from the review, which is itself a quote from somewhere else:

"Unlike most filmmakers of his generation, Anderson is not only technically astute (“I’m still young and I have to show off”), but he seems to have a larger, moral imperative in his films. They are not preachy, but it’s clear that Anderson was raised Catholic, that he believes in atonement and redemption. “When did you last go to confession?” I asked him. Anderson paused. “It’s about three hours long,” he said. “Haven’t you seen it?”

 
A Christian Interpretation of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Films One day, I would like to sit down with Paul Thomas Anderson and ask him why he is so interested in the theme of redemption and judgment. In the first three of his feature films, all of his characters either are seeking absolution for a sin in their past (such as in Hard Eight), are on a downward spiral into destruction only to be saved by random events (such as in Boogie Nights), or are the object of rescue by large-scale act of judgement (as in Magnolia). These themes are quite stark and apparent to any thoughtful viewer, and originally, I assumed that he must be consciously channeling some kind of Christian view of salvation in his movies. But, I believe that he is not channeling any kind of view of salvation, let alone a Christian one. Rather, these themes of redemption are the natural outflow of a filmmaker who tends to treat his characters with respect and fill them with dignity, and in the end, who falls in love with them. In Hard Eight, Anderson’s first feature film, the movie follows a similar arc as to his later creations, Boogie Nights and Magnolia – though both Boogie Nights and Magnolia address these themes on much grander, more epic scales. Sydney, played by Philip Baker Hall, has murdered John’s (played by John C. Reilly) father many years before. When he finds John down on his luck, Sydney decides to make up for this sin by adopting him - so to speak - and teaching him the ways of conning casinos and gambling. It all works well until Jimmy (played by Samuel Jackson) discovers his dark secret and blackmails him by threatening to tell Reilly. Rather than let that happen, Sydney murders Jackson, and the movie ends with a stunning scene of Sydney in a diner with blood on the cuff of his starched, white shirt. Seeing the stain, Sydney pulls the sleeve of his suit over the blood, in a symbolic effort to cover what he has done. To cover, in a sense, all of his life’s sins. In this debut, the themes that will later become more imaginative and more haunting in later attempts is laid out in its kernel form as Anderson explores the actions taken by people who find themselves imprisoned to sin and to the past. Boogie Nights is a stunning achievement for such a young filmmaker. It is nearly three hours long, and gives a detailed, psychosocial insider’s perspective into the world of film pornography, between the years of 1977 and 1984. It is worth noting that this span of time marks the advent of video technology, and thus a significant altering of the way that pornography is produced and distributed as well as consumed. When made on film, pornography still enjoyed a certain amount of legitimacy. Sets were expensive to maintain. Interview with 1970s pornstars reveal that many believed the popularity of Deep Throat would mark a new age in pornography where porn stars would rival film celebrities in their popularity. The advent of the new video technology meant lower barriers to entry for competing pornography entrepreneurs. Cast and crew costs decreased significantly, as did the costs of editing and filming. Likewise, new distribution channels emerged, and pornographic films could be shipped directly to consumer’s homes, rather than to public film houses. The introduction of the VCR and video marked a significant change in how pornography was produced, distributed and conceived of by insiders. This is the historical backdrop for what takes place in the film. In the director’s commentary for Boogie Nights, Anderson talks extensively about a “need” he had when writing the film to punish each of his characters. He wanted to drive them all to the absolute rock bottom of their lives. He does not give any explanation for this, and seems himself somewhat confused about that motivation. Dirk ends up prostituting himself to strangers again and trapped in a nightmarish drug-deal gone badly. Jack Horner's dreams of making "real film" are dashed when the Colonel is arrested for raping and sexually assaulting children, as well as the advent of video technology. Roller girl is "disrespected" by a former schoolmate of hers in a strange, sexual encounter in a limousine. Little Bill kills his wife and her lover before turning the gun on himself at New Year's Eve party. Amber Waves loses all of her parental and custodial rights in one final encounter with her ex-husband and a judge. There are other such tragic stories in this film. Yet, in the end, Anderson cannot leave it at this and decides to write the ending in such a way so as to literally "save" each of his creations. Dirk and Jack are reunited in a scene strangely reminiscent of the prodigal son parable - with the boy who had squandered his inheritance back at his father's house, begging for mercy, and being embraced immediately by the father as though all was forgiven. He is, in turn, reunited with his surrogate mother, pornstar Amber Waves, and is shown crying with his head in her lap while she brushes his hair with her hand. It is all extremely sad and haunting. Buck's inability to get a loan from the bank for his "hi-fi stereo world" business concept, because of his involvement with pornography, is solved by a fortuitous, frightening event involving a failed robbery at a donut store. When the robber, a customer and the clerk are all shot by one another, Buck - covered in the clerk's blood - sees the bag of money laying by the robber's feet, and seeing his opportunity, takes the money and leaves. We later see him in his own commercial for the stereo store. Amber Waves is behind the camera for this commercial, showing that she, too, has a future beyond merely becoming an aging, decrepit, porn star. Her future is in film, like Jack Horner. Both movies show Anderson’s belief that his characters do not possess the ability to truly escape their pasts or to save themselves in any meaningful way, but it is Magnolia that hits this idea with greater power. Magnolia, in comparison to his previous ventures, reads almost like a Christian morality play. All of the characters are either hiding from sins they themselves have committed, or from the effects of sins of which they were the object in their past. Each of the characters are imprisoned, psychologically speaking, to their pasts. They cannot be free, despite their yearnings otherwise. And to show that this is not merely another attempt to read redemption into art, Anderson makes this fact all the more explicit by continually showing us the numbers "8:2" and references to "Exodus 8:2" throughout the film. For instance, one man holds up a placard during the filming of the game show on which is written "Exodus 8:2." Elsewhere, the numbers 8:2 appear - quite often, in fact. Exodus 8:2 reads: "If you refuse to let them go, I will plague your whole country with frogs." This is a strange kind of apocalypse, yet the prophecy comes truth towards the end of the movie. The movie ends literally with a hailstorm of frogs - millions of them - falling to earth, crashing through car windows and pummeling pedestrians who happen to be walking by at the time. Leading up to this point the movie, the characters had all followed a similar arc as the characters in Boogie Nights. Anderson traces out the downward flow of their lives leading up to their hitting rock bottom and absolute despair. Aimee Mann sings a song in the background with the refrain, "Give up." Give up. There is nothing any of us can do about the prisons we find ourselves in. The psychological prison from being sexually abused by one's father; the prison of being in unreciprocated love; the prison of realizing what a horrible father one had been to one's child; the prison of knowing that one had married a rich, dying man only for the money, and had been unfaithful the entire marriage. There is nothing any of his characters can do to save themselves. But then something happens - frogs fall from heaven with the warning from God hanging in our minds - "if you refuse to let my people go, I will plague your whole country with frogs." The movie ends with each character's life being set on a new path and experiencing some form of liberation, appropriate to the prison each had found themselves in. What is going on with Anderson? Is he a believer doing as C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien both did, smuggling theology into his art? Listening to the commentary for Boogie Nights it's quite apparent the man is not a believer, nor even remotely religious. He's a foul-mouthed, brilliant filmmaker who grew up in the Valley and, I think, spent a lot of time dating porn stars as a teenager. The key to understanding why these themes are continually appearing his films has to do with how Anderson relates to his creation. He speaks repeatedly about falling in love with the actors in his movies and the characters they play. In fact, one gets the impression that he loves the characters more than the movie itself, as he repeatedly speaks about the difficulty he has in taking out scenes which he knows do not further the movie, because of his fidelity to the characters in the scenes. He seems to genuinely appreciate and love each of his creations as though they were real – even in spite of their very many moral failings. The re-enactment of biblical themes of judgment and redemption in Anderson’s films are, in my opinion, a function of his authentic, passionate love for the characters in his films. He is quite harsh on Dirk Digler's character at the end of the movie, saying nasty things about him, but if you listen to the entire commentary, it's apparent he is deeply fond of him as a character. That kind of sympathetic viewpoint is what marks all of his movies, in fact. He does not merely show his characters as archetypes of idealized good and evil. Rather, they are real people, and he wants us to see that. He wants us to see that Dirk is worth loving, even though he is such a shallow, naive, narcisstic porn star. His characters may be pathetic, but they are his characters, and he loves them. It is in his deeply personal love for his characters that Anderson finds himself compelled to write in explicit themes of redemption and judgment. He is not intending to write Christian allegory; rather, Christian allegory flows naturally because of how he sets himself in relation to his work. One must wonder if this does not mirror the thoughts of the Creator himself, who also loved the world so much that he sent someone to rescue us.

 
PBS documentary on Luther This is the year of Luther. Along with a fall-scheduled feature film starring Joseph Fiennes, PBS also has a documentary on the great German Reformer. (thanks to Poppa Chuck for the link). There are several excerpts from the documentary that are very interesting. One of them includes an interview with Alistar McGrath. Given that PBS is doing this, it should be no surprise that the documentary also fleshes out some of the secular ideals that flowed from Luther - such as liberation from the tyranny of the Catholic Church, the sovereignity of the individual, "belief in oneself" kind of thinking, the free exchange of ideas, etc. Likewise, many of the scholars interviewed take note that the seed of anti-semitism that would grow into fruition in Hitler and the Third Reich was nascent in the mind and writings of Luther. Though they are careful to note that he is not a racial anti-semite, but rather a Christian anti-semite, nonetheless they believe that given Luther's historical importance, he enabled the transmission of a strain of anti-semitism into subsequent generations. This is not a new accusation, obviously, and perhaps has some truth to it (I haven't studied it). But, on the whole, the documentary looks fascinating.

 
Sweden's 1979 Ban on Spanking In 1979, Sweden passed an act banning corporal punishment on children. Two articles on the history of this ban can be seen here and here. Somewhere - I cannot remember where - I had read that while the actual incidents of corporal punishment had declined in Sweden since the 1979 ban, the rise in "yelling and screaming" at children had risen. In the first article linked, it states that some data shows the 1979 ban having no effect on "unusual forms of corporal punishment," such as threats of using knives or firearms on the child. A lot of the data surrounding child abuse, in general, is unreliable, due to problems with under-reporting. For instance, there has been statistically an increase in the number of child abuse cases reported in Sweden over the last several decades, but this does not mean the ban has led to an increase in child abuse. Child abuse, like sexual assault, suffers from under-reporting, but in recent years, due to lobbying and educational campaigns, reporting has increased. So, an increase in the number of child abuse cases reported does not mean that there has been a real increase in child abuse in Sweden; only that more cases are being reported. The actual language of the ban is as follows: The Foraldrabalken (Parental Code, Section 6.1) is as follows: "Children have a right to care, safety and a good upbringing. Children shall be treated with respect for their person and character and shall not be subjected to physical punishment or any other form of humiliating treatment." This is the time when I hate having only one language that I can speak. It's difficult find documentation in English on this ban, and I can only imagine how much difficult it is to find reliable data, let alone reliable data in English.

 
2003 SSSR Meeting in Norfolk, Virginia The Social Scientific Study of Religion's annual meeting will be held in Norfolk, Virginia this year. The dates are October 23 - 26. The topic this year is "Religion in Motion." Any of the readers of this blog, by chance, planning on going? If so, please write me and tell me, as I will (hopefully) be in attendance as well.

 
I've got the ill communication What a night. I think I probably went to bed around 6:00pm and woke up some time this morning at 7:30am. I feel horrible - the aches, the stuffy head, the runny nose, the headache, the tiredness. I say this every time I get sick, but I wish I didn't take my health for granted all the time. I can't believe how nice life is when everything's going along nicely, physically. A friend of mine at church has chronic migraines. She always has a migraine - the only variation is in its severity. I cannot imagine the difficulty of that.

 
Revised Review of The Score Paige and I watched The Score last night. The Score was directed by Frank Oz (of Muppets fame) and heralds an all-star cast of three of the greatest actors of their representative generations - Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro and Ed Norton. Angela Basset co-stars and De Niro's love interest. The Score is a classic "big heist" film. A veteran thief wants to retire, because he is pulled between two worlds, but in order to do so, must pull off one last job - one that is both lucrative enough to make retirement a possibility, and especially risky. This movie has all the important elements of a "big heist" movie - the retiring, veteran cat burglar looking for one last score, the risky last job, the huge payoff, the juxtaposition of the two types of burglars - one somewhat reckless, the other meticulous, careful and unwilling to take risks - and the central character's desire to have a legitimate life. These elements usually are present in most "big heist" films, although not all of them. First, the good stuff. Ed Norton did the unthinkable in stealing the show from legendary actors Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro. As with Primal Fear, Norton showed his incredible range by playing a thief who pretended to be a mentally retarded janitor's assistant who worked the night shift at Montreal customshouse. His ability to move in and out of that character was amazing to watch. Brando, on the other hand, was a disappointment. As was Angela Basset. But De Niro was, as always, wonderful to watch. The beauty of a simple film like The Score is in its fidelity to the classic "big heist" formula. It plays the formula well. It shows inventive thieves in a race to steal the prize. It's a wonderful story that I never grow tired of. The beauty of "big heist" films, to me, isn't really in whether or not the movie succeeds in fooling the audience into believing the caper might not be pulled off - they always pull the caper off. That's part of the beauty of the big heist flick. If you have watched any of them, you know this for a fact. The thieves, in some way, will experience a degree of success - or if they do not, it will be because of some kind of sabotage, as in Heat. The real genius of the big heist flick is in laying out the obstacles of the security and the ingenuinity of the thieves. Even when Norton double-crossed De Niro, and then De Niro double-double-crossed him, it was this same thing. The central theme is cleverness. How clever can the thief be? De Niro showed himself to be the best - the brash, immaturity of Norton's character, who was more comfortable with risk-taking, was beaten by the slow, steady, and forward-thinking of De Niro. He had planned for every possible outcome, allowing himself various exit strategies - even in the possibility of a betrayal. I thought this was an interesting spin on the classic genre. But, again, it gets at what makes these kinds of movies so great to watch - watching the intelligent thief do what he does well. But, I didn't feel like it was as good as some of the other standards of the genre, like Heat, Ocean's Eleven, or even The Thomas Crown Affair. For TTCA, what I liked was the playfulness of Brosnan's character. He was a brilliant, yet slightly bored, millionaire. He wasn't a malicious thief - he merely stole for the pure game of it. I liked that. That same kind of free-spiritedness is in Ocean's Eleven, too (starring Clooney, Pitt, et al). The Score is a bit different, obviously. It's slightly darker, like Heat or Mamet's Heist, but not too much. The thieves are still protagonists - still people I rooted for. Even Norton's character was admirable. But it felt more toned down than the standards. Heat, for instance, does all that The Score does, but far better. The brilliance of the thieves is stunning, but it deals with more interesting dramatic themes from other genres, like the obsessive cop, the inability for these people to have normal lives, etc. It also is more tragic. The Score, on the other hand, felt more light. Which was nice. I needed a light film, and that's what I got. It was fun. I give it four out of five stars.

 
Another Test This one is pretty accurate. I am a translator of sorts between normal people and geeks. This just means, I enjoy hanging out with people who feel as, if not more, uncomfortable as I feel at office parties.

You are 26% geek

You are a geek liaison, which means you go both ways. You can hang out with normal people or you can hang out with geeks which means you often have geeks as friends and/or have a job where you have to mediate between geeks and normal people. This is an important role and one of which you should be proud. In fact, you can make a good deal of money as a translator. Normal: Tell our geek we need him to work this weekend. You [to Geek]: We need more than that, Scotty. You'll have to stay until you can squeeze more outta them engines! Geek [to You]: I'm givin' her all she's got, Captain, but we need more dilithium crystals! You [to Normal]: He wants to know if he gets overtime.

Take the Polygeek Quiz at Thudfactor.com

 
Ruminating on my obsession with reading lists Updated my reading list on the right-hand column. I love reading lists. When I graduated from college, I gave a lot of thought about how I was consuming far too much theology and non-fiction in general, and hardly any fiction. I had read this quote by Bacon that went something like, "Math makes a man subtle, poetry witty, literature deep, philosophy keen, etc." It read like a list of ingredients on the side of a cereal box. I reasoned that all of the ingredients that Bacon listed - philosophy, economics, mathematics, poetry, literature, history, etc. - were good, and even necessary, vitamins that the soul needed to function properly. Consuming too much of any one was not good for the body - even though the consumption of that one was necessary. Goiters form on people's necks when they don't get enough iodine. Scurvy occurs when sailors didn't get enough vitamin C. Or something alone those lines anyway. My own forms of scurvy and goiters formed all the time, I felt like, because I consumed too much of one thing and not enough of another. So, to correct this, I developed my "reading regiment." I felt like I needed to correct some of the imbalance and confusion in my heart by reading a diversity of things, and I had noticed that left to my own devices, I tended to never reach that kind of equilibrium on my own. The "reading regiment" first of all consisted of a list of the different ingredients that I would focus on: philosophy, economics/sociology, fiction, theology and history. I then assigned percentages to each of these. These percentages changer, over time, as I realized I didn't need as much philosophy as I had once thought. But originally it went something like:

Philosophy 10% Fiction 30% History 10% Economics/sociology 25% Theology 25% (In the end, though, I ended up weighting economics/sociology less, history less, and fiction more.)

Having these percentages, I then moved onto developing the reading regiment in its formal sense. I spaced out the different genres according to the percentages so that for every 100 hundred books I was reading, 30 of them were works of fiction, 10 were works of philosophy, 25 were workd of economics/sociology and so on. I typed out about 500 lines of this and bound the pages into a small booklet. On the front of the booklet, I wrote with black sharpie the words, "Reading Regiment." How it functioned was as follows: I would look in the book and see which type of book was next. I would then allow myself the opportunity of buying a book that fit that genre, or reading a book I owned already for that genre. I could not move onto the next genre until I was finished with that book, too. Nor could I purchase a new book. I could not start a new book nor purchase new books unless I was finished with the book I was currently reading. I also could not buy a book unless it matched the genre I had assigned myself to read. Given how I had broken it down, I felt like I could help correct the development of spiritual goiters by rotating my reading through pre-assigned genres. For two years, this worked really well. I think I got through about thirty or forty books, without cheating too much on my regiment. My reading slowed down considerably when Paige and I got married, and even moreso when Miles was born. The regular flow of words from my bachelor days had slowed to a steady trickle. But, the reading regiment enabled me to read such massive works as Anna Karenena and such classics as Adam Bede and The Trial. I also read Isaac Watts' Logic in this time, and some other stuff that I had always meant to read, but never could settle my hyperactive reading appetite down long enough to sit through it. I was horrible at reading multiple books at the same time, and rarely finishing any of them. This regiment was something I used to motivate me to set and complete goals, as well as give my spiritual faculties greater exercise. I also am just, in general, obsessed with lists. I make lists of everything. I am also particularly interested in cataloguing my life for whatever reason. I like to make lists and I like to document my life, placing markers along the way that I can then look back on and see what was happening at the time. So, when I would look back in the pages of my reading regiment, and see that I had finished Adam Bede on a certain date, I would remember being on my honeymoon with Paige in Saint Barth, where we stayed in a cottage once owned by the Russian ballet dancer, Rudolph Nouryeev. I would remember sitting on the porch overlooking the ocean with Paige, being served breakfast - croussants, coffee, freshly cut mangos and jams - by the lady who lived in the cottage next to ours. I would remember the private, ocean-fed swimming basin that was only steps down the porch, and laughing with Paige as she spun a tale about how the lady who fed us breakfast every morning had been Rudolph Nouryeev's mistress, and that she had killed him and he was somewhere hidden in a secret room behind the bedroom. (This was before we learned he was gay). Adam Bede was left out on the deck one night, and I woke in horror to see it soaked from the storm that had came in the night. I remember logging through that book, anxious to finish it, and then being surprised by how much I loved it, and being sad when it was over. I no longer use the reading regiment, because now I am in school, and cannot really justify reading anything that does not directly pertain to my research. Although, I still do. I started Graham Greene's thriller, Ministry of Fear yesterday, and woke up early, early this morning to read it. Greene is my favorite writer. I'm gradually making my way through his novels. This will be my fourth novel of his. My favorite book of Greene's, so far, is Heart of the Matter.

 
Love from my friends Thanks to Nikolai Toshikazu and my brother-in-law, Eric Vincill, I have four hardback copies of the Harry Potter books (all except for volume one) en route to my apartment in Athens. Paige started the first book yesterday after church, and from the look of it, is hooked. I'm ready to start volume 3, but I have a feeling that by the time it gets here, Paige will be caught up with me (as we have the paperback version of Chamber of Secrets already), and she'll steal the book away before I get to read it. Since these are technically presents for her, in the first place, I figure I should step aside, but only with extreme frustration.