neat.

My latest obsession is Cesar Milan, The Dog Whisperer. I’ve been trying to examine the fascination I find with watching this guy come in and essentially fix peoples’ problems with their dogs, whether they’re hyperactive, afraid, or even vicious; and this applies to both the dogs and their owners. Milan says that he “rehabilitates dogs and trains people” and that we should all be “calm and assertive” with our pets.

Lately, as I’ve been trying to get organized and find time to do my work, have a personal life, keeping up hobbies, and maintain that oh-so-fragile sanity, I find Cesar making a lot of sense. Dogs don’t reflect on the past—they only live in the present. Dogs absorb the enviroment around them, particularly the people (and other animals) they encounter. I think a lot of us, myself included, tend to let past performance and fears hold us back. Dogs don’t think that way—they take the mentality of the pack and they go with it.

I know that pack mentality is typically poorly regarded as the refuge of the obtuse, for people who can’t think for themselves. But the pack mentality can actually free us from the stress of daily life. Why concern ourselves with the actions of others, when we are not accountable for them? Why take on responsibilities that aren’t ours? I’ve been trying to be the alpha dog, and the amount of energy this takes is enormous—both to obtain that spot, and keep it. There will always be someone better at something than I am, and there will always be another ‘dog’ trying to grab the top spot. However, if I go with the flow, I can relax, bury bones, sniff things, and generally lead a healthy and relatively stress-free life. I may even learn stuff about the neighborhood and the local trees.

So, my new goal is to be calm and assertive with myself, and train myself to let go of the little things. I know that traveling with the pack is generally regarded as the kryptonite of the ambitious, and working in the corporate world, the concept is a bit frightening. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Jack Valenti, the man who will forever be remembered as the man who started the Motion Picture Association of America’s film ratings system, died yesterday at the age of 85. Valenti took over as president of the MPAA in 1966, and two years later the original ratings system, G, PG, R and X came to be, as a reaction to the rapidly increasing violence in films—Bonnie and Clyde (1967), with its striking and extremely graphic closing death scene, is said to have been the straw that broke the camel’s back. The Hollywood ratings system has always been fascinating to me—from the beginning, when it emerged as the Production Code of 1930 (at that time produced by the MPAA’s precursor, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America) the code and ratings system has been a form of self-censorship, a way to prevent the government from interfering with Hollywood’s cash flow

The Production Code, created by the first president of the MPPDA William H. Hays, had three guiding principles:

1. No picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin.
2. Correct standards of life, subject only to the requirements of drama and entertainment, shall be presented.
3. Law, natural or human, shall not be ridiculed, nor shall sympathy be created for its violation. (Production Code, wikipedia)

Hence, even in the darkest of films in the Classical Hollywood era, the bad guy is always either redeemed or killed, making some otherwise excellent films just a bit forced—take The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), for example. Because Lana Turner’s daughter had recently been on trial for murdering Johnny Stompanato, Lana’s abusive mobster boyfriend, the filmmakers dressed her in gleaming white, to enhance her virginal image in the film. Before Lana’s character Cora can announce her pregnancy (notice, without ever using the word “pregnant”) she has to awkwardly marry her lover Frank (John Garfield)—no children out of wedlock in Classical Hollywood! And, of course, in the end both Cora and Frank are punished for murdering Cora’s first husband: Cora dies in a car wreck, and Frank is put on death row.

The production code and the ratings system have been praised as protecting our morality and our children, and criticized for crushing the creativity of film. Independent filmmakers notoriously lock horns with the MPAA to avoid the so-called ‘kiss of death’ for films, the NC-17 rating (which replaced the X rating—because the ratings were not originally copyrighted, the pornographic industry latched onto the X as free advertising—leading to its replacement). The NC-17 rating is a cliff for films—covering everything from Showgirls (1995) to Debbie Does Dallas (1978), keeping audiences away, and keeping theaters from exhibiting them. The ratings system is uniquely rooted in puritanical American values—where else can you see someone’s brain explode at an R rating, but never, ever, a man’s penis? Sex is dirty, violence is profitable.

So, let’s tip a hat to the legacy of Jack Valenti—he may be a polarizing figure, but his affect on the film industry has been powerful and long lasting. Where we go from here will follow what has come before.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to see Jorge Cham, author of the grad student comic “Piled Higher and Deeper,” at the University of Arizona. Cham gave a great talk about procrastination, something I’ve been doing a lot lately. To procrastinate, he argues, is not necessarily a bad thing (separate from its close cousin, laziness)—you’re simply deferring a task, but still thinking about doing it; whereas laziness is simply a complete lack of desire to do anything. When we procrastinate, we let our minds wander from the tasks at hand, we can end up being even more creative, removing the mental blocks that occur when we concentrate too long on something. If you have the opportunity to see Cham speak, I highly recommend it—especially if you are or ever were a grad student–he really, really understands.

Procrastination is actually going to end up saving me a lot of time—the other day I was wandering around my del.icio.us bookmarks (I was supposed to be cleaning, but the computer was so enticing…) and I found one I had saved a while back: todoist. This seems to me like one of those fantastic applications developed by a software engineer while work was being avoided; procrastination brings us the most wonderful things.

Today at work when I needed to find a way to organize my (entire) life, todoist popped right back into my head again. You can create projects, add tasks, assign due dates, create color-coding and, best of all, there is a satisfying check box for when you complete something. It works like my brain, but with a bit more clarity—and you can access it from anywhere. With this tool, I can see myself becoming exponentially more productive than I am now…leaving me with oodles of valuable procrastination time. Life is good.

This is the inscription on the clock tower at the University of Texas at Austin, darkened in mourning.

I haven’t blogged in a while, though goodness knows there was plenty to blog about—Imus was good for at least a couple of entries—but we’ll come back to that later. Today I’m blogging about something wholly disturbing, the Virginia Tech shootings. The event in itself is heartbreaking, and has no logic—it was a sad act by a sad person. But what is just as disturbing is the treatment of the event by the media. A sick person quickly becomes a monster as we rip his life apart, and that makes it easier for us to grasp. The event becomes mythology—good versus evil; an event to be learned from and made better by for having survived it.

Our fascination with tragedy is remarkable—the tragic occurrences are the ones that shape us; I couldn’t tell you a great deal about the history of the University of Texas at Austin, but I know who Charles Whitman was. I was there when they decided to re-open the clock tower to visitors, (for the second time—a string of suicides in the 1970s closed the observation deck for a second time in 1974) and I heard stories about how he’d hit people almost a mile away, how bore marks in the marble of buildings were actually ricochets, and how he had scratched marks in the limestone of the clock tower to keep count of his kills. He was a regular person, capable, in a twisted way, of something remarkable. We still remember that day, as we remember 9/11 or Columbine. We examine killers with the same fervor as the great minds of our time. They fascinate us—just as we perhaps can’t see ourselves achieving greatness, we can’t see ourselves causing such suffering.

But I would ask that in this situation, as in others, we try to remember that there are never only two sides. We should have pity and not hatred, and we should try to understand why—and understand that there is no simple answer.