Soul (a movie review post)

 

Pixar has not been my favorite production company of late. After spending more than a decade as Hollywood's golden child that could do no wrong, they ended that run with Toy Story 3. Their movies after that, with only a few exceptions, became formulaic and, well, boring. I've said previously that I believe that was due to the loss of John Lasseter as their creative guide. I still mostly stand by that. Since 2010, only three of their movies stand out as something more than ordinary. Two of those were by Pete Docter, this being one of them.

The first thing I'm going to say is how... wonderful... yes, wonderful, it is to have a movie "about" jazz that isn't made by fucking Damien Chazelle. There's nothing in this about how the white savior man is going to save jazz from... I don't know. It was never really clear what Chazelle thought he was saving jazz from. Itself, probably, since Chazelle seems to believe that jazz was made for the white man, and it can't be trusted in the hands of the people who invented it.

This movie isn't really about jazz and doesn't have a whole lot of jazz in it. Which is fine, because I'm not much of a jazz fan. I don't hate it or anything, but it's not something I'm just going to turn on if I feel like some music. In fact, the movie isn't about music at all. It's about dreams. Life dreams, not the ones you have when you're asleep and forget promptly when you wake up. Or, maybe, it's about inspiration. That's the word, or a word, they use in the movie. 

But that's not really right, either. The movie is about living your life and not just... drifting through it. It's about not letting fear get in the way of pursuing the things that spark you. From a casual distance, it's a beautiful movie. It has some endearing and some poignant moments.

It also has some issues, which I will try to point out without being spoilery.

Joe is a musician, a jazz musician. He's been chasing that lucky break all his life. His mother wants him to get a real job. A permanent one. Not that he doesn't work. He teaches music, but he's not, evidently, a permanent teacher or anything like that. The conflict at the opening of the movie is that he's been offered a permanent teaching position, and he's torn over whether to accept it or not because, for some reason, if he acceptd a position as a music teacher he'll have to, for whatever reason, no longer accept gigs playing in clubs and bars. Um... The dude's not married and has no kids. This is an artificial conflict. Do I give up on my dream of being a "musician" by taking the teaching job or not?

There is also the subtle implication that Joe has not been adequately pursuing his dream because he hasn't been successful at becoming a "musician." There are scenes of him doing other life stuff, like watching TV and doing laundry, which are there to suggest that these are times when Joe was failing to pursue his calling. What the fuck is that about? No one can spend 24/7 doing one thing and one thing only. That he has not "made it" is not because he has not adequately pursued his dream.

And there is the complete dismissal of the importance Joe has played in the lives of the students he's taught and their own inspiration toward music because of him. It's like those things, though important, do not actually matter because those things have come at the expense of Joe's own success. Or something like that.

Maybe I'm being too harsh, but I don't really think these are good messages to be handing out. Not that I think these are messages that are really intended, but the framework of the movie delivers them anyway. If you are not famous and "successful," you have failed your dream. You have failed to pursue it adequately. It's our cultural belief, and it's ingrained in the movie, which is too bad, because there could have been a deeper message.

All of which may sound like I didn't like the movie, which would be incorrect. It's one of the top three Pixar movies of the past decade, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It came close to bringing tears to my eyes. I would gladly watch it again. And I might, since it's streaming on Disney+. None of which changes the fact that I wish that Docter had gone just a little bit further with the movie and not relied so heavily on our societal views of achievement and success. It's a really good movie, just not a great one.

How the System Failed My Son: Part One -- What's Love Got To Do With It?

It's no secret that the education system in the US is in trouble. It has been for decades, study after study showing the decline in performance among millennials in the United States as compared to millennials in the rest of the developed world. The PISA has shown a steady decline in US results going back to when the OECD first started doing the testing more than a decade ago. You can visit their site here if you're really interested.

But this is not really a post about the education system and what I think, after being involved in it in three different states, is wrong with it. Nor is it a post about how to fix it. Or a post about who or what caused it or who or what should fix it.

No, this is a post about my son, my younger son, and how the system has failed him, specifically.

Now, let me make one thing abundantly clear, my son is smart. Brilliant, even. And I know that's what all parents say about their kids and they probably even believe it, but I'm not saying this from any point of bragging, and the things I'm writing about here are facts, not beliefs. Look, my kid is probably smarter than me, and I don't say that lightly. To put this in perspective, if we're talking about the 1% of smart people, I'm that. I also don't say that to brag. It's an objective, testable thing, and I want you to understand what I'm saying about my kid in this post.

Which is to say that if there's anyone the system should not have failed, it's my son. Smart kids, really smart kids, not the ones who are just a bit above average, should not have to struggle through school the way they so frequently do.

So what happened?

It all started in 1st grade.

[Note: Much of what I'm going to talk about throughout this post is stuff I personally witnessed while working in the various classes at my kids' school.]

There were three smart kids in my son's 1st grade class.

The first one was very obnoxious and a know-it-all. When given assignments, he would flat out refuse and say that he didn't have to do the work because he already knew how to do it. He would also make comments about how smart he was and that the teacher was dumb. Remember, this is a 1st grader. It didn't take long for the teacher to get tired of dealing with him and transfer him up to 2nd grade... just to get him out of her hair.

The second one was also obnoxious and, actually, a troublemaker. His mother was on staff at the school, and he was frequently sent to her classroom to sit because he was in trouble. His strength was math, but he was a poor reader, and the teacher actually gave him over to my son to tutor in reading. And my son, a 1st grader!, was really good in that capacity. But, then, my son was already independently reading Harry Potter in 1st grade.

After the first boy got bumped up to 2nd grade, the second boy's mother put in a request to have her son, also, get bumped to 2nd grade, and it was granted. I can only assume that that happened because she was on staff. That and the boy was a troublemaker whom the teacher was glad to be rid of. But, remember, he was only advanced in math and was actually a bit behind in reading.

Now, I found it a bit annoying that the first kid got promoted, but he was actually smart enough for it. He might have been obnoxious (and, actually, that boy got better as he grew older), but he was a bright kid and was telling the truth when he said he already knew how to do the work they were doing. He's probably on about the same level as my son, math wise, but he never rose to the same level in other areas as my kid.

That the second boy also got promoted, though, made me mad. Both we cases of kids being rewarded for their bad behavior, but the second boy didn't actually deserve it academically. (And to draw a comparison, he did not grow out of his obnoxious behavior and remained a troublemaker all the way through middle school.)

So I went to the principal and requested that my son, also, be promoted. She said it had to come at the recommendation of the teacher. So I went to the teacher one day after school when I was picking my kids up. It went something like this:
Me: I'd like to have Phillip promoted to 2nd grade.
Teacher: Why do you want to do that?
Me: Phillip is at least as capable as <student 1> and more capable than <student 2>. Phillip was tutoring him in reading, after all. If they are going to be promoted, Phillip deserves to also be promoted.
Teacher (at this point, she pulled Phillip to her and hugged him against her): Oh, no, I could never promote Phillip this soon; I love him too much. He's the sweetest boy in the class.

I kind of stared blankly at her, because how do you respond to that? You want to think that teachers have the best interest of the kids at heart but, although it was great to hear her say how much she liked my kid, it was clear that she was more interested in her own well-being than what was good for the kids in the class. It didn't take her response to me to show that because she already had when she promoted the other two kids because she was tired of dealing with them.

To make matters worse, there was a boy with Asperger's in the class, and Phillip was the only kid he felt comfortable with. In fact, my son and that boy were best friends all the way through elementary school. Basically, until the other boy left the school and it became too difficult for them to maintain their friendship.

The long and the short of it is that, after my wife and I discussed it, we decided that it wasn't worth a fight to get him moved up to 2nd grade. It was, after all, only 1st grade, and it would all work itself out, right?

Right?

Growing Up In the Race Divide (part 5b)

Note: Go back and read the last entry in this series before reading this one.

So...
There I was, all of 20 years old, officially the unofficial youth pastor (or unofficially the official youth pastor; it's hard to know which) at my first night of youth group, and I had two kids. Middle schoolers whom I didn't know from Adam.

Initially, I couldn't even find them, because they weren't where they were supposed to be. They were down in the game room. You might think, "well, what else would you expect from middle schoolers," but that they were middle schoolers wasn't the reason. The reason they were down in the game room was because it had been weeks, at least, since they'd had any kind of teaching or, even, a leader down in the youth area. Basically, they just came each week to hang out because it was better than being at home. [And, man, I don't even know how to feel about that. I didn't then, and I still don't now. Just... how horrible is that, to have a home life that is so unenjoyable that you would rather come and just be ignored at church with nothing to do than to stay at home (because, sometimes, it was only one of them there).]

Now... You might think that the problem here was that the youth group was practically non-existent (however, we did have a few more, maybe 10 (including the two from Wednesdays), that would come on Sunday mornings, kids who had to come because their parents made them), and that was a problem, but that wasn't the problem. No, the problem was that I didn't have any of the prejudices held by the church at large and didn't care about the "acceptability" of the teenagers who came.

So let me give you some history:
My church was started as a mission of another church around 1915. At the time it was founded, the neighborhood it was planted in was a fairly well-to-do, up-and-coming middle class neighborhood. Big Southern houses and all of that. I think it probably reached its peak in the 50s and, by the 70s, was on a steep decline. The "founding fathers" of my church had all lived in the area around the church when it started; by the 80s, all of their families (and, yes, there were old men in the church, deacons and such, who had grown up in it) had moved to the outskirts of town to get away from "urban blight." [The actual definition of that term has to do with buildings (and that was true: once stately homes in the area around the church were falling into disrepair), but, when they talked about it in my church, it had to do with people.]

As the members moved farther away from the church, fewer and fewer people from the actual neighborhood around the church attended it. So, where it had once been a church that people walked to on Sunday morning, it had become a church that people drove to. And, sure, that's how churches are now (and were in the 80s), but churches didn't start out that way. Protestant churches in the US, I mean. But I digress... The point is that the church was still a mostly upper middle class/lower upper class congregation when I walked down the steps to the youth room in 1990. The people in the mile or so radius around the church weren't welcome there, and they knew it. [Which isn't to say that anyone would have been turned away (despite the fact that we had "guards" at the doors), but no one from that area, having come to the church once, would have ever come back.]

The real problem, I suppose, was that the church hired the wrong guy when they hired me. I mean, they didn't hire someone who was going to play their game. I'm sure they thought they had, but they should have known; I'd given them plenty of clues. The biggest one was that I refused to be a ministerial student despite the fact that they tried to bribe me to do it then tried to extort me to do it. They were very disappointed that I was majoring in English (so was my college faculty, except for the English department, who had tried to coerce (force) me into math). But those are other stories. I think they forgot that, although I grew up in the church, I was not ever one of them. I was part of the "hired help," and my family was, at best, lower middle class (and I'm not sure we were always that).

However, with their stated desire of hiring someone to revitalize the youth group, they definitely hired the right guy, and that's what I set out to do. [The issue here is that their stated goal was incomplete. It should have been "to revitalize the youth group with 'our kind of people.'"] And I did it by focusing on the neighborhood around the church. Because why? They were kids, and that's what I was there to do: minister to kids. I didn't care if they were rich or poor or black or white or, probably, even if they had been Martian, but I never had a green-skinned kid show up, so I guess we'll never know about that.

To make a long story short, we'll just say that I succeeded. Within a year, I was running over 30 kids on Wednesday nights and, by the end of two years, more than 50. Most of those kids were from lower income homes, and more than a dozen of them were black. Almost none of these kids had parents who went to the church. Or any church. And, now, we arrive at the problem: I thought I was doing a good thing. The right thing. But I was causing some problems higher up the food chain; I just didn't know about them.
Yet.

Playing with "You"

I mentioned in passing recently that I'm teaching a creative class at my kids' school. It's just once a week, and today is the second class. Last week, we started by talking about perspective (or POV (point of view) as it is more commonly referred to as these days). I figure you can sit down and start writing without a plot or a story or, really, any ideas at all, but you have to start with a character and a perspective or you can't write. Not that that comes first, necessarily, but you can have the greatest plot in the world and not be able to do anything with it without your perspective.

Mostly, we talked about 1st person and 3rd person, which is natural. But we did mention 2nd person. Writing in the 2nd person is something I find intriguing. Really, the only place you find it in fiction is in Choose Your Own Adventure books. But I don't think it has to be that way. No, I don't think a whole novel could be sustained in 2nd person, but there is certainly more room in short stories for 2nd person than what we see, which is basically nothing.

Anyway... all of that to say that a while back there was a... discussion... about writing in 2nd person in this (unfortunately short-lived) writing group I was participating in, and, just to challenge myself, I wrote this little 2nd person story. I think it worked well, and I'd love to hear what you guys think, so I'm going to tag that on at the end of this post.

One other note, first, though. I'm participating in the assignments I give the kids each week. Sort of. What that really means is that I will be work on Tib stories as we go along. Okay, Tib chapters, but I'm going to try to keep at least the first few individual enough that they could be picked up and read independently of each other. What this means for you is that I'm going to be updating my Tiberius tab with new stories as they're ready. The Tiberius tab hasn't received a whole lot of love, so I encourage you all to check it out, as I will be replacing the stories rather than just adding them on. I'm going to leave "The Tunnel" (the 1st Tib story) up for another week to give you guys a chance to check  it out, but the second story, "The Kitchen Table," is ready to go, so I'll be swapping those out next week. I'd love any feedback you have on those, too. And remember, the man with no eyes will be showing up in the Tiberius stories in a few weeks, and I'm sure none of you want to miss that!

As an aside to the previous paragraph, I'm also working on the prelude story for Tib. It's called "The Evil That Men Do," and I'll be making it available on the Kindle and the Nook as soon as it's finished. I'm not quite through with the writing, and the cover art isn't quite ready, but, hopefully, that will be soon. Although the Tib stories are kid accessible, the prelude is not. In my opinion. Basically, you should read it and decide whether you think it's too mature for your children. I'm not going to be letting my kids read it, though. Well, maybe the 15-year-old.

Here's the 2nd person story. Let me know what you think!

Locked In

You wake up slowly. But not gradually. Not smoothly. You wake up in fits and starts realizing that hunger gnaws at you. It is with annoyance that you realize that you’ve slept longer than you had intended. A lot longer if the hunger pangs are any indication. Your previous exertions must have taken more out of you than you had thought.

You climb out of what passes for your bed, grimacing at the stiffness in your limbs. Yes, you have, indeed, slept longer than you had intended, and your body cries out for sustenance. Idly, you wonder what the date is. Not that it really matters. Dates don’t mean anything to you.

You climb the stairs leading up from the cellar into the darkened interior of the house you make your dwelling place. How lucky you were to have found it flits into your head, but you correct yourself. Fortunate, not lucky. You don’t believe in luck. And you did pay the agent handsomely to find a house that suited your needs. Yes, you were fortunate to have found such a perfect house. The sheet-draped furniture looks ghostly in the darkness, vaguely reflecting the dim light sifting in from outside. The twinge of a smile hints about your lips, but it is not related to the décor. Tonight, you have no time for ambiance. Tonight, you feel the need only for the hunt.

You feel the setting of the sun, and you step outside, pulling the door closed behind you. You don’t bother to lock it. Few are foolhardy enough that they would try to enter your sanctum, and you would welcome them if they did. Welcome them in the way that a spider welcomes a fly that enters its web. There are children still at play outside. They freeze at the sight of you, sensing your presence in the same way a hare senses the hawk above as its shadow passes overhead. Although they are wise to fear you, they have no reason for that fear. You know better than to hunt where you live. Not that they aren’t… tempting.

As you move slowly down the steps of the house that everyone tries to avoid looking at, the children relocate to the front porch of a house at the other end of the street. You move in that direction for no other reason than that it brings you pleasure to see them squirm. Squirm like vermin in the dirt when a stone is moved or like termites when a rotting log is suddenly split open. This time, the smile is not fleeting.

It’s been too long since you’ve had a young one, but the desire is alive in you, tonight, thanks to those children. If the humans didn’t get so worked up over their missing young, you’d partake more often, but you have to be more than careful to not be discovered when you go after the young. Still, every so often, you can get away with it, and tonight will be one of those nights.

You move through the city, all of your senses alert in a way that no human’s ever can be. You are as much a part of the night as the darkness and the wind. And, like the wind, you flow from place to place being felt but not seen, leaving a quiet shudder in those you pass by, the angel of death, and they never know of their good fortune on this night. How magnanimous you feel, allowing them to go their way, keep their petty, fleeting lives.

Finally, you find what you are looking for, a gathering of young ones. And in a church, which makes it so much better. They will probably think that their faith, that the church itself, will protect them, and, once, long ago, it would have, but so very, very few people have faith anymore. It’s the ones that think they do that you enjoy the most. It makes it so much more… fun.

There are a couple of dozen people inside the little church. A matronly woman and a few of the teenagers in a small kitchen. A young man hardly older than a child himself in an office with another of them. The rest are in the chapel watching a movie. Two of them, thinking themselves clever, have sequestered themselves back in the pews to make out. Young lovers in a church locked up tighter than a drum. You wonder if it could possibly get any better. Of course, you will kill them all.

The locked building is of no hindrance to you, and, reveling in your power, you decide to play the part of the cat and toy with your food, first, before you feast. After all, you have no idea how long it will be before another opportunity like this one will present itself, so you should make the absolute most of it.

You creep along the ceiling allowing a hint of your presence to wash over the pitiful humans below. You smile as they grow restless and uneasy for no reason that they can understand. When their fear reaches ripeness, you drop down amongst them bestowing panic upon them like a benediction. You exalt in the chaos and screams and reach for one of them, the one with long, flowing blond hair.

You bare your fangs at her, preparing to sink them into her smooth, warm flesh that pulses with life, but she passes out in your hands. With a growl, you fling her aside. There is no pleasure without the struggle; you’ll come back for her when you have finished with the others. You reach for another, but you are suddenly and unexpectedly pierced with pain.

You can’t figure out what is happening. The pain is incomprehensible, piercing through your back into your heart. Slowly, and with full awareness, you fall to the floor, sprawled out on your face. You hear one of them, “Is it dead?” And another, “Why doesn’t it turn to dust?” And, “This isn’t Buffy, stupid.”

“Go get my copy of Dracula from my office, Tom.”

You feel confident that is the young man. You can now feel his faith, true faith, washing over you in revolting waves, sickening you. But you can’t move. You lie frozen on the floor, helpless, and you find yourself wishing that you had some deity to pray to. You begin to hope fervently that they believe the stake has finished you off. You have a chance if they just toss you out like this.

It grows quiet. The silence is a torment. The silence of the true grave. Faintly, you hear the turning of pages. There is mumbled talk of beheading and burning, and you wish you could scream. How pitiful… taken by your own prey. They lift your body and begin to drag you to the small graveyard behind the church, and you know that you go to your final resting place.