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November 21, 2005
a revolutionary edumakation
We watched a sweet German flick, The Edukators (dir. Hans Weingartner), on Saturday.
Basic plot: band of three revolutionary 20-somethings break into houses of the rich while the cats are away, rearrange furniture and belongings without stealing of damaging anything and leave a note saying “Your days of plenty are numbered.” (Here’s an online taste of their shenanigans.) Of course, complications develop: they take a prisoner, they fall in love, they question the revolution. It’s a movie that feels close to home. The characters and conversations are familiar — just replace the young adult post-communist European angst of the Edukators with ruminations and calls action to on environmentalism, monopolistic two-party politics, globalization, etc…. that seem to dominate the political dialogue in countries whose rebellious youth is too young to remember communist rule on their home soil.
And there’s a great dinner-table scene. Great because it puts at the same table a young idealistic revolutionary with an older, conservative member of society. Like that sweet dinner table scene in “I [heart] Huckabees” where Mark Whalberg reams out the conservative, religious SUV-driving father, it’s that conversation you always wanted to have with the person that you’ll never meet.
So it does drag a little in the middle (130 minutes long) and has a quick hitting, hard-to-interpret ending (we had a different read on it than my folks who coincidentally also watched it this weekend). All in all, though, this movie quickly attained the status of “must recommend and talk about with friends”. Get there.
Posted by nick at 10:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 08, 2005
biking for change
One of my oldest friends, David Kroodsma a.k.a. “Kroody”, began a year-long bike trip starting in Stanford, CA and ending in Tierra del Fuego. Check out his website/trip log at rideforclimate.com.
Some say he is riding because he likes doing epic things. Others (himself included) argue he is riding to increase awareness of global climate change. He has visited handful of elementary and high school classrooms both in Massachusetts and California and students will be tracking his progress and reading his updates from the road.
He is a wonderful travelogue writer and having spent the last five years in the environmental/outdoorsy/scientific community at Stanford, he has a great grasp of and explains really well the science and politics underpinning climate change. I highly recommend checking in on this site once and a while (link to the rss feed).
Posted by nick at 09:01 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
November 07, 2005
fall in baltimore
It’s starting to feel like home here. I guess. School keeps me busy enough that there’s not a lot of time to think about much else, let alone blog about it.
So today, with Johanna home on a weekend for the first time in two months (damn frisbee!) we took a stroll through Wyman park, a wildly overgrown, surprisingly lush and quiet corner of Baltimore just around the corner from our house. The “park” is essentially a gully that separates Johns Hopkins from Hampden (our neighborhood). There is a stream that runs the length of the park, recessed into the landscape so that water level is probably thiry feet or so below the level of the streets and campus. This, coupled with lots of trees and kudzu vines encasing the trees (that second part according to Johanna) makes for a quiet retreat, insulated from the outside world of Baltimore.
The highlight of the walk this morning, was picking out a broad-winged hawk washing himself in the stream. We couldn’t get the aperture on the digital camera to open past 4.8 so the tree trunks are more in focus that the bird here, but you get the point.
Also, note the cleanly sawed vine-trunks climbing up the left trunk here. Someone must be taking care of this path to keep it from being overrun by vine cover. But not from trash.
We rescued a soggy but “professional” soccer ball from the stream but weren’t sure what to make of the rest of the trash littered in the stream and caught in the logjammed area just before the stream heads into a culvert, Chesapeake-bound.
Posted by nick at 12:00 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack