Dirty Bass/Lush

Here’s another remix/collaboration, this time with Jordan Oost, an odd combination of electro and ethereal progressive house, check it out:

Jordan Oost – Bad Call (Altovideo’s Lush Remix)

Thoughts on Spanglish

We watched Spanglish last night. My thoughts:

The character of Flor’s perspective on class and power rang false because she was portrayed as someone who was more or less unaware of it. The best example of this is when she is walking along the street with a friend, and seeing her boss stuck in traffic, she introduces her friend to him. Of course, the idea is that this is a poor peasant woman who comes from a simpler, more natural environment, so she’s charmingly unaware of the social distance between herself (and her friend) and her boss. The underlying message is that class is an social construct (which I agree with) and that a more natural society would treat people more equally, which is really just naive, because ideals of equality are almost exclusively embraced in rich Western countries. In reality, a character like Flor would probably have been taught from birth through her culture and her religion that it is normal and natural that some people are better than other people. Its also likely that she would not want her daughter going to a private school because she would feel that her daughter is not good enough, and by having her daughter attend a rich, white school and socialize with them, she risks being ostracized by the Mexican community by giving the impression that she is too good for them.

The same criticism applies to contrast between the Flor’s and Deb’s approach to Bernie’s body image issues. Latino culture places as much (or more) pressure on women to look attractive to men as American culture does, and mothers are often the vehicle for this influence. Flor would certainly be able to relate to Deb’s perspective, and even wholeheartedly endorse it. But once again, this feature is presumed to be a product of Deb’s many neuroses and by extension, our diseased American society. A related problem is when the narrator mentions that Flor sees in John the emotions of a Mexican woman; if this were true, she would probably see this as a weakness and extremely unattractive, since being accused of being a woman is among the worst insults to a Latino. Ironically, in Latino cultures, its acceptable for men to cry and otherwise show strong emotion, and would not be seen as feminine or weak.

Flor is in most respects, an Anglo-American woman who happens to not speak English, which is why Anglo-American women can easily relate to her. This movie presents a simplistic version of cultural differences where we are led to conclude, “She’s just like me, only with a different language.” In fact, cultural differences run much deeper than that and this attitude actually says that Latino culture is good because it lives up to the standard of American culture. This is not tolerance. To be truly open-minded, one should accept what is valuable about a culture without needing to have it relate to you personally, otherwise you are saying that the only things that are good are those aspects of a different culture that you personally benefit from.

In other words, we should be tolerant of other people not because they are same as us, but despite the fact that they aren’t.

Unrelated to culture, this movie presents self-esteem as the panacea to all teenage problems, even though its known that sociopaths have extremely high self-esteem. Creating a culture where you shouldn’t ever listen to anyone if they say things that make you feel bad is sort of ridiculous, because sometimes people do things that they should feel bad about, and if they skip that part, they have no reason to not do those things again. That’s not to say that low self-esteem is not a huge problem, because it is, but I’m not convinced that high self-esteem, or at least the way people achieve high self-esteem, is the answer.

The problem lies in the view that self-esteem is something that is bestowed on you by society. If people say bad things about me, I feel bad, but if people say good things about me, I feel good, so the theory is that if we can convince people to only say nice things, then low self-esteem will vanish. This might work to protect children from failing to live up to other people’s standards, but as adults, we set expectations for ourselves, and when we fail at that, there’s no way we can say, “Don’t worry, it doesn’t mean anything, no-one’s mad at you!” because it does mean something to you and you are mad at yourself! After that, you just stop setting expectations for yourself because you can’t handle the hit to your self-esteem. What’s worse is that our culture tells us that the way to be happy is to follow our dreams, but doesn’t give us the tools necessary to survive in a world where following your dreams entails some amount of failure. The only way out is to set your hopes and dreams low enough to guarantee success, and then you conclude that the reason your dreams are so lame is because you just aren’t that great to begin with. Paradoxically, our culture’s attempt to create high self-esteem causes even lower self-esteem when we inevitably run up against failure.

Odds are that someone out there is prettier, smarter, more talented or more successful than you. Everything that you pride yourself on, there’s probably someone out there who’s better than you, and that’s OK, because they have limitations too. Its important to accept your failings and limitations and not try to convince yourself that they aren’t there, because then you are creating an illusion for yourself that can only persist for so long before you run up against harsh reality. Its much better to deal with harsh reality in tiny, managable bits until you realize that you can actually succeed at failure rather than waiting for your bubble to burst. You can deal with your mistakes and failings gracefully, pick yourself up and dust yourself off and try again. The problem with relying primarily on other people to do that for you is that you may feel better about yourself, but really you are just borrowing someone else’s viewpoint. Underneath that, you still have zero confidence in yourself, but the main problem is that if you are borrowing a viewpoint that makes you good about yourself, then you make yourself very susceptible to viewpoints that make you feel bad about yourself, and you end up in a vicious cycle, blown around like a bag in the wind by every passing influence.

Some people try to manage this by controlling their environment so that no bad influences enter their minds and make them feel bad, but by not having any practice, they are much weaker and easily influenced. Other people respond by shutting out anything that doesn’t reinforce their self-esteem, and these people are part-time sociopaths.