Jue's Blog (tag:long posts)

Sand Dollars

“What’s effective is not the placebo, but the meaning of the treatment,” writes the doctor Harriet Hall in Skeptic Magazine. “We enter into a human relationship with a caring person who offers to help us.”

Hall is talking about placebos, those pills used by doctors and scientists that don’t contain any medicine, but often seem to help patients get better anyway. I say “seem” because the exact nature of the improvement, and the way that placebos effect it, is one of the most famously controversial topics in 20th-century medicine.

The article mentions that patients who know they’ve been given a placebo (commonly a sugar pill or just water) often request to continue the treatment. If you’re the type doctor who only believes in a physically measurable improvement — and most doctors are — then this request seems hardly justified. On the other hand, even if the patient is “imagining” their improvement, it seems presumptuous to claim that they are also “imagining” the sense of subjective comfort they are obviously getting.

The answer, says Hall, is to widen the medical definition of “betterment” beyond the rigid and often unsympathetic limits imposed on it by the tradition of empirical science. (Personally, I think mind-body duality is also to blame…)

“We will be together. It is destiny.”

If I had told this to a cute girl when we were toddlers, then fate would reward me for the rest of my life. At least, this is what I’ve learned from Slumdog Millionaire, the Oscar-sniping pathos machine directed by Danny Boyle.

Score one for good old Hollywood film-making that this isn’t a criticism of the movie, but a grudging admission of admiration. The grumpy, unromantic critic in me did not like it, for reasons you’re free to ignore below. The young, secretly sentimental, alive person in me still recommends that you stop reading right now and watch it immediately.

The film begins as a smart, honest boy from the Mumbai slums, Jamal, is brutally interrogated for his success on the Indian version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.” His suspicious command of each answer is explained by a series of coincidences from his life. As Jamal’s anecdotes draw up to the present time, the disparate strands of narrative converge on a love story between him and a girl he met as a child. The rest of the movie follows his quest to find his love, and his newfound role as a folk hero to the “slumdogs” of Mumbai.

Was this made purely for an American audience, or with an eye to actually representing the experiences of an impoverished denizen of Mumbai?

Love is fragile, awkward, painful, and hilarious. Sometimes awkwardly, painfully hilarious. Love is all of these things, but above all it is something even more–love is not your fault.

This is the message I pondered through most of Un baiser s’il vous plaît, a kitschy romantic comedy with an occasional cruel streak that aired today at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, as part of the museum’s summer French film festival. I’m sticking with the French title here not because I’m pretentious (though I am) but because the English translation, Shall We Kiss?, might make you expect to see Richard Gere and Jennifer Lopez dancing around and giving each other awkward glances. No, that would be the wrong impression. The actual awkwardness in this movie transcends anything a Hollywood actor could conjure up (except maybe Woody Allen), and this is probably why the writer-director Emmanuel Mouret plays the lead role himself. With a few nervous glances and breathily uttered “oui”s from Virginie Ledoyen to back him up, Mouret shows us that even the liberated French have the occasional embarrassing sexual experience–in this case, comically, excruciating so. Then again, they probably make up for it by having even more of the non-embarrassing kind.

The plot is simple yet clever, and starts with a question. To kiss or not to kiss?

(This is part one of a three-part series of posts about weird and wonderful things on YouTube, drawn from my own extensive surfing and observation. Parts two and three will be up soon.) UPDATE: Maybe not so soon, but at some point, hopefully

You’ve all experienced it. The Internet is like a rabbit hole. During the school year, you’re busy and can resist, but the minute you get home, your boredom and weakness for information leads you to click link after link, for hours, until that embarrassing moment when someone walks in the room and you have no plausible explanation for why you’re reading about the history of NAMBLA.

Sometimes, though, the things you’ll find are so fascinating that you just have to tell a story about them. Do you think your click-orgies are interesting (and embarrassing)? You have no idea…

The Procrastination Begins

It’s the week of my MCAT exam. Instead of studying my ass off, I’m looking up Starcraft replays on YouTube, commentated by the venerable Klazart. I get curious; who is this guy with a funny English-sounding accent, who talks about a computer game like it’s tennis–although in Korea, Starcraft is probably more competitive than tennis–and spits out names and career details of professional Starcraft players like he’s reading them off a Rolodex? After the jump: The everyday geek confronts the strangeness of an online gaming culture

There are varying levels of regret that come with not doing your homework.

Level one is the brief pang of irritation when you realize that you will be too busy this week to make up the reading or lecture you missed yesterday.

Level two is the acute panic and then furious, unsubstantiated creativity when a question about that reading comes up on the midterm several weeks later (and you write a verbose and incredible–i.e. not credible–essay in response).

Level three is the wistful recollection, two weeks after the semester ends, of how much more insight and academic joy you could have had if you’d done your readings before discussion section.

Level four is when you are on your deathbed and realize that you have lived an unhappy and unfulfilling life because you threw away a chance to truly appreciate literature and the human spirit in spring of junior year.

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Coetzee’s Question

This past semester we were assigned some readings in my English class on the question of “What is a literary classic?” Because I am in level three-going-on-four of academic regret right now, and because I just read the new J.M. Coetzee book, I revisited–er, visited–his essay on the topic.

Bach’s music is not just the incarnation of certain musical ideas, but the incarnation of higher-order ideas of exposition, complication and resolution, that are more general than music. Bach thinks in music. Music thinks itself in Bach.
["What is a Classic?" by J.M. Coetzee]

So far so good. Gushing about Bach is not surprising; this is pretty much rule number one of being a Smart Person. But then Coetzee poses a strange and very penetrating question. After the jump: Coetzee’s question, Indie rock, and objective beauty