Since it was on my mind...

I just saw the move "Be Kind, Rewind." If you don't know it, it features Jack Black and Mos Def. Danny Glover is in there too. He needs new dentures... he can hardly speak anymore.

Anyway, I am oft on a rant about creativity these days. This, most of you know. This movie really got me thinking, though. If you've heard of this movie at all, you know that it's about a video store clerk and his buddy that have to film some famous movies like Ghostbusters and Rush Hour 2, because the buddy (Jack Black) became magnetized in an accident and erased all of the videos.

Underneath all of this, though, is a great story about holding onto our past and using our creative intellects to make things a little better. I could go on, but won't. It's a great movie and you should see it. Now on to my theme...

I am stricken lately by how few opportunities we have to create. Sure, there are those of us that work in creative endeavors, but it seems to me that, once upon a time, we all had little opportunities, at least. Perhaps it has been a steady decline into the bland and ordinary. And though I hate to sound so old fashioned - I have to, in part, blame the dilution of family interaction. Surely, this is not on the whole, but in large part, families are simply roommates these days. I picture days when families would sit around the dinner table and talk about their day. (As a teacher, I KNOW this isn't happening anymore. Many kids aren't even accountable to their parents anymore.) But I digress... After the meal, perhaps, they would retire to the living room to read or maybe listen, together, to a radio program. This inevitably was replaced by television, but I still remember times in my 1980's youth of sitting together with my family and watching gems like The Cosby Show and Cheers. Sure, maybe less imagination was needed, but the time and intent was the same.



I find myself wishing, quite often, that many of my students could have the family support and experiences that my brother and I were raised with. I can recall countless evenings spent with large family groups and talking about a wide variety of things. One can surely see the power of such interactions, since for us, it was not an everyday occurrence. Just having those moments as family passed through (or on our visits to them) made a huge impact on me. I remember my Auntie Paul and Auntie Carol swinging through a few times a year and regaling us with stories of family and their adventures together in extra-terrestrials and rocks and anything else that seemed to pop onto the table. We had some modern trappings. We had much more primitive video games and VCR's and stereos... but they never seemed to compare to hearing our grandfather talk of 1930's New Mexico. Or listening to our Uncle Eric and our father speak of Viet Nam or cowboy-ing around the southwest.



Flash forward. Today kids have cell phones and iPods and video games that are almost as real as real life. I still have faith, though, that moments like those can win out in the end. Maybe I am naive and maybe I'm just being a bit nostalgic, but is life that damned scary that we need constant escape? Maybe so. And I guess, in a round-about way, that is my point.

There was a time when the simple act of writing a letter to a loved one was all the escape one needed. And maybe the gentle and intricate act of perfecting the pen strokes - a sublime personal calligraphy - provided a tiny bit of creative release that made things okay again. Maybe, too, it was the venting of things we held inside. Whatever... we had communities. We experienced things together. I don't know if that's true anymore. Before cell phones, was the desire really there to talk to anyone and everyone while driving/walking/jogging/biking/shopping/gardening? I don't think it was. So has the capability produced the need? Is it an addiction?

An alternate theory.

"Be Kind, Rewind," at its heart, is the story of a community re-discovering why it loved being a community. Perhaps we have come to a point where we need constant stimulation and connection because constant stimulation and connection have actually separated us from our lives. Maybe our subconscious brains are screaming for something simpler... something real. Maybe we are yearning to re-discover our own communities.

Did anyone follow that?

Disgruntled by cherry pits,

Jed

(These are a couple of photos from my internet, cell phone free youth. I look miserable, don't I? Also, my mom made me the sweats I was wearing in the first picture... and I was totally satisfied. God, I feel like that curmudgeonly old man Dana Carvey used to play on SNL)