There’s an XBox game coming soon called Full Spectrum Warrior. This game is actually being developed for the United States Army as a method for training infantry soldiers. Basically, it’s the Army’s answer to the simulators that the Navy and Air Force have had for a while. Okay, seems like a good idea, and sounds very cool, but here’s what I don’t understand. They’re releasing it to the public. Now, it’ll have some minor changes to reduce the realism but increase the gameplay, but overall, it’s basically the same thing. So, isn’t it a bad idea to give away to our enemies how we train our soldiers? Not only that, but isn’t this a great way for terrorists to train their members, as well? I don’t want to be over-critical, and I’m all for an awesome new game to play, but….to give us the same game that the Army is using to train the soldiers…..I don’t know. Something about that strikes me as a bad idea.

Dr. Cornell West is a professor over at Princeton University. He recently came to Princeton Day School to speak to the students. The following New York Times article is about his involvement with ‘The Matrix Reloaded’:

May 18, 2003
By MICHAEL AGGER
What is Cornel West doing in “The Matrix Reloaded”?

Maybe this Princeton philosophy professor’s cameo shouldn’t be a surprise. In 1999, Larry and Andy Wachowski stated their ambition to make an “intellectual action movie” and they actually pulled it off. The first “Matrix” movie gave the equivalent of a cinematic high-five to the French thinker and philosopher Jean Baudrillard by featuring his book “Simulacra and Simulation” in an early scene. If you look closely (and people did), you could see that the book was open to a particular chapter, “On Nihilism.” The Wachowski brothers seized upon Mr. Baudrillard’s general nihilistic notion that we must deconstruct the images (television, movies, advertising, clothing) that oppress us and imbue them with a new set of values. They skillfully retold an archetypal messiah story with a dash of postmodern theory.

In an interview with The New York Times last year, Mr. Baudrillard said that the movie’s use of his work “stemmed mostly from misunderstandings.” But this time, the Wachowskis have found a more willing philosophical accomplice. Dr. West appears (minus his trademark glasses) as a wise councillor of Zion, the last free human city on earth. He delivers only one line, but it’s a doozy: “Comprehension is not requisite for cooperation.” Those words have already been spotted on T-shirts in Los Angeles.

Like the Wachowskis, Dr. West draws on an impressively wide array of sources for his work. And Dr. West has always aspired to be a very public intellectual – he’s recorded a rap album, he’s a regular on television shows and he writes for a nonacademic audience in publications like Spin – so it’s not surprising to find him involved in one of the biggest spectacles of the decade. A self-described “intellectual freedom fighter,” his studies address the legacy of racism and the problem of nihilism in black America. Larry Wachowski loved Dr. West’s writings so much – particularly the books “Race Matters” and “Prophesy Deliverance!” – that he decided to write a role for Dr. West in the movie, playing a loose version of himself. Which makes one wonder: after the Wachowskis told us to deconstruct reality � la Baudrillard, are they now rebuilding reality with the ideas of Dr. West?

Reached by telephone in his office in Princeton, Dr. West said that he and the Wachowski brothers had come together in “acknowledging the full-fledged and complex humanity of black people, which is a relatively new idea in Hollywood given pervasive racist stereotypes.” And, indeed, “The Matrix Reloaded” gives prominent roles and screen time to African-American stars like Laurence Fishburne and Jada Pinkett Smith. A more tantalizing connection seems to be Dr. West’s notion of the jazz freedom fighter that concludes his book “Race Matters.” He writes: “I use the term `jazz’ here not so much as a term for a musical art form as for a mode of being in the world, an improvisational mode of protean, fluid and flexible dispositions toward reality suspicious of `either/or viewpoints.’ ”

This seems to jibe with the direction that Neo, the character played by Mr. Reeves, is taking, as he discovers that the world of the Matrix is not operating by fixed rules but is something more permeable and uncertain. Dr. West also pointed out that “the second Matrix movie actually critiques the idea of the first. It’s suspicious of salvation narratives. It’s deeply anti-dogmatic. The critics haven’t figured that out yet, but the scholars will get to it.”

While in Sydney for the movie shoot, Dr. West said he and the Wachowskis had bonded over “wrestling with the meaning of life and the purpose of human existence.” They share an affinity for plucking ideas from religion, philosophy, pop music, television and movies, and synthesizing them into a prophetic, liberating message. They want to make the world a more philosophical place. (The brothers even gave reading assignments to all of the principal actors in the movie.)

Dr. West was coy when asked if he had a longer speech in the final installment of the trilogy, but he did say that he will appear in a documentary about the series where he expounds further on his ideas. Until then, he has some advice for the audiences going to see the movie: “You’ve got to look beneath the special effects.”��

Back in high school, I gained a desire to drive across the country. Gradually, this desire developed into a need, a certain knowledge that this was vital to me. This wasn’t a vacation. It wasn’t a sight-seeing trip. It was a journey of experience. Its purpose was to learn more about this country, this world, and myself. It’s hard for me to express in words how important the trip was, but it wasn’t just “something cool to do.” It was a necessity. Only recently had I reached a place in my life where this trip was finally a possibility. I made a decision, and this summer was to be the time to go.

I began asking friends if they wanted to go. Several said they would, only to back out. The rest just said they couldn’t go. Their reasons varied from lack of desire to lack of time to lack of money. They were all valid reasons. It looked like the trip wouldn’t happen this summer. Only now, it looks like the trip won’t happen at all.

My wife is pregnant.

This is excellent news, and I am very happy about it. I won’t elaborate on that, and my emotions on the subject, for now, will remain between me and myself. However, her being pregant now means that if this trip doesn’t happen this summer, it won’t happen. It’s not that I could never go, but I wouldn’t be able to go for around 20 years (assuming we only have one child). In 20 years I’ll be 46, and this trip won’t be the same trip it would be now. So I’m left with two options: go by myself, or don’t go at all. I’ve considered just going by myself, but part of the way I experience things is by way of other people’s reactions. Having another person there would help force me to experience things, and through them to experience even more of what is out there.

So, that’s it. I realize that there are sacrifices to be made and that in life you cannot always get what you want, but I can’t help feeling like I’m losing out on something truly important. I really feel like this would have changed me in some way, and I’m sad that I won’t get to find out what that would have been.

You know one of the problems with having a large CD collection? You end up hearing songs on the radio and really liking them, and then you go to Kazaa to download them, and then when you see what album they come from, you realize that already own the song but had no idea.

Am I that good at what I do? I don’t think so. I mean, I constantly screw things up, my hearing isn’t that great, and I tend to make things up as I go along. But it seems that any clients who I work for regularly are not happy unless I am personally running their shows for them. I can’t seem to send any other technician to one of these shows without hearing from the client about things that weren’t right and how they would be so much happier if I were there. I had a client tonight even offer to outbid whatever other job I had that was keeping me from being at her show tomorrow night. I just don’t get it. What is it about me that makes them do that?

It’s almost 2:30 am, and I just got home from PDS. I’m a bit tired, but I feel pretty good. I feel a certain sense of accomplishment and a sense of having done what I really should be doing. First of all, I hate being in most places alone. Especially theaters. Especially at night. My imagination drives my fear far too strongly. So, normally, if it had hit the time of night that it did and I was still in the theater, alone, I would have simply left. However, I knew that I had to get this work finished, and I refused to just make up excuses about why it couldn’t be done on time, or try to devise a plan to do it later.

The other thing is that I often feel bad about not putting in as much time at PDS as many people seem to think that I should. I feel somewhat guilty. But tonight I put in my time. I stayed long hours and did what I had to do for the school, for the people who are counting on me to help make their event really great. That was a good feeling, and it shows me that it’s not that I don’t put in the time, but that I put in the time when the time needs to be put in. I don’t like to waste my time, so I’m not going to sit around in my office for 8 hours in case someone happens to show up and needs to talk to me for 2 minutes. 2 minutes out of 8 hours is simply not worth it to me when that person could just as easily call me or send me an e-mail (which I check numerous times a day). If it takes a 16 hour day, though, to get the lights up and ready for an event, I’ll do that. I think a lot of people don’t understand that, and I don’t think there’s a way for me to make them understand that, but it makes me feel good when I do these things.

Hm…it seems that I’m rambling now. I’ll close with something I was thinking about in the car on the way home:

The sentence, “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy yellow dog” is often used in typing practice because it contains all of the letters of the alphabet. Only, the letter ‘s’ appears to be missing from that sentence. Of course, this is easily remedied by changing the word “dog” to “dogs”, but I wonder if I’m simply missing something?