“…our city is like a large horse which because of its size is inclined to be lazy and needs the stimulation of a gadfly… before long you will awake from your drowsing, and in annoyance take Anytus’s advice and swat me; and then you will go on sleeping.” -Socrates
Gadfly. March 2014 Red Fish David Burke Wisdom Akpan Giuseppe Vitellaro Gabe Miller Blue Fish James Geoffroy Noah Weber Paul Fister Hap Burke Kevin Strader Jack Embry Garret Fox Sam Fentress
1 Fish David Callon Ralph Scozzafava Ronald Logan Bears Dick Wehner
Concert Calendar 3/19
Pentatonix – Peabody Opera House
3/20
Lorde – Peabody Opera House
3/20
Demi Lovato/Cher Loyd– Chaifetz Arena
3/21
New World Symphony– Powell Hall
3/21
Young the Giant – Pageant
3/22
Yonder Mountain String Band – The Pageant
3/25
Ellen the Felon – Plush
3/28
Real Estate – Firebird
3/29
Blitzen Trapper – The Pageant
4/2
Gary Numan – Firebird
4/4
BB King – Peabody Opera House
4/6
G-Eazy – Pop’s
4/8
Phantogram – The Pageant
4/11
Billy Joel – Scottrade Center
4/12
Casting Crowns – Family Arena
4/16 -19
Poncho Sanchez – Jazz at the Bistro
4/16
Miley Cyrus/Icona Pop – Scottrade
4/20
Ghost B.C. – The Pageant
4/27
Arcade Fire –Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre
4/28
Christina Perri – Plush
Music Fun House
James Geoffroy There are many bands that people generally associate with the shaping of rock music in the early 1970’s. Some of the most commonly known include Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, and The Rolling Stones to name a few. While I love all of these bands and respect what they did, there is one band whose efforts stand out even more to me, The Stooges. While they only originally put two albums out under the name “The Stooges,” I would call the second album, titled Fun House, the most influential album to ever be released. While the music of The Stooges was released as rock music in the late 60’s and early 70’s, it has come to be more specifically identified as proto-punk, based on the fact that it held such a heavy influence over future punk bands such as The Sex Pistols and The Clash. While the self titled first album had a driving force and attitude to it, Fun House took what the first album began and blasted the concept to the moon and back, not only containing even more attitude than it’s predecessor, but more energy than a live show as well. While the recording was taking place, the band decided that they did not like all of the special equipment and padding that was inside the studio, so they had it all removed until all that was left was the basic setup of a live show. The album itself is extremely raw and not overly produced besides the feature of a saxophone on every track on the second side of the record. The first three tracks of the album are all fast, intense songs that make a person want to get up and thrash around. “Down on the Street” sets the tone for the next two songs to follow, capturing the listener right away with its driving beat and Ron Asheton’s powerful guitar track. “Loose” and “T.V. Eye” offer the same style of song while adding new twists of their own. The final song on the first side though, “Dirt,” changes what you’ve heard and flips it upside down, quickly grabbing your attention. While the first three songs were lively and powerful, the album soon transforms to a slower beat over a psychedelic bass line underneath the snarls, sighs, and screams of Iggy Pop. The song can take a listener right out of their comfort zone the first time they hear it. The second side begins with “1970” which contains a recycled riff from the song “1969” from the group’s self titled debut. The second song of the side, the title track, is slower with a potent bass line from Dave Alexander and once again
makes the listener fade away into the song. The final song, “L.A. Blues,” is entire chaos. The whole band just turns the volume up to 11 and goes crazy on their equipment for almost 5 minutes. This album is critically acclaimed by virtually all who have istened to it, and deserves every bit of praise it gets. The simple, powerful arrangements used in the songs were among the first examples of
the classic punk/alternative formula, one taken up by later bands such as the Ramones and Nirvana, proving that it can still be successful today. If you haven’t listen to this album, I highly suggest you set aside 45 minutes to experience everything it has to offer, because if you try to multitask while listening to it, you’ll just not get your other work done. Once you enter the Fun House, prepare yourself for a ride of emotion and testosterone, because I guarantee you will not leave in the same state of mind that you entered with.
Essay 4
Hap Burke I went into the woods one day. My mom always told me never to venture in alone, and I never had been able to arouse the curiosity of any other to make that shady journey, so, one day, my strong will final ousted my obedience. Something was hidden in that forest. I had alway known that much, but I never knew it so strongly until I passed through its leafy arches and walked its timbered pathways. My senses perceived a substantial difference of environment in that woodland that was strikingly different from the sunny, busy summer pool I had just so boldly deserted. I came upon a stream. I knew for a fact that a neighborhood lay not three hundred feet away, yet, screened by curtains of majestic oaks and towering sycamores, a creek wandered and tumbled as if it too was lost in a last haven of nature amidst a growth of urbanity. There I looked around. But for memory, no clue was present of the pressing concrete and asphalt that surrounded this lost growth. One could smell serenity passing shallowly under the odor of rotting logs and last night’s rain. I had found Eden— rather, I was lost within it. It was mid-spring in my sophomore year when my parents gave me the job talk. In truth, I had already gotten it once—spring the year earlier, when I applied for a lifeguarding position at my neighborhood pool. But this one was a bit more weighted; a bit more biting. I was asked—or required, depending on which point of view one takes—to apply for a job at four different pools, then, having been hired by all four, accept and begin work at at least three. Combined with my other three jobs of coaching, giving swim lessons, and lawn mowing (admittedly, a smaller commitment), my job total peaked at six, and thus my summer was officially booked. Scheduling was difficult, conflicts were frequent, and the summer of dreams was turning into the summer of duress. Though the weeks blended and swirled as all summers do, there was no symphony of color; no spectrum of the fantastic in my twisted sort of a summer. So I decided to get lost. I don’t have a smartphone, and, therefore, Google Maps is unable to grace my wanderings with perfect, absolute directives. My entire knowledge of city streets, neighborhood avenues,
and country lanes has arisen from a year of trial by error. The times I have gotten lost far exceeds any of my friends, and thus my knowledge of my city is vastly superior. My friends can understand this—after all, what does one learn when glued to a Californian-designed screen?—but they struggle with my strange desire to get lost. I learned this about myself soon after driving on my own: I enjoy being lost. Something about sights I have never seen, roads I have never touched, and people I have never met thrills me, and many a time I have driven off into unknown territory just for the joy of being without direction, without purpose. In this I find serenity. I found myself in serenity on that lost summer’s day. And at once, as the turf and bark and leaves drowned me, I felt my stresses wash away, floating off on a half-lost summer’s breeze. And suddenly, I stumbled upon a lesson. Stresses aren’t temporary. Stress will endure my whole life through. Unfortunately, the opposite is true with that remarkable grove of forgotten oaks I was lost in. One day, a developer would remember the plot. One day, the bulldozers would rip away the moss and grasses and rotted stumps. One day, a little boy would call that land his home; his yard. And, on that day, I couldn’t lose myself in woods to lose myself from problems. Life isn’t about getting lost. I learned the paths of the forest within a week.
Poetry&Prose Snow Melting There’s time in the air tonight. You can smell it. Maybe it’s not time— they’ve told me perhaps it’s the snow melting, perhaps the grass greening, perhaps the bark shifting, perhaps the dirt unearthing. But in the genesis of refreshed color, the foreword to distanced sunsets, the air lightens and bites less. And under a cover of fallen leaves long since swept and smothering snow long since shoveled, I rediscovered that scent long since lost to my world. I smell life; I smell time. And I realize with the symphony of lifting breeze that though come May the odors might be lost in the explosion of Spring, now all I hold and all I can ever know is the soft scent of grass greening, of bark shifting, of dirt unearthing, of snow melting. And time passes in my lungs. —Hap Burke Acrostic Friendship Arduous at times but beautiful to Remember Teases the tormented few who longingly Stare —Giuseppe Vitellaro How did you do it sir? The bottom is also the top You were a runner, lackey, coffee boy. Now you possess what you were. How did you do it sir? You struggled to get where you are. Others tried and failed, but you succeeded. Yet you are not the same man. How did you do it sir? You betrayed your friends for success. She left, you are not the man that she loved. Power clouded your vision. How did you do it sir? The top is also the bottom. She kept the child, and raised him herself. Money is all you have left. How do you do it sir? —Kevin Strader
AP Psychology Notes, 11 / 1 / 13
reminder that italics are my personal lecture notes— not for you to read or take notes on perc_______ show elephant video abs____ thr_____: minimum sti____ needed to detect a stimulus ___% of the time maggie drawing / carrot / razorblade, kevin, monkeybars story diff____ thr_____: minimum _____ between two stimuli to detect difference ___% of the time chew toys / the who Web____ Law: to be perceived as different, two stimuli must differ by a constant ______ kick Robinson in mouth / beer kegs / alphabet soup / throw baseball into Michael Sit’s groin while humming theme from Star Wars opp___ pro____ theory: after visual info leaves receptors, it is analyzed in pairs of o____ c____ tell em about smokin pot with bill brown, charlie busenhart, and mick jagger back in the summer of ‘76 p___ phenomenon: i____ of movement that results when two adjacent stationary spots of light bl___ potato salad, groggy meatball prototypes tr______ reduction umbrellas, kill Ben Tarter, what is ice cream…cerebellum 3d model hypo_______: portion of brain with a number of small n_____ 1 lb skinless, boneless chicken breast halves— cubed, 1 cup sliced carrots, 1 cup green peas, ⅓ cup butter, ⅔ cup milk, ½ teaspoon salt Preheat oven to 425°F. combine chicken, carrots, peas in saucepan. Add water, boil 15 mins. Remove from heat, drain, set aside Place mixture in bottom of pie crust. Cover with top pie crust. Bake for 30-35 min. Cool before serving. fla____ re____ closeness you can’t think and do naked monkey story, stoker’s effect, remove clothing cere______: region of the brain that is important in m____ c_____ sometimes when i wake up i cant remember where i am or who is sleeping next to me and im petrified and dont know how i keep myself moving and i just think what is my life what have i gotten myself into what have i been doing for the last thirty years of my life and i dont know where im going and i get up and shave but it all feels pathetic and meaningless and empty and i drive to school and nothing is the same anymore story lim___ sys____: old part of brain that deals with e_____ discretely gouge the eyes of every student as he exits class
Film
Review: The Desolation of Smaug Paul Fister
In Peter Jackson’s Hobbit film series, there are many changes, additions, subtractions, divisions and certainly multiplications from JRR Tolkien’s original 1937 novel, but one thematic approach to the films keeps me in the grip of Middle-Earth along with Bilbo, Gandalf, and the dwarves, with all its magical creatures, splendid landscapes, and ancient wonders: the music, scored by previous Lord of the Rings composer (for which he won three Academy Awards) Howard Shore. After stunning people all over the world with the peaceful Shire music (“Concerning Hobbits”), the grand Return of the King theme (“The Ring goes South”) that is present in each LOTR film, the overwhelming terror of Sauron’s music (“The Shadow of the Past”), and the epic fanfare of Minas Tirith (“The White Tree”), Shore has masterfully created new themes for An Unexpected Journey and The Desolation of Smaug so far, helping bring out the themes and emotions present throughout Tolkien’s age-old tales. Themes include an epic traveling tune based on a song the dwarves sing in the beginning (“The Misty Mountains”), a terrifying chant to accompany the vile orc general Azog the Defiler (“An Ancient Enemy”), a quick and joyful tune for the swift and elegant jolliness of the elves on the hunt (“The Forest River”) and an all new Shire theme for Bilbo, evoking his kind and homey spirit as he dreams of being back home in his big armchair, while still enjoying the adventure (“Dreaming of Bag End”). The music of the films borrow a little from LOTR’s before it for recurring characters like Galadriel, Saruman, Gollum, and of course the Ring, and while much bears a resemblance to the LOTR music, the majority of the music is brand new and just as stunning. Even Gandalf the Wizard has a new, cheeky, magical theme (“Old Friends”). But there is one extremely important theme on which I would like to elaborate, that of Smaug the Terrible, the feared dragon who reigns over the forgotten dwarf treasures of the Lonely Mountain. The music is first presented in the beginning of An
Unexpected Journey in “My Dear Frodo” and doesn’t show up again recognizably until Bilbo is inside the mountain with the dragon in Desolation of Smaug. The film begins with an older Bilbo Baggins who we know from the LOTR films writing his book (which turns out to be The Hobbit) for his nephew, LOTR protagonist Frodo Baggins. He begins by describing the ancient wonders of the dwarf kingdom of Erebor, inside the Lonely Mountain, with all it’s gold and gems and expert mining craft. Bilbo also lays out the scene of the prosperous human city of Dale at the foot of the mountain. But all the joy and prosperity turns sour as we see the greed of the dwarf king Thror with his endless piles of precious metals and his divine glistening jewel, the arkenstone. “It was a sickness of the mind,” says Bilbo, “and where sickness thrives, bad things will follow.” With hurricane-like winds from his massive wings and ruthless flames bursting out of his lips, in comes the “fire drake from the north,” Smaug the Terrible, and begins to wreak havoc on the land. We do not get to see him in the prologue to the film—a silhouette here, a wingtip there, and the destructive fireballs crashing down onto Dale is all there is. This is when we hear the music, a loud, shrill, and terrifying theme of a faceless monster, a mindless killing machine, later laced with the ominous chanting, as if from the mourning, homeless dwarves and men victim of the dragon’s destruction. Shore deals with this perfectly, because in the beginning of the book, that’s all Smaug is to the reader, a far-off terror, a monster that we fear because he is huge, firebreathing, has wrought ancient destruction, and could kill you in a split second. That is the Smaug that we know, that is the extent of the terror we have so far. The Smaug we find in the mountain is much more terrifying than the old one we’ve been envisioning, in a much different way. Bilbo sneaks into the mountain through the secret door, and wanders around the piles of cold, dusty treasure seeking the white luminescence of the arkenstone. But in the darkness of the lifeless and truly lonely mountain, Bilbo awakens the dragon. We see Smaug for the first time as he emerges from within a mass of gold coins. Smaug’s theme plays quietly and ominously as the dragon slowly reveals himself. He is truly massive and terrifying as we knew, but there is a new found terror: Smaug can talk. He’s not just a deadly beast, he’s up in Bilbo’s face, talking to him in a loud and booming yet smooth and eloquent voice, playing with him, tricking him. And this massive voice is backed by a massive body, don’t forget. The Smaug music intensifies as Smaug flies around the empty
mountain, toppling columns and bridges with ease, while threatening Bilbo and his crew, trying to turn him against the dwarves, and promising destruction upon all of Middle-Earth. This is the new and wholly terrifying dragon that we read about, with emotions and tricks and a present and unstoppable power that differs from the mythological killing machine. The music has new layers, new kinds of emotions and feelings than the purely scary theme of before. The tune is the same as before, but is now laced with a deep and foreboding string section like Smaug’s powerful voice to compliment the ever-shrill strings of before, an airy flute that brings to mind Smaug’s fiery breath, banging drums and claves, and lastly a jarring but beautiful clashing and clanging metal of all sorts of gongs, cymbals, triangles, and bells of a wicked and angry Dragon as old as time whose only companion is the gold and silver beneath his spearlike claws. This is truly Smaug’s music. Throughout the films, Shore works to create music that resonates with the themes, ideas, and emotions of the story and characters, but this musical difference between the mythological faceless monster of ancient terrors and scary bedtime stories, and the present, terrible, inevitable Smaug with lies in his words, fire in his heart, and death in his eyes.
Crafts
Product Review: Brookstone Sahnd Garret Fox I was walking around the shopping district in Kansas City a few months back while waiting for when my family would head back to the theater and see Frozen when the message chairs I saw through the glass enticed my brother and I into Brookstone. Two younger boys were vibrating in the luxury demo chairs so my brother and I sat impatiently in the lesser two of the four chairs. When the harsh rotation on our backs became bothersome more than soothing and the undulating pair of voices in front of us didn’t seem to be having any less of a good time, we decided to cut out. But just as we reached the propped open glass door, a salesman’s voice pleaded us to play with his product. I turned and saw him wiggling his fingers through the strange product which I assumed to be his product and which I now know is mine. I stopped listening to the noticeably happier salesman as I folded the soft, fluffy, compactable substance over itself and over my hands. Nor did I listen to my brother’s offer to buy me some for Christmas as I grabbed a container and hussled over to the register to pay for it. The best and perhaps the only way to describe the texture of Brookstone Sand (or Sahnd) is to compare it to one of Mr. Mueller’s kneaded erasers. If you take a chunk eraser and stretch it out until the strand in the middle becomes light and foamy and you push your finger down into it and it compresses, it feels like that except grittier and more tangible. As it’s clear, plastic tube explains, it’s 98% sand, 2% polymer, and 100% fun. I am so enamored with the stuff that I bought another bigger container online two weeks ago just so that I could fully immerse my hand in it. Yet it has been a wonder as much as a curse, for it has not moved from the family table where it can invite me to twist and tumble it in my fingers and can distract me from everything.
Music Album Review: St. Vincent Jack Embry
Annie Clark, known by her performing alias as St. Vincent, released her fourth solo album February 24, 2014. Known best for her 2012 collaboration album with Talking Heads’ David Byrne, Clark rose to critical acclaim with her self-titled piece, focusing more heavily on funky dance grooves backed by industrial noise, rather than the familiar indiepop/rock approach taken on some of her earlier works. Instead of taking her work entirely towards dance music, the grooves seem to appear and disappear throughout, drawing in the listener towards some of the interesting storytelling Clark features on this album. In “Prince Johnny”, Clark reworks a “Pinocchio”-style love story, describing a high school friend whom she wishes could be made into a “real boy”. Songs like “Digital Witness” and “Huey Newton” convey her opinions on the online world, as a trap of sorts, transforming what people become and leading them to hide behind their online identities. When Clark chooses to step away from the pattern of heavy groove-noise and bare her heart out in soft ballads such as “I Prefer Your Love” and “Severed Crossed Fingers”, the emotional impact closely matches the level of musical creativity.
St. Vincent’s fourth album may be considered her best. While remaining faithful to the style of music shown in her earlier efforts, she masterfully brings in newer, more diverse elements of music. Her talent as a vocalist matched by her stellar skill as a guitarist, taken together, shape the indierock goddess known as St. Vincent. St. Vincent’s self-titled LP, an exceptional work, fascinates and satisfies the listener with a unique style of music, earning itself the universal acclaim it has achieved.
Film Stanley Kubrick: The Faces of Human Persons Noah Weber
Kubrick’s life story is not that of a misunderstood genius against a world that was out to get him. People often frame him as a crazy perfectionist who would do insane things to get his movies right. Accustomed to so many stories of the social reject turned brilliant celebrity, one may be quick to say something like against all odds, despite the unacceptance of his family and peers, this beautiful mind persevered and triumphed over the world that turned away from him. That’s not the story, though. He grew up in a wealthier home than most of his peers. His father was a doctor who purchased him his first camera, and fully supported his artistic pursuits. Sure, he didn’t have many friends, but he had a photography job and played chess with professionals in New York parks when the weather was nice. Kubrick’s reclusion and shyness were not the result of an oppressive world out to get him, but rather a natural introversion that made him come off as strange or unlikeable. On the other hand, the world people see in his films is so often that brutal, oppressive world. So often his films seem devoid of hope: products of worlds in which human corruption has led to an Ironic lack of escape for the pitiful people surviving on it. Some are thrown off by their perception of Kubrick’s apparent misanthropy. But misanthropy isn’t quite accurate. A 1968 Playboy interview may give some light to Kubrick’s thinking. He says, “The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent… if man merely sat back and thought about his impending termination… he would surely go mad.” Kubrick argues that the world isn’t out to get man— it isn’t a system set against man from the outset. Perhaps even worse, the world just doesn’t care about man. Sometimes this means good things happen. Sometimes not. But in the eyes of the Universe both are the same. The final scenes of Kubrick’s films are the spokespeople of that ethos. In The Killing, we see all of the money Johnny Clay works so hard and so intricately to steal blow away on the tarmac of an airport. In my reflection on that scene, I wrote, “It is the futility of randomness that leaves Johnny with an unforgettable expression of disbelief— his body staggering seemingly beyond his control, his eyes unblinking and vacant.” The viewer feels empathy, and perhaps shares in Clay’s
disbelief as the money flies, but remember that the money was stolen. Remember that people were killed for that money, people were manipulated for that money, people lost their humanity for that money. Remember that Johnny Clay is a criminal mastermind. A brilliant mastermind, yes— but a criminal. And with randomness of the plan’s destruction ultimately comes a sort of justice. He didn’t get away with it. This isn’t a world of malice. In a misanthropic worldview, justice would be powerless against the brilliant and suave killer and thief. Such is the brilliance of Kubrick. He makes us feel bad that the criminal didn’t get away with it. Years later he explores that idea more explicitly in A Clockwork Orange. That any bone in your body could sympathize with the murdererrapist Alex Delarge of A Clockwork Orange reiterates in and of itself that Kubrick does not think people are inherently disgusting or bad. Alex is twisted and evil, but the argument the film makes is even an evil person is still a person. For a film that garnered so much criticism for glorifying violence, it strikes me as in fact quite pro-life. The state in which someone can keel over in pain from the sight of violence or the sound of Beethoven’s Ninth is not a state of proper human existence. Suddenly, the face of the man who Alex left unable to walk and whose wife Alex raped becomes the face of evil, staring up as he hears Alex shout for mercy. Ultimately, Alex tries to kill himself, as he narrates, to “Blast off forever out of this wicked, cruel world.” The world is wicked here for its treatment of Alex. The world is wicked for its ending of one man’s life of brutal crime. And the argument Kubrick makes is not that one man is horrible, but all other people are just as horrible to. Rather, the most malicious thing done in the film is rip one man of his humanity. It is a film that depicts someone in whom humanity may appear to already be lost. Someone who commits unspeakable crimes. But to value the ending of those crimes over the life of even the lowest of all people, the film argues, is wrong. No director who inherently scorns man could make that argument. Only someone with an appreciation for the still dusty corner of beauty in the attic of a villainous mind could make that argument. Portraying the darkest corners of one person’s soul presumes the existence of that soul, that humanity. Stanley also shows a fascination with war in Paths of Glory, Full Metal Jacket, Dr. Strangelove, Barry Lyndon, and the eventually unrealized Napoleon. In pointing out the atrocities of war in so many of his films, there is a great irony that forces Stanley to become one of the subject’s greatest students. Furthermore, though called anti-war, Kubrick stated
often that his goal was to depict, “the way war is.” The coldness with which the three wrongly accused soldiers die in Paths of Glory, the unbent depiction of them as animals stampeding toward the enemy feel more like reporting than message making. If an event was tragic, Kubrick showed it to be tragic. When discussing a tendency in filmmakers to make the audience happy and give them redeeming moments in cruel situations, Kubrick said in a 1987 interview with Rolling Stone, “I don’t mistrust sentiment and emotion, no. The question becomes, are you given them something to make them a little happier, or are you putting in something that is inherently true to the material? Are people behaving the way we all really behave, or are they behaving the way we would like them to behave?” To that end, his adaptations of A Clockwork Orange and The Shining forgo the final redemptions of the main villains. The chapter of Anthony Burgess’ novel in which Alex sees the errors of his ways and grows old shunning all of the terrors of his youth is replaced in the film with one final sexual fantasy. Jack Torrence’s remembrance of how much he loves his son in Stephen King’s version of The Shining is replaced with the image of the finally defeated evil doer frozen in the snow. Some people call Kubrick cold, but unapologetic honesty often feels that way. Kubrick doesn’t inflict his personal low opinions of man onto the screen, but rather lets you see them as he believes the Universe does: sometimes good, sometimes bad, when end the end those are both the same. Realistic is a better descriptor than misanthropic. But the equally tragic result of seeing Kubrick as a lonesome world hater is to ignore all the brilliantly poignant moments of comedy in his films. The clean, white world of 2001 leading up to the ultimate evolution of man into the Star Child, who has made contact with his extraterrestrial brothers is a distinctly optimistic statement, requiring a swift and beautiful advancement of the human race. The final image of the newly evolved race staring down at the Earth is as triumphant as it is bizarre, and the ending is one of the few black and white happy endings Kubrick offers. The soldiers brought to tears by the German woman’s singing at the end of Paths, undoubtedly mirrored in the marines marching to the Mickey Mouse theme song in Jacket both point at a resilience of the human spirit that should be admired. It is comedy in the face of atrocity, and while on the one hand a viewer could see a dark illusion of happiness, there is also the joy of still living. If life weren’t worth living,
the soldiers wouldn’t care whether they lived or died. Maybe the darkest Kubrick film, being so close to reality at the time of its production, is Dr. Strangelove, which similarly makes the audience laugh in the face of atrocity. In the early 1970s, Kubrick said in an interview, “A satirist is someone who has a very skeptical, pessimistic view of human nature… but who still has the optimism to make some sort of joke out of it. However brutal the joke might be.” That sentiment is at the heart of Dr. Strangelove. Stanley Kubrick may sometimes view man pessimistically, but the humor is almost always there. And more often than presenting a blatantly pessimistic view of the world, Kubrick gives us a muddled world. A world without, as he says in 1981, “easy answers.” The viewer doesn’t like to look at that world, because it is the world the viewer lives in. It is the world that most terrifies a person because it leaves the person guessing. As in The Shining, in which we are never quite sure where the evil forces are hiding and trying to find us, so too we live life, nervous about turning corners. Along the lines of his thinking about satire, Jack Nicholson recalls Kubrick telling him, smiling one day, “You know, all ghost stories are kind of optimistic, aren’t they? They all suggest the existence of an afterlife.” Once again, even in the darkest of characters—Jack the axe murderer— Kubrick finds semblances of hope. In a snarky joke, sure. But the thought is there. And even in the face of the darkness of Jack Torrence, as The Shining depicts, sometimes good can win. In the 1968 Playboy interview, he continues, “The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning… if we can come to terms with this indifference [of the Universe] and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.” Kubrick’s light is his art. As they terrify you, disgust you, delight you, make you jump, make you laugh— they in turn make you feel what it is to be human, and to have human emotions. One of Kubrick’s greatest talents was the ability to portray a character’s thoughts and feelings and emotions in a single, short lived facial expression. Whether conveying anger or shock, these are the faces of human persons. While Kubrick may not go so far as to say that makes them inherently good, he would still say that people have in them the capacity for goodness, the capacity for art, the capacity for light. Kubrick may have been a physical recluse, but he opened up his mind for all of us to peer into— a much more vulnerable offering, but an offering we are lucky he made.