We've been watching a movie a night over the past few nights. Tonight we watched Crumb. It was a low budget documentary about Robert Crumb. It is a good companion piece to American Splendor but since it is all real documentary it doesn't have the same feel to it. The one thing I was struck by was that there must have been something strange in the water near the Crumb family when those kids were growing-up. Everyone in the family was like a savant with art. They are socially misfit but have incredible talents. I left the movie wishing I had trained to be a comic book artist and had a great time listening to the interviews with people like the creator of Big Butt magazine who is a tall muscular woman who used to date Crumb.

We watched Stander last night. It was recommended because I was told I looked like the second actor, not the main one who looked like Starsky. I didn't see the doppelganger effect in any of the characters. The movie got long after a while but it was interesting to see South Africa in the seventies and try to understand the motivation of a bank robber who used to be a police officer who got fed-up with the system after being commanded to fire guns into a protest and then shoot an unarmed black protester. I also was listening to a writer on NPR from South Africa and she was defending the country despite everyone's criticism about how messy it is trying to reach social standards and stabilization in her country. Her point was that they have really only had ten years to achieve a more equal society and countries like the US have had a few hundred years and we still have plenty of unsolved social problems.

One thing that did stick out in watching Stander was the speech by the police chief defending the system of apartheid as beneficial to the blacks in South Africa because they had a higher standard of living and less tribal warfare than in the rest of Africa. I believe that it was true but it goes back to the problems with the robots from iRobot taking over for the humans as the only way to save them from their own wars. You can't justify taking away people's freedoms to protect them from themselves. We are lucky to be as far along as we are in the US but it isn't something we are ensured. Any day we could be sucked into the trap of letting our freedoms go in exchange for protection from ourselves. That is the big danger of terrorism coming here. I find it hard to believe it won't start on a wider scale than 9/11 because suicide bombers can't realistically be stopped. We aren't politically ready for the scenario where people start blowing themselves up in malls across America and we don't have adequate protection from these easy to understand but hard to shake philosophies. All we have are these movies and most people are paying to see the big explosions and the pretty people but not the bigger themes.

I also am still working my way through the Bob Dylan Chronicles book. One funny passage was when he was considering trading all of his money for a business and among the businesses he considered was a factory that made artificial legs. Imagine Bob Dylan with only one possession to his name, a big artificial leg factory. It made my day.