Please Watch The American Ruling Class

The American Ruling Class - Watch the Documentary Film for Free | Watch Free Documentaries Online | SnagFilms

I have recommended a few movies on this blog, but have never felt more strongly that everyone I know needs to watch a movie immediately than I feel right now. The movie is "The American Ruling Class". One of my immediate reactions to the film, besides horror, sadness, and the intense desire to abandon everything I was doing to start fighting for the causes the movie outlines, was why hadn't I seen this movie already?

Of course, the answer was right in the first scene, which was set at Yale's graduation. I am a member of the American Ruling Class. People who are members of this class will be made very uncomfortable by watching this movie. In fact, watching this movie was a very uncomfortable experience. Everyone is implicit in the class structure that it outlines, there's no safe spaces for the apathetic or unconcerned. And so, in a way I'm not recommending this movie, because I think most people I know would find it very disturbing to their worldview and the choices they have made so far in their life.

But of course, I am still VERY STRONGLY recommending this movie, because I have yet to be able to form a reasonable argument against this movie. Thus, I have the selfish motive of asking you, my extremely intelligent readers, to watch this movie and maybe find the flaw in it's reasoning that will convince me that what it satirizes isn't completely true. Either that, or you become as inflamed as I am and we can start the revolution together.

Just joking.

Sort of,

The American Ruling Class - Watch the Documentary Film for Free | Watch Free Documentaries Online | SnagFilms

Louis Kahn: Visionary

I recently watched this documentary about the life of Louis Kahn, filmed by one of his children, Nathaniel. At Yale, I was in the midst of some of Kahn's most beautiful buildings, and had a friend at Exeter who showed me his library when I was a freshman.

Louis Kahn had three families, one child in each one. So one wife, and two mistresses. When his two mistresses got pregnant, he did very little to support them. In the movie, both women state that this surprised them, that they expected Mr. Kahn to do something, like leave his wife or acknowledge his children once they got pregnant. But he didn't. And yet, on the flim, both women appear to still be in love with Mr. Kahn, and harbor little if any bitterness towards him. His first mistress, Anne Tyng, actually says she believes all of Kahn's children and loves are part of a large family.

Throughout the film, almost everyone that Nathaniel interviews tells him what a spiritual and visionary man Louis Kahn was. It's times like these that I wish it was traditional to speak only honestly of the dead, but it's repeated so many times it seems it must be true. The most heart wrenching moment comes in the end, when Nathaniel visits the Jatiyo Sangshad Bhaban, and is told, in so many words, that his father brought democracy to Bangladesh.

On paper, Kahn's personal life seems like a despicable sham. Neither of the women he had affairs with ever remarried, and they both live alone. And yet on screen, they at least appear content. They seem to love him and be satisfied with the relationship they had with him. I certainly believe that social standards for what an individual should do in the archetypal relationships: mother, father, wife, husband, child, are extremely confining and inadequate to describe the full range of love relationships that are possible between human beings. The standards don't allow for the infinite possibilities of connection in human interaction. Perhaps Louis Kahn, and other visionaries who led seemingly horrendous personal lives were just living their personal lives with the way the lived their working life: bravely and boldly bucking societal pressures and to fully live in their idealized world.

I'm not saying that everything Louis Kahn did in his personal life was greatness. Rather, I'm suggesting that it's easy to immediately discount the relationships visionaries engaged in as incongruous with their output as creators, when really it could be our own social standards that limit our understanding of his relationships. What if societal conventions about love relationships were loosened and relaxed, and love was defined not by sexual commitment but by deep and honest connection over intellectual and spiritual interest? What would we think about Louis Kahn's life then?

Dear Zachary: a letter to a son about his father

This is a documentary I watched a few weeks ago. I don't know if a movie has ever made me feel so deeply, but I don't want to give too much away, since it has one of the most gut wrenching twists I've ever experienced.



One of the biggest issues that the documentary brings up is the insanity of bureaucracy. On one hand, having a standardized way of doing business or government is essential to allowing for regulation and equality standards. But on the other hand, I think it becomes too easy for officials to hide behind rules and protocol, and miss out on what's really going on around them. In any case, the documentary is great, and it's free on netflix so check it out!

Peter Russell--Watch this Video!!

I admit that this guy may first appear to be of the "woo-woo" category, and yet I constantly find myself, since I first watched this video last January, coming back to his ideas. I'm embedding the short version (10 minutes) to wet your tongues, and then the full one, if you have the time. Basically, he starts with trying to solve the "hard problem" of consciousness, or how it comes to happen that 'unconscious' matter like the atoms we are made up of eventually comes to have consciousness. Through this explanation, he explains how light, and it's manipulation of time and space, could be the key to understanding our own consciousness.

Short Version


Long Version


Let me know what you think!