• Ladysmith — hometown of the Shabalala family, who comprise most of its nine members.
• Black — the area’s favored farm oxen.
• Mambazo — Zulu for ax, perhaps more in the metaphorical Christian sword sense. (Thanks, program notes.)
• Dinkelspiel — a smaller auditorium at Stanford University — or one of the bigger lecture halls, depending on whether it’s night or day.

So help me, I kept thinking Dinkelspiel during Saturday’s performance of the extraordinary men’s ensemble. In the late 1970s jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins played at Dink. In a still-memorable moment of my college years, the microphone clipped to his sax went out. Mr. Rollins hesitated for the briefest moment then resumed the piece. He sounded great before but now, astounding. To be heard in the last row of the 700-seat hall, not to mention over his combo, he changed his breath support and his embouchure (how the lips and teeth hold the mouthpiece). It made me realize how artificial amplification is, even when allegedly live and otherwise acoustic. In a couple of minutes though Mr. Rollins’ mike got repatched, and the wall of sound was re-erected.

The Mambazo band is known for dancing during its songs. They had no accompaniment. It was a cappella all the way, not even a hand drum. So when they kick or squat, they move from the microphones on stands.

The group, with few staff changes, has been together for over 40 years. Their words fading in and out must be deliberate. Maybe the fellows were playing their microphones like instruments; pros do that.

We had balcony seats, and I do have hearing problems. I’d have them hooked into wireless lavalier or headset microphones. Recalling Mr. Rollins, though, you know Mambazo would be more incredible sans amplification. I should’ve snuck into Walton Saturday afternoon, sat up close, to catch their sound check.

They sang little in English, notably Simon’s “Homeless.” For me as a sometime horn player, this cultural gap provided a deeper appreciation, hear the voices as instruments like flute or bass, without lyrics to distract.

The dancing pointed out another aspect. Mambazo gave a show, not a recital. By the dancing as well as song introductions and clowning, we got to know and understand them more deeply by their interplay.

In addition to a jokey speech about soccer’s World Cup to be this June in South Africa, delivered at the top of the second set by a Mambazo member, most remarks during the program were made by founder Joseph Shabalala. Otherwise the humor was silent, the international language of slapstick. Dance steps morphed mischievously into play-clumsiness or play-squabbles. Once, the fellows could remark and pantomime about the wife of one being pregnant, and he pulled up his dashiki to show his round belly. Repeatedly a singer would face upstage and jiggle his butt at the audience.

It got laughs, but it was worrisome, too. Slapstick crosses language boundaries, but in these parts, some moves were reminiscent of minstrelsy. Or not. Shabalala and his family aren’t American. If the genre has indigenous roots then I’m incorrect.

Make no mistake, this was a tremendous performance by outstanding musicians, comfortable with one another. Seeing them in an enthusiastic, nearly sold-out Walton Arts Center with its great sight lines and acoustics added to the thrill.

If it stays. The center’s board and staff are itching to expand. Its new CEO Peter Lane specified interest in keeping this building but somewhere in the region constructing an auditorium nearly double the size of this one (2,100 seats to 1,200). His example was to attract acts like comedian Jerry Seinfeld.

Mr. Lane was baiting the hoi polloi of the Ozarks. He should be ashamed of himself. He was selling a Toyota based on its acceleration. It’s not just that an additional building has its own costs of land and construction then staffing and maintenance, but sound theater management demands balancing costs with occupancy, to minimize the nights the “house is dark,” as my late father would call it.

Fayetteville’s Walton Arts Center — with the proscenium main hall, a black-box theater and art gallery, and Nadine Baum Studios a half-block away — has perhaps two-three shows a week. Could a big auditorium book like that here, citing realistic population projections? What is Mr. Lane’s estimate, 10 big-tent shows a year?

Stages worldwide began having money troubles before the Good Depression began. Blame the Internet, blame the necessary high tickets (my balcony seat for Mambazo was $38.50.) Sales are only part of what keeps such performance facilities going. There are donations or underwriting, then tax support and tax breaks. It doesn’t work this simply, but why not sign Jer’ to do his standup for two-or three-night run on Dickson Street. Can’t you hear the yada yada in a glittering Bentonville palace with a huge mortgage, then six weeks later stage The Lion King for the kids, with $150 tickets?

Card-Carrying Columnist Card

A nice thing just happened. On Jan. 31, I was elected vice president of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. I’ve been a card-carrying columnist since 1991, joining during the run of my column Mirthology, in the old Arkansas Democrat. The post is interim, to cover after a resignation, until the annual membership meeting in July in Bloomington, Ind.

VP should be just another officer and not particularly noteworthy. First I was archivist from 2005-07, then elected secretary and last summer re-elected minutes-taker. It’s cool that it’s a national group, but also comfortable in not being too big, around 300 members in a given year.

But veep is not just another officer. According to the motion, I am “to be willing to be on the slate as a nominee for president at that meeting.”

That’s what I’m in for. And barring nominations from the floor — a qualified candidate could get my vote — I’ll be out front for 2010-12.

Here’s the thing. I am a former newspaper columnist. My last print-published column, Loose Leaves, was dropped when I was downsized from that newsroom, in fall 2001. I’ve repeatedly made the fact known to board and lay members alike. For several years, different people have suggested I make myself available to the nominating committee, but I’ve insisted the NSNC president has to be a columnist. It’d be like the Bar Association run by a subpoena server, the Teamsters headed by a CPA, the American Veterinary Medical Association led by a Shih Tzu.

Times are changing. No need to detail here changes in the newspaper business/craft/industry/profession/racket.

The motion by longtime member, and currently newsletter editor, Robert L. Haught lists, too generously, my alleged qualifications:

The president needs to be someone who has been a member of NSNC long enough to know the organization well, who has demonstrated genuine interest in the future of NSNC, who is attuned to the conditions in the news business that affect columnists, who is articulate, promotion-minded, persuasive and able to lead. Ben possesses all these qualities and more. He has gone beyond the responsibility of the offices he has held to provide valuable assistance on the web site, the contest, the bylaws and other areas. He is the right person at the right time to move into a leadership position he has earned.”

But, I am a former newspaper columnist. For nearly six years, my 40-hour, insurance-carrying job has been news page designer and copy editor. When I was a columnist, it was always a weekly gig, a few hours taken from my business-card title of some kind of editor or another.

On reflection, though, I’m a former lots of things. Ex: reporter, metro editor, editorial page editor, low-brass musician, watercolorist, freezer assembly lineman, wire editor, photojournalist, book and show critic, public radio news producer, journalism scholar, college instructor. …

Former isn’t forever. Most of these things I can pick up again, should something happen to the current gig. Buy a picture of a trombone?

No worries: I am a columnist in a 21st-century sense: I blog. I opened my Web site back in 2002, a long time for this medium.

Most of our members who still produce columns for newspapers have an online presence as well, both staff and freelance writers. Yet we’re gaining members whose essays run solely online, either at their own or on broader sites.

Sure, among my former selves, newspaper columnist is tops. I’m a realist, though, so I press on under my own masthead. Brick gets a lot of hits.

These are interesting times. Thank heavens I’m still a columnist.

Seeing the backstage drama Crazy Heart down at the Malco on its opening weekend here in Northwest Arkansas gave me lots to think about, being a good movie.

It’d be fine to wait for a home viewing, but leisurely, panoramic views of New Mexico increase the worth of a cineplex screen (Houston’s skyline? Big deal).

The featured country & Western music was more Western than country. The plot though overrides that. It’s the old “star performer on the way down may be redeemed by the love of a good woman.” Last year’s middle-aged male star vehicle The Wrestler was another verse of the song. Both beg the question of what the female lead, who’s always much younger and beautiful, ever sees in these guys — in both flicks we should be grateful technology is not pursuing Smell-O-Vision.

There’s a certain reality to this hoary fictional device: artists who hit success early tend to coast later on. Perhaps it’s laziness, or burnout, or that their audience demands more of the same. It may not be alcoholism or other addictions.

Insight: If you’re coasting, you’re by definition coasting downhill.

The protagonists of both these movies recognize and love good women, whatever role groupies play. This brought to mind a recent column of Little Rock colleague Gene Lyons, writing in Salon.com about Tiger Woods, a golfer at the peak of his games. Gene writes, “At the expense of repeating myself, I first formulated Eugene’s First Law of Sexual Dynamics covering a pro bass fishing tournament in Tennessee:

‘If there’s something one man can do better than another, there’s a woman who’ll sleep with him for it.’”

Part of Gene’s argument is where there’s consent there’s often complicity. But not always. That makes not just for attractive fiction (for artists) but career-costing facts (for other public figures).

There’s more to solid movies than relationships. Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart uses the greatest subtlety to show how his character Bad Blake inflated into his on-stage confident self. As does Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler. That made me think of Myrna Loy.

Got you?

The actress, whose best roles were in mid-20th century movies, would not have occurred to me but for a column just out by Terry Teachout of The Wall Street Journal. The drama and culture critic was discussing a 1952 recording of a staged reading of George Bernard Shaw’s “Don Juan in Hell,” a 90-minute section of his play Man and Superman. It now is available as a download. Teachout explains this was a project of the character actor Charles Laughton, who traveled the country in this show, also starring Charles Boyer, Cedric Hardwicke and Agnes Moorehead.

Though this was before either Teachout or I were born, this production had legs. I saw Myrna Loy doing what must have been Moorehead’s part when I was a teen-ager in Arkansas in about 1973. “Don Juan in Hell” was a touring production that made a stop at the Fort Smith Municipal Auditorium.

Her main co-star was Ricardo Montalban (before TV’s Fantasy Island), whose autograph I still have somewhere, “To Ben, mi amigo …” and the others were Edward Mulhare (TV’s Ghost and Mrs. Muir) and Kurt Kasznar (TV’s Land of the Giants).

My life’s one stint as a “limo” driver was that night.

My dad for years volunteered as the booking agent for the Fort Smith Broadway Theater League. He also worked, as a part-time job, as stage manager for all shows that came through. Although he never used his position for any personal or family advantage, just this once he decided that with my very fresh driver’s license I should drive the stars in the family’s Pontiac from the Holiday Inn six blocks to the theater.

The men went first, as an apparent courtesy so on the next trip Miss Loy would have the car to herself. I recall wondering why Mr. Montalban didn’t also warrant a separate ride. But the other guys did insist he take the front seat. I was nervous; Mr. Montalban with kind words put me at ease. (Dad already was at the auditorium. Mom, not wanting to miss a thing, rode in the back seat.)

Then I saw the basis of the chivalry. Miss Loy walked with two canes, very slowly. By the Internet Movie Database I now see that she was not particularly old, about 68. But she no longer was the sexy, quick-witted babe Nora Charles.

She was dignified and quiet. Still, to a 16-year-old, an old lady. Until she took the stage.

Dramatic readings have no props, sets or costumes. Stools, maybe music stands to hold scripts. The cast took the stage one at a time in formal wear, which must have been waiting in their dressing rooms, because they sure weren’t wearing tuxes and such in the blue LeMans.

Last came Myrna Loy. She strode in, wearing a brilliant gown, to cheers. No canes, no halting gait. Head high and smiling like the movie star she was.

The show? Hardly remember it. What I do recall is Dad telling me about Shaw –  My Fair Lady came from his Pygmalion, that he was so cool his name became an adjective, “Shavian,” and that it wasn’t pronounced Ber NARD but accented on the first syllable, BER nu’d.

Her exit, then returns for curtain calls, had the same gallant stride. Bridges and Rourke whose characters also had physical problems, albeit self-inflicted, nailed that entering and leaving one’s stage persona.

Afterward people lined up outside Miss Loy’s dressing room. I watched; maybe I was waiting to take everyone back to the Holiday. The fans did not necessarily ask for autographs. Most just wanted to thank her for this or that movie that meant so much to them. She sat patiently as they walked past. They did not seem to notice the theater face was off. She looked tired but regal, a straight back under a dressy robe.

Next to the chair in the hallway rested those canes.

Yes, quit pipes and the occasional cigarette or cigar 22 years ago. Don’t mean miss my own smoking. I do miss how smoking helped the dexterity of nearly everyone — that is, people who smoked, which was nearly everyone.

That was not obvious until a few weeks ago. My office moved from little Lowell to working-class Springdale. The 14-mile, one-way commute became 11. It’s two exits closer on the interstate from the Shady Hill manse. But instead of 16-20 minutes’ drive, it’s 20-30, due to more stop-and-go distance to reach the new newsroom.

More time on city streets provides lots of defensive-driving workouts as well as seeing clearly what motorists are doing to cause speeding up and slowing down for no apparent reason, with the occasional crossing of a lane stripe. They’re on their phones.

If only these people smoked, they’d competently drive while fidgeting, often in the form of trying not to burn their fingers or mouths. The nicotine habit would be good practice for the chatting and texting masses.

In the Mad Men days when nearly everyone smoked, it took a knack while steering to pull a cigarette from a pack, tap one end flat, light the other and so on. If you were talking with a passenger and also tuning in a radio station, well there you go. We pipe-smoking drivers alertly mussed with more meddling — knocking out ashes, fuzzy wire cleaners, filling from the tobacco pouch, tamping but not too much, all the relighting.

Off-road use of cell phones is risky, too. The New York Times reports a widespread increase of injuries of walkers stumbling while using their phones. The injuries generally are minor but real. A survey confirms about 1,000 emergency room visits nationwide in 2008 by distracted pedestrians.

The article cites walking and chewing gum — how could it not? — with a researcher noting neither takes conscious effort so injuries are rare. Walking and messing with cigarettes? A little more deliberate and probably statistically insignificant as well.

You may not need to be an active smoker to learn how to safely talk or type on cell phones while on the move. If you smoked and quit, you likely retain those survival skills. It’s like riding a bicycle. Though come to think of it, few smoked and pedaled back in tobacco’s heyday, because ash would get in your eyes.

Klutzes like me don’t need cell phones. Early one morning a couple of weeks ago I was heading to the kitchen in Shady Hill when I saw My Beloved out in the snow-covered yard playing with our new dog, who’d never seen snow before. She was laughing, he was shuttling and prancing. It was buoyant.

I had to join them, even without a coat. I slammed into the glass door with my face.

My nose still hurts.

New Year’s Resolution No. 1 for 2010 is modest: Keep a book list. Then in a year there’ll be a better best books Brick.

One could say that if the books I read were memorable then I’d remember ‘em. It’s not as if I read that much, a couple of ink volumes a month at best, and about 1.5 recorded books a month heard while commuting. Quantity though measurable is relative. So this isn’t very many compared to either of my late parents, who read two or three novels or mysteries a week. All from the library, like me.

My Beloved prefers books on faith and spirituality — serious ones not glib pop — while I tend toward comic novels or Stephen King. It may mean I’m not deep anymore, but I’d rather claim that my mystical curiosity is on sabbatical because my set of live-by philosophies is working right now.

So when called upon to recall my favorite volumes of 2009 — and I’m the only one who’s asking — I recall King’s Duma Key (fun with great craftsmanship) and Nick Hornby’s Juliet, Naked for its wit and character development. Those were absorbed via audio; I read Financial Lives of the Poets by Jess Walter because of good reviews. I’m hard on comic novels and this one did succeed but it still was on the frothy side. Hornby’s still the contemporary writer to beat on making a reader giggle and think.

Some nonfiction titles hit me so strongly that this roundup is really about them.

Zeitoun by Dave Eggers, is A micro look at Hurricane Katrina, featuring a paint contractor, residential but some commercial, and his family and friends. Its twist is that the fellow is Syrian so the post-Katrina Keystone Kops operation naturally takes him for al Qaida. Zeitoun brings home how the leadership high in Washington is interpreted and made gospel on the ground. Turns out the Bill of Rights can be a luxury when it should be obvious how it’s most needed in crisis. The founding fathers knew this (Franklin: “Those who sacrifice liberty for freedom deserve neither.”) Long-form journalism is tricky, but Eggers paddles smoothly between all obstacles. This book should be required reading in high school.

Mainly, though I want to shout out Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson, read in the summer, and Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America by Barbara Ehrenreich.

The main thing about Free is that it explains the different kinds of free goods, from samples given away in hopes of making sales to shareware, computer applications distributed in the hope that a few offer a donation. The computer age turns sales into absurdity. How can Google give away nearly everything it does and make apparently buckets of bucks? Free explains. The cost of electronic information distribution and storage is approaching zero. I can’t see how businesses and consumers can proceed into the next decade without understand how inevitable this concept is.

If I had read Free before Brick’s attempt last year at explaining news distribution, I would have let Anderson do the explaining. My analysis is observational, without the benefit of an MBA, but my 2003 master’s in journalism from the University of Arkansas helped. I don’t have the access to experts or the time to do the extensive research that Anderson executed. His post as editor of the technology and culture magazine Wired gives him perspective as well. Still, I’m not deleting my essay.

While Free continues to inform my thinking on the Good Depression and beyond, Bright-Sided informs my overall perspective. I’m not summarizing it, though at 250-something pages it’s not too long, just focusing on a point or two.

Ehrenreich says her being treated for breast cancer inspired the book. She uses both history and current reporting to make points. The history doesn’t start with Norman Vincent Peale but decades before, to 19th-century Protestant trends, mainly the American approach to Calvinism (yes, Johnny was a 16th-century theologian) and the development of theological opposition to it. Her reporting includes taking in worship services of prominent evangelists and talking with them, as well as interviewing prominent psychologists and the like.

Ehrenreich isn’t a propagandist trying to manipulate readers but an arguer. I am persuaded, because she revealed something to me I never quite grasped before.

An extreme form of positive thinking is materialistic. If you want something bad enough, want it completely with no reservations, you can have it. For the religiously minded, wanted isn’t enough, you have to pray for it. It might be for a better job; it might be a car you can’t afford. These aren’t hers or my examples, just check out Oprah Winfrey or  pastor Joel Osteen.

Therefore if you’re stuck in your job or lose it — or are turned down for the car loan — then it’s your fault. Yes in some way, you failed. People who every day believe that with a little more “umph,” they can get something, then night falls without success, feel like losers.

The general form of positive thinking might best be Ehrenreich’s personal example. You can’t wish away cancer of course, but repeatedly she was told how a positive outlook helps. There is a little science, that a good disposition helps one keep to the course. But a pasted-on or even a sincere smile does absolutely nothing to stop the growth of cancer cells nor make therapy more effective. Chemistry and biology are at best indirectly advanced by pink household appliances. Sure, money for research helps, but what about all the other body parts cancer attacks?

No woman, Ehrenreich says, should ever think that breast cancer is her fault for not radiating good thoughts or memorizing affirmations. Cancer happens, and it’s fought conventionally, experimentally and with alternative approaches. People age and get sick. They need to learn their options with clear eyes, not lose time, focus or realistic hope with diversions, she writes.

The author didn’t say this, I don’t recall, but there’s lots of criticism and jokes about the me-me-me, it’s all about me attitude that’s prevalent. The Secret concept, and a too-broad application of Positive Thinking by definition is self-centered. I want X, nevermind the world. Y happened to me, nevermind genetics or toxins. Z struck this person I know, she didn’t fight hard enough, of course that won’t happen to me. What about compassion?

Ehrenreich sure didn’t mention Meredith Willson’s mid-20th-century musical The Music Man, where Prof. Harold Hill sells River City, Iowa, band instruments and uniforms with “The Think System,” where children don’t need any musical training, saying, “You don’t have to bother with the notes.”

Besides, there’s a need to even out the vitriol that Avatar caused me. It wormed under my skin like a Pandoran parasite.

What comes to mind are Up in the Air for grown-ups and the family-friendly Where the Wild Things Are. Neither show will be hurt by seeing on video when they’re released, but the big screen does them justice.

If Tom Hanks is our James Stewart, then George Clooney long ago earned the wings to be our Cary Grant. Clooney’s Up in the Air is a witty drama (serious comedy?) with not only realistic main characters but accurate minor ones, not to mention the unexpected documentary snippets of unemployed people. Clooney plays a hit man, hired to conduct layoffs across the country. That makes him legal, not an outlaw, though the carnage gives pause. He has a romance on the road, and he trains a protege. Everyone is smart, including the real-life cameos. From the start, he faces the risks we all do, if on a more suave, Cary Grant scale, and he and we learn from them. That’s the show, tight and seamless. Lie the screen that’s showing this movie flat over the seats, and I bet you could bounce a quarter on it.

I avoided Where the Wild Things Are until near the end of its fall run. The Maurice Sendak award-winning book was my childhood favorite, and it wasn’t yet a classic. I have two copies in different spots of the house now. They remind me that imagination always will be key, even at this time when so many wrongly think that the pursuit of truth rules out imagination. Still, I avoided the show because in expanding the 1963 picture book to a full-length picture, Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers had to surround the little boy with realism. Sum-up of book and movie: Bad Max is sent to his room, where he discovers a world he can rule. The movie’s Max, by having just a mom and a sister and deep snow in winter, no longer resembled little Ben or many other 8-year-olds. Not coloring in allows anyone to see themselves. I bought a ticket when I decided it wouldn’t cloud my memory. It turns out that showing Max’s family and street was a minor issue. What’s crucial is the movie tells its story start-to-finish through the perspective of a child. That has to be hard; it’s sure unusual. A child can see his truth with nearly friendly monsters, which makes as much sense to him as the fact his older sister’s friends play rough, not from malice, just size.

In our award-happy society — and that goes from schools to well-meaning employers — we forget that a good job doesn’t need praise. Sure it’s nice when it happens. It certainly is an overstatement that a good job is its own reward. Sometimes it seems we witness quality rarely so we don’t recognize it. Other times quality is so common in American goods and services we stop seeing it. In these two movies, everything from writing to acting to set design is flawless. Maybe that deserves awards, especially when you consider all the dreck around. But I can’t see Clooney being nominated for acting or Jonze for directing this year. All they did was exactly the right things.

Show me your hands. Good, they’re clean. Thumb check, everyone. Twitching and ready to turn up or down? Yes, it’s movie day.

I haven’t caught any stories that note James Cameron is the kind of director who sometimes drops into a shot a wink at a movie that inspired him or relates to that particular scene. The homages in his Avatar, though, were the first thing that caught my mind. My attention, not my mind, stayed arrested by the latest in fantasy visuals. But every day since I saw the epic, its memory grows sourer.

Avatar’s beginning, where hero Jake Scully (Sam Worthington) awakes and sums up his immediate circumstance, looks and sounds similar to Martin Sheen’s first morning in Apocalypse Now. Impressive, until one realizes that Cameron inverts the plot and theme of Coppola’s 1979 retelling of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

You can see elements of many recent war, fantasy or ptrek movies in Avatar, and that’s one of the fun things about it. It’s either Cameron ptipping his hat in respect, or there’s only so many ways a militaristic fantasy like this can go. The show has Transformer like robots, and there’s several pties to PTop Gun, hence the ptitle of this Brick. Ptop Gun has jets, not running and flying horses. Avatar’s planet (or moon) Pandora has an assortment of ground-hugging creatures, furry or scaly, and the winged cold- and warm-blooded creatures have some pterodactyl in them. My Beloved saw links to Dances with Wolves and the Matrix movies. I do advise paying the $2 extra to see Avatar with 3D glasses; the spectacle is a mental and nearly a physical roller coaster.

Now that I’ve dismounted and my head has stopped spinning, I’m mad.

Going undercover

We can’t go further without trying a summary. Way in the future, the (apparently) American government runs a long-term expedition to Pandora to help a corporation get a needed mineral. This world is populated with almost-like-earth animals and people, the Na’vi. [Pandora presumably is not a Na’vi word.] The project has a scientific component led by Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) in a Stanford T-shirt (the actress is an alum). The military side is led by Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang). Jake is in between them, a Marine replacement for his Ph.D. brother who died. Avatars are test-tube grown Na’vi (very large test tubes), each of which is controlled by a human in a trance. Jake’s not one to move much anyway, having lost the use of his legs from previous military service. The corporation would prefer the Na’vi’s cooperation in mining the mineral but has the government’s permission to mow down the slender, tall, blue Na’vi like it did American Indians. The colonel is impatient, while Grace has grown to love the people and their planet. Jake’s avatar heads in, as a spy, and “goes native.” Will he help the indigenous people?

That wasn’t so bad. Not quite as long as the original text of Where the Wild Things Are.

Others have found racism in Avatar. It’s not. Cameron is using broad outlines of familiar history, that’s all. But it is a wonder why evangelical Christians aren’t up in arms over the movie’s spiritual component. The humans express no religion at all, except perhaps in cursing (which like sex adds realism, don’t you know). The Na’vi are fervent in a made-for-Avatar animism-slash-Buddhism, worshiping the spirits of the land and air (which humans can’t breathe) so far as the former, with reincarnation as a nod to the latter. I’m not offended, except at Cameron’s theological shortcuts. But why aren’t other viewers? The “Force” of the Star Wars stories is similar window-dressing but the way George Lucas used that — with fewer narrative explanations, by the way — was both more minimal and more believable, and could be integrated into Western religions: “Use the Force, Luke,” means little more than trust your senses, skills and upbringing, and believe good is better than evil and can triumph.

Of course the Na’vi would have a back story including a belief system, because that is seen as helping the audience. (Good stories didn’t always need added psychological profiles.) Like popcorn, this show likely will pass through children with little absorption. But books and other movies have been burned for less.

My problem is its theme. There’s three routes for movie themes. The first is the expected, explicitly presenting a story’s underlying message by plot turn, often with one character explaining it to another — Hollywood feels obligated to do this and almost by definition indies don’t. [A right-by-us moral is how R-rated violence gets a PG-13.] The second is subtlety, with a moral hinted at, for viewers who can’t leave without one. [Old kids’ cartoons and new sex comedies get by with an absence of morals.] And the third is demonstrated in flicks like this: the movie is so fun, who cares about the empty-head extremism it espouses?

‘Jarhead’ kind of demeaning?

From the start, much is made of Jake’s lack of intelligence. He is an empty vessel, and the question is how much new knowledge will he retain, as his life will depend on it. He knows he’s opposite in smarts from his late brother. Grace regrets it, while the colonel sees Jake as a perfect soldier (Marine here, actually). [Grace is so tough she smokes in the sealed human habitat — go figure.] Jake gains the trust of the Na’vi. Before him, Grace’s avatar has been accepted. Grace’s avatar is missionary-like, teaching fascinated Na’vi children English and so on. Jake starts to learn the Na’vi language and begins a romance with a Na’vi princess. He comes to be repelled by the greed displayed by the conquering capitalism of the government, military and corporate interests.

We in the audience are to root for him, and this makes it opposite of Apocalypse Now, despite Cameron’s nod toward it. Col. Kurtz (a late, memorable Marlon Brando role) has gone native and rules a Southeast Asian tribe despotically. Sheen’s character, Capt. Willard, is sent to stop Kurtz.

Avatar is anti-intellectual: Book-learning is a waste. Ignorance allows unerring instinct. Science and reasoning distract. Does that remind anyone of any recent national political candidates?

Yes, one of the dichotomies of America is a passion for the application of education versus gut decisions. That makes Sarah Palin popular and before her George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan. Being a sort of savant though is the perception they gave; I’m not too sure but that all three of these folks are darn smart.

What’s with Avatar, though, is that its message is left-leaning: respectful of indigenous peoples, environmentally careful (the U.S. expedition is happy to destroy Pandora to get the mineral), with lots of chanting and hugs. When the Na’vi get in touch with their roots, it’s for mystical healing gathered ’round the base of a tree.

Republicans have been successful by pairing the know-nothing element with the savvy: Reagan and George H.W. Bush, George II with Dick Cheney, and Palin with Naval Academy graduate John McCain.

New Age same as the Old Age

Lefties, the movie shows, can find value in tossing away manuals. It’s the essence what can be called New Age beliefs and practices, which often use snippets of Eastern religions. When Democrats have a popular goof, they tend to lose races by not pairing them off like Republicans. Democratic know-nothings tend to run and win local/state races.

Impressionable movie goers of any age might be presented with ignorance as an ideal, but wouldn’t balance and contrast strengthen the story?

It’s repugnant that the liberals push a blank-headed seeker as the epitome of how to save the universe from destruction caused by greed. It’s one of those cases where the left and right are so extreme they reach around and touch.

The movie’s one smarty, Grace, is shown as one who can’t see the holy trees from the forest due to too many brains. The colonel to me is a tough warrior chief. MB resented that after his introduction his lines and behavior descend to caricature. The other main characters have a little arc of development. I’m not a snob; I’ve enjoyed all the recent Spiderman movies. That’s a real comic book series — Avatar’s an original screenplay — but even Spidey’s enemies have back stories.

For New Year’s Eve, two days after we saw Avatar, MB and I rented a DVD of last summer’s Star Trek prequel. It cemented my feelings. The young Kirk and Spock meet, and board the brand-new starship Enterprise, having attended a futuristic version of West Point (or perhaps an interplanetary Air Force Academy). I’ve not followed the Trek saga closely, but all of its main characters and often its villains rely on everything — their wiles to be sure but also their intelligence, backed by schooling. This Star Trek has its faults — the time travel explanation was muddy — but its special effects were pretty good, too, and with enough depth to the characters and enough logic to the plot. It has pacing and wit, too.

If Cameron has a message, it’s that he gets to be smart and we don’t have to be. That’s being charitable. Maybe the famed director is manipulating and patronizing us film lovers while mastering the latest in special effects. His message is honorable: Corporate greed is hurting the Earth. But our real planet’s rescuers will need every advantage, not just a bit of magic and talking to animals through hair braids. I’m glad I saw Avatar, I had fun, but it deserves nothing higher than the technical Oscars.

My relationship with money sometimes irritates people. It would be none of their business of course, except when it comes up in conversation. I’m one who avoids specifics, but I try to be supportive of stuff that people say casually. Yet every once in a while I bite my tongue when people talk about what things ought to be worth or how much their collectibles will bring, should they sell them.

History and literature are full of stories of people exchanging a gold ring or an unset diamond, sewn into a coat hem, just for a meal. We forget than when we’re desperate, the people around us are, too. The worth of an object is what people offer when you want to sell it. Price tags in stores is rather new, and Western.

We must have been in junior high when my neighbor Dana and I were talking about the relative value of things. At that time, the early 1970s, Radio Shack sold remainder cassettes. It’s where I bought jazz tapes, to teach myself what happened after Big Band, which is what Dad still played. I had read about John Coltrane and Dizzy Gillespie, and found tapes of them there. (Dana liked Newhart and Cosby comedy LPs.) So the cassettes there on Rogers Avenue in Fort Smith were a couple of bucks and buying new ones at Elmore’s (locally owned) or Madcats (a mall chain), three times that easily.

What struck us is how for the price of lunch for both of us at Sandy’s (which became Hardee’s) you could buy cut-outs. With care, albums could last forever. The burgers, fries and shakes last until dinner time. I still don’t understand why a hot meal costs the same as a 44-minute tape, but one incident as an adult helped.

Some 15 years later, in about 1988, I decided to sell my dad’s coin collection. This was not the plastic-mounted set of a collector. We’re talking about a shoebox full of mainly buffalo nickels.

From the late 1940s to 1967 when bankruptcy was declared, my dad managed a dry cleaners owned by his big brother. After ‘67, Uncle Al retired, and Dad took a series of jobs including office manager, Realtor and income tax preparer. As part of the Model Laundry & Dry Cleaners of Fort Smith, Dad and Uncle Al owned two coin-operated washaterias. When Dad saw an interesting coin while emptying the machines he pocketed it and put in a newer one in its place. A shoebox full of these was in his desk, and Mom gave it to me after he died in 1985, at age 69 of emphysema from smoking.

After a while, I decided to sell most of them, for practical and emotional reasons. If Dad had no sentiment for them, why should I? I did the homework and didn’t just go to one of those people who set up in hotels with ads in the paper for Cash for Gold or Collectibles. I made an appointment with a legitimate coin dealer in downtown Little Rock, near my newsroom. I first cleaned the coins in a sink of suds.

The manager looked at each coin, quickly and with an obviously practiced eye. He confirmed that the condition of the coin makes all the difference, and these nickels — this was long before you had to feed all those quarters at Laundromats — had long been circulated (1938 was the buffalo’s last year). A few, however, were decent, and were worth — get this — five times their face value.

Five times their face value. That’s right, 25 cents for each 5-cent piece.

The rest, the dealer said, were worth double. Double! If I agreed to the sale, he would toss my worn coins in a bucket he kept for children getting started in coin collecting.

The rest he offered me what I have estimated at $34.70. If there were 300 nickels, then 270 were worth double their value, $27, and 30 times five, or $7.50.

I could have kept the box. Maybe the smoother coins now could get four times their price and the sharper ones 10 times. Still not even $100.

Ever since, when someone says their  300 $5 Beanie Babies are each worth $40 on eBay because they never took the stuffed critters out of the packaging, well, I just think they’ve got their first mortgage payment, 359 to go.

The box of nickels logic applies to everything. Winning a lottery? My friend Don McNay has advice for you. If you sell your house for cash, you’ve bought yourself two or four years of income, if managed well. Then what?

Besides relative worth, the shoebox’s main lesson turned out to be the value of work. A job with its regular paychecks is what pays for stuff more than some one-time windfall, or even 20 jackpots. If I finish a novel and sell it to Hollywood, I’ll revise this core belief.

The dealer back in 1988 did point out two coins, one a like-new old nickel and a Nazi Germany coin. The latter wasn’t worth much, but for historical value I kept it and the one great nickel. Ten bucks for both; call me.

Maybe my sleep has been less sound recently, and maybe it’s the pillow’s fault. That’s what I thought when I read an article on bed pillows filled with buckwheat hulls, instead of closed-cell foam, feathers and polyester fluff. Before the special foam pillow bought over two years ago, I came to prefer a “better” (Sears memorably used to sell similar items in good, better and best categories) polyester pillow, ideally bought every year for under $10. Inspired this week by The Wall Street Journal story, I’ve Googled up buckwheat pillows and placed an order online.

Disturbed sleep may not be the fault of the pillow but the stresses of the day. I can’t blame it on the bedroom, a healthy mix of Hers and His. Most of the wall decorations are hers. Still left are two of my singleton posters, Pier 1 (back when it was closer to Spenser Gifts than Crate & Barrel) reproductions of vague nudes by Matisse and Picasso. There’s one wedding photo and the ketubah (Jewish wedding certificate) I calligraphed. The bedclothes are her choice. No pink thankfully, rather, soothing earth tones. The furniture for the past five years was inherited from my mom; it’s 1950s, beautiful but mainly we kept it for its practicality. The dresser is large, and My Beloved uses it. The headboard is full of cabinets, draws and shelves. My dresser remains a rolling plastic cart that fits precisely in my closet.

The master bedrooms of others can be such a window. Those of couples older than us generally are comfortable like ours. Family photos and sensible furniture. Sentiment may define the decorations. Whatever it is, it’s rarely decor.

Younger couples reflect the wife’s impulses, it appears. Many are so frilly I feel like I fell into a J.C. Penney catalog. Window and bed treatments define them, not the other way around. I try to understand the husband, how he can walk in the bedroom with his swagger intact. He can’t. Guys with this situation never complain. It is very important to a husband that the bedroom makes his wife happy.

One could suspect that the bedrooms of single women therefore would have a more pronounced femininity but, in my experience, that is rare. The bedrooms of unattached women demonstrate their personality but generally they’re very spare, with most pictures and furnishings placed in the living room. It’s not that I spend much time in women’s bedrooms — really — but the bed is where the coats go at parties, and without peaking under the bed, I do make observations. Single women only have time to make a bed by smoothing out the comforter, while lots of set-up women make dusting and vacuuming bedskirts and pillow shams, valances and window scarves, a priority.

Bachelors’ quarters are as spare as their living rooms. Ideally, guys would have the color sense and showmanship shown in the paneled flat of the dashing fellow played by Ewan McGregor in the 2003 movie Down with Love (one of my favorite comedies of the decade, too clever and as light as a stray blonde hair on your tweed coat). My rooms when I was single were as sparse as my friends, and these days that seems not to have changed with men. A mattress defines the bedroom and the sofa the living room.

Few people ever rave about their pillows. They give them points for being better than the ones of most motels they’ve stayed in, but that’s it.

My memory-foam simply may have forgotten the shape of my head. Yet it seems fresh even now. Where that special plastic works well is in the car. In my hatchback I place at my lower back a memory foam chair pillow from Office Depot, where I found the best price and quality. Still on nights like last night, when it’s 12:15 a.m. and 16 degrees, the foam feels like a flagstone set on its edge. it is that hard. The pillow warms quickly, but in the winter it won’t soften in my 20-minute drive home. It’s a keeper, though, because my spine is happy.

As a bed pillow, closed-cell foam is much heavier than batting and won’t settle into batting’s dreaded lumps. Buckwheat may well be better. Perhaps going back to batting pillows, a new one every year, is the right way to go if it isn’t.

Maybe I should pull an old pillowcase over this Sleep Innovations pillow and cast it into Beaver Lake, as if to drown it. It is foam, though, so it will just float off.

NAN comprises the Northwest Arkansas edition of the Demzette along with the daily newspapers of Fayetteville, Bentonville, Springdale and Rogers. Dozens of colleagues — and I’ve been around enough years to know and appreciate many of them — have been laid off. It hurt to see them go. NAN still employs me, but that could change in the new year, or this afternoon. Blame the nation’s Good Depression that started a year or two ago.

When Ozarkers have had a chance to speak to me in the last month, they uniformly hate the merger, specifically the look of the four city papers. They’re not vague, not ambiguous.

Until I tell them what could’ve happened: The papers could have been shut down entirely. I alway hope that is a reminder, not news, but to a one, friends, acquaintances and people I do business with (doctor, barber etc.) do not connect the national newspaper crisis — with big city newspapers in bankruptcy, ending print editions or out-and-out closing — with home. Some don’t know about San Francisco, Denver, Detroit, Chicago, Minneapolis-St. Paul and so on. Today: The New York Times Co. “expects its print advertising revenue to decline 25 percent in the fourth quarter.”

A quarter in a quarter is a bunch.

This Brick isn’t to save me breath. The people who’ve talked to me don’t read it. This is to flesh out my observations of the past five weeks.

The papers look good in one specific way, as does the redesigned Web site, nwaonline.com, in content. All have more articles than ever before. More news, more features. Sure, you can see lots of gaps and bugs, in ink or pixels. That’ll take months to smooth out. The typography is mismatched; more on that in a moment. Yes, the number of opinions on the editorial pages has shrunk.

Although I am a column maven, I’m not too bothered yet by the cutting of many columns by newsroom staff and by community members. To people who’ve asked me about that specifically, suspecting conspiracy, I say again, the alternative is no newspaper, so even the few writers published by NAN would not see print.

There’s some essays by regular contributors I will miss. Others have been writing too long and frankly need a break. If I am wrong and they should still be hollering about what’s wrong, there’s always the Internet, with blogging and the online version of letters to the editor, “comments.”

What I’m suggesting to the region is to give this operation at least six months before judging. The four city newspapers will get a shared typographical design before too long. Let’s hope the retention of separate identities in form and content remains the top priority. Seeing the differences between Fayetteville’s Northwest Arkansas Times (progressive, often culturally astute) and Bentonville’s Benton County Daily Record (Mayberry-like, with sophisticated touches) always has been a pleasure for me, heightened by the fact they have been owned by a single media company (Community Publishers then Wehco) for a good decade.

If there’s a lesson here, besides the Good Depression hits in different ways and some are as near as your driveway, it’s this: Opinions are like orifices, everyone’s got a half-dozen, on a good day.