Word: self
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...midlife, though, Jobs has mellowed enough to chuckle at that elevator story, and seems to have vanquished at least some of his personal demons. Adopted as an infant, Jobs spent his early adulthood on a classic '60s-era quest for personal identity, seeking transcendence and self-realization through drugs and meditation, founding Apple and establishing a New Age "family" of fervent Macintosh partisans while keeping his own out-of-wedlock daughter Lisa and her mother at a sad remove...
From these studies, Damasio, who is chairman of the University of Iowa's neurology department, concludes that consciousness is a layered edifice, like some Mayan pyramid or Mesopotamian ziggurat. It is based on an inchoate feeling of self that arises from the brain's detailed "diagram" of the body. Damasio says this diagram, which is continuously revised by the senses, can be thought of as the "protoself"; it props up the rest of the structure...
...this core consciousness, as Damasio calls it, that registers "the feeling of what happens," and it's something we share with other intelligent animals, such as dogs. But there is another form of consciousness that embellishes one's image of self with a wealth of autobiographical detail. Damasio calls this extended consciousness, and it requires such a vast capacity for memory that it's probably special only to humans and great apes. Hence, damage to the brain's memory centers can impair a person's extended consciousness while leaving core consciousness intact...
...Seinfeld's inane blabber and outlandishly tragicomic situations with more angst than you could scrub out with a bar of Fight Club's Paper Street soap. After that came Mallrats and Chasing Amy, more dismally delightful chronicles of the post-yuppie malaise, all starring the director (in a requisite self-referential flourish) as the omnipresent Silent Bob. Not content with Stillman's trilogy concept, Smith has spawned an entire cottage industry with this year's forthcoming release of Dogma (with Alanis Morissette, which is Canadian for "25-year-old angst queen," in the role...
...Fight Club tries to turn the same self-referential tricks as Smith's movies as an antidote to the violence of yuppie angst. The Clockwork Orange-esque rejoicing in mayhem that characterizes so much of the movie is contrasted with its many self-referential moments (without giving too much away...): the bizarre walk through the IKEA catalog; the moment when movie projectionist Tyler Durden, discussing the "change filmstrip" blip that appears on movie screens, points to the one on the screen of the movie he is in; and a final revelation about the relationship between Durden and the narrator. Unfortunately...