Frim

A transition of sorts

2011-07-28T16:21:00.005-07:00

Here is the link to a hot new photo blog that I highly recommend.

Central Methodist Church

2010-11-13T11:25:00.012-08:00

Finally edited and uploaded, it's my side project from South Africa: Part one, Part two (on youtube), or here.

Most institutions that want to serve the poor play out a conflict between exclusivity and compassion. Faced with extreme need, an institution can establish rigid in/out boundaries in order to serve a few people well. Or it can take the alternate tack: It can open the gates wide and be overwhelmed, working hard to establish even a baseline standard of service and courting "burn out".

In the context of South Africa's dramatic and ongoing Zimbabwean refugee crisis, the Central Methodist Church has opted for the latter approach. An observer becomes aware of this in the South African media, where accusations of crime, sexual abuse, and "sub-human" living conditions are often made. The same realization can be had in visiting the place, which I had the privilege of doing in March: One is immediately greeted by that instantly recognizable cornucopia of stale stenches that usually accompanies human misery.

Paul Verryn, former Anglican bishop and current caretaker of Johannesburg's downtown parish, has not denied the chaos of the situation he has created by refusing to shut the doors. Rather, he has attempted to do his best to get the problems under control while reframing the discussion to talk about the national government's complete refusal to come up with some sort of plan to deal with the influx of Zimbabwean immigrants.

Beyond dirty bodies, what the place really reeks of is compassion. This dilapidated industrial-style monolith goes very far to embody compassion--black sheep of the family of Holy Spirit fruits, unmentionable in polite conversation--what with her enormous sweaty embrace, effusive, jabbering, unseemly, incapable of making all kinds of distinctions, blind to all the varieties and categories of personal accomplishment and failure claimed by those she draws to herself.

Sure looks bad now, but here's a church that might just stand a chance on the last day.

How to explain it to my parents?

2010-08-20T15:24:00.007-07:00

Here is a perfect video interview project, in which nine abstract artists attempt to explain their works of art to their parents.

A fascinating theme in the series is the acute familiarity of the interviewer and interviewee, whereby it seems very difficult for most of these artists to maintain their composure when asked a question (there's plenty of squirming), much less to treat their parents' questions objectively or seriously (despite the fact that several of the questions are valid and well-articulated). Reminds me that the habitual nature of intimate relationships brings about a certain blindness towards the other.

There is a gracefulness that involves learning (or maybe loving) the esoteric vocabulary of a certain society well enough to perform it convincingly for the in-group. There is another, very different kind of gracefulness which is able to engage someone from the out-group, in spite of the inherent awkwardness (or nakedness) involved in setting aside jargon.

This post not suitable for the faint of technological heart

2010-04-29T08:19:00.006-07:00

This blog has fallen silent for a number of months. At the moment, I am writing a couple of reflections on the recent trip to South Africa that I will put up soon enough. But part of the silence is due to the fact that my desire to share things with friends online has shifted into other venues, especially "shared items" on google reader.

So I just wanted to say that if you are a gmail user and an internet nerd (usually synonymous), turn on google buzz in gmail and "follow me", which you can do using the button on this page. What this will do is consolidate into one stream any blog posts I may write and any pictures I may share (not that many) and also articles or links that I am recommending. Probably soon any video I post on my vimeo page will also show up there. So next time you wonder, "What is Tim up to digitally?", you can just click on "buzz" and you will know. INSTANTLY.

One thing that is good about doing things this way is that the items that I want to share stay private among friends, instead of the whole internet. One or two things will show up on my "public" google profile (which fellow facebook haters will be happy to discover contains no personal details or interests whatsoever), but most of what I am recommending will only go out to people who are on a set list of my email contacts, an exclusive group which I have designated "The Book of Life" in my contacts.

Please understand that this technological recommendation will be revoked at the inevitable point in time when google's willingness to engage in privacy-invasion and other evils of all kinds surpasses the benefit derived from the social conveniences they provide. Until then, happy sharing.

The marketing of one's self

2009-12-19T18:05:00.009-08:00

Been meaning to get a video portfolio up and running for a long time. Finally it's happening, in at least two places:
1. Fryett.org (created with the wonderful indexhibit)
2. My vimeo page (more videos, less description)

Additionally, the final round of A.S.A.D. videos are coming up soon, uploading as I write...

A.S.A.D.

2009-11-11T07:00:00.005-08:00

Check out the blog for the after school video course that I'm teaching this fall on Wednesdays via Ayuda Community Center.

More great videos on the way. Including but not limited to: Street interviews at Broad & Hunting Park Ave. and more in-depth interviews that the boys are shooting this week.

We welcome your comments...

Putting up

2009-08-22T07:29:00.007-07:00

For something near two years I have been plodding at a luscious, stop-and-smell-the-flowers pace through the copious autobiography of the excellent Ammon Hennacy. This morning I came across an especially sparkling section of memoir-izing; this excerpt I consider a crystallization of the best of Ammon. It deals with a period of his life in which he was living and working at a Catholic Worker house located in the Bowery, New York City. This would have been the mid 1950s:

We are a paper and a movement and a house of hospitality. We are a station where folks who have lost their way stop for a time until they can decide where they want to buy a ticket to--a monastery, the Ford Foundation, a union job, the Carmelites, marriage, or lower down on skid row...

In my early days at 223 Chrystie Street... I got up at 5:00 A.M. and helped pour coffee for the line and scrubbed the slime from the hall and kitchen floor. Some men would come back as much as three times in the line. Often one drunk would preach to the men in the line, telling them that they were all no-good bums.

What kind of people come to us? All sorts of tortured souls who have no other place to go. Peter [Maurin] said that we had to put up with one another the way God puts up with us, and Dorothy [Day] said we loved God as much as we loved the person we loved the least. By this measure I am a failure, and so are the most of us. The only thing is that we have different points of touchiness and tension and different breaking points as to how much of any certain kind of misery we can take. And I suppose we get a "tolerance" toward certain irritations and and added intolerance toward others.

One kind that is especially difficult for me to take is the scrupulous, over-pious person always wanting to put a scapular on me and hovering near the holy water. They are sure to burst out in vituperation a little later. We have had some of the quiet, withdrawn scrupulous types who have generally been good workers in detailed filing, etc. But once they are presented with an emergency their frustration and hatred of life have resulted in their violently attacking whoever is in their way. Then we have the loud-mouth braggart who when drunk would upset everything by his very noise. One such person who has been here for twenty years used to exasperate me by his noise when I was trying to phone, and I said to him, "How long do I have to put up with you?"

"How long do I have to put up with you, you damn intellectual?" he replied.

This is wonderful, for the Catholic Worker is a place for derelicts, and we intellectuals talk pacifism and anarchism and go to Mass. All some of these folks want is one more drink, and in between they have to listen to us.

A big white globe

2009-07-08T10:24:00.010-07:00

"First Lesson About Man" by Thomas Merton

Man begins in zoology.
He is the saddest animal.
He drives a big red car called anxiety.
He dreams at night
Of riding all the elevators.
Lost in the halls,
He never finds the right door.

Man is the saddest animal.
A flake-eater in the morning,
A milk-drinker.
He fills his skin with coffee
And loses patience with the rest of his species.

He draws his sin on the wall,
On all the ads in all the subways.
He draws moustaches on all the women
Because he cannot find his joy,
Except in zoology.
Whenever he goes to the phone to call Joy,
He gets the wrong number.

Therefore he likes weapons.
He knows all guns by their right name.
He drives a big black Cadillac called death.

Now he is putting anxiety into space.
He flies his worries all around Venus,
But it does him no good.
In space where for a long time there is only emptiness,
He drives a big white globe called death.

Now dear children
Who have learned the first lesson about man,
Answer your test:

"Man is the saddest animal.
He begins in zoology,
And gets lost
In his own bad news."

-------

I don't know much about poetry. But I like this poem, which I just came across last night in an essay about the poetry of Thomas Merton. One reason I like the poem is that I find it to be a graceful interplay between tragedy and humor. But I don't know what is meant by that repeated line about man beginning "in zoology."

Living in Germantown has given me a brand new appreciation for birds

2009-04-28T20:47:00.023-07:00

Hafez says:

One rosy face from the world's garden for us is enough,
And the shade of that one cypress in the field
Strolling along gracefully for us is enough.

Look at the flow of money and the suffering
Of the world. If this glimpse of profit and loss
Is not enough for you, for us it is enough.

The dearest companion of all is here. What
Else is there to look for? The delight of a few words
With the soul friend is enough.

--

Listening to Chopin in my room, both windows open and the rain pouring down outside, incense burning, watching that nocturne spinning around on a beautiful turntable. Cascading notes getting twisted up into the quiet, repetitive chaos of the rain.

I suppose it will sound hyperbolic to say it, but wouldn't it be somehow opulent to ask for another dose of this? In the interest of modesty alone, wouldn't it feel appropriate now to put away this whole business of recorded music? Surely for me one side of a good record at the right moment is enough.

This morning I experienced the glory of God on my front porch--I was eating a grapefruit at 830 in the morning, jobless "downwardly-mobile" bourgeois dilettante that I am; I was surveying the front yard. A moment of silence creeps up on you and then the foreground of Yard and Breakfast and Schedule and What-I-Am-Doing-With-My-Life starts disintegrating, like expanding holes of acid consuming a piece of paper (where the acid is the dull, stubborn insistence of the Background to be noticed). White noise becomes colored noise and suddenly I get startled to notice all of these birds, singing, taking turns, overlapping and interrupting, screaming, calling from every direction, up in the trees all around, at every distance, at varied volume, all shapes and sizes. Lord have mercy I live in the center ring of a bizarre circus. Help, my homo sapiens frame of reference is outnumbered, drowning in the chaotic net of delicate sounds and drowning in what it represents: The day-to-day routines of a million tiny winged bodies (twitching, contracting, jumping into the air, pooping, hungry again), none of whom for even a moment have felt the need of taking up the burden of self-awareness. For goodness sakes what has the Robin or the Cardinal ever done to accommodate the grand narrative of the human race, much less the arc of my life?

Surely for me a half an hour with these little chirping aliens is enough. Surely I could move back to the cement jungle of North Philadelphia and live there for the rest of my life without ever seeing another exotic-looking migratory bird, protected by the reality of one such encounter.

Tip toes

2009-03-09T09:48:00.003-07:00

In the glass

2009-01-27T19:18:00.014-08:00

Pre-eminent documentary filmmaker Errol Morris contributes something to the NY Times every now and again.

He's just come out with a fascinating retrospective of iconic images from the 43rd presidency, as curated by representatives of three of the major still photography proprietor: AP, AFP and Reuters.

Some of the commentary is of interest, some of it is forgettable and/or predictable. I'm afraid that many of the images are best reviewed as they were first viewed: without much interpretation.

In general, I find that the AFP collection blows the others away. However, the standout image for me is this AP shot, from Crawford, Texas, which I had never seen before:

There's so much to see here, between the varied poses of the supporting cast (esp. Rice), the lines of perspective, the horizon, the evocative setting (interrupted by the microphones). The president dominates this photo in his casual attire and confident poise. There has been from the beginning something very compelling about Bush's Texan-ness, something the Republican strategists sniffed from the get-go and then failed to capitalize on, and this shot sums up for me precisely that essence. As one facet among many, this Bush is--dare I say it--dead sexy.

The other worthy bit from Morris' piece is his closing thought, as nabbed from Oliver Wendell Holmes:

"Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., writing in 1859 (about 20 years after the first daguerreotypes appeared), called photography 'a mirror with a memory.' He writes,

'The man beholdeth himself in the glass and goeth his way, and straightway both the mirror and the mirrored forget what manner of man he was…'"

Kinds of technology

2009-01-20T19:32:00.012-08:00

A while back I submitted this blog to a website that tracks a few basic statistics about it. Having this information available does a couple of things for me: First of all, it makes me a little embarrassed to be blogging, as I get so few visitors. Secondly, it provides me with a good laugh by tracking the google search phrases that bring my random google searcher to one of my posts.

I wanted to take the opportunity to review a few choice selections, in no particular order. Some of them are pretty surprising--I had to go to google and enter a couple of these search phrases myself to confirm that they will actually route you to this blog:

1. "the onion magazine"
I must be one of the few that finds these things funny.

2. "recent top stories"
Shockingly, this blog shows up as the third result for that phrase.

3. "too many sermon podcasts"
I feel for this guy. Perhaps he's part of an emerging constituency of internet browsers who are turning to google for some kind of therapeutic release.

4. "quotes baden powell nation of wasters"
Unfortunately my blog was unable to provide an intrepid browser with the following quote from "Recovering To Success: A Book of Life-Sport for Young Men," by an author named Robert Baden-Powell, who I have never heard of:
"'The world can be made safe for democracy, but democracy will never be safe for the world until the mental loafer is saved from himself.' There are mental loafers and wasters just as much as there are physical wasters, fellows who let themselves be guided by cheap newspapers, persuasive orators, and rotten literature and cinemas."

5. "what does frim look like"
You won't find any pictures of me on here. But you could get close by looking up the old post that discusses my celebrity look-alike.

6. "how to get a frim but and tight legs" (sic)
All time favorite.

7. "kinds of technology", "three kinds of technology", "what are the kinds of technology", and the altruistic "what kinds of technology will help the poor"
This theme, in its many variations, brings in a steady stream of random cyber-guests. What shows up on google is an old post that was made up of a quote from Ted Kaczynski's technology manifesto. My best guess of what these browsers are looking for is quick-n-dirty ideas to work into an essay, maybe for some introductory-level college class in engineering or technology theory. The following answer, provided by Yahoo(!) answers, should do for these purposes: (1) Instructional technology (2) Assistive technology (3) Medical technology (4) Technology productive tools (5) Information technology. However, if you, dear reader, happen to be one such befuddled youngster, please note that in my newly legitimate, google-result-endorsed, blogger opinion, there is no conventional over-simplification of the "kinds" of technology that can justify your question. Technology encompasses all kinds of human creations and therefore contains an infinite amount of possible uses and categories. Certainly there is no authoritative single way to divide technology into "kinds". But, I happen to think Ted's theory is worth repeating. He breaks down technology into two functional categories: tools which can be used independently and those which are dependent on other tools to be used, requiring an ever more complex system to be sustained.

8. "my hands feel heavy"

A New Year's Post

2009-01-17T09:06:00.019-08:00

In recognition of the dawn of 2009, I have prepared the a year-end list. I am calling it "The Most Important Ideological Questions of 2008."

Unlike The Wire magazine's top 50 albums of 2008 list and Time magazine's list of Fond Farewells 2008, it is not a very practical list. This is because (1) it has only one entry, and (2) it is likely to exist in the same form at the end of 2009 (as it has for 2007 and 2006). Nevertheless and without further ado:

THE MOST IMPORTANT IDEOLOGICAL QUESTIONS OF 2008:
1. Is the world getting better and better or is the world getting worse and worse?*

I suggest that your answer to this very basic question will determine a great deal of your politics and your religion. It will certainly determine your response to the many technological developments in which we are awash.

Greg Ash is a friend from church and a graphic designer. I contributed an essay to the latest installment of the monthly digital magazine he puts out.

You can download it here.

My essay is basically a review and reflection on a recent NY Times editorial by Kevin Kelly, an influential technological-cultural theorist and writer whose name and thoughts have regularly appeared on the pages of this blog. His NYT piece (which I would recommend reading) basically claims that the written word (as located in "the book") is in the process of being replaced by the image (as located on "the screen"). This is a thesis which comes across as either techno-centrically pretentious or really obvious, depending on how you look at it.

Though it undergirds the whole essay, The Most Important Ideological Question of 2008 waits patiently for 800 words to make a cameo appearance in the concluding sentences.

*Granted: If we're looking to get basic, the question "(What) Will I eat today?" is a more influential question in determining ideology. But I have chosen to confine my list to a more abstract or rational kind of questioning.

Ode to SEATAC

2008-12-13T18:41:00.014-08:00

Welcome Tim. (List view). Click here to filter results immediately. Show me my recent searches. Show me the WorldPerks. Switch off the personal devices. 1-L, 1-R. It’s already time for the crosschecking of doors.

Twelve minutes spent quietly bonding with my fellow patrons over a mild sense of anticipatory restlessness. Cellular conversations occur, some affectionate, some curt. When the logjam starts moving, when it is my turn to shuffle out into the aisle, I will be courteous yet assertive. We will see if I am able to quickly spot and gracefully free my carry-on from the overhead bin.

A brief rush of cold air and a narrow glimpse of the night, it’s a blast of dry warmth that greets me. Two otherwise unaffected faces with matching pairs of collared white shirts, short sleeve burgundy v-necks and navy blue dickies are rendered enigmatic, draped in long shadows by overhead lighting installed just a foot or two above. These two are standing out of the way, hands idly wrapped around the vertical, perpetually oily stainless bar of respective horizontally collapsed wheelchairs. The dress code has apparently placed one’s choice of shoes at liberty (within the inevitable confines of appropriateness): Loafers here; there, two permanently creased mesh, leather and dingy, flamboyantly sculpted foam chariots resting flatly, patiently on the unforgiving dense spring of worn blue-gray industrial carpet.

No windows in this dim tunnel, just shadowy accordion walls on the side, those lights overhead, and an unhurried jean and fleece-clad (cat enthusiast?) steady walker immediately in front. Stepping into a bright cavernous echo chamber of white noise and indoor public place white smell, stepping between streams of light evening foot traffic, I have just now received my final sincere service smile of the day, supplemented perhaps with the uplift of a shift about to end.

At the rubber-bounded conclusion of carpeting, I am re-introduced to the solid squeak of linoleum laid over cement. Left or right? There is no need to consult internationally legible signage when the business casual advance team has already begun to confidently stride towards the promise of baggage. I catch a pungent buttery whiff of Auntie Anne’s.

No discount to be found when paying the ultimate price

2008-11-28T08:13:00.017-08:00

VALLEY STREAM, NY—Until now, late November's violence and upheaval had been confined to south and southeast Asia. This morning the terror touches down on American soil, as horrific eyewitness accounts begin to trickle in from the idyllically-named Long Island suburb:

"They took the doors off the hinges..."

"He was trampled and killed in front of me."

"They're savages..."

"They took me down too...I literally had to fight people off my back."

"There's nothing we can do. The baby is gone."

“ ”

2008-10-12T19:07:00.007-07:00

Werner Herzog says:
"People thought films could cause revolutions or whatever. And it does not. But films might change our perspective of things and ultimately in the long term it may be something valuable. But there is a lot of absurdity involved as well. As you see, it makes me into a clown. And that happens to everyone. Just look at Orson Welles or look at even people like Truffat: They have become clowns... It's because what we do as filmmakers is immaterial. It's only a projection of light. And doing that all your life makes you just a clown. And it's an almost inevitable process... It's illusionist's work and it's just embarrassing to be a filmmaker. To sit here like this... I mean, thank heaven's I don't sit here for my own films. I am sitting here for a film that was made by a friend of mine."

A smoking gun or a mushroom cloud

2008-10-12T18:44:00.002-07:00

Bill Moyers has provided some thoughtful and sobering reflections on the six year anniversary of our nation's ramp up to the invasion of Iraq.

Historical Philadelphia

2008-09-25T22:00:00.004-07:00

Can't seem to get enough of this online database of historical Philadelphia photos, which is searchable by address, date and neighborhood.

History being what it has been, reality being what it is

2008-09-23T10:38:00.016-07:00

This morning I woke up to a pointed exchange between Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and NPR correspondent Steve Inskeep. I would recommend reading the whole thing.

Ahmadinejad is a sharp interviewee and he successfully reframes Steve Inskeep's gently-attempted gotcha questions into a very important, much larger conversation about national sovereignty, the history of U.S. interests in Iran and the Middle East, and who gets to be the Grand Inquisitor in the Court of Global Affairs.

All the layers of "the Iran Problem" remind me that editing is one of the most crucial, dangerous and unavoidable steps in the process of understanding truth about any person, place or thing. At least until we human beings are able to achieve omnipresence.

Update: Required reading on the infamous comment regarding the wiping of Israel

Trip-Tych-Bo

2008-09-08T19:54:00.031-07:00

I came across a book written by a new age sage calling himself Bo Lozoff. The pages seemed saturated with the dissolute ramblings of a rather cheap mysticism. Fortunately, Lozoff had apparently retained a great deal of his wit and sense of absurdity, as evidenced by the many pen and ink illustrations peppering the pages of his book. Here are three of my favorites, which I have now brought to you with the help of a scanner.

Conspiracy to incite free assembly

2008-09-03T10:42:00.017-07:00

Apologies for another rant, but the current rash of overzealous law enforcement is really getting my goat.

Apparently it is neither out of the ordinary nor newsworthy for a cocktail of Federal and local law enforcement agents to raid some innocuous little house of political/cultural dissidents without having any sort of legal justification.

Well, this month it's more of the same Fourth Amendment mockery in Minneapolis (Again, credit to Glen Greenwald for his ongoing, blow-by-blow analysis): Several houses in the region of the Minnesota Republican National Convention meeting were raided by police and FBI. Computers, planners, notebooks, propaganda, etc. were seized with, again, only building code violations produced and various tantalizing instruments of potential crime. But wait, there's a surprise plot twist in this case: Unlike in Philadelphia, the police and FBI had actually gone to the trouble of acquiring a warrant this time around. So while nothing illegal had taken place and no actual evidence of wrongdoing has yet come to light the police had invoked a previously unused Minnesota statute to search these houses and take stuff in order to pre-empt a "conspiracy to incite a riot."

So were these angry youngsters planning a state coup? A terrorist bombing of the convention center? A riot? Perhaps they were. After all, these days any group of people assembling in public without first acquiring the permission of the state authorities (or outside of the designated "free-speech zone") is technically "rioting".

But if past experiences are any indication, we can deduce the probable outcome of these groups' alleged conspiracies: A lot of people making their voice heard, a few of them willing to break the law. Over the passing of hours, a medium size march dwindling down to a minority of angry kids with bandanas on their faces, who decide not to disperse in the face of repeated threats of arrest for disturbing the evening commute (that most sacred of events) and perhaps even going so far as to break a window of a nearby department store. Eventually the kids are backed into a corner, surrounded by 5-10 times as many riot-gear-clad police armed with rubber bullets and tear gas and efficiently, anti-climatically loaded onto a series of paddy wagons.

The icing on the cake here is that no one really cares at all. Why? Because a certain pseudo-militant-cynical-smelly-activist-Debbie-Downer archetype called to mind by any act of public protest has long since been alienated from the empathy of "average Americans". Conservatives feel deeply resentful of this ungrateful prick (holding up a sign and shouting about politics being several notches above 'not wearing a flag pin' on the Anti-American-O-Meter) and registered Democrats keep an embarrassed distance.

However, while we're all free to pass judgment on the questionable tactics or dubious morals of certain protesters, it's crucially important to provide the opportunity to exercise free speech and free assembly to everyone and then only those who actually break the law should have to expect arrest. I guess I am in favor of that old, out-dated system where you couldn't get arrested until you actually did something wrong.

The One

2008-08-09T10:42:00.005-07:00

This just in: Biblical scholars in Colorado Springs argue that presidential candidate John McCain exhibits telltale characteristics of the Antichrist. Read more here.

This is next

2008-08-02T09:05:00.016-07:00

--

Oh, you Axis!
You dark prince!
Wielding your scimitar, bloodthirsty.

Castle of Pure Evil:
Shimmering, oriental palace;
Standing in sharp, foreboding profile on the horizon of the American public discourse.

--

This article presents a fairly well-documented genealogy of a key brick in the ideological bridge that would link Saddam Hussein with "Al Qaeda" in 2001.

Both capitalism and democracy are premised upon the "well-informed consumer," who will make the best self-interested decision based on that knowledge. But in our information-based economy, hidden-fee cell phone pricing plans and insidiously suggestive but unfounded front page news stories both seriously threaten the integrity of each system, respectively.

What satisfies me about this article is the same thing that satisfies me about reading Noam Chomsky and Paul Farmer re-trace American foreign policy Haiti: It is the incomparable pleasure of The Instant Replay. The semi-processed "data" that shapes public opinion is incredibly fluid--it zips by at a hundred miles per hour in a constant fluctuating feed of small information parcels. The Feed is not physical but spiritual, never complete but always coming into being (constantly reshaped based on its reception and consequences). Who among us mortals can possibly keep track of what was said, who said it, what happened as a result, much less whether or not it was true?

Thus, as an information consumer, I am always surprised by and grateful to anyone who has the resources and tenacity to exhume, reassemble and re-present an "information play" in slow motion, that it might be processed in a way that can yield understanding.

“ ”

2008-07-28T14:12:00.004-07:00

George Santayana (reportedly) says:
"All history is wrong and has to be rewritten."

2008-07-22T07:25:00.005-07:00

2008-07-09T19:31:00.007-07:00

Independence day

2008-07-04T13:04:00.019-07:00

The other day, Liz and I were meandering through one of the many, quiet old church graveyards in the historic part of downtown Philadelphia. We came across a simple, stone grave marker from the early 1800s, pock-marked and shined with age and precipitation. This fellow, my countryman, is to be remembered by exactly two pieces of information—his name and a five-word legacy: "A Son Of The Revolution."

This dramatic, distinctly concise epitaph could be the launch pad for a thousand reveries, depending on the nature of your mental trade winds. On this day (our nation-state's glorious birthday), I would like to leave you, dear reader, with just a few reflections. The first three fall into the category of "The Impossibly Ironic (But Inevitable?) Oxymorons of Institutional Aging":

1. That a state conceived by anti-imperial revolutionary fervor could in such a short period of time grow into the largest and most complete global empire the world has ever known, thus becoming the de facto arch nemesis of any contemporary sons of any revolution opposed to the current, global capitalist order (in which 86% of the world's goods are consumed by 20% of the world's population).

2. That a state birthed by an intensely politically engaged populace (e.g. ready to shoot, ready to die, ready to identify themselves primarily with the life or death of their local community) could in 200 years so completely become transformed into a disaffected, disengaged crowd of virtual spectators (e.g. ready to watch the TV, ready to make fun of the President, simultaneously ready to benefit from the perpetuation of the current order).

3. That a state birthed from not only from a radical political revolution but from a very violent political revolution could evolve into a state of people generally in denial about the violence of the world, distant from even the possibility of either killing or dying for their beliefs, taught to instinctively disregard any person or social movement that uses violence to achieve its ends (other than America, of course) as shocking and inherently illegitimate. (To me, this doctrine seems to be an echo of nonviolent strategy, twisted out of shape, co-opted and bent back onto itself to reinforce a detached passivity.)

4. The truly shocking, pervasive association of any disturbance (creative or not, violent or not, just or not, in line with the constitution or not) with the recently invented monolithic meme known as "Terror" (e.g. “Domestic terrorism”--esp. “Eco-Terror”, Human rights activists as terrorists, Peaceable assembly as terrorism; also, see China tear a page out of the American propaganda rule book, referring to the Dalai Lama as a terrorist).

II.

The Organizational Kid is good at finding practical, productive ways to integrate all his energies into the existing order. But he is not very good at getting any larger perspective on the good-ness or evil-ness of the existing order.

Granted, the American kid of my generation is working with some pretty mixed messages. Namely:

“Rebel! Conformists are boring and un-sexy.”

“Conform! Get real. Cynicism and resistance are downers (and futile, to boot).”

The most obvious way to synthesize this contradiction—especially when the second claim holds more ultimate, authoritative weight in society—is to conform with the substance of one's life while preserving one or two symbolic holdouts of cultural rebellion, perhaps in the realm of accessorization or media consumption.

These days I am also learning about another, equally comforting way to resolve such cognitive dissonance: To oscillate back and forth, to weigh endlessly, to “not take a stance." The social pressure to withhold judgment, masquerading as a value for intellectual humility, is in fact a very effective way for cultural conformity to insinuate itself. For example, to harbor a vague sense of disapproval about the Iraq war (“What a messy conflict. I wouldn’t want to hold one of those big guns. Women and children are dying. Plus, I don’t like dusty places.” Or “What are we even over there for?”—the confused question, not the rhetorical one) without real or actual commitment to that disapproval, while enjoying the benefits of imperial dominance every day, is one such remarkable feat of incoherent resolution.

Beyond this, there is of course the social pressure to not act on a defined position even once it has been reached (“Don’t be one of those extremists.”). A moderately acceptable path might perhaps be to teach about your radical position from within the academy. Or blog about it.

But to quote Howard Zinn: You can’t stay neutral on a moving train.

I wish that I could be extricated quicker, more completely, with more objectivity, from the numbing, paralyzing body cast of illusory neutrality.

2008-07-04T13:02:00.014-07:00

After Brancusi's "The Kiss"

2008-06-27T15:34:00.001-07:00

2008-06-26T15:32:00.009-07:00

Peculiar visitor

2008-06-22T16:00:00.017-07:00

Photo by cardiganscratch

Obama, Race, The Birthplace of Freedom

2008-03-28T16:27:00.024-07:00

I'm about a week and a half behind the election game here, listening to Barack Obama's "race speech" just now on youtube. As a hardline reactionist, I would generally be disposed to dislike any media item so hyped. (More than one ecstatic commentator immediately dubbed it "one of the best speeches in American history"). However, it would not be fair to judge the man exclusively by the imbecility of his groupies--I found the speech itself to be remarkably good, particularly in the calm, even-handedness that marked both content and delivery. Here is the first speech by anyone remotely near the White House in recent memory who didn't appear to be talking down to his audience, who appears to actually be attempting to elevate rather than either denigrate or do damage control on "the national conversation." All things considered, "A More Perfect Union" was an extremely decent speech. All of which is to say that for once a politician is talking in a way that resembles the baseline standard of what a politician should be expected to talk like.

Obama's creation was a "classy" one; effectively and effortlessly transforming his campaign's latest PR hurdle into a balance beam on which might bounce and twirl Great American Themes such as Love, Freedom, Opportunity, and Life. It was ever so graceful at every turn, making concessions to everyone and everything, getting us to put our guards down. I confess, against my better judgment I felt assured and reassured as I listened--it was almost as if the tall, thin, quiet, obscurely effeminate dad that I never had was stroking my hair as I drifted back into a pleasant slumber, having awoken to a terrible nightmare on a stormy night.

Grace and charisma, of course, have their limits of usefulness. Sweet sentiments and boundary-blurring reassurances which mesmerize us on stage may quickly sour when exposed to the harder, clearer light found just outside the convention center: Sure, talk to us about the integrity of the American Dream, with an allusion or two to the need for CHANGE. That "More Perfect Union" sounds pretty nice. And yes, of course we believe in the "Decency And Generosity Of The American People." And what would we do without "Hope In The Next Generation"? Sure, Mr. Obama, lead us onward in that "March For A More Just, More Equal, More Free, More Caring, More Prosperous America."

But let's not get too carried away. We shouldn't make the mistake of completely uprooting this speech from all context, forgetting its pretext and stimulus: the "incendiary" and "divisive" views of one Rev. Jeremiah Wright (Obama's former pastor), views that according to Barack "have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but [also to] denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike."

I took the liberty of reading up on the Reverend's views. Here's a nice summation, nabbed from (his Wikipedia entry):

"Where governments lie, God does not lie. Where governments change, God does not change... And the United States of America government, when it came to treating her citizens of Indian descent fairly, she failed. She put them on reservations. When it came to treating her citizens of Japanese descent fairly, she failed. She put them in internment prison camps. When it came to treating her citizens of African descent fairly, America failed. She put them in chains, the government put them on slave quarters, put them on auction blocks, put them in cotton field, put them in inferior schools, put them in substandard housing, put them in scientific experiments, put them in the lowest paying jobs, put them outside the equal protection of the law, kept them out of their racist bastions of higher education and locked them into positions of hopelessness and helplessness... The government gives them drugs built bigger prisons, passes a three strike law, and then wants us to sing God bless America. No, no, no, not God bless America, God damn America, that's in the Bible, for killing innocent people. God damn America, for treating her citizens as less than human. God damn America, as long as she pretends to act like she is God, and she is supreme."

And here:

If only Reverend Wright was running for office...

I understand the political pressures that require Obama to be a mediator and an ameliorator, to please everyone and thus distance himself from any voices anchored in objectivity or prophetic witness. To many, Barack Obama may be the best available presidential issue-resolution package. But sophistication and even-handedness don't lend themselves to "change" and Wright is the only one coming out of this whole media spectacle with anything resembling audacity.

As long as "political realities" necessitate that any vestiges of an ideal must be softened up and bent into the time-tested mold of vain optimism in order to survive in our nation's capitol, it will be impossible for me to really get excited about Obama's candidacy. Vapid whispers of progress, sweet political nothings, the sickly thin veneer of state religion--is it cynicism to hope for something more?

Letter from Thomas Merton to James Forest

2008-01-29T07:10:00.000-08:00

I like this blog the most when I think of it as a little clearing house for noteworthy items gleaned from the internet and from the physical world--I feel especially useful when I type up something not readily available on the internet, as in the case of the following letter. It is a letter from Thomas Merton to James Forest, the latter of whom is a Catholic activist and founder of the Catholic Peace Fellowship:

Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there too a great deal has to be gone through, as gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything.

You are fed up with words, and I don't blame you. I am nauseated by them sometimes. I am also, to tell the truth nauseated by ideals and with causes. This sounds like heresy, but I think you will understand what I mean. It is so easy to get engrossed with ideas and slogans and myths that in the end one is left holding the bag, empty, with no trace of meaning left in it. And then the temptation is to yell louder than ever in order to make the meaning be there again by magic. Going through this kind of reaction helps you to guard against this. Your system is complaining of too much verbalizing, and it is right.

...[T]he big results are not in your hands or mine, but they suddenly happen, and we can share in them; but there is no point in building our lives on this personal satisfaction which may be denied us and which after all is not that important.

The next step in the process is for you to see that your own thinking about what you are doing is crucially important. You are probably striving to build yourself an identity in your work, out of your work and your witness. You are using it, so to speak, to protect yourself against nothingness, annihilation. That is not the right use of your work. All the good that you will do will come not from you but from the fact that you have allowed yourself, in the obedience of faith, to be used by God's love. Think of this more and gradually you will be free from the need to prove yourself, and you can be more open to the power that will work through you without your knowing it.

The great thing after all is to live, not to pour our your life in the service of a myth: and we turn the best things into myths. If you can get free from the domination of causes and just serve Christ's truth, you will be able to do more and will be less crushed by the inevitable disappointments...

The real hope, then, is not in something we think we can do, but in God who is making something good out of it in some way we cannot see. If we can do His will, we will be helping in this process. But we will not necessarily know all about it beforehand...

Enough of this...it is at least a gesture...I will keep you in my prayers.

All the best in Christ,
Tom

Pebbles flung

2008-01-23T19:00:00.000-08:00

I recommend to you this article, entitled "Corporate Priests and Moron Jokes". It was written by a man named Robert Shetterly. In addition to being a writer, Shetterly is a painter. His ongoing portrait series called "Americans Who Tell the Truth" is also worth looking at.

Seven Notes On Ratatouille by Charles Tonderai Mudede

2007-12-22T09:54:00.000-08:00

As reprinted from a journal called Arcade (“Architecture and Design in the Northwest”), a copy of which I happened upon yesterday:

The entire meaning of the struggle between humans and rats is this: we produce and store food, and they, the rats, want to eat the food we produce and store.

1. The Rat and Human Problem
Remove the food, and you end the struggle. As the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze pointed out in his book, What Is Philosophy, life no matter what form it takes, is determined by a problem: the bird form has the problem of worms the giraffe from has the problem of leaves, the bee has the problem of flowers, the cow has the problem of grass. These are their problems. Because the rat’s problem happens to be our food, rats themselves present us with a problem. There is no other reason why rats live in our cities, race onto our ships, raid our garbage cans and, worst of all, invade our homes—they are working on their problem, which is our food.

2. A Rat in the Kitchen
The lyrics of a popular song by the British reggae band UB40:

There’s a rat in me kitchen/what am I gonna do?
There’s a rat in me kitchen/what am I gonna do?
I’m gonna fix that rat that/what I’m gonna do…
I’m gonna fix that rat
You invade my space
Make me feel disgraced
And you just don’t give a damn
If I had my way…
I’d like to see you hang…

3. Clean God
For humans, cleanliness is next to Godliness, and the furthest thing from cleanliness, as far as we are concerned, is a rat. Therefore, a rat is the furthest thing from what humans aspire to be: God.

4. The Greatness of Ratatouille
We know that rats have nothing else on their mind than getting at our food. We know they are filthy little creatures. If we see a dead squirrel, we first feel consternation and then concern; a dead bird, even a raven, makes us sad. But a dead rat makes us happy. The only kind of rat we like to see is a dead one. The worst kind of rat we can ever see is one in our kitchen. A rat in the kitchen represents, in the immemorial struggle between humans and rats, the frontline—the final area of combat. This is why Ratatouille is such a great movie. It is nothing less than bold to make a comedy about a rat in a kitchen, a rat in the space that defines the long war between the natural enemies.

5. The Story of Ratatouille
The story is about a tribe of rats that is forced to flee a country home and settle in the city of Paris. One rat in this tribe, Remy, has a strange passion, a dangerous passion, a mad passion, a passion for fine foods. He not only likes to eat good cheeses, rare mushrooms, spices from islands in the Indian Ocean, he also loves to cook. And, to make matters more bizarre, he has a knack for cooking. Remy the rat has a gift for preparing human foods. He doesn’t want to steal food from a kitchen; he wants to cook and serve it to humans. Impossible! Yet the film works. It not only works, it also makes us laugh like there’s no tomorrow. A rat that wants to cook fine foods! Because there is nothing more ridiculous than that idea, that image (a rat stirring a stew), there is nothing more hilarious than Ratatouille.

6. Remy The Great Self-hater
Because Remy the rat loves humans, loves their religion of cleanliness, their sensitivity to beauty, their ability to prepare exquisite dishes—because he loves the things that humans most love about themselves, he hates what he is, a rat. And because he hates rates, he hates himself. What he wants to be is what hates him the most: a human being. And a rat that loves humans (the lover’s of God’s cleanliness) is a rat that hates itself in the most radical way. This is the movie’s dark conclusion: Remy is only lovable because he does not love himself.

7. Passing a building near the corner of Commercial Drive and Main in Vancouver, BC
My lover: See across the street. Two good restaurants right next to each other.
Me: But look what is above them?
My lover: Yes, apartments.
Me: I would hate to live in those apartments.
My lover: Why?
Me: Rats! The place has to be infested with rats. All of the food in storage, in the garbage in the back. The rats can’t help it. They must get inside, get to the food.

What would Anderson Cooper do?

2007-12-11T21:25:00.000-08:00

To me, this is fantastic:
Lord, deliver us...

Communism, bad ideas, science fiction

2007-11-15T08:20:00.003-08:00

In which we wonder on a couple of excerpts from the wonderfully wonder-free first chapter of Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, in which we witness Kurt boiling a world of frustration into a bubbly, gelatinous stew of absurdity:

"When Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout met each other their country was by far the richest and most powerful country on the planet. It had most of the food and minerals and machinery, and it disciplined other countries by threatening to shoot big rockets and them or to drop things on them from airplanes.

"Most other countries didn't have doodley-squat. Many of them weren't even inhabitable anymore. They had too many people and not enough space. They had sold everything that was any good, and there wasn't anything to eat anymore...

"...A lot of the people on the wrecked planet were Communists. They had a theory that what was left of the planet should be shared more or less equally among all the people, who hadn't asked to come to a wrecked planet in the first place... Meanwhile, more babies were arriving all the time--kicking and screaming, yelling for milk. In some places people would actually try to eat mud or such on gravel while babies were being born just a few feet away. And so on.

"Dwayne Hoover's and Kilgore Trout's country, where there was still plenty of everything, was opposed to Communism. It didn't think that Earthlings who had a lot should share it with others unless they really wanted to, and most of them didn't want to. So they didn't have to."

And then a page later:

"The bad ideas were delivered to Dwayne by Kilgore Trout... Here was the core of the bad ideas which Trout gave to Dwayne: Everybody on Earth was a robot, with one exception--Dwayne Hoover.

"Of all the creatures in the Universe, only Dwayne was thinking and feeling and worrying and planning and so on. Nobody else knew what pain was. Nobody else had any choices to make. Everybody else was fully automatic machine, whose purpose was to stimulate Dwayne. Dwayne was a new type of creature being tested by the Creator of the Universe. Only Dwayne had free will.

"Trout did not expect to be believed. He put the bad ideas into a science-fiction novel, and that was where Dwayne found them. The book wasn't addressed to Dwayne alone. Trout had never heard of Dwayne when he wrote it. It was addressed to anybody who happened to open it up. It said to simply anybody, in effect, "Hey--guess what: You're the only creature with free will. How does that make you feel?" And so on.

"It was a tour de force. It was a jeu d'espirit."

The whole world salivating

2007-10-27T10:53:00.003-07:00

Adam Wiltzie, musician, on why it took six years for his band to release an album:

"What I learnt was essentially in the past (or I should say around finishing Tired Sounds) I was pretty fatigued, mentally. I wondered why I felt it was so necessary to make a record every year, or to be in the endless cycle of recording, then touring, and then starting over again. I reckon that, in general, musicians can fool themselves into thinking the whole world salivates for more new music, and the result is letting that false sense of reality push them into releasing music that is not really finished, or just to make the release date their label wants them to make so as to beat the Christmas rush, et cetera. So, some people will pre-suppose that six years is a long time to wait to release a new record. But I do not buy into that assumption."

And later, responding to a question about his influences:
"As I may have said, it is painfully uncomfortable for me to talk about my body of work with any sort of reverence..."

Maybe a portion of the world was salivating for a new Stars of the Lid album. But my hope is that Adam Wiltzie is among a perhaps small number of entertainers who are reasonably suspicious of the dysfunctionally co-dependent relationship of fan and celebrity. Such co-dependent cycles can be broken if one of the two parties are willing to call BS.

Three Questions

2007-08-27T23:26:00.000-07:00

A fictional character once said:

“Remember then: there is only one time that is important—Now! It is the most important time because it is the only time when we have any power. The most necessary man is he with whom you are, for no man knows whether he will have any dealings with any one else: and the most important affair is, to do him good, because for that purpose alone was man sent into this life!”

It's worth reading Leo Tolstoy's whole short story, of which this quote is the conclusion. The story is called "Three Questions" and it can be found in the Tolstoy compilation "Walk In The Light And Twenty-Three Tales," available here for free because clearly the folks over at the Plough Publishing House have been reading a little too much Tolstoy.

August 9, 1945

2007-08-09T18:56:00.001-07:00

We loved our bomb. We had such affection for the tidy, miraculous work of our hands. We wanted to give him a nickname, an enduring testament to our cleverness. We called him Fat Man.

On the ground, 73,844 Japanese people called him sudden death. 74,909 more called him a lifetime of physical suffering.

Today, 62 years later, we might call him a reminder to pray for a world in which the destruction of innocent human lives on a catastrophic scale is still considered an effective means of conflict resolution. (Only if diplomatic measures fail, mind you).

The desire to pick up weapons that we're not really prepared to handle is only one manifestation of our giddy faith in technological control as the solution to all problems. Let's get off the frenzied, promise-laden bandwagon of the Next Big Thing and learn to use, with love and patience, the means we already have in front of us.

Thinking about music with Brian Eno

2007-08-09T18:01:00.001-07:00

Brian Eno was born in the village of Woodbridge, Suffolk, on May 15, 1948 and educated by nuns and Brothers of the De La Salle order until he was 16 - at which point he enrolled for a two-year course at Ipswich Art School.

"I went to art school because I didn't want to do a conventional job. I saw a job as a trap and something to avoid. In fact, that's a characteristic of my life: making moves not so much towards things as away from them, avoiding them."

Although young Brian knew he didn't want to be ordinary, his conceptions were, at that point quite as ordinary as those of his fellow students. He was in need of a shake-up.

"By a stroke of luck I happened to go to a very good school. Ipswich was run by a guy called Roy Ascot - a very brilliant educationalist, I think - and what he and his staff were concerned with was not the teaching of technique so much as experimenting with notions of what constitutes creative behaviour.

"So, instead of sitting there doing little paintings, we found ourselves being required to get involved in discussions and self-investigation projects. Like, the first thing we had to do was a 'mind-map', which was constructing a series of tests to find out what sort of behaviour we exhibited in different situations, from which it was decided what sort of character type we each were .

"Having established that, we had to behave in a way diametrically opposed to our normal selves, ie., if you were naturally extrovert, you had to be introvert; if you were a born leader, you had to be a follower, etc."

Which were you?

"I had to become a follower. I had to execute everyone else's ideas, not make a fuss, not try to dominate the proceedings.

"Some people really pushed it. One girl was very perky and exuberant and the only way she could get herself to calm down was to tie her legs to her chair. Another girl, called Lily, was very nervous - she made herself learn how to walk the tight-rope.

"I sat on this porter's trolley all day. If anyone wanted me to do anything, they had to wheel me to where I was required.

"All of this was very exciting and disorientating and aroused in me a lasting interest in working with other people under what might normally be considered quite artificial restrictions."

During this period, Eno met a major influence in the artist Tom Phillips, who was one of the staff, and began to get interested in music via a chance encounter with John Cage's book Silence and the occasional visit to the school of avant-garde composer Cornelius Cardew.

Unable, as yet, to manipulate a conventional musical instrument, he started playing about with tape-recorders and, by 1965 - at which juncture he left Ipswich for Winchester Art School - he had amassed about 30 machines, of which only two were in full working order.

Winchester was a traditional institution and Eno found his newly-inspired experimentalism forced underground. The staff and most of the other students made no secret of finding him rather odd.

"I felt that art was more serious and important than they seemed to think. They regarded it as merely decorative - or there to make things a bit better or something. I thought there was much more to it, but I couldn't then put my finger on it.

"Also, there was my mother-in-law - a very bright woman, a logician into scientific method - who'd always say to me things like 'I can't understand why somebody with your mind is wasting his time doing this'. She was very cutting about it indeed.

"So I was forced into justifying my position and that started what has been a continuous train of thinking over the last ten years."

*From New Musical Express, November 26th, 1977
Here's the full article.

“ ”

2007-06-22T22:44:00.002-07:00

Dostoyevsky's monk says:
"Love in practice is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams."

Intolerable beauty

2007-06-18T08:59:00.000-07:00

The band Radiohead always gives me good links to online photography.

A couple of years ago they alerted me to The Daily Nice, a simple page that provides a new, usually-interesting photo every day. It's been the default page on my web browser ever since.

Now they've directed me to the online portfolio of Chris Jordan, which I think is pretty remarkable, particularly his "Intolerable Beauty" series.

Recent top stories from the Onion's magazine rack

2007-06-17T22:37:00.000-07:00

Two kinds of technology

2007-06-10T15:06:00.000-07:00

Here's a nice distinction between two kinds of technology from Theodore Kaczynski's "Industrial Society and Its Future":

"We distinguish between two kinds of technology, which we will call small-scale technology and organization-dependent technology. Small-scale technology is technology that can be used by small-scale communities without outside assistance. Organization-dependent technology is technology that depends on large-scale social organization. We are aware of no significant cases of regression in small-scale technology. But organization-dependent technology DOES regress when the social organization on which it depends breaks down. Example: When the Roman Empire fell apart the Romans' small-scale technology survived because any clever village craftsman could build, for instance, a water wheel, any skilled smith could make steel by Roman methods, and so forth. But the Romans' organization-dependent technology DID regress. Their aqueducts fell into disrepair and were never rebuilt. Their techniques of road construction were lost. The Roman system of urban sanitation was forgotten, so that only until rather recent times did the sanitation of European cities equal that of Ancient Rome.

"The reason why technology has seemed always to progress is that, until perhaps a century or two before the Industrial Revolution, most technology was small-scale technology. But most of the technology developed since the Industrial Revolution is organization-dependent technology. Take the refrigerator for example. Without factory-made parts or the facilities of a post-industrial machine shop it would be virtually impossible for a handful of local craftsmen to build a refrigerator. If by some miracle they did succeed in building one it would be useless to them without a reliable source of electric power. So they would have to dam a stream and build a generator. Generators require large amounts of copper wire. Imagine trying to make that wire without modern machinery. And where would they get a gas suitable for refrigeration? It would be much easier to build an ice house or preserve food by drying or picking, as was done before the invention of the refrigerator."

Other good sections are the part where Kaczynski profiles leftists as "oversocialized" individuals and the part where he talks about the profusion of increasingly empty "surrogate activities" in an industrialized society in order to feed the natural human desire to accomplish meaningful work.

2007-05-22T21:12:00.001-07:00

Today on the way to work my daily bus-time reveries were interrupted by the gentleman sitting next to me, who quietly and somewhat sheepishly brought to my attention the fact that I bear an uncanny resemblance to Sylar, a character on the hit NBC television series Heroes.

It was the second time a complete stranger on public transportation has informed me of this fact and the fourth time in five days that someone I've been introduced to has mentioned the resemblance.

I don't watch the show but apparently Sylar is an arch-villain who controls people and things with his brain. I suppose this association creates an unfortunate social hurdle for me, or an advantage, depending on the situation.

See what you think:
Exhibit A
Exhibit B
Exhibit C
Exhibit D

Price tags

2007-05-21T08:42:00.001-07:00

In the ideology of capitalism, the value and meaning of all things is understood by the dollar amount that the almighty market confers upon them. We may be queasy about evaluating the price of a human life in terms of money, but there is no doubt that this sort of evaluation can and is being done. It is, after all, the final frontier in a long history of capitalizations (or "privatizations") that include plots of land, song lyrics, certain plant seed cross-breeds, quantities of pollution, the lives of animals, the holy bible, and the one-click online shopping experience. And the color burgundy, as Robb discovered the other day while looking at the packaging of a bag of shredded cheese from the store--burgundy is trademarked as the "trade dress" of food manufacturer Sargento.

Granted that capitalism is a deeply rooted way of understanding the world that you and I most likely share (to one degree or another), it can be revealing to step completely inside of this value system for a moment in order to take a look at our values. Or, in other words, to put a mouth where our money is; a money-mouth that is capable of bluntly telling us what we care about: Tom Engelhardt compares the market value of an American life versus that of our fellow humans who happened to be born on other parts of the earth.

Whitecaps of white noise

2007-05-08T21:20:00.001-07:00

Fitting that Canadian sound explorer Tim Hecker sculpts seven and a half minutes of almost completely undifferentiated fuzz into a track called "The Work of Art in an Age of Cultural Overproduction." Fitting because he realizes that one has to start dealing with the reality of life in a big, viscous glut of cultural junk.

Obviously the social condition of cultural obesity has something to do with the fact that the primary way that I, an individual here in the beating heart of the media empire, am able to come to terms with my own identity is to cross the coveted threshold from media consumer to media producer. To lay down some tracks, to shoot and edit a film, to write a book (my memoirs!), to be interviewed on some documentary, to put some dumb video of myself online.

But in what sense is it socially desirable to add my voice or your voice to the already deafening roar of cultural white noise? There are too many records. Too many films showing in too many theaters. Too much must-see video programming. Too many new releases, too many staff picks, too many best-sellers. Too many logos, too much smart design play, too many fonts, too many slick magazines, and way too many clever advertising concepts. Too many photos taken of ourselves and too many of our friends in interesting places and positions, too many attempts at interesting angles. Too much data accessible on too many PDAs at any time and any place. Too many people eating lunch alone, accompanied only by one of those wireless cell phone earpieces. Too many mp3s. Too many "relevant" churches posting too many sermon podcasts to be played back on too many video iPods. Too many blogs with too many posts. And too many sleek Apple laptops cranking out this blather.

Maybe in some way cultural production can still be valid, but I can't imagine any worthwhile piece of art that doesn't first respond to it's relationship to all of the other cultural, virtual, enticing, bite-size media bits trying to edge it out for a second of our attention. Which is why tediously slow washes of barely harmonic sound that demand at least an hour of listening time is about all the cultural product that I can keep down these days.

And I know that the right thing to do is to not get so easily seduced into the belief that I exist to propagate of my own "unique" perspective on the world via the free market apparatus.

But I do get so easily seduced. And I start to make things. And I start to recommend cultural product like the artists above or the video below as an antidote to an overload of cultural product. Why do I do it, the thing I don't want to do?

2007-05-07T18:53:00.001-07:00

Here is a great video.

Cardinal Arinze & Co.

2007-04-29T10:04:00.001-07:00

Here is an article I arrived at via a roundabout path starting at the blog of an acquaintance from last spring.

Summarizing his 2002 book, The Next Christendom, historian Philip Jenkins makes the sociological case that Christianity is headed for major crisis in the next few hundred years as the bulk of its constituency shifts from Europe and America towards the global south, where hierarchy and communal values are in order, homosexuality is clearly a sin, and Jesus' ministry is interpreted with an emphasis on healing and spiritual warfare.

And as a sidenote, thanks to the King County Library System, whose subscription to ProQuest has enabled me to share this and other articles of note with you. In other, less libraried quarters of the internet it could cost you $5 to read such an article.

Unfocused reflections on taking part in protest

2007-04-04T20:09:00.001-07:00

Since I made a post a while back with some pre-emptory thoughts on this Christian Peace Witness for Iraq event that happened in the middle of March, I wanted to follow up with some retrospection.

And since Davis beat me to the topic with a prickly little rant about some protests in NYC that he read about last month, perhaps I can respond using his post as an entry point. He sums up well the persistent, tiring sense of disappointment that have underlaid my experience at both of the protests I've witnessed, one last September in which I was merely a man behind a camera, and this time as a participant. My immediate hesitancy to embrace these public marches has been certainly due to what Davis identifies as "theatricality," which is the right word for it. I think this is a direct result of reluctant acceptance on the part of protest organizers of the average American's "event reality" being highly mediated by, well, the media: If a tree falls on a mime in the forest, does it make a sound? Likewise, if 3,000 protesters march from the National Cathedral to the White House on a Friday night around midnight, if the president is at Camp David for the weekend and only a few hundred pedestrians witness the event and a handfull of newspapers carry the story--did it ever really happen? Well, in the awareness of most Americans, no, it never did.

So last September at the White House, there was a certain palpable tense expectancy on the part of the organizers... would Senator Jim McGovern actually show up and get arrested? Were lots of anti-war people going to gather from all over and turn this into a Big Deal that NBC couldn't ignore? Or would this party turn out to be for only 8 "independent news" cameras and the 15 endorsers of the document?

Apparently left at the mercy of the media, protesters attempt to creatively introduce various degrees of theatricality: Staging "die-ins" at senators' offices, pouring dyed blood into rivers, or some going so far as to collect their own blood and pour it on the interior of a military recruitment center. In the case of last September, a team of moderately well-known organization leaders marched up to the white house gates, claiming that they won't leave until President Bush meets with them and signs on to their troop-withdrawal terms. The anti-climax comes after 3 hours of sitting on the sidewalk singing old protest songs, when a bunch of police officers that have been standing around announce that everyone who doesn't leave right now is going to be arrested for creating a "safety hazard" by sitting on the sidewalk for too long. An edict which also happens to include one angry, party-crashing bystander on a soap box exposing her breasts with a sign reading "War Is Indecent."

Set against the immortalized drama of the 60s that those gingerly-sung songs reference--thousands of working-class leaving work to march for miles down the street singing spirituals while being provoked and attacked by police and heckled by crowds of pissed-off, status-quo-enforcing onlookers--it's quite a let-down. In fact, I think the prospect of marching against war with hundreds of old, earth-tone-clad, gentle liberals is exactly what drives all of those wild-n-crazy anarchist kids to gear up in militaristic black paraphernalia and strike out at cops whenever they organize enough to get out on the streets.

The reality of my experience with war protests is that the compromise (that utterly terrifying confrontation with The Mundane) that seems to inevitably result from any large-scale communal activity is something that an impatient idealist such as myself just has to get used to on some level. Of course, this is where I have to disagree with Davis, who writes off those NY die-in protesters as self-serving rebels without a cause. In fact, in my experience it's really hard to stay excited on rebellious sentiment when one is faced with almost completely uninterested/unphased audience. And the odd angry patriot shouting from a car. And finally the television-saturated pedestrian who is flabbergastedly documenting the event on a camera phone, startled, barely believing that he is witnessing something in person that one would usually see on television (hence the irresistible urge to commit the experience into a medium that will finally render it comprehensible).

On the contrary, I have a lot of respect for the tenacity of anyone who can hold on to their moral beliefs after glancing into the bored eyes of city-dweller after city-dweller, and finally a cop who can't wait for this technical exercise in zip-tie-ing limp bodies to be over... and then proceed do it again and again. Besides, most of the people I've seen get arrested are over the age of 50. Middle-finger-raisers? Not likely. Pietists? Perhaps, but then anyone who's acting out what they believe in is in danger of being a self-serving pietist. But for that matter, perhaps your average, apathetic couch-potato, watching the evening news and your latte-sipping i-banker, rushing off to work, could use just a trace of piety. I guess the attempt to rouse others from complete and utter apathy becomes the main goal of most contemporary protests in our neck of the woods.

Which brings me to March's Christian Witness for Peace event. Just about everyone I knew who went with me to D.C. had long-since worn through the enamor of their first glorious march. (We had to grit our teeth when someone quoted Martin Luther King Jr. saying that in order to be successful, nonviolent activists must exercise endless energy and creativity in their cause to effectively counter the ingrained momentum of years and years of belief in the redemptive value of violent force).

All that said, the worship service in the National Cathedral was one of the most moving services I've been to in quite a while, highlighted by beautiful music and a few wonderful speakers. It was encouraging to gather with several thousand other Christians, as Christians, to collectively mourn our government's careless, hasty militarism. As it has been pointed out before, the history of international military conflict is marked almost without exception by confident church endorsements on every side, so it's nice to see at least a small part of the American church developing a voice that is at least able call into question rote national allegiance. So while the march itself was more a simulation of civil disobedience than an effective tool for change, I chose to take the event for what it was--a symbolic gesture--and appreciate it for that.

Real galvanizing protest, such as what happened in the 60s around civil rights, takes a lot of built-up pressure as well as a widespread collective agreement, besides all of the top-down creativity. My own judgment about this messy situation in Iraq, along with that of many other people, would need to crystallize before we could all expect to see something both big and compelling enough to get the average American onto the streets. But judging by the conformity backlash we're currently experiencing, I'd say we've got some more time to sit and mull over our what it means to be an American, maybe 5 or 10 or 15 years and a few more catastrophes before a significant portion are ready to really freak out again. Until then, protest will probably continue to look like bland fringe activity to most of us.

But then again there's the small-scale dynamic stuff.

If you're interested, the following items represent the rather modest media footprint of the March event:
Some photos
Fox News 5 coverage (featuring a wildly-haired moment with Dimitri)
A compilation of all of the print coverage

Upbeat 1962 pre-assassination innocence

2007-03-23T14:16:00.001-07:00

Here's an article by David Brooks called "The Organizational Kid" from 2001 that is worth a read. It's basically a profile of my generation as it faces the college and early career years. I would say that it resonates strongly with my own experience.

Iraq

2007-02-28T09:06:00.001-08:00

I've been doing some reading as I consider my degree of involvement in the Christian Peace Witness for Iraq's March 16th demonstration in Washington, DC. Collected on their website are a number of statements on the war by various Christian denominations, many of whom will be represented at the upcoming event.

In my first bout of reading, one particular paragraph from a Presbyterian Church (USA) statement was of particular interest:

"Opposition to the projected action against Iraq was also expressed by a wide range of Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox leaders in the United States, as well as Pope John Paul II. From August 2002 until February 2003 religious leaders appealed to President Bush multiple times citing opposition to preemptive military action, a fear of destabilizing the region, concern for the erosion of support for combating terrorism, and a desire to work within the structure of the United Nations. Leaders of the National Council of Churches of Christ, representing thirty-six denominations, called for restraint and a halt to the 'rush to war.' The Moderator and Stated Clerk of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) were consistent voices in the call for restraint along with the leaders of the other so-called mainline churches. The appeals regularly asked for a meeting between the president or his national security advisor and leaders of the mainline churches. Requests for such meetings were rejected by the administration. (For an overview of the opposition that came from religious bodies are Peter Steinfels, "Deaf Ears on Iraq," The New York Times, September 28, 2002.)"

I was not aware of the degree to which many Christian leaders spoke out on this one--not necessarily against any and all war, but at least advocating for more care and restraint in making war. It is outrageous to me that an allegedly Christian President who regularly, publicly uses Christian rhetoric to support his causes and whose agenda in the Middle East is reportedly informed by particular Christian eschatological beliefs could conceive of rejecting the appeals of huge portions of his "mainline" religious constituency in America and abroad for something as simple and straightforward as a meeting. As Steinfels points out, other statements of similar concern (such as the statement undersigned by by over 100 Christian ethicists) were similarly discarded. A Christian President indeed.

So dark the con of Bush that he has won the hearts and undying allegiance of millions of devoted church-goers across the country, convincing them in the face of much opposition that he represents their interests and convictions. It speaks of a strange dissonance between the folks in the pews and their own pastors and denominations. And the bizarre efficency of the President's PR team. And maybe easily played-upon fears of "the other." Or it could just be people looking for quick answers ("It's pure evil we're fighting!") in the messy world of international relations.

Off World announcement!

2007-02-24T20:58:00.000-08:00

I've been having a lot of mental lapses into absurdity as of late. Last week I was sitting in a car stopped in traffic on I-76, staring out the front window. You could say I was contemplating the skyline. That's when I was struck by the absurdity of billboards. It was the scale that got me first--realizing how enormous a billboard has to be in order to convey a roughly magazine-size readable image at a distance. Consider with me how much physical space has been utilized in order to colonize our fields of vision. It got me thinking about a Gnostic/Platonic mind-body split in which psychological space becomes much more valuable than physical space.

Great architectural constructions have always played on psychological space, but it seems to me that the meaning of that visual space was always a logical extension from the meaning of the actual physical structure: A palace or cathedral was much bigger than it needed to be in order to create in the viewer a sense of grandeur, which is a utilization (a sort of exaggeration) of physical space to make a psychological impression. But what about when a massive structure is erected exclusively to pass on a photograph or written message, completely severed from any physically useful purpose?

The strange dis-proportionality of it all illustrates a general disregard for the physical environment (as in most cities). More broadly, billboards point to a physical existence that is subjugated, discarded, dominated by the world of ideas. Yet another cyclical pattern of careless abuse and fragmented meaning, another competitive relationship enacted between worlds that were meant to be constructively integrated.

Or in the case that my reactions seem more ridiculous than the billboard itself, at the very least we can pause for a moment to think about the great expenditures of creative energy and capital invested into capturing little pieces of our mental space for a few seconds.

Fred Rogers

2007-02-06T20:00:00.000-08:00

Today, as I do every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I took bus routes 60 and 23 to arrive at my job at Germantown high school. Despite the extreme cold, it was a beautiful afternoon. Between gazing out of the bus windows at the sharp, slanting, yellow afternoon light and being distracted by the bewildered ramblings and raspy, plaintive singing of a 250-pound retarded gentleman sitting a few seats away, I didn't get a whole lot of the usual reading done. However, one thing that I did discover from my book on Henri Nouwen is that he and Fred Rogers were good friends.

This evening I (naturally) turned to Wikipedia in order to read up on Fred Rogers. What follows are five excerpts from the article which I consider worthy of passing on:

1. "Rogers had a life-changing moment when he first saw television in his parents' home. He had planned to enter seminary after college, but had been diverted into television after his first experience as a viewer; he wanted to explore what the medium was capable of. 'I went into television because I hated it so. And I thought there was some way of using this fabulous instrument to be of nurture to those who would watch and listen.' ...Ultimately [after working for NBC in New York], while he did want to remain in children's television, Rogers decided that commercial television's reliance on advertisement and merchandising undermined its ability to educate or enrich young audiences, and quit NBC."

2. "In 1954, he began working at WQED, a Pittsburgh public television station, as a puppeteer on a local children's series, The Children's Corner. For the next seven years, he worked with host Josie Carey in unscripted live TV, and developed many of the puppets, characters and music used in his later work, such as King Friday XIII, and Curious X the Owl. Rogers first began wearing his famous sneakers when he found them to be quieter than his work shoes when he moved about behind the set... For eight years during this period, he would leave the WQED studios during his lunch breaks to study theology at the nearby Pittsburgh Theological Seminary."

3. About 2,700 people were present at his public memorial service in Pittsburgh, his hometown. "Outside, a number of members of an anti-gay organization protested over his teachings about tolerance and acceptance, while about 150 supporters of Mr. Rogers from gay rights and peace groups marched in counter-protest, singing songs from Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood."

4. In an interview with TV Guide, Fred related the following anecdote: "[He] had been driving the same car for years, an old second-hand Impala. Then it was stolen from its parking spot near the WQED studio. Rogers filed a police report, the story was picked up by local news outlets, and general shock swept across town. Within 48 hours, the car was back in the spot where he left it, along with a note saying "If we'd known it was yours, we never would have taken it!"

5. "During the 1997 Daytime Emmys, the Lifetime Achievement Award was presented to Rogers. The following is an excerpt from Esquire Magazine's coverage of the gala, written by Tom Junod:

"Mister Rogers went onstage to accept the award — and there, in front of all the soap opera stars and talk show sinceratrons, in front of all the jutting man-tanned jaws and jutting saltwater bosoms, he made his small bow and said into the microphone, 'All of us have special ones who have loved us into being. Would you just take, along with me, one minute to think of the people who have helped you become who you are. One minute of silence.'

"And then he lifted his wrist, looked at the audience, looked at his watch, and said, 'I'll watch the time.' There was, at first, a small whoop from the crowd, a giddy, strangled hiccup of laughter, as people realized that he wasn't kidding, that Mister Rogers was not some convenient eunuch, but rather a man, an authority figure who actually expected them to do what he asked. And so they did. One second, two seconds, three seconds — and now the jaws clenched, and the bosoms heaved, and the mascara ran, and the tears fell upon the beglittered gathering like rain leaking down a crystal chandelier. And Mister Rogers finally looked up from his watch and said softly, 'May God be with you,' to all his vanquished children."

Read more about Fred Rogers (about his upbringing, his support of VCR technology and more) in the full Wikipedia article. And/or check out his Wikiquote page.

The feel of heavy items in my hands

2007-01-16T21:01:00.001-08:00

For anyone familiar with the evangelical manhood-recovery blockbuster "Wild at Heart," allow me to pass on the link to a thoughtful critique of the book by Byron Borger that was likewise recommended to me earlier this week.

Kevin Kelly, provocateur

2006-12-30T23:20:00.001-08:00

Kevin Kelly is a writer and senior brain at Wired magazine. I first came across him by reading his essay "Scan this book!" in one of Jeff Shafer's issues of New York Times Magazine that was sitting on the dining room table in 329 last spring. I was inspired to go back and look up this article after realizing that it had significantly implanted itself in a central part of my brain--I think I've referred to it in about 25 conversations since the time I read it.

In "Scan this book!", Kelly explores the meaning and ramifications of Google's ongoing project to digitize all books. Here is my html version of the article, which is really a travesty considering the (characteristically) beautiful layout and accompanying photography from the magazine version. It's probably worth searching out a physical copy at your local library. (It will be found in the May 2006 issue).

He's got other technology-related essays on his personal website and some shorter stuff on his blog.

Here is one such short piece that I will recommend: "The Rise and Fall of the Copy"

As they have done for me, his writings may very well force you to edge topics you may have formerly relegated to the category "irrelevant sci-fi inquiries" into your everyday perspective on the world.

“ ”

2006-12-29T18:30:00.001-08:00

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. says:
"Whom you would change you must first love, and they must know that you love them."

A feeling of existential dread

2006-12-21T20:27:00.000-08:00

The most recent chapter in my ongoing Philip Glass infatuation, I just picked up the Fog of War soundtrack from the library. Nothing ground-breaking, just more of the same old quality Glass.

I thought I'd pass on the following note from Errol Morris, the film-maker, that is found in the liner notes:

"How do you write music for a story that encompasses the 20th Century...? A story that also combines elements of caprice and destiny. And at its center a story that asks whether war is inevitable, unavoidable, part of human nature. This is my third collaboration with Philip Glass, and I cannot think of who else could have written the music. I once told Philip that he creates a feeling of existential dread better than anyone else I knew of. And this is a movie filled with existential dread. I like to think of it as music for the apocalypse, where the apocalypse is not so much the end of the world but just more of what we've seen before, more of the same."

I am reminded of how good of a movie that was. A fantastic example of the impression that a truly artful documentary can make.

Conversion

2006-12-20T13:27:00.002-08:00

Conversion means death. A person or thing loses all meaning and life in one frame of reference to be born new in an alternate universe. The former world still exists in all of its reality, but a passer-by in that world finds only a bluish corpse remaining where there was once a life.

Whereas the Word, Logos, might refer to either the spoken or the written word, in my little theological box it has only been known to refer to the written word, that is the word that has been canonized, frozen in time, the word subject to detached discussions about context and intent.

An oral tradition seems rather attractive right now; will that is still breathed into a word-y, practically useful existence but not yet butchered on the pages of a book; will converted into a more fluid, lively word.

Jean Vanier wrote from personal experience about the natural process of institutionalization that occurs in every wave of communal energy and excitement. Meaningful movements always come about in resistance to a current, dead order but they always end up institutionalizing: Expressionism. Punk. The Jesus People. Every counterculture. Every business that comes into success by effectively serving a group of people only to end up serving nothing but the bottom line.

The predictability of the emotional highs of Pentecostal worship sets off my internal inathenticty alarm. I can understand how many people are bothered by the fixed-ness and non-emotionally-dependency of more traditional liturgical forms, but institutionalizing communal energy and always-escalating cathartic releases seems like a bit of an oxymoron to me.

Why is my future will so resistant to my present will? Why do all my desires burn out so easily? Recording thoughts in a journal (or blog) becomes my vain, sometimes frantic attempt at rigor-mortisizing the present state of mind into something durable, something capable of exerting its force beyond the next hour.

Optimists always look for some degree of practical change in the process of institutionalization. Though it is sad to see the underground become overground, they always look for the transformation and evolution of the larger system. But it's hard for me to see. I'm not ready for the death of what exists now.

The Word is alive. Does it always have to die in order to become active?

Buy Nothing Day 2006

2006-11-24T19:56:00.001-08:00

The Pogo Avenger and about 30 of his friends showed up to celebrate Buy Nothing Day outside The Gallery mall in Philadelphia. Above, you seem him posing with the T.J. Maxx promotional Santa and Elves that whisked by near the end of our celebration. Here are some more photos and an in-depth report from the event.

In other BND news, see the extraordinary Reverend Billy attempting to dissuade Macy's shoppers from their early morning shopping spree. Or see him conducting services in a parking lot.

Dr. Bronner

2006-11-20T12:12:00.001-08:00

Dr. Emmanuel H. Bronner says:
"Think and act 10 years ahead! And the man without fault? He's dead! Do one thing at a time, work hard! Get done! Then teach friend and enemy the Moral ABC that unites all mankind free!"

This morning I cleansed myself with a portion of Dr. Bronner's Peppermint Pure Castile Soap (up for sale at your local Trader Joe's). It was refreshing (as always). Of interest is the label, composed by the late Dr. Bronner himself and maintained in its in all of its original, claustrophobic splendour by his sympathetic estate. Now, I am in the habit of using the bar version of the soap, which has a small, fairly utilitarian label. However, for a more interesting and characteristically Dr. Bronner label, take a peek at the smorgasbord of philosophy found on the liquid version of the soap.

Kurt Cobain

2006-11-09T21:18:00.000-08:00

Hell house

2006-11-02T10:59:00.000-08:00

Jonathan Perry from the Boston Globe says that Hell House is "a candid and often fascinating documentary about a Pentecostal church in Dallas that assembles an elaborate haunted house each year to scare teenagers into attending services."

Perhaps it is telling that two of the critics compiled on Rotten Tomatoes compare the subject of the film to a Jack Chick tract come to life.

Having never heard anything about this recent (2002) documentary, I watched it with my housemates on Halloween. It was really good. Definitely one of the best documentaries I've ever seen. The filmmaker has incredible access to the inner workings of the "Hell House" production and captures some really amazing moments. The cinematography is nice and is made even better due to the fact that it was shot on film.

PETA, paranoia, vegetarianism, blah, blah, blah...

2006-10-27T12:47:00.001-07:00

Here is Tyson's dinner prayer booklet, free for you to download. Go ahead, look it over! Despite entirely cynical preconceptions, I couldn't help but feel relaxed and warmed this sentimental little booklet.

On the other hand, here's an interesting video from inside one of Tyson's chicken processing facilities.

I am not so bothered by the visual, visceral sensation of a conscious chicken's head popping off in the rubber gloves of a weary factory employee. After all, eating meat has always involved the toleration of a certain amount of violence. It's the image of that moving belt loaded with hundreds of dead chickens, a few live ones freaking out--a mass-processing system that treats millions of living beings in every way as inanimate "food units" for their entire (short) lives.

What disturbs me even more though is how you and I deal with the disconnect between our personal comfort level and the reality of industrial meat production. I think that most of us have seen something like this at some point but we have to push the image to the back our minds, to the very edge of our consciousness, in order to contentedly eat a chicken breast. Maybe we westerners have been doing this in many areas of life ever since we had to start questioning the giddy utopianism of endlesss technological progress sometime in the middle of the 20th century, ever since we became vaguely and obscurely afraid that our lives might be negatively transformed by the elaborate systems and environments we've engineered for ourselves.

If we chose to look under the hood, we would most likely be disgusted by feces-littered pens crowded with obese chickens with clipped beaks. We might have to consider the unpleasant possibility that our international system of food production and transportation would find ways of perpetuating itself even after it ceased to be the most efficient, cheap or healthy solution. But why should I consider such complicated questions when I can easily opt for the comforting vision printed on the packaging of my chicken breasts? "Look, this food was raised on an idyllic village farm where happy, healthy animals wander around on the sun-warmed earth under the gaze of a watchful, benevolent farmer."

Corny marketing is not convincing, it's just an extremely convenient anesthetic for the chafing of our various ideals against the world as it is.

Flickr

2006-10-19T21:08:00.000-07:00

My collection of photos on Flickr. Nothing new just yet, but check out the photo-mapping feature.

Hsi-an Monument

2006-10-14T18:13:00.000-07:00

"Twenty-seven sacred books [the number in the New Testament] have been left, which disseminate intelligence by unfolding the original transforming principles. By the rule for admission, it is the custom to apply the water of baptism, to wash away all superficial show and to cleanse and purify the neophytes. As a seal, they hold the cross, whose influence is reflected in every direction, uniting all without distinction. As they strike the wood, the fame of their benevolence is diffused abroad; worshiping toward the east, they hasten on the way to life and glory; they preserve the beard to symbolize their outward actions, they shave the crown to indicate the absence of inward affections; they do not keep slaves, but put noble and mean all on an equality; they do not amass wealth, but cast all their property into the common stock; they fast, in order to perfect themselves by self-inspection; they submit to restraints, in order to strengthen themselves by silent watchfulness; seven times a day they have worship and praise for the benefit of the living and the dead; once in seven days they sacrifice, to cleanse the heart and return to purity."

The above is an excerpt from the Hsi-an Monument, set up in 781 AD to document the several-hundred-year history of Nestorian Christian missionaries in the East, where their influence had been praised and accepted by Emperor Dezong of the Tang dynasty. Follow this link for the full translation of the monument's text.

It's always fascinating to hear about ancient movements which speak powerfully to the current "missional" trend in Christianity. For unknown reasons, Nestorian Christian presence in China had pretty much disappeared by the 1800s. Did 1950s evangelical missionaries to China know of that region's long history of interaction with Christianity or did they imagine that they were the first witnesses of Christ in Asia?

Despite widespread war between all sorts of peoples and civilizations, it strikes me that there are a lot of surprising examples of religious tolerance in the 1000s. You've got Buddhists welcoming Christians in China, St. Francis studying prayer with Muslims, and the Ottoman Empire, an entire ethnicity-spanning Muslim civilization that was explicitly and legally tolerant of Christians and Jews.

Elsewhere in the Hsi-an Monument's explication of Christianity, there are a lot of inherantly cross-cultural themes. The cross, in addition to being described as the location which defines "the four cardinal points" (N, S, E, W), becomes "a seal... whose influence is reflected in every direction, uniting all without distinction."

Father Aelred

2006-10-10T00:21:00.000-07:00

Father Aelred, Benedictine monk and founder of the Monastery of Christ in the Desert, says:
"The monastery is not a refuge, not a solution for dealing with problems of adjustment. Monasticism is a head-on collision with reality, and the more silent, the more solitude, the more head-on it is."

Withdrawal from the world gets all kinds of flack from people. Say what you will, the raw idealistic commitment of classical monasticism inspires respect from me. It attempts to hollow out a space within the dense, destructive weight of a fallen world, pulling at and stretching out an ever-thinning membrane that enforces the boundary between a sin-enslaved existence and one defined by absolute freedom to obey. Forced to admit the inevitably human anchoring in the present fallen world, fanatical monks struggle to live in sync with another, incoming world.

What does a contemplative monk do? Pray. Meditate. In a practical sense, nothing. It is by definition impossible for the entire body of believers to abide in this state and what a malformed body it would be if everyone tried to or wanted to.

Speculatively, we could say that contemplative monasticism is the nervous system of the body of Christ: A network of cells, flowing upwards and inwards, towards that central point of contact with the Brain, convulsing with electric impulses which are the first physical traces of another level of consciousness.

I just deleted my Facebook.com account one final time

2006-10-08T23:39:00.001-07:00

Declaration of Peace

2006-10-01T00:02:00.000-07:00

During the past week I was fortunate to land a job shooting and editing some short (2-4 minute) documentary videos for the Declaration of Peace, a coalition of various organizations who planned a week of events to vocally oppose the US military campaign in Iraq. Here are four of the videos I made from the week; (please pardon the grainy/dull results of compressing the videos into a size that would be small enough to upload onto YouTube's servers):

Philadelphia, September 25th:

Press Conference at the White House (Kelly Dougherty), September 21st:

The Capitol, September 26th:

Interfaith Rally at the Capitol, September 26th:

If you're interested, you can find more videos on the YouTube channel we created. Oh and here's some press coverage from the Washington Post.

“ ”

2006-09-30T11:55:00.001-07:00

Dietrich Bonhoeffer says:
"Let him who cannot be alone beware of community... Let him who is not in community beware of being alone."

Sex and the city and the mob and the mall

2006-09-13T21:24:00.000-07:00

"One of the causes of the downfall of Rome was that people, being fed by the state...ceased to have any responsibility for themselves or their children, and consequently became a nation of wasters. They frequented circuses, where paid performers appeared before them in the arena, much as we see the crowds now flocking to look on at paid players playing football...Thousands of boys and young men, pale, narrow-chested, hunched-up, miserable specimens, smoking endless cigarettes, numbers of them betting, all of them learning to be hysterical as they groan and cheer in panic unison with their neighbors--the worst sound of all being the hysterical scream of laughter that greets any little trip or fall of a player."
(R. Baden-Powell from Scouting for Boys, as quoted in Among the Thugs by Bill Buford)

The self-engrossed life of pure, stimulation-craving consumption seems to be the booby-trap along western culture's several hundred year path from radical social hierarchy to radical social individualism.

We commitment-phobic 20-somethings wander from place to place, looking for the next psychological fix. It may be a stage-show of immense pathos, an adrenaline-fueled splurge on a luxury that dangles just outside our means, an erotically-tinged connection with a world of fantasy and/or celebrity, some shade of numbed physical intoxication, or (as explored in Among the Thugs) a hypnotizing orgy of violence. In all cases, as in the Coliseum, sensational, engrossing, exciting, high-gloss, heart-racing entertainment is the prize and the cold, gray, mundane dungeon of boredom and obligation is the most frightening possibility for existence.

Sosumi!

2006-09-09T15:37:00.000-07:00

“ ”

2006-09-07T07:15:00.001-07:00

The Buddhist master says:
"If you eat the moment you are hungry, you will never find out what your hunger is for."

“ ”

2006-09-06T13:19:00.001-07:00

Marcel Duchamp says:
"There is no solution because there is no problem."

An apocalyptic way to spend ten minutes

2006-08-25T23:12:00.001-07:00

1. Download the following two songs by Woven Hand:
Sparrow falls and Bleary eyed duty
2. Once you've got them downloaded (it may take a few minutes), start them playing (preferably on headphones) and read the Wikipedia entry on the life of Keith Green.

“ ”

2006-08-23T00:40:00.002-07:00

Stephanie Coontz says:
"The beginning of the nineteenth century, however, saw a new emphasis on women's innate sexual purity. The older view that women had to be controlled because they were inherently more passionate and prone to moral and sexual error was replaced by the idea that women were asexual beings, who would not respond to sexual overtures unless they had been drugged or depraved from an early age. This cult of female purity encouraged women to internalize limits on their sexual behavior that sixteenth and seventeenth century authorities had imposed by force."
(from "Marriage, a history").

As i scour the internet for reasonable air fare

2006-08-17T00:31:00.001-07:00

Last night my mother gave me a fortune cookie for dessert. I was to find the following fragment of destiny within:

2006-08-16T23:46:00.000-07:00

Music video: "Smile around the face" by Four Tet

“ ”

2006-08-03T23:54:00.001-07:00

Thomas à Kempis says:
"Blessed is that simplicity that leaves the way of hard questions and goes in the plain and certain way of the commandments of God."

What ever happened to tolerance?

2006-08-02T13:40:00.000-07:00

Here is a thought-provoking article by Hanif Kureishi, published in the UK’s Guardian, in which he makes the case that our idea of tolerance must be more robust, a real exchange of ideas, not just a festival of food. I like how he constructs the relationships between issues that are on my mind--liberalism and fundamentalism, idealism and practicality, race and “the other.” Here’s a good summation of how some of these ideas fit together in his mind:

“I believed that questions of race, identity and culture were the major issues post-colonial Europe had to face, and that inter-generational conflict was where these conflicts were being played out.”

This sentence got me excited, particularly the part about inter-generational conflict.

From what we learn in his article, Kureishi’s personal beliefs about God could run the gamut from humanism to atheism. In any case, he seems to doubt an individual’s access to God via faith. Like the Christian, who’s ultimate goal in a pluralistic society is to convince everyone else to pursue relationship with the Living God, Kureishi’s ultimate goal of in this exchange of ideas must necessarily be the dilution of religious ideals to the degree that they become indistinct from general humanistic ideals. The underlying Nietzchean belief found here is that religion is valid (is nice) insofar as it is a vehicle for the progress of mankind. Religion is undeniably useful as catalyst for culture, for self-discipline and belief about the world. Religion galvanizes humans together. But the prospect of human myths about the personal-ness or designed-ness of the universe actually being true? That’s ridiculous.

In an even more direct statement of the goals of materialism, we have Dan Dennett, a philosopher and writer, who touches on his ideal version of society while giving a talk on the nonsense of looking for a designed purpose in life.

To me, these two thinkers embody an important discourse that is going on right now in America and Europe: Beyond the topic itself (of the truth or falsity of God), both authors are taking a stance regarding the question of whether or not tolerance is a valid way for people in disagreement to relate to each other.

Maybe tolerance is a continuum: On one end is outright bloodshed among warring cultures and nations, on the other end is an over-saturation of pluralistic subjectivity in which no one believes in anything but tolerance.

As I look around the world, I see what appears to be a growing animosity between Islamic fundamentalists and European materialists, a widening rift between American liberals and the Religious Right. My speculation is that the mode for the exchange of ideas seems to be trending towards the war end of the exchange spectrum.

If politics do indeed progress in this direction, it would mean resolution for the giant experiment in tolerance that America represents to many people. Perhaps more than any other particular country, America has been attempting to gather mostly non-violent consensus from a rather diverse group of citizens ever since it was pre-born in the 1600s, and an even more diverse group as time has progressed.

As battle lines get drawn, I’m not sure if in 20 years there will be many people around who are seeking a delicate balance of holding firmly to their beliefs on one hand as well as genuine tolerance, even love, for their neighbors on the other.

(Philosophically speaking, this experimentation with tolerance could be described as the human struggle to come to terms with the paradox that explains both the limits of our individual subjectivity as well as our essential need to connect to objectivity.)

Gymnopedia, to be performed at least three times a day

2006-07-27T01:37:00.000-07:00

This is a self-portrait of Erik Satie, the original bohemian.

The text reads (translated from French):
"Project for a bust of Mr. Erik Satie (painted by the same), with a thought: 'I came into the world very young, in an age that was very old'"

Part two in a two-part series

2006-07-25T14:32:00.001-07:00

What if the advent of liberalism is not really the cause of the red state/blue state American culture war? What if American liberalism was adopted as a newer form of traditional conservative co-optation, a way for white people to attempt to deal with their cultural self-loathing by escaping from their own criticism?

Some things to consider: The Western, white, male perspective is the implicit target of Deconstructionist criticism. But most foundational Postmodern critics and many (not all) humanities professors are still white and a significant percentage of them male. President Bush is constructed to be the arrogant, ignorant, white, supreme-arch-nemesis of all that is Liberal. But most Democrats and almost all Democratic political candidates share more similarity than difference with Bush, being usually white, male, and middle-to-upper class.

Long before anyone mainstream in America cared about identity politics, white kids had been having this long-term love affair with black culture, a history that includes the co-option of Jazz and Blues, Elvis, and Johnny Cash, among others. Functionally for white people, it may be that the hippie movement predates any concern with identity politics. Look at photos from Woodstock and commune experiments: These weren't angry, marginalized minorities, they were recently straight-laced white kids that had a problem with the culture of their parents on a number of levels.

Then, after all of our parents returned to mainstream culture after their short-lived hippie vacation, they became the "oppressive authoritarians" and our generation developed its own reactionary culture (though it happens to be pretty mainstream itself ever since capitalism figured out that “alternative” is a market too).

Here we are in 2006 and conservative kids have two options: Stay in the conservative fold or seize your moment to run into the arms of The Other. Because it’s still just as hip to be un-white, to be anti-consumer, to read Marx, to listen to M.I.A., to wear dreadlocks or something, to dive into these things at least during a phase in life. Even the significant portion of college-age kids who stay conservative still dance to Jamaican dancehall on the weekends and blast Outkast on their iPods. It's almost entirely unavoidable: Co-optation of "the other" (esp. black culture) is nothing less than a coming-of-age ritual in our country for every generation since slavery ended (and perhaps before). (See this page of a related interview with John McWhorter that Davis brought to my attention).

Moving closer to home, the Christian microcosm of all this is conservative Evangelical kids who react against their parents by becoming liberal (or libertarian) Christians and getting involved in social justice and multiculturalism and international aid, trying to read and apply a wider section of their Bibles, if only because it was the opposite of the preceeding generation’s user-friendly prosperity gospel. And when reading the red letters, they saw that it said community was important, that poor people matter, and, like, something about Feminism.

I admit that I fit in somewhere along these lines: I question authority. I have been known to rage against the machine. And I generally think I'm right.

But putting the rightness or wrongness of liberalism (or Liberation theology) to the side, the important, self-analytical question that I am asking myself right now is about the origin of my embrace of it: I'm concerned that the core of this for me may be significantly reactive in nature. Not every Christian who cares about social issues was introduced to those issues reactively (some had liberal parents, of course), but it seems undeniable to me that many were introduced in this way, many more will be, and even the most authentically liberal Christians are powered by at least a strain of reactionary belief.

So while I am personally committed to thinking outside of “the box” and especially inside the gospels, I think it’s pretty important for myself and every Christian who finds their identity anywhere near the category of the “alternative" to consider the specific origins of their personal party platforms.

Being reactively-motivated is not something you or I should take lightly: At the very least can easily render anyone self-righteously asinine and likely to sell out. But it’s ultimate threat to white, American Christians is that it will put pride, generational issues, and our ever-present white identity crises before the gospel in our hearts and actions.

I hope that Jesus’ core values continue to permeate my life and those of my fellow Christians. (As a matter of fact, I hope His values permeate everyone's lives). I hope that they outlive and erode mere reactionary sentiment. If they do, I am confident that self-loathing will necessarily be dissipated and the passing on of culture between generations will start to become more harmonious, a process of growth rather than one that is cyclically dissonant.

John Perkins and my DSC-P72

2006-07-18T00:05:00.001-07:00

Genre photos! Media cliches! They're all around us! Have you noticed? This month it seems that every time I turn around I am assaulted by photo sets of empathetically-(tearfully?)-smiling Christian white kids surrounded by a small crowd of black street urchins (who they appear to have just befriended).

What are the photos saying about us?

If the digital point-and-shoot camera is apt to become the poor man's creativity crutch, the digital SLR can easily become the rich man's "Art" crutch. But neither device is merely for art, it also has the potential for documentary, which gives it street cred and accessibility. And relevance!

Who is this strange beast, the Christian Day-Tripper? He/she parades around the (third) world, building little cinderblock houses and capturing an obscene number of confused little black children inside of a camera, eventually returning home to broadcast this evidence of association across all forms of digital image technology in order to share the experience of their poverty in some small way. In some small way indeed, since we viewers are not really capable of experiencing their poverty at all. For that matter, are we really even capable of experiencing “the other half” when we travel abroad for a week, a month, a year?

The likely, terrifying possibility is that there may be a whole lot of personal pleasure getting mixed in to something that was supposed to be service. Who’s really getting served? Might it be the one who stops in to visit, who documents their association with the poor, and who steps off the plane on the return to their comfortable hometown deafened by a moral fanfare?

I’ve never been on a real mission trip, but the only thing I ever hear is “Well, you know, I gave up so much to do this, but in return I received far more than I gave.” Well maybe this is actually true, maybe we Christians are actually receiving more than we're giving. Maybe our mission trips are really gathering trips. Maybe we are really stealing from the poor a second time over, this time of the authenticity implied by the poverty we imparted to them.

I've got a hypothesis about the commodity, the new treasure that we’re digitally mining out of the third world: It’s that new, post-modern, coveted value known as “The Grime Factor.” Just as fashion has progressed from plastic-slick, technology-fetish costumes of the 80s into faux-ripped Abercrombie & Fitch authenticity, the rest of our interests are quickly growing tired of that ever-present, oh-so-commonplace polished, industrial gloss. Enough opaquely computerized keyboard bleeps, give me real drum kits floating in a sea of gentle vinyl pops! Better yet, go ahead and resample old soul records on that new Kanyeyed Peas track—-oops, I mean "record": The sampling's worth at least two points, since vomiting up black music from the 70s exploits “the other” twice over: The second time blaxploitation rolls around we'll call it vintage. And OMG, second-hand shops are so funky-fresh! Forget the orgasmically-minimal international style, we want classic lofts, you know, renovated stone fronts that scream “this building has character!” After all, for all we know poor black folks probably lived in this very building this at some point!

Let's be honest with ourselves: We’re apathetic, alienated, disaffected, over-disinfected rich people, alternately bored of and devastated by the world we've created for ourselves, seeking to associate with another world. We’re bustling around on our kitchen linoleum, which by the way seems to be starting to wear. We’re making calls and placing ads, trying to get rid of the old Mies van der Rohe dining set as quick as possible because the fact that it is horrendously sterile-looking just dawned on us. Unfortunately we just can’t find anything to replace it with, so milking culture from the tiny, chafed teats of the poor man that we keep in a cage in the garage will have to do for now. Better yet, maybe we can find an old loft in to move into, along with the new-vintage couch.

Why should we delude ourselves about the good we're doing on our short-term missions projects? Why should we stroke our overworked little social consciences like this? If we think about it, we may find that we are actually, literally benefiting from our "third-world encounters."

So rather then deny this fact, why don't we start applying Christian ethics to this situation:

In the best-case scenario, we’re taking because we perceive that we are in need. Which is fine for us to admit. But if this is the case, the first thing we should do is to admit this to the people we’re taking from:

“You have something I need: Perhaps it’s spiritual vitality, perhaps it’s a breath of fresh air outside of our pleasantly-stifling sphere of consumption, perhaps it’s a stimulus for deeply-rooted nostalgia about the wholesomely simple pleasures of our agricultural past (we’ll just gloss over those nauseatingly fixed cultural roles that it was built on for now). Let’s trade: I’ll try my best to re-distribute my amassed wealth and privilege, hopefully lessening my drain on the earth’s resources and people I am oppressing, like you. In return you give me a day-to-day life that has more space, is more sane, is less drunk on the quickly souring Kool-aid of industrial progress.”

Absurd? Yes, indeed! but at least it's a start at moving away from the condescension to the “third-world” that is necessitated by the lie that we’re primarily selfless in our efforts. The most significant thing your average youth group short-term missionary is offering the "third world" is the commodification of poor folks’ way of life as an accessory to wealth, as a bullet point alongside a six-figure future income.

In the best-possible-case scenario, we might even find that in attempting to re-access real authenticity and humility, we actually are able to offer our poorer neighbors some resources of value.

And as hesitant as I am to admit it, perhaps short-term missions have a value, perhaps it makes some backwards ethical sense to spoon-feed digital deaths and pre-packaged, frozen, third-world moments to the rich in order to finance this blunt, systematic exchange of resources.

It’s fine if mission trips do have a value, but first, at the very least, it is time to admit that the value is not only passing from the rich man to the poor man, but also vice versa.

Zidane Strikes Back!

2006-07-10T13:01:00.000-07:00

2006-06-27T16:01:00.000-07:00

Who needs reality television when we have reality reality?

2006-06-24T00:28:00.001-07:00

And so it was, whenever the spirit from God was upon Saul, that David would take a harp and play it with his hand. Then Saul would become refreshed and well, and the distressing spirit would depart from him.

2006-06-19T00:50:00.000-07:00

The Fog of War is a very timely exploration of rationality: of its potential to solve our problems and of its limits.

On paper, it is a dry, political interview documentary. On screen, it is an engaging, aesthetically hypnotizing, quick-witted chase through the last 50 years of American military engagement.

The documentary is timely in that it seems obvious that the specific rationalistic, materialistic suite of problem-solving techniques that we inherited from Plato, honed through the industrial revolution, and which is appropriately and compellingly embodied in the personal character of Robert McNamara, saturates the minds of the power-players and the policy-makers in America today.

As the film calls into question the ruling philosophy of our country, it simultaneously exists as a rather experiential take on exploration itself. It’s not a book, after all, but a film, and it makes its points by subtle suggestion and provocative juxtapositions. In this sense, it is a distinctly post-modern comment on the state of our country and world; and there could be no more fitting subject to this visual essay than the very worldwide social disasters that are said to have engendered so much bitter criticism of Modernism’s blind optimism.

But to take it a step further, combining Meyers-Briggs vocabulary with the Feminist jab that violent routines of death and destruction are the result of a political world controlled almost entirely by men, we might interpret Robert McNamara’s 20-20 hindsight lessons as an backhanded admission from one of the most stalwart, coldly-rational, “walking IBM computer” (T) individuals around that perhaps our current political leaders are badly in need of some relational-minded (F) input to help America avoid situations where we find ourselves annihilating 200,000 Japanese civilians in a single stroke or (more commonly) sacrificing innocent lives abroad in the name of our own economic interest.

A wet blanket

2006-06-04T23:42:00.000-07:00

Here's a few related passages from the last chapter of Thomas Merton's autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain. Most of this chapter is about monastic life. These three excerpts are on the theme of moodiness and how it affects others:

"'Each one of you,' the Father Abbot said, 'will make the community either better or worse. Everything you do will have an influence upon others. It can be a good influence or a bad one. It all depends on you. Our Lord will never refuse you grace...'"

"It can be said, as a general rule, that the greatest saints are seldom the ones whose piety is most evident in their expression when they are kneeling at prayer, and the holiest men in a monastery are almost never the ones who get that exalted look, on feast days, in the choir. The people who gaze up at Our Lady's statue with glistening eyes are very often the ones with the worst tempers."

"[Simple, easily-contented monks] stood at the mean between two extremes. On one hand there were one or two who exagerated everything they did and tried to carry out every rule with scrupulousness that was a travesty of the real thing. They were the ones who seemed to be trying to make themselves saints by sheer effort and concentration--as if the work depended on them, and not even God could help them. But then there were also the ones who did little or nothing to sanctify themselves, as if none of the work depended on them--as if God would come along one day and put a halo on their heads and it would all be over. They followed the others and kept the Rule after a fashion, but as soon as they thought they were sick they started pleading for all the mitigations that they did not already have. And the rest of the time, they fluctuated between a gaity that was noisy and disquieting, and a sullen exasperation that threw a wet blanket over the whole novitiate."

That troublesome dichotemy

2006-06-01T00:40:00.000-07:00

An excerpt from "Sexual Attraction: The Magic Formula":
"Women’s preferences for certain male scents and other male features change over their cycle. Near ovulation, they prefer masculine traits; at other phases of their cycle they prefer less sexiness and more stability."

Tonight I watched "Match Point," Woody Allen's new film. It is certainly a departure from his characteristic style, but definitely worth watching and thinking about. I found that some of the sexual relationships in the film resonated a bit with the comment above (from the full article that I read earlier today--thanks, Linshuang). Most of the film revolves around Chris' inner conflict between the seductive magnetism of Nola (played by Scarlett Johansson) and the "sweetness," niceness and stability of Chloe (played by some other actress), as well as the resources Chloe's family provides him. In the film, this distinction explains the difference between passionate love-making with Nola, who becomes Chris' mistress-muse, and machinistic attempts at producing a child with Chloe, his wife. Here are a couple fragments of dialogue in the film that shed some light on the "sexy" end of the dichotemy.

The first is an exchange between Chloe, Tom's sister, and Eleanor, Tom's mother, in which Eleanor attempts to use Tom's current (and ultimately short-lived) relationship with Nola in order to caution her daughter:
ELEANOR "Be careful. Tom's involved with a woman I have reservations about. Don't rush off."
CHLOE "Tom's happy with Nola! You're prejudiced because she's American."
ELEANOR "She's spoiled. And tempermental."
CHLOE "She's an actress! They're emotional!"
ELEANOR "She's deluding herself. And she's moody--she's not right for Tom."

Later on, Nola speaks with an admiring Chris:
NOLA "You should see my sister, she's very beautiful. But she's lost...drugs...and..."
CHRIS "I'm sure she's not more beautiful than you are."
NOLA "No, what I am is sexy. Linda--my sister--is classically beautiful..."
CHRIS "So you are aware of your affect on men."

And finally this, the same dichotemy restated in a line from a somewhat Feminist film critique of the film:
"So [Allen] grafts an eleventh-hour murder plot onto Match Point, a narrative twist anchored by the fallacious assumption that every woman on Earth is either an alluring cocktease or a needy shrew."

Or in this case, both, since Nola makes a surprisingly quick transition from "cocktease" to "needy shrew" as she becomes controlled by the conditions of her affair with Chris. In this sense she yields much less power as a femme fatale than she might have, had she remained an inaccessible fantasy to Chris or used her seductiveness on him in a more effectively controlling way.

Or neither, since Chloe is remarkably un-needy. However she is extremely stable, which bores Chris for most of the film, until he realizes how comfortable stability can be and how much of a pain in the ass sexiness can be.

Regardless, to return to the first quote, the core issue for me here is the pure irony of two attractiveness criteria, sexiness and stability, which seem essentially and irreconcilably at odds (for both men and women): Isn't it true that stability is necessarily practical and sexiness is by definition impractical, and that we all want them both?

This dilemma is alternately funny and frustrating. Woody Allen, always the pessimist, poignantly reminds us of the all-too-common tragedy of those who, asphixiated by their own selfish idealism, refuse to give up either passion or practicality and instead try to invent hackneyed schemes where both can be maintained at once. However, obnoxious infidelities aside, the dilemma stands.

Bakerman

2006-05-30T02:47:00.000-07:00

Danish pop duo Laid Back, better known for their 1983 electro-funk classic "White Horse" (a track Prince is said to have called a favorite), here perform their 90s hit "Bakerman" in mid air. This exquisite music video, ultimately more popular than the song itself, was conceived and directed by Lars von Trier, a fellow Dane and an internationally recognized film director.

I really wanted you to see this video, which is why I made the effort to downloaded it from a bit-torrent client, register for an account with YouTube, then upload it onto their servers. So please enjoy it.

To witness yet another stratospheric musical spectacle, see Dayvan cowboy, the recent music video debut of the peerless Boards of Canada.

2006-05-25T23:16:00.000-07:00

In 1979, Mother Teresa was awarded both the Nobel Peace Prize and the Balzan Prize for promoting peace and brotherhood among the nations. Upon receipt of the former she was asked, "What can we do to promote world peace?" Her answer was simple: "Go home and love your family."
I suppose this comment is in danger of being dismissed as rather trite. Except that:
1. Mother Teresa was extremely hardcore.
2. Loving your family well is probably more difficult than founding a successful and reputable charity organization.

What do you think?

2006-05-24T22:38:00.002-07:00

As reported in The Onion:
The release of The Da Vinci Code, the long-awaited film adaptation of the bestselling novel, is being met with controversy. Larry Brun responds, among others:

Larry does have a point. Mel Gibson's depiction of Satan in The Passion is the other obvious evil albino cameo in recent memory. What is the origin of this bizarre cinematic shorthand for Pure Evil, this tantalizing trace of the fantastically superstitious collective unconscious of middle America?

2006-05-24T12:46:00.000-07:00

Today I am packing up. I am organizing. I am sorting. I am getting ready to move out. I am also starting a blog.