The Golden Ass

A Reply To My Dear Engineer Friend On Art :)

2011-08-04T19:56:00.000-07:00

TO SET THE SCENE:
------------------
Me: "I think art should try to be about more than just what meets the EYE."

My Dear Engineer Friend Who Enjoys Art:
“This is where I think we disagree -
if I want to be challenged in the way I think, I'll read a book.
if I want to be entertained through my ears, I'll go to a concert

There are different types of art for different senses.
But if visual art is not visually appealing - then is it art?”
-------------------------

I have decided to respond to my Dear Engineer Friend more formally in this more public forum, because I think the conversation he and I are having speaks to much more than just the conversation he and I are having. So my response to him ensues. Now that the scene has been set, I’ll just jump into it:

I'm not saying the visual arts shouldn't be visually appealing. They have another name, you know. The PLASTIC arts. We think of plastic as a material used to make contemporary crap. But that speaks to my point....

From dictionary.com, on “plastic”:
6. capable of being molded or of receiving form: clay and other plastic substances.
7. produced by molding: plastic figures.
Origin:
1625–35; 1900–10 for def. 1; < Latin plasticus that may be molded < Greek plastikós. See -plast, -ic

4. easily influenced; impressionable: the plastic minds of children
5. capable of being moulded or formed
6. fine arts
a. of or relating to moulding or modelling: the plastic arts
b. produced or apparently produced by moulding: the plastic draperies of Giotto's figures
7. having the power to form or influence: the plastic forces of the imagination
8. biology of or relating to any formative process; able to change, develop, or grow: plastic tissues
9. of or relating to plastic surgery

[C17: from Latin plasticus relating to moulding, from Greek plastikos, from plassein to form]

In fact, prior to modernity, the plastic arts were more often referred to as such. Only after modernity did they come to be thought of as the visual arts. And in fact, with the idea of what plastic really means, music would actually also be a plastic art. Although it wasn't referred to as such, at least not as often, so far as I know. The end product isn't something that the body or senses can grasp in the same way as a painting, building or sculpture. You can't walk around it, take it in, think about it, ect. Music leaves its traces on your memory and mind in a much different way, and you approach it differently. It is, however, still "plastic," in the sense described above. In terms of giving form to the formless. Of molding and modelling. Of giving order. The maker still has an image, a model, in mind, to which he is trying to give representation with the end product.

All of that is background information necessary before I can even begin to frame my response or answer. The framing of my response, then, is made of what will, I think, in the context of this conversation, become a re-contextualization of art, or a re-imaging of what art is and how it is “experienced.” The framing of my answer is also partially made of the history of western art.

A piece of art is a made thing or, rather, a thing being made. Its really that simple, and yet it gets quite complex. No thing is ever made without the mind. As mentioned, the one who gives order or form to something has an image or model in his mind to which he is giving representation with the end product. In turn, the end product then shapes the mind of one who experiences the piece of art. It gives form to the audience’s image of the world. You could also say, however, that the end product doesn’t stop being formed when the original maker puts it into the world as a made thing. Every time the audience experiences it, it is interpreted, and thus is reshaped, reformed, given meaning. The audience becomes a participant in the becoming of that product. The audience participates in what the made thing becomes in the world.

All this is to say two things. For one, art is PLASTIC. Two, you can’t really separate “art” from “reading a book,” categorizing “art” as stimulating the senses, while the “reading a book” stimulates the mind. They are both inherently intertwined. Art and the mind were just discussed. And your intellectual experience of reading a book would have no meaning or message to you without a whole system of signs that were given meaning by experiences in the sensible world. On top of that, a book, too, is a made thing. Someone shaped it, gave form and order to it as something that would have coherent meaning to others in the world. It becomes a body of thought and enters the realm of textual discourse that – hey, shapes – the world.

You also really can’t separately categorize arts that stimulate the eye, ear, or mind. In which category does architecture belong? Or film!? Ballet: Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake”? John Cage’s “In a Landscape” is a piece of music! Similarly, any piece of “visual” art (painting or sculpture) that doesn’t have good RHYTHM or HARMONY (attributes usually given to musical works) not only won’t hold together well as a work of art (that has been given form, shape and order) but it will be downright ugly. The same goes for film, actually!

Now, to speak more specifically to a question of VISUAL art, I need to address the history of Western art. I defer here to Marshall McLuhan:

The dominant organ of sensory and social orientation in pre-alphabet societies was the ear – ‘hearing was believing.’ The phonetic alphabet forced the magic world of the ear to yield to the neutral world of the eye. Man was given an eye for an ear.

Western history as shaped for some three thousand years by the introduction of the phonetic alephbet, a medium that depends solely on the eye for comprehension. The alphabet is a construct of fragmented bits and parts which have no semantic meaning in themselves, and which must be strung together in a line, bead-like, and in a prescribed order. Its use fostered and encouraged the habit of perceiving all environment in visual and spatial terms – particularly in terms of a space and of a time that are uniform,
c,o,n,t,i,n,u,o,u,s
and
c-o-n-n-e-c-t-e-d.

The line, the continuum
-this sentence is a prime example-

became the organizing principle of life….

Visual space is uniform, continuous, and connected. The rational man in our Western culture is a visual man. The fact that most conscious experience has little ‘visuality’ in it is lost on him…

Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, by terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog…

Whence did the wond’rous mystic art arise,
Of painting SPEECH, and of speaking to the eyes?
That we by tracing magic lines are taught,
How to embody, and to color THOUGHT?

Printing, a ditto device confirmed and extended the new visual stress. It provided the first uniformly repeatable ‘commodity,’ the first assembly line – mass production. It created the portable book, which men could read in privacy and in isolation from others. Man could now inspire – and conspire.

Like easel painting, the printed book added much to the new cult of individualism. The private, fixed point of view became possible and literacy conferred the power of detachment, non-involvement.

The Renaissance Legacy.
The Vanishing Point = Self-effacement,
The Detached Observer.
No Involvement!

The viewer of Renaissance art is systematically placed outside the frame of experience. A piazza for everything and everything in a piazza.

The instantaneous world of electric informational media involves all of us, all at once. No detachment or frame is possible.

Art, or the graphic translation of a culture, is shaped by the way space is perceived. Since the Renaissance the Western artist perceived the environment primarily in terms of the visual. Everything was dominated by the eye of the beholder. His conception of space was in terms of a perspective projection upon a plane surface consisting of formal units of special measurement. He accepted the dominance of the vertical and the horizontal – of symmetry – as an absolute condition of order. This view is deeply embedded in the consciousness of Western art.

Primitive art and pre-alphabet people integrate time and space as one and live in an acoustic, horizonless, boundless, olfactory space, rather than in visual space. Their graphic presentation is like an x-ray. Thay put in everything they know, rather than only what they see. A drawing of a manmn hunting a seal on an ice floe will show not only what is on top of the ice, but what lies underneath as well. The primitive artist twists and tilts the various possible visual aspects until they fully explain what he wishes to represent….

Electronic circuitry is recreating in us the multidimensional space orientation of the ‘primitive.’

Ours is a brand-new world of allatonceness. ‘Time’ has ceased, ‘space’ has vanished. We now live in a global village…a simultaneous happening. We are back in acoustic space. We have begun again to structure the primordial feeling, the tribal emotions from which a few centuries of literacy divorced us.

- From the medium is the MASSAGE, by marshall McLuhan (pp. 44-63)

A couple of things to take from that:

Yes, to some degree, there are different kinds of art for different senses. But its not like painting is for the eyes and music the ears, and since in a piece of architecture you can touch it, see it and hear things, its for the nose, eyes and ears. As McLuhan reveals, the question is more complex than that. As McLuhan says elsewhere, technologies (made things!) are extensions of man. He shapes his tools, and they, in turn, shape him. The art of each age, almost regardless of the medium, will reveal a man who is primarily visual, acoustic, or what have you.

Corbusier spoke of “visual acoustics” when making sense of the relationship between his architecture and his painting. The difference between Gregorian chant and Bach reveals the difference between an acoustic man and a visual man. Synthetic cubism is a bit more acoustic than analytic cubism, which is more visual.

Something else. My dear engineer friend said the following: “if I want to be entertained through my ears, I'll go to a concert…But if visual art is not visually appealing - then is it art?” But Marshall McLuhan rebuts him with this: “Art, or the graphic translation of a culture…” A background piece of factual information to McLuhan’s spiel on the detached observer being born in the Renaissance is that perspective was actually invented in the early Renaissance in Florence, in 1404, by an architect named Brunelleschi. There was no such thing as “entertainment,” even then, but “perspective” set the stage for it. McLuhan says that acoustic space is participatory, but, just the same, it takes a detached, visual man to make detached, visual art. Art is not framed and hung on a wall; art is the embodiment of its culture.

The idea of subjective aesthetic judgment, in contrast to objective truth, also seems to be implied by “if I want to be entertained through my ears, I'll go to a concert…But if visual art is not visually appealing - then is it art?” This is already very long, and can easily be a while other topic. But for this purpose, I will just say that subjective aesthetic judgment would not be possible without disembodied visual observation. Embodied truth is “objective.” The same mathematics that govern the human body give order and beauty to a work of art (again, technologies are the extensions of man).

That is all, then, for the framing of my answer. To actually, then, give my answer, which was partially given in the framing of it:

A book is a piece of art, too. A painting not only stimulates the mind but would be utterly meaningless without it.
The different crafts can’t really be categorically broken up in accordance with a rule that says particular ones belong to particular senses (or faculties).
Art is not detached entertainment, but an embodiment of its culture and a reflection and extension of the man who made it (your house is a work of art just as much as the Van Goh print that hangs on its wall).
The beauty of art lies in the beauty of man and the world, not in “the eye of the beholder” (see the highlighted link).
When art DOES become categorically broken up between the senses, detached entertainment, judged according to subjective aesthetic opinion and devoid of “objective” truth, and primarily visually appealing, then you end up with McArthur Mall (again, see highlighted link).

On Tithing/Giving

2010-11-15T17:07:00.000-08:00

Disclaimer: I originally sent this as a private message to a friend who wanted to hear about tithing, so I apologize if at any point the intended audience seems mixed. I am going to try to modify it where appropriate for a blog, but in some ways it may not be possible.....

I want to speak of tithing in a particular order of things. I want to put it in its place, in its context of the overall story of what God has done and is doing on earth, of God’s love, and of our response to that love. Of God’s kingdom coming to rise up on earth and obliterate all the sickness and perversity and power plays that work to bring everything and everyone down. I don’t think I can just start blabbing away about tithing as if it is disconnected from a larger reality. So….

That larger reality starts with the overwhelming, unconditional, unstoppable and forever love of God...for YOU. When I went to the prayer vigil on Saturday that pretty much marked the end of my [church-wide 40 day] fast [not from food, for most members, including myself], I walked into the sanctuary, and was immediately overwhelmed. I had tears in my eyes before I uttered a single word of prayer in my mind, on my heart or through my mouth. I was wondering what was going on, and, still before I said one word of prayer, God spoke directly to me (this doesn’t happen too often), saying: “I love you. I have always loved you. I will always love you. I can never not love you, because I am God.” One of the names for God is Jehovah Jireh, which is typically translated as “The Lord will provide”, or “Lord Provider”, or something of the sort. God’s provision for us can never be separated from his abundant and never ending love that could never run out.

The story from which that name for God originates is that of Abraham’s near sacrifice of his only son Isaac. Keep in mind that God had promised, through a sacred covenant, to bless Abraham as a FATEHR OF NATIONS. And yet Abraham was like 100 years old or something crazy, with no kids. Then Abraham finally has his one and only young son (who was supposed to be near the head of the genetic line of MANY NATIONS), and God tells him to go to a particular mountain to sacrifice this precious boy. Abraham actually listens – out of pure and simple obedience!

Here are Abraham and his son trekking on up the mountainside with firewood, fuel to light the fire, ect, and do you think Isaac was wondering where the sacrifice was? Just as Abraham was about to bring the knife down on the boy, who at this point was tied to a stone altar that he had probably helped his dad build, and an angel stops Abraham, and tells him that now he knows he “fears” God. Keep in mind that in the Bible “fear of God” doesn’t mean “fear.” It means something like “silent wonder”, “radical amazement” and “affectionate awe.”

Just then Abraham SEES a ram caught by the thorns in the thicket that can be sacrificed in the place of his son Isaac. What “Jehovah Jireh” actually means in Hebrew isn’t so much “provider” as “The Lord Who Sees,” or “The Lord Who Will See To It.” In other words, the Lord is always with us, always here to care for us and our DEEPEST needs, no matter the circumstances – OUT OF HIS GREAT LOVE FOR US. The master of the universe watches over us in care. WE ARE NOT ALONE.

What God said to Moses in appointing him to lead the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt was: “I’ve taken a good, long look at the affliction of my people in Egypt. I’ve heard their cries for deliverance….I know all about their pain. And now I have come down to help them.” 2,000 years later God’s one and only begotten son was sacrificed in my place to bring me out of my slavery to my uncontrollable and destructive life of sin and into a land of freedom and opportunity, where I am now in a place of greater freedom and joy than I have ever been.

Which brings me to the idea of OUR RESPONSE to this incredible love of God, who wants to be ever closer to us and will never let go. The way that Jesus most often referred to God in speaking about Him and praying to Him is typically translated as “Father.” But that is utterly misleading. This was the same word in their native Aramaic that a 2 year old toddler used when he was about to jump into the arms of his “DADDY” at dinner time with a huge smile on his face and a look of utter trust and delight in his eyes. Out of this simple trust in the One who created….everything, lol….the obvious response is simply to love Him back. To listen to what he says, and do it – just like that 2 year old. And trust that it is for the best. “Let the little ones come to me.” Obviously, for a long time when I was aware of God’s love, I did not do that.

What God wants is our HEART. What else can we give to God Himself? He just wants to be close to us, and He has done everything to get our attention, to woo us.

From Mark, Ch. 12: “Jesus sat down opposite the place where the offerings were put and watched the crowd putting their money into the temple treasury. Many rich people threw in large amounts. But a poor widow came and put in two very small copper coins, worth only a few cents. Calling his disciples to him, Jesus said, ‘Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others. They all gave out of their wealth; but she, out of her poverty, put in everything—all she had to live on.’”

What she gave was her heart, and God in the flesh was impressed, and very happy! I can hear the excitement in his voice! So then on a practical level, he also said: “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” He did not say that your heart gets all ushy mushy and full of joy and generosity, and then you give out of such a spirit. He said to simply put your money in the hands of God, and that’s where your heart, your trust, your mind and your strength will be also. The command in the Old Testament for tithing was that the Israelites give their first fruits. We give to God from the top of the harvest for a reason.

So all in all, the reason to give a tenth of our income to God right off the top is that it is a humble, awe inspired, small and utterly pitiful return on God’s investment in His very Life of love for you and me (most primarily demonstrated in the death and resurrection of His Son on the cross). But there is a little bit more reason, too, which is sort of an added bonus :D Luke 6: 38: “Give, and you will receive. You will be given much. It will be poured into your hands – more than you can hold. You will be given so much that it will spill into your lap. The way you give to others is the way God will give to you.” I’m not an expert on this one, because I’m too much of a saver still at this point in my life, I guess. But my pastor and his wife have literally given EVERYTHING away three times now, in an effort to out-give God, and they have failed miserably, lol. He now drives a corvette.

From Malichi, Ch. 6: “’I the LORD do not change. So you, the descendants of Jacob, are not destroyed. 7 Ever since the time of your ancestors you have turned away from my decrees and have not kept them. Return to me, and I will return to you,” says the LORD Almighty.

‘But you ask, ‘How are we to return?’

‘Will a mere mortal rob God? Yet you rob me.

‘But you ask, ‘How are we robbing you?’

‘In tithes and offerings. You are under a curse—your whole nation—because you are robbing me. Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. Test me in this,’ says the LORD Almighty, ‘and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it. I will prevent pests from devouring your crops, and the vines in your fields will not drop their fruit before it is ripe,’ says the LORD Almighty. ‘Then all the nations will call you blessed, for yours will be a delightful land,’ says the LORD Almighty.”

The other thing God said to me directly, this one once I was already in prayer during the prayer vigil on Saturday? “Turn to me, and I will heal your land. Rather than be angry and bitter at the world’s sickness, turn to me, and I will heal your land. Turn to me, and you will see that I will not fail you."

Interestingly, after Malichi wrote the above about “testing God in this” (the only place the Bible says to test God), the Israealites actually listened to Malichi, lol. So then the storehouses for overflowing when a great famine came through the land. And guess who was feeding who at that point? Yes, Egypt, formerly Israel’s slave driver, was coming to get the crumbs off their table.

As one of my best friends in Los Angels said (with whom I ran the coolest open mic in LA, by many accounts): “You get what you give.” Its like a fundamental universal law or something, lol. As an example unrelated to money in particular, I wrote this in my journal as a realization I had during that prayer vigil: “Before the 40 day fast, I didn’t really think it was possible for my needs for intimacy with that special someone to be met [at least, that is much of my history] Just as I didn’t think purity was possible. God changed my heart, my faith, and my very view of what sexuality and intimacy is about, bringing an order. I gave sex its proper place in relation to God and intimacy (basically), and now it all seems possible together.”

Then of course there’s the idea of tithing as a kind of spiritual discipline of “character formation”, as some folks in Christian circles call it. Basically for me this simply means that I am aware that at any moment I could or am prone to becoming a greedy douche bag who wants to hoard all my money and resources for myself, whether monetary resources, emotional resources, spiritual resources (in prayer, for example) or my time. Giving helps me to be more generous with all of those things, and just more generous and free spirited and joyful in general.

So yeah I think I’m done with my passionate rant now lol.

How Tears Came To Be

2010-11-14T21:07:00.000-08:00

One day in my third year of architecture school I was sitting in studio, very intently drawing some geometric forms after having read "The Poem of the Right Angle" by one of my favorite architects, and suddenly everything clicked. See, my professor seemed to be on to something ever since I had met him in first year. That was why I took him third year. I spent about two thirds of that third year moping around, because I couldn't figure out what he was talking about....ever. But I knew, by intuition, that somehow it was all connected, and that somehow he was correct in what he was saying.

Then suddenly this day, with this poem and architect in the background, drawing geometric configurations of how things come to be in the world (I realized as I was drawing them), it all clicked. I was filled with exhilaration and excitement, and was covered in goose bumps. I was so excited I was jumping up and down, and everyone around me (the late stragglers in our 3 hour studio class, who were having some typical deeply intellectual conversation with my professor and hadn't yet gone to dinner) was wondering what on earth was going on, lol. It wasn't the kind of thing you keep to yourself, so I had to go over to them and share. I felt a kind of high for the next day or so.

Well today something happened to me that reminded me of that experience. I had what has been for me lately an unusual period of almost two hours to sit, relax, read, and spend time with God as best you can in the middle of Starbucks. I have been reading Every Man's Battle (which I finished a little while ago) and Every Man's Marriage (even though I'm single), and I have gotten to the end of the Marriage one, where he starts to talk about sex. I am toward the end of the book, so I was expecting to finish with time to spare before I had to be at work. But he kept saying such simple things that were so profound and hit me so deeply that I found myself stopping, thinking and praying often (subtly, since I was in Starbucks).

I guess my heart must have softened, because the next thing I knew my life was flashing before my eyes, I was having a deep moment of repentance at the core of my soul, and I had tears streaming down my cheeks - right there in the middle of Starbucks. Just from reading the following rather simple few of sentences: "God knew our desire for intimacy - and how we could attain it - from the beginning. He knew that women give and receive intimacy through sharing, talking, hugging, and touching. After all, He created her so that men might not be lonely. These traits are perfectly fitted to that purpose."

The train of the authors thoughts were obviously heading somewhere, but he blew me right off his tracks with that, lol. I felt the same kind of exhilaration I felt that day in the middle of studio while drawing geometric forms, as well as the same desire to share with others this seemingly universal and powerful truth that had just hit me so squarely between the eyes!

So I had to stop reading, because "it all came together" for me! Just as I put so much energy in college into trying to figure out what my professor was saying, I have spent similar amounts of time, energy, and willpower lately trying to piece my sexuality back together after a lifetime of brokenness. I had mentioned that I was moping around campus that year, but recently I've been on this journey full of hope and joy, deeply moved by a new found faith in myself, in God, and in God's plan for my life. Suddenly lately, life-long purity seems possible, so its obviously an occasion for joy. And just as I couldn't quite grasp what my college professor was saying but had enough intuition to know he was correct, I knew the author of this Every Man series was onto something.

I was excited and inspired by everything he said about purity in Battle, and about how service, sacrifice and (mutual) submission edifies your wife (and the husband) in Marriage and tends to give her a feeling of intimacy, thus bringing life to the marriage bed (which is such a stronger and more central desire for the husband)....but....there was something more. Simply, why? Why was all of this so true? Architecturally, when I find myself asking why questions, I know enough by now to know that they are usually a clue to look back to the beginnings of whatever it is I'm asking about. But in the area of my sexuality, my weakness, my blindness, I couldn't see clearly enough to even think to look back to the beginning. Nor even to consciously ask "why?" And yet here was some relatively simple-minded macho-manly almost-anti-intellectual author - with a core theological notion about some funny "sin nature" and a thoroughly modern anthropology I don't enjoy or agree with - answering a profoundly simple question that I hadn't even thought to ask!! And in such a powerful way, with utter nonchalance, that he left me in tears. How humbling, lol.

And of course, because "it all came together" I saw ever so clearly how I had been tearing it apart for my entire life! In the presence of God, and with no thoughts of beating myself up over it, I was in full realization of just how in the wrong I'd been my whole life! I saw just how utterly blind and selfish I have always been. God set it up PERFECTLY - not only "IN MY FAVOR", but as a kind of "favor" to me ("God saw that it was not good for man to be alone") - and up until recently I have been doing EVERYTHING I POSSIBLY CAN to obliterate the fragile picture of unity, wholeness and intimacy that God painted on the souls of a man and a woman - FROM THE VERY BEGINNING.

God took her from man's rib. Woman CAME FROM MAN to be his companion. This is a rather deep and profound truth that I had intuited enough to ponder, but never really understand. This is another dose of "it all coming together" after my spending so much time, energy and willpower seeking after an amazing realization that included the simple fact that God made woman from man as his companion and then gave her all the most perfect gifts and desires for relationship at the core of her soul (such as being hospitable, sympathetic, caring, nurturing and a good judge of character) to meet that purpose and reflecting that origin. And lets not forget the never ending and amazing mystery of her beauty that draws us as well, and gives us all the more extra reason to cherish her and build her up! How amazingly magnificent for both the man and the woman!!

I mean, there it is right there in the script for the universe from the beginning, in plain English, ever so simple, and I not only missed it, but I trampled all over it with the way I constantly objectified women sexually (I mean in general, but not in every instance, of course, but you get the point). I ran hard after sexuality to find intimacy, while God, from the very beginning, had ALREADY SET IT UP for me to have the intimacy I was looking for, out of which sexuality arises!! How foolish could could I have been!? I could have said whatever I wanted about the value of woman and her gifts and tried to understand and listen to her as best I could, but my actions told the truth. I was being a selfish pig, and my selfishness blinded me to a reality not only of who Woman is, but to an ever so much greater general reality in harmony with how the universe came to be.

"Male and female He made them in his image." I guess there is a reason why marriage is depicted in the Bible as being analogical to worship. The joy of such a realization, combined all in the same moment with being impressed by the Holy Spirit to the point of such conviction of how wrong I have always been in my actions, thoughts and attitude - and in such a gentle and non-violent way - was overwhelming to me. So there I was, crying cleansing tears of joy and repentance all in one in the middle of Starbucks, lol. And I have felt high ever since.

2010-10-01T04:12:00.000-07:00

I originally wrote this on July 23, 2006. Recently going through something emotionally difficult, but remaining standing (as opposed to wilting into a sense of shame, despair and worthlessness, as I once would do when experiencing something painful enough to not fully understand my feelings), has reminded me of it again.

Below is a testimony I gave in church this morning, as mentioned in my previous post:

When I began to think and pray about the story I wanted to tell about one way that God brought me out of the darkness and into the light, a piece of the Hebrew scriptures came to mind. I pictured the Isrealites wondering through the wilderness, with Egypt in their dust and the promised land before them. I thought of the holiness of the tabernacle and how the social organization of the community was based on that. The “uclean”, those with leprosy or physical deformities for example, were always left on the outside of the camp. I thought of that social organization because, in that situation, when remembering back to my childhood, and in some ways a bit more recently, I could identify with the leapors who were cast out from the community.

As a kid I was the one who got picked on. Now, we all get picked on as kids, and I think we all generally get over it pretty much by the time we are in college. I’d say in that sense my story isn’t that much different from any one else’s. But I think, for me at least, such a starting point in life starts a train of history that takes on new masks over time. It might still be present later on even though you have healthy friendships and are no longer the guy who gets picked on.

As a kid, for me, it was REALLY bad. In some sense I was actually like those unclean Isrealites not allowed inside the camp. I was born with cleft lip and palette, leaving my lip scarred and deformed, and also my nose a bit crooked and funny looking. Both of those features for me were more noticeable when I was a kid than now, partially simply because now I have a mustache. Also partially because I’ve had some reconstructive surgery on my nose to help alleviate medical problems that came as a result of my deformities. As a kid I was also the short little runt who had to struggle mightily in every way just to be able to participate in all the things kids do. And some things I just couldn’t do. I couldn’t throw a football as far, for example. I certainly didn’t have the power to hit a baseball as far or throw it as hard, even though in little league I wanted to be a pitcher.

Now, so far you might think that my being cast out could have just been a misconception that I was making up in my head. I assure you, that was not it. I have plenty of memories of very hurtful things done to me by the kids in the neighborhood, whether intentionally hurtful or not. I do remember that, in general, I was the butt of all the jokes, some of which were more hurtful than others. One less intentionally hurtful thing I remember was one cold winter morning when a couple of older neighborhood bullies ran around the bus stop handing off to each other with me chasing them futily my funny-looking Redskins floppy toboggan with a fuzzy ball on the end. An example of a particularly scarring incident was when one of the kids in the neighborhood, the other short guy (but not as short as me) when we got off the bus followed me home wanting to fight me. And I assure you, it wasn’t because of anything I had said. Looking back on it, I now realize it was a power trip on his part. But at the time I did not understand that, and the lesson I came away with is that the world is an unpredictable monster out to eat me, hurt me, scratch me, and beat me down - all randomly and for no reason as if that was just the world’s purpose.

Around the time of the beginning of college is when I had the reconstructive surgery on my nose. Wrapped up in the same surgery was my jaw getting broken in four places and put back together with four metal plates and sixteen metal screws. Such things for me by that time weren’t so abnormal, and I was in Intensive Care for four days. Soon after that, when I went into the doctor for my checkup, he told me that he could “make my nose more symmetrical if I wanted”. By this point in my life, my answer to that was a hearty no. I wore my crooked nose and scarred lip like a badge of honor. I felt like I had been through a rough battle and come through standing, alive and but covered in blood. I think of the scene in Braveheart when the smaller, dirtier, under-fed, less-equipped army of Scotts unexpectedly defeated the great and vast English army. William Wallace is left standing tall, sword in the air, breathing heavily, yelling victory. More importantly, I think of the wounds of Christ on the cross. The blood runs down the wood of the cross, pours off of its edge and covers me as I sit at its foot.

This past year during our church’s intensive and community-centered leadership training, which we call “E4” (based on Ephesians 4: 11-16), during which time we focus as much on building healthy relationships as studying the Word, I came to realize that the train-wreck of my history was in fact still present in my life. Not so much in terms of my own not being accepted by my peers. I was no longer the butt of the jokes. I was no longer the short little runt. OK, not as much. And I certainly didn’t any longer experience so many of the hurtful things that filled my childhood. But what I discovered in prayer and community with God is that that train of pain had lead to my being an ass hole. Essentially judgemental, angry, bitter, isolated and alone, essentially. It was in the light of God’s love and community that God brought these painful parts of myself to the light, as gently asked me to begin correcting them.

One especially powerful time of this past year in E4 was at a weekend-long retreat with a famous speaker named Brennan Manning (author who wrote The Ragamuffin Gospel). He made it clear that he was not there to speak to anyone who had any illusions about themselves or God. He was there to speak to the tired, the weary, the broken-hearted and the down-trodden. I thought, “Hey, that’s me”! And sure enough, that weekend, I was swept away. I remember certain things. I remember Brennan’s YELLING “GOD CANNOT STOP LOVING YOU.” “God’s love is not like your mother’s or your father’s love. God’s love does not stop. It is not conditional in any way. If God were to stop loving you, He would not be God.” “Come now my love, my lovely one come. For you the time of winter has passed. The time of spring has come. Come now my love, my lovely one come.” Not only was the entirety of my being, my heart, my mind, my spirit, my head, my eyelids, my fingernails and my shaking knees, SWEPT AWAY by the love of God that weekend, but I experienced a sense and practice of community that rivals any other time in my life.

I came away from that weekend in full realization that everything that I do is a part of who I am, and God’s love overwhelmes and overtakes every aspect of my being. I came away from that weekend inspired by the Holy Spirit to be more open, vulnerable and loving. I came away from that weekend a little bit less of an ass hole, inspired to be less judgemental, less mean-spirited, less shelfish, and generally more caring and accepting of others. I came away more inspired to accept others into my camp. Not to judge as a reaction to my being judged or criticized, but, like God, to be unable to stop loving.

Gates of Pearl

2010-05-21T15:54:00.000-07:00

Who are you loving if the dream is that everything in life goes the way you want it? What is love if it doesn't forge through trial and pain? Is it worth its weight in gold if it doesn't have the power to raise the dead or love the unlovable? What is life if its not big enough to hold your pain? Because your pain is a jewel, worth more than its weight in gold.

John 15: 13

2010-03-28T17:50:00.000-07:00

I heard this story tonight, and had to share:

Two butterflies r close frndz.
One day .........
1st butterfly: Let us play a game.
2nd butterfly: Ok
1st: Tomorrow mrng who sit on dis flower first, dat one has a true frndship.
2nd: Ok
The next day early mrng the 1st butterfly waiting to sit on dat flower .
The flower opened.
2nd butterfly was dead inside dat flower.

It stayed whole nite in d flower to show it's TRUE FRIENDSHIP.....!!!

Funny Conversation of the Day

2010-03-23T11:25:00.000-07:00

Jo: "So were you successful?"
Me: "In what?"
Jo: "In finding it?"
Me: "In finding what?" The meaning of life?"
Jo: "Noooo.....Harpers Road."
Me: "OH. Yes."

To Snip, or Not to Snip?

2010-03-22T18:20:00.000-07:00

You saw the title and thought this was about birth control, didn't you :p No. This is a funny story that my friend Tammy told me last night. It was good enough that I wanted to share it with my blogging audience, basically unedited :)

[Beginning]

For the last month or so , have been having internet problems...i have cable internet. I have used the same company, modem..etc..years..not a problem. I also use VOIP for my home phone, so no internet..no home phone. (i do have a cell as back up though)

So earlier this month....my modem, and internet just started going offline...would do it a few hours, then come back. I called my company, they couldn't see the problem at their end, so they set up a service call with the cable company to come have a look. That was on the 11th.

Btw, i live in an apt building. Early this month, i got new neighbors. Like 3 or 4 guys from Haiti moved in next door. Ok lol so the reason i mention this is, before the cable guy visit on the 11th...guy next door comes over ( at this point, my internet was mostly working but i chose to not cancel the appt ) so he comes to my back door, and introduces himself...asks if he's been loud next door, things like that. Then asks me if my cable is working.

I say yes, its fine...tho i have had internet probs off and on. He says his isn't . I'm like..oh..well call them. Whatever..guy goes home.
I come back in, sit down, about 2 mins later..my internet is down again. Am cursing. lol
Talking to my friend Steph i jokingly say , watch if my new neighbours arent splicing into my cable :O

The 11th comes, cable comes over..cant find a problem..replaces some parts, just in case. Puts a booster on my line cuz apparently i'm getting low (something) and goes.
My internet is good for ...about a week.
Yesterday goes down again....i'm goddammit! Call the Internet company, now they are convinced i need a new modem.

That has to be it. So i take my kids with me, we go downtown..grab that and stay for dinner and a movie. Get back home i set that all up ...stilll no internet.
Internet company is totally confused...they set up another appt with the cable company for this wednesday. (Meanwhile i have no phone, or internet ~ cable is fine tho).

So am on my cell with my friend Steph again, talking about how this makes no sense. Why is my line suddenly not working...just this past month??
Neighbor topic comes up again...i'm like, i'm going to look outside. So its dark..i have my cell with me, go out on my balcony...see where the cable goes into this box, i look over next door. The two boxes are connected sort of. I look closer. There's this black cable coming out of the corner of their back door.

Now i'm all...WTF lol and its going towards the cable place. So Steph says, i'm gonna run over and look too.
So she comes over. Agrees with me..this looks bad. I'm tempted to run over with wire cutters and see if that fixes my problem lmao
Seriously..VERY tempted. We decide we'll go over and ask if their cable is working :P
So she goes...says..excuse me, we're just wondering if your cable is working cuz ours is out. Phone and internet too. He's all . No its fine, we're watching right now...i'll come over and look at it .

Steph is all...no no..thanks , we're calling the company.
She comes back here...so we decide...we're calling the cable company to see if they do have cable lol
The guy there listens to our story...tells us about privacy issues BUT....says ...i can tell you apt 101 (my super) has cable...apt 103 (me) has cable...that's it.
Me: 102( neighbours) ?
Him : apt 101...apt 103...
lol
so were like, ooooh ok.thank you.

Steph has to get home, so she leaves.....i'm here talking to my son, with my back door closed. And we hear the neighbours door open....then the gate to my balcony.
I have my hand on the door knob...waiting for a knock...nothing...nothing..nothing.
I yank open the door and there's my neighbour..half turned to take off.
I'm like..YES?
He's all....uh....is your cable working now?
Me: NO..the company is sending a guy over.
He's all oh , ok...uh bye....
takes off...

I come back in....look at my modem....1, 2, ..3....5 mins....ooooh
wait...whats this??? oh its my internet. I am online , whaddya know :P
So i talked to security put in a complaint, especially for the sneaking around on my balcony...then to the super...and am waiting to hear from the cable guys tomorrow.

Honestly, had they just stolen the damn cable..i dont care lol but my INTERNET?? putting me offline...OH NO..no no no!

I was talking to my son about it again tonight, was in the kitchen setting up my coffee for morning..counting scoops...and i said, i still want to sneak over and cut that cable . We were all laughing and he says...Mom...your not batman. You can go around with a cape and wire cutters taking cable justice into your own hands.
LOL i was dying, i was laughimg so hard. Spilled freakin' coffee grinds everywhere. :D

And that is my story...it was just a long day from running to pick up a modem for nothing, spending most of the evening out to coming back to no internet..never ending phone calls between internet\cable\super...spying outside..neighbors on my balcony ..oh and we got a pic of that wire in case it disappears later ; ) lol
Like i said, tiring yesterday...funny today

[the Next Day Update]

You thought I was talking about a pregnancy test, didn't you? No. Lol. This is an update to the story from this evening, thanks to Tammy's lovely self :) Lol. Here we go....

Ok so i got a call today, lady says..its the cable company, we're in the neighborhood and can we come by if this is a good time for you.
Me? hell yes! :P (since i thought i had to wait till wednesday to get someone to come out)
So he shows up, at first i'm getting a bit of 'whats the problem lil' lady attitude because my modem is up and working '

So i brief him on the story..basically what i sent you before lol
Now he's interested...so he goes outside, leaves my balcony , goes onto the neighbours and looks around. I hear him laughing. He pulls out his phone and talks to the office..telling them basically what i thought, guy is spliced into my cable with this very apparent cord going under his door into his apt.
They had gotten into the casing , set up a splitter and ran it in.
I have no idea if they are home, but my cable guy is loud lol

nd lets remember, 5 guys next door...Tammy and 2 kids over here.
So i'm listening to him, he's telling him how he found this splicing...came to check a problem at my place, etc....then he sort of slips and i hear, she said they were steal....Me at the door *ahem ahem..clearing throat loudly...pssst....a-n-o-n-y-m-o-u-s...is what i'm mouthing to him...laughing tho. And he continued his story in a much more 'he's totally responsible for finding this whole thing' sort of way. lol
I did turn back to my oldest and say...'cable guy is trying to get us killed :P ' ....Jokingly of course lol we just have that kind of sense of humor in this house

Anyway, he took pictures..will be coming back around to see in a week if they are still tampering with it...and did indeed snip the wire ( i kind of felt i should of got that honor but hard to stay anonymous that way ) lol
He also took the splicer with him and left no doubt the company was here and aware.

So that's my update....so far no visits..nothing. I'm here, so Internet is up...
P.S on the way out , i told cable guy the batman joke , he laughed his ass off :P

Btw, i just realized i went from 3-4 guys next door to 5...i don't know ok? But there's alot ! lol
Its like a fishing story.....'holds hands a few feet apart' it was THIS big....til the next retelling LOL

[Conclusion]

So yes the wire was "snipped", so to speak. But the woman of the house didn't get to do the honors herself :p Lol.

Why Avatar Is Apocalypse Now Again

2010-02-19T15:04:00.000-08:00

Why Avatar Is Apocalypse Now

I saw the new sensation in film in the new video game-like 3-D medium, so after watching Avatar I was trying to think of the film that it reminded me of the most, and what came to mind was Apocalypse Now. In Apocalypse Now a kind of lone but skilled outcast captain whose best days seem behind him is sent on a mission far beyond the lines of combat in Vietnam (itself a kind of faraway mysterious land for us Americans) where he encounters a people who appear to us as very uncivilized and mysterious. The movie frames it as though he is sent on the mission by his superiors who don’t appear to have an actual military reason for the mission, but are simply interested holding on to established and apparently dead capitalist power and moral structures that have been not only stretched but broken by the target of the mission, a rogue general living amongst the perceived-to-be less than human savages and apparently being worshipped by them as a god.

It is also set in the midst such apocalyptic chaos that it takes on an other-worldly feel. In order to complete his mission, which is to assassinate the rogue general, the captain slowly takes on a kind of ancient ritual-like mask in action and personality that seems to fit his environment. When the captain finally arrives at the village where the general has been living, he is regarded by the local savages as a kind of alien being. They just step back and clear the way for him as he makes his way to the power center of the village to talk to the captain. He does not complete his mission at this time, and its almost as if its simply because his masking is not complete. After the culmination of this process, the moment when the mask finally comes on and the mission is completed, the captain again makes his way amongst the villagers, this time regarded as the new god, but with a strange similarity to how he was treated when he arrived at the village. He is no longer the man he was when he started the mission. He is something or someone new. But it is not possible to live out his new personhood in its proper context. All there is to do is leave behind this other world, and return to where he came from, a new alien in his new home.

In Avatar a loner and handicapped but very strong willed young ex-marine who gets around in a wheel chair is sent out on a reconnaissance mission amongst the mysterious, uncivilized and perceived-to-be less than human savage aliens. A huge private company of the future has occupied a faraway planet in the hopes of mining some highly valuable underground…stuff. Of course the savage aliens’ village sits right on top of the biggest underground field of this….stuff. So as in Apocalypse Now, the military figure head of this private company who sends the young man on his mission represents some capitalist power structures or forces that are taken to be not only less fixed-in-place than we often take them to be but also a bit frivolous, hypocritical, or even evil.

As in Apocalypse Now, the young man has to put on a kind of mask in order to carry out his mission. When he first arrives on the new planet, he has to wear an actual breathing mask and tank to get from space shuttle to base. So the mining company has developed a technology whereby humans can become their own “avatar”, which is a kind of simulation or replica of the form of the alien beings. The humans can lay inside of a kind of portal that also resembles a coffin. They in a sense go to sleep, and essentially become their avatar, in much the same way that the captain in Apocalypse Now lost himself and became a new person in order to carry out his mission and live amongst the alien people. In fact in Avatar there is a strange scene that parallels the two in Apocalypse Now when the captain first arrives at the village and just after carrying out his mission. The main character’s avatar actually flies in the midst of a sacred gathering of the alien people on the wings of a giant bird that they all regard as in a way sacred. He climbs off its back and just like on Apocalypse Now he walks straight to the power center of the gathering and is regarded in exactly the same way by the alien beings, as a kind of god.

Also as in Apocalypse Now, the young ex marine is no longer his former self at the end of the film. He actually becomes his avatar. Unlike in Apocalypse Now he does not return to his home as a new man, but he stays in his new alien land as a new alien. This is easily accepted, because the whole presumption of the film is that there is no home for him to return to. This is the shift from the early ‘70’s to the present.

Why Apocalypse Now and Avatar Are History

Here you can read the famous Cartography story by Jorge Luis Borges. In the story, the rise of Cartography corresponds historically to the rise of modern science and modernity in general (Cartography actually did become popular with modernity!). The ability and drive to build an exact scientific model or representation of the universe without gaps, whether mental or metaphysical or otherwise (like maybe an actual physical planetary model), and to map all the faraway distant corners of the earth.

In the story, the later generations let the map be destroyed by the elements. This corresponds to postmodernity. Everything has been found, so all that's left is to either loose it or live in fear of loosing it. This is our time, which had seeds much earlier but became popular conversation around the time when Apocalypse Now came out. When things became digital, TV became popular, and everyone could essentially be everywhere at once. The internet was inevitable at this point.

Why Avatar Is Apocalypse Now Again

Here you can read the first part of Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation. You only have to read the first page to get the idea and to see how it relates to this very blog post. Like Borges' Cartography story, it talks about the decline of the Empire, its ruins. These ruins are the chaos that is the context in which the captain swims in Apocalypse Now, as well as the presumption in Avatar that there is no home to return to. Now the map does not represent the territory, but the map precedes it. Now the avatar does not represent the man who it simulates, but the person is the person of the avatar. Interestingly, the title of chapter 5 of Simulacra and Simulation is….Apocalypse Now.

And remember that in both Apocalypse Now and Avatar the (military) forces that be represent decaying or dying capitalist power structures. In Avatar its even more pointed, because the military is actually a department of a giant private mining company which has gone to mine some crazy material under the surface of some faraway planet in another glaxy. Chapter 7 of Simulacra and Simulation, interestingly, is called “Hypermarket and Hypercommodity.” And again, Simulacra and Simulation begins by talking about our ruins. This is why I say that Avatar is Apocalypse Now again.

Quote of the Day

2009-12-16T06:15:00.000-08:00

"Of all the stupid ideas I've ever had in my life, this is the best one."
- one of the Mikes on Mike and Mike In The Morning this morning lol

A Brief History of (Property) Taxes: And How Taxes Really Do Relate To Death

2009-12-14T14:40:00.000-08:00

I just read a very interesting and informative on line paper called "A Brief History of Property Tax". I think that it was written by a liberterian (based on comments that he made on how high taxes were the primary reason for the downfall of the Roman empire), but nonetheless it was a very interesting read, regardless of his position. What lead me to reading this was when I was recently faced with the need to pay property tax on a car that I used to drive not to long ago. I got to wondering about why we pay property taxes, upon what basis they exist, and what the really are in the first place. I must say, I really didn't understand them at all. And not only did I not understand taxes in general very well, but property taxes, in themselves, were like the bright spot in a myspace mirror picture. You can't see anything in that portion of the picture, and because of the flash you imagine closing your eyes in the moment when the actual picture was taken. Funnily enough, toward the end of the paper, I learned that sales and income taxes came to supplant property taxes about the time of the end of WWII, which is when the eara of postmodern history - my time - was born.

A few highlights that I found most interesting:

Taxes in the ancient world were very low by our standards. In the Roman world and further back, I remember making mental note of property taxes (which were pretty much all the taxes at the time) as low as 1 percent.

In Medieval times, property taxes were raised to the level of a tithe, and paid to a "Landlord," who then paid a part of that to the king. These were only paid by wealthy landowners. For the peasants, their "taxes" were basically a portion of their crops, which were a kind of rent (I already kind of knew about that one). Humorously, around 1200 or so (I don't remember the exact date) an English Lord received a tax abatement when his wife paraded around the streets naked on a white horse to protest high taxes. I'm not sure if that means she was beautiful or repulsive on that horse. Lol.

Something I read that I must say I really didn't understand, concerns the US Colonies and their efforts to raise money for the Civil War. I read that the Northern and Southern states could not agree on good form of taxation, because the merchantile economy of the North lended itself to a different form of taxation of the South, which relied on weathly plantations (and more on poll taxes than income taxes, which seems backwards, if you have a bunch of rich landowners). I understand the basic idea that the two were different, and so had different interests in mind, and that the two would better raise money in different ways. But what I did not understand, is how the interests of the wealthy landowners of the South blocked the efforts of the North for more taxation at a national level with national control (to raise national funds to pay for the war). If I remember correctly, the States ended up taxing separately for the most part, and fowarding the necessary funds to the national army for the war.

Other very interesting stories involved efforts by citizens of early America to have some taxes lowered or removed. In all cases rebellions and violence were involved, and in once case the tax was actually removed, while the person in charge of the rebellion, who initially received the death penatly, went free. Also interestingly, the tax that he was rebelling against was one of the few taxes that could not be gotten around, because it was where the "tax assessors" count the number and sizes of the hearths in a home/estate in order to calculate the value of an estate and also the amount of tax owed. With other forms of property tax, people throughout history often just moved their assest around to different properties when they knew that the assessor was on his way, lol. It seems that they usually got away with it too. It also seems like this is probably the basis for how a lot of people try to get around taxes today (by "moving things around in the books"). That's just a bit of a wild guess, though.

And perhaps what I found to be most interesting about the whole thing, was that sales and income tax came to supplant property tax at right about that time when the world really lost its foothold to physical reality. When we entered what McLuhan calls the "electronic environment", and our world began to head toward a virtual one, and what people had was less and less determined by something that can be physically measured and seen, then things really changed drastically. Its not like you had property in the form of a hearth standing on the earth, or grain in a storehouse that an assessor would come by every so often and measure with his eye. When we entered what McLuhan also sometimes refers to as the "acoustic environment", what people have - at least moreso - is now a matter of a kind of metaphysical speculation.

So assessment is done by the traces of a constant and ever-changing flow. People don't move their assets to avoid taxation; what is taxed is already on the move anyway. The filing cabinet full of income check receipts, from which most of the money has already flown away someplace, is the new storehouse of grain that the assessor comes to measure. Is the cash register a kind of station point marking the end of a trip to a space of retail activity and the beginning of the new phase of barely measurable activity, or is it just the recorder of the vestiges of an endless river of sales activity for the tax assessor, a kind of frozen moment in time? At this station point where time dies for a moment, the inevitable happens, every time, no matter what, for everyone - a sales tax. No I was not referring to death, lol.

Lastly, what might have rivaled that last note about the shift in taxation methods around the time of WWII for the peak of my interest level is the fact that, from this brief overall survey of history, it appears as though the survival and livliness of a civilization does not depend so much on whether taxes are higher or lower at a given time in said history (and correspondingly whether goods and services are produced publicly or privately), but whether the taxes are decreed, administered and collected justly (in either case, whether the taxes are higher or lower). The biggest measure of this in history seems to be whether or not the tax collectors/assesors were pocketing extra for themselves. It seems to be a given that they kept some; that was part of their livelihood. But obviously if you have a whole group of corrupt tax collectors getting rich off of the people's property while the Roman army isn't getting paid (or while some other public need isn't being met), then you have problems. At that point, Rome was invaded by "the barbarians." Funnily enough, of the memorable quotes from the paper: "Taxes are what we pay for civilized society."

OH and I almost forgot. Probably the biggest lesson I learned from the read: the BASIS of taxation. Its simple. NEED. That's why taxes have often gone up in wartime. Simply because the government NEEDS more money. I guess that's why the utilitarianism of it has always struck me as a mere hassle. Its not that I have ever really minded paying taxes; its more that its struck me as kind of boring. Like a lowly activity. Like the difference between reading T.S. Eliot versus reading a weekly tabloid about celebrity escapades.

A Stormy Day

2009-11-12T16:35:00.000-08:00

OK so for those of you who don't know, we are having a huge storm here with lots of flooding and rain, and my tires have no treads left so i figured it would be good to get the tires changed on my car. So i dropped my car off at AAA this morning as I arrived at work, which is just next door. But the parking lot of my work was flooded, so with my umbrella in my left hand, big green bag slung on my shoulder and coffee in my right hand I was walking toward the street to get to work on the sidewalk. Uumm, just then, randomly, the wind broke my umbrella. So here I am, still holding the handle of the umbrella in my left hand, running (I mean lumbering, thanks to my giant green bag) toward the street trying to catch my newly ineffective umbrella. It was a little bit of an extra challenge, because I was also trying not to spill my coffee. I was also laughing really hard realizing that the people in AAA could see me. LMAO. Well I didn't catch it in time and the umbrella went in the street. God bless my umbrella; may it rest in peace, wherever the 50 mile an hour winds have taken it. So, still laughing really hard I ran (uumm, lumbered) to work as fast as I could, unsuccessfully trying not to spill my coffee all over myself. Lmao. I arrived with a bang (literally, as the wind blew the door shut behind me), still laughing really hard and still holding the handle to my umbrella up for all to see and gaze at with wonder and amazement.

A little while later I had to take a dump. OK so I was having stomach issues this morning :P And when I flushed, well everything KINDA went down, but not EVERYTHING. So I had to flush again. But everything else is flooded around here, so the toilet flooded too - all over the bathroom floor. Then, fittingly, I broke the mop trying to squeegie the water out of it, lmao. Many paper towels later, the bathroom floor was pretty much OK. But not my stomach. So a little while later I went into a different, newer bathroom, with a newer toilet. It flushed fine, but I'm sure everyone heard the toilet paper dispenser fall to the floor with a resounding crash when I tried to wipe. Then everyone probably heard me laughing and the toilet flushing successfully.

Then later at lunch time, since its raining like crazy and I have no car, we called Papa Johns for a pizza delivery. Yes, I called PAPA Johns after breaking the little mini john. Their internet is down, and they are not taking any orders. Lol. A fitting end to a funny morning. :)

Then later in the afternoon, when i went to pick up my car at AAA, i found out that they DID IN FACT see what happened between myself, the wind and my former umbrella; and they were in fact laughing. AND i found out what happened to the umbrella, lol. It blew down the street (behind me when I was running to work) and hit a car! :P

The end.

A Certain Kind of Synchoronicity

2009-08-12T12:03:00.001-07:00

I drink my coffee with lots of cream and sugar. And lately I've been drinking a lot of coffee. So a couple of weeks ago, when I went to do some field work at a local elementary school (measuring and taking notes), I naturally had my coffee with me. On my way out of the building, I realized that I didn't have my coffee with me. Being an air head, I naturally had no idea where in the vasness of that entire elementary school I had left it. I just drove back to the office, feeling guilty that I had left it somewhere for the nice janitor lady to have to pick up.

This morning, I went back to that same elementary school to put the finishing touches on my field work. Naturally, I had my coffee with me. I walked into one randomly chosen classroom that exemplified the typical conditions of many other classrooms like it in the school to take a few photographs. In order to take the photographs and make notes on my sheet of paper, I naturally put my coffee down. Being an air head, I walked out of the room without my coffee, which of course I didn't realize until I was half way back down the hall. I turned around, found the classroom I had just been in, and thought: “OK so where in this room did I leave my coffee?” I saw a 7-11 coffee cup just like mine sitting right next to where I had made my notes on my paper, so I picked it up and took a sip on my way out of the room.

Thank God there happened to be a water fountain just outside that particular class room, because that was the nastiest thing I have ever put in my mouth. I would not call it coffee, exactly. I was more like two week old gurdled half and half with a lot of sugar and cold coffee mixed in. When I poured it into the water fountain (after drinking a lot of water FROM said water fountain), there was some sort of unidentified slimy goo still stuck to the side of the cup. It was pretty nasty. And I drank it. Clearly the janitor had not picked up that coffee from two weeks ago. I no longer felt guilty, but I'm not so sure I'm happy with the trade off.

Now the kicker. On my way out of the elementary school today, I found myself thinking: “Now where on earth did I leave my coffee?”

True Story.

Quote of the Day

2009-03-23T05:29:00.000-07:00

The Positivist: "Put enough monkeys in front of a typewriter, and eventually you'll get a Shakespeare."

I like this quote because positivism usually just pisses me off, but this is funny. A mathematictian, btw, ACTUALLY SAID this...and MEANT IT.

:))

Baudrillardian Humor

2009-03-20T12:36:00.000-07:00

A few minutes ago I was in the conference room working on the specifications for a couple of projects in our office. One of the architects, to whom I was not connected before working here, and who thinks of architecture quite a bit differently from myself, was in the adjacent room talking to the secretary about something. The architect popped his head in the conference room: “Jason, did you see this?” Jason: “See what?” Architect: “The building I designed…here…on the secretary's computer.” Me: (walking toward the secretary's computer): “No.” The architect went on to explain about the color of the doors and the sun screens and some other stuff. Eventually I asked, “Did so and so do these renderings?” Architect: “No, these are photographs.” Me: “What? These are photographs, of the actual building!?”

And I wasn’t joking. I thought they were virtual renderings. I felt bad for a minute, because in my own head that said something about my judgement of the building. Generally I think that if its a good building, no one will mistake a photograph of the building for a virtual rendering, whereas if someone DOES make such a mistake, it clearly says something about the building, especially these days, in light of, for example, Baudrillard. Anyway, then I felt bad because I was thinking ironic thoughts about which the architect guy in my office, standing next to me, was clueless (uuhh, hence the irony). Then I felt bad that I had said something out loud that reflected the silent irony. Then I felt bad because I saw no hope of a way to communicate clearly about the misunderstanding. NOR did I see how it would help the situation if I were to say, "Oh wait, I didn't mean anything by that comment about the renderings." That would only give him a clue that our conversation would have lead to a negative judgement of his building in my head! Babylon...is wierd. And I am still confused about how I should have handled it.

Now maybe I can giggle about it instead of feel bad.

WHAT THE...!?

2009-02-19T11:57:00.001-08:00

Phil Jackson shaved!!

A Redskins Rant: Updated

2008-12-14T14:38:00.000-08:00

OK this isn't what this blog is usually for, but dernit I'm pissed about the Redskins and this is a Redskins venting post. They just now got done loosing to the previously 1-11-1 Bengals. They are now 7-7 and their season is effectively over with two games to go. There is nothing left. I won't be surprised if they loose the next two, one against Philly and the other against I forgot but someone at least halfway decent. I want to address three things in my rant. 1. How the F&^# did we loose to the BENGALS!? 2. What happened to the SEASON!? 3. What's worst of all, amongst those those depressing questions is, do the Redskins seem to have a FUTURE (and the answer seems to be no)?

1. I actually know a fair amount about football. I can typically watch a game and tell you exactly what happened. And not even factually like "So and so ran for so many yards and this guy had this turnover and that's what happened and it lead to this score." Usually NFL games are more complicated than that, and on top of that the involve a bit more of a macrocosmic view, if you will. They involve the whole history of a franchise, and...a game and even a play usually just involves a bigger picture. For example, last week the Redskins lost to the Ravens. The Ravens are like the Steelers. You generally won't out hit them, you can only keep up with them and hope to make some plays. Early in the game we found ourselves down 14 to null. At that point I predicted exactly what would happen. We would crawl back into the game (for a large variety of complicated factors), but then in the end the Ravens would win, basically because of something very simple: people get tired. And sure enough, the Redskins had climbed back into the game (were down like 7 or 10 points) and with 9 minutes or so left the Ravens go the ball, with the momentum belonging to the Redskins. The Ravens ran the ball down the throat of the Redskins, who typically have one of the best run defenses in the NFL (behind the Ravens and Stellers, btw), and ran out the clock for like 6 or 7 minutes (down to like the 3 minute mark or so) and scored a touchdown. Game over.

All that to say, I can follow an NFL game pretty well. But watching this Redskins-Bengals game - I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT HAPPENED! AND - I think that's because - what happend was...NOTHING! Nothing happened. Null, zero, nadda. At the beginning the Redskins turned it over. They stampeded us because we were playing like we were working on an assembly line, and from there on out they played like the horrible Bengals (but didn't do anything overly horrible mistake wise) and we played like the better team who was still working an assembly line, except our assembly line sped up a little. That is to say, we out played them statistically the rest of the way after the first quarter, but still lost. But I swear I can't really give you a real reason why we lost. We just...did. It feels like fate.

Update: I forgot to mention - Clinton Portis. He made the big hullabaloo outburst this week, but it didn't seem to have a lot to do with why we lost. I mean...he ran OK. Like everything else, our running game this week seemed pretty non-descript. It was like he ran and got nowhere sometiems, but then sometimes he had pretty good runs, and then he had a couple of heroic 2nd effort runs that got first downs. But like every other part of this game, it didn't really stand out but it also didn't really seem to be horrible, either. We just lost, and it feels inexplicably wierd and sad and crappy.

Update 2: Perhaps most disturbing as part of why we lost is that we played like we assumed we would win, when we had lost 4 of the last 5. Make it 5 of 6.

2. What happened to the season? We were 6-2 at the half way mark, and playing as well as anyone in the league. Everyone was saying that if we could get through the first 5 games with 3 wins, then we'd be golden, because of how tough the beginning of our schedule was. We got through the first 5 with 4 wins, but lost to what looked at that time to be pretty much the worst team in the league (they had just fired their head coach the week prior to our game against them) the Rams. We then beat the Browns, but barely (who were also pretty bad). That put us at 6-2, and high on everyone's list of "Wow" teams. I remember before the season looking at the schedule the second half and having two conflicting thoughts: "Umm, we have late games against good NFC East opponents, and records don't really matter in those games. But then we also have the Steelers and the Ravens late, and I'm not so sure our young defensive line and grandparenthood offensive line will do so hot against those two." Well, as it turns out, we got handled by both the Steelers and Ravens. The better teams clearly won both of those games, and it wasn't the Redskins. And we've lost to the Giants and Cowboys here in the second half. And we will probably loose to Philly at home now that the season is like the hot chick with a paper bag over her head - nothing to write home about (to ether your brother OR your Mom).

Oh and plus our offensive line is old like a piece of poop that was once good fertilizer but is now just dusty white crumbly stuff. They are all hurt and in pass protection they like fingers through which the sand crubmles and next thing you know Jason Campbell is on the ground. This was happenning a bit early in the year, too, but we were running the ball so well we were able to hide the problem. Now the line is so hurt that we can't run the ball, either, so with the still-new offensive system and what-not we just have no offense to speak of, really.

Update - back to the Clinton Portis thing. As I mentioned he had his outburst this week. Some people seem to be blaming the loss of the season on the players and their doing their own thing come hell or highwater despite whatever the coaches say or do. They cite Portis as a prime example. Well I can see their point, but Portis is a guy who is hard not to like, for all the reasons that Gibbs liked him. He's a workhorse. He plays through pain, which is more rare than it used to be, and he's just plain good. Before...everything...fell apart, he was the leading rusher in the NFL! I guess maybe to a degree he's a symptom of what's wrong with the team, but he's hard to blame with the loss of the season. I do think that maybe we'd be better off if the money spent on him were spent on the offensive and defensive lines and we had Ladell Betts and (a non-fumbling) Rock Cartwright as our running backs, but I'm not so sure of that. Portis is a heckufa player. And on top of that, I'm not even sure he was being selfish with his outburst. He would say that he was just doing what his Momma taught him to do, and...HE WAS! Considering where he came from, I respect the guy.

3. Redskins future? This is most disturbing at this point. I'm sad about the game, and I'm sad about the season, but I'd be less sad if I felt we had a future, but we don't. We seem to have a pretty darn good quarterback. Or, at least one who CAN be good. Especially, I think in the future, with his buddy Zorn. But the problem is, there are whispers that the Zorn man will be gone now that the season has tanked. And lastely, with that guy Snyder at the helm, our front office has has the patience of an 8 week old puppy who has to pee. The only guy who got any leeway was ALREADY in the Hall of Fame, and that was Joe Gibbs. I don't think Dan Snyder is Christian (could be wrong, of course), because next to Clinton Portis, Gibbs is God in the eyes of Vinny Snyderato. Well Gibbs couldn't get it done, and I think I might be with John Riggins on this one. Jim Zorn hasn't lost his locker room, his locker room has lost Jim Zorn. There is no righting this ship. Riggins says that the best thing to happen to Zorn might just be to get fired, because these players do what they want, as Clinton Portis proved this past Tuesday with his outburst on the radio show "The John Thompson Show" and as Santanna Moss proved with his 15 yard Unsportsmanlike Conduct penalty after a touchdown. But Zorn gone would mean something like 8 new offensive systems for Jason Campbell in 9 years.

In other words, we would suck again next year. But even if Zorn is back and Campbell puts up Hall of Fame numbers for a year, we will have an offensive line that is all like 400 pounds but also all like 40 years old. And you can't draft a good offensive line one year and then suddenly have an offensive line that can be the offensive line of a really good football team in 1 year. Its just not possible. I don't have statistics on this, but I would guess that 40 to 50 percent of the Left Tackles drafted in the first round since 1988 haven't panned out. And Chris Samuels, btw, is now officially old. His age, is a big part of our offensive woes. He's done for the season, out, gone. When we were hiding our pass protection problems with our running early in the season, we were running behind him. Suddenly his knee started hurting simply because he's old, and he couldn't go for a couple weeks. Suddenly we couldn't run or pass the ball, and now we suck. He came back for a few weeks, and the running kinda sorta improved a bit, but he tore his triceps muscle, pretty much also because he's old. In his place now is an undrafted free agent.

And then there is the Vinny Snyderato factor. I told my Mom before the season started that I had a serious fear that as long as Dan Snyder (owner) and Vinny Cerrato (this being his first year as like the official General Manager) were running this team that we were going to suck. Then we didn't go on the wild spending spree in the off season, and we actually made like 10 draft pics! I thought, "Hhmm, maybe we've learned our lesson. Maybe we can be good." Then we went 6-2 in our first 8 games, and I thought, "HEY, I have serious hope now. Zorn is awsome." HAH! What a fool I was. We drafted a punter. And he's no longer on the team. And I'm still holding out hope on those 3 second round Recievers (one of them a Tight End, who this week btw finally caught pass, btw, and lemme tell ya he's a big dude and he cat skoot) all drafted in the second round, because Steve Smith only had 10 receptions his Rookie season, but jeez this draft looks like it has some real busts. I'm afraid now that we will suck until Snyder dies, or until Snyder wakes up and gives the reigns over to a real GM. And it will probably be a while before Snyder dies, because he was only in like elementary school when I watched the Redskins beat the Dolphins with Riggo's famous run in 1982 in my diaper at 2-almost-3 years old. And it will probably be a while before Snyder gets rid of Cerrato and gets a real GM and gives over control to him, because Snyder is a control freak, which I learned when I read THIS article.

Early that season, after a Redskins loss, Snyder told Nolan [as in Mike Nolan, a well respected NFL Defensive Coordinator] that his defensive calls were “too vanilla.” Like the other coaches, Nolan had figured out by then that trying to explain football to Snyder was pointless, since he already had the game figured out. A few days later a gallon of 31 Flavors ice cream showed up on Nolan’s desk with a note that said, “This is what I like. Not vanilla.”

Nolan laughed and sent Snyder a note: “Thanks for the ice cream. My kids enjoyed it.”
“The first time it was actually kind of funny,” Nolan said. “I didn’t mind it at all.”

The next time wasn’t as funny.

The Redskins lost on the road to Dallas, and Nolan went into his office late Sunday night to start looking at game tape. When he arrived, there were three giant canisters of melting 31 Flavors ice cream on his desk with another note: “I wasn’t joking. I do not like vanilla.”

THERE WAS A NEXT TIME!??!!

That there was a next time leads me to believe that there is no next time for the Redskins, not for a while. Unfortunately for me, as a Redskin fan. I am strongly considering handing in my fan card for quite a while, until the Vinny Snyderato thing changes.

OK. I'm done ranting and I feel better. Thanks for listening.

Muted Cries of Desperation Amongst Opposing Winds

2008-11-17T20:02:00.001-08:00

“Now notes of desperation have begun
to overtake my hearing; now I come
where mighty lamentation beats against me.
I reached a place where every light is muted,
which bellows like the sea beneath a tempest,
when it is battered by opposing winds.”
-from Dante’s Inferno, Cantos V

Interestingly I was in one of my uinversity's local bookstores buying books for the coming semester when I first heard about 9/11. I was watching live news footage on television soon after the second tower had been hit and before either tower fell. Realizing that the first was no accident by the time the second had hit, I saw that the events unfolding were the fulfillment of a script. To be honest, the first script I considered was The Odyssey. I would like to think that this is because the events match the referenced script so well, but as time goes on I think, in reality, this reaction of mine reflects a conflict in my soul. Over time, I have come to see tha tthe events of 9/11 also fulfill the Tower of Bable script quite well. Regardless, I can't point to one script or the other and say that the event fits one script and not the other. I feel, instead, that I must simply choose with my life.

Outside of the unbearable cries of lamentation that pierced to the center of my heart and had to be pushed to the underside of my world in order for me to get to class on time that day, my first thought was of the projectile that the Cyclopse violently hurled at Odyssius and his ships when, after the Cyclopse asked Odyssius what to tell his friends about his missing one eye, Odyssius replied, "Tell them Nobody did it." This oversized projectile was, of course, the two airplanes being "hurled" at the "vessels" containing the people of New York. In this scenario, the source of the force behind the projectile is monstrous (Cycloptic, surprisingly narrow minded :), the splash is explosive, and the reaction of those hit (Americans) is a reflection of the monster before their gaze. The examples of the irrational monstrosity fo our reaction are too numerious and obvious to recount, but some examples include: "God out and shop," "United we stand," and "We will fight [to no end, against an enemy with no face] for our freedom and a way of life."

In the Tower of Babel script, there is a kind of overwhelming monstrosity in the unfinished character of the Tower. We undertake a project to build and build and build to Nowhere under the weights of vanity and fear, and the veil fo blindness from the desires of our project is still not lifted when our Tower literally collapses due to a fireball from heaven. The unfinished character of the Tower at the end of the story is simply a reflection of the fear and vanity of Nimrod at the outset of the project. The script reads: "Let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scatterd abroad the face of the whole earth." The task of assigning names to the animals was given to Adam, but once men sought to make a name for themselves (which was the basic fuel that ran the Greek polis, by the way), then suddenly they could no longer speak sensibly to each other.

So Nimrod's Tower we left unfinished, but in practical reality the continuing of our project - our inability to bring it to a halt in the face of two collapsing Towers - is the same as Nimrod's inability to continue. The preconditions of Nimrod's primal existance were those of stillness and slow motion that was all too close to absolute zero, of a death to be overcome, of a primitive terror at the very edge of an abyss. The backdrop of the stage set for the collapse of the World Trade Center is that of a well oiled and functioning machine whose parts and turnings not only engulf the field of vision of every member of the audience, but extend far beyond the limits of said field.

In Nimrod's world, one man's words in one place in the Tower being misunderstood by a man in another place in the Tower meant an unfinshed Tower. Our foundation, however, if it could be said that there is one, is not the Ground but not only an already completed Tower but an upside down one, so for us an unfinished Tower is the last thing that is meant by two people having a misunderstanding. You could even have the collapse of two of the tallest towers n the Tower followed by some of the workers crying out that the heads of the opponents in the conflict are in cohorts with each other to build their own personal private towers further up toward the heavens.

Concerning misunderstandings and misrecognitions, it is interesting that in the Homeric script, Odyssius and his men slip out of the Cyclopse' cave when each is mistaken for noe of the Cyclopse' own sheep. Where in the Hebraic script a primal Silence arises when one man in the Tower thinks the other is saying something he is not, in the Homeric script a sheep is mistaken for a man out of a monster's blindness. I think this has to do with a certain violence at the heart of the Homeric script; more on that in a moment.

There is another parallel scenario between the events of 9/11 and the Homeric script, as well. In my last scenario of uniting scripts with the events of 9/11, the airplane was the rock that the monster hurled at Nobody. In this scenario the airplane is the innocent sheep that Bin Laden uses to try and get his Home back. Just as "Nobody" suspects anything when there's an airplane flying through the air (gasp, surprise), nobody is surprised to find, (gasp, surprise), a group of (Arabic) passengers board boarding the darn thing. Of course, too, nobody suspects anything when the planes veer wildly off course, either.

And just as Odyssius and his men passed through the monster's "security check point" out in plain sight by appearing to said monster to be something totally normal and innocent, which in that case was one of the monster's very own sheep, the terrorists passed right through the mouth of the monster's cave as in order to climb aboard their weapon! Interestingly Odyssius and his men passed as sheep by climbing upon their belly. So, of course, "Nobody" expected anything until the weapon struck its large target in the eye at the top of the Tower. Then the monster goes berserk, and the guy looking for his home just smiles quietly and continues on his quest.

Of course, though, despite the quiet smile of Odyssius, the Cyclopse isn't the only one harboring violence. There is a great and decisive kind of violence in the act of striking the Cyclopse in his one eye with a burning ember, the kind of violence that causes an unchangeable change in your view of the world. Of course, where the planes are the projectiles hurled by the monster, there is also a certain notable violence in the act of the throw. There is a desire to extend something from a projected unreal part of your own being out into an undefined place that is perceived to be without limits.

The inversion of that extension of a kind of unreality into an open field might be to extend your being directly and possibly uninvited into the private world of another. This is the terrorist's desire to find his own death by actually blowing himself up onto everyone around him. This is the "shock value" of pornography. Economics is from the Greek word "oikos," meaning "house." The home is where the secret and sacred family rituals occur, many of them sexual. In Bin Laden's targeting of our economic system is a certain desire to kick us in the privates. So then of course our natural response as a large beuracracy is a set of trade restrictions on any country that is friendly to terrorists. Of course, a terrorist expects us to understand the passionate urge behind his kicking gesture, while we then in turn expect them to understand the language of our beurocratic "memo."

At times it seems as though the in many ways opposing scripts of the Tower of Babel and of Homer's Odyssey are inextricably interwoven into the events surrounding 9/11 (and many other events as well, of course). I think, however, that it is important to maintain a distinction between the two scripts. When I begin to follow with my mind and my life the Homeric script, I tend to walk my path with a certain kind of detachment, as if there really isn't much of a value of good or bad that could be assigned to my actions or to the events of the world. There is only my quest, and the events seem to primarily be recorded as a kind of simple neutral expression of sheer fact of the matter (of what and what kind of matter is a different discussion). As an artist, this simplicity is very attractive, and even at times, I think, important.

When it comes to the experience of most human beings in the world, however, I think that an even more primal voice in comparison to that simple and often detached existence of things and of myself might be found in the lamentations described by Danted in Cnato V of his Inferno, which I quoted at the beginning of this post. Where the pride of my intellect wants to speculatively contemplate being and becoming and the pride it takes to assume that man's being attains to the heights of the Tower required to be able to see it all occur in perspective, I think that Jesus is even more simply calling me to have sympathy with teh cries at the bottom of a falling tower, which I thought I had to ignore on that fated day of 9/11 in order to get to class on time. One redeeming aspect of the aftermath of 9/11 was how de-alienating it was.

The opening scene of Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev is a dream-like sequence in which a man is flying through the air over the terrain of his hometown in a hot air balloon. At some seemingly random point in time, the man simply comes crashing back to earth, with his balloon. The next mage in the montage is of a beautiful stallion, evidently in some kind of serious pain, struggling to slowly rise up from the earth to which the man had just crashed.

Obama Is That Guy

2008-11-05T04:08:00.001-08:00

That guy who was beaten, whipped, spat upon and hung from a tree...is now President. And is probably not going to do those things in return. I am deeply moved. Last night I actually got choked up hearing a news agent describing his not-too-distant ancestor who would have been beaten for looking a white man or woman in the eye. And when another old white man with grey hair noted the momenteousness of the occasion, saying that he went to segregated schools as a boy and never imagined this would happen in his lifetime. And also when Obama himself told the story of the 106 yr. old woman who, as a young lady, couldn't vote "for two reasons", because she was a woman, and because she was black. I am wearing red today, because the guy who was beaten, whipped, spat upon and hung from a tree is now President. But what if that guy who was beaten, whipped, spit upon and hung from a tree...is shot? Would that be the glory of the Cross? Would it be proof that things really won't change because "change" is just an empty symbolic fallacy? Would it be history's repeating of itself? Would it be a kind of Constantinism turned on its head? Or maybe...would it just be a sad event? Would it have been inevitable? Would we forget about the momenteousness of the occasion for the man who was beaten, spat upon, whipped and hung from a tree becoming President of the United States of America?

Holy Shit

2008-10-15T19:54:00.000-07:00

Quite literally. Holy Shit. OK so I started reading Thougths In Solitude and he started talking about the desert in a number of ways. One, as a place for a man to meet God alone, in the “wilderness”, without the various distractions and such of civilization. Two, as a place for man to potentially go mad, given that it is a dry thirsty place where the Devil roams. From there Merton went on to say that, although the wilderness was traditionally a place from which civilization was set apart, everything becomes desert when man takes his civilization to it. When the greeds and lusts of the city permeate the primitive escape from the city, then the madness of the city meets the madness of the desert, leaving us everywhere to fight despair. With the only possible weapons, Grace and hope. In his discussion on the desert in the opening section of Thoughts In Solitude, Merton made a veiled reference to The Manhatten Project (nuclear testing in the desert leading to the end of WWII), which peaked my interested in the relationship between actual chronological history and this all-pervasive more qualitative meeting of madnesses of which Merton speaks. I looked up the history of Las Vegas, and sure enough Vegas became popular as a place for the greeds and lusts of man right around the time of (or just before) of Sputnik!

Interestingly, as it turns out the mob was behind the rise of Vegas. From there I ended up watching some 60 Minutes series of videos on some retired FBI agent who infiltrated the Gambino family and was offered to become a “made man.”

And then just by coincidence, the next series of 60 Minutes videos was on this “sub-prime mortgage crisis” which befalls us. I happen to have been studying that quite a bit for the last week or two, so I watched them. The big question mark in my mind that is still lingering is the “securities” involved in the whole sub-prime mess. I just didn’t understand what they were! Well, now I know why, lol. No one did! Except the physicists who came to Wall Street to cook them up via complicated positivistic mathematical equasions that were meant to sociologically do everything from represent the behavior of some of the poorest people in America who traditionally couldn’t get credit to layout when exactly who would be paid! Keep in mind that the whole point of the distribution of the "securities" was that both "when" and "who" was to be made nebulous in the "distribution risk", meaning that no one would ever possibly bear the responsibility of failure.

Anyway, we’re talking 300 plus pages to these documents that “are” these “securities”, which happen to include all these equations that no one understands – including the mortgage brokers who were trading them! "Hello! McFly!" Common sense - which would obviously say, "Hey, these 'securities' are wierd. And on top of that, how does it make sense to, without risk, lend money to poor people who can't pay me back?" - is the Holy Shit of the Prime Matter that eludes the postitivists. The worried looks on the faces of the Wall Street investors whose houses are built on sand -sand that someone frantically shovelled with their foot to cover a big steaming pile of poop - make me giggle in much the same way as the very image that big steaming pile of pooh-pooh (especially when that image is juxtaposed with the idea of Prime Matter :).

More to come on the Holy Shits plopped in both the desert near the end of WWII and on Wall Street fifty plus years later. But suffice it to say for now that I won’t be surprised to find out in twenty years or so that the mob, in the same way that it was behind the rise of Vegas and took profit from it directly, was involved in these sub-prime mortgages and all that came with them. Which, considering all the cheesy Hollywood films on the mafia, would be kind of amusing. But what’s not amusing is that its costing tax payers – that’s us – like a trillion dollars (which, btw, won’t fix the problem).

Quot of the Day: Pierre Bayard

2008-10-15T17:07:00.000-07:00

from a book that was originally brought to my attention by The Doylomania -- How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read:

"There is more than one way to not read, the most radical of which is not to open any book at all. For any given reader, however dedicated he might be, such total abstention necessisarily holds true for virtually everything that has been published, and thus in fact constitutes our primary way of relateing to books. We must not forget that even a prodigious reader never has access to more than an infintesimal fraction of the books that exist. As a result, he will find himself forever obliged to express his thoughts on books he hasn't read.

If we take this attitude to the extreme, we arrive at the case of the absolute non-reader, who never opens a book and yet knows them and talks about them without hesitation."

:))

Batty Old Men And Their Death Defying Gazes

2008-10-12T17:18:00.000-07:00

(this was written to be posted at church and postmodern culture: conversation)....

I liked No Country For Old Men for many reasons, but I think maybe they can all be sort of categorized into two groups. One is that I would consider it a "postmodern film," and yet, in and of itself as a film, still good (I will explain more in a moment). The other is that it weaved the threads of the story together in such a way that in the end I was left with the impression of a beautifully patterened rug that takes your heart to the center of the labyrinth - that place where my heart wants to explode with both joy and sorrow at the same time - in such a way that, although the story does not parallel or demonstrate the gospel, reminds me of it.

To demonstrate my first set of reasons, I will set No Country against Batman: Dark Knight. Now, I understand that my gutteral reaction as I leave a film is not a judgement that has any real public value, but bear with me for a moment. The very experience of walking out of No Country was for me itself a kind of kairos moment, as if many things about my world and my life - sorrows and losses, joys and triumphs, hopes and dreams, resentments and dissilusionments - came together in the moment of that story. Batman, however, left me with a big headache, in disbelief that it was not an hour shorter, wishing that there were like at least two more genuine lines in the film that an actual human being would say, angry that I had just spent $7.50 for the matinee, distantly nostalgic about the reasons why i was originally infuriatedly turned off by what I had come to percieve as "postmodernism", and unable to re-member much of what I just watched.

To connect my gutteral reations to the films to things that might be more public, let me explain a bit about why I think I may have had these two very different reactions to these two films that are so similar, and yet so different. Based on what I now understand about "postmodernism", I percieve both as "postmodern" - or, I at least can see certain parallels between postmodernism and the two films. Where Dark Knight, however, makes it a not only an explicit but over-wrought point to explain to you that the world is falling apart from the center(ral character) outward (probably often leaving great joy in the hearts of those who identify themselves as "postmodernists"), No Country weaves your being into a story that places you sympathetically into the midst a very real set with scenery and characters leaving you in a state of awe and wonder over how things just might stay together somehow in the midst of a pool of blood spilled over a convex surface. Where Dark Knight is not only content but intentional about selling tickets to the drunk young folk drowning in seas of "BATMAN, HELL YEAH!" chants both before and after the film, regardless of its quality (or lack thereof), No Country leaves that same audience - by their own admission and/or pubic opining - thinking, "Huh? What was the point of that?"

Meanwhile those who enjoy "postmodernism" (and as well maybe those who hate postmodernism but love a good film) are left joyously meditating on how all of the most important "points" of No Country are not only unstated explicitly but left for the audience to figure out by immersing one's being into the story; and then that on top of one's having to figure out the unspoken rules to the game that shape how you experience that very story into which you have immersed yourself in the first place! No one in the film explains to the audience, or to any other character in the film, that the central character (who does not become the central character until the end, btw!), as a rule, kills everyone who sets eyes on him. We are just left to meditate on the rather genuinely human verse from the "old man" sherriff: "Its like he's a ghost." Additionally, no one in the film explains to the audience the significance of the conversation between the man who in the end becomes the central character and the simple gas station attendant who lives despite setting eyes on him. This is the exeption that proves that the rule is not imposed from the outside but is written into pattern of the interwoven fabrics. "Call it - heads or tails...Why? Why does it matter? Call it - heads or tails....I don't understand what it means....It means everything...But, but...?...Think of it as if you're life depends on it....But, but what do I have to do with that coin?...You and the coin come from the same place."

Now to comment on what I am referencing as the humanness of the two films, I would like to address their endings. Where Dark Night ends with the double of the central character who we thought at the beginning was supposed to be the central character (Batman) becoming an alienated lone willing Scapegoat wondering purposelessly through the shadows of the night, No Country ends with a very simple but extraordinary interaction in broad daylight between an anonymous half dead unconscious bleeding guy sitting in the driver's seat of his car, the man who at that moment becomes the central character sitting on the side of the road with the bone of his forearm sticking out, and two young teen-aged boys, an interaction which at the same time both warms and wrenches the heart. Where Dark Night is organized around all the heady and complicated intellectual machinery supposedly downloaded from the praisworthily smart and gifted author (the Joker) to the mind of the audience, which I could nor cared to keep up with, No Country is a simple series of events through which the audience lives or dies.

So I supose I could summarize my opinion of No Country of Old Men by saying that I experienced it as a medium through which I lived out my life and my death, and that it was a refereshing experience after Batman: Dark Knight, through which I felt as though I simply experienced my death. Much of "postmodernism" seems to be about actually living life after the history of spectacle left us inevitably on the outside looking in. Although Dark Knight seems engaged in an effort to be a hip new popular pomo film, it seems to miss the boat entirely by being content with window gazing (eerrr, window shopping) on (the) life (of the film itself) from the outside. No Country For Old Men (much like The Departed, for example), however, seems to have learned about "postmodernism" millinia ago, forgotten about it, and come out the other side a better "pomo film" than the film that was trying to be pomo!

And along a parallel line on life and death - where Batman seemed to take me under the bloody shadow of Tiamat, No Country, written by a couple of Jewish brothers, rather purposefully seemed to take me under the shadow of the compassionate wings of Yahweh. Now as a disclaimer: this Tiamat/Yahweh thing is, for me, not necessarily a basis for determining whether a film, as such, is good or bad - I liked, for example, There Will Be Blood. I'm just saying that this idea of leaving us with a sense of the fear of God was another aspect of No Country that I thoroughly enjoyed. Now I will not give away the previously discussed interaction in No Country between the main character, the teen-age boys, and the man in the car, but I will say that it threw a beam of light straight into the core of my soul in much the same way that the Torah is meant to be like an arrow shot directly, forcefully, accurately and craftily at a difficlut target. That target was my heart: the Joker - like the adjustable rate mortgage lenders and investors who didn't seem to realize that they are human beings with limits - didn't seem to know whether he was playing the game of philosophy or film (whereas Zizek, on the other hand, seems to know quite well when and how he's playing around with all the different games), and thus the arrow was of course wildly off the mark (only in Pink Panther is an arrow with no direction and conflicting forces behind it going to hit a target). The Coen brothers, however, scored, if not a bulls eye (which would land directly between the Cross and the Resurrection :), then somewhere pretty darn close.

Quote of the Day (from Marx, funny guy he was)

2008-10-08T21:53:00.000-07:00

"It is as clear as noon-day, that man, by his industry, changes the forms of the materials furnished by nature. The form of wood, for instance, is altered by making a table out of it. Yet, for all that the table continues to be that common, every-day thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to dance of its own accord..."

(I think this is from Capital, but I'm not sure)

Quote Of The Day

2008-08-28T18:08:00.000-07:00

"I think the one way is just on the other side of the street." - my sister (who is actually really smart, which made it all the more funny).

Recent Amuseents

2008-07-02T04:17:00.000-07:00

1 - Inspired by the sale of things like empty Dorito bags and Dr. Pepper cans - for prices like $400 dollars - a young woman in my home town by the name of Kelly Gray sold a bridesmaid spot in her wedding on ebay. When bidding closed the winner was to pay $5,700 dollars. Shop victoriously. Irony of ironies...as it turns out, the winner was "a representative of Dr. Pepper", and they plan to generate lots of hoopla around the whole thing, providing $10,000 dollars and possibly a celebrity bridesmaid. Can't wait to see what this random crazy hair leads to in 10 years.
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/SummerSizzle/story?id=5252056&page=1

2 - There is a science experiment in Switzerland. OK, yeah, so what? Well, the thing is, some scientists are saying that it might cause a black hole that swallows earth. And yes, there is an argument going on in the scientific community as to whether this big huge contraption made by us folks here on earth will cause a black hole that swallows this earth on which we walk.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080628/ap_on_re_eu/doomsday_collider
Memorable quote: "Obviously, the world will not end when the LHC switches on..."

3 - The office where I work is expanding to include what was previously the office next door. There was a representative of "PM Electric" there yesterday morning trying to figure out which breaker box was connected to a particular circuit in question. Soon after his walking over to us and expressing his frustration at having been stumped, we all hear from next door through the newly cut hole in the wall (where the construction is going on) "ELECTRIC MAN! ELECTRIC MAN! ELECTRIC MAN! ELECTRIC MAN! WHERE ARE YOU ELECTRIC MAN! ELECTRIC MAN! ELECTRIC MAN! HEY! HEEEYYY! WE'RE HAVING POWER SURGES OVER HERE!!" Us: "Can I help you?" Him: "ARE YOU THE ELECTRIC MAN!!?? WHERE IS THE ELECTRIC MAN?" Us: "Just calm down, sir." Him: "I'M NOT CALM!" Us, thinking to ourselves: "Yeah, no kidding. And yeah, we can see that you are having 'power surges.'" Him: "WHAT IS THIS!?" Us: "This is our office. *snicker snicker, out loud, I might add*" Him: *Without saying another word, I am now stomping off very briskly and intentionally to go yell and cuss at the owners of the building.* I laughed about that doofus for a good while. I don't know how people like that exist.

Burro De Oro

2008-04-02T17:32:00.000-07:00

I just found out today that my blog name is Spanish when translated is:

Burro de Oro.

Which is rather entertaining to me. It has an even better ring to it in Espanol!! LOL!!

PEACE and goofiness to all!

Jason

The Golden Booger

2007-12-25T18:35:00.000-08:00

One day the great King Bob woke up with a neck ache and a sinus headache. Appropriately, then, the land awoke covered in gloomy coulds with no sign of sunlight. He though to himself: "Hhhmmm...this sinus headache isn't that bad. I'll just eat some breakfast and then it'll probably go away." Correspondingly, the people though: "If only the King's sinus headache will go away, then we will see the sun!"

After some sugar on his cinnamon buns and some fat free white water...err...milk...for breakfast...sure enough the sinus headache of the great Kin Bob only got worse. But in also drinking some O.J. with his breakfast he began to become conscious of an uncomfortable sensation in one of his nostrils. There seemed to be an uncomfortable foreign object lodged in the great King's nose that did not belong! So he marched upstairs to unsheath his weapon of choice for the great war to come. The coming war was so great that it might be termed a quest, and the weapon of choice had the glistening and purifying whiteness of a q-tip. At stake was no less than the health of the great King, sunlight falling on the land, and happiness in the hearts of the people!

So the great King Bob unsheathed his q-tip and went to battle with the pesky booger. If only he could dislodge this one gargantuan booger, he thought, then it would clear his nasal passages for proper drainage, thus eventually ending this epic battle in his favor. The land could have its sun, the people their sunlight, and he his health.

So he dug and dug and rotated and clawed with the pruity of the whiteness of the cotton q-tip. He withdrew the q-tip and observed with intense purpose. Was this the great booger that plages the land? But alas...he had only unearthed a small little peion booger...not the real problem. His frustration increased and his headache reamined. But his resolve strengthened!! He resolved to learn better q-tipping techniques. As he dug and dug unsucessfully more and more times, he learned better and better q-tipping technique. He learned by failure; with each unsuccessful dig...leaving only a little green meaningless booger with a small bit of yellow snot to blot out only a small bit of the glistening pure whiteness of the q-tip...he grew steadily closer to finding the proper relationship between the digging, clawing, twisting, and turning of the q-tip in order to remove the dreaded Great Booger from its circumstantial location (for alas, if the Great Booger were to find a different location in the nostril, then a different combination of digging, clawing, twisting and turning would be required).

Finally the Great Booger was removed and the nostril could return to the enjoyment of its originally natural and comfortable nostrillage. As it sat on the end of the previously glistening white q-tip, then king admired it with great awe and wonder. How was THAT in MY nose! Surely THIS will mean the end of this great war! This great quest! Surely THIS will mean sunlight throught the land, happiness in the hearts of the people, and health in the body of the King! When the diffused light of the couldy day combined with the light over the mirror of the bathroom fell upon the great thumnail-sized dried-up booger sitting on the tip of the great King Bob's unsheathed q-tip and as the great King contemplated the Quest, he decided to give the booger a name. It needed a name. After all, it was truly important. This booger meant so much!! Thus in its glistening yellowness it was dubbed "The Golden Booger."

But there was a problem. The great king still had his headache. Five minutes went by, and then ten. And the headache remained. Twenty and then thirty. The headache even dared to grow worse. There was no sunlight over the land, and the people grew even more weary and dim-witted...and emotionally drained as well over all the energy that was being put into this great Quest. After all...the boogers return!! Who do you think goes to the grocery store to buy the q-tips!! Why...its the people!! And on top of that, who keeps the stock of q-tips available in the grocery store!! Why its the people!! After a day of war with the ever-returning booger, the toll of this great war...the price of clear sinuses for the king...was becoming too much to bear.

So alas a specialist was called in. With great hesitation, reverence and fear Dr. Booger Eater (of course this is not his real name but instead was the genius of a catchy marketing campaign) approached the throne of King Bob. King Bob explained the story of his war with the Golden Booger to date, and the noble Dr. Eater had a quick and immediate response.

"Good and honorable King Bob, please do pardon me, but you are approaching this war the complete wrong way! You must approach the Sinus Headache scientifically! It is not a monster to be feared. There are no spirits to be fought. You need not name its boogers. They don't need to be called out of the darkness and brought into the light for you to be healed. This is a very practical matter. And above all, I need not sympathize with your Headachimus Neckachimus. Here. Here's a prescription. Have one of your little dwarfs run to the pharmacy and get you some Tylenol sinus and some Claritin HD. Take one Claritin and two of the Tylenol and call me in the morning with a report. You were approaching this thing with far too much superstition. I assure you, my science and my medicine will have you healed by the morning. The land will see the sun and the people will see their happiness. Great King Bob, I honour you but I need not sympathize with your headache to not have my happiness when you do have your headache."

The Great King Bob was not only honorable but humble. He nodded and said thank you to the Dr. Booger Eater and sent him on his way. He sent one of his people to the store immediately in order to fulfill the Doctor's orders...

When he awoke the next morning, the Great King Bob still had his sinus headache!! He was furious, the land was without sunlight, and the people were sad! King Bob called in the Doctor and forced him against the gift of his own free will to eat all the great Golden Boogers that had been dislodged from the Great King Bob's nostril in the last couple of days (17 glistening Golden Boogers to be exact). Dr. Booger Eater cired when he heard the orders, but he carried them out dutifully.

Next, the Great King Bob called in another specialist. Preacher Joe approached the great throne and said, "Hey Bob, how 'ya doin'?" Bob said, "Not good neighbor Joe. I've had this sinus headache for a while now. The land is without sunlight, the people without happiness, and I without a clear head, so to speak. I have been waging war for a while now. With some help from me, my generals have called it Operation Godlen Booger. Can you help me? Can you help, bring sunlight back to the land, happiness and bright wit back to the people, and also to resstore world peace as well?"

Well, Bob, I think maybe the world peace thing is kinda up to you. You're the one waging the war. For that I'd say just end the war. As for the sinus headache, I'd say just take a nap, get up and eat a good healthy Christmas dinner with your family. Laugh, love, enjoy life and be at peace with your boogers. After all, just as there will always be thorns and thistles in the earth, there will always be boogers in the nostril. If you can be at peace with your Booger, then there will be sulnight in the land, happiness in the hearts of the people (after all, you had been laughing at dinner, correct?), and health in your body (I guaranteee it!)."

"Thanks Joe. I'll call you after dinner and let you know the latest."

So the King had his people prepare the prescribed meal for Christmas dinner and invited Preach Joe and his family to join them. He ate and laughed at his Golden Boogers...his ornery Generals...even at his great headache (which must remain un-named) . He ate until his tummy was bloated and he had to unbotten the button on his pants. He laughted until his cheeks hurt. And he loved his family with his Preacher Joe and his family on Christmas day. As he plopped happily on his throne after a Great Dinner of breaking bread with his family, it suddenly "dawned" on him that his headache was gone!! He went to bed hopeful. So the families of Preacher Joe and King Bob said good night and hugged.

Surely enough there was sunlight on the land the next morning!! The people were happy and the great King Bob was healthy. The people were more light-witted, but no one to this day knows the exact connection between Preacher Joe's prescription and the resulting health of the land, the people and the King. But regardless, with great joy and haste...without bothering to get someone else to do it for him, King Bob called Preacher Joe first thing in the morning to share with him the Good News. "HEY MERRY CHRISTMAS JOE......"

And so the story goes :) Merry Christmas!

Jason Hesiak

Deep Thoughts, by Jason Hesiak

2007-11-24T18:54:00.000-08:00

If I overpay my credit card company, do they owe me interest?

If I hang one of those colored fabric rug-like toilet covers on my wall, is it still ornament?

What is the average speed of an unladen swallow?

Whose space is myspace? Is it space?

If its possible to drink till she wants me, is it possible that she wants me till she drinks?

And lastly...umm...I forgot...

Broken Heart Publishing

2007-10-07T01:17:00.000-07:00

:( We'll miss you.

I am going to miss you man. Please stay in touch and come visit when you can. - Matt

Jason - It's not going to be the same w/o you! I hope those Easterners appreciate what they're getting! :) Kim F.

Bye Jason. I don't want you to go! Celina (10 yrs. old)

Thank you for being by my side when God was showing me who I really am. - Genesis (started www.solisfoundation.org and is an executive at one of the largest marketing firms in the world).

We will miss you here. You have been so good to my kids & I will never forget that. Don't forget us and keep in touch. Love, Maria

Jason - I am writing upside down b/c it is symbolic - how you may ask? It is symbolic b/c it is who you are - you go against the grain, you are firm in your convictions that society and culture can be so much more, you are quirky and unique and you march (literally sometime :) to the beat of your own drum when others are mimicking the beat that they hear and think they need to conform. I don't know what I'm saying but I think you can understand despite my befuddled thoughts & words. I will miss you so much - you enrich my life and bring smiles to my soul. Now I will stop b/c others will get mad that I'm taking so much space you will alwasy be a true and close, fun friend & know I'll always support & cheer you on! "heart" Ames (Wu Tang)

What the mess?! It was nice knowing you. I hope you rest in peace - now, you are dead to me! No one leaves the family! Once yor're in the family you're always in the family. The only way out is in a pine box! Concrete-n-shoes in the Chesapeake. Fine! Enough of the hollow thoughts. I will miss you. We had a great run, peace to you brother. Don't forget - we both know a dead man who rose, so do we. - David

Dear Jason, I will miss you because you bring joy & wisdom into my life. I will miss you because you help me feel & think more fully. I will miss you because you are my friend & matter to me. I will miss you. Love, Audrey

Thanks for being so good to my kids. Julio

I'm writing this while still holding on to the hope that you won't actually leave. Like I said before, the only good thing is that we will see you when we go back to VA to see family. Other than that, nothing good can come out of this :) I love you, man!! Remember that you always have a home with the Blumbers if you want to visit (or come back!) Eric

Orienting Ourselves On The Site

2007-09-13T09:38:00.000-07:00

So my last post is at some point going to be posted over at the church and postmodern culture: a conversation. In trying to figure out how best to say what I wanted to say, lots of stuff came out in the meantime. I figure I might as well share it with you guys. So - disclaimer - what follows is sort of being dug up from the trash bin, although the reasons were other than its trashyness. It, as well as the other things to be dug up from the same trash bin later, was in the trash bin mostly just because either it wasn't provacative enough (in the sense of getting thoughts moving around in people's noggin') or didn't provide a clear enough picture of how contemporary church relates to contemporary architecture (or some combination of the two). So, dearest readers (ode to Dejan :)...we're off...

(oh wait...one additional note: you may notice some overlap between the previous post that will actually go up at church and postmodern cultre and this one, as well as with the other post later to be dug up from the trash bin)...(oh and another...as for my reader's reaction: you may judge for yourself whether I chose the best route for posting over at church and postmodern culture, or you may treat each post separately as its own work...or some other unknown-to-me alternative :)...(oh and one more: I may actually still follow up on what I said I would follow up on but obviously did not since I didn't actually post this at the place that would have involved the follow-up)...

It is interesting to me that the first four chapters of the first book of the first treatise ever written on architecture – The Ten Books of Architecture, by a Roman architect named Vitruvius who died right about the same time as Jesus – contains just about all of the seeds of conversation in which I would like to engage in order to address the various ways that architecture is relevant to the church and to the conversation that is happening here at “the church and postmodern culture: a conversation.”

The opening of Chapter IV, called “The Site of a City”, seems to provide a kind of focal point, both for how I hope to illuminate how architecture in general itself “sits on” this web “site” and as well for how I hope to relate architecture to the church (besides the fact that churches often have buildings). I see a kind of triangulation happening. There is the “conversation” happening at this site. Then there’s a whole history and tradition of architecture, largely forgotten by most architects and unknown, I think (?), by much of my audience here. And then, of course, there is the church, of which many of us are a part. The conversation here at this “site” focuses primarily on how contemporary culture and theory relates to various issues or maladies (depending on who is speaking about them) and their justifications or cures (also depending on who is speaking).

To state it succinctly, then, my hope for this post is to relate architecture to the conversation occurring at this site. This conversation is obviously related to the church, so I also hope to clearly relate for my audience, much of whom I’m assuming has (for the sake of ease) a lack of knowledge of architecture, some architectural theory and practice to some church theory and practice. Later I will discuss these things in more detail as they pertain more to architecture specifically.

So back to Vitruvius: his Chapter IV opens as follows:

For fortified towns the following general principles are to be observed. First comes the choice of a very healthy site. Such a site will be high, neither misty nor frosty, and in a climate neither hot nor cold, but temperate; further, without marshes in the neighborhood. For when the morning breezes blow toward the town at sunrise, if they bring with them mists from marshes and, mingled with the mist, the poisonous breath of creatures of the marshes to be wafted into the bodies of the inhabitants, they will make the site unhealthy.

Now, my contention is that we’re already screwed on that count. We’re already settled into a very unhealthy “site” with lots of both mist and frost, and located all to near to lots of local marshes blowing “poisonous breath of the creatures of the marshes to be wafted into the bodies of the inhabitants” (ancient people spoke funnily, lol). What do I mean by that? I do not mean that this website “blows” and that I hope to avoid conversation with all of you sickly creatures so as to avoid catching your diseases. What I mean is that I think our cultural “site” in which we are all situated, in which we are all trying to work and “make a living” (or do church), is “sick.”

Now, Jesus seems to have had a bit of a different attitude toward sick folks than did Vitruvius. Vitruvius says: “First comes the choice of a very healthy site.” Compared to Jesus who says: “Here I come you sick screw-ups into a very unhealthy site. Welcome to my neighborhood! I love ‘ya.” That is just, however, to state the obvious so as not to stumble over it. I will mostly leave that aside for now, and move on to figuring out more of what I mean when I say that our “site” is sick. My professor once said that if Architecture is most like any profession, it is that of Medicine. Let’s then see what kind of diagnoses and prescriptions we can make out. Uumm…with the help of our healing Counselor, of course!

So, I’d say that its fair for me to say that three of the top topics of conversation these days in the church are: discipleship (and its programmatization), spiritual formation (even if the topic of conversation is either a more philosophical notion of “the formation of the self”, or how it is too often ignored) and liturgy (and the supposedly less “mechanical” and more protestant ways of doing worship). The architectural seeds of all three are found right there in Chapters I – III of Book I of Vitruvius’ treatise. Obviously, though, the categorizations shake out a bit differently in Vitruvius’ discussion on architecture!

What I am referencing as discipleship corresponds to Chapter I of Book I of Vitruvius’ treatise, which is on “The Education of the Architect.” In it he discusses how the knowledge that an architect must acquire “is the child of practice and theory.” He goes on to discuss how theory and practice should properly relate to each other. I find these thoughts from Vitruvius, then, to be fascinatingly relevant to what I’ve heard David Fitch complain about toward the church as its “pragmatization.” I will explain more of this later, as well, but I don’t think it’s a great leap to relate the church’s pragmatization to its programmatization (nor its programmatization to its mechanization, more on that as well).

Again, my take is that such a “pragmatization” does exist, as a sickness. And I know of at least one contemporary architect who, correspondingly I think, complains of the constant proliferation of “meaningless form” in architecture (meaningless utilitarian and beurocratically acceptable form, of course!).

What I am referencing as spiritual formation, and connecting to the more philosophical (and/or psychological) notion of the formation of the self, is often dealt with these days in a conversation about language (how or whether language plays an active role in the formation of the self). One section of Vitruvius’ chapter on education is on what I first interpreted long ago when I read Vitruvius for the first time as “the idea of sign and signified.” Basically Vitruvius says that an architect has to be both naturally gifted, corresponding in a building to “the thing signified” (the laws of nature), and also “amenable to instruction,” corresponding to “what gives it its significance” (the laws being demonstrated by buildings, which then signify natural laws).

There is also more on this to come, but the point here is that the seeds for our current conversation on language and the formation of the self seem to be present right there in Chapter I, Book I of Vitruvius writings. For now I will just note how the talk of the town these days is how the capitalist machine manipulates our identity, and yet how the church is mostly not only doing nothing to fight back, but is capitulating to such smelly marsh winds. Architecturally, although this is quite the rabbit hole, I think the place to start is, again, with the repeated observation that much contemporary architecture is pretty devoid of meaning, besides, of course, the meaning graciously granted to it by the market. My contention, then, is that architecture often participates in the very same consumerist forces of manipulation of the self that folks complain about in the conversation about church. Why have or worry about spiritual formation, of the self or of buildings, in the church or in the practice of architecture when…uumm…eerrr…you just buy them (both selves and buildings)?

What I am referencing as liturgy corresponds to Vitruvius’ Chapter II of Book I on “The Fundamental Principles of Architecture.” In this section Vitruvius discusses how the parts of a building should be properly arranged in an orderly relationship to each other according to the principle of “Eurythmy” (the Greek flows better: “eurythmia”) in such a way that the parts correspond properly to the whole and its character. The question of liturgy or a lack thereof in church is a question of how to properly arrange the various parts of the ecclesial service or mass in relation to each other in response to the calling of a good God who works in all of history and eternity. More liturgical ways of doing church often seem to be organized and guided by a higher kind of musical rhythm present in how the very flow of time is itself kept by and participated in with this rhythm, which appears sensibly in the actual audible music that occurs throughout the liturgical proceedings.

I like when a well-proportioned house (very, very uncommon) has a grand piano in it (also uncommon). And most church services appear to me as like the cacophony of and MTV video. Keep in mind, also, that when I say “cacophony,” I am referring not just to the bad sound of it, but also to the disorderly relations of the parts of the service – and thus, of man - that do not lead to a coherent picture of wholeness that reflects or glorifies the character of the God who made us (to reference spiritual formation again).

Now, Chapter III of Book I of Vitruvius’ treatise is on “The Departments of Architecture.” It opens: “There are three departments of architecture: the art of building, the making of time-pieces, and the construction of machinery.” Liturgy has already arisen here as sort of a way of keeping time. Additionally, I previously made note of “and the supposedly less ‘mechanical’ and more protestant ways of doing worship.” As it turns out, the changes in architecture’s relation to the machine throughout the historical sands of time is a good way to tie all of these various themes together, which I plan to do in a future post or two. This should now come as no surprise, considering the rest of the post.

This question of the machine and the departments of architecture, however, does relate I think, to a current hot-button topic of conversation whose seeds are not directly or actually present in Vitruvius’ treatise. And that is the question of how to relate either to contemporary pluralism or modern colonial imperialism (again, how it is referenced depends on who is speaking). Vitruvius was Roman, and speaking to the Emperor (as per his Apologia, which I will discuss in a moment), so I don’t think he was too concerned with anyone else! Architecturally, however, I am not a fan of “eclecticism.” I am not a fan of collage. I do think that things appearing in the world should have a certain coherence to them, which should naturally be reflected in certain truths that I do believe lie at the bottom of nature. How exactly that should work out in church, I do not know. But our narcissistic diseases that cause us to refer to Paul as an expository preacher and Augustine’s former Manicheanism as “materialistic” has got to stop.

So, and this is completely backwards, I feel that a bit of an Apologia is in the works. Vitruvius’ “apologia” is in the Preface of Book I, so that’s what I mean by “backwards,” lol (this is the end of my post). His reads:

While your divine intelligence and will, Imperator Caesar, were engaged in acquiring the right to command the world, and while your fellow citizens, when all their enemies had been laid low by your invincible valour, were glorying in your triumph and victory, - while all foreign nations were in subjection awaiting your beck and call, the Roman people and senate, released from their alarm, were beginning to be guided by your most noble conceptions and policies, I hardly dared, in view of your serious employments, to publish my writings and long considered ideas on architecture, for fear of subjecting myself to your displeasure by an unseasonable interruption.

Wait. Lacan just whispered in my ear that Vitruvius had major Father issues. Lol. Shoot. Let me start over, then! After all, everyone here knows that in a man’s work, which has theatrical meaning and political implications, the Apologia goes to the audience. And – more relevant to why I have to start over here with my backwardsly-placed Apologia – we all know as well that in our contemporary modern liberal democracy the audience is “The People!” But of course, most of those people are still busy glorying in Imperator Market’s (probably not a technically correct turn of phrase – “Imperator Market” - the market is the house, not the head of it; and “capital”, the head of the column, eerrr…house, drives the market rather than is the market) “triumphs and victories,” since he seems already to have “acquir[ed] the right to command the world.” What is the economic use of pluralism? Even “all foreign nations” are still “awaiting [his] beck and call”, so I must await his call before setting out on something so ambitious as a treatise (against him, snicker snicker).

Here I humbly begin, however, a short series of posts on architecture and its relation the postmodern culture in which we find ourselves, as well as its relation to various church issues often discussed at this “site.” As noted previously, the capitalist machine “turns out” to be a good way of bringing together lots of themes that, at the first glance had in this introduction, might appear as disconnected or disorderly categorizations.

And although I am not writing a treatise, the preface of Vitruvius’, however, continues by explaining how he began to take note that Caesar’s attention was being given, ”not only to the welfare of society in general and to the establishment of public order, but also to the providing of public buildings intended for utilitarian purposes.” Vitruvius himself took his continued commissions from the Emperor as evidence that, “I need have no fear of want to the end of my life, and being thus laid under obligation I began to write this work for you…”

Oh, and before I forget, dear audience. Please extend lots of grace from the very depths of your soul to my small number of Doctorate and Masters degrees (a big fat zero) as compared to the large number that usually accompanies the writers here at this “site” (usually somewhere between two and six – no exaggeration!).

Shalom.

The Geometry of Architecture and Church

2007-09-03T20:59:00.000-07:00

The folowing should soon be found posed over at The Church and Postmodern Culture: A Conversation:

In The Geometry of Art and Life, Matila Ghyka says that the mathematics of architecture are about ratio, proportion and analogy. Ratio is a set relationship between two measures or numbers, proportion is developed in a series of relationships (in time), and analogy is the link holding them together. Imagine a rectangle with sides whose measures are 2 and 3. Now imagine a rectangle with sides whose measures are 4 and 6. Those two rectangles are in proportion with each other, and the analogy between them is 2.

These, however, are mere numbers. Geo-metry means “earth-measure.” The numbers once meant something. Pythagoras probably demonstrated (not “discovered” or “invented”) his theorem with triangular clay tiles. So what I plan to do in this post is draw an analogy between some of the key relationships at play in two famous museums designed by two famous contemporary architects (relationships which might be termed mathematical or geometric) and some corresponding relationships at play in what might be described as two contemporary ways of doing church (relationships which also might be descried as geometric).

There is a well-known evangelical way of doing church that is nicely exemplified in the hotly debated virtues or lack thereof of the typical mega-church (or in smaller churches that emulate them). Its like a shiny, well oiled machine that runs so smoothly that its members just continue to desire joyfully to do all the necessary work to keep the heavy and complicated machine running just as smoothly as it “always has.” After all, the point of a nicely humming machine is to attract “other” now-greatly-blessed people to come over and take a look at your shiny red car, right? Off, then, into the great frontiers…err, wheat fields…of God’s labour!

Corresponding to the peacefully running well-oiled pretty and shiny machine of the mega-church is The Getty Center in Los Angeles, CA, by American (of course) architect Richard Meir. Like the shiny mega-church, it photographs really well; however the photographs are often merely graphic and actually mean next to nothing (and often have no relationship to the ground). I mentioned once to a pastor who runs something like a mega-church that there is a strong correspondence to his typically Cartesian way of moving around the world by notation and the fact that the cross on the wall in his church has no body. He simply explained to me the history of the Protestant tradition of showing the cross without the body of Christ in order to celebrate the Resurrection. In his mind that was pretty much the end of the discussion (but not before he did share some fairly personal and touching stories of his own experiences with death).

The Getty is designed on a graphically-imposed orthogonal grid whose module size is determined by the distance at which most Americans have a “comfortable” level of intimacy when standing next to another person (determined by a survey, of course), which if I remember right is 30 inches (in Africa, or even Europe, you will notice that people stand much closer to each other in line). Similarly the preaching in a mega-church has that funny “warm tone” to it, but in reality the guy is talking to thousands of people he’s never met using an expository format that is meant to graphically expose everything in an obscene way to all these foreign people. By "obscene" there I mean the exposing of more than what is appropriate, even the very source of life, to a public showing.

Correspondingly, at the Getty there is no Shadow. Instead the joints between the elements of construction expose the fact that the shadows are really meant to be reveals. A reveal, these days, is a joint in the plaster finish of a building to prevent cracking. Or back in the day when a mason would take a hand tool to get the extraneous mortar that had dripped out of the joint between the bricks off the wall, the tool might leave a "reveal." Or in enlightenment period architecture, sometimes you just see this horizontal band, a visual/linear line of a little shadow cut into the stone finish of the building that is meant to evoke the mechanical motion of...well, everything...including the planets going around and around (hence the band's going "around and around" the building, and hence the elliptical contour of the wall around which the "reveal" probably runs "around"). At Meir's building, the "reveals" are the little joints between the white aluminum panels, or between the stones that are mechnaically fixed to the side of the building as the finish. The reason you see the reveal is because it makes a shadow; but figuratively it is not a Shadow but a reveal.

Additinally, the Getty is designed in such a way as to look holy and pure and “set apart” from its context. Of course, though, we then have to be reconciled to “nature,” so there are a bunch of gardens and trees around the grounds in which people can mosey. And the buildings themselves seem to twist and turn peacefully along with the Romance of the innocent American Landscape, a “view” of which is a primary feature of the Getty experience. In that picture one should take note the “fallen impurities” of the tall buildings in the way of the view (lol); luckily for the viewer they are really far away and so comfortably insignificant.

Similarly a mega-church has supposedly been “set apart” into a holy life with God. The only problem is that it is not really till after we die, so it is kind of far away and appears insignificant (the “it” that is far away is either life in the now or life in heaven after we die). Or maybe life with God is even in the now, but just as the Getty Center looks white, pure and shiny but isn’t really any different from the “context” around it – and in fact borrows its most important and determining features from its “context” – both the mega-church and the Getty, in their Downy-absorbent whiteness, really don’t do anything but cater to the stifling powers that be. In their “whiteness” they take on the colors of the things around them, although in a way that looks quite distorted and even a bit horrifying.

Ironically the biggest problems the architect had getting the Getty built was with the neighborhood “context” around the proposed center. They didn’t want this mechanically busy white piece of soon-rusted metal in the way their peaceful life in the mountains.

There is another less well-worn way of doing church that some evangelicals have been exploring lately. It doesn’t rely on expository disjunctions between what we do now and the “landscape” or context that we inhabit. It doesn’t rely on a series of whitely abstracted propositions about truths that conform strictly to the eternal laws of logic but then have a hard time conforming to the actual world that we live in. And it generally seems less interested in the erotic shiny redness of the well-oiled sports car. Instead some people today are interested in embracing their history as the only door to their present and future in such a way that – surprise - life and all of its oily and greasy mess is actually lived in a hopefully coherent way that leads to the wholeness of man living with and toward God. Some of us are trying to live in sight of the Cross and Resurrection rather than the red shiny Carriage. The King's Carriage is of course carried on the backs of the workers rather than on that of Jesus.

Corresponding in my analogy to this new way of doing church, about which others have already said much that they are more qualified than myself to say, is Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin. The building shares a plot of land with and sits right next to a pre-existing museum of the history of Berlin, which itself was built in the 1800s. As a tribute to the importance of the past in shaping the present, the only entrance to Libeskind’s new museum is through the old and pre-existing one. The new museum has no public entrance of its own.

Rather than being a reactionary tribute to the fading shine of the red sports car (think Joel Osteen as a most extreme example), the museum is also meant to, through various expressions of the language of architecture, remember the pain of the Holocaust and the resulting sense of loss and place of the Void in our souls and in the world. Yet the building is also meant to, in the face of such pain and sorrow, celebrate the past and ongoing collaborative influence of the Jewish people of Berlin on their city. As Libeskind says: The task of a Jewish Museum in Berlin demands more than a mere functional response to the program. Such a task in all its ethical depth requires the incorporation of the void of Berlin back into itself, in order to disclose how the past continues to affect the present and to reveal how a hopeful horizon can be opened through the aporias of time.

Like the more liturgical character of some of the new churches, the parts of the Jewish museum are themselves like measured modules of the life of the Jewish people of Berlin, meant to reflect the character of Jewish life and the Jewish God. It is also constructed or ordered in such a way that those invisible and visible remnants of Jewish life and the character of their God (both painful and hopeful, scarring and encouraging) is to be gathered into one experience, in time, of the “microcosmic” whole of the museum and city, an experience which itself will later leave a kind of footprint of memory in one’s soul after having “been through” it (someone I respect once said that an architectural plan is like a footprint). Says Libeskind: The Jewish Mesuem has a multivalent relation to its context. It acts as a lens magnifying the vectors of history in order to make the continuity of spaces visible.

Interestngly, then, rather than being designed over a superimposed and at least conceptually infinitely extended “grid,” the overall plan is a broken construction of the ancient Jewish symbol, the Star of David. The "symbol" of the Star of David is not, by the way, just an object that appears on the spacially flat and infinite screen of life, but fits inside the geometric Unity of a circle as part of a larger alchemical geometric construction of the world, figuratively speaking of course. The referenced figurative geometric construction is that of a square inside a circle using only a stright edge and compass, and its beginnings are actually the logo of Studio Libeskind. I digress.

Back to the Jewish Museum, the grounds do not form a flat platform good for viewing the whole world as if from atop the Tower of Babel, but instead leaves the pilgrim on a series of labyrinthine and interconnected pathways that are often deeply disorienting and yet in turn sometimes profoundly re-orienting. Spacially, the re-orientation is only possible through the actual physical and sensible horizon, which was unfortunately lost a good 400 years ago. Even a keen awarenes of, as well as a profound questioning of a naive reliance upon, what we take to be the very laws of optics are a part of the actual "ground plan" of the building (Libeskind knew that Deleuze was aware that objects in the world become subjects when they stare back at you). This becomes very evident in some of his drawings. In some of his early exploratory drawings, the vanishing point, which occurs at the "ground," is exposed and exploded as something more than just a point on a line at which you stare blankly. You can see the remnants of this in his buildings.

Interestingly, Libeskind’s mentor was Catholic, and the following quote from him helps me to come to terms with the definition and sacramental nature of ritual. The Jewish Museum is conceived as an emblem in which the Invisible and Visible are the structural features which have been gathered in this space of Berlin and laid bare in an architecture where the unnamed remains the name which keeps still. Libeskind also says: The Jewish Museum is based on the invisible figures whose traces constitute the geometry of the building. The ground on which the building stands is not only the apparent one in Kreuzberg, but that other one which is both above and below it (Libeskind).

Libeskind’s mentor, mentioned a moment ago (named John Hejduk), would in his projects oftentimes be sure to bring you into contact with a scratching of the surface of the ground before you enter simply to remind you that its here. I had mentioned that at Libeskind’s museum, you can only enter through the past, but you also actually enter through the ground. You actually break the surface of the ground and descend into the depths of the earth in order to begin your journey of contact with the above-ground Jewish history of Berlin. You enter the depths of the Ground of Being, and by the time many people emerge from their experience of the building they are on their knees weeping, having been stirred to the depths of their soul.

As soon as you enter the building, then, you are underground, as when you proceed through more liturgical worship. The only “windows” are above you. They are the breaking of the surface of the ground, and in form and placement are part of the embodied story of the building and the city. The windows are the physical manifestation of a matrix of connections pervading the site. These ‘cuts’ are the actual topographical lines joining addresses of Germans and Jews immediately around the site and radiating outwards. The windows are the ‘writing of the addresses by the walls of the Museum itself’ (Libeskind).

As you can see, then, the windows are more than simply panes of glass meant to fulfill the biological function of sight. After contact with the Jewish Museum, some come to associate these “cuts” in the face of the building with facial “scars” (those of the past, no doubt). Like a missional church, the museum, rather than being a pristinely disjointed machine for the production of surface level truths and experiences that avoid the depths of reality, elicits deep sympathies with the very depths of God and the human heart.

Another interesting aspect of Libeskind referring to the “windows” as “cuts”, again considering his interest in the actualization of history, is the fact that the word “covenant” means “to cut.” It is a reference to the covenant ritual performed by God and Abraham, in which Abraham “cut” the animals into two halves through which the a holy fire of God then passed, thus symbolizing the two sides of the covenant between God and man. This was the “old covenant” on which stands the covenant by which our savior bears our “scars.”

Once you have entered the museum and are underground, the image of the God in you and in covenant with you is played out through your choices between three pathways (pathos). As you walk down each, you find that they lead, respectively, to a Void with a sliver of light descending from above accompanied by an upside down staircase, an “upside down” Garden of Exile and Emigration, and a long and slowly ascending staircase leading up to the exhibition spaces from which light floods downwards.

And just for the curious, here is what the “windows” look like from inside the building on the upper levels. It is appropriate, by the way, that its the windows, the openings, that symbolize the covenant. In Greek mythology windows are Orphic; in the Judeo-Christian tradition windows guide us on our procession toward God. It is often those heterogeneous places in a given space of a Libeskind building where the "cuts" begin and/or end that you begin to notice the figure of vanishing point staring back at you.

Much could be said about all of these, and the rest of the architectural features (or “words”) of the museum, as well as how it relates analogically through other buildings to other ecclesiologies. Suffice it to say for now, however, that the building is meant to be an embodiment – in time - of what it means to be human, or maybe Jewish, in the specific world in which we dwell and in relation to God. It is not a machine with a distant love/hate relationship to the body that involves lots of bickering arguments between originally harmonious parts of the self, arguments which themselves involve throwing foreign cinematic projectiles at a screen from across the room.

Instead the objects in the room, so to speak, are meant to be gathered up as parts of a meaningful and coherent whole that does not ignore the pains of our days or our bodies but instead “lays bare” all the deepest desires placed on our heart by God in such a way as to make a “pathos” to a place of hope in the face of an all-too-easily-ignored blackness (thus leading to those regrettable yet memorable purchases of red sports cars). Although Libeskind often intentionally ignores entirely the term "form" in his written discourses because of all the baggage that comes with it, the very form of his building, and not just the linguistic content that is often assumed to be the only messenger in the world, is meant to be part of the wholistic message of hope and breath in a constricted world of darkness whose future can tend to look so bleak.

A Moving Experience

2007-08-28T16:53:00.000-07:00

Today (Tuesday morning) I came across the following real life story, which I found just had to be shared:

-------------------------

i moved this weekend...IT WAS A CATASTROPHE!!! You will not believe was a disaster it was! Let me just give a sample of just how bad it really was...

Before noon on moving day there was people doing back flips from the second floor to a luv sac on the first floor

4 large pizzas, 24 sierra nevadas and a bottle of crown royal that had be injested

A truck that did a full roll going full speed (hit it's roof and rolled back on the tires)

and someone with a concussion

That was just saturday morning...

Since then I've had cable problems, internet problems, a sprinkler leaking everywhere, I'm missing everything and a ping pong ball burst into flames

there are so many things that went wrong...im officially never moving again!!

--------------------------

I laughed at all of that, my hard ass must admit. But...then my stone heart felt compassion when later in the day I heard an extension of the same story:

--------------------------

This moving thing is the biggest disaster in my LIFE!!!

It actually cost me a new job opportunity!!! WHAT THE HELL??? I just found out today and me moving actually caused me to miss this opportunity!!! What else is gonna go wrong??? I'm scared to do anything...i have to leave right now...am i gonna get in a car accident and die????

So everyone out there...do whatever it is that you do to wish good for someone...praying, voodoo, witchcraft, The Secret, WHATEVER!!! whatever it is that you do send the goodness towards me cos I'm sinking!

-----------------------------

Its funny to me how "moving" was the experience that "moved" her to religion. Lol. I don't think that this story requires any commentary. Besides the observation that it makes me, all the more, want to see Balls of Fury when it comes out :)

Musings on Some Cultural Absurdities

2007-08-19T00:09:00.000-07:00

I have recently come acorss a few cultural absurdities of note. I would like to share them with my cyber-audiece, if it so pleases :) The first two will be news stories, and the last will be a personal encounter. I will not comment so much on the news stories for now, as there is much that could be said about both. For now I will more simply just point and laugh. The last musing, however, from the personal encounter, will sort of serve as a new framework through which to view the first two.

Musing One: Sputnik on Steroids

Here is a link that is a news story about the first space hotel, which is supposed to open in the year 2012 A.D. If you ask me, sputnik might just be the prime sign of the shift from what is often referenced as the modern world to the postmodern. For most people, Sputnik represents man's scientific progress toward greater mastery of the universe. For me, however, Sputnik represents the actualization of the modern project to put himself in the place of God and have mastery over the world in which he lives. Technologies are the extensions of man, as McLuhan says, and Sputnik was man's extending the limits of his being out to the entirety of the globe.

At the time of Sputnik, as you can see from the link provided, Sputnik represented the technological superiority of Communism over Capitalist Democracy. Ahh but democracy need not fear; now it can offer a three night stay in a space hotel for the modest price of four million dollars! Sputnik circled the entirety of the globe once every 90 minutes. This space station will do so 15 times in a day, which obviously puts it at under 60 minutes for the same feat. Rich people in the poor parts of Kenya make between 30 and 50 cents a day; meanwhile these adventerous entertainment seekers will pass Kenya 15 times a day and, while thinking to themselves, "Poor, worthless saps," say, "Look honey, isn't it beautiful."

Musing Two: Steven Segal Is Gone With The Wind

Here is a link on a funny news article informing us that Steven Segal blames his fallen career on the FBI. I don't think this one requires as much explanation as the previous one in order for my audience to share in my laughter. The obvious first thought is the Britney Spears comparison; Steven Segal is no Peter Sellers. More relevant to the fact that this post is a musing on culture, however: did Segal not get the memo that Pop Culture is like glittery confetti in the wind? Someone throws it up in the air. Everyone looks up and goes, "Ooohh." Then it either falls or blows away, and everyone forgets about it. Problem is, everyone is still busy going "oohh" over the next handfull of glittery confetti that someone threw up in the air, which - thank God! - constantly helps us to forget the rough spots in our own hearts.

Musinng Three: Mighty Aphrodite vs. Old School

Thursday night I hung out with a very good friend of mine. We went and ate dinner, talked about life and God and stuff, and then he asked if I wanted to watch a movie. I said I didn't want to watch a pop-culture movie, and I suggested that we watch either The Discreet Charm of the Bourgoisie, which I explained that he would probably think it was boring since its not filled with dramatic music and car crashes and explosions of fire and emotion, or we could watch a Woody Allen Comedy (I had in mind Mighty Aprhodite). I don't think he's even seen many Woody Allen films, so I had to try to explain that to him as well, trying to convince him that a Woody Allen movie is "less boring" than one by Luis Bunuel. When I was done explaining our Allen and Bunuel options, he got all tense and said, "I don't think I want to watch a movie with you tonight." I said, "Why not?" Him, "Because your movie will be serious and boring." Me, "Woody Allen isn't boring. I promise." Him, "OK."

So we payed our bill and were off to the video store. We watched the Mighty Aprhodite. I laughed a lot. He mostly had a look of boredom on his face but laughted every now and again. At the end I could tell without his saying it that he was disappointed that he had just spent an hour and a half of his time watching it. The next night (Friday night), however, I ended up watching Old School with him and another friend. Both of them loved it, of course. They said, "That was so good." They looked over at me, "...wasn't it?" I said, "It was funny, but quite juvenile." Meanwhile I was disappointed and wishing I hadn't just spent an hour and a half watching that stupid movie.

Then tonight (Saturday) I was at a concert listening to the live heartfelt music of Josh Garrels and - while in a prayer-like state listening to the music - realized that I had the same aggrevation with my being subjected to Old School as with the very existence of a space hotel and also with the whole confetti throwing phenomenon of pop culture. The whole thrust of the comedy of Old School is the glorification of the shallowness and hedonism of college life when a group of older men (some married, some still single) are faced with the prospect of growing up - and actually relating to their spouses with all of their being (depths and all). The movie ends with Will Farrel's walking off sad and lonely after his wife tells him she wants a divorce. Somehow that's supposed to be the peaceful denoument.

There is something in me that wants to cutt myself off entirely from such rediculousness. Something in me wants to hold a posture of indignation and contempt towards my two close friends who enjoyed Old School (more towards the fact that it exists, but I hope my audience gets the point), toward Steven Segal, and toward all those who would want to come up with the idea of a space hotel and of course all those who would want to stay in one as well. Now, the music of Josh Garrels is like worship. Like the Word of God itself it strikes at the core of the heart.

I realized tonight while listening to his music that such a posture toward my friends betrays the very reason why I wouldn't want to watch Old School. I have in myself the very same darkness that lead to Will Farrel's character's divorce in the movie. I have in me that same desire to escape the darkness in my own heart and say "oohh" to the confetti. The differences between myself and my two close friends who liked Old School is that I look to different confetti, and I take art seriously. In fact, I look to different forms of "confetti" because I take art seriously. Listening to God's Word I realize that I'm no different from the star-gazers on Hollywood Boulevard, and I need to have some Grace and Mercy. I need to let God love me tenderly; and I need to have the same posture of tenderness and acceptance toward others. Maybe then my art might speak to others like the Word of God. Maybe then when I speak to both of those friends, they won't feel like I'm speaking at them (which sometimes they do feel) but to them.

So, then I must ask. Are the "cultural absurdities" referenced in the title of this post the absurdities of the folks' going "ooohh" at the confetti, or are they instead the cultural absurdities of what's often being cultivated in my own heart? Is the "culture" in question in the first place one of contempt (or love) or confetti and pop-culture (or "authenticity")?

Jeremiah's Indignation

2007-08-10T07:38:00.000-07:00

Those of you who know me know that I've been struggling for some time now with or against (?) the world in which we live. To get the engines of this post revving, I'll offer a primer. A couple weeks ago I heard a pastor give a sermon on having "perspective." She was saying that God is with you even if your pain is so great that, like Hannah, you can't even say the words, you can only shape them with your mouth without uttering a sound. I thought to myself, I can identify with that.

Lately I've been reading the prophets, and have found much there that gives voice to where I am. I haven't been sharing much of it with my cyber audience, but last night I found something so striking in Jeremiah that I just had to share it. For more context, here is something I was desparately trying to explain to another cyber-friend recently in a conversation about - interestingly - how church relates to what I reference there as our "insane" culture:

"I'm going to be open, honest and transparent about something on a personal level in my own life with regards to all this. I was recently hanging out with a good friend of mine who is about 35 yrs. old (I'm 28). He's really good at connecting with people, just having a long conversation with just about anyone on just about any topic. And he's always meeting women too (which I am not always doing). So we got into a conversation about why its so easy for him to meet new people, whereas it really isn't for me. To make a long story short, through his sharing of his own personal experiences where he used to think he was just plain smarter than everyone else - but then mysteriously couldn't get a date or meet new friends - he struggled with arrogance and God humbled him. Now, I'm not one to think hardly anyone is dumb, so I couln't relate on that level. But I realized that I think of many people as ignorant. So I discount most all people, Christians included, who give themselves over to the 'insanity' of the culture that we live in. Which is most everyone. Which means I don't have much to say to most folks. Which means that I'm not the best conversationalist and I'm not so good at meeting new folks. And also, apparently...I'm slowly realizing...that I'm arrogant in some way and God wants to do something about it. A week after that conversation (so this past Sunday night), my friend (his name is Genesis, interestingly) said, "You can have convictions! You just don't have to be arrogant about them!"

I wrote that a couple of days before reading:

Jeremiah 15: 12-21 -

12-14"O Israel, O Judah, what are your chances
against the iron juggernaut from the north?
In punishment for your sins, I'm giving away
everything you've got, giving it away for nothing.
I'll make you slaves to your enemies
in a strange and far-off land.
My anger is blazing and fierce,
burning in hot judgment against you."

15-18You know where I am, God! Remember what I'm doing here!
Take my side against my detractors.
Don't stand back while they ruin me.
Just look at the abuse I'm taking!
When your words showed up, I ate them—
swallowed them whole. What a feast!
What delight I took in being yours,
O God, God-of-the-Angel-Armies!
I never joined the party crowd
in their laughter and their fun.
Led by you, I went off by myself.
You'd filled me with indignation. Their sin had me seething.
But why, why this chronic pain,
this ever worsening wound and no healing in sight?
You're nothing, God, but a mirage,
a lovely oasis in the distance—and then nothing?!

19-21This is how God answered me:

"Take back those words, and I'll take you back.
Then you'll stand tall before me.
Use words truly and well. Don't stoop to cheap whining.
Then, but only then, you'll speak for me.
Let your words change them.
Don't change your words to suit them.
I'll turn you into a steel wall,
a thick steel wall, impregnable.
They'll attack you but won't put a dent in you
because I'm at your side, defending and delivering."
God's Decree.
"I'll deliver you from the grip of the wicked.
I'll get you out of the clutch of the ruthless."

The Message version of that one part reminds me of that blasted Protestant Liberalism: "Let your words change them. Don't change your words to suit them." The very same verse has a very differnet ring to it in the New American Standard Version, which I really like the sound of, but which I have yet to really embrace, I don't think:

"And if you extract the precious from the worthless,
You will become My spokesman."

I guess I'm prematurely stuck on the next words of the very same verse of our Holy Scriptures:

"They for their part may turn to you,
But as for you, you must not turn to them."