All I Got Are Questions - Edited
First of all, I forgot to give props to Elliott for coming in third for being voted into the All Star. Not that what Kyle was doing wasn’t cool, it was. Very. But the charity campaign he did and the fact that all the weight of the “Junior Nation” falls behind Martin Truex Jr. whenever he is up for a vote makes coming in third a pretty fine accolade.
EDIT 2: I just read Jayski and now NASCAR.com. Wow! A racing organization is having problems back at the shop...and they're actually addressing them! How refreshing! Here's hoping to see some great cars coming out of RYR for the second half of the season! *Yea!*
And Elliott gets his Busch ride back! **Double Yea!**
EDIT 3: I was reading through the CEO's copy of Machine Design when I stumbled across a familiar name: Roush Performance Products. Apparently they are the ultimate in aftermarket upgrades to trucks. Check it out. I know I'm very green and want to cut our oil dependant ties with the Middle East, but still....*drool*.
Check out the sidebar about the Porche that was turned into a truck too.
The Immigration Wrangle Continues To Go On.
First of all, I have to wonder if this isn’t some distracting tactic that backfired on the Bush administration. First Social Security and now this.
People tend to forget that for half of the nations history, there was no immigration law. “Give me your tired, you poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free” was taken at face value and the United States was open to all comers sorta…. The alien act of 1790 stated that “any alien, being a free white person, may be admitted to become a citizen of the United States" which for the time was pretty liberal considering nations in Europe were kicking people out for being the wrong sect of Christianity.
This is of course ignoring the simple fact the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, the first English colonists, were themselves immigrants.
I love watching the mental gymnastics white supremacists do after you throw that one into the fray.
In 1882, the first immigration law was passed, and not to our credit. It was a law to restrict the number of Chinese people entering the nation, which they were doing in large numbers. They pretty built our railroads west of the Mississippi and much of old California.
Then in 1890, we began to “process” immigrants: inspecting, admitting or rejecting them. Ellis Island was opened two years later. From then on it’s just been more and more laws. A quota system was put in place to allow more “desirable” people in such as English and French, but keep out as many “undesirables” such as those of Jewish decent, as possible. Sadly, this is why many of them could not flee to the U.S. when the Third Reich began it’s “Final Solution”. Non-resident aliens within the U.S. were all required to register with the government and carry a, “Alien Registration Receipt Card”, the precursor of the Green card in 1940. In 1952, the immigration system we know now was put in place, but acts in 1968 and 1972 eliminated any preferential acceptance based on race, sex, religion or country of origin.
Now many people, such as myself, have wondered if we want to stop illegal immigration, why don’t we fine companies that hire illegal immigrants? Well, we already have that law in place. A law passed in 1986 went after companies that employed illegal immigrants and also cracked down on marriage fraud. In 1990, we passed a law restricting aliens again, but this time based on occupation to curtail the flood of unskilled workers entering the country.
Now here is an interesting tidbit I just learned, in 2003 the department of immigration was suborned to the Office of Homeland Security. (You’ll have to forgive me if this is old news to you all, but this isn’t a subject I paid much attention to until
recently.)
Well, after FEMA I think we all know what happened then. Maybe instead of thousands of miles and billion of wasted dollar in fencing, we should just stop Chertoff from siphoning off Immigration and Naturalization funds and give the department it’s autonomy back.
It seems a case of having all the laws we need in place, we just need to actually enforce them. Instead of creating an entire underclass of disenfranchised people in this country, I think the answer to stopping illegal immigration is cracking down, very hard, on the companies that hire illegal immigrants. If there are no jobs for people who come into the country illegally, they won’t come into the country illegally.
The problem is this means Bush would have to go after his next to last and most important political ally: Business. Evangelicals who think Bush is working for them are blind, Bush works for Business. Everything he has done in office proves that. So rather than actually stopping the problem at the source, he throws gobs of money we don’t have to make a useless gesture.
As for English being the official language…I really can't see a problem with that. If you move to France, you have to learn to speak French. If you move to China, you have to learn to speak Chinese. My sister in law is Japanese and she taught here. Her English is just fine, even though now dosed with a Maine accent *chuckle*. My nephew is being raised in a bi-lingual household, but it’s BI-lingual. He’s going to be able to swim in both languages which is not only proven to be a benefit to children’s learning skills and useful to him as an adult, but just darn cool. But that’s on a personal or household level. He will come home speak Japanese with his mother (and probably Dad too) and write his grandparents in Kanji, but he will be able to take full advantage of being in an American schools and work in an American workplace.
Los Angeles is a bi-lingual city and the number of people that live there for years, decades even, without learning the English is pretty appalling. I know this may piss off some of my friends back there, but the level to which non-English speaker is catered to is has made our schools and cities more cumbersome certainly, and I think those people have been denied full access to the American Dream because of their being segregated by language in the workplace. I don’t think it’s a bad thing to require people here learn to speak English. ESL programs are great, but not for a person's entire life.
If anyone wants to chime in here, I’m fully open to debate on this. I’ve just got my point of view. I’m sure there are other very valid points of view as well. Immigration is a very difficult, touchy and complex issue and the more open discussion we have on it the better.
Let’s Take a Breather
O.K. the latest issue of the Smith came yesterday.
The first thing that caught my eyes was: Who’s Counting: 330,000 scarab beetles from the Museum of Natural History are on loan to the University of Nebraska. The family of 35,000 species included yes, the June Bug.
Did the Smith just acknowledge Jyoonyer mania?
There is a great article titled Wyeth’s World (The site doesn't have the articles posted yet) which is a look at the uniquely American vision of Andrew Wyeth, most famous for Christina World. As the article observes everyone relates to the iconic piece in their own way. (For example until this article I never realized that she was crippled and crawling up the hill. I see it as a wild moment of despair in the inherent repression of an extremely limited existence. )
I call Wyeth’s work uniquely American because so many of them are lone figures in an overwhelming landscape or surroundings. Even the ones without human figures seem to be visions that evoke a sort of frontier remoteness, each with their own story that is generated within the observers mind. Even what are on the surface more erotic pieces like Day Dream have an gentling, “home-y” quality to them the humanizes the figures and makes them utterly comfortable yet stil remote and somewhat...off.
“People have pigeonholed Wyeth as a realist, a virtuoso draftsman, almost like a camera recording his world, and we want to demonstrate that realism is only the beginning of his method, which is so much more fantastic and artful and memory based than people may have realized. And strange.”
Strangeness hidden or perhaps revealed by an exacting normally or realism, which too is a very American trait. The idea of the thin skin of normal Americana covering a sometimes dark strangeness that was so well capitalized on by David Lynch is something that goes a ways back in American culture. Peyton Place, first published in 1956 was one of the first to peel the layer of sweet sleepy rural America back and address the things that were happening behind the closed door of quaint New England cottages. (And speaking from small town experience, yeah there a lot of stuff the goes on that doesn’t make it into Norman Rockwell paintings.)
However unlike Lynch and Metalious who consider the normalcy to be nothing more than a facade, Wyeth gives equal honor on his canvas to both the normalacy and the strangeness.
Were I much more learned in art I could probably go on, but this is about the extent of my artistic analytical abilities.
Anyway, good article and a great artist.
Gee, It’s Not All Swell Mr. President?
Golly, I would have never known…
While it is vaguely nice to hear him vaguely admit there were mistakes made (singling out Abu Gharib does not even begin to cover the incredible amount of mistakes made in Iraq: See Blind Into Bagdhad) this weeks speech doesn’t even begin to address the culpability the Bush administration had directly in making Iraq the mess it is now.
A man in a chef's uniform, complete with tall white hat, went to the microphone and thanked Bush "on behalf of all the cooks and chefs in our country" for creating jobs in the restaurant industry and "running the country the way a chef would run the country." He said he hoped Bush's brother - Florida Gov. Jeb Bush - would run for the White House and continue Bush's policies.
I call shenanigans. I’ve worked in a four star, they don’t wear tall white hats and if Bush ran a professional kitchen the way he has run this country, the restaurant would be closed in six months.
I mean, really, can you see it?
First he would advertise as a steakhouse, only people would show up to find a Souplantation. He wouldn’t change the menu to please the customers, following doggedly on his “singular culinary vision” even if it didn't sell. What did sell he would under charge people who wore Armani and over charge those wearing clothes from J.C. Penny. He would use cheap substitutions for the high quality items on the menu, he’d chisel his wait staff and make them buy their own uniforms. He kick out anyone of talent and experience that had a dissenting voice or independent idea, he’d run the resturaunt DEEP into the red within months (not that that is hard for a start up, but then the United States wasn’t exactly a start up country). He'd wouldn't lock up at night and he wouldn't bother with sanitation, instead accusing the Health inspectors of working for a competing resturaunt rather than addressing any issues they bring to his attention.
Months? This place would be boarded up within weeks.
What idiocy, but then I suspect this was a clumsily engineered attempt and making Bush seem popular amougn the service industry.
Will the new government stabilize Iraq?
Administration officials have said the establishment of a new government is a key step toward stabilizing Iraq and making discussion of an eventual American troop pullout possible. But they said it was unlikely to lead to a reduction of violence anytime soon.
That’s sort of like a doctor saying a patient in the ICU’s prognosis is “guarded”. Not a good sign.
Is it good they have finally seated a government? Yes. But a government was seated in Afghanistan two years ago and the violence there continues to escalate.
While the New PM’s cabinet is more balanced than anticipated (though we await with baited breath who is named for Secretaries of the Interior and Defense), the Iranian influenced Shi’ite controls of many culturally important seats. This makes me wonder if after we leave, if the country doesn’t dissolve into Civil War (which given the violence this week, it may) as it did after the English left in the 1950's, the country isn’t just going to become a satellite or partner of theocratic Iran. So while we have removed a dictator, we will have helped create a yet another second theocracy in the Middle East that really, REALLY, hates the U.S.
But then, some people here seem to like theocracies, constantly railing against that burdensome “Separation of Church and State” thing, so they should be very happy that we helped another theocracy come into being.
And what are we doing to cut our apron strings to the Middle East? Nothing. And with the oil rich countries in South America nationalizing their oil industries and much of our manufacturing overseas, it entirely possible that U.N. Sanctions could economically hurt us.
Barring a civil war, I just really don’t know how this country could be a bigger mess.
And it is a mess. It’s not one huge thing wrong as it was back in 1860 (well, the Bush administration, but we’re talking issues here), there are ton of different things wrong: Iraq, Immigration, violations of constitutional rights, poverty, economy, national debt, torture and holding prisoners in violation of the Geneva Convention, the disappearing middle class, repairing the Gulf Coast, FEMA, loss of manufacturing jobs, the environment, quality of education, out of control Health Care costs, government and business ethics violations, the large amount of control Big Business has over the government, cutting of veterans benefits, actual honest to gawd security, terrorism which continues worldwide (and not just in the Middle East), the two party system which has become the Squabbling Siblings system while the public roots for their favorite team like it’s a freakin’ sport, let see, am I forgetting anything?
Aigh, it just boggles my mind thinking about it all. We think just because we have satellite dishes and running water that everything is just spiffy, but it’s not. The U.S. has a lot of problems running just under the surface, problems that threaten to drag us down in time unless we address them rather than chasing after phantoms and making useless gestures.
It’s no wonder Jeb won’t run, who the hell want to clean up that mess? I pity the multiple administrations that have to come in after this one and try and straighten it all out because it will take many, many years to rectify the mistakes that have been made.
Just In Time for the Davinci Code
Another article in this month's Smithsonian Magazine well worth reading is Who Was Mary Magdalene? This article breaks down the popular concept of Mary as the repentant whore to her biblical roots, which have no mention of her family or occupation (much less being married to Jesus in any canonical or noncanonical gospel) prior to accompanying Jesus and The Twelve. Around the 6th century in the early Catholic Church, Pope Gregory the Great turned her into an amalgam of several women mentioned into the Gospels. As most congregations through the Middle Ages and Renaissance were illiterate, and indeed many of the Priests in rural areas were as well, this version of Mary is what entered Western consciousness despite having no Biblcal reference.
What is interesting about the article is that it also tracks the role of women in the church from Christ’s considering women to be equals under the eyes of God (Citing St. Paul and the non-canonical Gospel of Mary) and therefore worthy of roles of leadership, to women being “reduced to their sexual roles, even if sexuality itself was reduced to the realm of temptation, the source of human unworthiness. All of this- from the sexualizing of Mary Magdalene to the emphatic veneration of the virginity of Mary, mother of Jesus, to embrace celibacy as a clerical ideal (which was not universally embraced when the church began), to the marginalizing of female devotion, to the recasting of piety as self denial, particularly through penitential cults- came to a kind of defining climax at the end of the 16th century….it was then that the rails along which the church – and the Western imagination- would run were set...”
Thus Mary of Magdala, who began as a powerful woman at Jesus side “became” in Haskins summary” the redeemed and Christianity’s model of repentance, a manageable, controllable figure, and an effective weapon and instrument of propaganda against her own sex.” There were reasons of narrative form for which this happened. There was a harnessing of sexual restlessness to this image. There was the humane appeal of a story that emphasized the possibility of forgiveness and redemption. But what most drove the anti-sexual sexualizing of Mary Magdalene was the male need to dominate women. In the Catholic Church, as elsewhere, that need is still being met.”
Philip K. Dick
Only in the last 20 years or so the film world of SciFi has fallen more and more under the sway of a man practically unknown in the popular culture. Philip K. Dick was a paranoid with multiple physical and emotional problems that often led him to question to question the nature of reality before the Wachowski Brothers were even born.
The one film most are familiar with is Bladerunner which is based off Dick’s "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" which questions the nature of humanity. The cheesily executed Total Recall is based on his short story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" that questions the nature of memory. The underrated and nearly unknown Dark City (tres’ cool film) is said to have drawn on one of PKD’s works and the known yet still underrated Minority Report (often called “Spielberg’s apology for A.I.” in the SciFi world *chuckle*) is based on a “Dickinson” short story of the same name that questions the nature of free will and predestination. Now there is a film coming out called Scanner Darkly also based on a Dickinson novel which questions the reality of self and how that self perceives reality through a drug cult.
“My major preoccupation is the question, 'What is reality?' Many of my stories and novels deal with psychotic states or drug-induced states by which I can present the concept of a multiverse rather than a universe.” ~Philip K. Dick
I find it interesting from an anthropological point of view that in the late quarter of the 20th century, we as a culture became enamored of the questions of reality and truth that were first asked thousands of years ago by the Hindus and the Greeks and have been almost the sole bailiwick of philosophers ever since. I wonder what is happening in western culture that has made these questions more mainstream?
Anyway, if you like these films and others such as Thirteenth Floor and EXsitenZ, you should probably give PKD's short stories a whirl.
EDIT 2: I just read Jayski and now NASCAR.com. Wow! A racing organization is having problems back at the shop...and they're actually addressing them! How refreshing! Here's hoping to see some great cars coming out of RYR for the second half of the season! *Yea!*
And Elliott gets his Busch ride back! **Double Yea!**
EDIT 3: I was reading through the CEO's copy of Machine Design when I stumbled across a familiar name: Roush Performance Products. Apparently they are the ultimate in aftermarket upgrades to trucks. Check it out. I know I'm very green and want to cut our oil dependant ties with the Middle East, but still....*drool*.
Check out the sidebar about the Porche that was turned into a truck too.
The Immigration Wrangle Continues To Go On.
First of all, I have to wonder if this isn’t some distracting tactic that backfired on the Bush administration. First Social Security and now this.
People tend to forget that for half of the nations history, there was no immigration law. “Give me your tired, you poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free” was taken at face value and the United States was open to all comers sorta…. The alien act of 1790 stated that “any alien, being a free white person, may be admitted to become a citizen of the United States" which for the time was pretty liberal considering nations in Europe were kicking people out for being the wrong sect of Christianity.
This is of course ignoring the simple fact the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, the first English colonists, were themselves immigrants.
I love watching the mental gymnastics white supremacists do after you throw that one into the fray.
In 1882, the first immigration law was passed, and not to our credit. It was a law to restrict the number of Chinese people entering the nation, which they were doing in large numbers. They pretty built our railroads west of the Mississippi and much of old California.
Then in 1890, we began to “process” immigrants: inspecting, admitting or rejecting them. Ellis Island was opened two years later. From then on it’s just been more and more laws. A quota system was put in place to allow more “desirable” people in such as English and French, but keep out as many “undesirables” such as those of Jewish decent, as possible. Sadly, this is why many of them could not flee to the U.S. when the Third Reich began it’s “Final Solution”. Non-resident aliens within the U.S. were all required to register with the government and carry a, “Alien Registration Receipt Card”, the precursor of the Green card in 1940. In 1952, the immigration system we know now was put in place, but acts in 1968 and 1972 eliminated any preferential acceptance based on race, sex, religion or country of origin.
Now many people, such as myself, have wondered if we want to stop illegal immigration, why don’t we fine companies that hire illegal immigrants? Well, we already have that law in place. A law passed in 1986 went after companies that employed illegal immigrants and also cracked down on marriage fraud. In 1990, we passed a law restricting aliens again, but this time based on occupation to curtail the flood of unskilled workers entering the country.
Now here is an interesting tidbit I just learned, in 2003 the department of immigration was suborned to the Office of Homeland Security. (You’ll have to forgive me if this is old news to you all, but this isn’t a subject I paid much attention to until
recently.)
Well, after FEMA I think we all know what happened then. Maybe instead of thousands of miles and billion of wasted dollar in fencing, we should just stop Chertoff from siphoning off Immigration and Naturalization funds and give the department it’s autonomy back.
It seems a case of having all the laws we need in place, we just need to actually enforce them. Instead of creating an entire underclass of disenfranchised people in this country, I think the answer to stopping illegal immigration is cracking down, very hard, on the companies that hire illegal immigrants. If there are no jobs for people who come into the country illegally, they won’t come into the country illegally.
The problem is this means Bush would have to go after his next to last and most important political ally: Business. Evangelicals who think Bush is working for them are blind, Bush works for Business. Everything he has done in office proves that. So rather than actually stopping the problem at the source, he throws gobs of money we don’t have to make a useless gesture.
As for English being the official language…I really can't see a problem with that. If you move to France, you have to learn to speak French. If you move to China, you have to learn to speak Chinese. My sister in law is Japanese and she taught here. Her English is just fine, even though now dosed with a Maine accent *chuckle*. My nephew is being raised in a bi-lingual household, but it’s BI-lingual. He’s going to be able to swim in both languages which is not only proven to be a benefit to children’s learning skills and useful to him as an adult, but just darn cool. But that’s on a personal or household level. He will come home speak Japanese with his mother (and probably Dad too) and write his grandparents in Kanji, but he will be able to take full advantage of being in an American schools and work in an American workplace.
Los Angeles is a bi-lingual city and the number of people that live there for years, decades even, without learning the English is pretty appalling. I know this may piss off some of my friends back there, but the level to which non-English speaker is catered to is has made our schools and cities more cumbersome certainly, and I think those people have been denied full access to the American Dream because of their being segregated by language in the workplace. I don’t think it’s a bad thing to require people here learn to speak English. ESL programs are great, but not for a person's entire life.
If anyone wants to chime in here, I’m fully open to debate on this. I’ve just got my point of view. I’m sure there are other very valid points of view as well. Immigration is a very difficult, touchy and complex issue and the more open discussion we have on it the better.
Let’s Take a Breather
O.K. the latest issue of the Smith came yesterday.
The first thing that caught my eyes was: Who’s Counting: 330,000 scarab beetles from the Museum of Natural History are on loan to the University of Nebraska. The family of 35,000 species included yes, the June Bug.
Did the Smith just acknowledge Jyoonyer mania?
There is a great article titled Wyeth’s World (The site doesn't have the articles posted yet) which is a look at the uniquely American vision of Andrew Wyeth, most famous for Christina World. As the article observes everyone relates to the iconic piece in their own way. (For example until this article I never realized that she was crippled and crawling up the hill. I see it as a wild moment of despair in the inherent repression of an extremely limited existence. )
I call Wyeth’s work uniquely American because so many of them are lone figures in an overwhelming landscape or surroundings. Even the ones without human figures seem to be visions that evoke a sort of frontier remoteness, each with their own story that is generated within the observers mind. Even what are on the surface more erotic pieces like Day Dream have an gentling, “home-y” quality to them the humanizes the figures and makes them utterly comfortable yet stil remote and somewhat...off.
“People have pigeonholed Wyeth as a realist, a virtuoso draftsman, almost like a camera recording his world, and we want to demonstrate that realism is only the beginning of his method, which is so much more fantastic and artful and memory based than people may have realized. And strange.”
Strangeness hidden or perhaps revealed by an exacting normally or realism, which too is a very American trait. The idea of the thin skin of normal Americana covering a sometimes dark strangeness that was so well capitalized on by David Lynch is something that goes a ways back in American culture. Peyton Place, first published in 1956 was one of the first to peel the layer of sweet sleepy rural America back and address the things that were happening behind the closed door of quaint New England cottages. (And speaking from small town experience, yeah there a lot of stuff the goes on that doesn’t make it into Norman Rockwell paintings.)
However unlike Lynch and Metalious who consider the normalcy to be nothing more than a facade, Wyeth gives equal honor on his canvas to both the normalacy and the strangeness.
Were I much more learned in art I could probably go on, but this is about the extent of my artistic analytical abilities.
Anyway, good article and a great artist.
Gee, It’s Not All Swell Mr. President?
Golly, I would have never known…
While it is vaguely nice to hear him vaguely admit there were mistakes made (singling out Abu Gharib does not even begin to cover the incredible amount of mistakes made in Iraq: See Blind Into Bagdhad) this weeks speech doesn’t even begin to address the culpability the Bush administration had directly in making Iraq the mess it is now.
A man in a chef's uniform, complete with tall white hat, went to the microphone and thanked Bush "on behalf of all the cooks and chefs in our country" for creating jobs in the restaurant industry and "running the country the way a chef would run the country." He said he hoped Bush's brother - Florida Gov. Jeb Bush - would run for the White House and continue Bush's policies.
I call shenanigans. I’ve worked in a four star, they don’t wear tall white hats and if Bush ran a professional kitchen the way he has run this country, the restaurant would be closed in six months.
I mean, really, can you see it?
First he would advertise as a steakhouse, only people would show up to find a Souplantation. He wouldn’t change the menu to please the customers, following doggedly on his “singular culinary vision” even if it didn't sell. What did sell he would under charge people who wore Armani and over charge those wearing clothes from J.C. Penny. He would use cheap substitutions for the high quality items on the menu, he’d chisel his wait staff and make them buy their own uniforms. He kick out anyone of talent and experience that had a dissenting voice or independent idea, he’d run the resturaunt DEEP into the red within months (not that that is hard for a start up, but then the United States wasn’t exactly a start up country). He'd wouldn't lock up at night and he wouldn't bother with sanitation, instead accusing the Health inspectors of working for a competing resturaunt rather than addressing any issues they bring to his attention.
Months? This place would be boarded up within weeks.
What idiocy, but then I suspect this was a clumsily engineered attempt and making Bush seem popular amougn the service industry.
Will the new government stabilize Iraq?
Administration officials have said the establishment of a new government is a key step toward stabilizing Iraq and making discussion of an eventual American troop pullout possible. But they said it was unlikely to lead to a reduction of violence anytime soon.
That’s sort of like a doctor saying a patient in the ICU’s prognosis is “guarded”. Not a good sign.
Is it good they have finally seated a government? Yes. But a government was seated in Afghanistan two years ago and the violence there continues to escalate.
While the New PM’s cabinet is more balanced than anticipated (though we await with baited breath who is named for Secretaries of the Interior and Defense), the Iranian influenced Shi’ite controls of many culturally important seats. This makes me wonder if after we leave, if the country doesn’t dissolve into Civil War (which given the violence this week, it may) as it did after the English left in the 1950's, the country isn’t just going to become a satellite or partner of theocratic Iran. So while we have removed a dictator, we will have helped create a yet another second theocracy in the Middle East that really, REALLY, hates the U.S.
But then, some people here seem to like theocracies, constantly railing against that burdensome “Separation of Church and State” thing, so they should be very happy that we helped another theocracy come into being.
And what are we doing to cut our apron strings to the Middle East? Nothing. And with the oil rich countries in South America nationalizing their oil industries and much of our manufacturing overseas, it entirely possible that U.N. Sanctions could economically hurt us.
Barring a civil war, I just really don’t know how this country could be a bigger mess.
And it is a mess. It’s not one huge thing wrong as it was back in 1860 (well, the Bush administration, but we’re talking issues here), there are ton of different things wrong: Iraq, Immigration, violations of constitutional rights, poverty, economy, national debt, torture and holding prisoners in violation of the Geneva Convention, the disappearing middle class, repairing the Gulf Coast, FEMA, loss of manufacturing jobs, the environment, quality of education, out of control Health Care costs, government and business ethics violations, the large amount of control Big Business has over the government, cutting of veterans benefits, actual honest to gawd security, terrorism which continues worldwide (and not just in the Middle East), the two party system which has become the Squabbling Siblings system while the public roots for their favorite team like it’s a freakin’ sport, let see, am I forgetting anything?
Aigh, it just boggles my mind thinking about it all. We think just because we have satellite dishes and running water that everything is just spiffy, but it’s not. The U.S. has a lot of problems running just under the surface, problems that threaten to drag us down in time unless we address them rather than chasing after phantoms and making useless gestures.
It’s no wonder Jeb won’t run, who the hell want to clean up that mess? I pity the multiple administrations that have to come in after this one and try and straighten it all out because it will take many, many years to rectify the mistakes that have been made.
Just In Time for the Davinci Code
Another article in this month's Smithsonian Magazine well worth reading is Who Was Mary Magdalene? This article breaks down the popular concept of Mary as the repentant whore to her biblical roots, which have no mention of her family or occupation (much less being married to Jesus in any canonical or noncanonical gospel) prior to accompanying Jesus and The Twelve. Around the 6th century in the early Catholic Church, Pope Gregory the Great turned her into an amalgam of several women mentioned into the Gospels. As most congregations through the Middle Ages and Renaissance were illiterate, and indeed many of the Priests in rural areas were as well, this version of Mary is what entered Western consciousness despite having no Biblcal reference.
What is interesting about the article is that it also tracks the role of women in the church from Christ’s considering women to be equals under the eyes of God (Citing St. Paul and the non-canonical Gospel of Mary) and therefore worthy of roles of leadership, to women being “reduced to their sexual roles, even if sexuality itself was reduced to the realm of temptation, the source of human unworthiness. All of this- from the sexualizing of Mary Magdalene to the emphatic veneration of the virginity of Mary, mother of Jesus, to embrace celibacy as a clerical ideal (which was not universally embraced when the church began), to the marginalizing of female devotion, to the recasting of piety as self denial, particularly through penitential cults- came to a kind of defining climax at the end of the 16th century….it was then that the rails along which the church – and the Western imagination- would run were set...”
Thus Mary of Magdala, who began as a powerful woman at Jesus side “became” in Haskins summary” the redeemed and Christianity’s model of repentance, a manageable, controllable figure, and an effective weapon and instrument of propaganda against her own sex.” There were reasons of narrative form for which this happened. There was a harnessing of sexual restlessness to this image. There was the humane appeal of a story that emphasized the possibility of forgiveness and redemption. But what most drove the anti-sexual sexualizing of Mary Magdalene was the male need to dominate women. In the Catholic Church, as elsewhere, that need is still being met.”
Philip K. Dick
Only in the last 20 years or so the film world of SciFi has fallen more and more under the sway of a man practically unknown in the popular culture. Philip K. Dick was a paranoid with multiple physical and emotional problems that often led him to question to question the nature of reality before the Wachowski Brothers were even born.
The one film most are familiar with is Bladerunner which is based off Dick’s "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" which questions the nature of humanity. The cheesily executed Total Recall is based on his short story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" that questions the nature of memory. The underrated and nearly unknown Dark City (tres’ cool film) is said to have drawn on one of PKD’s works and the known yet still underrated Minority Report (often called “Spielberg’s apology for A.I.” in the SciFi world *chuckle*) is based on a “Dickinson” short story of the same name that questions the nature of free will and predestination. Now there is a film coming out called Scanner Darkly also based on a Dickinson novel which questions the reality of self and how that self perceives reality through a drug cult.
“My major preoccupation is the question, 'What is reality?' Many of my stories and novels deal with psychotic states or drug-induced states by which I can present the concept of a multiverse rather than a universe.” ~Philip K. Dick
I find it interesting from an anthropological point of view that in the late quarter of the 20th century, we as a culture became enamored of the questions of reality and truth that were first asked thousands of years ago by the Hindus and the Greeks and have been almost the sole bailiwick of philosophers ever since. I wonder what is happening in western culture that has made these questions more mainstream?
Anyway, if you like these films and others such as Thirteenth Floor and EXsitenZ, you should probably give PKD's short stories a whirl.
posted by KiplingKat | 11:56 PM
9 Comments:
Thanks. :) I wish I could be all clever and take credit for it, but I can't. If you mean the parchment background and general layout, it is one of templates you get to pick when you create a blog (Scribe). The only alteration I made was to add a links section with some cut-n'-paste HTML script.
(Which I can give you if you like.)
I add pics and whatnot to the blog entries themselves through the buttons in the "Create Page".
Hope this helped and thanks for reading! :)
Okay, you've started with waaay too much here, so i'm going to stop and start interupting before i get to the end (how rude)
the bedouin is cool.
I have no problem with English being the official language if People Who Were Born Here Actually Spoke It. We don't hold ourselves to the same standards we hold immigrants to: How many naturals don't have jobs? How many couldn't answer the history tests that are part of the naturalization process? How many couldn't reach minimum requirements in spelling, grammar, or literacy? While ESL was a band-aid on an artery from the start, I'd like to see some work done to teach Americans English, Spanish, hell any langage at all, just please pick one and try making yourself understood. We're a nation of idiots.
Sorry, just got a letter from a reader. You would not believe it, and legally, I can't transcribe it. But Oh. Dear. God.
Wyeth gets a lot of hype, which makes me dislike him in a reactionary way, much the same as my instant distaste for whatever numbskull gets herself on the cover of maxim for the month. As for his "neo-realism" or "surrealism" or "neo-surra-fana-twit-ism" or whatever it is the gallery owners are trying to sell this week, it boils down to the fact that he was a very skilled technician with a slightly off-center perception. Most artists already have a slightly off-center perception, so really it's the skill that makes him stand out. I've heard his work described as "like photographs of things that could exist, but don't". it turns out, you can do that with photgraphy these days, so try again. "he paints things no one else would bother to". apparently, so did warhol. next. "his work freaks me out". oh, okay. it's all about the reaction. well, that's called art. it's a conversation between what the artist was thinking and what the audience/viewer/guy on street ends up thinking as a result of the work. it's called "the work" and not "the finished" (thanks seinfeld) because it's never done.
personally, i always thought the stupid girl had spun around in the midst of a daydream when a sound (scream? phone ring? fight?) came from the house. i figured she was just in that moment of indecision/reaction time where you decide if you need to jump up and run, or if you can get away with ignoring it for awhile. i gave him credit for capturing that weird, precarious moment in a way that shows so much consequence in the scope of her environment.
if she's just a cripple dragging her polio-afflicted ass up a hill towards a cruel home where she's a burden..this painting sucks.
the language he's using either way (yay! a theme!) is realism, because he captures it in the right perspective and stuff. no melting clocks or anything. is that uniquely American? Well, "Girl With A Pearl Earring" was for the time quite realistic, but it was also seen as subversive. Anytime you try to describe life in absolutes, you usually end up with subversion of some kind. It could be religious, political, sexual....or artistic. chickie with the mosquito net is again voyeuristic and disturbing, but if she were clothed, or looking at us, would it be less? Looking at us implies her permission to look back, which is something we need to remember in our tabloid-laden culture. Clothed would be less "sinfully" creepy, it would mitigate the act of voyeurism. instead, he creates a physical barrier that doesn't block the view. so we're restricted, but not "saved" from the deviant act of looking. pigs.
i don't know if that's disntictly American just because they live in rural areas. America doesn't really have the market on open spaces, if you check the South American desert plain, and especially that wide swath of Eurasia that is nothing but empty plain. But, our obsession with "big space" equalling "manifest destiny" is very distinctly our own, and if you take that to mean "well, baby, it's just you and me and the big blue sky and not much else to look at, so it must mean i can look" well then that pretty much sums up the whole American Entitlement thing in one neat package. The helplessness, remote location far from help, and ignorance of being watched all imply rape. Whether it's the girl or the land is up to the viewer.
Wouldn't want it in my house, fo damn sure.
Lynch, whom i love, finds balance in showing extremes of popularly accepted "goodness" with it's opposite "sickness", not just the underbelly but the actual filthy mechanics of the man behind the curtain of oz, the impossible demands that no one could ever live up to but can imitate thru some deal with the devil or a midget or log or something. he's awesome. and fun. but totally fcking nuts.
Peyton Place was just (sorry) a jealous fat wench's airing of everyone's dirty laundry but her own (and she had plenty) because she hated the ease with which they hid their problems. She wanted to be better; they wanted to look good. So she let em have it, and they still hate her for it. It's tempting, but it's also cautionary: she never had a day's happiness after that book was written. the movie was great though.
now i've caught up.
I concur about the status of education in this country wholeheartedly. That one of the points I am screamingly liberal on: Education dollars. The fact that our president doesn’t even know the history of the country he is invading speak volumes, let alone the average guy on the street. I actually had a co-worker going through the naturalization process and she brought in a smoke of the history tests she had to pass to gain her citizenship. I did alright, but I was ashamed I still couldn’t answer all of them.
I call Wyeth “uniquely American” not because of the technical skill, but the remoteness of his paintings. It’s not the “rural” aspect so much as the “alone and on the edge of something” aspect. It’s like there is an emotional frontier being physically represented.
The entire joy of Christina’s World is that everybody puts their own spin on it. It’s like Seal refusing to print his lyrics: he is far more interested in what you hear in his song than what he wrote. I wouldn’t let what the painting was of originally stop me from thinking that she lives in a horribly repressive environment or in your case, that she is tottering on the edge of decision.
RE: Case in point, Day Dream. I don’t get that at all. I don’t necessarily view the artist or viewer as begin present as part of the painting. I don’t feel that anyone is present. She is alone and in her safe solitude, comfortably nude. To me that painting is the beauty within that no one ever sees because we never feel safe enough to show it.
But that doesn’t mean you interpretation is not equally valid. You certainly have a lot of good reasoning for it. IMO, art only fails when is fails to engender reaction, which is why I don’t like Warhol’s work. I can’t get anything out of it.
But it’s art and either you like it or you don’t. You don’t, it’s all good. What artists do you like?
Seen from our standpoint yeah, Peyton Place sounds whiny. But at the time it was published, it really ripped into the entire “Sleepy American Town” image and form the stories my Grandfather would tell, it really needed ripping into.
Re: Bedioun, are you referring to their multi lingual society? Actually they are cool, my Anthropology proff has worked with them. They are a very interesting bunch. They have set up their own boarding schools for their kids at various oasis and wells on their routes so that kids can continue their education so they can complete in the marketplace. Smart folks.
"She brought in a sample of the hsitory test she had to pass..." Damn MSWord autocorrect.
actually, the bedouin in question was the car shown on the sidebar in the roush truck package article. when you mentioned the sportscar that became a cargo-hauling wagon, i thought you meant the "bedouin" on the page.
bedouins (the tribe) are also cool, in a screw-all-you-johnny-come-latelys, our-way-works kinda way.
but hey! the theme lives on!
warhol was, imho, making a case against (not art itself) Art Critics, Art Galleries, Art Collectors, and Artistes in general that make up the Art Community. They make nascar look wildly liberal free-for-all openminded and diverse in comparison.
Really.
and they needed a good shot in the ass. he gave it to them, and with his crazy tribe of junkies and romantics, he actually gave them the substance they'd been missing. it's weird, but his own work was like a rebuke (see this soup can? is that art? huh? cause it fits all your requirements...philistines!) but his contributions went beyond that to the people he introduced, mentored, and bullied/inspired. so many were so into the drug scene, you almost could understand his tactics. but he was deeply flawed, which makes it hard. he was technically gifted, and he had that "knack" and the insatiable curiosity, but the majority of the work he produced was more like a prank on the people who buy, luv, sell, and imitate such things. his effect on others was immeasurable.
john lennon was like that in music and "on" celebrity: some of his most oft-mentioned, over-used, glib little comments were basically him being a brat for a minute, while the influence resounded deep in people with the training or inclination to pick up on it. the combination of the 2 in one person, along with the unpredictability of what was going to happen next, made him not just a tabloid fixation but like a literal pop-culture phenomenon people couldn't look away from. i think that's how some people felt about kurt cobain, too, although i was never blown away by him. i liked "smells like..." a hell of a lot, but no hero worship. however, his unabashed expressions of pain and loneliness and isolation, the way he changed music to express it better, and the open drug use/marrying a coked-out stripper/baldly messed up life did kind of strike a cord with a lot of people. i was pulling for marilyn manson or trent reznor to be the "voice" of that era and group, but no, it had to be freakin kurt. the winner is the guy with the most imitators, so it's best not to excel at anything too difficult.
that's why bowie never gets his due.
i wonder if in nascardom the people we like now will be the people they canonize later. i think about that a lot in music, and when it comes to film (cassavetes gets love only after he died, altman gets respect only after somebody noticed he didn't need it, scorsese still gets roasted by critics and shunned by academy, but spielberg somehow always turns his trivial crap-fests into slobbery make-out sessions with the press. i don't get it) with literature it's a different, less immediate form so it's impossible to tell in your own lifetime who will speak for your time afterward, but with our sped-up cycles in fame, film, and music, i have to wonder. why isn't mankiewitz celebrated with his own parade, national Day, and large statues? how much did the blacklist change our perception of quality and success even after it was "ended"? why are classical composers left to wilt on the vine when pop sales are suffering too, and classical audiences are more loyal? why is it more expensive to see bon jovi that joshua bell (my all-time crush, you mentioned "red violin" and i must point out i've seen him 3 times and met him twice. he's a beautiful, humble, insanely gifted young god. i literally felt struck dumb) since you mentioned dark city, i must again point out the wonders of rufus sewell. where's his romantic comedy, huh? will he be remembered as "a film actor in the era of tom cruise"?
ewwww.
okay, now that i've depressed myself. talk to you later,
Re: Beduoin. *smacks forehead* Duh! Sometimes I jump around topics to much for even me.
Re: Art and time. Well, with music you have a time filtering process as well. IN the days before Clear Channel, my dad pointed out that whenever a radio station would have an “All Moldy Oldies” weekend (his words, not mine), by about 11pm on Sunday they would be playing some songs he had forgotten and wished he could forget again. For every Chuck Berry, “You Never Can Tell” there was “Hey Paula” by Hildebrand and Jackson. So even though “Hey, Mickey” seems to retain life due to it’s simple awfulness, time even filters out pop music. As for classical music, the problem is that the pool of music itself is so small. I mean how many different versions of Beethoven’s 9th and Vivaldi’s Four Seasons does one need? (Though there does seem to be a movement right now to dig up lesser known composers, they’re works I mean) So despite the fan loyalty, it’s always going to be a limited.
Completely agree on Bell, incredible player and simply lovely man.
Re: Bowie, Reznor and Manson. I also agree completely, they’re all too complex to imitate, esp. Bowie. Manson probably come the closest in visual cultural commentary. Pretty Hate Machine was a kick ass album, but the industrial thing never took hold here the way it did in Europe. Also not overly thrilled by Kurt, liked but not blown away by Nirvana.
Would you really want Rufus Sewell to be stuck making some of the romantic comedies coming out today? I was fortunate enough to be raised with a father and two older brothers who liked Eastwood and James Bond films and a mother who didn’t like movies much at all, so I never saw a romantic comedy until I saw “When Harry Met Sally” as a teen. That set the bar so high I rarely trouble myself with them but the ones I have seen are pretty pale in comparison. Sewell is probably thankful avoiding them.
Thanks for explaining Warhol to me, I didn’t understand him at all. But then my knowledge of modern art is extremely lean. What I wonder now is if people, as in young artists, seem to have taken him a little too seriously so that you have museums spending good money to buy “Three Basketballs in a Fish tank”, which of course is three basketballs in a fish tank, and an red acrylic block titled “Red” (both on display at LACMA). I don’t think they are poking fun at the establishment, I think they are cheating and calling it “art”.
Re: NASCAR icondom. Good Lord, what do you think Jr. fans do now? I actually got banned from the largest Dale Jr. fanboard for pointing out he got a definition of “precedent” wrong in an interview. He could strew body parts of children all over his lawn and the Junior Nation would be rationalizing at a mile a minute. And his father….He doesn’t have fans, he has acolytes. I have seen people say they “Look to Dale for guidance” and Gawd help you if you even make the slightest implication that St. Dale the Beneficent was anything less that the perfection of mankind or that he might get too much press coverage. I have to admit that half the reason Dale Jr.’s stock dropped was that I was sick to death of having Dale Sr. shoved down my throat by Intimidator fans.
It’s funny, but having seen some fan reactions to drivers “lesser moments” if you will, it’s obvious the hero-worship that goes on is pretty severe. They get put on some pretty high pedestals by their fans and when they slip people are either excusing them completely or tearing them into little bits. I mean a few weeks back some pictures hit the net of Sadler drinking a beer while messing around next to a dock in a zodiac with a couple pals. From some Sadler fans reaction he might as well have plowed through a Red Cross Tadpole swim class in a cigarette boat while cooking heroin over a burning American flag. An entire fan site shut down in protest over the fact that Elliott Sadler sometimes drinks and does goofy things on his days off. Was it stupid of him to let those pics get out? Yeah. That was dumb. But jeez-loueeze ladies, untwist thine knickers. Their reaction is pretty funny for fans of a sport that spawned figures like Curtis Turner and Jo Weatherly.
While the mainstreaming of NASCR has expanded the sport, brought in a ton of moolah, and made it accessible to more fans, it has gotten very restrictive for the people in it. Nobody chucks defanged rattle snakes into cockpits anymore. *sigh*
Sorry, re: classical music. "So despite fan loyalty, the production base is always going to be limited, ergo it's not going to make as much $$"
Though I wish they would find a good technique for introducing the classics to kids in school. Or myabe they don't have the attention span for it?
I do wish they would teach more of the literary classics. I mean good ones, like "Tale of Two Cities" rather than those monsterously boring volumes for which Dickens was being paid by the word. I mean, why can't we teach kids that reading is fun by assigning Kipling or Dumas?
AAAAAACCCCKK!
AAACCCK! ACCKKK!
AAAAAAAAAAAACCCK!
Limited base "small pool" she says! AAAAAACCKK!
NO!
See Edgar Meyer (my all-time fav) see Phillip Glass (an aquired taste, yes, but when acquired and delivered in small potent doses....) see N. Maw, see countless others who are invited to compose beautiful, head-spinning works for various festivals and quartets and chamber orchestras (loveliest) that aren't full-length concertos or suites, and weren't commisioned for any big (ending in "ennial") event, but are worth listening to and sharing and preserving and definitely worth experiencing in person where the dynamics and power of the sound send shivers up your arms and back.
Kickass!
Don't get me wrong, normally I listen to more popular music (fav bands are u2, Stones, coldplay, old faith no more, some bowie, spacehogs, ben folds five..shutting up now) and lately i've been on a seriously twanged-out country streak (patty loveless: hero of brokehearted wimmen...or patron saint? can sara evans ever reach that level of sucker-punching empathy...or are the dixie chicks our last hope?)
all of which got me into trouble as a youngster with my (ahem) music teaching, every instrument playing, bar-owner-turned-methodist-choir-director-and-fill-in-minister stepfather. oh the irony of me liking classical after i'd moved hundreds of miles away. although i learned to love the Romantics, whereas he's more of a...Sousa fan. (that sound you hear is my gag reflex waking up)
the trouble is, without new recordings of new pieces commisioned by say, sony classical, there's nothing new to promote. nothing new to promote means no pr budget, no concerts, no tours, no interviews, no grammy appearances, no soundtrack commissions, no airplay on the 3 remaining classical stations, and no $ to support the next generation of artists, composers, conservatories... and yet, american idol makes millions on crap by michael mcdonald sung by an ugly man who sounds exactly like michael mcdonald but it's marketed as something new, novel, and above all, the choice of a new generation.
AAAAACCCKKK!! AAACKK AAAACCCCCCK AAAAAACKKKK! AAAAACKKKK!
anyway, the small but loyal and stubborn classical audience may shell out to hear a favorite soloist's rendition of an old standard...but they'd shell out for new stuff by their favs, too, if they could. that creates buzz, which finds new ears to nestle in... new pockets to empty, and new mountains to climb. and not every orchestra can play every piece. composers prove their versatility and worth by composing for different sizes, combos, and solo instruments. (it'd be like a crew chief winning a championship in craftsman truck, busch, nextel, bobsledding, and the America's Cup in consecutive years. so, um, not easy) so there's plenty to work with even if you don't start re-arranging things, which most now do (see my beloved Edgar Meyer again...not only does he also dabble in bluegrass with mike marshall, sam bush, and bela fleck; and pop country for the likes of indigo girls, mary chapin carpenter, randy and dwight; but he screws around with things like playing concertos written for cello on the acoustic bass. (translation, if you don't already know: if dj raced the truck, it'd be close to how difficult it was for edgar meyer to switch that around.) he is cool as hell, my beloved edgar is. in addition and f.y.i., when he talks, he sounds like elvis' younger brother grew up to be a hypnotist and wants to read you a bedtime story...soooo smooooth.)
i digress. (as always) classical does not mean "old" it is not entirely music written before electricity or any such nonsense. it's a question of form. rules can be bent, fucked with, and rearranged in countless ways, or thrown out completely, but it retains a basic structure that categorizes it. if you sing in church (although i guess wiccans don't, but maybe you did years ago) you've sung some classical music. it is not at all defined by how stuffy, white, or elitist the audience is: just by how dedicated the performers are. it's rough as hell to play.
and since i'm trying to make nascar equivalents for everything i say (it's kind of fun) saying "i like classical music" is akin to saying "i like things with wheels". they can fuck with everything else, but the wheels have to be round, or it won't go. since you mentioned liking "red violin" i'd say you probably would like the Romantics, too. (just don't go overboard into Cheeseland, where water music and Wagner and totally bombastic nonsense live...and that's always what people think of, too) check out absolutely any damn thing edgar meyer has been part of , or pretty much everything of joshua bell's besides west side story, which is not my fav. the barber violin concerto (hilary hahn is the soloist on one album, josh bell is on another i have somewhere) is one of the single most beautiful things i have heard, and kept me close to sane after the oftmentioned day in new york. i have respect for anything that has power to comfort and heal so many years after it was first conceived. if only i had some goddamned talent to create something that could do the same.
now i'm heading out, so we'll get to hashing literature another time, i hope. i just had to get all that (cough! AAAAACCCKKKKK! ugghh) out of my system or 'splode.
Well, I consider myself corrected and educated. I readily admit my musical knowledge is extraordinarily slim and I have horrible taste in music, just ask any of my jazz playing, eye-rolling friends. But I do enjoy the baroque and of the romantics, the only one I know is Beethoven which I do enjoy. I was completely unfamiliar with the newer composers, though I shouldn’t have spoken about a “limited Base” being introduced to John …I want to say Winston some years ago. Pianist, did an album called “December.” Anyway, I’m clueless accept we learned about ostinado in my International Music survey class and how Glass uses it.
Loveless is pretty hard to top. Chicks definitely have it though. “You Were Mine” will rip a woman’s heart out even if it’s never happened to her. Jamie O’Neal also scored for “There Is No Arizona” which was of great comfort after things ended with the pathological liar narcissus. Nothing like belting that song out while sobbing over a steering wheel. Cheryle Wright also has a good one called "Shut Up and Drive" which is pretty good that way.
Though for the real down and dirty blues, Bessie amd Ella. My Dad used to sing me "St Louis Blues" as a lulluby....which sort of explains a lot. *chuckle*
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